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4. High-Yield Investments – How a 27-Year-Old Doubled Her Money in 12 Months

High-Yield Investments – How a 27-Year-Old Doubled Her Money in 12 Months

High-Yield Investing: Online vs. Physical Properties

My name is Stacy Caprio, and I’m a 27-year-old who doubled her website investment in a year.

I’m here to walk you through why websites can be a great investment, and how I’ve personally gotten such great returns from my own site investments.

Everyone knows that real estate can be a good investment, but many have no idea that online properties (websites) as opposed to physical properties can also be high-yield, high-return investment when used correctly.

Real estate can be profitable, and there are many ultra-wealthy who were able to get there through their property purchases.

However, buying property is not without risk or downside. You have to pay ongoing property taxes as well as take unexpected hits for maintenance, repairs, and negligent tenants or dogs that didn’t have a chance to use the restroom outside.

You also risk having nobody wanting to stay in your building, or rent rates in your area taking a nosedive.

It can take years or even decades to break even on your real estate investments.

Buying online properties instead of physical ones is a way to get undervalued websites at a very low cost relative to their value, allowing you to earn your money back in as little as 10 months.

First you earn your initial investment back with all the cash directly in your pocket.

Then, all the monthly income from your online properties becomes pure profit, coming back to you, literally in your pocket each month.

The best part is that online properties have very little overhead and maintenance payments, which can be around $20 or so a month for hosting, and $10 a year for a domain name on the lower end.

This high-yield investing strategy is what allowed me, a 27-year-old without a background in web development or programming, to start buying websites and double my initial inputs fairly quickly. I have been able to consistently break even after around 10 months and double my investment within 1 to 2 years, depending on the specific site and if I chose to hold or sell it at that point.

Website investing is one of the only investments in the world, other than real estate, where you can earn back your full investment by getting cash payments each month until you start getting cash payments that are pure profit.

I’m not the only one who’s profited from investing in websites. If you’re curious, you can check out more success stories here.

Stocks and other traditional investments can go up or down in value at any time. In a crash, you can lose everything in one fell swoop because all the value was stored online and never paid out to you in full over time.

When you own websites, you pocket monthly payments.

This means that instead of watching a stock market graph go up and down randomly, always with the chance of losing it all, you get cold hard cash in your pocket each month until your initial investment is paid back. Then, the money coming in each month becomes extra and yours to keep.

I’ll take you through how I buy websites profitably and provide some tips to help you do the same.

How To Buy a Website With High Returns

Verify Site Traffic and Revenue

The first, and most important, part of buying any website is verifying its traffic and revenue.

I personally bought a site where the owner lied about its earnings, telling me it was making around 20X what it actually was. I’ve also seen thousands of sites listed online that I haven’t bought, lying about their revenues and profits.

Empire Flippers does a very thorough job of verifying site traffic and revenue, which is one reason it has such a strong reputation in the online site buying and selling community.

When you buy a site from them, you pretty much know it’s making what it says it’s making, both revenue and profit-wise.

While other sites, such as Flippa, offer cheaper deals along with great undervalued sites, they are also where I’ve seen the most outright site revenue fraud. Flippa was where my fake revenue site was posted.

You learn a lot when you make these types of mistakes, and what I learned from mine is that you should always, and I do mean every single time, verify and triple-check revenue and analytics before buying a site.

If you don’t believe me, feel free to make that mistake once. You’ll never do it again.

Experience tends to be the best teacher, but I’m hoping you’ll be able to learn from my mistakes instead.

Websites tend to sell for anywhere from 20 to 60 times (on the very high end) their monthly profit, which is a much better deal than any physical business or real estate property can offer.

Any site, even without increasing its value quickly, will be a great investment, allowing you to earn your money back and start making pure profit within 1.5 to 5 years on the very high end, even if all you do is let it sit, assuming your site doesn’t need new content daily or won’t be hit with a Google penalty before you make your money back.

Every type of investment has risk, and a website’s risk comes from mismanagement and traffic losses due to something outside of your control.

