Mushfiq S. joins us on the Podcast again to share a whole lot more on how to buy and flip websites. He’s bought and sold over 180 websites now, so I think we can call him an expert!

He first joined us in an interview on the podcast back at the end of 2020 where we focused on his easy win formula for niche sites. This time around the discussion revolves around how to find the right websites to flip and what comes after that. He even shares the domain of one of his most recent purchases with us.

Mushfiq has a 5 step process when buying and flipping websites:

• Aquire
• Stabilize
• Grow
• Optimize
• Exit

Each of these 5 steps can be expanded upon greatly, and that’s exactly what our host Jared Bauman and Mushfiq do. Mushfiq shares how he does what he does, and how you can best do it as well.

Anyone interested in online business is going to love this episode, so watch, read, or listen to it as soon as you get the chance.

Finally, Mushfiq has created a database of things you should be looking at when you are considering buying a website.  He calls it Easy Diligence.

You can check out Mushfiq’s database of Easy Diligence items here.

Mushfiq From The Website Flip

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This interview covers a huge amount of ground, and you can expect to hear about:

• About Mushfiq’s new subscription service Deal Feed
• Musfiqs view on link building when your intention is to sell quickly
• What he has done in the first 3 – 4 weeks with his latest buy Upmostly
• The ‘fixes’ he works on when first buying a site
• Where he finds writers for his sites
• Different ways of structuring writer payments

Resources and sites mentioned in the interview:

Read the Full Transcript Below: 

Spencer: Hey, before we jump into today’s episode, I wanted to share with you a little SEO tip. That’s been working really well. On one of my sites. In fact, it’s only yard.com. I niche site, project foresight. I’ve been building internal links with that site. One thing that I like to do is find all the orphaned pages on the site, and so that our articles that don’t have any links pointing to that.

And so I’m using link whisper to just sort those pages by those that don’t have any internal links or very few internal links. And it makes it very easy using link whisper in the reports to do that. And so I went ahead and I went through a bunch of those that didn’t have any links and I added one or two.

Internal links to those articles and I’m starting to see big movement in the rankings and I’ve been keeping track. And in fact, it’s been about 25 days since I built, uh, for most of these, just one or two internal links, and I wanted to share some of those results. So one of these, I was previously one of these keywords.

I was ranked number 32 in Google. I built one internal link. Now it’s been, like I said, a little over three weeks later and I now ranked number one in Google for that particular keyword. Another one of these keywords, I built just one internal link to that page. I was ranking over 100. Uh, I now ranked number nine in Google.

Another one, I was ranking number 21 in Google. I built just one internal link. And now I ranked number two in Google. And again, this is all about 25 days later. And a couple of these others, I built five internal links to this particular keyword. I was ranking over 100 and now I ranked number one, another one of these.

I was ranked number five in Google, and I built eight internal links. And now I ranked number one in Google for that particular keyword. So I’m seeing huge impact, uh, without building external links to these particular pages. We do know that external links are important and can help a lot, but there’s a ton that can be left on the table sometimes with internal links.

And I’ve been using my WordPress plugin, which is called link whisper to build internal links. It makes it really fast and easy to see a full report on your site. How many internal links each of your pages has and then to build those internal. In a very fast and efficient and effective manner. I’m seeing big results by doing this on my own site.

So I hope that you would consider checking out link whisper by going to link whisper.com. Thanks a lot.

Jared: Welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman, and today we’re joined by moose feet. Now this is not his first time on the podcast. You might remember him from many months back.

One of the more popular episodes, moose feat joins us from the website, flipped.com where he has now flipped over 180. Yes. I said that right. 180 websites. So we talked today about the life cycle of a website, flip how to do due diligence, where to find sites and what to look for insights. There’s a lot of different places out there.

He goes through where to find different sites where the good opportunities are right. We touch on what to do after you buy the site, how to find those easy wins. We spend a lot of time talking about the growth of the site, how to grow a site that you bought. And this is really applicable for anyone who owns a site, whether you are buying it, or whether you started it from scratch.

Uh, we speak is kind enough to share a real life website with us that he’s working on one, he bought just a little while ago and what he’s doing with it and what his plans are for the future. It’s great to have a real live URL. We can all go take a look at and follow along. I hit him with a bunch of questions, rapid fire style ranging from link-building his approaches to applying links to sites after he buys them a page optimizer software, and when to use them a core web vitals, how to focus on site speed and where to focus.

So you don’t get overwhelmed, uh, eat expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, and how it applies when you’re buying a site and taking over personas. Uh, and I also ask them which niches have the best RPMs. So which at which industries really are the best ones to go after. If you’re looking to make the most money per visitor from an ad standpoint, uh, just like the last episode, misspeak shares a ton of.

Uh, you’re gonna want to get your pen and paper ready because there’s a lot of notes you can take to apply to your site, whether you’re buying a site or whether you just have a site and you want to grow it quicker. All right. Let’s dive in.

Jared: welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman, and today we’re joined by  mushy. Welcome here.

Mushfiq: Hey, thanks for having me on.

Jared: Yeah, sure. It’s, I’m really excited to be able to interview you. I was privileged enough to listen to your first interview here on the podcast with Spencer. And that was, I don’t know, nine or nine or 10 months ago, probably now at this point, but so many great things I’ll say from the outset, if you haven’t listened to the first interview that we speak to, it’s one of those popular ones I’m on the podcast.

And I personally learned a ton, ended up interacting with me, speak after that as a result of it. So, um, thanks so much for that first podcast and excited to have you back on today.

Mushfiq: That was great. Thank you.

Jared: Why don’t you start out? I mean, I know many people have already listened to it, but for those who haven’t, um, give us a background, give us a little bit, just catch us up to where you are, what you’re doing.

Uh, certainly we can go into some of your background and some of your websites. Sure.

