7 Day Holiday Shopping Earnings For One Website:

Google Adsense: $666.74

Amazon Associates: $326.21

Commission Junction + Linkshare: $200ish

I also made a few hundred dollars from other merchants as well

Overall 7 Day Earnings For One Website: Roughly $1,200

Boo Yah! Thank you for shopping America.

How Did I Maximize My Earnings For This Website?

Let me cover some of the specific things I did for these earnings:

Writing Content To Target Seasonal Shopping Keywords:

The first thing I did was write Black Friday, Cyber Monday etc. deal style posts using my standard keyword style i.e. “Cyber Monday -My Niche- Sales” and every time these types of posts cause huge spikes in traffic to my various websites. Millions of people every year search exactly in this manner of “Cyber Monday -Some Niche- Sales” and the first strategy was to write content targeting those keywords.

Result: Gave me traffic spikes and earning spikes on those days.

Monetize The Content Very Well:

This year more and more retailers were doing deals every single day from before Black Friday began, through Cyber Monday and now they’re still doing them every day all the way up to Christmas. I noticed this trend last year and so moving into 2011 my goal was to increase my income from other sources which includes Google Adsense and other affiliate programs like Linkshare and Commission Junction across the board.

Using More Affiliate Programs:

I more heavily promoted Wal-Mart (who had some really good online deals this holiday season), Buy.com and a few other large merchants besides just Amazon.com through Linkshare and Commission Junction. This helped give an extra few hundred dollars for the month.

Google Adsense Strategy:

For Adsense I went for an inline Adsense approach instead of just using out of the way banners (this is a pretty obvious step of course, but normally I’m much more focused on going after the affiliate commissions). The Adsense ad titles and URL’s matched my regular site navigation link color and I left the text of the ad black. I trailed all content with Adsense ads as well which is something I’ve since done on every site I own. The idea is that if people don’t find what they’re looking for after looking through the content the next natural step is to click a link to leave. In this case, the first link they see next being an Adsense ad.

Amazon Associates Strategy:

For Amazon I just focused on linking to products within my niche that were on sale for the entire black friday / cyber monday deals week time period. I didn’t spend a bunch of time focusing on the lightning deals this year because I noticed those products were selling out far too fast to do any heavy affiliate promotion of them. You can see more tips on how to make money with Amazon here.

Email Marketing Strategy:

I sent multiple emails out during this week just linking back to the content that I created above. Email has always been a pretty strong component to making money over the holidays and that’s something that I like to do for my larger authority style websites (I don’t do a ton of email for my smaller niche sites).

Go Create And Promote Last Minute Shopping Content:

If you missed the boat on Black Friday / Cyber Monday promotion on your websites don’t miss the days leading up to Christmas. You can make a lot of money on “Last Minute” style keywords and shoppers for your websites, so make sure you’re creating and marketing that last minute content on your website later this month. Let’s make December a record month for our website earnings

Don’t Own Any Websites?

If you don’t own any websites stop reading about all the money I’m making and get started making your own websites. You can sign up for my free course outlining how I make money with websites below this post (or via this link) and that’s a great free way for you to learn more about this business – All I ask is that you don’t sign up and do nothing with the information I’ve provided.

What Is The Website I Am Selling?

The website I’m selling is Coupon Code Plugin – the first WordPress plugin that I ever released. I had the idea for this plugin last year as a way to help make sure I was getting credit for all the coupons I would be using for Black Friday, Cyber Monday etc. that I’d be using on my various product focused blogs. I partnered with my buddy Hyder from Weborithm to have the plugin developed. In this instance we decided to do an income split where he would handle development work and I would handle the marketing and selling of the plugin. I’ve done a partnerships like this in the past on various ventures and I’m a big believer in focusing on what you do best and only focusing on those things. It’s worked well for me so far and that’s why I’ve never learned how to code myself and why I just partner with others who are good at that (or hire them to help me out).

