RMRB 1279 – Building an Amazon Associates Business Making $5K per Month in the Beauty Niche

In this episode, Lauren talks to the seller of an Amazon Associates, display advertising, and Facebook-monetized business created in March 2020 in the beauty and personal care niches. Listen in to find out how the business makes an average of $5,908.00 per month 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/93496 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 have no background in running online businesses. I am an advertising copywriter by trade. I got into building this website because, in lockdown, I lost all my work. I'm a freelancer, and there was no work.

So I thought that I would build a blog, really to learn about SEO, teach myself some new skills, teach myself WordPress, and learn about building a blog. At the time, people were asking me for a lot of advice on what the business was and what my niche was. So I thought, why not start a website where I could direct people? They started telling their friends, you know, “Ask Nick for some advice on this.”

So, really, that's how it came about. I found that I really enjoyed it. I learned how to monetize it, and money started rolling in. That's how I started building it.

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

There are a few reasons why I want to sell the business instead of keeping it or growing it. One of those is time. It only takes a couple of hours a day, really, to work on the blog, but it's just two hours I don't have at the moment.

I'm a freelancer. I used to get down days or a couple of weeks where I could spend time on my website updating articles and writing new articles. I've been, for the last year, sort of permanently somewhere four or five days a week, so finding those two hours a day to work on the socials is getting increasingly hard.

I also have two little kids, both of whom are autistic, and I would like the money to put them into private school. That's another reason I want to sell.

I also know that it's kind of got bigger than me. It was meant to be just sort of a hobby blog, but it's turned into quite a lucrative business. Really, what it needs now is a team, or I need to hand it off to somebody to take over. I just don't want to manage people. I manage people in my job, and I don't want to do it on the website, too.

So there's that side of it. I can see the potential in it, but it's not something that I'm willing to take on and push through.

Then the other reason is that I just want to go out with it on a high. I was thinking about selling it before the Helpful Content Update hit, and regretted it when that came and wiped out most of my traffic, as it did with most niche sites.

I've spent the time since then rebuilding it, pivoting it, and getting it working in a different way. I'm proud of that, and I really want to hand it over to someone who can now take it to the next level. I can just bank the money and pat myself on the back.

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

The amount and type of work I have to do on the business to maintain it? I would say most of it is on Facebook. I schedule eight to ten posts a day, and on Pinterest there are six pins a day.

I've tried upping the pins, actually, to get more traffic, but it seems to have the reverse effect. So six pins is the sweet spot. That takes a couple of hours a day, I would say, although, of course, you can schedule well in advance.

Something I used to have a VA do, but when the blog stopped earning as much, I let her go and took over myself. That's why, again, I'm at this point where I either hire another one or sell the blog.

Other than that, I update probably one or two articles a week. This is just refreshing intros, images, and titles. It's not sort of heavy work. Which articles I refresh comes from what I'm posting on social media. I always want to direct people to fresh content. So if I think there's something that needs updating that I can post on social media and drive people to, then that's what gets updated.

As for new articles, it's usually when I see competitors posting about something that is relevant to my niche. I will then create a new article, put my own spin on it, and again make posts and drive people to it. But I would say this is probably once every two weeks or once a month.

My focus really has gone away from SEO and Google and onto social media. So I think there's an opportunity there for people to revamp the site. There's probably loads of technical stuff there as well, but on the whole, yes, it's a couple of hours of work a day.

Social media is a bit of a hamster wheel. You do have to reply to people and invite people to like the page, but it's pretty easy work for someone else to pick up, I would say.

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

There are lots of ways that I would grow the business. First of all, on social media, Facebook, my pages are monetized through the Content Monetization Program. I would spin out some other pages.

The type of content I'm posting is in a particular niche within a niche that people are interested in, and I would create my own pages for these. The beauty of this is that I've got an incredible backlog of content that I know is successful. I've got all the metrics for it, and I would just repost this onto new pages. You have to alter it slightly, but I would try probably a couple more Facebook pages and get those monetized.

