$164,000/mo from 100K visitors

Sometimes I stumble on a niche content site that, well, restores my waning hope in niche content sites. 😅 

I’m sharing one of those sites with you today.

I’ve seen it before while doing research in the travel niche, but had no idea how profitable it was.

And then last week, I saw it was listed for sale on Empire Flippers (one of the top website marketplaces).

The numbers blew me away.

In February alone, the site generated $164,541.88 in pure profit, from just 100,075 unique visitors.

I hope you can appreciate how insane that is.

That’s $1.65 per visitor.

That’s unheard of.

3 cents per visitor is considered good for a content site!

Even in the “low” months, like May (it’s a seasonal niche), the site is earning more than $1 per visitor ($63,647 from 54,579 users).

Now that I’ve got your attention, it’s time to reveal the site and dig into it a bit…

I should mention that I got permission from both Empire Flippers and the seller to share the site here in my newsletter. Here are the receipts:

I won’t be sharing it anywhere else, so as a subscriber, you’ve got an exclusive look at it. 🙂 

And if you’re in the market for a profitable content site, go check out the listing for all the details. This looks like a fantastic opportunity!

Alrighty. Without further ado, the site is:

TubHotels.com.

It’s a directory of hotels with Jacuzzi/hot tub suites. The site is also a great example of programmatic SEO (pSEO) where you have a template that can be replicated across hundreds or thousands of articles.

For example, there’s an article for every state and every moderate-large city about hotels in that area with hot tub suites.

Each article has a long list of hot tub hotels broken into categories like romantic, cheap, weekend getaway, honeymoon, etc (good use of secondary keywords). They’re also broken into geographic areas, like “southwest Kansas City”, “east Kansas City”, etc. You can check out the Kansas City article here to see what I mean.

As you can see, the articles are highly focused on conversions, which explains the astronomical revenue per visitor.

Clicking “See available rooms” takes you to TripAdvisor, which is an affiliate for sites like Booking.com, Hotels.com, and Expedia.

TripAdvisor has a generous affiliate program, offering 50% commissions on the commissions they receive from their hotel booking partners.

So, TubHotels is an affiliate for TripAdvisor, which is an affiliate for the actual booking sites.

It’s notoriously difficult to become an affiliate for the primary hotel booking sites, so TripAdvisor created its own affiliate program that allows you to indirectly be an affiliate for hotel booking sites. Smart cookies, they are.

The TripAdvisor affiliate program is quite generous. Not only do affiliates earn 50% commissions, no hotel booking is even required! You get paid something even if a user just clicks a booking link on TripAdvisor!

No wonder revenue per visitor is so high in this niche.

How did TubHotels become so successful?

The main reason as far as I can tell is that TubHotels is one of the few sites that satisfies the search intent for keywords like “hotels with hot tub in room”.

When you search a keyword like “hotels with hot tub in room billings mt” for example, There’s the big ‘ol Google Hotels pack at the top.

But when you actually look at the hotels listed, some of them don’t have hot tubs in any room. Since the Hotels pack is unreliable, frustrated users will scroll down and look for a different, better source.

They’ll see the giants like TripAdvisor, Expedia, Booking, etc. But those sites aren’t reliable either. For instance, Expedia has a page of hotels with hot tubs in Billings, but I checked all four listings, and ONLY ONE has a room with a hot tub in it!

Those hotels have public hot tubs, but the intent of the searcher was to find hotels with hot tubs in the room.

And that’s where TubHotels comes in. It’s an actually reliable source for hotels with hot tubs in the room.

Google must realize users like the site, because it ranks on the first page for almost all “hotel with hot tub in room [location]” keywords.

It’s pretty wild when you think about it.

Hotel bookings is a highly competitive niche. Yet, there was a gap in the market no one solved until TubHotels came along in 2022.

Filling that void was very rewarding, as TubHotels has generated over $1,000,000 in profit so far (growing by nearly 100% in the past year), and is now looking to exit for just under $2,500,000.

Check out the listing page to see revenue and traffic growth since 2022. It’s quite impressive.

I hope this email was inspiring. You can still be wildly successful with a content site by finding and filling gaps like “hotels with hot tub in the room”.

I’m sure there are lots more ideas out there!

Thanks for reading,

Ian

P.S.

If you want some ideas for websites/SaaS products to build, check out What To Ship. It’s a list of over 13,000 ideas, all with search volume so you know there’s demand.

A few random ideas from the list that I’ve shared:

You can sort and filter the What To Ship idea list by search volume, competition level, technical complexity, and lots more. Check it out here!

_{Affiliate disclosure: the links to the Empire Flippers listing are affiliate links. If you end up buying the site, I’ll earn a commission and be forever grateful, and would be happy to treat you to dinner or something if we ever meet or give you free advertising in my newsletter for life lol} 😁