Where Am I Selling This Website And For How Much?

Unfortunately, this website is not even close to being big enough to sell with the help of a broker and although I’ve said before that Flippa is not always the best place to buy and sell websites I do believe they are one of the best places to SELL websites under the $100,000 mark. I have only listed one other website for sale on Flippa years ago that didn’t sell back when I was still a noob. Since that time I’ve been involved in numerous other private sales, but I’m retrying Flippa for this website in part as another public case study for you to follow along with and also because I think it’s an inexpensive starter website property that you might like to pick up on the cheap.

I started the auction for this website for only $1 and the reserve is set at only $1,000. I also set a buy it now option at $4,000.

See The Listing Here

Why Am I Selling This Website?

Unfortunately the plugin never really took off in a huge way like some of the other projects I’ve done, but sometimes that happens. I think the blame falls on me as I could have done a better job marketing the plugin to a different demographic of potential buyers – like the hundreds (thousands?) of coupon bloggers that crop up every month. The primary reason why I’m selling though is that I’m trying to just have one less thing on my plate to think about and the monthly income stream could be improved on by doing more marketing / partnering with other plugin sellers etc.

When compared to most of the other inexpensive listings I believe this is actually a pretty solid website for the price.

So who wants to buy my website?

See the auction listing here

The $1,000 reserve doesn’t even cover the development hours in this plugin so I really do think it’s a good deal (yes I’m of course bias) I’ll see you in the comments below and perhaps as a bidder on the listing

Note: If you did purchase this plugin from me last year (or even recently) I will of course still help with any support issues you may have.

Why CopyCatCrafts.com Was A Great Purchase

(See past blog posts on this case study: Start Here, Then Part 1 and Part 2)
I’ve already discussed how important it is to buy websites that are easy to manage and CopyCatCrafts.com was the perfect example that fit my criteria. When I bought the website there was already a terrific editor involved that I could pay to help run this website. I pay her a very nice hourly rate to help run this website and she does a great job. Some websites can be managed for a lower price than what I’m paying but with CopyCatCrafts the quality of what is shared on the website is most of what makes it so successful and helps to drive the traffic so I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that. Plus I like working with this editor too which is always nice to bounce ideas off her.

Future Plans For CopyCatCrafts.com

I had a list of things I planned to do to increase the income on the website that I’ve mentioned in past blog posts and even though I haven’t spent much time implementing all of the ideas the website still continues to generate a nice income. The biggest things I want to focus on in the future are better monetizing the highest traffic pages on the website with additional affiliate links, split testing more CPC advertising solutions and to start offering high quality products for sale to the email list members. After I’ve done these things I’ll write another follow up blog post to share my results, but listed below I’ve put together more details on the income split and history since I first purchased this website.

Total 4 Month Income Graph For CopyCatCrafts.com

Rivit Media Total Income: $881.79

You’ll notice that Rivit Media has dropped a bit from the July and August highs. I’ve been told by my account manager that late Q4 is their best quarter, so I’m expecting November and December to be much higher income. Rivit uses my Adsense code as back fill when they don’t have more premium deals with advertisers so in October they just must not have had many deals with advertisers.

Google Adsense Total Income: $332.39

I didn’t put Adsense onto the website until late July, but in August I put in an additional Adsense unit that was a 468 x 60 unit just beneath the headline of all of the blog posts, this one new unit has contributed to about half of the income. I could be more aggressive and put in a 336 x 280 adsense unit in that location, but there is a fine line between making money and too much advertising hurting the user experience especially when this website is less focused on Google organic search traffic and more reliant on users sharing the website. I will do more testing with Adsense sometime soon.

