Income Report – August 2011
Updated on February 29, 2020
It’s amazing to us how quickly this project has grown and how much we feel drawn to this side of our business. When we originally started here we were still focused on growing our outsourcing business through client acquisition, maintaining relationships, etc. While we’re happy to continue the current relationships we have with our long-standing clients, we’ve found ourselves saying no to taking on new customers more and more. It’s not that we’re not interested in growing that side of our business as well, it’s just that we feel such a connection with AdSenseFlippers and have so many projects we’d like to see accomplished that we don’t want to see anything stand in the way of our growth here and there’s quite a bit we still need to do.
Our AdSense earnings were up over 25% and we had our best day ever on 8/25/11 at $176.65. All in, we averaged $137.91 per day in AdSense earnings in August…a significant jump up from last month! We’ve continued our conversations with Spencer from Niche Pursuits and I’m really hoping we’ll get the chance to work together on a project or two in the future…the guy has some great ideas and is amazingly capable. As you know, it can be a little boring going it alone and we’ve made a point to reach out more to others in the industry that we look up to, think we could help, or would love to learn from. While it’s definitely possible to make money in IM “on an island”, the real value is in connecting and building relationships that can multiply your business…that and it’s just more interesting!
We’ve been debating whether we should release/sell more of our sites in the short term to build up cash flow or whether we should hang onto them and continue to stack the passive income. We have some pretty major projects we’re planning to get involved in over the next 3-6 months (both with AdSense Flippers and our outsourcing company, TryBPO) and we’d like to not come too deep out of pocket to get those up and running. It seems the market is hot right now…if we wait and are forced to sell when we need the cash we might not get the value we’d like. On the other hand, taking up short-term cash at the (potentially) expense of our long-term goals is a pill that’s hard to swallow.
AdSense
Through August, our Mar-July income seems to be on track…all except for May’s sites. We’re not sure what exactly is going on there, but we’re just not getting the rankings or the traffic that we’ve gotten on earlier and previous months. On the other hand, our February sites are still KILLING it comparatively, averaging over $21 per site through August. We’ve sold off all of our December and January sites now, so February is next on the chopping block and you’ll see some of those sites up for auction soon.
In an effort to get caught up on our linkbuilding that had fallen behind, we added one of our company Project Leads to the project as a linkbuilding manager. While she doesn’t have the SEO knowledge you might expect for someone in the position, we needed a quick fix and she’s highly capable…plus she’s going to be outsourcing almost all of the work from vendors anyway…we just need someone who’s responsible and can work well with others, managing vendor relationships.
I’ve adjusted our projections to assume we’re going to sell all of our February sites in September. Since we’ve been averaging $160 or more per day in the last week, I think it’s quite reasonable we’ll hit our $178 daily average in September…I really hope so, anyway!
Flippa
We only held two auctions on Flippa this month, but we were very happy with the value received. As mentioned last month, we decided to include a BuyItNow option as we’d had some requests from people that simply weren’t able to wait out the end of the auction. Our first auction sold within 24 hours of our listing, but the second auction went all the way towards the end where someone picked it up with the BuyItNow option.
We’ve noticed a few sellers have been copying our auctions recently, hoping to get the same results. While we encourage people to consider Flippa as their marketplace of choice, we have asked them not to copy our auctions word for word. (Aside from the fact it’s against Flippa ToS, it’s just kind of a shitty thing to do) We give away freely what we think are the keys to success anyway and it’s NOT the exact wording of the auctions! Check that post out here.
Private Sales
While we’ve continued to say no to people asking us to broker their sites for them on Flippa, (We do this because we don’t want someone piggybacking off our good reputation to rip off unsuspecting buyers…we simply don’t know whether the sites are any good, how they’re built out, etc. unless we worked on them ourselves) we did agree to some private sales this month as a test.
Private Sale 1:
We had a conversation with a guy that would like us to build out sites for him on a regular basis. We’ve said no to this arrangement in the past, but we were impressed with him and figured if we were going to test it out, this would be the perfect person to work with. We agreed to test out building him sites alongside ours to see how the process would work and see if it’s something we’d like to open up long-term.
