RMRB 1390 – Building an Affiliate Business Making $175K per Year in the Information Niche

In this episode, Lauren talks to the seller of an affiliate, digital product, YouTube, info product, and newsletter business created in November 2020 in the information, lifestyle, and finance niches. Listen in to find out how the business makes an average of $175,130.00 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/97415 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 that the best insights in online business come from your fellow online business builders. We dig into the stories of entrepreneurs selling their businesses on the Empire Flippers marketplace so you can learn how they made their businesses profitable, how they overcame obstacles, and what lessons they learned on their online journeys. If you want to take your—

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 and 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 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?

Hey, my name is Yvonne, and I’m from Germany. Our business we’re selling was our first online business. Before that, I had a background in direct sales to consumers, so that’s what I brought into building the business. And my partner in crime—

Which is me. My name is Jen, and I’m originally from Guatemala. I live in Germany, and my background is that I worked professionally as a web developer. With that knowledge, I was able to build the platforms, website, and things needed for our online business.

Nothing custom-made. On purpose, I used tools that could be used by anyone, essentially, because one of my biggest missions was for Yvonne to be able to use the tools and for them to be friendly to external partners, employees, or anyone. That’s why I decided to use existing tools without needing to reinvent the wheel, essentially.

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

We are looking to sell the business instead of growing it or keeping it for multiple reasons. Number one is that, after doing it for six years, we’ve reached a point where we’ve experienced some sort of topic fatigue. We’re just kind of tired of talking about the same things.

Also, since it was our first online business, we feel that we’ve outgrown the topic and the challenges. We’re just ready to talk about something different that matches our personalities more nowadays.

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

Currently, we actually put in very little effort. Before deciding to sell it, we had put it in maintenance mode. By very little effort, I mean that together we invest maybe around 10 hours a week maximum. That pretty much involves answering partner emails, making sure the content is up to date if there are any changes in the environment we’re operating in, answering customer emails, and just making sure the workflow is optimal. Updates for plugins and stuff like that.

Correct, exactly. So, it’s really maintenance mode that we’ve operated in. Beforehand, when we were more active, the workload was bigger and more creative, of course, but that’s up to any buyer. However, it was always supposed to be a lifestyle business. It was never a startup where we’d grind 16 hours a day to maximize revenue and profits.

100%. So, the potential is there to continue as a lifestyle business or, if there’s an ambitious buyer out there, to grow this into really big, successful figures.

Yeah.

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

Obviously, we talked about this multiple times before we decided to sell it. The number one thing that Jen and I agree offers the most potential is to focus on our own products and product suite, specifically the high-ticket cohort model that we validated in the last year, because we believe there’s a lot of room for growth through paid advertising.

The reason is that with paid advertising, Meta ads in particular, we can target geographically and reach our ideal customer profile for that cohort more specifically, rather than the general audience from YouTube. So that’s definitely a route. We also believe there’s enough margin in a high-ticket offer to make it the most promising option.

Of course, there are other areas as well. For example, sponsorships. We didn’t explore many sponsorships for our YouTube channel, but we did explore sponsorships for a newsletter, and that worked pretty well. So, that could be expanded by working with more partners and sponsors to generate that kind of income as well.

Another opportunity is to update the website so it can rank in GEO—what is it called?—AI-generated suggestions. For that, of course, it’s important to position the brand as the solution to a problem. That’s why Yvonne mentioned going even further down the path of creating our own products and honing in on that.

Yeah. Also, if there’s a partnership geek out there, I think we have beautiful, long-term partnerships, mainly through affiliate models here in Germany. I think those can be extended and expanded, especially not through affiliate networks, which is what we’ve mostly done, but through direct partnerships with individual service providers. That’s mostly untapped by us, so I think there’s great potential as well.

A lot of potential, right? And what would you say are the biggest risks with this business that buyers should be aware of?

I would say, to start with, maybe not the biggest risk, but one of the biggest things is that the buyer will need to invest a lot of energy to pivot the business model from affiliate and SEO to actually gaining traction with our own digital products or products in general.

Another risk is that this brand has featured our faces prominently. So, one of the risks could be maintaining the trust in the brand. We’ve built that trust over the past six years, and we think it’s pretty high. To help with the transition, we’re more than willing to provide a proper introduction to our audience and be part of the onboarding process and transition period, so that trust can also be transferred to the new era, so to speak.

100%. Yeah, we would 100% support what Jen just said. We’d hand over as much trust as possible, but, of course, there is a risk that a new face or new faces will first need to gain that trust and show the audience who they are and what they stand for, and that they have integrity and all that kind of stuff. All of this also depends on whether the buyer continues creating YouTube content with a face and everything, right? So, it’s also dependent on the strategy the buyer wants to take.

Yeah, definitely. How much support are you willing to offer the buyer who acquires this business?

I think Jen already pre-answered that a little bit in the previous question. We’re very happy to support the buyer for 30 days with phone calls, video calls, email exchanges, and a whole walkthrough of the technical side: how everything is set up, the different partnerships we have, and introductions to the buyer. We’ll at least make the effort to schedule calls with the partners we have personal relationships with. That’s not every partner, but with some, we have very deep personal relationships, so we can have a three-way call and introduce the buyer to those partners.

We pretty much want to do everything that offers a smooth handover for the buyer on the backend, as well as on the frontend. Like we said before, we can make a video and send an email explaining why we opted out and sold, who the new buyer is, and what their new mission and vision are. We can introduce them to really hand over as much trust as possible and offer a smooth start.

Yeah, 100%. Are you open to negotiating something like an earnout agreement?

We’re not open to an earnout payment structure. We’d like this to be a clean-cut, all-cash deal, just to close the chapter for us and open it for the buyer without any mingling and meddling in the middle. So, no—clean cut. We stop, you start, we help you transition, and then you’re off to the races to grow that little baby of ours.

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

We think this is a business worth buying because there’s a real-life pain that our business solves. It’s a very transformational pain. It’s an impact-driven business. Not only is there a beautiful financial reward, but there’s also the real-life reward of knowing that you’re changing and impacting people’s lives for the better.

We’ve always been touched by the feedback from our audience, with people literally saying, “Jen and Yvonne, you’ve changed our lives.” If that’s something you’re looking for, this is a perfect business to fill both buckets: the money bucket and the soul bucket, so to speak.

Yeah. And, regarding what we mentioned before, it will just require energy that we currently don’t have to create this new era for our business. When done right, the need is still there. It hasn’t been replaced by anything like AI or anything like that. People still need this human guidance for our topic because there’s a lot of confusion and people get very lost. It’s still highly relevant for this day and age.

100%. We’re done with the topic in a way. We’ve fatigued out in a way.

Yeah. 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.

Thanks for joining us. See you next time.