How Spending an Hour a Week Netted This Buyer an Extra $6,000
Updated on February 29, 2020
We believe at Empire Flippers that when you buy a business, you can dramatically shorten both your learning curve and time to profit, if you purchase the business that best fits your lifestyle.
For people wondering about our process and what happens in the aftermath of a sale, we thought offering this series on buyer experiences would be incredibly useful for showing you not only what our buyers do with the websites but also who they are and how their personalities fit the business they’ve chosen.
Allow us to introduce Zach Gray.
As he mentions below, he has purchased over 15 websites. Many of them through us here at Empire Flippers. Zach was not only able to increase the earnings of his websites, but he has been cruising on the passive income that they continue to generate for him since that initial boost.
We recently caught up with Zach, and asked some questions about his experience as a buyer in the Empire Flipper’s marketplace.
Empire Flippers: What is your background in owning online businesses?
Zach: This was not the first purchase. I have completed over 15 website acquisitions since making this my full-time job. I’ve been doing this for 3 years full time now and 6 years part time.
I got into the online world a little differently than everyone else. Kickstarter had just started ramping up, and I was doing interviews through YouTube as a pure passion project, and started to look at online marketing and affiliates as a possible revenue stream.
EF: Where are your traffic and earnings today compared to when you first bought the site?
Zach: When we purchased this particular site it was making $2.5k a month, and now is $3k a month with very little effort put into it.
EF: What do you attribute the change to?
Zach: While there has been very little change, I am coming up on a year of owning the site and spend maybe 1 hour a week on it.
We currently post 2 articles a month on the site and have a VA do a small amount of backlinking. Overall this has allowed the website to see a monthly increase of $500.00 a month since we have purchased the site. For such little work and consistency in revenue this was a dream purchase.
So, for 52 hours of work, seeing an $500.00 increase a month is amazing.
EF: Do you now own/manage a portfolio of websites or online businesses?
Zach: I do currently. I have around 20 web properties, but only about 8 earn an income. Four are brand new sites we are building out.
EF: How do you manage the newest site you’ve purchased? Do you use VA’s, have a team, or documented processes, etc.?
Zach: We use a blend of things.
We use VA’s, and want to give a shout out to Dom Wells at Human Proof Design and Greg Nunan at No Hat Digital, they handle a lot of tasks for me as well. I also do a lot of the work and testing.
EF: Do you think buying a business gave you an advantage over starting from scratch?
Zach: I have yet to create a site that has gone over $50 dollars in earnings a month, while I have seen great success in maintaining and growing established sites. Close to 95% of our monthly website revenue is from purchased established sites.
EF: What advice would you give someone looking to buy a website or business?
Zach: Do your research.
Empire Flippers does a great job of vetting and weeding out a lot of the subpar websites, but you will still want to vet yourself as well.
Second, buy something you have an understanding of and/or are passionate about. I’m a 30 year old balding male and it’s a struggle to constantly put up good content and to be able to proof articles (Editors Note: Zach, like many website builders, has built profitable sites in niches he was not incredibly knowledgable on. It just goes to show you that you can build money making sites even with very little knowledge on the niche. What he did was hire out the experts via outsourcing the content. The writers did the research for him or processed the research he did into workable articles.). I am lucky enough to have set up expert panels that help me out a ton, but it goes a long way to know and have experience in the niche you are buying.
It’s not the end of the world, but there are enough challenges in this website game, why add another?
EF: What is a key tip or tool that allows you to manage and grow particular sites while adding more to your portfolio?
Zach: Content is king.
Get a good understanding of your audiences’ needs and help them. Get on forums around your niche, learn what people are asking about, find the answers, write content on it, and present it in an easy to read, readily available way.
Not only are you helping out your base, but Google loves that stuff and will become your friend instead of a sparring mate.
Key Takeaways
What is really interesting about Zach is that he has not created a website that earns over $50 a month himself, yet he has bought, maintained, and grown websites that bring in thousands of dollars a month.
This is what I alluded to at the top of this post. While there is no real shortcut in business, buying an online business does take away a lot of the guesswork.
Here are some of the quick wins you can realize when you buy a business that is already producing an income:
- No need to guess on a niche
- Keyword research is done
- Keyword research can easily be expanded because of proof of an ROI from the niche
- Website is already converting traffic into customers
- Many of our websites are fairly passive, so you can either build out the sites even more or just keep them as part of a passive income portfolio
Given all these factors, the simple act of buying a business can be a lucrative move. Zach added $6,000 to his annual income, just by putting an hour a week into a website he had purchased.
Since he has a portfolio of income producing websites, he is now building out more of his own, using the income and leveraging it into new projects.
This is something he might not had been able to do, had he not first invested in an online business versus trying to make one work from the start.
Are you ready to start your own portfolio of income producing websites? Click here to check out our current listings on our marketplace.
Discussion
Seems like, Zach’s buy and hold strategy is paying dividends. Good work.
Lots of power to holding onto the investments and letting them grow 😉
Did I miss it? What does he spend the hour on?
Hey Troy!
Yes, so he added extra articles and had a VA do some backlinking to increase the websites incomes. Once a website is making money and is getting a good amount of traffic from Google, it is often even easier to rank for articles with very little backlinking or promotion done just on the strength of the domain authority itself.
Easy win for people looking at buying websites that are killing it with SEO already 🙂