You might remember the story we shared about Nathan and Alexa and how they quit their 9 to 5 jobs and now earn their income online. Well last year they completed three big goals:
First, they started buying websites for passive income and increased the income of one of their first learner websites from $300 to $900 per month.
Second, they were both able to quit their jobs to work full time in their Parramatta digital agency.
Thirdly, fast forward a year and they’ve now bought and built themselves a portfolio of websites that generate a reliable passive income they can live off.
And because of the digital skills that they learned at eBusiness Institute, they’re now able to travel around the world living the laptop lifestyle.
CLICK ON THE VIDEO BELOW to hear how Nathan and Alexa applied simple renovations to sell their website for massive profit.
Matt Raad: Today I’m here with Nathan and Alexa, who are two of our star students. And I wanted to share their story because they’ve just had an amazing win flipping their first website. They’ve had amazing success with buying and selling websites, not just in flipping websites but also in buying passive websites.
So, that’s why I just wanted to give everyone an update with what’s happened because it’s a pretty cool result. You both must be feeling very proud of yourselves!
Alexa: Yes, we’re pretty happy!
Creating Freedom by Buying Websites for Passive Income
Matt: Can you share with us what you just sold the site for, and give us a bit of background to the site.
Alexa: Yes, so we bought the website https://curd-nerd.com/ about two years ago. And we recently sold that for US$16,900, which is around 80-81x multiple of the monthly income. So, we think that’s a good result.
Matt: I like how modest you are, “that’s a really good result”. I’d say that’s an outstanding result! How much did you work on that site?
Alexa: Not much at all. Maybe a few days of the year.
Matt: Only a few days a year, in the whole two years that you’ve owned it.
Nathan: At the start, we did some work on the website. We built a shop on there, we tweaked some things, and lengthened some articles. But I think for the whole time we owned it, we only published four articles. That was about it.
Matt: Oh wow! I thought that was your learner site, and you were studiously doing everything that we were teaching you to do, and you were doing lots of work on it.
Alexa: We did actually do a renovation on it. We changed up the layout of the front page a little bit.
Matt: Right, and is that with the Accelerate theme?
Alexa: Yes, the Accelerate theme.
Matt: Like we teach you, and looks very similar to all the sites that our students have.
Now, this was your learner site (what we teach our students to practice their digital skills on), so how much did you buy it for?
Nathan: We bought this site for US$950.
How To Buy and Sell Websites For Maximum Profit
Matt: Two years ago. Wow, and it sold for US$16,900.
Nathan: We used Joe Burrill as our broker, and he listed it on Flippa for us.
Matt: We should mention, Joe Burrill is one of our other star graduates as well. And he’s now a leading website broker and he brokered the deal for you.
Alexa: He brokered the deal for us. He did an amazing job, obviously by the results. It’s a great website as well, but Joe did a really good job selling that. We were really happy.
Small Renovations That Tripled Their Website’s Monthly Income
Matt: Now, because of COVID-19, and the niche that it’s in (cheese making), this site’s actually going really well. The traffic and the numbers have both gone up.
Nathan: Yes, so now all the survivalists have come in and they want to make their own cheese. The topic of home cheese making has really spiked, and the traffic for the site has doubled since March.
Matt: And that’s with you guys doing basically nothing to the site.
Alexa: That’s right, the only thing we have done was add some guest posting on there. We published our guest posts onto the website, and that was all we did on it. We didn’t touch it other than that.
Matt: And so what happened to the income? Did it actually go up quite a bit?
Nathan: Yes, when we changed our ads from Ezoic to Mediavine, plus the increase in traffic, and then our income tripled. We also found that Amazon went really well too.
Matt: So for you guys, this was the perfect little passive site where you literally didn’t do much work on. COVID comes along and it triples, you sell it off for US$17,000.
Alexa: It was the perfect time to sell it. And what was interesting was we didn’t necessarily want to sell it at that time. We did want to sell it, but we weren’t sure with the market. Were we going to get a good price?
So we were a bit nervous going into the sale, but actually, it worked out really well. Turns out it was the right time, I guess.
Matt: Yes, that is an outstanding result!
Nathan & Alexa are using their Digital Skills to reach their big Income Goals
So now, you’ve got a portfolio of sites, and you’ve done the digital agency strategy that we teach our students. But, jumping ahead, what’s your main goal? Being a young couple, what do you want to be doing over the next couple of years?
Alexa: We mainly just want to do a lot of travelling. We want to go overseas and live the laptop lifestyle.
Matt: So now your portfolio is at that stage, where you can see it supporting you to travel around the world.
Nathan: That’s right, and of course we would love to grow our portfolio some more.
Matt: Nathan and Alexa have really big goals in terms of income, and what they can earn off their portfolio sites.
Buying Websites for Passive Income Gives You Multiple Streams of Income Online
You’re definitely on that path with a couple of particular sites that we’ve been helping you on. I’m really excited about them for your sake because I think they could be very big sites. You’ve got a really good eye for it, and you’re still buying some very nice sites, aren’t you?
Alexa: We’re still buying and building some sites, and we’ve got our digital agency as well, with our ongoing SEO clients.
With the agency, we would like to slow that down a little bit, and really grow the portfolio. This will give us a lot of freedom, and we can really go anywhere.
Matt: With the digital agency sites, our clients would think you’d normally need to be face-to-face with them. But you mentioned earlier, what you’re finding now is that as long as you’ve got Skype, you’re fine.
Nathan: Yes, we operate via email with most of our clients, and we rarely need to talk to them.
Alexa: And that’s because they say they’re happy with the work that we do, so we don’t need to call or see them often.
Matt: Awesome. That’s fantastic, guys. Well, thank you so much for that update. It is just brilliant to hear, and congratulations.
Free Masterclass on Buying Websites For Passive Income
To learn more, watch our free masterclass on How To Buy and Renovate Websites For Passive Income. And follow our 3-step website investment strategy for buying simple sites… with simple renovation opportunities, that generate income as quickly or passively as possible.