There is also a group I'm in for Facebook content monetization where, once you get over a certain number of followers, you can join their turnkey program. They take 50%, but they'll manage the whole page and grow it. I'm sort of interested in that.

I haven't made any use of video, so YouTube and TikTok could be huge for this. I would partner with somebody in the niche who can create these videos because it needs to be real people, and I would do that because it's a really highly visual niche and video is perfect for it. I just have never wanted to get into it.

There's also a newsletter, because the email list is rapidly growing. There are some quizzes on the site where you have to give your email to get the answers, and they're really popular. The email list is growing quickly, but I've just literally set up some automated sequences of old content driving them to the website, which works okay. Again, it's hands-off. I just didn't want to have to deal with that.

Writing newsletters is another opportunity as well. There's an RSS feed email that goes out twice a week, so again, I would really look at getting sponsorship for the newsletters. I would maybe switch email providers to one that can allow ads in your emails.

I would partner with people. It's another thing: I do get lots of requests for partnerships with products or people wanting to send me stuff to try. Again, I haven't wanted to do that. I don't want to seem biased or do anything sponsored, mainly because I was worried about it being black hat or Google not looking favorably on people paying me to talk about their stuff. But I think there's a huge opportunity there, once you see the niche, to perhaps get these partnerships going.

I also get requests for guest posts, which again, I've never accepted. I haven't wanted to do that. But I know that can be quite a lucrative channel to monetize for people.

And, yeah, updating old articles. I would say the recent Google Update seems to have been quite favorable. It's still very minimal traffic, but I think that's just because that hasn't been my focus for probably two years.

But I'm a writer, so there's probably lots of technical issues as well that would be easy for somebody to fix and get the blog doing well on Google.

Again, I think that's everything. Basically, there's a lot because I've diversified the ways it can be monetized so much. There's a great opportunity to explore these more and make more of them, as well as new ones, like video.

Digital products are another one as well: offering guides and tutorials. I have kind of done a bit of that with trying to collect emails. So, yeah, there's loads you can do to keep it growing.

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

The biggest risk with this business is that it is a niche website, which is terribly unpredictable in terms of the platforms that you work on. Facebook, Pinterest, and Google can change their algorithms at any time.

The site is now pretty robust across all channels. I've tried to do that so that if one goes down, the other ones are okay, and that seems to have worked quite well. It's in a really strong position now, I think, to go forward and not be affected by any one channel getting hit, as it was by the Google Helpful Content Update.

But, of course, these risks are associated with any niche site. They're not specific to mine. I think mine is, as I say, in a good place to weather any sort of ups and downs that you get with the traffic, as much as it can.

Otherwise, I don't think there are any other risks associated with the business.

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

Whatever the minimal terms were, I think it is a month of support. It's not a tricky site to run. I'm happy to chat with any buyer. I want this site to go on and be a success, so I will, of course, be available to help you set up.

But the reason I'm selling is to get my time back, so I don't want to be offering a lot of time to support.

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

No, I am not interested in an earn-out payment structure.

Thank you.

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

For the potential. For the potential to keep doing what it's doing and keep growing. I think it is only at the start of where it can go. I think there is so much more that can be done with it: more channels and more monetization opportunities.

I think it's a great brand. I've created a really unique brand within the niche. That was something that I always wanted, so I created it to fill a gap. The feedback I consistently get is, “I always wanted a site like this.”

I think it's more than a site. I think it is a very evolvable brand. The audience has deep pockets. They are older American ladies, and my RPM on Raptive is $56 and growing, even through Q1, which is just testament to the quality of the traffic that's interested in the website and interested in our content.

On social media, the content is evergreen. It does have the odd seasonal dip, but throughout the year this content is pretty stable and growing all the time because of the nature of the niche.

And, yeah, I think it's a bargain for what it is. I've put a lot of work into it, and I think there are a lot of quick wins, probably, for the right buyer. As I said, I'm a writer. There's probably a lot of technical and design work that can be improved.

So, yeah, I think it's easy to run. It's sort of really nice—a unicorn. I think it's a unicorn. I think someone can really, really make it big.

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.