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If you could turn an Amazon affiliate website that is producing a few thousand a month into a six-figure paycheck , would you do it?
This is exactly what you can do if you decide to sell your profit-producing website and it’s exactly what a seller did with us over at Empire Flippers.
I’m going to give you the details on how this seller was able to get $190,000 for his Amazon Affiliate website on our marketplace and how you could do the same.
By the end of this post, you will understand the exact process it takes to make a profitable website and sell it for a big payday.
Table Of Contents
What You Will Learn
- Why the platform your Amazon Affiliate website is on matters
- How to prepare your business for sale
- Negotiating with potential buyers
- Why to do and how to run a Buyer-Seller conference call
- Ways to maximize selling an Amazon affiliate website for the most profit
- Why using a business broker can significantly help you in selling your business
The platform and monetization really does matter.
You need to have something that is easy to hand off because a well-established site will be much more attractive to a prospective buyer.
For example, WordPress is a platform almost everyone understands.
In fact, 22% of US registered domains run on WordPress.
If not, there are plenty of free resources and tutorials out there to make anyone a WordPress expert pretty quickly. In addition, the monetization method for this site — the Amazon Affiliate program –– is pretty simple to grasp.
Using Amazon Affiliate as a monetization strategy is even easier for people to understand than other affiliate programs.
Almost everyone in the world is familiar with Amazon’s brand and can instantly relate to the fact that Amazon has built a very trustworthy name that people respect and buy from.
If this Amazon Affiliate website had been built on Joomla – this site would be a lot harder of a sale, though not impossible.
The reasoning isn’t only because Joomla is less reputable; it simply isn’t used as widely as WordPress, so fewer people are familiar with it.
Whatever platform you use, the key is to make sure the business you’re trying to sell has systems and processes in place to make it as plug and play as possible.
Once that business starts creating a proven track record as a solid profit earner, you’ll be able to reap the rewards of the systems you’ve built and sell the website for a big payday.
Some of you out there might be shocked at this idea and thinking…
“Why would anyone sell a profitable online business?!”
Well, the reasons are as varied as why anyone would sell anything.
This business, in particular, was pretty hands-off, as many Amazon Affiliate websites are, but there are always legitimate reasons for wanting to sell one’s business.
These might include taking that big lump sum of cash and investing it into real estate or into another online venture, or just going on an extended, exotic vacation.
In fact, we’ve done an entire podcast episode on this subject if you want to learn more about the different kinds of seller profiles that exist.
In the case of this Amazon Affiliate website, the seller wanted to take the influx of cash from the sale of his site to invest in offline real estate.
Considering the price he was able to sell it for, that cash could be the start of several investment properties, or enough to pay off an entire house.
Not a bad deal for an Amazon Affiliate website!
The Road To $161,500 In Net Profit In Less Than 110 Days
The Amazon Affiliate website was in the home and garden niche and had been created just the year before the sale back in 2014. The first month of the new year, the seller listed with us and submitted the website to our internal vetting process.
The website itself had one big piece of content reviewing multiple items in their niche. Every item then led to its own individual review to gain more search traffic.
Within the main piece of content they:
- Deep dove into common issues that people have with the products
- How to fix certain small problems
- How to do proper product selection
- The biggest benefits of choosing the right product for the task
Then was supported by articles in the sidebar that each were between 500-800 words on their own with 22 pieces of content altogether.
The sidebar of the WordPress site was filled with several buying guides, along with their top reviews of various products within the niche that sat around 500-700 words each.
All of this led to having an extremely high-quality content website that did more than just pass traffic through an Amazon affiliate link, but actually offered solid value to the readers who are looking at making a purchase of these high ticket items.
Through the vetting process, we gave the business a valuation, listed the website on our marketplace, took in deposits, negotiated with prospective buyers and eventually helped the seller and the buyer to come to a mutually satisfactory agreement.
Earning $161,500 in 110 days is a pretty amazing feat for almost anyone, especially when you consider that this website was making just over $10,000 a month WHILE it was listed with us.
Not too shabby.
Preparing & Listing The Amazon Affiliate Website For Sale
A crucial part of the value you get at Empire Flippers is the confidence buyers have in our vetting process.
In this case, as in every case, we ensured the site was properly valued so that both seller and buyer got the fairest deal possible.
Assessing Analytics & Income
As a preliminary step, we had the seller forward their Profit & Loss statements (P&L) for the business and screenshots of both traffic and earnings.
However, we don’t just rely on screenshots. Instead, we actually login to their traffic analytics accounts and earnings accounts.
This seller used Clicky Analytics instead of Google Analytics. While Google is better known, Clicky is still a highly regarded analytics company.
As the website was built on a Private Blog Network (PBN) in an effort to appeal to Google’s ranking algorithm, it has done quite well in search rankings.
The nice thing about PBNs is that the website will rank. If it ranks and the content is good enough, the website will often start earning natural links from the exposure.
As you can see below, the Clicky Analytics were solid with the traffic maintaining a steady pattern.
Obviously, traffic is only part of what we look at in the vetting process.
