Live Case Study: Watch Us 5X the Value of Our Latest Acquisition Within 12 Months (Or Less)

The time has finally come for me to start producing some actionable (and interesting?) content. And there’s no better way to do it than launching a live case study and set the goals really high.

‘High’ is very subjective in this case. 

IMO, we can definitely pull this off, but it’s not going to be easy.

So, let me give you a short introduction to what this is all about…

A quick content site flip

We decided to acquire a content-based website with the intention of 5x’ing the revenue/value within 12 months, and then we’ll flip it for a profit.

The site passed this checklist with flying colors, and there are lots of quick wins, as outlined in this article.

Here are some details about the site. I’ll add in the screenshots after so that you can get a clearer picture.

• Age: Started in August 2019 
• Niche: General/Tech 
• Total posts: 150 
• DR: 66 
• Trust Flow: 58 
• Referring domains: 3.25K 
• Organic visits per day: 400-500  
• US Earnings YTD: $8,186.74

The original owner built the site on a great (!) expired domain, and we have four other domains redirecting to relevant inner pages. The backlink profile is very good, and there’s a lot of inbound link juice waiting to be spread around.

Here are the financials behind the acquisition:

• We based the valuation on the last nine months (L9M)
• The site is averaging $987/month – L9M
• The final purchase price was $26,000 (26x multiple)

That means that we’re aiming to increase the revenue to $5,000/month (at least), which should result in an asking price of $150,000 or so.

How are we going to do that

Oh, it’s going to be a process…

Luckily, we have a strong team and many systems in place that are a perfect fit for this type of challenge. 

We’re doing this for our clients (and our portfolio) on a regular basis, so adding this project to the queue won’t be an issue.

However, we’ll definitely be way more aggressive with growth because of the goals we’ve set.

The project will be broken down into three main phases:

1. Learning
2. Improving
3. Building

Learning

This is the most important phase of the project.

We’ll run multiple discovery audits, and here are some of the deliverables we’ll complete during the first month or so:

• Competition analysis
• Website Quality Audit
• Keyword research for existing and new pages (gap analysis)
• We’ll find the target pages (for our link building campaigns)
• On-page SEO audit
• Technical SEO audit
• Internal linking optimization
• Full content audit
• And finally, the Conversion Rate Optimization

Improving

Completing all those audits listed above will provide us with an actionable set of tasks that we need to do right away to maximize our chances of success.

All sites are different, but after taking a closer look at this site, CRO and content audits should prove the most beneficial to this site’s bottom line. 

During this phase, we’ll go through the audits and implement all the fixes and prepare the site for the next phase.

Building

This is where this project will go on an auto-pilot, so to say. 

During the first two phases, we’ll form a strategy and start executing the game plan. 

This phase will focus on the ongoing work from months 3-12. It will boil down to producing content (researching, outlining, writing) and on the link building at scale.

We’ll throw in occasional content, technical, and CRO audits just to be sure that everything’s properly optimized, but it’s going to be an auto-pilot mode after month three.

To wrap it up

The main purpose of this case study is to showcase to investors what can be done with a ‘simple’ content site and to emphasize the fact that digital assets are here to stay and that they are a viable investment option with GREAT returns (if you know how to manage them).

The secondary goal is to educate content site operators and owners on what can be done to maximize their assets’ revenue/value. We’ll do that by providing actionable tips and advice based on years of experience in the industry and working on 2,000+ websites during that time.

So there you have it. I hope you’ll find this case study interesting and helpful.

If you’d like to follow along and be notified as soon as I publish another case study update, click on this link and subscribe to our newsletter.

Andrej Ilisin

Chief Marketing Officer

Entrepreneur. Investor. Husband & Father. I balance that out with a healthy dose of CrossFit and Chess. Currently working as a CMO/Co-founder at MMA Warehouse & CMO at Odys Global.

Connect with Andrej: 
Linkedin | Odys Global