Vibrant Media In Text Advertising Total Income: $806.53

The in text advertising income from Vibrant Media was more than double what Google Adsense provided! (Are you seeing this Pat, Spencer, Jeremy and Justin / Joe? Time for you guys to try riding more than one pony on your niche sites. Just mention my name when you sign up ). Now I should mention that you need to have much higher page view counts to run Vibrant Media and I know that some smaller Adsense earners wouldn’t qualify, but I just wanted to toss a friendly jab out at a few of my friends and fellow bloggers. Now would also be a good time to mention that most of them make a lot more money on Adsense than I do though lol like Spencer for example.

Vibrant Media Display Advertising Total Income: $169.64

This is a new advertising option I just recently added. Basically I noticed a second column for earnings data that appeared one time inside my Vibrant Media dashboard. So I contacted my Vibrant Media rep to find out what it was about and if I could try using it on my website and I was able to test it out on a trial period. I can’t remember how long my trial is supposed to go on for, but in any case this is the little bar you see at the bottom of the page when you go to CopyCatCrafts.com. Again, this is additional income that I was able to generate without doing anything extra except send an email a few months ago to see if I could test it out.

Overall Income Impressions:

Rivit Media was the only income source on the website when I bought CopyCatCrafts.com and as you can see it doesn’t even contribute to half of the overall total income since I took it over. If you see a website is only making money from one income source you can see by this example that it’s entirely possible to buy that website, add in some other income sources and make more money without having to increase traffic. Boo yah!

Reminder: In Depth Training Opening Soon…

I’ve mentioned this training before, but the details are almost set in stone now. I will be hosting a webinar with the website brokers I partnered with who’ve sold millions of dollars worth of websites to discuss more in depth tactics on buying and selling websites. The invite for this webinar will be going out to people on my email list in the next week or less and on that webinar we’ll also be officially opening up the doors on our in depth coaching course on how to buy and sell websites. There will be a true open / closed period for people interested in joining this coaching program because in addition to the written and video course material we’re also going to be doing live training / question and answer webinars for the members soon after we close down the registration. In any case, I’m very excited about being able to start teaching on this topic in a classroom setting where everyone will be able to have a chance to ask questions live while we answer and dive into much more detail.

P.S. Let me know what you think about the income report, upcoming coaching program and anything else in the comments below

Why I Started This Blog With My Extra Free Time After Getting Fired

I built an income that surpassed my $60k a year high stress sales job in the extra hours I put into my business every day when I got home from my regular day job. So I knew that when I got fired I could use some of my new found free time to start a blog sharing my experiences in the hope that people won’t repeat my mistakes trying methods for making money that just don’t work. Some people will try to sell you on the idea that you can make money easily and instantly on the internet – this is not the case. I tried for several years to make money online and it took a lot of failure before things really started to work because I didn’t really know anyone that I could get good advice from.

What I’ve Learned After Getting Fired

I’ve learned that self employment can suck at times, but the freedom and uncapped earning potential is worth the downside. Since last year’s fireversary update I’ve also met dozens more like minded people who build, manage and run websites full time that generally don’t talk about their business success online (I interviewed some of them for an upcoming project). Last year when I wrote this update I hardly knew anyone doing the same thing that I did, but this year I’ve found people that I can relate to and bounce ideas off each other (most of my friends give blank stares when I explain what I do for a living).

What The Future Holds For This Blog And My Business

I will continue to share advice based on my real life online business experiences rather than speaking in general terms about topics I know nothing about (I’m referring to 95% of the other blogs that discuss blogging, making money online etc). I’ve also been working on some much bigger projects behind the scenes that I’m eager to share with you as well. Some of them are related to this blog but another project is very focused on mainstream use. When I open it up I’d love for you to try it out and be among the first users of this new website. I know that I haven’t described what it will do yet but it’s completely unrelated to earning money online.

Thanks for continuing to read my blog. I’ve got a little less than 19 years to reach my (admittedly silly) goal of buying the Guthrie Castle.