Mushfiq: Yeah. So make it quick. So I got started in 2008, uh, built up my first site and then, uh, it was, uh, sold in 2010. That actually got me started in the game of website flipping, uh, fast forward about 12, 13 years now. Uh, I’ve done about 175 flips.

Um, well that was last year. So now it was probably like 180, uh, have lost count. Um, and so that’s what I do. I Bri uh, distressed websites implement my tactics and then flip them within about a 12 month to 24 month range.

Jared: 180 is a staggering number, just to be clear. So it’s so many websites. Um, I I’ve flipped several now.

And, um, but to, to talk in terms of 180 is absolutely nuts. Now on the previous podcast, you talked a lot about the methodology you go through specifically with trying to find easy wins. You have a platform and a program, not program, but basically a long checklist of easy wins that you have that you go through.

Uh, today I thought it’d be really fun if we kind of wandered through the life cycle of a website flip, um, a lot of what we talked about again, the last of is always exactly how to make quick fixes, but maybe we could start today by talking through not just the quick fixes you do on websites, but really the entire process where you, where you come at it from how you evaluate it, then the process of flipping it and growing it.

And then the way you look to sell it on. Yeah. Yeah. Could you kind of, could we, could we just kind of start by walking through that process?

Mushfiq: Yeah. Yeah. And just stop me. Uh, cause I’ll just explain essentially I have like a five-step lifecycle that I really like to follow. Um, it’s, you know, the first stage is you acquire the site, right?

The second you stabilize third is you grow it in four days, you optimize and then you exit, right. And each of these has so much. Details in it, but essentially that’s the high level. I like to follow any acquisition stage. You know, I’m looking to buy some, a website that meets my investment criteria, which every investor should have a criteria of.

And that’s, you know, for stocks that’s different for websites, that’s different, right. For websites. That’s how old does the website need to be? What kind of backlinks should it have? Um, what should they demonetization streams? Um, how much content you have. So these are all criteria you can set beforehand that you feel comfortable.

And then when you go deal searching, you can apply it in the acquisition stage to find that best fit. Does that make sense? Yep.

Jared: Yep. Can you, um, you talked about investment criteria and, uh, what are some of the different things that investors should be paying attention to when it comes to the acquisition?

Mushfiq: Yeah. Each person in different. What I care for is a domain age. So website age, essentially. Um, I also care for what’s the monetization, uh, streams, because I have some expertise. Mine is affiliate marketing, right? So I’m looking for, if the website owner missed affiliate marketing and only did display ads, that’s an upside for me because I can go in and do a lot of easy wins.

Um, that’s one, uh, the other one is I’m looking at the backlink profile. I don’t like to buy sites with PBNs or toxic leaks. Nobody really wants toxic links, but I know a lot of people who do buy sites with PBNs. So I personally stay away from that. Um, let’s see. Um, Yeah. I mean, those are just a high level, just maybe a few more in there, but, um, but yeah, everybody needs to figure out what their criteria is for sure.

Jared: A lot of people we’ll talk about page views per month, um, about monitors, how much it makes per month. I didn’t hear you mention any of these things. I heard you mentioned more, it’s more of the technical side of what you’re looking

Mushfiq: at. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t care. I want you to next. Uh, because, uh, the websites that I buy are, I’ll usually, you know, if it’s somebody who knows what they’re doing, I’m not gonna buy it.

I’m not gonna buy that site because those people are just like me. They kind of over-optimize the site. Take our rail, the readiness creates a potential. Um, so I stay away from those. I like to buy sites that are under, you know, distressed. So that means they might have a lot of traffic because the individual will put a lot of effort writing content, but they just don’t know how to monetize much if they just put on like ad sense, for example, let’s say, or just basic easily.

Right. Um, and that’s it. So those are the sites I’m located by. So what I, what I like to do is look at the ratio earnings to traffic, and essentially use some mathematical Spain there. So you have to kind of figure, okay, if there’s an upside, but for an example, I bought a site in the outdoor nation. Um, it was, uh, getting about a hundred thousand page views.

So last April when we bought and is still in our portfolio, um, but it was making $300 a month. So $300 a month on a a hundred thousand pages, anybody in this game long enough knows, that’s just, that’s just way too long. Right? So even if you just stick on normal easily, Three times, at least four times that, so anyways, that’s kind of what I’m looking at.

Um, and so yeah, you could say that’s my criteria. I ratio that makes sense.

Jared: You mentioned domain age and that’s not something I hear a lot of people necessarily taking into consideration, especially. Um, when you start looking around at the different opportunities that are out there, I’d say the majority, and I don’t have any numbers in this.

I’m just guessing, but the majority of these websites that are being sold are fairly new. Um, why are you attracted to domain age specifically besides the fact that, you know, in, in this, in this world, you know, age is better, the longer it’s been around is better, but is there any specifics to why or what you do with, with, uh, with an older.

Mushfiq: Yeah. So just one caveat I’d like to mention, um, the difference between domain, age and website age, which is something that a lot of people miss, unless I can be a domain can be aged 20 years, but the westbound went live last year. Right? I that’s, that’s not what I’m looking for. I’m looking for. How long has the website been lie?

So index age, let’s say, um, and that’s for a fresh domain. So if I see a fresh domain that was just registered and somebody holding the Hilda domain for 10 years and then started building it out two years ago, really, to me, that’s a two year old, um, um, website, this, the remaining time it was, it was staggered.

Um, and yeah, the reason primary reason I’m doing that is if the west that has been live for a long period of time, it has gone through potentially a many Google updates. It has had time in the index where people have potentially linked to it more than a website that’s been around for six months. So yeah, those, those are the easy ones.

Um, but primarily that it’s been around many Google updates so that when I go in. I can add back links and I’m not worried that is it. Is it going to get penalized? Because all of a sudden, I know a site with one year of age getting like 10 to 20 back links. That’s not so normal versus something that’s been around for five years and, you know, getting back to the explore, getting clean.