Where the rubber meets the road is the earnings.
Since this site was monetized via an Amazon Affiliate account, it was an easy task to verify the earnings from the site.
The seller used a specialized tracking ID for this website specifically to keep all the earnings organized.
This was their last screenshot before the sale of the site. It shows the Amazon affiliate commissions sitting at just over $11,000.
Here is the P&L that the seller submitted. This shows us a good overview of where the website started, where it was at the time the owner was interested in selling and any trends we needed to be looking into during our vetting process.
You might notice we haven’t included the hosting and domain renewal fees, as these are fairly negligible. Also, you will notice no costs for content in here.
The reasoning why is because the seller had left the site alone for several months, adding zeros pieces of content and just letting the current organic traffic to bring in more and more sales as the rankings went upwards.
As we dug through the vetting process for this website, our agents came across a discrepancy.
It appeared someone had been attempting to create a copycat version of the seller’s site. Using Copyscape, we found that about 61 percent of content was copied from the content the seller had on their website.
The content was brand new and contained some obvious copy and paste content theft from the seller’s website. This duplication of material presented a real problem, as it’s well known that Google’s ranking algorithm doesn’t like duplicate content.
Our agents suggested that the seller either contact the domain owners of the websites that had copied him (we provided the names easily enough with a simple WhoIS search query) or revise portions of his content to make it more unique.
Ultimately, the problem was fixed easily by revising some of the content.
Post-Sale Support
When asked what kind of support the new buyer would get from the seller, the seller was willing to give 30 days of email support.
In addition, the new owner suggested a price of $150 a month for link maintenance to the new owner to keep all the PBN links the exact same.
This expense was worked into the final valuation of the site as well.
Negotiating A Price
The final valuation for the site was given with a listing price initially at $85,234.20 using a 12-month average of the site’s earnings. This pricing was due to the seasonal nature of the website’s traffic and income which made its productivity less consistent.
However, the seller argued for a three-month average to be used instead because links had been added over the preceding 12 months that had stabilized and increased the site’s productivity.
He felt, therefore, that the preceding three months were a more accurate reflection of the site’s value.
Upon further vetting of the website, our agents determined the seasonal fluctuations were minimal. Ultimately, the three-month average better reflected the site’s stability and earnings.
Taking all this into consideration, Empire Flippers listed the site at $185,098.60.
However, this was not the end of the negotiations.
The seller also pointed out that given the high volume of traffic and sales the site moved through Amazon…
The buyer would be able to instantly increase all of the earnings on her already existing Amazon sites because the buyer’s newly acquired site would push them into the highest Amazon Affiliate tier of 8 percent.
This is something to keep in mind when you go about selling or buying sites.
If you buy several Amazon sites, they can all work together in pushing you into that next tier of affiliate commissions which is always a nice bump in revenue.
As time went on, it became clear that the seller had been correct when they stated there would be very little seasonal fluctuation to take into account.
In fact, the website kept trending upwards over the next couple months. Empire Flippers readjusted the listing price until the final listing price on our marketplace was $205,305.80.
On the Market
During this time of increasing revenue, more prospective buyers appeared. Some submitted deposits and were therefore allowed to take a closer look and check out the website’s viability.
One of the reasons a deposit system is used on our marketplace instead of a Letter of Intent (LOI) option is because it allows more buyers to do due diligence at once instead of having to wait for an LOI exclusivity to run out (which is typically 30 days).
An LOI can drastically increase the sales cycle, so deposits are our preferred method.
The other benefit to the seller of our deposit system is that people who put down money to see these websites are typically serious buyers.
This isn’t the case with an LOI which allows fraudsters to PhotoShop their bank account statements, fill out the LOI and see whatever website they want in order to copy its successful model.
With the site listed and legitimate buyers’ interest peaked, we moved to the next part of the process: cutting a deal.
Negotiations & Closing The Deal For A Big Payday
The serious buyer’s first point of contact was with our deal agents using the Zendesk ticketing system (a customer support software we use to help manage all customer service conversations).
This method of contact protected the seller’s time while allowing Empire Flippers to field any low-level questions and move the serious buyers towards a potential sale.
Fielding Concerns About PBNs
One thing that concerns many sellers is whether their website will be devalued by using a Private Blog Network (PBN) to rank the site. This is understandable since a minority of buyers are hesitant to buy websites that have PBNs attributed to them.
While it is understandable to be extra careful buying websites built off PBN services, this was a case where the seller actually built his own PBN to rank this site along with other money sites in their portfolio.
One of the offers the seller made to potential buyers is that he would be more than happy to keep the links pointed towards the website for a small monthly fee. This cost was also put into the total price of the website as an expense.
If you are wondering what to do in a situation where a potential buyer looking at your business brings up questions about the PBN you used, our seller’s response might be a perfect answer when you decide to sell your own business.
The screenshot below is the seller’s response from our Zendesk ticketing system to the buyer. All of our communication is done via Zendesk to keep everything neatly organized for us and to keep the sales process going smoothly.
Check out the response below:
As you can see, this prospective buyer asked some good questions and the seller gave some very good answers.
