- eBiz Insider
- Posts
- This website gets 65,000 monthly traffic and sold for $1.1 million 🎵
This website gets 65,000 monthly traffic and sold for $1.1 million 🎵
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
65,000 Monthly Traffic = $1.1 Million Sale
Up To 70% Off FlexiSpot Standing Desks
Buying a Business With a Credit Card: The $15K/Month Pivot
$7,400/Month Niche Job Board
No Code SaaS: $2000/Month After 1 Year
October Finance Report
Her Niche Ebook Has Earned $10,000+
$250 Giveaway
Did someone forward this to you? → subscribe here
65,000 Monthly Traffic = $1.1 Million Sale
John Bardos tweets…
Ludwig-van, a classical music and opera newsletter, sold for $1.1m to ZoomerMedia.
The website says they have 150k readers, but the press release says 65,000.
SimilarWeb says the site gets 59.9k visits per month.
I did some digging and it looks like the site was originally called Musical Toronto 🎶 started in 2011 "by former Toronto Star Critic, John Terauds." (source)
Then, according to the timeline on this page…
2014: Michael Vincent takes over a blog to write about the cool things happening in Toronto
2015: The dinky little blog starts getting popular and wins an award
Michael was also a music journalist working for the Toronto Star, but left that job in 2017 to go full time with the blog 😎
According to a press release, his mission with the site was "to keep arts coverage alive and change how media companies operate."
Over the years, Ludwing Van kept growing steadily 👇
Publishing 1000 articles per year
Became Canada's largest classical music community
Ranked #1 on Google for “Classical Music” in Canada
Started doing events
Launched a couple of podcasts
Reached 65K monthly readers
Unclear what kind of revenue they were earning before the sale, but the advertising form linked from this page suggests their rates started at $1000 a pop, all the way up to $50,000 🤑
And while $1.1 million is a nice chunk of change – especially for a site with only 65,000 monthly visitors – it sounds like it took a ton of work to achieve that outcome.
Then again, I doubt Michael could have ended up with a $1.1 million payday if he'd stuck with his old journalism job at the Toronto Star.
Also encouraging to see that a blog about such a niche topic – classical music in Canada – can do well 💪
Up To 70% Off FlexiSpot Standing Desks
Today's email is brought to you by FlexiSpot.
That's a highly-rated standing desk brand that's running an early Black Friday sale 🥳
I bought their E5 desk about a year ago (photo) and it's been serving me very well.
Most of the time I use it in the sitting position, but for calls – or YouTube binges 😜 – I press one button and it raises up to my perfect standing height.
Their sale runs until Monday.
Buying a Business With a Credit Card: The $15K/Month Pivot
💬 Brandon Pindulic recently tweeted about a business he bought 2 years ago…
At the time the business was doing ~$2k a month in revenue
Now it does about $15k a month
… I paid 3x revenue, $74k
I put $65k down on a credit card and the rest was an earnout
The business is Planet Compliance, a B2B (business-to-business) media site and directory that focuses on covering business regulations. They also offer listings for businesses.
Why Brandon decided to buy 👇
I have spent my entire career in B2B SaaS (worked at/invest in SaaS) and previously started and sold a 7 figure B2B Demand Gen/Marketing Ops Agency that worked almost exclusively with SaaS companies.
So I know the market and opportunities here
😕 But things didn't exactly go to plan…
The business model was a membership site
Customers would pay ~$800 a year to access the content and community.
I assumed that I'd be able to scale this up and grow the subscriber base quickly
My goal was to go from $24k in annual revenue to $300k in 2 years
Turns out, my original thesis was wrong
The premium memberships were extremely difficult to sell
That forced him to pivot…
I spent time building up the newsletter, which is what I knew advertisers would value more than website hits
I partnered up with companies that wanted to advertise to the people in my community and charged them either a flat fee or by the lead
Now, 2 years later…
This year, Planet Compliance will do about $150k, with $115k or so being profit
💰
While I don't generally recommend going into debt to buy a business, there are some good takeaways from Brandon's story.
A big one: it can be easier to buy and grow an existing business than to start one from scratch.
Brandon found Planet Compliance for sale via Acquire.com, which is free to join and browse listings. Last I checked, they had many businesses listed for $1000 or less 👀
Brandon tweeted after buying Planet Compliance…
The prior owner (now a friend!) was not spending much time on this asset. His HoldCo has bigger investments, businesses. Fair enough… this site drives ~100k pageviews/mo and is under-monetized & under-developed...
That's the kind of opportunity to look for.
Mega bonus points if you already have some experience you can leverage to take the business to the next level 👍
$7,400/Month Niche Job Board
🗂 From the archive, published January 2023…
Pieter Levels once tweeted about a guy who buys random domain names and then tries to turn them into businesses.
For example:
BirthdayParties.com – directory of birthday party venues and entertainment
RanchWork.com – ranching job board
VidaliaOnions.com – D2C onions
The guy’s name is Peter Askew and he wrote about the onion business here 🧅
But RanchWork.com seems to be the star of Peter’s portfolio nowadays.
