Our previous blogs about website as a source of passive income is possible as we have been blogging for almost a year. Although start-ups as we say have very little income to show as of now, there is a way to speed up earnings from a website if you have the capital to buy a working website already.
Yes, there are a lot of websites being sold out there everyday at the right prices you can own one already anytime especially those that are earning income every month. Even those that are already earning very high passive income (>$1000 per month or more) are being sold. It really depends on the circumstances of the seller of a website why they still need to sell a very profitable business.
Some of the reasons I read from sellers why they sell a website
- They have no more time to monitor the business and as such will be better for more passionate individuals.
- They have more than enough website to attend to, which is pretty much similar to what I am experiencing now (better start 1 website, make it profitable first before venturing to a new one)
- Other just do flipping a website with a profit, similar to domain name buy and sell. Some websites that are being sold just needed some modifications. You can buy at lower price and then sell it at higher prices.
Why buy a Website for passive Income
As I have mention above, buying a website takes a short cut from establishing an earning website as compared to building one from a scratch. It takes lots of research, time invested on writing articles and additional cost from hiring writers can be eliminated. This reality hit me after creating several websites at the start.
I was thinking that creating from scratch will be very easy, well it does, however as time goes by and when you ran out of ideas to create new articles to post every week, you tend to stop writing. You will not notice it but time will pass by very fast and suddenly you realize that 2 months have already gone and you haven’t write anything. The payment for renewals of domain name, SSL certificate and hosting will cost you more or less $150 per year as well so if your website is not earning then it becomes a liability. I own 4 websites which are just starting out, 3 are monetized and 1 is not yet approved with AdSense, so I need to earn $600 per year to break even. So I am still losing money on this venture.
Buying a website is similar to buying a property which you intend to earn from rentals. Just for this case the rental payment will come from your readers through earnings from AdSense, affiliates or best case you can have sponsors as well. It is easier to manage as compared to real properties as there is no physical maintenance needed because all your products will be digital.
As long as the website you buy have an organic following say for example you managed to buy something that has a niche on Games, those who are gamers will tend to visit your site every now and then to get latest information. You will have steady income stream from your visitors. Some of them will just want to read articles where you can earn from Ad revenues or some of them would like to buy assets of games where you have affiliates and earn commissions along the way.
And you might be wondering if I bought a website to know all this things, Yes I did buy a website and we will discuss this in a while.
It is my first time to buy a website so I am a bit cautious as well on selecting my first digital asset. I mentioned on my blogs that I have a small capital being save every month from my Vlog earnings and this is one of them where I am using it. Although my very first investment was from buying a new car, this I think is the first ever I bought for passive income.
I never spent a thing from a youtube vlog and I earned a lot from it but as I always mentioned to you if you are a frequent reader, website with good topics are always a better passive income as it requires less work of uploading content (once established) as compared to youtube vlogging. I would not earn more than 5 digits (pesos) per month in Youtube if I did not consistently uploaded videos but here in website I saw from the perspective of the person where I bought the website that it is possible to just earn everymonth without uploading much content.
My quota for website AdSense earnings of $30 per month will now be possible thanks to the website I bought. I target at least $60 per month in additional earnings from AdSense because of this.
Here’s how my AdSense earnings now. This is for the past 16 days of the month as compared to my $14 earnings last month it quadrupled, thanks to the new website I bought.
How much I spend buying a website?
It cost me more than $900, so at this rate of $60 per month earnings, my ROI will be in 1.5 to 2 years which is common for website buying investments.
So my activity now is just continue uploading content similar to what the niche of the website is. As mentioned the articles on this site I bought is focused on students so its easy to research topics and interpret and put it on this new website.
How to Buy a Website
Well the basic requirement for buying a website is asking yourself how much are you willing to invest.
There are all sort of websites available from a start up website with at least 50 articles to an established website costing around $500,000. Well yes it’s a lot looking at the high side so we can start with as much as what I have used for my investing which is at $1,000. You can save this amount at least and you should have a keen eyes on selecting your website.
As with other things that you can buy online, you should be very careful when selecting the website such that at least you should be able to conduct due diligence on which are just pretending to be a good website than those are that just been prop up. People can buy readers to inflate stats of a website to become attractive.
Once you have the capital established, look for a online sites that sells a website. Go to reputable buy and sell sites like Motion invest, Empire and Flippa. We will discuss each of this websites in another post blogs as they cater to varying type of customers and website sellers. For the buying criteria, check the basic requirements on buying a website below.
After you have established a connection with the right seller, initiate the transfer of assets. Remember don’t give any cash to your seller, the website selling sites act as a third party broker to facilitate the payment but the transfer of asset like domain name, SSL and Host is up to buyer and seller. Do not click the transfer money button unless all things are completed.
Basic Requirements on what Websites to Buy
- Look for the age of the Website
Websites which have just started up and claiming to be earning $20 per month is a not a good sign. Always look for the Age of a website to be at least 1 year. Remember I started a website from scratch and it took me at least 1 year to earn as much as $20 a month and this is type of website still needs a lot of tender loving care (TLC). So unless you have time to update contents very often then better stick with websites that have aged already.
The main reason why you need to buy an aged website is they tend to have also a regular organic followers after few years of being established. I can’t stress out the importance of organic followers. This also puts the site in a test that its articles have matured and people like what was written into it.