By virtue of ranking on the first page of Google for keywords, the seller was able to garner more attention from other website owners and scored natural links through a combination of exposure and high-quality content.
This diminished the need for the PBN links overall and as time went on for the website the PBN links would become less and less important to the actual rankings of the website.
This question actually came in from a different prospective buyer right as the deal was starting to close with a buyer that had some serious intention.
An initial offer was made for $190,000, which was $25,000 below the asking price but still $5,000 above the initial listing price we had it listed on our marketplace.
Buyer-Seller Conference Call
This led to a buyer-seller conference call.
These calls are crucial in negotiations for sites above the six-figure range.
While many sites below the $50,000 mark will sell almost “automatically” due to the large pool of hungry buyers, sites above $50,000 and into the six-figure range require a more intimate sales process.
That is exactly why we facilitate these buyer-seller conference calls.
Our deal consultant reaches out to the seller to set up a time for them to get on the phone with the buyer. Before the call takes place, the deal consultant coaches the seller on anything they need to know about the buyer, such as the buyer’s goals or personality type.
The deal consultant is always present on these calls to make both the seller and the buyer more comfortable and to mediate between the parties.
Managing The Unexpected
One thing that the prospective buyer was concerned about was whether the domain was clean.
It turned out that the domain was actually used before the seller registered it for their Amazon Affiliate website.
Upon further research, we found out that in 2005 and 2006 the domain was once used as part of a “Parked Domain Monetization Method.”
Basically, this was an old school way of making money from ads displayed on parked domains that had no real content, but because of the domain name, there was a bit of direct traffic from people actively typing in that domain name.
This was a pretty hyped-up strategy back in the mid-2000s, though very few people find themselves doing it anymore due to there being so many better ways to monetize a site property.
The seller confirmed that the domain was new to them and fully under this control since December 2013 and due diligence revealed that the domain itself was clean of anything unsavoury as far as SEO goes.
After this initial concern, another issue came up regarding the buyer’s dealings with the Amazon affiliate links. They wanted to make sure the seller would transfer all affiliate links over to their Amazon account.
Normally, this process can be pretty tedious for both the seller and the buyer, but since they were using our brokerage we were able to mitigate the frustrating process of migration.
Our deal consultant stepped in and informed the buyer that our agents are specifically trained to migrate sites over from an old owner to a new owner.
The migration service included changing out all affiliate links to the buyer’s account along with pushing the domain to the new owner’s registrant account and hosting account.
Closing the Deal
Thanks to the buyer-seller conference call, the buyer and seller were able to get to know each other, which put both parties at ease and made them more open to proceeding with the deal.
The buyer in this case was a very strong candidate and our deal consultant advised the seller to agree to the $190,000 offer.
The seller agreed and a purchase agreement was signed by both parties.
Empire Flippers began migrating the site to the new owner.
Post-Sale Transfer & Turnover Process
From here, we opened a new ticket and our migration specialists began the transfer of the site to the new owner.
They gathered both the buyer’s and the seller’s hosting login details.
Since it was an Amazon Affiliate website, our agents also instructed the new buyer on how to set up an Amazon Affiliate tracking ID code specifically for this website in their Amazon Associates account.
Due to the site’s high traffic volume, the seller used a VPS hosting solution that the website received from Google.
The seller recommended that the new buyer continue to use a VPS and create a new registrant account as the specific domain registrar that the seller was using.
Since the seller’s hosting situation was unusual, the seller helped out by migrating the site hosting to the new owner.
In addition, since the seller decided to keep the PBN they used, the buyer negotiated a deal in which they could continue to rent the links on the PBN pointing to the site.
This was included in the expenses of the site and was set up by using a recurring credit card payment on the buyer’s side.
Ultimately, the site migration was a complete success.
As the brokers of these deals, we do our best to represent both sides and make sure both parties walk away with a win-win situation. We are always glad when one of our buyers tell us something like this:
And let the money flow is exactly what we did.
Since the buyer was comfortable with the migration and had reported correct traffic numbers and earnings, we released the funds to the seller for a grand total of $161,000 after our brokerage fee.
That is over three times the average income a US citizen earns in a year. Not too bad for an Amazon Affiliate website and remember, this is just ONE site.
This seller actually had several sites in the pipeline, positioning all of them for their own individual paydays down the road as they ranked, gathered traffic and began to be successfully monetized.
How To Sell Your Amazon Affiliate Website For Maximum Profit
To put yourself in a great position to sell your Amazon affiliate site for the maximum amount of profit then you need to keep track of some valuable figures.
Having an up to date record of expenses and analytics will work massively in your favour when speaking to potential buyers.
If you’re wondering how you could copy this seller’s success, you should follow these rules.
Track Expenses
The very first step for successfully selling an Amazon affiliate website is making sure you track ALL expenses. Keep these separate from personal expenses.
These expenses might appear in the form of content, in the form of buying PBN sites, renting out links, or a myriad of other ways.
It is extremely important to be clear on what kind of expenses your website is producing so that a future buyer can be aware of what it took to grow the site and any ongoing costs that they will have to pay once they take over the website.