And I come in and put a few left wins. That’s that’s okay to do.

Jared: You just mentioned it. So I’ll ask about it. Google, uh, Google, like algorithm updates, ups, downs. Um, are you, I don’t wanna say afraid, but do you avoid sites that have been, uh, negatively affected by an algorithm update? Are you only going after sites that are just, you know, positive throughout these updates?

What’s your, you know, how, how could it, how could another investor look at that? Or, you know, H how do you evaluate.

Mushfiq: Yeah, no, I’m not afraid. Um, if I was afraid I couldn’t do that many. So the reason why I am not afraid is I buy smart. When I’m, when I’m buying a site, I’m buying smart. So I’m only buying an asset that I know that even if I pay a 40 X, multiple, which is like the average right now, um, I can go in and immediately, you know, two X, the revenues, three X, the revenues, the month one, and still that even if the traffic decreases for whatever reason who updates whatnot, I’m still gonna get my far away, um, in a typical timeframe.

So that’s what I’m allowed. When I’m looking for a site I’m looking for a site that’s been, that has those opportunities for extreme growth, right? When that happens. That I’m buying it. And if I Google up, it happens, it’s okay. I don’t mind. And I bought sites like that. For example, we bought one last month, it’s in the, um, and actually I can share it.

It’s up mostly.com. So UPM or less tli.com. It’s in the software engineering like programming needs tutorials. So that’s like, it’s a perfect example because it was somebody, a hobby blogger. That’s a software engineer that put together the site in 2019. So again, it’s been around for a few years, um, and he wrote all the content on all the tutorials.

Now I have a, I’m also looking for sites that have a moat, right. And somebody else can’t just come and copy this site. I mean, you got to have some expertise, right? This is not the same, for example, in the kitchen. And you should home niche where anybody can write about those topics. So again, I’m old. Um, this, I used to get 150 to 200 K visitors.

When I bought it, it was hit by a, some kind of penalty, uh, not manual the algorithm and it was getting, now it gets a hundred thousand. So again, go ahead. But I still bought it. Why? Because they use the homeowner. Did anyone monetize the site? So I went day one and then put his life on that and it’s making her $900 a month.

Now I’ve only had it for a month, so we’ll keep growing it and think about what to do with it.

Jared: Wow. Yeah. That’s um, and I think I’ve heard, you mentioned this before for those that don’t know. Um, we speak blogs about a lot of this stuff on, uh, on the website, flipped.com. And again, I’ve been a follower of that for a while now.

A lot of great content. Um, you, you do a good job of specifically tackling some of these really kind of more in-depth nuanced questions and, um, uh, and you have a lot of case studies there, which are fun. I think every in this industry, we just love case studies, right? And you have a bunch of those. So we’ll be excited to follow along with that.

mostly.com. Thanks for sharing that domain. I know everybody loves to get a good look at stuff. Um, and I think we’ll be talking more about that throughout the podcast here today. We’ll kind of reference back to what you’re doing with that one. Um, one more thing on due diligence before we move on, or at least one more question, you mentioned PBNs now that is man for even experienced, um, experienced people that those are tough to identify.

And oftentimes not mentioned by the selling party, even though they should be disclosed. And, and oftentimes the brokerages will ask about that. Like, can you give us a little bit of insights into how someone might go about looking for a PBN? Have they spot one, how they find it in the, in the, um, in the software, that sort of thing.

Mushfiq: Yeah. Good question. Um, yeah. And to the second point that you made the, not everybody just disclosure on that. Right? A lot of people don’t even know they have a PPN because they buy, say guest posts, which is initiated or whatever. Those are some, sometimes they are part of PBS and they just don’t know.

Right. Um, so I use a tress, uh, is my go-to tool and there’s some characteristics of PBNs that are very obvious. For example, if you’re getting a link from our homepage, a high der, low traffic home page, that’s the red flag walk away. Um, first of all, You shouldn’t have external many external links from your home page in general.

Right? And if you have hundreds of articles that, and what these guys do, this is the old school way of doing things is instead of pointing archive, like excerpts, like which we have archives, you know, on the homepage, they put all the whole article on the home page and every single one that links subsequently.

So there’s like hundreds of articles on their own page. The reason they do that is to pass all the link juice from the high Dr. Homepage to your site. Right. And so that just avoid that altogether. Uh, the other ones are, if you see a site that’s, uh, let’s say you have a, let’s say you have a home site, right.

And you’re getting a link from a random site. That’s not in the home, which, but when you visit that random site, you see that they have content from all topics. That are, you know, uh, branded as a home, but then have loyal content, medical content, you know, that, that, you know, that’s just, that’s just a red flag, um, just to walk away.

So you have to look at those things. You have to look at where the link is coming from. And then look at how short the content is. Most PBN providers don’t write 2000 word articles, they write four or 500, right? Uh, many guest posts providers as well. So if you see a lot of content, that’s four or 500 words, very literal, very, you know, maybe even AI generated content just to get up.

Just, you know, if that’s a PBM and that doesn’t mean you walk away from the deal. So it could be that the site has, you know, a hundred good back links in it initially. And it’s early stages to, you know, because the people who are building these sites may, um, use PBNs early on because they just don’t know what it is.

And then they’d realize over time and then at good links and forgot about those. So all the good links are actually helping the site. The bad links may be ignored, but what you can do is just da just allow those bad links and replace them with good tenants. So it’s not a deal killer, but it’s something to be aware of.

Jared: Yeah. The days of penguin are a little past us. Now it’s a little bit more of a fluid process, but yeah, that’s, those are some good tips. I mean, um, I think you bring up a really great point that doesn’t get talked about a lot. Is that a guest post? Just because it’s labeled as a guest. And this is great for site owners who aren’t buying an and, um, and, and doing due diligence on sites, just to look at if you’re link building on your own site and using a third party guest posting service, or even if you’re outreaching on your own, it’s easy to stumble across these guest posts sites that really are just glorified, PBNs and stuff.