Private Sale 2:
Someone contacted us via Flippa and said he was really interested in purchasing some of our sites, but simply couldn’t afford the price point that most of our sites were going at. He asked if we could offer a private sale to him of a much smaller network and we agreed.
Affiliates
Very little change here and we’re not planning to explore affiliate sites much in the future. We do offer some affiliate links here at AdSenseFlippers, but we’ve found it not very conducive to our process for our niche sites. We are working on a few Authority sites as a test and those will have affiliate offers on them simply to round out their earnings potential and to provide more value to the user, but I don’t think we’ll be aggressively pursuing this any time soon with our niche sites, except for expanding on the few we have up that are currently running affiliate programs.
Summary
Overall, we’re extremely happy with how this month turned out and we’re really looking forward to September. We’re really hoping to cross the 20K barrier this month if everything works out!
Sites created: 168 (135 last month)
AdSense Earnings: $4,275.23 ($3,391.25 last month)
Flippa Sales: $6,510 ($6,600 last month)
Private Sales: $3,600 ($0 last month)
Affiliate Sales: $50.00 ($189.68 last month)
Total: $14,435.23 ($10,180.93 last month)
Anything else you’d like to see in our Income Reports? Let us know in the comments below! If you think these posts are helpful, help us out by sending this out via Twitter, Facebook, and give us a mention on your blog!
Discussion
How do you generate traffic and how do you place your adsense ads.
Regards Jennifer:)
Hey Jennifer…thanks for stopping by!
All of our traffic is natural/organic through the search engines. We cover our ad layouts well in our podcast episode here:
http://adsenseflippers.com/niche-websites/episode-8-adsense-flippers-podcast-ad-unit-layouts-and-strategies
We go through exactly how we do it here on the blog so feel free to look around.
Hello,
I was looking at your business model lately and thought it was very interesting. However, I have one question about your adsense earnings and site creation : Are you actually creating over 100 sites a month now, or don’t those numbers sum up and from a month to another the sites are the remaining ones + a few (20) new ones ?
Hey David,
You’re correct in that we are creating more than 100 sites per month now. They’re not summed up. We’ve sold some of our sites off (a good portion just recently) but still have around 700-750 sites. We’ve created right around 900 sites or so since we’ve started.
Ok, well that’s huge ! I believe it’s the price to pay to find good niches amongst many possibilities.
That brings me another question, I’m French, and have selected quite a few very good domain names targeting french speaking people. Do you know if buyers on Flippa are friendly with French sites ? Or do you know any other website auction platforms equivalent to Flippa (I didn’t find any…) ?
I have no idea as to whether there are any site flipping places that cater to French sites…that would seem to be quite niche to me. If there’s not…I’ll bet there’s a market for that someone should consider! Ok, they wouldn’t be the next Flippa or anything if it’s in French, but I’m sure there’d be enough money in it to be worthwhile.
All the same, many buyers on Flippa are buying for the revenue. If I were you and I was looking to sell sites that are earning on Flippa, I would have have French content writers setup, a French SEO expert they could go to, etc. and lay out that those resources will go to the highest bidder.
Hi Justin,
Thanks for the reply.
At this very moment, I have no idea where to find French content writers and a French SEO expert, and mostly how much it could cost, but I believe it could be a good idea.
I might come back to you for further questions 🙂
If you had that information, I’d feel much more confident as buyer that I could continue to run the site.
It brings up another good point though…I really do think there’s a way to compete with Flippa if you’re looking to establish a buy/sell marketplace. I think the way to do it would be to go niche…make it country or industry specific.
You should add the total amount of adsense sites you own
Hey Tony,
You can add them up from the screenshots provided.
Hey guys –
Had something happen to my adsense account last night, and I am very worried about it. I have been getting payments since 2009 and have never had an issue, and haven’t done anything differently. They put a hold on my account yesterday that says “Your payments are currently on hold. Action is required to release payment. More details.” And in the details it just says “Payment issue – please contact AdSense Support” which I have done.
I have been doing as much research as I can, and I am not finding any help. I know this probably hasn’t happened to you guys, but do you have any suggestions or ideas for me? Adsense is a very large part of my income and to not get paid will be a pretty big blow for my family.
I found 3 crawler errors inside my account area, which I promptly fixed, but I doubt that is the reason for this. I follow adsense ToS as well.
