Just Sold My Portfolio for 7 Figures USD, AMA.

DanielS said:
How is this site performing? Were the majority of your target keywords low search volume keywords?
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I should probably clarify, all the content was posted by February-March, when lockdown started. Haven't touched it since. So most of the articles went live in 2019.
It's doing well, making a stable income. It was hit by January update, but has recovered the traffic since and is now hitting new highs.

Yes, the majority of keywords were low search volume info keywords. I'd go after anything with 0-10 or 20 searches.
 
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Andrey said:
I should probably clarify, all the content was posted by February-March, when lockdown started. Haven't touched it since. So most of the articles went live in 2019.
It's doing well, making a stable income. It was hit by January update, but has recovered the traffic since and is now hitting new highs.

Yes, the majority of keywords were low search volume info keywords. I'd go after anything with 0-10 or 20 searches.
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Thank you for your response! I’m building out a website now using the same strategy, so I’m always curious to see how it works for other people.
 
I dont know if this question has been asked already but why did you sell? What do you see on the horizon that motivated you to liquidate your entire portfolio? Are there more lucrative ventures you are now pursuing?
 
How much money did you invest throughout the life of the project?
How much time did you invest throughout the life of the project?
Would make this time and money investment again if you were starting out today?
 
Asad said:
I dont know if this question has been asked already but why did you sell? What do you see on the horizon that motivated you to liquidate your entire portfolio? Are there more lucrative ventures you are now pursuing?
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I want to explore offline opportunities and also start new fresh online projects.

MBS said:
How much money did you invest throughout the life of the project?
How much time did you invest throughout the life of the project?
Would make this time and money investment again if you were starting out today?
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  1. Total investments were in the region of $300K
  2. A lot :smile:
  3. I'm starting again as if from scratch and doing it exactly the same way. The only difference this time is that I am investigating link building as part of the process. Review on this is to follow.
 
MrMedia said:
I want to explore offline opportunities and also start new fresh online projects.



  1. Total investments were in the region of $300K
  2. A lot :smile:
  3. I'm starting again as if from scratch and doing it exactly the same way. The only difference this time is that I am investigating link building as part of the process. Review on this is to follow.
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1. Was all of this investment on content for the sites or are you including the value of your time?
 
One more question:
Do you have someone who handles the tech, like making sure your server is set your properly, you are using all the important plugins without missing out on good ones and having redundant plugins, who does the design/layout using the builder, who is looking after site speed, crawl budget, schema etc, and the tech seo side of things or you handle all these alone.

these can also be overwhelming at times.
 
bopeep said:
One more question:
Do you have someone who handles the tech, like making sure your server is set your properly, you are using all the important plugins without missing out on good ones and having redundant plugins, who does the design/layout using the builder, who is looking after site speed, crawl budget, schema etc, and the tech seo side of things or you handle all these alone.

these can also be overwhelming at times.
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No I handle.

Unless it is highly technical then I outsource to a trusted contact
 
Why would you sell? To me, you're trading in a secure income source for 36 months of income. Then you're taking some of the profit to invest in new sites, which might or might not result in an ROI. Why the risk?

If it was me, I'd just write SOPs and train people so that the sites run themselves and not sell. Then just make more sites.

I only read the first few pages of this thread but, to me, it looks like all you need is an editor, a few writers, and writing guidelines per site to make it manage itself. The editor manages the content and writers, the writers write based upon the editor's guidance and the writing guidelines, and bam, your site is managed by a professional team and you're not free to worry about the finances, build new sites, or whatever.
 
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Philip J. Fry said:
Why would you sell? To me, you're trading in a secure income source for 36 months of income. Then you're taking some of the profit to invest in new sites, which might or might not result in an ROI. Why the risk?
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Can't speak on OP's behalf, but generally:

The bigger a site is, the harder it can fall. You never know what Google update, affiliate commission change, ad revenue change (ie 3rd party cookies) are round the corner. There's been monster sites that have been slammed after an update and lost 50% or more of their traffic.

