RMRB 1373 – Building an Affiliate Business Making $154K per Year in the Outdoors Niche

In this episode, Lauren talks to the seller of an affiliate, Amazon Associates, and display advertising business created in January 2016 in the outdoors, home, and hobbies niches. Listen in to find out how the business makes an average of $154,576.00 per year in net profit, why the seller has decided to sell, the lessons learned from running the business, and much more.

Visit https://empireflippers.com/listing/90968 to learn more about this business.

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Transcript

Forget gurus. Forget anyone claiming to be an online business expert without going through the challenges of entrepreneurship themselves. The Real Money, Real Business podcast is here to prove the best insights in online business come from your fellow online business builders.

We dig into stories of entrepreneurs selling their businesses on the Empire Flippers Marketplace so that you can learn how they made their businesses profitable, how they overcame obstacles, and what lessons they learned in their online journeys. If you want to take your business and your knowledge to the next level, you've come to the right podcast. Let's get started.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Real Money, Real Business Podcast. We record these interviews so that potential buyers can learn more about the business and the seller to help them make an informed buying decision.

If you would like to learn more about this business, including details like what type of business it is, how much revenue and profit it makes, and all of the assets included with the business, simply visit empireflippers.com/marketplace and search for this business's listing number, which you can find in the video thumbnail and in the description. Or, if you're watching this on YouTube, you can click the link in the description to go straight to the listing.

So, without further ado, let's get into this interview.

First up, let's learn a little bit about you. Can you tell us about your background in building and running online businesses?

I've been building online businesses since 2016, which was when this site was created. It was the first one I ever built and, funnily enough, it's the most successful one I've ever built.

Over that time period, as you can imagine, I've had to kind of master traffic generation. In the earlier days, it was certainly more of an SEO play, and there was a real emphasis on finding the right people who could create real content and do real product reviews. So, there's a lot of authenticity behind the site.

As traffic trends developed, I've then had to learn how to incorporate the social element as well—Pinterest and Facebook more recently. So, I suppose over this time period, this project is a real culmination of all of these methods put together into one master project that has, thankfully, done very well.

Again, building a project like this doesn't just rely on myself. One of the key things has been finding the right people, whether those are product testers or experienced writers who can really get across why a product is worth buying and write well-written reviews.

Again, on the VA side of things, I've been able to bring in people who are very self-sufficient, trusted, and can really get on with the day-to-day tasks in the business to make sure it continues to grow.

So, yeah, this project, as I say, is a culmination of 10 years of solid work and experience, which, thankfully, has brought it to a position today where it's really quite a successful, well-managed business that doesn't require a great amount of time from myself.

Why are you selling the business now instead of keeping it and growing it further?

I've decided to sell the business. I suppose, like many entrepreneurs, I run several projects, and there's one project in particular that is my real passion and calling in life, shall we say. It gives me a lot of excitement when I'm working on it. It's something that I get my kids involved with as well, so it just brings me a lot of joy each day.

I've come to a crossroads and decided that that's what I want to be spending the majority of my time doing, even though it's still in its early phase and still growing. And, yeah, that's led me to the decision to sell this particular business because it's in such a healthy position, I guess.

Can you describe the amount and the type of work that you do on this business to maintain it?

Over time, I've deliberately reduced my involvement in the business. Roughly speaking, I'd say it's about five hours a week, but it's really to focus on higher-level decision-making with regard to the content direction or things like tracking important metrics to make sure everything is growing the way I want it to.

But, as I mentioned, I've put in place a very experienced content manager who's worked with the business for several years and knows it very well; a real trusted VA who works on a lot of the operational tasks day to day; and ad hoc product testers, writers, and a web developer whom I've worked with for a decade.

All these people are in place to ensure that the business runs really well without huge involvement from the owner. Of course, that's something that is a massive benefit to somebody who takes over the business. They can mirror exactly what I'm doing, or that frees them up to be more involved in that side of things.

But, yeah, as I say, I've taken it to a point where it really doesn't require a huge amount of my time. And, you know, for the monthly level of profit it's making, it's really quite a nice position to be in, I'd say.

So, if you were to keep this business, what are some of the ways you were trying to grow it?

There were two clear paths to grow the business, the first of which was Facebook. What I've experienced over the last 12 months has really opened my eyes to what is possible from a traffic perspective. Again, for whoever ends up buying the business, my entire process would be shared and very clearly laid out.

Ultimately, it's to do with growing the audience, increasing the posting frequency, and, of course, matching that with content that people are genuinely interested in reading about. That would have a direct impact on growing the display advertising revenue.