Ethan
Ethan,
It’s hard to say for sure, but it sounds like there is a problem with your payment method. Did your bank account change?
Expect the AdSense team to take at least a week to get back to you. They are pretty backed up over there!
Bank account is the same it has always been, just got paid on august 21st.
I just keep reading horror stories, like someones payments were held for 10 months etc etc, and really hoping this doesn’t turn out that way. Other than the change in income, and the 3 crawler errors which I took care of yesterday, I have literally no idea what it could be. Really is a horrible feeling though.
I feel for Ethan. You are at the mercy of Google, however. All you can do is follow the rules and play nice. Best of luck.
wow, i just looked at your auctions and one closed today for almost $4400 on less than $200rev/mo….I dont see those multiples anywhere else on flippa…..how do you do that ? Like comments below, im also trying to figure out how I can fund this business model and flippa seems best bet but I havent seem anyone else selling at revenue/income multiples like above
Honesty, openness, supporting documentation, and post sales support!
Hey Brian,
If you look at other quality providers, you’ll see that they get 15x or more pretty regularly as well. You’ll see quite a few going for less than 10x, but MANY of those are quite questionable auctions/sellers for a number of reasons and you’re probably 50/50 (or worse) on whether they’ll actually work out for you.
Often they won’t post verified Google Analytics because of questionable traffic, don’t include their “real” names or are new out-of-the-blue sellers, or claiming their last 7 days of income (their launch days) are going to be the AVERAGE income the site will earn.
In the end, though, the model still works at 10-12x with a decent return, as long as your sites are earning decently and you’ve built them cheap.
Hey guys, I have a quick question:
I just reached the 50-site limit in Google Analytics. How have you handled this?
You’ll have to click on “Add New Account” on the upper right hand side, right below Day/Week/Month/Year. A few clicks later and it’s ready to go. It will give you a new code to use with your sites and any filters you had in the other account you’ll need to add to this one. We’ve named ours AdSense Project 1, AdSense Project 2, etc.
holy crap. How did you guys create 135 sites in one month? are you outsourcing? How big are the pages. What are you using to backlink them all. seems like a ton of work for two people.
We own an outsourcing company — TryBPO.com. This project started as a way to keep idle agents busy and now has legs of it’s own. No way we could do it with just two people! Right now we have 7-8 full time agents working on creating and maintaining the sites. All content is outsourced to contractors.
Hey All,
Had a bit of a debate with an anonymous reader. He kept asking questions but would edit the original post so that my answers didn’t fit. It continued on and on and I finally ended up deleting the comments. I’m not a fan of deleting or editing comments, so you shouldn’t see this often, but I found that he was making other abusive comments elswhere as well. Here’s a rundown of his points, though, because I thought some of them were valid:
1. Could you list your costs?
2. Haven’t you spent around 40K and made 40K? When will you be profitable?
3. If we were going to a bank to get a loan, we’d need to offer more than income statements.
4. That he didn’t think it would work without Flippa sales.
5. He doesn’t think we earn enough $$ per site to make it worth it.
My general answers were:
1. Not really, we keep our outsourcing revenue/expenses separate from AdSenseFlippers, but can state that generally our costs per site were around $40 each up until August and have moved up towards $50 in the last 2-4 weeks or so.
2. That’s close….right around 35K spent and around 40K made. But we have “assets” there as well. The reason we haven’t realized much profit is because we’re reinvesting the “profits” into building more sites faster.
3. Yes, but we’re not posting these in need of a loan. Hopefully, they inspire others…they also help me keep focused on how we can improve and increase earnings.
4. We wouldn’t be able to scale as much, you’re right. It would just take longer to get to the same position is all.
5. Completely understood….this isn’t for everyone.
Although we haven’t turned much profit, we have passive-income assets…and that’s what we’re looking to scale. The less profit we make, the more we are reinvesting into the business, creating more and more of those assets.
Evening,
I’m enjoying following your site and progress. You sent out an email asking about things your readers would be interested in and I thought I would mention something. I would appreciate it if you could share your thoughts on how you decide on ad placement and types. Also, do you utilize an adsense plugin for wordpress to set your ads?
Thanks much and best wishes going forward.
