Recently two of our awesome graduates, Nathan and Alexa were able to quit their 9 to 5 jobs, and earn their income online working from home. They’re now on a whole-new path to making full-time incomes from their acquired digital skills.
We recently caught up with them to hear about one of their earlier website deals, and how they bought it for thousands of dollars less than the seller’s asking price.
Better yet, using our simple renovation tips, we look at how this website has turned into nice little passive money-making machine and was the catalyst for them to quitting their PAYG jobs and going online full time.
CLICK ON THE VIDEO BELOW to hear how Nathan & Alexa bought a website for passive income
Liz Raad: Welcome and today we have some very special guests with us. This is Nathan and Alexa, big welcome to you.
The reason that we’ve invited Nathan and Alexa to be with us today, is because they’ve just finished a year with us on our high-level coaching program, the Champions Program, and they have done some amazing stuff over that time.
And what we wanted to share with you was actually a couple of the deals that they’ve done online in buying websites, and the sort of results that they’re getting, which is really exciting.
Changing Career’s to full-time Online Entrepreneur’s
First of all, can we start out because, Nathan, you’re a former sparky (electrician) aren’t you?
Nathan: I used to be yes.
Matt: Used to be, good answer.
Nathan: I don’t have a license anymore.
Liz: And Alexa, you were in customer service. You had no prior experience online did you?
Alexa: Correct, none whatsoever.
Their First Passive Website Purchase – in the crochet niche!
Liz: I want you to tell us about your very first website purchase. Well one of our favourite ones, and that was Crochet News, wasn’t it?
Alexa: Yes, we bought a couple of training wheel websites and then we went straight in and bought the website “Crochet News”.
Liz: How much did you buy that website for?
Alexa: We bought that website for USD $4,500.
Liz: And how much was it making at the time?
Alexa: It was making about USD $300 on average per month.
Liz: And what attracted you to that website? What was it about that made you think this is a good one?
Key Stats: Passive website purchased for $4,500 making $300 per month with 70,000 visitors per month
Nathan: It was making a good profit, it had 70,000 uniques a month. It also came with another website and a number of free domains.
Matt: Nathan, I’m guessing you don’t know anything about crochet?
Nathan: My mum crochets. I don’t know how to do it!
Matt: It’s not a personal hobby of yours then?
Nathan: Not at all.
Making money before the purchase – by negotiating a great website price
Liz: And, when you bought the site, was that an auction or did you negotiate with the seller?
Nathan: I negotiated with the seller. It was listed as an auction. But I bought it before the auction ended.
Liz: Oh well done
Nathan: The listing price was around the USD $10,000 mark. But I ended up talking to her and getting it cheaper.
Easy website renovations to increase passive profits
Liz: And when you bought it, you then did a renovation didn’t you? Were there some really obvious things that you saw before you bought it, that you knew you could do?
Alexa: Yes, there were some navigation issues which we knew we needed to fix straight away. But we didn’t fix it until we owned the website for a few months.
How they made the website more passive…
We also fixed the amount of work that was being put into the website, which at that stage was a post per day. We really reduced that back and worked on the strategy which ended up working really well.
The one key thing that doubled the websites income:
Nathan: Also, we extended the articles. The previous owner created 100 words on each post. We took the top 30 posts and extended these to around 500 words. That pretty much doubled the income.
Liz: Fantastic, so quite a simple strategy but really effective. So how much time do you now need to spend on the website to maintain that?
Alexa: “About one, maybe two weeks a year we spend on it. We put up one post a month now.“
Matt: So, there’s no product with this website? It’s just posting content now.
Nathan: Yes, that’s right.
Website makes passive income through affiliate commissions and advertising
Liz: So how does it make its money?
Alexa: So, there’s a couple of different avenues. The first one is affiliate commissions. We sell people’s patterns from Etsy and we have a commission for each pattern that we sell.
And we also do advertising, which we make a commission through. We use Media Vine for that.
Liz: Fantastic. And here’s the big question, what’s it making now?
Alexa: Now the site is making USD $900 a month.
Liz: Great, and when you work that out for two weeks’ worth of work a year (say maybe eight hours of work?), that’s a good return on your time.
Alexa: It is, we’re pretty happy with that one!
Liz: Is that a little bit more than your hourly rate when you were in customer service, or working as an electrician?
Alexa: Yeah, just a little bit more.
How the value of the website is now much higher…
Matt: Another thing is too, is the asset value of the website now. Because it’s a good solid viable website that you only have to work on (only two weeks out of the year), you’ll probably sell that easily for 20+ times multiple. You’re probably looking at $20,000 to $30,000 for that website, that you originally bought for $4,500.
Alexa: Well I think the value of websites has also increased since we purchased it. So even if we hadn’t increased the monthly profits, over time that still would have increased the value of the asset.
And then, on top of that, you’ve got the increased profits as well as the reduced time. We don’t spend of lot of time on it. So yes, it’s made a pretty good asset for us.
Liz: Now both those sites, have you paid them back to yourself? Do you owe any money on those sites?
Nathan: Yes, we paid it back a long time ago. And a few times over.
Liz: Fantastic, so the risk is now zero. And you just bank the income.
Matt: An awesome passive website. And just think – how much you’re earning off these and the return on investment, all while you sleep. This is why you’re learning how to do this stuff. So it’s pretty exciting!
Rinse & Repeat – moving onto bigger website deals
Alexa: Yes, and we’re looking forward to doing it on some bigger websites as well.
Liz: Great! Well you guys are absolutely rocking it. It has been amazing to talk to you because, this is really inspirational to hear live what’s going on and what our students are achieving out there.
So, thanks so much for sharing your story. We really appreciate it and we’ll look forward to hearing more from you soon.
If you are interested in learning how to buy websites for passive income and profit, then make sure you check out our free training on how to buy and renovate your first investment website.