In addition, you should maintain a monthly Profit & Loss statement (P&L for short). This is just good practice and will let the potential buyer to see the trajectory of the website in a quick snapshot.
While it is a big hassle to go back and create a P&L, it is an easy endeavour just to make updating a P&L spreadsheet part of the monthly work you do on the website.
(Plus, watching the profits displace the losses is an inspiring thing that will increase your drive to work on the site.)
Analytics
Along with keeping a solid track record of earnings and expenses, you should have some kind of analytics installed on your website from day one.
This could be Google Analytics or if you lean more on the paranoid side, you could use a third-party service such as Clicky to track how many visitors your site is getting every month.
The more data you have on this, the better because a buyer will be very interested in any dips or increases in traffic and obviously having this data will allow them to see if your website is overall trending upward or downward month after month.
Speaking of dips and spikes of traffic, when you see fluctuations in your analytics, ask yourself why it happened. Did you try a new advertising method?
Did you pick up brand new links? Or is the website just doing the Google Dance?
It is important to have explanations for these as many buyers will be curious.
Not having the answers to these could be the make or break question depending on the buyer. It is best to be prepared — keep an Excel spreadsheet of the dips and the spikes with just a brief explanation of why it happened according to your analyses.
Just like the P&L statement, this is easiest to do by just staying on top of it and noting these spikes or dips as part of your monthly work on the website.
It will be a lot easier than having to go back through all your analytics at some later date and trying to remember what happened on that specific week or month.
Collecting all of this data will help you sell your business at a higher multiple more quickly. At the very least, you should have three solid months of good earnings and traffic.
Of course, the longer the trend of solid earnings and traffic, the better your website is going to sell for on our marketplace.
Systemize
The next thing you will want to implement on your website is a form of systemization.
Systemization is basically taking every task you perform on the site and turning it into a repeatable process.
For example, you might have a certain way you hire content writers for your site. Write down this hiring process, what you look for in the article, or even brief outlines of different types of articles (such as social clickbait articles, SEO articles, how to, etc).
The more you can put systems and processes into place, the more attractive the business becomes.
When a buyer is looking at a potential business, especially one they may not be familiar with, it is best to demonstrate as many plug and play portions as you can…
This will make that buyer feel more comfortable with their investment choice and confident in their ability to run the site effectively.
Finally, while you certainly can sell a website privately and avoid a brokerage fee, it is not recommended (and I’m not saying that just because of my obviously biased opinion).
There are a lot of pros to using a broker that many sellers don’t realize until they try to sell a website on their own — which can be an incredibly frustrating process if you are not familiar with how deals are structured.
Here are just a few benefits of using a professional business broker that understands online businesses:
- Buyer Reach: Most private sellers struggle finding buyers and often they are unqualified buyers that just give them low ball offers. One difference we make for our sellers is that we have a list of over 30,000+ potential buyers.
- Negotiation: This is a problem that ails a lot of sellers and can seriously lower the price at which they do end up selling their business. A trained deal consultant that sees hundreds of deals is going to be able to represent you far better.
- Migration: Not all brokers do this, but it is something that we take care of at Empire Flippers for our customers. Migration can be an incredibly tedious process what with changing all the affiliate links, hosting, etc.
- Security: Having a third party overseeing the deal, especially one that is trained and experienced with online businesses, can help avoid a scam or an underhanded deal.
- Time: Selling an online business for a big payday is not exactly a quick or painless process. One reason the seller of this particular Amazon site chose us is because their time is at a premium. We took that burden off the seller.
Hopefully, by this point, you are pretty pumped about the idea of selling your own Amazon affiliate website or other online business.
As you can see, there is a lot of profit to be realized upfront with an asset sale like this and there is a hungry market of online business buyers who are prepared to spend well into the six-figure range.
If you are ready to see how big of a payday you can get for your website, the first step is to find out what your website is actually worth.
No worries. We already built a tool to help you with this that you can use totally free of charge.
Click here for our free valuation tool and see what your website is worth.
Wrapping It Up
As you can see, there is a lot of moving parts when it comes to selling an online business.
You need to make sure all the loose ends are tied up, that your traffic is good, that you can legitimately verify your earnings and so much more.
Then there is the whole marketing portion of the sale – something most sellers simply do not have the capability, skills or experience to pull off. That is especially true for higher-end sales like this one that are in the six-figure range.
One of the big benefits of using a good broker is that these frustrations are eliminated for the seller.
A good broker can make your business look attractive, help you make it professional with documentation and most important of all help you with the actual selling portion.
A professional brokerage is going to have ways to weed out tire-kickers from real, qualified buyers that can actually purchase your business.
As you can see, selling your Amazon affiliate website or any website for that matter can lead to a huge payday.
Where you literally earn 20-30 months worth of income all upfront, without having to wait around and worry that your Google rankings might fall off the chart or any other worries that keep us, online entrepreneurs, up at night with fear and stress.
Many of our sellers have become repeat sellers because of all this and like this seller – they too have seen the money flow from the fruits of their efforts.