Note: Yes I do realize how stupid some people think I look when I continue to publicly say that I want to buy a castle that costs millions of dollars when I haven’t even made my first million. I still have plenty of time…

Edit 1: I should mention that I wouldn’t actually live in the castle, I’m too cheap and practical to do that. I’d run it as an investment property like the current owners do now. I just want to buy it so that I can say I own a castle named after my ancestors hah hah!

Why Bother Building An iPhone App In The First Place?

I’m sure this is a question you might be thinking – ‘Why bother building an iPhone app when you’ve already had some success doing these other things?’ Well, part of what sucks about self employment is that even though I feel more secure now with my business than in the old job I was eventually fired from is that even working for yourself can get boring at times. I like to do new things and if I’m not challenging myself with new goals then it’s no different than if I was back at my old job. Don’t get me wrong I love what I do now more than anything I’ve ever done before, but half the fun is in being able to decide what to work on. It’s also just nice to focus on diversification with any business so that’s part of why I just recently bought an unusual website that makes money selling really random medical products off Clickbank and I bought another one that is a massive 20,000+ page website with miscellaneous media information that makes money with Google Adsense. So in my continuing quest to be more diversified I thought why not try building an iPhone app?

The iPhone App Idea

My idea was that I hate going to movies and waiting all the way until after the credits roll to see if there is an extra scene at the end of the movies. Why not have an iPhone app that uses crowd sourced voting to tell people that either yes it’s worth staying after the credits or no? I bought the domain name and decided that I’d try to build an iPhone app on this concept. I found some movie API’s that would automatically update the most recent movies in theaters and knew that would be an easy way to provide an auto updating method for the iPhone app that wouldn’t require the list to be constantly edited by hand. Armed with that information I set off to hire a developer to help me build the iPhone app and that’s when things started to take a turn for the worse. In all of the successful projects I’ve outsourced I’ve always focused on providing as much detail as possible so that there is little room for guess work on the part of my hired help.

Bad Help Is Easy To Find

This time around I used Odesk to hire an iPhone developer and I made sure in my job description to emphasize that I already had researched how I needed the iPhone app to be developed (use this API to pull in movies, crowd source the voting with other users etc. etc.) – again this was done to make it clear what I wanted – The person I ended up hiring didn’t have a ton of feedback and was a little less expensive than the others. When I hired him I literally thought, “How could he screw this up?” because I basically handed everything necessary to create the iPhone app I required but in the end I committed the cardinal sin of not spending enough money. In the past there are times when I couldn’t decide which candidate to hire for a job and the deciding factor would often be who charged more and I’d go with that candidate instead. With this project, I wanted to get in and test the iPhone app waters for as cheap as possible and that was my biggest problem.

Losing The Money Isn’t The Only Thing That Sucks

I spent $1,200 (paid hourly) on the iPhone app which he halfway completed. The loading screen still had a place holder graphic that said “Loading Screen Here Perhaps?” and there were spelling errors all over inside the app. He also never finished the free version which was essential to the success of the project. I needed enough active free users to be voting on which movies to stay after in order to get accurate data. The paid version he did complete was just meant to be there for people that hated ads (more of an after thought really). Losing the $1,200 doesn’t matter that much to me, what matters the most from this project was the time I wasted. I wasted time explaining the project over and over again and constantly telling him to fix things that he wouldn’t do. In total I had 110 emails and Google chat conversations combined and I could have made so many websites during that time instead.

Will I Do An iPhone App Again?

I would like to try doing another iPhone app, but the problem is that I didn’t really spend a lot of time researching what it takes to make a successful iPhone app. While you could say my idea was crappy anyway (just don’t do it in the comments as it will hurt my feelings /sarcasm) one key point of failure was in the person that I hired. So I basically failed before I was even able to get started. The app did make it up onto the app store (it’s not there anymore), but I didn’t even get to move into the fun stuff of dealing with marketing and everything else. I told my friend Pat Flynn about this iPhone app experience several months ago and he gave me some tips on what I could do differently next time and recommended I check out this eBook that his friends made that are making a ton of money with iPhone apps (see it here). I haven’t bought it yet, but when I can finish up all of the other things I’m working on right now I will buy the eBook and this time around I’ll actually document my progress from start to finish on the blog so that you can follow along.

