How How To Clean Anything Makes Money
By Richard
Something a little different! Trent over at Online Income Lab does a great job showing people the behind the scenes workings of his muses.
So when I was there recently I checked out his analysis of his authority site on cleaning tips. Oh yeah, if it hasn’t been made clear through the other examples above, you can pretty much start an authority site on any niche, and often the more boring, the better.
If you pop over to How to Clean Anything, you’ll notice is has a ton of content on all things cleaning related. That epically deep content brings in around 40,000 monthly uniques (type in cleaning or cleaning tips into Google to see how well this site is doing!).
Now a lot of these people are just looking for quick simple free advice on how to do something, and don’t want or need to buy anything. So for a large percentage of the audience, you’re not going to get any money from. But that’s okay.
As I’m sure you can guess the site is monetized by Google Ads and Trent’s done a great job of formatting them to fit within the site more smoothly, ie they look less ad-like.
Now the fun part.
How did Trent write all that content and get it up to the top of Google?
Simple. He bought the content-rich site through private sale for about $5000, which at the time was making $400 a month. So he bought it roughly on a 1 times multiple. ie 1 x yearly net profit – in the affiliate marketing, ad and info product space often revenue and profit are just a few % points away, since apart from hosting and domain there are no costs in maintaining a site.
Then he tweaked some things like nav bar, styling etc, to increase click through rates on the ads. Bam! It started making about $700-$1000 a month.
Now this may still feel like chump change to some of you, but all you need to do is buy 10 more sites like this to bring in $100,000 a year…almost all of which is profit!
Cooler still, Trent was able to earn back the purchase price within less than a year, and then after that it was all pure profit.
No back breaking content production or painfully waiting for the site to rank in Google. He basically just turned the tap on.
Also, what other asset class can you earn back the purchase price that fast?
I’ve never heard of a tenant paying 9-12 months of rent and the landlord walking to the bank to pay off the mortgage 100%!
So this case study is brilliant at showing us that buying an existing online passive income business may not be such a bad idea.
I will say, and this is hugely important, you need to be very good at weeding out the BS-riddled online businesses for sale from the kickass ones.
You need to be great at working out whether the business is going to be still bringing in streams of income 12 months from now and whether it can survive the next Google update.
You also need to know how you can improve it, because if you think you can, then you’d be willing to pay a price that others can’t afford, and thus you’ll land the business – a particularly important point for sites sold on public auction sites like Flippa.
And remember, buying a business is completely different to starting a business, and as such you should only go ahead with it if you know all the finer details and how to DD etc.
Sites like Flippa do make a lot of these things easier though, so hey, why not have a go and start with something small, like a $2,000 site.
How to Clean Anything is a perfect example; purchase price just a couple thousand dollars, it already earned income, boring niche, lots of content already made, been around for a few years, lots of potential for immediate quick improvements and a bit of a no brainer.
Find one of these and preferably wrap up a deal privately, as opposed to public online auction, so you don’t end up overpaying.
PS Trent suggested a smart way to go about buying sites it to simply look at sites in the top 10 Google search results for different niches you’re interested in and then just get in touch with the site owner. You can useWho Is to find out this info if it is not readily available on the site. After some back and forth – some basic DD – you can make a cheeky first offer, subject to further DD. Easy!
Visit How to Clean Anything or check out Online Income Lab where case study originally spotted