How To Make Decent Money Flipping Starter Sites? How I Made $3500 From Almost Nothing?
Making money from your niche sites is difficult and REALLY hard when you’re just starting out. It takes a lot of money to start ranking on some moderately competitive terms.
If you are someone who is just starting out and thinking to build his/her own niche site – this case study is for you.
Long story short – I bought an expired domain from GoDaddy Auctions and later sold it for low four figures. How much did I buy the domain for? $50. That’s it.
What was the domain like?
- Decent links – 20-30 contextual links
- Clean History – Checked from Archive.org
- Brandable Domain Name
- Domain was ranking on it’s brand term and had some brand value.
How did I find this domain?
I was actively looking for domains in the Golf Niche on ExpiredDomains.net and came across a domain which wasn’t a very strong one but was ranking on it’s brand term and had a history of traffic.
I put the site in my watchlist and made a bid exactly 15 minutes before the ending time. Luckily, there was only one bidder and I was able to outbid him.
Setup
I had a shared hosting (A2 Hosting) which I bought on a Black Friday before. I built a WordPress site and used GeneratePress Theme and optimised the site for speed using WP Rocket.
Here are the plugins I used:
- WP Rocket
- Yoast SEO
- Easy Table of Content
- GeneratePress Premium
- Affiliatable.io for building Affiliate Tables
Keyword Research
I used Ahrefs to find some really low DR, weak sites in the Golf Niche and created a list of the keywords they were ranking on without any links. I had a list of good 50-100 keywords and then I categorised them and started building a virtual SILO structure.
This was literally all of the KW Research I did.
Content
This is a case study for beginners or people who are just starting out so I’m assuming that they will write the content themselves, all of it.
PS: I bought content. I didn’t write it myself. I also used SurferSEO on Affiliate articles.
Backlinks
As someone who is just starting out, you would not have a good budget for links or even no budget at all. It’s OK.
Backlinks help A LOT and it’s almost necessary to build them in order to build authority. Doesn’t matter if you get them naturally or buy them. BUILD BACKLINKS.
What I did here was reach out to sites with some personalised emails and I received tons of replies. A lot of them demanded money but instead, I offered them to promote their site on my socials or write X amount of words for them. You can replicate the same strategy and start building links for yourself. You obviously wouldn’t get a lot of links and it’d take a lot of time but if you don’t have the money to spend on links – this is probably the best way by which you can get good links.
I did not build a lot of backlinks as I decided to use 301 to boost my site’s rankings.
301 Redirect
I bought a domain off of an expired domain marketplace. It was related to the Golf niche as well and was owned by a golf course before. I set up the site, wrote some articles and let it age for 2 months.
I then went ahead and put a 301 to my main site. Homepage to Homepage.
Both of these domains -> My main site and the one I was redirecting had some sort of traffic and after about 3-4 weeks, I saw that my traffic was increasing and the rankings started climbing.
A couple of screenshots:
The Sale
The site started making about $100/mo and as it was a new site on a growth spur – I was able to get 36x and I sold it for $3600
Bottom Line
You can make money from your niche sites even if you’re not wanting to invest heavily or invest at all. You just have to put in the work and start executing! Everything works in SEO if you do it the right way. Ofc not GSA on the site or links from Fiverr but you get the point.
