Website Valuation: From $18K to $88K in 1 Year

Jake Ward recently tweeted…

In 2022, I bought a website for $17,675.
A few months later, it was worth $64,750.
I worked on this project for less than 1 month.

He doesn’t reveal the site, but apparently it’s in the sports niche ⚽️🎾🏈

When Jake bought it, the site was earning $505/month “through affiliate commission and ads.”

He hasn’t done much work on it apart from that 1 month right after buying.

But…

it’s now earning roughly $2,000-$2,500 average profit per month ($87,500 value).

Here are the main changes Jake made during that month…

– Ran a website and content audit
– Made slight changes to the theme
– Changed ads from Adsense to Ezoic
– Added more ad placements on the site
– Optimised 8 product list posts (e.g. Best X)

[…] From these changes alone, the site quickly started earning $1,850 average profit per month.

Obviously you need to have some solid SEO skills to pull off something like this, but methinks the real key is finding and acquiring the undervalued asset in the first place 😎

Jake found his site after going down the rabbit hole researching websites about the sport he was interested in…

I researched the niche and kept seeing a website nearly ranking for lots of great keywords.

This website had (many) quick wins.

I found the owner’s email and reached out. We negotiated and came to a deal.

My guess is that the previous owner of the site was a hobby blogger. They probably started the blog many years ago, produced a ton of content because they were passionate about the topic, but never really cared or learned about monetization 🥱

There are surely lots more blogs like that out there in the world. But you’re unlikely to find them listed for sale anywhere, because the owners don’t think they have anything of value.

Jake’s approach is probably the best way to find them: research a niche and keep an eye out for sites that aren’t monetized very well, then contact the owner and see if they’d be interested in selling 🤝

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