You Want To See More Case Studies Right?

I want to continue doing as many case studies here as possible because after looking through some of my older past posts and the comment counts it’s obvious that you all like reading those more than anything else. Example 1, Example 2, Example 3, Example 4, Example 5, etc.

Would you like to follow along and see me do it? About the only thing I’d hold back is the idea during the development stages (until the app was completed).

Let me know what you think in the comments below

How I Planned To Increase The Income For This Website

1. Split test Google Adsense vs Rivit Media using OIOpublisher

I didn’t end up doing this because I spoke with my account rep at Rivit Media and she was able to use my Adsense code as back fill when they don’t have enough ads from premium advertisers to use. It became quickly apparent that Rivit Media would continue to be a good source of income for the website when they have the ad space to sell (I’ll get to that in the results).

2. Test Vibrant Media in text advertising

I did get around to installing Vibrant Media in text advertising on the blog and in August so far it has out performed Adsense (see results below)!

3. Use CPC advertising in more locations

I was pretty busy in August with other projects so I didn’t get around to testing Adsense and other forms of advertising in other locations until just a few days ago when I added in a 468 x 60 banner ad just beneath the title of the blog post. I may remove this because so far it hasn’t converted very well and I sort of prefer the minimal advertising that was on the site before.

4. Contact craft supply companies for private advertising deals / joint promotion deals
5. Add Amazon affiliate links on the old blog posts that are related to physical products
6. Optimize high traffic pages with better targeted advertising
7. Start monetizing the email list

Didn’t get to these tasks. I was too busy to work on them and yes I realize that every day that goes by that I don’t complete these tasks I’m leaving money on the table.

Month 1 Income Results: $560.46

August Income Total So Far: $560.46 (With 7 days left)
Estimated August Ending Income: $672.55

Adsense $78.18 (New Income Source)

Vibrant Media $182.77 (New Income Source)

Rivit Media $299.51 (Pre-Existing Income Source)

Income Analysis:

I only did 1.5 things on my list of 7 tasks and the income for the website still went up thanks to the two new income sources from Adsense and Vibrant Media. I expect that if I finish the list of things I planned to do but never got around to the income could rise at least an extra $100 – $200 a month or maybe even break the $1,000 per month barrier. Some days Rivit Media contributes just a little bit of money because the ads aren’t running and the backfill Adsense ads are going instead, so it’d be nice if they always had advertisers promoting because the income is significantly higher on those days.

The best part about this website is that it’s basically passive income for me. I’ve spent more time writing these case study blog posts for MakeMoneyontheInternet.com than I have spent working on CopyCatCrafts.com.

Why I Love Buying And Selling Websites

I set a goal this year to buy $100k worth of websites and if I can keep finding good websites worth buying I should easily be able to meet my goal. Part of the reason why I started buying websites is because I want to grow my business faster and just like Fortune 500 companies one of the fastest ways to grow is through acquisitions. I’ve been applying this methodology to my business this year and it’s been very effective so far. I generally don’t share websites that I buy on this blog for obvious competitive reasons but I hope this shows you one way I’m making money.

You can get started buying websites at any price point too, last summer I bought a site for $500 that’s made me around $5,000.

Want To Learn More?

If you want to find out more about how to make money with websites sign up for my newsletter and you’ll be one of the first to find out when my live training course on buying and selling websites opens up. I partnered with some website brokers on both content creation and to help make sure we can provide great content on all the live webinars we’ll be doing for the members as well.

What Else Would You Like Me To Cover?