Bill
I am doing some testing on ad placement and it’s affect on CTR. Look for a post in the future. Use can use something like CTR Theme to test ad placements easily, so I highly recommend it.
In general, the large square and large skyscraper ad units get the highest CTR because these are the most common ad units that advertisers have optimized their image ads for. Those two along with a link unit should give your visitors plenty of options.
We don’t use a plugin to set our ads. CTR Theme has a nice options panel for setting up AdSense while other themes need to be edited manually.
how do you transfer your sites to new owner with CTR theme installed when selling your sites…do you swap out the theme when selling it or pay for their license
We haven’t sold any CTR Theme sites yet, but Eppie has a deal that allows you to convert your license to a single site code. Just email him.
People have been copying successful auctions since 1995 when eBay was born 🙂 Not really a big deal in my opinion. But they should really just take bits and pieces of it that make sense for them, not blatantly copy the whole thing.
Yes, Ethan…exactly.
While we encourage people to review successful auctions (including ours) and borrow ideas that seem to be working and make them their own…copying and pasting large pieces of the auction copy is silly.
By the way…this had gotten SO bad that someone who copied us word-for-word (and changed out the stats) had HIS auction copied as well…except the second copier forgot to change out the stats! Had the wrong stats from the previous auction including keywords, traffic revenue information copied into his auction on accident! lol
hahahah…well that’s just plain lazy…or ignorance, however you wanna view it 🙂
This is quite compelling….
Thanks for this awesome and inspirational website as a whole. I have been a subscriber of this site for a quite a while but never interacted directly with you guys. But this time, i really wanted to drop a comment and ask a few of my doubts thereby.
1. Can u pls share the secrets of finding out Exact match domains every time?
2. In some sites, your domain names seem to be hyphenated. Do you still encourage us to use hyphenated domains in case of non-availability of exact match ones?
Thanks in advance…
Waiting for your reply…
Hey Mahamed…thanks for commenting!
1. There’s not a huge secret here, really. We use Market Samurai to find the keywords and then use their internal domain finder to find available domains. You can do it manually with the Google Keyword Tool…it just takes a lot longer.
2. We do have hyphenated domains. I can say that if you’re just starting out, we would not suggest using them…just skip the keyword and look for another KW with an exact match domain. They can rank, can earn well, etc…we just think it’s slighly more difficult. Your results may vary!
Thank you very much for your kind reply.
I have brainstormed and collected a few keywords whose EMDs are available. But am not confident about them all.
Would u mind to take a look at the list and tell me whether or not they are profitable, if I mail u the list in private?
Thanks…
Sure…just email us and I’d be happy to take a look at a couple of them for you.
Hi there,
Another great post, thanks for the info.
I have an unrelated question regarding RPU on different type sites.
After reading Justins post http://www.flipfilter.com/blog/2010/10/29/adsense-site-monetisation-problems/
I decided to try and get rid of some of the adsense on my product websites promoting amazon products. Conversions, though existent have been slow. Of course,promoting Clickbank products would be more profitable.
From your experience, what type sites give you the highest RPU?
Thanks!
Hey Shamir!
It makes sense to me that product websites would have a higher RPU as they’re not simply passing off leads/clicks to someone else…they’re beginning-to-end with the customer and so get more $$ per visit. Of course, those types of sites might require a bit more work unless you have the entire process automated, of course.
I think decided whether Amazon OR AdSense is better for your site is key…and then going with the one that’s better for that particular site.
sorry I’ve mistakenly post the comment below.
may I ask do you have ever use Long Tail Pro from the guy Niche Persuit? If so what do you think about it? is it any better than MS?
We use both Market Samurai and LongTailPro. If I had to choose just one, it would be Market Samurai. We mainly useLongTailPro for 1st page competition research as it’s a much faster tool for this than MS, overall.
How are you guys liking the CTR Theme?
That’s tough to answer at this point! I’ll tell you that I love the look/feel of CTR Theme much better than ProSense. We’ve been able to add custom images that make the site really stand out and look specific to the niche and just has a better feel overall.
Aside from aesthetics, I’m worried it’s not performing as well. We’re not near the end of our test yet, but it’s under-performing on CTR significantly, unfortunately. Now…that being said…we think the reason is the particular ad positioning we chose…and we didn’t have rotating positioning. We’re going to switch that up a bit and see if it makes a difference. If it’s close, we’ll stick with it…but if it’s still seriously underperforming, we’ll probably have to move away from CTR Theme…ugh.
