Featured Listing: 5-Year-Old Highly Competitive Fashion & Beauty Website

About the business

Tell us a little about yourself. What’s your background? How did you start the business?

My name is Armine. When I was a student, I got my first-ever job in a company doing link building and SEO back 17 years ago. So naturally, the “SEO” of those days was entirely different from the SEO of our days.

While I chose a completely different profession at the university (Tourism and European Studies), life brought me back to the online sphere after graduating, getting married, and moving to another country. I struggled hard to learn the language while also not wanting to stay unemployed, which is when the idea of starting my first content blog came to my mind.

I’ve been in this business since 2010, and I’ve tried my hand at different niches since then, selling tech-related, travel, and beauty websites on Flippa, only to find out that fashion and beauty is my real passion where I can say I excel.

Before launching the current website, I had another successful fashion website that I sold out for a lucrative price. So I started the current website five years ago, intending to turn it into a growing fashion platform and with no intention of ever selling it.

However, due to my growing family and little to no time to dedicate to realizing my ideas, I finally acknowledged that it needed to get a new owner.

Is the asset on your listing owner-operated, how much time does it take to run the business, who else is needed on the team, and what is automated?

I’m the founder and owner of the website and also the one who manages it and its social accounts. I work with freelance content writers who write the articles I assign them (I hand-pick and create the structure of every article that goes live), but I’m the one who edits, publishes them, and promotes them on social accounts.

I’m also responsible for checking and answering emails related to the website.

I used to work 4-5 hours a day, 5 days a week, to manage it all. However, for the last two years, I could hardly keep pace after my daughter was born. The lack of time to manage it the way I want is why I decided to sell it.

What does someone need to do to continue operating the business in its current form?

The new owner will need to update the website’s content regularly, adding new articles and yearly updating some evergreen content that’s already published (changing the products featured in the reviews, removing or adding more based on the product availability).

Trying to improve specific articles that don’t rank well will help in getting better positions on Google Search.

Keeping the social accounts up to date will increase the traffic flow and the site’s popularity growth.

Checking and answering the emails and sending regular newsletters to the subscribers will keep the engagement level.

Growing the business

Can you list a few opportunities for a potential new owner to continue growing the business?

SEO and marketing strategies, which I have never implemented since the launch of the website, as I focused on growing it completely organically. I’ve done 0 advertising or SEO and marketing campaigns to boost its visibility.

Better social account management will boost the traffic flow and website engagement and keep its popularity growing. I couldn’t focus on this much.

Improving the website’s Google Adsense monetization will certainly improve the revenue, and this is one aspect I wasn’t good at.

Focusing on direct ad sales and perhaps even selling your own product on the site is another potential opportunity I never managed to explore myself.

What has been the evolution of this asset since its launch?

Since its launch date (July 2017), the website has only had growth (around 50% monthly), reaching 30K daily unique visitors as per Google Analytics (about 1m unique visitors monthly) in October 2019. This was the peak of growth of the website when we generated around $15K monthly.

However, at the end of 2019, specific Google algorithms affected us negatively for the first time ever, when we started losing traffic. Nevertheless, we stuck to our working pattern, not daring to change anything to see if we could recover our visibility.

In March of 2021, after not having succeeded, we started completely restructuring the website, splitting its long-form content into several related articles. Since I’ve been doing this all alone, it has taken a year to finish this process, and I’m currently working on the last category of the site.

During this time, we have lost significant traffic, which was quite expected, as we were completely altering the website, creating redirects, and naturally, it takes time for Google to reevaluate the website.

In the whole process, we have been loyal to keeping the content genuine and to staying away from any SEO strategies, but rather keeping it all as organic and natural as possible. Currently, the website generates around 125K unique visitors monthly, which is the lowest we have had so far.

I’m still sure that it has a huge potential to recover its good traffic days and grow further with the right tactics implemented.

How does this business make money? What are the current revenue streams?

Our primary source of income is affiliate marketing, mainly RewardStyle. We write articles with product reviews and earn commissions from the products we feature. We also use Amazon affiliates, which, however, makes a very small percentage of the revenue generated.

We also use Google Adsense ads.

Since its launch date, I’ve accepted only three direct sales – 2 advertising campaigns from Walmart totaling $5000 and a sponsored article from Nordstrom for $2000.

I keep on getting multiple direct ad sales offers, with brands reaching out to get their products featured on our lists. Still, I have declined all of them, rather than focusing on creating honest product reviews and selecting products we find really the best. Also, especially in the last year of restructuring the website, I’ve completely shut down any partnership offers and instead focused on regaining the site’s visibility.

How big is your current team? How many people does it take to run this business?

There are 2-3 freelance content writers I work with currently, and the rest of the work I do all by myself.

What’s the reason for selling your business on Flippa?

My growing family. I’m now pregnant with my second child, and with an active toddler, I know I’m not going to have time to keep it updated and work on regaining its growth. Already with a 2-year-old toddler, I hardly manage to complete the tasks I set, and I acknowledge it needs to be handed to a new good owner who could potentially reach the goals I had.