Don’t get tempted on buying low cost with high earnings websites, this business requires work and is not a get rich quick scheme so I get wary already for sites claims.
- Buy a website that has organic followers and good traffic
Organic followers are those that regularly search the web for information and manages to see your website. You can request for google analytics from the seller to connect you and you can view the actual movement or readers going in and out of the website. You can also see if the website have really the correct amount of traffic as posted on the website selling platform. Remember as I say some intend to mislead us to see good traffic but they never have an organic following.
We will discuss in details the detailed website criteria like domain ranks, organic followers, niche, backlinks in a separate topic so we can focus on the basics here first.
For example this website is claiming to have at least 30k Organic followers per month but upon checking site checker like SEMrush, the organic follower is just 2k per month is a big red flag to me at least.
SEM rush Stats for Organic followers.
SEMrush is a great tool to help weed out those sites who have been just boosted to look good on google analytics.
- Look for the Niche of the website that you intend to buy
Remember the main reason to buy is to earn, but together, you should have interest as well on the niche of the website. Later on you will need to upload new content once in a while so in order to do this you need to research, but if you understand how the business works then you can easily find relevant topics to add.
Don’t buy a website that you don’t have an idea how they do what they are telling on their sites.
- Technical expertise on buyer and seller
When buying and selling a website, include also the capability of yourself and the seller. If for example you are like me who have little to no knowledge on how to transfer a website under your care, be selective at least that your seller know how to do this transferring of asset. Otherwise you will spend an additional money to ask someone to transfer the asset for you.
- Revenue Multiple
Check this at a glance. This refers to your return on investment or ROI. If the website is selling at 20x of its earnings then your capital recovery is up to 2 years. Multiples of 30x will be 3 years of capital recovery and so on.
Remember I bought a website at 1.5 to 2 year return on investment. Some websites do bidding to sell, which means the highest bidder will will the right to buy a website and I do monitor this. Some buy at multiples of 4 years to recover which might be too long already unless you know how to speed up like adding affiliates instead of just AdSense.
- Check the website revenue source
I prefer to select websites which have earnings basically coming from EZOIC or AdSense as you need not rely on the earnings coming from selling products online if the website source is through Amazon or affiliates. AdSense or Ad revenue are easier although may provide lower earnings but this is the passive thing that I prefer for now.
And of course you can add affiliate later on especially if the website have opportunities to sell related products with articles.
For example if you buy a website catering pets, then you can link products related to pet food, pet bins and the like.
My Experience on Buying a Website
For the longest time I was contemplating on buying a website, it is taking some time for me as my earnings is less than a dollar per day (equivalent to $20 per month) if I really put on an effort. But it is not picking up as I recently realized that the topics I put mainly on Bodegapik.com is news just like my youtube vlog. News tend to fade way in a day so there will be no more readers the next day unless I put up new articles.
This type of niche requires time so I look for a website that have organic following and luckily I saw someone posted in Flippa!
I will not reveal my website here to protect my seller identity business but the niche is on Filipino articles. The articles are what you can call “evergreen” as they focus on what students regularly need as a research material in class.
The website one year earning average is $100 but is currently on a decline. This means that on its peak it did earn $150 per month and gradually declining now to $60 a month. But I tried to study this and the main reason for the decline is probably because the students who needed the research area already done with their assignments.
But the topics I mentioned is “evergreen” and so I have opted still to buy, anyway ROI is possible in 2 years which is the most basic of websites and the organic traffic search is still high at 70k organic readers per month which is a big opportunity for me to learn and implement on my own websites.
Actually the seller is not doing any uploading anymore for the last 2 years and still earning so I thought what if I regularly update the content, lets wait and see what will happen next!
I am still studying also how to improve the website.
It was a bit of luck finding the guy because he is very accommodating as well. The seller always answers my questions and help me improve the site. By the way, this is an old site using HTML format, if you don’t know this type of website requires some coding skills to upgrade, so I ask him for some help and he gladly supported me as well. He’s a Filipino guy. He sold also his other website for $12,000 more than half million pesos! So its very profitable on his side. I hope I could learn a thing or 2 from his style of website creation.
And by the way, hard lesson for me on opening 2 more websites on Philippine niche as well, the RPM (rate per mile) or payment per 1000 views is below $1 means at 70k viewers per month I will just get $60 per month. While if the niche is focus for US, Europe citizens the RPM would be more than $10. So consider the readers location as well when buying a website.
A website on Western countries may just have 1k organic followers but can earn $60 as well per month. So always take this as a factor especially if you focus on Ad revenue only.
Other websites focus on affiliates, dropshipping, product reviews and commissions. Since this requires focus on the products I don’t have time to monitor. Ad revenue from readers is what I prefer as they are more passive.
So that’s it for now on my experience on How to buy a Website. I ended up buying a site from a co-Filipino but in a way is a huge blessing as the guy is honest and helpful to guide me on my first venture, so now I know the basics when buying a website out there. I still am preparing for my next website that I will buy and this proves to me to be more convenient than starting up from a scratch.
Other Articles You might want to read:
How to Make a Website for Passive Income
Do you have a goal why you do Side hustles or Side Income?
13, 019 Php, My Google AdSense Earnings for May 2022
Before You Invest, You need to Save, How Will you do it?