I tried the CTR theme hoping that it would outperform the custom theme I designed. My current theme achieves a 6% CTR and when I switched to CTR theme it dropped to 3%. I really only tested it for a month however, perhaps more testing would have been necessary to assess it’s potential value.
I moved back to my custom theme and I maintain a 6% CTR.
Phil
Interesting, Phil. Did you try this across a wide range of sites? I don’t think we should get into specific CTR %’s, but your numbers seem pretty close to what we’ve seen.
Justin
Yes, I converted all my site to the CTR theme (keep in mind that I only had 8 or 9 sites at that point).
Tried it for a month and CTR was 3%. Like I said before perhaps that wasn’t a long enough test.
Phil
What subtheme and ad layout did you try? Did you use rotating layout with custom channels to really get good numbers?
I only use a few of the layouts and don’t rotate the ads. I am split testing them but I think you guys should just stick to a couple. I think I am done with the 728×90 ads though.
I am not a fan of the leaderboard either. Not enough advertisers use it. We’ll stick with a square block and a skyscraper.
I have tried CTR themes several times but I never had any success with it. So in my point of view, I don’t like it.
Hello Justin..glad to see you and all the other team enjoying the success that is truly a result of hard work, determination and accurate planning. I am reading that your sites averaging over $21 per site and i am curious..can a low traffic resulting to such numbers of dollars eventually hurt your adsense account? or is it okay for an adsense site to earn 10 or 20 dollars per month? Thanks
Hey Giatziston,
Thanks so much! Actually, our average per site is right around $11 per site or so. I don’t think the AdSense team cares how much revenue comes from each URL…I don’t think that’s an issue of theirs. Consider this: What if I had a very high traffic site and only put one small AdSense block on the entire site? I wouldn’t get many clicks or much revenue for the site, but why would Google care, right?
Really great info, Justin. Thanks so much for sharing all your insights. Going back to the previous comment about using Company names, isn’t this also against Adsense TOS? not sure..
thanks!
Well you are allowed two accounts per name — one personal and one business. So if you created multiple corporations you will still need to have a different representative name or you could be in violation of the TOS. I’m not a lawyer so be sure to check directly with AdSense if this what you are trying to do. 😉
I think Gene was referring to my question.
Have you enabled notifications for new comments? Because I’m not getting them.
Sorry a bit of confusion there. Too many comments to keep track of!
Regarding company/trademark names, with the over 800 sites we have created, we have only been contacted 6 or 7 times on this issue. So unless the corporation is actively pursuing their trademark, I don’t think it is much of a problem.
Is it against AdSense TOS? Google simply states that if they “become aware” of a trademark infringement they will remove the domain from the AdSense network. Again, the company need to be actively pursuing their trademark, which most are not doing. In my opinion, you can’t get your account banned for trademarked domains. Your results may vary. 😉
Check out:
http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=96332
Looking into the comments things. We’ll install a plug that allows for updates.
Pretty impressive Justin. I’ve been checking some of your sites, and it seems you’re using company names in the domain name for some of your websites. Aren’t you concerned of having copyright issues?
Hey Javier,
We’ve had a few contacts (6, I think?) regarding the use of brands and that usually happens within the first 30 days. We haven’t sold any of the sites where we had been contacted and we do try to make sure we maintain some diversity there with sites created as well.
It’s a small concern for the most part. Some of our best earners don’t include brands…go figure!
I was excited to find your site, right up my alley.
Great job on the earnings for August you guys are seriously hustling!
135 sites created last month…wow
I’m looking forward to following your progress and I hope to be where you’re at someday soon (haven’t cracked $1,500 a month yet unless you count the sale of sites).
Keep up the great content and good luck with the growth of your sites.
Regards
Phil
Hey Phil!
I just took a look at your site…will be interesting to follow your progress! It’s to bad about your multiple on your sale…was it your first one? Once you’ve proven yourself in the market as a provider of quality sites you’ll get better value. Back to the grindstone, hehe.
Justin
Thanks for checking out my site.
No, it wasn’t my first sale, but I’ve only sold a few of my sites so far. Better luck next time.