Selling provides security. That money coming in at once also means it's not lessened by your monthly living costs or the expenses you need to keep the site running and growing each month. Instead, it's all pure profit.

And, as OP said, completely decimating your income provides an insane amount of motivation. Meaning it lights a fire under your ass again (which can go out after being in site management mode for a long time).

Personally, I have a rough number I want to hit in order to make life easy. Not buying audi's for fun style, but enough to put in an index fund and live off of. So I can get the freedom to only work on projects I'm truly passionate about.
 
If you can get 3 years worth of monthly profit in your bank account and can use a portion of that to rebuild in less than 3 years to the same monthly revenue, you've fast-forwarded your life significantly. And since we can't get back time, this is actually a smart play, though it does involve some risk, which is why I'd start two new projects probably in case one is a dud.

Anyone can be affected by an algorithm update, no matter the content quality, link quality, technical SEO problems, etc. New SERP features, re-weighting of ranking factors, new competitors, etc... nobody is safe. False security feels secure but it's not. There's no guarantees when it comes to SEO.
 
Ryuzaki said:
If you can get 3 years worth of monthly profit in your bank account and can use a portion of that to rebuild in less than 3 years to the same monthly revenue, you've fast-forwarded your life significantly. And since we can't get back time, this is actually a smart play, though it does involve some risk, which is why I'd start two new projects probably in case one is a dud.

Anyone can be affected by an algorithm update, no matter the content quality, link quality, technical SEO problems, etc. New SERP features, re-weighting of ranking factors, new competitors, etc... nobody is safe. False security feels secure but it's not. There's no guarantees when it comes to SEO.
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Could not have said it better. This sums up exactly why most of us make an exit perfectly.

If you can't understand what @Ryuzaki just said I would read again and then read this case study carefully from page 1 again.

Happy to continue to field any useful questions.
 
Once upon a time.
I had a bunch of adsense sites cash flowing enough I could retire and build my super mega nerd coffee shop of doom.
Panda happened.
Revenue basically went to 0.

Still recovering. Still making websites.
Cash is certainty. Liquidity has a premium for a reason.
You can't count on continued subsidization from another company as part of a long term income plan.

Market conditions change over time.
Digital meta positioning plays are not annuities and can not be evaluated or valued like them.
 
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What do you do to help lessen the effects of burnout? Not so much in relation to content writing (outsourcing eliminates this) but just the general day-to-day grind?

I've been trying to make an effort to not go on my computer or phone during the weekends. However, I find it nearly impossible to disconnect completely because I only ever leave my house to go for a walk or a bike ride. So, whenever Monday comes around, I don't feel like I've gotten a chance to re-charge.

(Maybe this is just a never ending struggle that entrepreneurs/business owners constantly face?)
 
DanielS said:
What do you do to help lessen the effects of burnout? Not so much in relation to content writing (outsourcing eliminates this) but just the general day-to-day grind?

I've been trying to make an effort to not go on my computer or phone during the weekends. However, I find it nearly impossible to disconnect completely because I only ever leave my house to go for a walk or a bike ride. So, whenever Monday comes around, I don't feel like I've gotten a chance to re-charge.

(Maybe this is just a never ending struggle that entrepreneurs/business owners constantly face?)
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I take time out and lift heavy weights.

That clears my head and blasts away frustruations pretty well.

Truthfully though sometimes you just gotta put the head down and push through "burnout".

To continue the weight lifting theme Arnold always said that most of the muscle growth happened in the last few reps of set - the ones that you felt you really had to grind out.

I often think about that when doing something I really don't enjoy.
 
Hey @MrMedia

Did you go for keywords where the featured snippet is a youtube video? I have a tendency to think that in these cases, even if we rank top 5, our CTR is just going to be too low for it to be worth.

If you do chose to go after these, do you have a minimum threshold of monthly searches for the targeted keyword?
 
Travelingpizza said:
Hey @MrMedia

Did you go for keywords where the featured snippet is a youtube video? I have a tendency to think that in these cases, even if we rank top 5, our CTR is just going to be too low for it to be worth.