When you are ready to cash in on your business in a big way, you can check out the exact steps this seller went through to list his site with us by clicking here.
Interested in entrepreneurship? Check out these entrepreneurial statistics.
Looking to join affiliate networks? Check out my list of high ticket affiliate programs.
94 Responses
This is really informative article and I get a lot of knowledge from this. I request you please write an article on Amazon affiliate. Like how can we start it with profitable niche that pay us at least 1000 dollars. I hope you understand. Please
Thanks
Hey Sukhman – I understand what you mean.
I added your request to my list for a potential new article!
hi
this is a very nice article.
thanks.
Glad you enjoyed it
This is really a big motivation and the best read so far for me. This one has enhanced the belief in having clean backlink record. Most bloggers do not keep a track on the monthly expenses and also do hire writers and guest posts from professional sites. But this article got into knitty gritties of what should be not missed out if one is seriously into amazon affiliate business. Also this article helps anyone sell their website at once when they are really in need of big money. Great Read and Thanks a Ton Matthew.
No problem, but I can’t take the credit for it :)
Thanks Matt & Greg,
This information is gold, I have been thinking about building an Amazon Affiliate site myself.
Glad to publish it for you :)
Really Amazing…..
Thanks Freya!
Thank you Freya :-)
Reading these insights, Greg are also useful when starting a new blog. Work with the end result in mind –to create an online business that’s worthy of being purchased. Then add in steps that you’ve suggested –consider the platform, type of monetization, visitor analytics.
Great idea to also consult with a website broker for his/her intuition based on learning what buyers value.
~Keri
I absolutely agree Keri!
I think it is a good idea to start a website already having a system in mind of how you are going to do it.
It can take a lot longer to start off this way, but ultimately it’ll pay you dividends when it is time to actually sell the business, build a new one in the same business model, or both.
Brokers are great places to get sound advice, as long as they’re reputable ones.
We tend to know the pulse of the industry since we’re living and breathing it every day, so we can often see trends that niche site builders might be missing out on – so always sound advice to approach one with any questions you might have about your site.
Great Report I loved this one too
No problem Dave!
Glad to hear Dave!
Greg, a few questions for you:
1. How come the margin that EF takes is not reduced as the price of a property increase? I am looking to sell a site in the next 5-6 months for high six figures, potentially low 7 figures and a margin of 15% sounds pretty ridiculous. I am speculating, but perhaps it’s because you have a decent market share and therefore you can demand that margin but honestly speaking I think I’d prefer an equity deal with other companies than giving away a 15% margin on a high ticket sale for brokerage services.
I am interested in hearing your thoughts and justifications?
Secondly, I noticed a lot of sites sell for between 20-25 multiples, what about if a site has consistent monthly growth of 10-30% with solid proof for 12 months. Would it be possible to hit higher multiples of 35?
Hey Will,
Thanks for checking out this piece and appreciate the questions!
1. I hear what you’re saying – seems like a lot to pay, right?
You’re right in that we have a large selection of legitimate buyer/investors in our network. This allows us to get deals done both quickly and for top dollar.
Another way to look at it is like this – let’s say you’re selling on your own and, with a limited buyer pool, are able to get 20X on a business making $20K per month. That nets you $400K with no fees.
If we’re able to get you 25X that’s still $25K more WITH the fees included. At 30X and you’re looking a full $110K more in your pocket.
Consider the fact that we help you through negotiations, have a lawyer working the contracts on your behalf, help to develop earnout structures and counter offers, etc. – that’s why our sellers consider our fees worth it. (And come back again and again)
2. The multiples vary – typically as low as 20-25X and as high as 30-35X – depending on a bunch of factors. (Age of the business, trajectory, diversity of earnings/traffic, risk factors, etc.) Our Valuation Tool will give you a rough estimate, but submitting your business and going through our full vetting process is the only way to know the multiple for sure.
Hope that helps, Will!
Hi, Matthew, nice post!
I discovered the power of capitalization when I first started selling websites.
If you have a website, and it is making a few dollars a day, probably, you think that is not a huge amount of money. That’s right. But you can sell it for thousands of dollars.
Just create a website making $1 a day, sell it, and you’ll have $500-$1000 in your pocket.
Empire Flippers… I’ve been buying and selling quite a few sites with them but I don’t understand why so many people are so happy with them. Unfortunately there aren’t many other broker sites in that price niche but they do a crappy job every single time.
Their communication is complete crap with their filipino assistants only forwarding emails from buyers to sellers and visa versa. Their listing texts are very poor and mostly copied exactly what a seller provides in the initial email instead of creating a nice marketing sales pitch. They provide minimal history and base the listing price on the most profitable average. Even if there is a year history available, and the last 3 month are most profitable, they calculate on the last 3 month. Many times seller claim that the site is without PBNs or other SEO services and after receiving the URL and doing my own due diligence I find those kind of backlinks. So I don’t know how great the EF due diligence is but I don’t trust them one single second. Those two owners are really the worst of all and all the time bragging about how great they are. They are so full of themselves that it really starts to piss off many of IM acquaintances. Including myself… So I hope that a new broker will stand up and have good customer service so I can completely forget about EF…
Sorry to hear about your experience Andy.