Cheers
Phil
Hi,
Have any of your sites ever been hit by panda?
I actually have couple of minisites of about 10 pages per site, quite similar to the sites you built got slammed by panada recently. I’m trying to see if I can make some recovery, so far, it only gotten worse.
No Panda issues for us. We had a slight issue/change around the middle of April where we weren’t growing as quickly as we’d like and the sites we created in May are under-performing, but we rebounded…definitely nothing across the board that’s negatively impacting us.
Still exactly not sure why my minisites got slapped then. Do you build backlinks to your sites every month? Maybe something off-page instead of on-page.
Thanks.
We build links to new sites, but our linkbuilding methods are pretty limited. Are your sites autoblogs or using PLR for content?
No autoblogs or PLR content used, the sites are static html built, so I don’t think its that.
Guys,
What theme do you guys, after all of your experience, think is the most effective for adsense
Hey Kevin,
That’s a tough question to answer. We’ve had some success with the ProSense theme lineup, but we’ve recently switched over heavily to CTR Theme. Our initial view on CTR Theme is that our CTR is actually slightly lower, but we think it might have to do more with the particular layout we chose, so we’re going to start rotating the ad layout to see what works best for us.
Still, though, we wouldn’t use those themes for our authority sites. We’re going with a modified version of the SimpleFolio theme and the Clickbump Engine theme for those so far. I really don’t think it’s the theme that’s going to get it done for you…I think the niche has much more to do with your stats than the theme does. As long as you’re using any of the standard themes with correct placement you’ll do find…I don’t think there’s any “magic” behind ProSense necessarily.
Nice Done Guys!!!,
Looks like someone is using the NITRO here!!!.
Best for you guys next Month 20k!!!
Thanks, Aldo…really hoping we can break 20K for sure!
Another inspiring income report. I have had a rough go of niche sites these last few months, I hope to see success by following your blueprint step by step now. Question: I notice in many of your auction sites, the webpages have images in them. Where do you find images you can use for commercial use? I struggle with that a lot.
Sorry to hear that, Kate…what specifically do you think is going on with your niche sites?
If you’re looking for paid, high-quality pictures, definitely check out iStockPhoto. For our niche sites, we simply search out related (not exact) keywords to find the images we’d like to use and then rename them to the keyword related to the page.
I’m not real sure what’s going on. I think I picked relatively low-comp keywords and I have EMDs. However, I am still not anywhere near the top 10 in some cases, even when the sites in the top 10 aren’t even optimized for the KW I’m going for. Maybe it’s something wrong with my on-page SEO?
Hey Kate,
My guess is it wasn’t as low-comp as you thought…that’s the most common reason we’ve seen…we make mistakes there often too. Will you contact us directly and, if you’re willing, give us a couple of sites and we’ll take a look?
Thank you so much!! I really appreciate it. I contacted you through the Contact Us link, please let me know if you didn’t get it.
Hi guys
Nothing thats important is missing from the report 🙂
I follow you auctions very proffesionally put together. I get tempted to go for one but too often there going at near or on the buy it now price 🙁
I think you should consider private tutoring (just an hour at a time or some kind of private memebrs club. The issue with forum is to much selling and not enough sharing as they are so open.
I suggest this as you guys clerly have htis down pat and those of use with knowledge and expertise but less success could find a mentoring group enviorment very usefull.
regards
Wow, thanks Steve!
We’ve considered some type of paid membership site where we get even more involved, hold calls, etc. What we don’t want to become, though, is THOSE guys. You know the ones…those who charge you
$99.95$49.95$16.95 selling you stuff rather than actually doing anything! Still though, I guess some kind of nominal fee would be nothing to those that are serious and would help US build a team of people doing the same thing…we can all help each other.We’ve been working more to reach out to others in our niche and those with similar lifestyles, but are serious about their business. We’ve met some interesting people including Spencer, the guys from LifestyleBusinessPodcast, etc…will be posting about that pretty soon, I’m sure.
Hi
Yes the idea was a nominal fee just to make people have some kinda commitment to the process.
Sure network is cool and something i do with like mind folks when ever i can
Spencer certainly walks the walk.
regards
do you do anything to your sites much after creation besides a little backlinking…..as it has to be daunting trying to manage that many.