Yes, yes. For sure. Any other tips on due diligence, um, you know, on how you evaluate these websites? I mean, I, I’d love to ask you a few more questions about how you come up with how much it’s worth or how much you’re willing to pay for a site, but I don’t want to move past some of the things, some of the tactical things we’re talking about asking, you know, is there anything else to mention.

Mushfiq: Yeah, so due diligence. Um, yeah, so we on due diligence, I follow like a six step process there again. Um, really I’m looking at the website and the domain. Is it brandable? Um, is it, are there any trademark or copyright issues that I should be aware of? Um, is the niche interesting? Um, no, I initiate Gnostic.

Um, most of the time I just don’t care. I care about what’s the potential of that niche, but as a first time buyer, um, a niche may be important for you because it’s one website and you’re going to work on it. So just keep that in mind, traffic trend is something else I look at. Is it downpours or stable?

Um, over how long? 30 days, 90 days, two years, one year, all those things mattered. Uh, we already talked about toxic links, um, and obviously you do due diligence on how much it’s our need to verify those revenue streams against screenshots and PNL. So that’s one. And then what are the monetization sources?

So I see a lot of sites that are Amazon affiliate, which is fine. Now you should have a backup plan if Amazon cuts conditions again, right. Don’t just buy a straightforward blender site, right? Just best lenders.com in 2021, because primarily that’s going to Amazon and there is not a replacement that pays as well as Amazon for kitchen, kitchen type items.

Uh, fairly quick and easy for people to buy. So you know, that other things I’ve seen like lead gen sites, lead generation. So I see a lot of sites on flip up where somebody bought or built up a local, like a roofing site, for example, for a specific city. And it did, you know, did the hard work of bringing on contractors to sell leads to, and then they put it up on slipper after the contractor quits and say, Hey, this site is perfectly ready for you.

You just need to make, make phone calls and get the contractors on board. And you’ll send until at least that’s nice what $0, by the way, don’t pay much for that, because if they’re not able to do it and they have the relationships, how are you going to do so, you know, those things, six kind of things I really look into.

Jared: Well, you make it sound complicated.

Mushfiq: It isn’t, but you know, there’s, you can trust other, you know, brokers, a lot of brokers do this kind of due diligence for you. And they presented in a very nice fashion. Um, but you know, and you can trust them and that’s fine. Uh, but as a buyer, you really should, um, have a high level understanding of what you’re looking at.

So you can cross check their information.

Jared: Let’s talk about brokers. Let’s, let’s, let’s talk about how to, um, actually go out and acquire these these sites, um, and, and where to find them. And, um, uh, you know, there’s a lot of brokers out there. We’ve talked about them with different people in the past and interviews.

I know in your previous podcast episode, I’m going to keep referencing it by the way, because I just think people need to go back and listen to it. And we did gloss over. You’re a backstory on purpose. And so if you’re wondering a little bit more about, about machine’s backstory, definitely go check out the first episode or the first interview, but you talked a lot about Flippa and why you like it so much, but in general, let’s talk about where you go to buy these sites and how you find them.

And then, um, you know, uh, you’ve mentioned some of the brokers do a better job, you know, maybe, you know, talk some life in this or

Mushfiq: that if you DIY. Flippa is a gold mine. I, I bought all my sides from flip on that. I do case studies for, uh, the one we just talked about was from Flippa. Um, the biggest sites I have front to find the reason for that is when you build a marketplace, like Flippa, has you attract hobby, hobby, bloggers, and people who don’t understand how to monetize their site and they think, okay, let’s just put it up on Flippa and see what it’s worth.

Right? So that’s a gold mine of good deals. And so that’s why I’m saying, if you will know how to do due diligence, it makes sense. So flipped by it. It is great, but just be aware that the good deals go fast. I buy, when I see a site I closed. You know, if I can make an offer within 12 hours so that doesn’t even go to an auction process or a buy it now, process.

I just don’t like that. And I even make it clear to the seller, look, I am here. You can look at my profile. I had done 140 transactions on flip by itself. I’m a recognized broker, you know, and you can check out that I’m a legitimate person. And I’m going to make sure that you don’t have to worry about the transfer process.

I’m going to buy the site and you’ve just, I’m going to pay you and we’ll never walk away. This is done. Right. So I made that clear, but I tell them, look, my offer it’s now or never. I’m not going to wait a week for you to come back to me. Just, just to be that, because if it goes to an auction process and if you guys are familiar with eBay, I mean, things just go crazy.

Right. Um, I like to use flip up for those purposes now. Other brokers. Yeah. If you have a large budget, uh, empire flippers is probably your second go-to large budget and it’s a hundred thousand dollars or more honestly. Um, I have some issues with them, but you know, I’ll keep that separate. Uh, and the other, if you look, if you have a budget of less than 20 K motion, invest is great.

A motion invests a team over there. Very good at due diligence. Um, he knows what he’s doing, so whatever metrics is providing you as good, but you should obviously double check the second. The third one, I would recommend one next after that probably the fourth line investors club, um, is great for deals, you know, 20 K 200 K um, range.

And again, Andrea are there top class, so, uh, good people to work with this.

Jared: So you have a, you have a product, I think you’re just came out with, or it’s pretty, pretty recent called deal feed. Where in essence, you aggregate a lot of these deals into one platform. Um, yeah. And, and I can see that being really valuable cause I I’m on all these different email lists myself for different websites that are available, you know, empire flippers sends them out every Monday.