I am confused why you would buy and sell so many sites through us though if it was so bad? There are plenty of other brokers out there to do business with.
I don’t really see Joe and Justin puffing out their chests very much either alas, but I guess that’s kind of in the eyes of the beholder.
I can say from experience that we don’t based prices purely on just what is the most profitable average. While we are trying to give our sellers the best deal possible, it is the best deal within reason. This comes into even more effect with businesses that show strong seasonality. Some businesses that are huge businesses we’ve flat out refused because of the low amount of history for the asking price was just too much of a red flag on whether it was a legitimate business or not. Or if was a legit business, whether or not the explosive growth would steady out or just fall off completely. Just not enough history to decide.
I would say our marketing gives sellers a lot more exposure then if they went on their own as well – from our marketplace listing, to our email list of 35,000+, our social media presence, and long standing history.
But again, that’s the job of a broker is to get eyes on the deal and there are other brokers out there in the space you can use – FE and Quiet Light are both alternative options you could try out.
Either way,I hope you find what you are looking for Andy!
Amazing and very inspirational post!
I have a question about amazon affiliate website, as I want to start one myself…
Your tips about traffic and SEO on your blog… do they apply for the amazon affiliate website or are they strictly for digital products only?
Newbie question, but answer would be appreciated :)
Thanks
No the tips transition across any niche/approach
Should definitely get involved Wooten!
It’s important to remember that these sites can take upwards of 6-7 months before they start seeing any kind of real profit. After that, they can balloon up quite considerably.
It’s a long game, so the sooner you start the better!
I would wager the vast majority of Mathew’s training on here will help you in a big way to conquer an Amazon affiliate niche.
One great thing about learning about marketing strategies in the “make money online niche” is that it is highly competitive, so I would also study how Mathew markets his products himself because it’ll give you some major edges over potential competitors in niches outside of the “make money niche”.
For example, about 99% of Amazon affiliates NEVER build out an email list.
That’s fine for micro niche sites but if you build out a huge Amazon authority site doing $10k a month, building an email list could allow you to increase that significantly by bringing traffic back plus allowing you to diversify your income even more (such as with info products, or other affiliate offers / display ads)
Just some tips!
Thanks for sharing this amazing article Greg. I know quite a lot of people who increased their income by building (sometime buying) and selling websites.
Hey Onehalf!
Glad you liked the article!
Yes, flipping – whether it is buying or selling websites – can be an incredibly lucrative career.
We have many customers that just buy up sites and hold onto them for a year, making money and doing relatively little to the sites and then can sell them for a lot more based off just some tweaks they made to the site that increased conversions and the fact that the site has a longer track record of making money.
Of course, many buy sites and just hold onto them – especially Adsense and Amazon sites that are often pretty passive and take minimal work to manage.
Really in depth and insightful article Greg! Keep up the great work buddy and looking forward to get my AMZ site up and running. #Marketing
#marketing :-)
I recently sold my website through Empire Flippers (EF) and would highly recommend them to anybody who is serious about selling a proven, successful online business.
Long before coming across EF I had been a subscriber of Matthew’s newsletter and paid for a PBN through Matthew just before we started negotiating the sale with the new buyer however, since the new buyer and his partner was seriously disturbed at the thought of the PBN, I never followed through with it… Just goes to show that the attitude towards PBNs all depends on the buyer.
With regards to Empire Flippers, I must confess that to begin with I was skeptical about the whole process, one of my first conversations did not go well with their consultant who made made some incorrect assumptions about my background and net worth based on the previous ten years forgetting I had a successful career before that but we persevered and I’m glad we did.
My niche ‘real estate and lifestyle’ website is 13 years old with 5,000+ articles, hundreds of videos and 25,000 ‘VIP Members’ who receive my weekly email newsletter so it is quite established.
Why would someone sell a successful website that consistently earned $10,000 per month? And a lot more than that a few years ago?
Quite simple really… After 13 years I just lost the spark and the passion for what I was doing and wanted to put my ‘baby’ in the hands of someone who had more energy and perhaps more technical know how and I think we managed to do that… I want to focus now on more artistic and creative endeavors with video.
During this process, the many different people I dealt with at Empire Flippers were incredibly helpful and communicative, we exchanged a zillion emails and even though the thought of transferring control of the business to them was terrifying – it’s kind of held in ‘escrow’ until the migration process is complete – I am a very happy customer.
If you have any questions, I would be happy to help. [email protected]
Thanks for your additional insights Scott, seems like you have been on an awesome journey!
Hey Scott!
I’m glad to hear about your experience.
The reasoning why someone would sell a site varies as much as any business, for sure. I think it is a smart idea to transfer out of the business when the spark has died and you’re ready to move on to your next project.
Allow someone to breathe new life into it and hopefully take it to even higher heights!
Thanks for being an awesome customer!
Damn…how can we achieve this kind of results ? It’s amazing.
Build a site that makes a bunch of money per month :)
Bican,
If you want to build out a site like this, there are a couple of good courses I can recommend.