Grate site but seems this system is only sustainable from selling sites as the site creation costs still exceed revenue from Adsense. I mean 168 sites created times maybe $40 a site that you mentioned elsewhere(for content/domain/backlinking) a least is $6720 vs. the $4275 adsense earnings.
Hi Brian
But the $6720 (if thats accurate) is a one off cost. if they stopped building sites then the income would exceed the cost at some point i.e. the break even point.
All due to the fact that sites dont make money from day 0 probably 2-3 months before they really do.
regards
Hey Steve…it’s pretty accurate, although I think we’re closer to $50 per site with some additions, putting the costs closer to $8,000 for the month. You’re spot-on with our point, though…the reason we initially offered the auctions was so that we could scale more quickly without having to wait to realize the profits from AdSense to expand. We thought if we could realize them upfront through auction sales, we could simply reinvest and earn considerably more in a shorter period of time.
You’re also right in that if we were at a level we were comfortable with, we could simply cute back on site creation and work on maintaining that level of income for a while. Not sure when we’ll get to that point, though…
Hey Brian,
Not much done to the sites…we have a process for the off-site seo and we do make tweaks to the sites now and again globally. You’re right, it can be quite a pain to update all of the sites so we try to only do it when absolutely necessary.
You’re 100% correct that our AdSense earnings haven’t outpaced our cost on site creation yet…good catch. The reason for this though is because of heavily increased production…if we were still creating only 50 sites/month our costs would be around the $2,000 per month range. It’s the auctions that allow us to scale up heavily and still keep the project profitable. All-in, we’ve made more than we’ve spent on the project now though and we expect that to continue from here on out. (Although this long weekend is shaping out to be pretty rough for us…ugh!)
I’d also mention that we’re closer to $50 per site on current site creation…maybe even a bit more than that, actually. Now that we’ve got a new backlinking process in place I really need to run through costs again, factoring that in, heh.
This is great guys. I’ve really enjoyed seeing this evolve and it really encourages me. Though I’m working on a much smaller scale, it makes me see that I can do the same thing and make a profit.
I remember seeing an auction on Flippa that looked almost exactly like yours. Sorry you guys have to deal with that. Of course, they probably can’t follow through like you guys…
I’ll be posting some sites soon and I’d love for you guys to look over my auctions too. You’ve done it before and your suggestions helped… thanks!
Yep, unfortunately. When we catch/find them we do report to Flippa, but I can’t be bothered chasing down all auctions unfortunately! I mean, we do give the process away…I just think some people are fearful of saying the wrong thing, have poor English, etc. so it’s easier for them to copy our auctions word for word. What they don’t get is that it’s not simply the wording of the auction, of course, heh.
Sounds good, Kenny…let us know!
Looks like you are going to increase 1.5k per month every single month now onwards. I was closely noticing your feb sites progress from 3 months. These site looks bit more competitive terms as compared to other niche website you have that why they took some time to rank and first they were less profitable for 3 months and now they are more profitable then others. What global exact searches you prefer per month/ cpc.
Yes, Rahul, not exactly sure what the reason is for the Feb sites…I like the way you’re thinking, though. What I should do is go through and collect the stats for the Feb keyword research. Pull out an average exact match search, cpc, etc. per site and compare that to our overall average. If you’re right, maybe we should go after more aggressive niches and simply wait it out, right? God, if all of our sites were just doing as well…we’d be killing it! 🙂
Yeah that is true. I know one guy who have 9k-14 emd domain 90 sites rank on number 1. Guess what he must be earning 5-10k per month very professionally heavily backlinked xfactor sites. He must be killing. Your
luggage site is on auction. do you use product names sites for adsense?
Amazing stuff. I Look forward to you, Spencer and Trent income/project reports each month. Keeps me motivated to soldier on with my site.
In a few months I will be trying to flip one of my best earners on Flippa. Taking notes from you guys ( NOT COPYING THOUGH )… that sucked to hear ppl were doing a Xerox of your auctions.
Anyway… good going fellas. Keep the fire blazing!
Thanks, man!
Glad to hear you’re fighting through. Feel free to have us review your auction copy if you like…we’d like to help you get full value!
Best to you…
Many thanks. Will do!