What else do you want me to cover in these case study posts on CopyCatCrafts.com? I’ll be hanging out in the comments below waiting for some responses…

p.s. Do me a favor and +1 this I’m running some tests with Google Plus right now:

Advertising is everywhere, from the logo on the computer you are using to view this post to the sidebar of this blog. Back in March 2006 when Twitter was launched it was a misunderstood product but, that did not stop it from rapidly gaining prominence by helping promote presidential campaigns to making bloggers “digital celebrities”. Most importantly it was advertisement and, to a certain extent, spam free.

That is not the case today.

While Twitter itself was late to its own party, by not launching any revenue generation scheme till mid 2010, this did not deter others to enter, at the time, this highly lucrative market.

Sponsored Tweets was perhaps the first company to offer a platform to advertisers to pay twitter users for a tweet. The concept has since then evolved to include a myriad of segmentation options, advertising models and even custom campaigns featuring celebrities.

But is it all really worth it to the advertiser?

WP Auctions Case Study

For those of you who don’t know, Weborithm develops a WordPress plugin called WP Auctions. It allows anyone to host personal auctions on their WordPress powered site. We recently released version 4.0 of the plugin and decided to use Sponsored Tweets (ST) to help get the word out and possibly make some sales.

Please note: We had won some free credits to use with ST, hence our liberal selection of “tweeters” for this campaign.

How does Sponsored Tweets work?

I’ll just go over very briefly how ST works with some supporting images.

1. You first enter the title, instructions and the URL of the product/site you wish to promote.

A BIG point to note here is that some tweeters will literally just tweet out the instructions you write. Yes, it has happened before in campaigns we’ve run on ST. Knowing full well the amount of creativity, read non-existent, tweeters have put in my past campaigns I decided to just go with text that they could copy and paste.

2. Here is the price selection feature where you can select what prices you want to set and even choose a few select twitter users you wish to invite.

3. Next, you choose more specific targeting like tags, countries and the time you wish for your tweets to be broadcast.

Once you’re done with the above steps you confirm your selections and your campaign is underway!

The Case Study Results

We choose some high profile tweeters along with others who had a large follower count. We’ve done other campaigns on ST, again with those free credits, that used their Pay Per Click model. In the Pay Per Click model you go through the same set up process above but instead you post a price you are willing to pay per click to a tweeter. The amount you pay depends on the clicks you get, almost exactly like the Google AdWords program.

In the above case we used the Pay Per Tweet model, i.e you pay per tweet rather than per click your link gets. The model does take the cost per click into account, which means your tweet may be sent out more than once via a tweeter’s profile.

(Click to enlarge)

CPC – Why it’s flawed on Sponsored Tweets

As you can see above it took some tweeters almost 3 tweets before they could reach the required CPC as determined by their history on the platform.

This is heavily flawed because there is a huge chance that most of the clicks will overlap from the previous tweets sent out. ST may have some checks in place to discount repeat clicks from the same users, but I highly doubt it.

Cost effectiveness

Having an overall CPC of $1.39 is simply way too high for any advertiser to see ST, and Twitter, as a long term advertising strategy.

If I were to actually spend the amount of money I spent with ST on Google Adwords or buying ad spots on popular blogs I would have easily made it last up to a month, probably more, and had an effective CPC of around $0.15 – $0.30 generating anywhere from 4000 – 3000 clicks.

Anyone can clearly see what would be a more effective medium.

Show me the money!

What?…What money?

Our grand total in sales from this campaign: $0

Now, before people jump in say that our product might not be cool enough, that’s not really the point of this post. But do know that we’ve been selling it quite successfully for the past 4 years taking into account how much actual time (very little) we spend on developing it. We solely develop it in our free time, me and my core developer have otherwise full time gigs.

In Conclusion

My experience with Sponsored Tweets could have used a lot of other variables to help the campaign like split testing, ad copy variations etc… Though, I doubt this is a medium one would use to test those variables. At best, I believe, Sponsored Tweets can only ever be used to promote offers that have gone through a testing phase and one that can make an impact on a twitter user who probably has the world’s shortest attention span of 0.140 seconds.