He tweeted earlier this month…
RanchWork.com revenue from last 9 years. (for new followers, I’m building this solo)
2014: $10,479
2015: $16,487
2016: $20,139
2017: $26,552
2018: $26,152
2019: $20,355
2020: $31,933
2021: $62,113
2022: $88,534
In an article about the project, Peter shared why he decided to launch a job board when there are so many big competitors out there…
Now, sure, from the outset, I could have viewed this idea from a defeatist attitude, that being, “What? I’m gonna try to compete with Indeed, SimplyHired, Monster, and the like? They’re VC backed heavyweights… I have no chance.”
I rarely approach projects from this mindset. I tend to approach them from the perspective, “what do I have to lose”. And usually, the answer is “not much”.
The same article has a postscript revealing how Peter bought the domain RanchJobs.com for $5k after first being quoted $15k for it 😏
In short, he bided his time and used “a 3rd party domain marketplace platform where I could remain somewhat anonymous.”
RanchJobs.com now redirects a few hundred people per month to Peter’s job board.
No Code SaaS: $2000/Month After 1 Year
Minh Pham is an indie maker from France 🇫🇷 who shared in a recent interview…
I used to work in Finance for 7 years at big banks (JP Morgan, French Investment Bank, etc.) then left everything to learn programming at 42.
Sounds like he started learning to code in 2017.
Then he discovered the no-code tool Bubble.io during COVID, which allowed him to work much faster 🚀
Minh is now a freelance developer specializing in no code.
He also created SEOmatic, a software product that lets you "automate content creation with programmatic SEO and AI" 🤖
About a year after launch, that's now earning $2000/month.
The backstory 👇
I learned about programmatic SEO by doing programmatic SEO for a freelance client… I've learned how to implement it by working with the Head of SEO from a French scale-up company.
We were creating thousands of pages to cover every running events.
And it worked. We were ranking #1 on Google for a lot of long-term keywords with more than 7k pages indexed and +18k visits/month.
He realized this could be a useful software tool for others and built the first version with Bubble in just one month 💪
Then…
I got my first 10 customers by just showing my work and connecting with people I had zero followers back then.
You can see some of the "build in public" tweets Minh used to grow his business via this search.
It took him 5 months to reach $1000 in monthly recurring revenue 📈
Minh's marketing strategy…
I'm building an SEO-related tool so my strategy is 100% on SEO.
It can be Content Marketing I have a full blog that covers everything about programmatic SEO or programmatic SEO by creating integrations pages, alternative & comparison pages.
I'm dogfooding myself with my own tool, that's the best way to create a better product!
Another key to growing the business…
I've also created multiple lead magnets (programmatic seo course, 50 programmatic seo examples, etc) to capture e-mails.
E-mails list is key when you are starting a business.
Minh's advice for anyone starting a software as a service business 👇
It takes at least 2 years to run a successful SaaS and start to get tractions.
Build in nocode, you save yourself a year easy.
And just to reiterate: Minh left a career in finance to learn coding and work for himself at age 42.
Now he's doing well with freelance work and a growing SaaS business.
A lot can change in a few years if you put your mind to it 🧠
October Finance Report
My latest monthly finance report is here 👈 detailing everything we earned and spent in my business last month.
$26,229 income
$8,913 expenses
More details in the full report.
Her Niche Ebook Has Earned $10,000+
🗂 From the archive, published August 2021…
Last week Úna-Minh Kavanagh released a super niche ebook: DIY Gaeilge: 150 Online Irish Language Resources 🇮🇪
She earned €2000 off it on the first day, and revealed in my private FBB group this week that she’s now up to €3500 in sales (that’s about $4100).
Pretty incredible for an ebook about a language that less than 100,000 people in the world speak daily 🤯
If anyone could pull that off though, it’s Úna-Minh, who has long been a public advocate of the Irish language and has amassed 23k followers on Twitter.
Just goes to show that you can make money in pretty much any niche online if you’re willing to stick with it for the long haul.
Nov 2023 Update 👇
Úna-Minh shared an update in the group…
in total my niche ebooks have earned: €9647.67 (around 10,352.19 USD) in passive income since launch in 2021!
ebook 1 €8,901.67: DIY Gaeilge: 150 Online Irish Language Resources
ebook 2 €646.00: DIY Gaeilge Part Two: 50 More Irish Language Resources – basically acted as an upsell.
I broke down my entire process as well on how I made it here [7 minute video].
$250 Giveaway
We’re doing another $250 giveaway at eBiz Facts this month.
Check the list of online business courses on this page… have you done any of them?
If so, submit your rating and review – takes 3-5 minutes – and once published you’ll be entered into a draw to win up to $250 😎
If you’ve done multiple courses, you can leave multiple reviews and thereby have a better chance of winning.
(Want to review a course that’s not listed? Tell me about it here.)
…
Thanks to Fardeen Khan for helping me write and research today's newsletter.
Hasta la próxima, rock on with your legendary self 💪
Niall Doherty – Canillo, Andorra
eBiz Facts (follow on twitter)
P.S. If you're in the market for a nice office desk, check out FlexiSpot.
They're running an early Black Friday sale, up to 70% off 😍
I'm a happy FlexiSpot customer, bought their adjustable E5 desk about a year ago (photo).
What did you think of today's email? |