Then, the other side of things would be YouTube. There are two clear paths to go down here. The first would be getting more products in hand and creating product review videos. I've got a very talented freelancer whom I work with who is very comfortable on camera. That, of course, adds a lot of authenticity to the product reviews.

So, that's one way of growing affiliate revenue through YouTube. Another, perhaps easier, option is to create faceless videos around product reviews—top-five roundup videos, again with links in the description. That, too, can increase the affiliate side.

So, yeah, two really clear options and two levers to pull there, both for display and affiliate revenue growth.

Right. And what would you say are the biggest risks with this business that buyers should be aware of?

I suppose with an online content business, the biggest risk involved is around algorithm changes, and of course, they're outside of your control. But I suppose you have to remember with a business like mine, which I've built over 10 years, that everything has been done with diversification in mind.

Sure, in the early days, it was all about SEO, affiliate revenue, and ranking highly on Google. But obviously, the hard times that SEO had several years ago taught you the importance of developing traffic from different platforms and making sure your revenue is evenly split between different sources as well.

That has really been such a focus, particularly over the last few years, to make sure that there's as even a split in terms of traffic and revenue as possible. That way, if there's an algorithm change, it's negated as much as possible.

Specifically looking at some of the different platforms, for example, with SEO, a lot of businesses failed to recover from the Google changes a few years ago. But this business has continued to operate and generate traffic from Google and Bing.

Of course, the SERPs aren't what they used to be. It isn't as easy as it used to be to generate visitors, and less traffic comes from Google. That's well documented. But still, this site has such a strong backlink profile and such authenticity because of the real reviews, real writers, and real photos that it still stands up as best as it can in terms of the search environment.

Then, if we look at Pinterest, which was built on top of that, again with diversification in mind, the Pinterest account associated with the business has 14,000 pins and gets anywhere from 7 to 15 million monthly impressions, depending on seasonality, which is a huge amount of visitors from that.

Then there's Facebook on top of that. The audience we've got on Facebook is 50,000 strong. All of those things combined mean that the site has three main platforms, three main areas that it generates visitors from, and obviously, that's not mentioning YouTube as well.

The revenue split in terms of display and affiliate is also very evenly balanced. So, as I say, what the buyer is getting is a business that has taken great care in diversifying and protecting itself as much as possible off the back of some experiences from the past few years.

How much support are you willing to offer the buyer who acquires this business?

I think it's really important for whoever acquires the site to know that I'm here and happy to help. As you can imagine, this site has been a big part of my work and life for the last decade, and I want to see it continue to do well and whoever acquires it to be happy with what they've purchased.

I think it's really important for me. If I were in your shoes and buying a business, I would want the same kind of courtesy as well.

Of course, with Empire Flippers, you're going to get the standard phone and email support. But if you ever wanted to jump on a Zoom call with me and talk anything through, or needed a screen recording of how something worked, a written SOP, or whatever it might be, I just want the buyer to know that I'm here.

Not only that, my web developer has been with me on this journey for the last decade, building the site and putting a lot of things in place. He knows it as well as I do from a technical point of view, so he would be accessible too.

But, yeah, the overriding message is that I'm here, happy to help, and want to see the business continue to do well.

Are you open to negotiating something like an earn-out agreement?

No. I'd say for this level of business, I'm looking for a straight sale. I wouldn't be open to an earn-out.

No.

Okay, final question. If you had to put yourself in the shoes of a buyer, why is your business worth buying?

I think ultimately you are buying a business that's got 10 years of work, experience, and knowledge behind it, which has led it to be incredibly successful. The figures back it up. It generates a significant amount of profit each month with minimal input. And, you know, for a lot of people starting from scratch, that's the ultimate goal.

But if we dig a little bit deeper, it's got a highly autonomous and clever team behind it who operate the business. It's highly diversified in terms of its traffic and revenue. It's got a huge content library, takes advantage of search, and takes advantage of social. The niche is evergreen and delivers every year. The business is growing year on year as well.

From my point of view, it ticks every box. For somebody starting from scratch, this is what they strive for. So, ultimately, I'm very proud of where it's got to today. And, yeah, good luck to the buyer.

All right, everyone. Thanks for listening. To learn more and see if this business is still for sale, head over to empireflippers.com/marketplace and search for this business's listing number, which you can find in the video thumbnail and description.

Or, if you're watching this on YouTube, click the link in the description to go straight to the listing. Once you've unlocked this listing, you'll find everything you need to know about this business.

So, thanks for joining us. See you next time.