I believe the time is ripe though for twitter users, with high profile counts, to jump on the bandwagon and make away with some easy cash before this medium is overtaken by the next great social phenomenon.

Have you ever used twitter to advertise your product, i.e actually pay for a tweet? If so, share your experience in the comments and let us know about it.

Special Offer for Readers of this Blog!

Chris was able to find out where I live and gave me an offer “I couldn’t refuse”. So here is 20% off to anyone entering the coupon code “CHRIS” when you buy the WP Auctions plugin.

As a bonus offer, again “I couldn’t refuse”, I’m offering* any WordPress theme from my library on Mojo-Themes to anyone who buys the plugin with the code above completely FREE!

This offer expires at the end of July.

*Theme will be provided without updates or support.

How To Increase The Income For Any Website

Increasing income for any website always comes down to two simple methods:

Method 1. Earn More From Your Existing Traffic
Method 2. Get More Traffic

It really is that simple when you break it down. In the future I’ll give you an update on how I plan to increase traffic to CopyCatCrafts.com, but the one thing you can start with immediately is to find more ways to make money from your existing traffic. Some people make the mistake of trying to optimize their website(s) with a ton of advertising to maximize the value from the very first day the site is launched which is not at all what I’m advising here (unless you don’t care about building regular readers). There is always a fine line between user experience and increased ad revenue and although it’s difficult to measure that line I’ll explain how I do it in some capacity through the video below, but first let me share the two core ways you can make more money with your existing traffic.

How To Earn More Money From Your Existing Traffic

Again, I can explain how to earn more money from your existing traffic in two simple methods:

Method 1. Try new income generation methods and programs
Method 2. Test, track and optimize existing and future income generation methods

I used the catch all term of “income generation methods” because depending on your website market and focus – “income generation methods” – could mean testing Adsense colors to creating and selling some type of information product. So let me explain how income generation methods fit into the context of my case study on CopyCatCrafts.com:

Method 1. Try new income generation methods and programs:

With CopyCatCrafts.com the website is currently making money from only one major banner ad network: Rivit Media. In this video I’ll show you my plan on how to increase the income for CopyCatCrafts.com:

Summary Of What I’ll Be Doing Next:

1. Split test Google Adsense vs Rivit Media using OIOpublisher
2. Test Vibrant Media in text advertising
3. Use CPC advertising in more locations
4. Contact craft supply companies for private advertising deals / joint promotion deals
5. Add Amazon affiliate links on the old blog posts that are related to physical products
6. Optimize high traffic pages with better targeted advertising
7. Start monetizing the email list

Bottom Line:

There is always room to improve a website’s income especially when you’re buying a website. Whenever I buy a website I come up with an extensive list of improvements to make to the website (Use the same line of reasoning that you would with real estate but applied to websites). The list that you come up with can generally be built off the initial feedback from the seller because they have already tried different ways to make money or simply planned to do things but never got around to it for whatever reason (i.e. monetize the email list, introduce and test more / different types of advertising etc.). So when I’m buying websites I use the 5 step process I outlined before and I focus on increasing income from my existing traffic before I bother with trying to grow the traffic.

Your Action Required (comments please!):

What do you think of this case study so far? I’ve always learned by example and so part of why I decided to share the URL of this website I purchased was so that I could teach based on an example. Remember, I’m putting together a much more in depth classroom style setting on the topic of buying and selling websites over at Virtual Moguls which hasn’t been opened yet but if you’re interested in learning how to really buy and sell websites sign up to find out more details when we open:

Sign up to find out more about Virtual Moguls here

Don’t be shy, I’ll see you in the comments below ask me anything about buying websites and I’ll try and help you out. Also, I’d like to remind you that if you’re looking to sell your website(s) feel free to contact me here as I’m always looking to buy websites.