Um, motion invest, you get an email, you know, sometimes three or four times a week with a bunch of different stuff. Uh, investors clubs, you know, somewhat of a similar pattern. So what does deal fee do and what are kind of it’s it’s, you know, what, what does it help? How does it

Mushfiq: help? Yeah, so, you know, I like to build products that I use, so this was something I really, really needed.

Um, so deal feed.io is an aggregation tool. So we connect directly. One-to-one to all of these brokers at direct connections to their deals. Uh, we bring them in into one place and organize the data in a standardized format. Uh, one thing you’ll see is empire flippers, as you said, they’re at different timings.

Um, but not only that they have different ways. They present data on use of profits on these revenues. How many as last six months now, these last 12 months, these different, these different metrics that everybody’s using. And then they also presented in a different way. Right? And so what we do is bring the raw data.

Organized structure it and put it all into one, you know, specific, structured way so that you can compare and contrast between brokers. You can filter by multiples. If you have a maximum multiple you’re willing to pay or a max price, or if you’re looking for five-year-old to ten-year-old sites, you can do all of that.

Or if you’re looking for sites with high traffic, high age, you know, you, all those filter abilities are there for you to kind of look through and pick out a shortlist. And then you can just click through to the broker and go to the same process. So we’re not, we’re not replacing them. We are just organizing the data because every single day there’s a new broker popping up.

And, and so it’s, it’s time for a data analytics tool to kind of organize all of that for you. So you’d like to Google data

Jared: studio.

Mushfiq: Yeah, that’s great. Except

Jared: that you hook it all up because Google, they just did, it can be a bummer to hook up and it’s already comes pretty hooked up

Mushfiq: for ya.

Jared: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Okay. Well, that’s obviously, there’s a lot of value there, especially if you’re actively looking and you have some criteria and you don’t want to be bouncing around and checking five different brokers at one time. Um, and are you guys, are you guys able to pull in data from Flippa.

Mushfiq: Yes. So that’s going to launch into, you know, September 7th, probably early October, we’ll be, we have our own criteria on flip on that I use.

So all the searches and stuff. So we’ll be bringing in, um, those deals as well, and then putting it in the same structure. Um, and we estimate about 60 or so listings that will come online. So we have about 180 listings now across the top brokers live at any given time. And then we will bring in another 60 from flip.

Those will be between the two hundreds, um, and to get any given time. And then when they sell, you know, we update it, uh, and it gets taken out of the live stream. And actually long-term, we’re collecting all this data. So we’ll be launching an analytics platform where you can potentially. Past sales to understand what your asset value should be.

So you don’t have to rely on brokers. One thing, you know, and sorry, if I’m going on a tangent, the reason I built a website, flip deal fee, easy diligence, all these different tools is because to be unbiased, a lot of the time the brokers are the ones educating, you’ll see empire flippers played a lot of content out that they have the evaluation calculator, investors club has Dez motion and assessor, but I think that has to be an unbiased resource.

Um, that’s not tied to these brokers or, you know, that, that doesn’t have a, um, you know, a biasness there.

Jared: So, and they have a stake in it, whether they, you know, whether they, uh, you know, whether they consciously, you know, let that be a bias or not, they have a stake to some degree. Yeah,

Mushfiq: exactly. So, and that’s why, you know, the deal feed and all.

Is being built and specifically analytics platform. It has not launched yet, but really the goal there is, okay. You can use a calculator to kind of get an idea of what the value is. You can go and plug in your numbers at the different brokerages to get what the valuation is, but should I sell now or should I wait?

You know, all these types of questions they’ll, they will always tell you sell now, but if you can use pet comparable sales to see, okay, the last 10 deals that sold, what was their age? What was the revenue stream? What was, you know, all those details. It can give you more knowledge. Should I wait, or should I spell what’s the typical range?

Um, maybe someone can a nice side sell great at three years to five-year range. Um, maybe some other sites sell great at the one year range. You know, all that information is, is, is valuable in some way, whatever

Jared: that that’s really that’s, that’s really cool because, um, you know, there, there’s certainly an element of, especially if you’re a first time buyer, there’s a lot of fear and trepidation that goes along with buying that first site and not knowing, I mean, the end of the deal at the end of the day, you can look at it as.

And it can meet all your criteria. Right. But you still don’t know if it’s a good deal or not. You still don’t know if it’s the right price. And I guess at the end of the day, if it meets your criteria, maybe there’s an argument that says you buy it because it meets your criteria. But there’s something powerful about being able to have some data that says, oh yeah, not only does this meet your criteria, but historically speaking, this is right within the range or even a good deal within the range of what we’ve seen sold previously.

Exactly. Okay. So we wouldn’t be able to do a podcast episode on flipping sites. If we didn’t talk about. What you do right after you buy kind of the arbitrage style, uh, wins that, that, that you go after. Um, and you spend a lot of time in the last episode, the last podcast talking a lot about the easy wins.

You have an easy wins, um, sheet that you kind of go through and you’ve coalesced a lot of the different opportunities. I think if we could, let’s just go over the, the, the big, the big hitters, the ones you see most commonly are the ones that have the biggest impact. And I’d also like to try to frame it also for people listening, because I think a lot of people listen to this kind of stuff and they think, well, I’m not in the market of buying a website or I’m, I haven’t bought a website.

So some of this stuff doesn’t apply, but I think the most fascinating thing is you walk Spencer through own the yard. Good. We hadn’t bought, he had, he built that site and you’re able to apply a lot of these wins to an existing site. So if you’re listening and you’re not buying a site, all this stuff still applies.

You can almost treat this as though, you know,  bought your site is going to go through your site and plot ply, these winds. We can all do these to our sites that we currently have in our portfolio anyways.

Mushfiq: Yep. Yeah. And I, a hundred percent, you know, it, buying a site is just one level above building. Right.

