3 Easy Wins To 10x Website Growth: A Flippa Case Study

Buying a content website is only the first step. What to do with the site post-acquisition to 10X website growth is what counts.

In April 2020, I acquired a content website from the Flippa marketplace earning $300 per month on average with over 100,000 page views per month for $23,000.

In May 2020, the website earned $3,000 per month after applying a set of calculated and proven easy win strategies.

As of December 2020, the website is making $6,000 on average per month. This website is earning via affiliate links, display ads, and email marketing.

For no-fluff actionable tactics, check out more of The Website Flip’s active case studies.

This write-up will cover what were the most impactful easy win strategies that were applied to the site. The easy wins can be spotted pre-acquisition when sites are listed for sale. This gives you leverage to pay way beyond the market valuations for websites to win the deal.

Let’s get to it!

3 High-Impact Easy Win Strategies to 10X Growth

Adding Product Comparison Tables

If your site is monetized by affiliate marketing (whereby you get paid a fixed commission percentage or fixed payment per lead), adding comparison tables can significantly increase revenues.

This strategy is best applied by analyzing the high-traffic pages. The 80-20 principle is evident with content sites, such that 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your articles. I like to focus on the top-ten high-traffic pages that are focused on buying-related keywords (e.g., best product, product review, etc

Examples:

Here is a table for Amazon products using the AAWP plugin

If you have affiliate products or services, you can use the Ninja Tables plugin to create tables such as:

Takeaways:

• Place your comparison table right after the introduction section. You want these tables as high-up as possible on the page.
• Use Call-to-action (CTA) buttons that differ drastically from the colors of your site (e.g., if you have a site that’s a white background, a yellow CTA will do well). For further details, read this guide.
• Make your tables mobile response
• Keep the tables simple; no paragraphs of text, bullet lists work great

Optimizing Top Pages with Product Popups

If you are promoting high-commission offers, you can utilize popups to ensure your visitors view the offer you want them to focus on.

Using popup services like OptinMonster or ConvertBox, you can customize popups to show high-paying offers on specific pages, or even sitewide. 

For example, on a specific buying guide on this website, we reviewed 5 products with 4 of them being on Amazon, and one from a dedicated eCommerce site. The eCommerce brand is willing to pay $70 per sale, whereas, on Amazon, the commission rate is 3%.

By using popups partnered with comparison tables, we can showcase the $70 per sale product to entice users to check it out. 

Example:

Here is an example of a popup created using OptinMonster:

Takeaways:

• Create popup boxes for specific products that pay well, have good reviews, and are of quality
• Popup boxes should be optimized for exit-intent such that as soon as someone is about to leave, the popup shows
• Popup boxes should also show after a specific time on the page (e.g., 30 seconds)

Important note: It’s against Amazon terms to place affiliate links within popup boxes. Do not do this easy win with products on Amazon’s marketplace.

Add Video Advertisements

Video advertisements can add significant revenue monthly. 

On a desktop, these ads are placed on the bottom right of the page, do not have sound, and are typically non-intrusive. On mobile, they popup at the bottom and in my opinion, are intrusive to the user experience.

The structure I follow is:

1. Enable desktop video ads
2. Disable mobile video ads
3. Make sure videos are muted by default

The majority of the top display advertising networks provide in-house video ad services. Examples include MediaVine and AdThrive. Dedicated video ad providers can be used as well such as Ex.co.

Example

This is an example of a video ad on this outdoor site:

Takeaways

• Video ads can add revenue streamy without major impact to site speed or UX
• Ask your display ad network to enable video ads, if they have that option

Strategically Implement Easy Wins

For content sites, there are a set of strategic easy wins that can increase the earnings in a short amount of time.

If the traffic is high enough, like it was for this case study site, the earnings can even be 10X if under-monetized.

When analyzing websites to buy, keep an eye out for strategies you can apply to a site. By keeping these tactics on-hand, you can estimate the upside potential and set your bid price accordingly to beat out the competition.

A savvy value investor is always looking for exponential growth opportunities; you should too.