He 10xed Revenue on a $50,000 Website

Ian Nuttall shares how he purchased a website in 2021 after selling one of his projects for a 7-figure exit.

In short 👇

• He emailed the owner persistently for 25 days before he replied about selling the site.
• The site was earning $600/month from display ads but had made $1300/month previously. 
• Ian wanted to buy the site because he saw big potential to boost it with programmatic SEO.

He explains…

Programmatic SEO is a way of generating a large number of blog posts or content on topics people are searching for in Google at scale using a template and a data source…

You’ll probably have seen it in action with local SEO. Sites like TripAdvisor, Expedia, Airbnb, etc use programmatic SEO to generate landing pages for tens of thousands of locations.

Let’s say you have a website with 1,000 pages created using programmatic SEO (which is a tiny amount compared to most of my sites).

If you average 50 visits a month per page, that’s 50,000 visits a month.

After the due diligence process, Ian finally acquired the $50k site in October 2021 💵

(He never reveals the actual site, btw. Which is understandable, to avoid copycats.)

Ian then began the process of wrangling all the messy data sources into a usable database to power the updated pSEO version of the site….

Honestly, the data was PAINFUL to work with.

I hadn’t worked with this type of data before, so I found a Python developer to write me a set of scripts that would pull the data in from all of the locations, along with pretty column names that described what each piece of data was.

He also changed the URLs…

The structure of the existing site was so erratic, with content in the same sections having completely different URLs, that it was virtually impossible to keep the existing URLs as-is.

The new site launched in November 2021 and immediately lost 50% of its search traffic due to a Google algorithm update 😱

I knew when I made the decision to change the URLs that there was a risk of the site losing a lot of traffic, but the long-term benefit of clean URLs, well-structured sections, and removing the nauseating hyphen and underscore combo, was worth it.

For the next 6 months he worked to diagnose and fix issues 🛠

Ian’s persistence finally paid off when a Google update in May 2022 restored the lost traffic.

🥳 The story has a happy ending…

the site now earns $6-7k a month passively. Programmatic SEO, ftw.

Sounds like it’s still mostly monetized with display ads, but Ian has also mixed in some affiliate offers.

He concludes 👇

The final thing I’ve learned is that building SEO-powered businesses requires extreme levels of patience.

I’ve sold many sites too early, only to see the traffic sky-rocket and the new owners generate five figures a month.

Six months is a long time to wait for a recovery, but that was almost a year ago now and seems like a distant memory. The road is long and winding, so stay the course.