So if your building is the same thing, so you can apply it to anything to your site to 10 X revenue. Cause I had one person who was earning $300 by easy wins and then he built the site. Um, he just didn’t know how to take it on to the next level, because most courses, most YouTube videos, they talk about the basics to get people started, but one of those extra tactics, right.

And um, to really 10 X that growth like that we’ve tested. And so they apply, he applied that and he’s making $2,000 right now, um, per month. And just because equals able to go through that checklist. So anyways, um, the ones that. I see, as obvious is the combination of affiliate and display acts. Um, this is a no brainer.

If you’re in Facebook groups, you see this all the time, but really a lot of people miss this. Uh, today we just got a site in the pet space. That’s monetized by Amazon associates, but not any display ads. Now in the pet space you can make are actually probably more with display on. It’s done with, uh, Amazon associates.

So that’s an easy one. We are a brokerage as well. We’ll probably sell that. Somebody will pick that up at a very high multiple, because they’ll immediately. Enabled display ads. Right? So that’s one. The other one that I like is, you know, most people, uh, add display ads to affiliate marketing. I like to add affiliate marketing to display ads.

So a lot of sites have display ads, but they, because affiliate marketing is more nuanced. You can’t do display ads. You could just tell easily to put it on. It starts making money, but affiliate marketing, you need to know what products to promote, how, what, which elements to add on a page comparison tables, product boxes called taction buttons.

And that can get a lot of beginners confused, but that’s an opportunity for me. So adding those elements. A lot of sites. So that’s first the combination of those two second would be that some affiliate sites, Amazon specific sites, miss a lot of elements on the page. Um, one of them is comparison tables, uh, comparison tables convert very well.

Uh, so they definitely need to be added. Some sites do add comparison tables, but they put way too many products. So let’s say they do like a top 10 article. They put all 10 articles in the us, all 10 products in the progressive table. Now a user doesn’t care. I mean, they just want to know what are the top ones that I should care about.

Right. Even though you’re talking, but all of them you’ll have to cater to different audiences, someone just coming to get validated that, Hey, okay. These three are the ones that I was thinking about. Okay. He’s telling the, the owner of this site is telling me about them. So maybe this, this legitimate, and then they clicked.

So you got to cater to different audiences. So keep your comparison tables, short and sweet. Um, others is a very distinct colored call to action buttons. This is very easy. When, where if your site is all white, you know, you should have red or yellow or blue call to action buttons to really pop out. Um, so yeah, those are the elements adding to the page.

Uh, the other, some other things, you know, does it not the easiest of easy wins, but some sites will do well with the non-marketing. So having pop-ups, um, to capture emails, some of those are missed. Um, but yeah, those are, those are probably the easiest of easy wins.

Jared: Those is the big ones. Those are the big ones.

Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s a must for you. Somebody who’s bought so many sites, you must have like alarm bells going off on your computer or something. When a site comes through. Uh, you know, it doesn’t have, uh, you know, any sort of, um, uh, advertising on it, but it’s just monetized by affiliate or vice versa because, you know, that seems like the biggest opportunity.

So, um, and again, um, lots more. I know you, you, you kind of did a site tear down of own the yard.com and the previous. So we’ll, we’ll leave a lot of the details there. Cause there are a lot of details to some of the wins you can do, but we’ll leave those for the previous podcast episode. Uh, I mean, given that you talked at the beginning about how you typically hold a site for 12 months or even longer, obviously the bulk of the work though, isn’t done just in that first quick, easy wind session, you’re doing a lot of work for these sites.

So after you’ve acquired a site, you’ve done the due diligence. You’ve negotiated the deal. You’ve taken over the site and you’ve taken care of the easy wins. I think let’s spend some time talking about the growth that you try to do for it, because there’s only a certain amount of upside you can get from that arbitrage style of applying easy wins.

But oftentimes you get this site dumped in your lap. You don’t have any experience with it. You’d haven’t, you know, you don’t really know a lot about maybe the content that’s been published on it. Uh, the bat, the history of it, how you go about growing the site and what are the tactics you use for growing these sites?

Once you buy it?

Mushfiq: Yeah. Good question. Yeah. So after you’ve done those arbitrageurs you wins, right? Um, now you have cashflow, right? You have cash coming in, um, to actually grow the site. So that’s very important. Um, and so I actually hire writers for my site, dedicated writers. Um, I don’t use agencies, um, honestly, don’t, don’t like agencies.

Um, so I used dedicated writers. I signed them off work for each individual site. I’d like to have a lead writer. So I hire that person before I even closed on the deal on escrow. I’m looking for a writer, right? And this person comes in and I am doing keyword research. So the, after the stabilization phase and into the growth phase, essentially what I’m trying to figure out how to take them site, even higher traffic, I’m finding low competition keywords, using typical tools, nothing special age stress.

Um, and I’m just assigning it to the writers, but simultaneously I’m doing a content audit because. Um, sites are built by people, either beginners or hobby people. Right. And they put a lot of content that’s unnecessary, um, for the site. Um, so doing a very rigorous content audit, and one of the sites we had about 1000 articles and we removed 300 or so on average from the site, because it was just outdated content time-sensitive content, because this one site was an outdoor space.

It’s been around since 2010. So you can imagine the amount of unnecessary content that’s, it’s built up. Um, and so, you know, getting that done, we also a very significant thing. We did, we overhauled the entire site. So if we see that this is a site, we want to spend a lot of time on, uh, for example, in the outdoor, uh, we do a full revamp of the site, um, in general, Using the big, no generate press theme, generate blocks, you know, kind of remove any element like, uh, page builders to make sure the page, uh, the website runs fast, smooth, and we can grow on it because if you don’t have a strong foundation, there’s whatever you do, doesn’t matter.

So we do that and that can take a week or two weeks for a team to kind of do some work on that. While simultaneously we’re doing keyword research and our content is being written and then it’s just spray and pray. I love, I know this doesn’t always work for everybody, but we can keep our content costs so low that I don’t care if you have the article is optimized for every individual keyword that I’m trying to target.

