I sold a site for $10,500

I started the site in mid-2019 with the goal being to sell it as a starter site.

The inspiration behind it was Human Proof Designs which built and sold tons of starter sites for the ~$1,000-2,000 range.

I outsourced the content but did everything else myself.

Figured I'd invest about $400 into the site and flip it a couple months later for at least $1,000 once content was indexed.

If that worked, I'd rinse and repeat.

Things were going well except I had very little time.

So I ended up not selling the site as planned.

And then...

One of the article started ranking in the first position.

It was an informational article targeting a keyword that hadn't been covered well by any other sites at the time.

The other articles were all "best of" style and reviews. Commercial intent.

They weren't doing well.

Instead of going all in on informational articles...

I decided to go all in on keywords with unmatched intent.

RPM for commercial intent is way higher than for informational intent.

So it only made sense to keep publishing commercial intent, but target unmatched keywords.

After some painstaking research, I found a couple commercial keywords without any relevant results (unmatched intent).

Also found several with partially matched intent, and a bunch with matched intent but easy competition (low DA sites or low quality content).

Ordered a batch of articles targeting those easy keywords I found.

Within months, the two articles targeting commercial, unmatched intent keywords ranked on the first page.

My site went from earning $30/mo to $400/mo.

(BTW, those keywords had "0" estimated search volume lol).

Once the site was earning $400/mo, I held on for 6 months and then decided to sell to cover some personal expenses.

Last September, I listed it with Motion Invest for over $12,000.

Got an offer for 10K and negotiated it to $10,500.

I probably could have gotten more for it, but I was a motivated seller.

After Motion Invest's 20% cut, I got $8,400.

Spent most of it on a nice used car :)

And that's the story!

Some takeaways...

1. Target easy keywords.

2. If you target easy keywords, there's no need to avoid publishing content with commercial intent.

3. If you plan to sell, the valuation is usually based off last 6 months (or even last 12 months). So hold on until you like the valuation.

The keyword research strategy I used back then is similar to the one I use today.

But I've improved upon it a lot since then.

I use several different methods to find keywords and I also have a system to analyze the competition to determine whether a keyword is worth targeting.

If you want to learn my exact keyword research methods, check out smartkeywordresearch.com!

Now's the best time to pick up the course since it's 50% off. Just use the code BFCM at checkout!

Update on my niche site case study:

I spent a couple hours working on the site since my last email.

In that time, I:

• Removed all those articles that were super similar (read this if you’re not sure what I’m talking about)

• Published 7 new articles from Hands Off Publishing

• HoP finished and uploaded the rest of the articles I ordered, so I have another 28 sitting in Drafts (I asked them to leave the articles as drafts since I like to make a few minor tweaks before publishing).

• Tested two more content agencies

For the first point, none of those articles were getting traffic and none had any backlinks. So I simply deleted them and didn’t bother with redirecting them to the main article.

So for now, they’ll 404 and eventually drop out of Google’s index.

And for the last point, the agencies I tested were TextHopper and Click Vision.

I was very impressed with both. I already shared my thoughts about TextHopper on Twitter, so I won’t repeat myself here. The tweet if you’re curious:

As for Click Vision, they are very similar to Hands Off Publishing in the sense that they can do everything for you.

Just give them a keyword and some guidelines and they can research, write the article, add relevant Creative Commons images, create a slick featured image, and upload, format, and publish the article on your site.

The writing quality was on par with what I get from Hands Off Publishing, which is saying a lot because HoP’s quality is among the best I’ve ever seen from a content agency.

For now, I’ll work with both HoP and Click Vision since they’re on par with each other. HoP is slightly cheaper on the bigger packages which is the biggest difference I’ve seen so far.

As for TextHopper, their quality was easily as good as both HoP and ClickVision but they also cost a bit more.

Anyway, enough about agencies.

One thing has me slightly worried.

None of my content is ranking yet. Some of it used to, but not anymore.

Here’s what my SERP tracker shows:

I think this has to do with all the super-similar articles I published. Most of my content is “Crawled - currently not indexed” according to Search Console.

This means Google knows about the content, but chose not to index it. Usually that means there’s a problem with content quality. Here’s a good overview.

But I know the content is high quality. So that can’t be the issue.

The only thing that makes sense is that I had a bunch of “near-duplicate” content.

That’s why I decided to just delete those articles and instead have a single article with all the information on that topic.

So, we’ll see what happens. I’m not going to worry too much about it. Just gotta keep publishing more high quality content.

I’m confident Google will decide to index my articles eventually. :)

That’s it for the update.

Remember, I currently have a 50% discount on my keyword research course if you use the code BFCM. The discount lasts until November 30th.

Thanks for reading!