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4. How Did this $1,918 Per Month Amazon Affiliate Site Make $51,810.57 in 10 Days?

How Did this $1,918 Per Month Amazon Affiliate Site Make $51,810.57 in 10 Days?

What would you do with an extra $40,000?

It would probably help you supercharge almost every aspect of your business life. You would be able to hire new services and freelancers, increase your user engagement across all of your businesses, and likely get you out of having to do all the tedious grunt work that is involved with building an online business, since you’d finally be able to hire VAs to take care of all the administrative tasks you’re currently doing.

It sounds nice. And I’ll be the first to tell you…it IS nice.

That is exactly what this niche site builder was able to do.

He took a website that was making just $1,918 per month on average and sold that website to pocket well over $40,000 after our commission was factored out.

There are a lot of you reading this blog right now that are building out sites just like his. Yet, you might be looking at some of our case studies and see these seven-figure businesses and think to yourself, “Well, I am nowhere near that level!”

This post is to serve as a reminder that if you’re building out an Amazon Associates site, even smaller earning websites can be gateways of leverage for your business when you decide to sell your site.

This seller was able to cash in on his website and use those funds to hire a litany of writers, formatters, and other people for jobs he needed done to grow his overall portfolio using a specific seller business model I’ll get into below.

He was able to get $44,039.35 in just 10 days.

That is exactly how long it took from the time this website went live on our marketplace to a buyer acquiring it at a 27x multiple.

We do these kind of deals all the time. If you want similar results you really have two options, either schedule an exit planning call with us or just submit the business for sale here.

We’re going dive into what happened during those ten very profitable days for this seller, but first I would like to note something about this style of affiliate sites.

Selling Amazon Associate Sites Are Our Bread and Butter

In 2016 and 2017, the primary businesses we sold on our marketplace were Amazon Associate sites. They are easy for us to vet, and we have a huge database of active buyers who are hungry to acquire these sites.

At the time of this writing, we have 90,700 active buyers and sellers in our database, which you can see on our scoreboard.

In 2018, we started selling more ecommerce businesses, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t continued selling a ton of Amazon Associate sites (you can see the exact amount we sold of each when you download our leading State of the Industry Report).

It is not uncommon for us to sell even a six-figure Amazon affiliate site in less than a month, often in less than half a month on our marketplace. The reason is that investors are hungry to acquire this style of sites. They’re incredibly easy to manage and most of the work to make them profitable is front-loaded rather than a continuous effort.

The best part for our buyers is that many of them realize that a true authority content site can be expanded into any monetization under the sun. What may have started off as a humble Amazon affiliate site can be scaled into showing display ads, selling information products, and even launching ecommerce products or a SaaS solution. A content site that is looking to grow aggressively can literally expand into almost any online business model you want.

If you have an Amazon Associate site and you want to collect 24–30+ months of net profit upfront, then contact us to sell your affiliate site.

What Went Down in this Sale?

So what actually happened?

Before we go into the deal, let’s first take a closer look at what the site was already doing.

First off, how much work is required? Every buyer or investor is going to want to know the work required to maintain the site. After all, buyers are not looking to buy a job. They want to buy something they can leverage as a true cash flowing asset. As mentioned above, most of the work to make an Amazon affiliate site profitable is front-loaded.

In its current state, this website requires almost zero work to maintain by the seller. The seller would write a couple blog posts per year and make sure all of their product links were working and pointing to the right place.

He also didn’t actually write the blog posts himself, since he had an in-house staff of writers producing the content. When it came to building his backlinks, he chose to go the PBN route by using RankClub links (formerly known as Diggity Links). The website did have social media profiles, but these profiles were only used for SEO purposes. As is common with sites that use PBNs, this seller used Clicky rather than Google Analytics to track its traffic. In addition, this site had also partnered with LeadSpring to bring its revenue up.

Questions that Came In

Since this deal sold so quickly on our marketplace (as the majority of sub-$100k deals do), there weren’t that many questions about the business itself. This is partly because of the small deal size, but also a testament to just how simple and straightforward an Amazon affiliate site really is.

The only question that the seller was asked was why there was an increase in monthly PBN link building spending from $250 to $390 per month. The reason for this was the seller purchasing the RankClub links, so it had an easy explanation.

While not many questions came in, two different offers did.

The Two Offers

The first offer was for a sales price of $30,000 with $21,000 upfront and an earnout that required 30 days of inspection before the buyer would start paying out $1k per month over a nine-month period.

Obviously, that was a pretty low offer. While what the buyer was attempting to do is something many savvy buyers do when making their deal structures, but ultimately the value of this business was too low for such negotiations. A seller would usually be much more flexible with this kind of earnout scenario if the business was priced over the $300k range.

In this situation, the seller only lowered their list price by $1,000. This counter-offer was rejected right away, but it didn’t perturb the seller, considering the offer came in on Day One of the listing being live on the marketplace.

Just nine days after that first offer came in, another offer came in for the full list price. The seller accepted the offer, the listing was marked sold, and it began the migration process.

What Happened During Migration?

Migration is the process of successfully handing over the business you’ve sold to its new owner. If you can’t get this process down, then everything you’ve done up to this point has been for nothing. That makes migration more important than the actual sale of the business in many ways.

Luckily, Empire Flippers helps you out in this department. We’re the only brokerage that has a full dedicated team to help our clients migrate their businesses.

Our team doesn’t just oversee handing the business over to the new owner either. If there is an earnout situation, our migration team will help you manage that whole process. In fact, we would take the remainder of our commission from that earnout, so you would know we’re in the same position as you.

Once the migration process started, it was a simple matter of the buyer creating a new Amazon Associates tracking ID and for our team to swap out the old links with these new links. The buyer monitored their traffic, clicks, and sales, which all started rolling in slow due to Amazon’s hard caching of affiliate links. If you feel a bit of anxiety at this point, that is understandable (whether you’re a buyer or a seller), but this is actually completely normal. Amazon zeros out this hard caching in a few days before beginning to attribute 100% of the sales to the new links.

Sure enough, sales picked up and the buyer approved the release of funds to the seller. Empire Flippers paid out the $44,039.35 to the seller, leaving the seller free to use that capital in any way they wished. The seller then created an automatic payment link to the buyer so the buyer could rent the PBN links via a simple Paypal transaction. This is a very common practice for sellers that use PBNs, but don’t want to sell them off. Most buyers will continue to pay for PBN link rentals ad infinitum, or at least until they can replace the links with either their own PBN or white hat links.

Overall, this was a simple business to transfer over and shows just how fast you can sell a business with the power of the Empire Flippers marketplace.

Are You Ready to Sell?

Hopefully, this case study inspired you with what is possible.

You don’t need a seven-figure business to change your life. Even a small business like this has enough capital to be gained for reinvesting into aggressively growing your business and other site properties.

After all, $40,000 is A LOT of money to go out and spend on content, building backlinks, and other typical SEO costs. It would allow you to amplify and scale “you” as you start buying services, hiring freelancers, and perhaps even a full-time employee to help you in your business.

Are you ready for an injection of capital?

Click here to sell your business now.