How I Built a Niche Site & Sold It For $315k
Master the art of creating wealth
Did you know that David Daneshgar, founder of BloomNation, got his seed money by playing poker?
Well, David and his friends wanted to start an online flower business but were stuck where 99% of entrepreneurs get stuck — startup funds. They wanted $30k for the idea to take off.
David heard of a poker tournament whose prize money was $30k. And having won the World Series of Poker in 2008, he spent $1000 and participated. Rest is history.
Back in 2012, I was at a crossroads, and unfortunately, I was not David-like great at poker, to have whipped up that much money. But, despite all odds, I did it.
This story is not to brag about my success. Let this help you take control of things and start thinking about solutions than getting stuck with problems.
The Ideation
In 2012, I was working with a startup. And within a year, I was able to grow the site to 1 million visitors.
Now, SEO is tricky that way. A lot of it is about experimenting. If you try your hands on ten things, a thing or two will hit the mark. And after that, it is refining the things that work till you reach the maximum efficiency.
Almost like alchemy.
Experimenting on a site that has just started is easy. Nothing much is at stake. But things become a lot more difficult when it has already amassed to a profitable size. You cannot take the risk of jeopardizing the existing traffic with a single wrong decision.
So, although I had several ideas, the CEO of the company was not willing to take the risk. Nine out of my ten suggestions found themselves in the trash can of his cabin.
Seeing my frustration, he suggested (God bless his soul) that I start a parallel site for experimentation and then apply only the workable trials to the company website.
And that would eventually change a lot of things in my life.
The Foundation
The journey from the idea to the final culmination was patchy with ups and downs, well mostly downs. But I was prepared to fight one battle at a time.
Now that I was all set to start my own site, I had to go for a domain name. Now, getting a new domain that fits your bill, i.e., catchy & easy to remember, was forcing me to cough up almost $10k.
$10k!? Forget it. I went to the flea market instead— expired domains.
Many website owners start their own websites and work on them relentlessly by creating content & generating backlinks, only to leave them halfway because of lack of profits or prematurely because of less traffic.
These unused domains go on to expire in some time and are great picks for a very less price. Of course, it takes a lot of hard work and time to analyze thousands of domains and arrive at one good domain.
Once I was done with the naming ceremony, I got down to doing the basics of the website. The designing, the layout, basic SEO, and speed optimization.
The Experiment
As I had already mentioned, this website’s objective was to experiment with my ideas. And my first experiment was to test the following:
long-tail less searched competition keywords.
I got down to work and picked 100 such topics since I knew that I had to stuff my site with content to make it a reliable place for Google. But when I knew what topics to write on, there was another hindrance — the writer.
You see, I was myself a $450 employee in a full-time job. And that salary did not permit me the luxury of hiring a good writer to write the content for my website. And neither did I have the time to invest in this.
I had to find an alternative.
The Hiring
For an employee in a small startup website, hiring someone and running a business are too big and melodramatically-dreamy words. But with a lot of self-belief and much motivation from my boss, I also sought to crack this issue.
At that time, a good writer in India cost $200. It didn’t take much time for me to deduce that it was way out of my capacity to go for it. What else?
As Robert Heinlein said:
Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.
Well, in my case, it is the shallow-pocketed man.
I found my solution in one of my friend’s wife. Educated and a homemaker, she was eager to do the writing job for a price I could afford. I did not interview her and decided to train her.
3 months hence, with dedicated efforts, she was able to write content. Although it was up to 80 satisfaction rate, I did not bother. Because I knew that in the quest for 100% perfectionism, I would only push my goals further away.
I wanted to start rolling — perfecting will come eventually.
The Acceleration
3 months of constant content creation, we hit the 100+ articles mark.
6 months later, the website started ranking for more queries on Google, and we witnessed a slow but steady increase in traffic. And within a couple more months, we were at 2k visitors per day. We did not stop the momentum of content creation:
- Researched again on long-tail low-competition keywords
- Shortlisted 200–300 topics
- Kept adding content to the website
A year later, after continuously fueling the website with content, we reached 10k visitors per day, i.e., 300k per month. This was a feat achieved for me — bringing the website to a sustainable level.
The Course Correction
At one point, I took a break and started analyzing what I had in hand. I wanted an in-depth look at the website’s status and the knowledge of what was working and what was not.
The findings:
- 25% of the articles were doing well, and the rest, 75%, contributed much less traffic-wise.
- Google Analytics confirmed that the time spent on the low-traffic articles was much less than on the well-performing ones.
- The maximum traffic was from the USA, but the content was not that palatable for American readers.
- In-depth information was missing in the articles owing to the limited knowledge of the writer
- Despite adding new articles consistently, there was no significant growth in traffic. In fact, there was a decline.
The new strategy:
The findings gave a new insight into the whole approach. I had to
improvise and find ways to maximize results with optimized efforts.
- I changed the writing strategy to invest 50% time on new articles and the rest in improving the engagement quality of the existing well-performing articles.
- I hired another writer to maintain the speed of the growth and enhance the work quality.
- Focused on making the articles more palatable for US readers since the maximum traffic was from there.
- Hired US editors to match their English standards.
- I got involved in the content creation process, infusing the same with in-depth information so that the readers got all the information.
Within a year, I was on another level — we crossed one million visitors per month.
And the Money, Honey
The money came in two ways.
One was from the website. Within two years of starting it, I generated a lot of revenue from the website. With continuous experimenting, analyzing minutely, and implementing proactive strategies, I could scale the traffic immensely.
The AdSense money generated from the website consistently went up to $ 8k/$ 10k per month.
That’s 4 times my salary!!
And on the work front also, it brought huge success. I replicated the things that worked on my niche site onto the business site. As expected, the results were remarkable.
l could scale up to 8 million visitors per month.
I was promoted twice from SEO Team Lead to SEO Manager, and thereon to the AVP. My team grew, and so did my paycheck — 500% in two years, at $2500.
Coming from a lower-middle-class family, it was a windfall for me.
The real money came in when I was approached by a company to buy my niche.
The offer price — 36 times the monthly profit, i.e., $300k.
Now, that’s too much money for a guy of my background. Although I was hesitant to sell, the offer was too good to turn down.
And also because I had some long-term plans too. After having a fair grip on the Google algorithm, I wanted to venture into the other two dominant areas — Amazon & YouTube.
I wanted to establish myself as a steadfast and reliable Amazon seller with a world-class brand to my name. And also to become a dynamic and big-league YouTube creator who has total control of the brand growth.
In short, I wanted to become a long-lasting and complete brand across all dominant platforms.
Hence, I agreed.
I still remember staring at the message from the bank when the money was transferred to my account. I wanted someone to pinch me for real. It was too good to be true.
As I Say Goodbye
What started as an experiment landed up making me a millionaire.
Life can be really crazy. But it was not all luck. It was more of :
- willingness to take the right amount of risk
- finding solutions to problems
- constantly improvising as the situation demands
- quick in changing tracks to reach the destination faster
Learn to turn challenges into opportunities and then witness how life starts throwing in pleasant surprises.
