As you know niche sites have been one of the various streams of income feeding into the public portfolio over the last two years.
Last month I decided to sell one of the sites (reasons I’ll go into below) and the sale finally settled this month.
Some Background
This particular niche site was in the wellness niche and is a project I started during Covid in 2020.
With so much spare time on my hands, I had big visions for this site and invested a lot of time into it.
In the end I had over 100+ articles published and had spent a lot of time building backlinks, sourcing images and building the site in general.
The site actually did reasonably well for a brand new site.
I remember waking up to my first commission of about $2 and was cheering, because it meant I had successfully monetized the site! Now all I needed to do was scale it up and make millions of dollars.
Right?
I hired a couple of writers and kept publishing articles myself. It was my main project at the time and I was spending all day and night on it.
In the end, the site peaked at about $500 income per month, after which it started to dwiddle in Google rankings for reasons I’m unsure of, and I also started working on it less and less (as moneybren.com grew more and more, I started spending more time on this site instead).
Nowadays the site makes about $100 in commissions per month, which is still a nice little chunk of pocket money for the portfolio each money.
However, in the end I decided selling it would be the best option.
Why Did I Decide To Sell?
The main reason was I had lost interest in building it.
Sure I could have started spending 4+ hours a day on it again and I’m certain I could have built it into a $2k per month site.
However, working on the site isn’t interesting for me anymore.
I have other things I’d much rather work on, like researching stocks, reading, and just things that move the needle more (and are more interesting).
The second was because niche sites are getting more unpredictable.
With AI booming and Google literally changing its search engine rules weekly, it’s hard to invest a lot of time in something that has such a precarious future.
I wouldn’t be surprised if niche sites die out completely in the next few years. Or … if they keep ticking along just like normal. Like I said, unpredictable.
Thirdly – I see quite a lot of good places to invest money right now. For example, the retirement sector in NZ still looks great to me.
Selling this small website business to invest in a bigger, more lucrative business makes a lot of sense to me.
The Selling Process
I decided to sell my site on Flippa.
It’s like an eBay for websites and is very popular in the online business space.
The listing process was reasonably simple and I was able to have the site listed within an hour after confirming my identity.
I got quite a lot of interest in the site, because unlike many sites, I built the site from the ground up myself, so it wasn’t full of spam and crappy content. It was a high quality site with high quality articles and designed with care and love.
It’s quite common to find the opposite on Flippa – sites that have been thrown together in a few days with a bunch of crappy articles and a free WordPress theme.
Eventually, the site sold for $2,900, or about 29x its monthly income which is about standard.
I had set the reserve at $2,000, so was prepared to let it go for less, but thankfully it got bid up to a healthy price.
As you can see, at that multiple selling sites can be quite lucrative.
If you’re able to build a site to $3k/month, you can reasonably sell it for $100k.
The success fee on Flippa is 10%, so after their cut of $290, I was left with $2.6k USD, or around $4,200 NZD.
Out of respect to the new owner, I won’t be sharing the site URL itself.
What’s Next?
First, I will be sending that $4,200 to Sharesies to add to the public portfolio snowball!
As for sites, I don’t think I will be building (or selling) any more niche sites for the forseeable future.
However, I still think they are a great side hustle for people at the start of their journey learning how to make money online.
Building your first niche site will teach you SO MUCH about online business – site design, backlinks, search engine rankings, content creation, affiliate marketing, advertising and so much more.
It really is the perfect side hustle to getting started with digital commerce.
I still have two niche sites that contribute to the moneybren public portfolio, and I plan to hold onto these for now. Both make several hundred dollars per month without any ongoing commitments, so the income is passive at this point. The plan is to just keep pumping that income into stocks and keep the snowball growing.
Interested in building your first niche site?
Like I said, I highly recommend building a niche site if you’re interested in building online income streams.