Tung’s AMZ Bootcamp, he’s the owner of the Cloud Living blog, and also Mark Webster’s Authority Hacker. Both solid courses that can help you build some huge sites. Neither of them followed the PBN route though, but the concepts that this seller and those teachers talk about overlap a lot.
Hope this helps!
Hey Matt, It’s been long! I don’t comment as often as I do but still do visit your site and enjoy your posts as much, especially the monthly Income reports…
By The way for anyone reading, Matt has a great course on building PBN’s. You should make sure to get it.
Hi Greg,
Great post and thank you for the valuable info. Was just wondering… I know you sometimes have interviews with your sellers, did you do one with this seller? Would be nice to watch. Thanks again.
The course hasn’t being for sale for a while now but I might make it available again later this year via http://marketerseal.com/
Hey Munir!
Glad you enjoyed my post! :-)
As far as the seller interviews go, this site was done before my time. We sold it a few months before I came on board, so never did the interview for it.
We do have a new interview that just went live for an Amazon FBA business for $1.5 million, which was a pretty fun experience.
Lots of potential with Amazon, both from the affiliate and the FBA space!
Nice informative as usual you are awesome.
Haha thanks Hammad :)
Thanks Hammad! :-)
Wow. Really enjoyed the full article. This is the first time hearing about Empire flippers. i have been in the flipping business for some time. (Starter). I am also unaware about these many steps involved in flipping websites.
Will try to do in coming days. Thanks for this article !
No problem, I hope you learned something new :)
Hey Gunaseelan!
Glad you enjoyed the article. There is a lot that goes into buying and selling online businesses, especially bigger ones like this.
Hopefully it helps you when it comes to you selling or buying some sites – and obviously we would love to help you if you want to use a professional broker with your flipping sites business
Fantastic post on right time :)
Amazon affiliate site was in my mind, and I am going to build it :)
Do we need to do different SEO for various countries?
Thanks in advance :)
Hey Aezaz!
I know of people that take successful English Amazon affiliate sites and then apply it towards the French and German market, so building internationally is definitely possible.
I would highly recommend using some kind of localization plugin as well that will make it so when someone from say the UK visits your site and clicks your link is automatically redirected to the Amazon UK site instead of the USA site.
That way you can capitalize on international traffic.
As far as English-speaking markets I would recommend using the localizer for:
USA
UK
Australia
Canada
Hi Greg,
Thank you for your reply and thank you for localization idea. I didn’t think about it. Will go for it.
Can I get paid if UK visitor redirected to US website?
Hey Aezaz!
You’re welcome!
And yes, if you had a UK based Amazon site and used a localization plugint o send US visitors of your site to the US version of Amazon, you would reap the affiliate commissions of anything they buy.
It’s a great strategy and very few people actually use it.
It’s a super easy win for people that come onto our marketplace and buy Amazon sites, sometimes just localization will increase their net monthly earnings of the site they purchased by several hundred dollars a month.
Hey Matthew, This is nice post myself being an affiliate I look for selling the products through its reviews, but this is something different.
Will try to work on it also how can we improve our CTR on our affiliate products any idea?
By building out genuinely helpful content with well placed call to actions
I second what Mathew said.
You can some insane backlinks or traffic strategy, but at the end of the day without great content that genuinely helps people, you just won’t convert as many people into actual sales.
Hi Greg, do you have any plans of letting list new websites with unique content in your marketplace? A separate place for unique niche websites ? I have the capacity to list 100’s of new sites everymonth.
I don’t think they deal with that end of the market
Hey Sathrak!
We don’t list niche sites that have no cashflow coming in. Right now at the time of this writing, a webiste has to be making a minimum of $500 a month to be listed on our marketplace.
Even if it is making that much money, it will still need to pass our vetting process before it actually gets published to the marketplace.
I believe there is a few places where you can sell pre-made niche sites or partner with other people who are doing it.
Some places to check out might be Source Market on Source Wave, where you can create a gig where people buy these kind of sties from you. Human Proof Designs might be a good person to reach out to as well, as he often sells niche site packages.
Just my two cents on the subject, hopefully that helps!
Did you(Matthew) create the PBN for this particular site that was sold?
I did not
No, Mathew wasn’t the seller of this business.
The seller of the business did have a PBN though, one that they created from the ground up.
Thanks Matt. Just wanted to say I get a heap of value from your posts, and really appreciate the effort you put in! Keep doing what you’re doing!
Cheers,
Jamie
Thanks Jamie, although I can’t take credit for the value delivered here :)
Thanks Jamie!
Mathew’s posts are super valuable, but I’m glad you also found a lot of value from the one I wrote that he allowed on his blog!
Hopefully it helps you in your business somewhere!
Amazing :) :) Great Work
Glad you enjoyed it Arslan!
Thanks for the compliment Arslan :-)
This was a very inspiring and aspirational post to read. Thank you.
I hope that transitions into action for you!
Thank you Alex!
I’m glad I was able to write something that inspired you :-)
I am trying to rank a amazon niche site, hope I can sell that very soon. :)
Good luck Khokon!
