This little venture started in the “for sale” section of an online forum for webmasters (specifically, www.namepros.com). I always try to browse through sites like these (a list of similar sites is available at the bottom of this post) to see if there are any good websites or domain names for sale at an undervalued price.
In this case I stumbled upon a website that was up for sale, the topic of which was an upcoming movie installment of a very popular movie series. I’d had no idea that this movie was in the works to be made, and neither did the majority of movie fans, but enough people did that the site was getting steady traffic, about 8,000 unique visitors per month.
The site was also earning around $70 US per month through Google Adsense. I looked into the movie and noticed that as of IMDB.com‘s info, it was scheduled to be put out in 2009, but it had already been pushed back twice. This was good, since the further away the film was, the longer the site’s lifespan would be (sites like these tend to die out not long after the movie is released).
More importantly though, I noticed two very attractive factors. First, the site was currently made up of only a single image, a few lines of text, and a single Adsense block. Secondly, the site ranked very well in Google when the title of the movie was searched on, and the image the site used was indexed highly in Google images for the same search terms. This mean opportunity. I purchased the site for $700 US, about 10 months earnings, but I knew it was worth much more.
I got started on developing the site a little more. I revamped the design adding more pages, more images, more information, video, and more Adsense blocks. In total, to build out the site to about 8 pages, I spent probably about ten hours. The obvious initial benefit was that now I had three Adsense units on every page instead of the single one the site initially had. The increase in pages also meant that visitors to the site had more pages to browse through, and the page views per visit went up to about three from the one that visitors were originally limited to. This meant the views from the Adsense blocks on the site went from one per visit to about nine per visit (three adsense blocks times three pageviews per visit). The result of this was a near immediate earnings jump, pushing monthly earnings to over $100 US.
I then asked myself, if this one site could earn money by feeding the curiosity of movie fans, why not try and repeat the feat? I went to IMDB.com and scoured the list of upcoming movies for 2009, 2010 and 2011. I bought up probably 15 domain names, and over the course of the next month or so, developed 6 of them into sites. By using the first site as a layout template and changing only the details of each site, I was able to develop the new sites very quickly. All in all, to develop all seven sites in the network, I spent a total of probably 25-30 hours. I linked all the sites together, and the new sites began to immediately benefit from the traffic to the initial site.
One major key to all this was the use of search engine optimization. Using only very simple SEO techniques, I was able to write the sites in such a way that Google loved them. Sure enough over the next couple of months my Google placement for the sites improved dramatically. After 6 months, the first site, as well as one other, were ranked in the top four in Google for their respective titles. For one site, I’d managed to rank second, beating giants like Yahoo! Movies and Wikipedia, with only IMDB.com in front of me! Most of the sites had reached the first page of Google for their titles as search terms, and none were buried further than the second page. This search ranking resulted in a skyrocketing of my traffic.
At the peak, the network of seven sites was totaling over 80,000 unique visitors per month and close to 170,000 page views each month. And aside from the initial 25-30 hours of setting up the sites, the amount of work I’d done on updating the sites amounted to…zero. I had not touched one of the sites since initially putting them up. At the peak, the network of seven sites pulled in almost $500 US from Google Adsense, completely passively, without the need for any additional upkeep. Of course, had I been constantly updating the sites, perhaps the traffic would have been better, but then again, maybe not! Anyway, I was quite content with hundreds of dollars each month for nothing!
As summer turned to fall, the blockbuster season came and went, as did some of the big money advertisers that were driving my Adsense earnings. Adsense naturally fell back down to around $100 USD per month in September and October, and then began growing again in November and December as the Christmas movie season brought in more advertisers. At this point, I was looking to fund some other projects and decided to sell the site network. I placed the network for sale through auction on SitePoint.com, and after a short time the network sold for $3200 US.
In total, I had the sites for roughly seven months, over the course of which the network brought it just over $1900 in Adsense earnings, for an average of around $270 per month. After the sale, the total earnings was $5100 US. Subtract my initial $700 investment and you’re looking at net profit of about $628 per month if you break it up over the life of the site. An even better way of looking at it though is earnings per hour. After All, as we know relative wealth is the number that counts! Breaking the total earnings down over the hours put in, I made $4400 in profit, for about 25-30 hours of total work. At 30 hours work, that works out to an hourly wage of $146 an hour. Not too shabby at all.
The key lesson here was that I was able to identify a web property that was not only underdeveloped and therefor quite undervalued, but also one that was begging to be expanded into sites featuring similar topics in the same niche. By doing this, I was able to bring in a nice little chunk of passive income each month, all from work done in my spare time, put in while watching TV in my underwear, resulting in an hourly rate that most executives would be happy to make!
Sites I use to find websites/domain names for sale:
marketplace.SitePoint.com
forums.DigitalPoint.com
www.NamePros.com