If you do chose to go after these, do you have a minimum threshold of monthly searches for the targeted keyword?
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No not at all.

I literally found every kw that my competitors were ranking for and out did them in terms of quality content. Search volume was not a guiding principal in most instances and some of the smallest kws delivered long term very reliable traffic.

I do notice now that SERP features are killing off anything below the 1-4/5 mark which just means that you have to make sure you take up as much real estate as possible on page one with proper markup etc.

But to answer your question - no a feature rich SERP page would not deter me.
 
Congrats on the success and apologies in advance if this has been asked.

How, assuming you did, did you avoid lifestyle creep once you hit 5 figure months and now that you have exited?

Also, do you make any smart plays in your actual day to day life, routines, etc? I'm extremely interested in how high performers optimize their lifestyles.

A great example is heavy kettlebell swings as opposed to spending hours doing cardio then weights at the gym; a high intensity kettlebell swing, clean, jerk and some turkish getups (TGU) hit every muscle group in the body and at a high rate of cardioaerobic activity at the same time. Ie "killing two birds with one stone".

What do you do that is similar to this, or that you consider a "cheat code" in your life, both inside and outside of business?

Thank you for taking the time to do this AMA!
 
nothing said:
A great example is heavy kettlebell swings as opposed to spending hours doing cardio then weights at the gym; a high intensity kettlebell swing, clean, jerk and some turkish getups (TGU) hit every muscle group in the body and at a high rate of cardioaerobic activity at the same time. Ie "killing two birds with one stone".
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I'm not OP but I love fitness and I've been going to the gym since I was 16.

You should find your balance, if you just do high intensity cardio, your heart will be small and very strong, so it can colapse. The same can happen if you only do normal cardio, your heart will be bigger but not strong enough so it can colapse too, some elite athletes die because of these.

The ideal situation would be to train both. I go to the gym every day and exercise just one big muscle group like chest, back, arms, legs. Just one so It's faster and I can lift more weight, that's my high intensity cardio. Then I do normal cardio on some machine or I just go running at least 3 days a week.
 
@MrMedia - thanks for taking the time to answer all the questions. I've read every single one of your answers.

Your pushing out a ton of content so:
1) I've seen lots of people do 'content pruning' with great success, and there are many case studies on it too. Basically killing pages that aren't bringing in traffic and adding bloat. Having so much content produced would cause quite a bit of this. How do you handle it?
2) How do you decide between big article targetting many KWs vs many smaller articles?
(In my niches I'm seeing Google favour larger articles covering more of the topic than smaller ones)
3) Can you share a bit about your process for choosing KWs to target?

I really look forward to your response. I've got a great expired domain and think this could be the perfect approach, but still deciding...
 
AlexR said:
@MrMedia - thanks for taking the time to answer all the questions. I've read every single one of your answers.

Your pushing out a ton of content so:
1) I've seen lots of people do 'content pruning' with great success, and there are many case studies on it too. Basically killing pages that aren't bringing in traffic and adding bloat. Having so much content produced would cause quite a bit of this. How do you handle it?
2) How do you decide between big article targetting many KWs vs many smaller articles?
(In my niches I'm seeing Google favour larger articles covering more of the topic than smaller ones)
3) Can you share a bit about your process for choosing KWs to target?

I really look forward to your response. I've got a great expired domain and think this could be the perfect approach, but still deciding...
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1. I prune content every 12 months or sooner if my gut feeling tells me to merge and prune. I use analytics and sort pages by organic traffic -> landing page -> ranked lowest to highest -> delete / merge any that have below average incoming traffic.

2. I dont. I use a combination of both. Some articles with high search volumes will get long and elaborate articles that will naturally hoover up smaller terms. Some articles are purely sniping low comp low traffic terms to start the ball rolling with G.

3. I look at my top 3 competitors and reach out to them and offer to buy their website or compete with them directly. Most don't reply or just reply saying no. I then use SEMRush to download all the pages of the website and replicate each only making it better and adding value.
 
How do you select a niche? What’s your process?
 
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