I’m just posting, posting, posting, and then waiting, seeing what works and then removing content that didn’t work. And then, you know, focusing on the silos or the clusters that didn’t work and keep investing in that. Does that make sense? That does. Wow.

Jared: It’s interesting to hear you just identify so clearly that it’s a really, basically once you stabilize it, And you have the technical details fixed.

You have the site transitioned over to a very clean, simple, you know, it sounds like a standard theme and, and, and, and, and plugging stack that you use. It’s just a bit content.

Mushfiq: Yeah. And we, we designed each site uniquely, um, we, we don’t use, we use generate press and generate blocks to essentially customize the site.

Um, so that it looks good. We don’t, we don’t make cookie cutter sites of cookie cutter themes. We customize every single site and yeah, it is a big content push. And also while in that face, um, because in the first stabilization phase where we’re doing the arbitrage easy wins, right. We have kind of increased the revenue, but each individual page bringing in traffic, maybe the top 10 or 15, um, they, they are now bringing in more revenue, but they haven’t.

Um, let’s see tweaked to make the most they can. So during that time we’re actually going in there improving the design, improving, um, where to add call to action buttons or comparison tables and all of that. We’re kind of improving those high traffic pages so we can get out more revenue. Uh, for example, on our outdoor site, uh, it was earning 300 after we did their growth, easy growth plans.

It was earning, uh, 2,500. Um, and then in the growth phase within that’s about a three-month period, um, yeah, we were adding content, but content takes time to ramp, right? So during that time, really it’s the tweaks that we do on the top, you know, 80% of the pages that are bringing in the traffic. Um, so I taught 20% of the pages that are bringing into traffic.

What we’re doing, those tweaks that took that two and a half K to six. So just by doing those tweaks and that’s not just, you know, tweaking like where to put the elements, but it’s finding other affiliate programs. For example, we saw that we were sending a lot of traffic to Amazon for a certain category of product.

We found a, a brand on share. So paying 5% commissions, but in the outdoor niche, we know that people like to buy from brands, direct those brand loyalty. And therefore we flipped, um, that’s the RSL brand alongside Amazon in a comparison table. And we were making one-to-one. So we’re making $500 on a page.

We’ll make you another $500 from the same brand. So we doubled the income because we gave people options. Well, otherwise that other group of people were probably just leaving our site saying I don’t want to buy from Amazon. Let me go and do more lease options are critical.

Jared: Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, I’m in the market right now for new hiking bags.

And I do kind of want to buy from a certain brand. That’s not on Amazon. And that is a brand that I’ve shopped at for years. So that’s, that’s, that’s a really interesting way. So you don’t find it putting, say, buy this at REI or buy at Amazon. It actually helps the revenue. Yes. And you don’t lose people to indecision or, or bouncing off and going somewhere else?

Mushfiq: No, I think you help people stay and you also get the cookie. So if they decide to buy later, yeah, it’s a good point

Jared: because people who want to buy an Amazon, they have their, their, their prime, their two day shipping and they’re not married to a certain brand. They’re thinking I’m going to go buy an REI when I can just get it at my doorstep in a couple of days.

They’ll go turn into Amazon then. Okay. Yeah, I see that point. That’s good. Um, uh, how do you pick the content that you, that you go down the road of? Do you just do kind of, I’ll say generic keyword research and you just say, Hey, basically any keyword that’s really. To this brand we’re going to go after, and then we’ll wait and watch.

Or are you looking at the top articles and trying to stay within maybe those content silos? Is there, is there, is there a, uh, you know, a specific approach you take, because again, when you get a site, oftentimes it’s hard to know where to focus your efforts.

Mushfiq: Yeah, I wish I could give you like the secret sauce here, but honestly for me, uh, I’ll give you honestly, what I do is I try to keep my content costs low, such that even if I invest in one article, it doesn’t work on not, I’m not sad or I’m not losing a lot of money.

Um, so that’s one, so keep your content costs low, but with quality, right? Um, and that’s probably a whole different topic of how to hire writers at low cost with quality. Um, and the second. So most people aren’t looking at the short term, which is, Hey, I need, I have $3,000 coming in from my site. Um, I want to keep a thousand and maybe we invest 2000 and that’s all I have.

I don’t do that because I am looking at the long-term value of the asset. It’s worth that a 40 X, multiple 35 to 40 X, multiple. So I’m willing to spend a lot right now to grow it so that I know that later I can recoup, um, a lot of it. So that’s why when I’m getting my point at is I do a spray and pray.

So I just find a lot of keyboards, right. That have, I’m not looking at what topics I’m ranking for now. I’m looking at, okay, this outdoor nation. Category, what can I put in there? And you’ll some articles, maybe 700 wars, 3000 wars. I don’t care. I just put a list of them together and give it to the writer and whatever.

And I also let the writer choose which ones they want to work on that has kept my writers very happy. I don’t force them to write something if they give, like, if I give them a list of 20 articles, they might say no to about 10 of them and keep work on 10 of them, the remaining 10, I just put it in a pile.

And then when I get a new writer on board, let’s say that I have a big pile of content. I need written, I get a few new writers and I just give them those. And then over time they just get taken care of. So that has kept my writers happy. And long-term so anyways, yeah, to answer your question, spray, all the content on there.

Wait, and then, uh, uh, readmit.

Jared: I, I appreciate that because, um, man, I’ll tell you, you hear people talk about a very siloed approach and all that. And when it works, it works really well. And there’s case studies about how it works. Uh, you know, when it, when it, when it went well, but obviously sometimes you just, you have this article that you think is a perfect fit for your site and it’s, it’s, it’s, you’re, you’re already ranking for several, for several topics in that same silo.

And you put this article out, you put a lot of time and effort in. He goes, don’t worry.