Absolutely Khokon!
If the Amazon site is still relatively new, just give it time. A lot of these sites take about 6-7 months to reach an income producing stage and then a few months after that to create a really good, steady income that you can later use to sell that business for a nice sum of cash.
The main thing is to just keep going and be persistent with working on the site even if there is no income coming in at the moment.
Thanks Greg Elfrink, you replied me. Yes, I am new. Actually its hard for me to focus only to my niche site as I am not earning much from there & I have to earn some dollars everyday for my family.
However, your word encourage me to work out.
The fastest way to make money online is via offering a service. What I did when I first started was write for other people – A LOT.
Then used that money to focus on my niche sites. It is important to remember a niche site can take 6+ months before it really sees any profit. It’s a long game, not a short win.
Keep focusing on it while also doing some fast cash services for others (such as writing, keyword research, or graphic design) and you’ll get to where you want to go
Good post detailed, now i need to read it three times to understand everything :)
Haha well it will always be here for you to read :)
I’m glad you enjoyed it Julien :-)
The process has a lot of moving parts, but when you have a broker the sales process becomes a lot smoother of a transaction.
I have been selling websites Amazon, adsense & clickbank sites on flippa from 2010. (Starter sites ) and some established sites too. But Empireflippers have changed the way people buy websites. You guys work very hard to get the right website the price it deserves.
Keep up the great work.
Yeah it’s great to get some insight into the whole process!
Hey Aaslin!
We actually started back in the day selling on Flippa ourselves. That was back when we were pretty much 100% Adsense sites. Our evolution into a brokerage and creating our curated marketplace came from our success there and having people wanting us to sell their sites for them.
We like to think we helped to eliminate and mitigate a lot of the risks people have when it comes to selling their websites and businesses. I’m glad to hear your compliment on our business, always a good thing to read :-)
Thanks for the post.
I knew people flipped sites but didn’t know that they can earn that much by doing the same.
I also was unaware that there are so many steps involved in the flipping site.
Will try to make a successful niche site in the future.
Anyways nice share.
Yeah it looks to be a very profitable business!
Yeah Himanshu!
Flipping websites and online businesses can be an incredibly lucrative career. We have sellers and buyers that all they do is build up web properties and then sell or resell them on our marketplace for higher multiples.
When you think if you buy a $60k website from us, double the monthly earnings and then a year later you can sell it at $120-150k due to the extra earnings and longer history, it can be a really wild ROI for your time.
Definitely check out more of Mathew’s tutorials, they can steer you in the right direction when it comes to creating successful niche sites.
I’m also a fan of just straight up buying niches sites that are already profitable. The reasoning is that you take a ton of the guesswork out of the equation from the very start, which is nice, and you can just focus on growing what is already working instead of waiting for a few months to see if your keyword research is going to bear fruit.
Sweet Greg, really good article, one question: what is the best amazon affiliate theme for you?
Thanks a lot!
Hey Jorge!
I’m glad you enjoyed the article!
The majority of our Amazon sites use a myriad of themes, so it is really hard to say what is the “best” theme. Every niche might have a certain theme that converts better than another.
As far as my personal favorite goes though… I have to say I love Thrive Themes. I just think it’s a great theme and you can do so much with it. I also think it is really great value for the price.
Great tutorial Matthew! That is a great post. I love the transparency and in depth information that you provide!
I can’t take credit for this one :)
Hey GentlemanUp!
Thanks a lot for the compliment :-)
It’s kind of surreal that my words are being posted on Mathew’s blog. I’m a big fan of the blog and read Mathew’s great tutorials a long time before I became a full time content marketer. So that’s pretty cool.
Anyhow, glad you loved the transparency and found the information to be so in depth!
I am so sorry for the seller, this is a very low price for a steady five-figure income website. And you are presenting this as a success story?
What do you feel was the right price?
I would be curious what you think a fair price is as well.
Walking away with close to $200k in your pocket in less than ninety days is a pretty good deal in my book.
One thing to note here is that the earnings that caused the site to increase in price were still being skewed by the previous month. We would never give a 23-27 multiple for instance on just one month of earnings, we look to give the multiple over a long trend which averages out the monthly earnings.
This helps prevents us from using earnings that might only have spiked because of seasonality or some other traffic anomaly
Wow, this is huge.
Matt, based on your link building experience, would you advocate we build links to rank using PBNs. And just curious, what’s the difference between the Tiered link building strategy you teach and using PBNs to rank?
Yeah I love PBN’s :) But there are many pitfalls when building them and people are often lazy/take shortcuts which comes back to haunt them
PBNs are still super effective. The main thing is making sure you’re following best practices with building one. Also if you plan on selling the site, you should really rent out the PBN links to the new owner instead of taking them down.
Thank you. Is it still relevant for 2021?
Amazing…Amazing…
Glad you enjoyed it Zul!
Hey Zul!
Yeah, the opportunity with Amazon affiliate is huge. A lot of people dislike it because the low payouts, but they forget how much Amazon’s trusted brand converts and can often make up for the lower commission.