For instance, Google updates multiple times a year, and if your site is hit, you may lose site traffic and revenue, keeping you from making your money back.

To avoid this, buy high-quality sites that offer value to their readers.

All Google tries to do with its updates is knock out sites trying to game the system and those that don’t actually provide value to their readers. If your site’s content and links are high quality, you shouldn’t have issues with algorithm updates.

Of course, even quality sites can get hit with penalties, but all investments, not just websites, have risks.

The potential risk of a traffic penalty is why you can often get great deals, buying websites at a lower multiple than any type of physical real estate or business.

Increase Revenue by Increasing Site Speed

Once you find and buy a site with amazing revenue and traffic numbers, you can do several things to increase its value quickly, speeding up the return on your investment.

For instance, to get more site traffic in a little as a week, optimize your site speed.

Not only do search engines favor sites that load faster, users are less likely to hit the back button when they land on your site in a second or two as opposed to four or more seconds.

To test your current site speed, use a tool such as Google Lighthouse or the Pingdom Speed Test.

Testing your site speed before optimization is the only way you’ll be able to measure the effectiveness of your site speed optimization.

After that, you can make several optimizations fairly quickly.

I recommend starting with a content delivery network that has servers set up all over the world. Anyone accessing your site will get there faster since they’ll be closer to a server storing your site’s data.

Another way to increase your site speed is to use an image compression or optimization service. There are even a few free WordPress plugins that can help you accomplish this.

To implement other site speed improvements, talk to a developer for more information and support.

Increasing your site speed will increase the number of visitors search engines send to your site and the number of people who stay on your site boosting your revenue whether your site is based on ads or on selling physical products and services.

Increase Revenue by Optimizing Ads

There are three ways to optimize your ads and increase your revenue immediately.

Start by testing the ad placement on your site. If you only have one or two ads per page, you can add a few more with different ad code, so you can use analytics to determine which positions return the most revenue.

Keep the higher revenue position ads and cut the lower ones.

As well, keep more ads on each page than you started with. I’ve found that simply having more ads per page usually returns more revenue per pageview and can have a huge positive impact on your monthly revenue.

You can also test ad placement revenue with an ad placement testing tool, such as Ezoic, instead of trying to do it manually. Ezoic helps you easily test different ad placements on your site, letting you know which placements return the most revenue.

Increase your ad revenue further by testing different ad networks.

Don’t simply stick with the ad network the previous site owner was using. Test at least three other networks and let them run for at least two weeks each to determine which is the best for your website’s audience and niche.

I’ve seen 2-4X revenue lifts by testing different ad networks, making the potential return huge. For example, say you bought a site for 40X its monthly valuation. If you were able to double the revenue, you’d make your money back in just 20 months instead of 40.

Lastly, in addition to testing ad networks, you can reach out to sponsors and brands in your niche, creating paid posts or flat fee rates for your site.

When your site fits with a company’s or brand’s desired image or audience, I’ve found that they are willing to pay sizable flat fees to get an ad position or sponsored post on your site.

Reaching out to companies and brands requires a little legwork, but it can pay off each month in the form of additional flat fees.

If your site is Ecommerce- or service-based, then you can use A/B test elements (such as ad copy or design) to see how your conversions and revenue will respond.

Why are Websites One of the Best High-Return Investments?

Websites are great high-yield investments because you can buy them for a small fraction of their actual value.

After that, it’s easy to increase your revenue and profit by optimizing the site for speed, ads, and conversions. When performed correctly, your return on investing in sites will be much higher than any other form of traditional investing.

There is always the risk of a Google penalty or other factors outside of your control, but the risk-reward ratio leans heavily towards the reward side if you do it correctly.

I, a 27-year-old female without technical web development experience, doubled my investment in a little over a year by buying a site for 20X its monthly valuation and using the techniques outlined above to double its revenue., I made back my investment in 10 months and earned it again within a year.

I was then able to sell the site for a higher price than I bought it, after I’d already earned back and doubled the initial investment.

If you’ve ever made a successful website investment, let us know about it in the comments below.