Mushfiq: What the heck? And I’ll be honest. So we do silos a lot later in the cycle because when you buy a site or when you’re building a site, you’re just trying to get traffic. I mean, let’s be honest. You’re just trying to grow the traffic to grow the revenues silos come along later when I honestly think, because we did this on our site, we’ve owned the outdoor site now for, let’s say 18 months.

Um, and maybe if month 15, we started adding a few, you know, sub sub sub topics of really small silo on our main site. And it started to get traction. So we doubled down and added another 50 articles and they all started to get traction, but I couldn’t figure that out early on because I’m not, I don’t know the topic.

I don’t know the outdoor niche. I don’t know all, all the little nuances. Right. And that silo is very competitive. So there’s no guarantees early on if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna rank for that. So one strategy somebody, some people can do is if you have, if you’ve kind of figured out that, okay, here’s a lot of low competition, right?

Kind of finished and now what should I do next? Pick a few high competition silos, add two to three articles in those, put it on the site. Wait, wait, six months. See which one of those is getting the most traffic and then add more over time. I see a lot of people make mistakes. They, Hey, I can rank for that.

Let’s just put 50 articles and spend several thousand dollars on that. And then it gets no traction. Don’t do that. You gotta, you gotta reiterate, you gotta always have the feedback loop.

Jared: Yeah. And you can learn that with just a handful of articles rather than 50 articles.

Mushfiq: Well, let’s

Jared: talk about the, you mentioned the website earlier.

I think you said you recently acquired up mostly.com. And where are you at in the PR? I mean, we just went through a lengthy process from due diligence all the way up to long-term growth. It’s like, where are you at with mostly like, what have you done so far? Maybe we can take a lot of what we just heard you say and apply it back to this.

Mushfiq: Sure. Yeah. I’ll walk you through exactly. I bought it August 10th. So it’s only been, you know, almost 30 days,

Jared: 30 days is recording, so yeah, that’s, that’s that’s good.

Mushfiq: Yeah. So immediately after buying it, what we do. Was, you know, I, I like to do a lot of the base beginning work to really just stabilize it and diet includes, uh, for example, um, installing some plugins that they may be missing.

Like I like WP rocket for caching, I data to have that. So caching is important to put that I transfer the site over to a fast host cloud waste, um, is my go-to. So, you know, get the site’s tech stack to a level that makes sense. Um, and I like to do some of that work. Um, and if the site does require a full revamp in the theme and whatnot, It gets outsourced to one of my, um, people on my team to completely redesign the site.

So, so the first, I think one week, that’s what I did. And then after that, you know, simultaneously I’m talking to a display ad provider because this site had a hundred thousand visitors. Um, and so what’s the quickest way and no revenue streams, right? It’s not monetized. This was a hobby of the individual and they got a lot of consulting projects and a full-time job out of this.

Cause they can use it as a portfolio, but I don’t care for that. Right. Um, so what do I do? How do I monetize this? Like since I had a hundred thousand, I reached out to ad thrive. I reached out to media vine because those are the high level tier. I have networks and they both rejected the site because primarily because it’s in, not in the topics that they cater to.

And also a lot of the traffic is. Um, uh, non-material one country. So not us, not us, not Australia and our UK country. More, more like south Asia, um, traffic. So my next go-to is easily like so easily, like accepted it. We put it on there. Now these are like, has been optimizing the site for the last 15, 20 days making about 35 to $40 on the peak days, because this is cyclical.

As in weekdays, get a lot of traffic, weekends, get low traffic. So making about 35 to 40 on the weekdays and about 15 to 20 on the weekends. But on average, it’s about a $900 per month. And we haven’t really been finished at 30 day marks. Right. I’m looking at 840 right now for the last 30. And

Jared: he’s built desktop better over time, too.

Right. Their algorithm top to optimize. So you could even be, you know, to higher multiple, uh, or higher number, sorry, later. Yeah,

Mushfiq: yeah, yeah, exactly. So, um, that’s, that’s what we’ve, we’ve done. And it’s simultaneously doing this the last 30 days. I’ve been on Upwork trying to find a software engineer that.

This is a specifically about JavaScript and within that, it’s about a specific framework called react. So it’s very unique. Um, and so I’m looking, I’ve been looking for a writer to find, we found three writers, um, and they were in a range of 5 cents to 10 cents per word. Um, and we honed down on one guy who’s on Upwork writing at 5 cents and we kind of fix it and say, look, can you write articles at $50 fix?

I don’t, I don’t care about the links. It, this is something that I think a lot of the industry misses. When you pay somebody by cents per word, it’s a disinterest for both parties. Um, the writer has an incentive to write more and I, how can I, as non-expert of the topic, tell you exactly how much to write.

I mean, that just doesn’t make sense. So I like to keep it fixed. I’m at $50 in articles, um, and some articles may take longer or shorter, but on average it’ll workout. And, um, this person has to even write the tutorials. So you’ll see a lot of code on our site. He, he actually has to put that together. So it’s a great deal for us, um, to get this individual.

And we’ve been sending him about five articles a week, so he’s been publishing, um, uh, those, and so that’s what we’ve been doing the last 30 days, right? One other thing that we’ve been doing is finding other ways to monetize, um, because there’s a lot of courses that like from Udemy, Skillshare, you Udacity and all these different scores platforms that sell, uh, JavaScript courses for beginners to work, researching those and adding those on the site, we just got accepted to Denny today.

So we’ll be implementing those. And I’m sorry, it’s taught me if I’m saying too much

Jared: talking, I’m taking notes over here, to be honest

Mushfiq: with you. Another thing we’ve been doing is on site any, you know, elements on the page, right? So the previous owner has a banner at the top. If you scroll down on the site, you’ll see our top banner.

Um, that’s a good advertisement space to do quick tests for us because when you ge