An Affiliate Site Flip Results In 190% ROI After Just 6 Months
- abuhena
- Case Study
- November 9, 2022
The Opportunity
We are always looking to acquire content-based businesses that are underoptimized and provide a lot of quick wins.
5 things that we need to validate before proceeding with the due diligence are traffic, revenue, quick wins, lots of affiliates in the space, lots of unexplored content ideas.
We did in-depth due diligence and vetted the financials, traffic numbers, growth potential, and competition research before officially putting in the offer.
Our initial research showed that simply by applying some of our ‘core’ strategies, we’d be able to see substantial gains in both traffic and conversions (affiliate link clicks).
We analyzed the top ten competitors and created a detailed plan of action that includes the content, link building, and CRO gameplan.
The Gameplan
The main strengths of the business were steady organic traffic and stable earnings.
The main weaknesses were poor content (outsourced to non-native speakers for cheap), no product comparison tables, poor site architecture, no trust, etc.
The plan was to completely re-do the website: design, structure, CRO & testing, improve dwell time, page speed optimization, internal and external link structure, new content calendar, and in-depth link building strategy.
We created a detailed ‘plan of attack’ and scheduled the tasks in order of importance: design, CRO, and on-page optimization first, new content and link building second.
The Execution
After the initial round of ‘fixes’, we set up some basic CRO tests and started testing different tables, post outlines, CTAs, etc. against each other to get the best possible conversion rates.
At the same time, and over the next 5 months, we ran a link building campaign (guest posts, link inclusions, ‘stealing’ competitors’ backlinks, link swaps) which helped us acquire over 70 new LRDs from highly (topically) relevant websites with real traffic.
These backlinks resulted in a substantial increase in organic traffic and helped us establish the website as an authority in the niche.
Our new content strategy focused on providing the readers (and search engines) with educational and informative content, which the site was lacking before. The other benefit of creating such content was to increase the overall topical relevancy of the site in Google’s eyes, and we definitely succeeded at that (huge traffic growth).
By applying some of our SEO strategies, we managed to utilize the incoming ‘link juice’ that was pointing to the new informational content to improve organic visibility of our money pages – which led to more conversions and revenue over time.
The Results
Financials
The business was making $1,970 per month at the time of the purchase (6-month average).
Within the first month, we were able to grow the revenue to $4,453 (first month) and then up to $8,851 at the time of the sale.
We would usually keep this site for at least 2 years, but, due to the high volatility of the niche (new products are often released, new upgrades), we decided it’s time to sell.
The business was purchased for $74,000 on July 2nd.
The business generated $42,333 in affiliate commissions before we ultimately transferred everything to the new owner on January 7th.We sold it for $202,800. Broker’s fee was $30,420, so net profit on the sale was $172,380.
Combined, the business made us $140,713 after only 6 months of actively working on it – or 190% ROI.