Deal Flow (May 3): 4 Websites, 6 Aged and 9 Branded Domains

This week’s deals feature 2 websites for sale from Emiper Flippers and one of my own sites in the relationships and business niches, and 2 websites from our private Facebook group in the nightlife and diving niches. We also cover an aged domain in the beverages niche from Odys.

For domains, we share findings on 5 aged SEO domains and 9 branded domains live at GoDaddy auctions.

Off-Market Site: RelationshipExplained.com

This is an off-market deal not available on any marketplaces and is a part of The Website Flip’s portfolio. Fill out the Google Form, if interested.

Summary

Niche: Dating

Source: The Website Flip

Revenue: Monetized via Mediavine display ads

Last month: $874
Last 3-mo average: $821
Last 12-mo average: $408

Listed Price: $32,019 (~39X of L3M average)

Ahrefs

Due Diligence Dashboard

TWF For Blueprints › Monthly Analysis 11

Growth Blueprint

Highlights

Excellent traffic growth over the last 12 months
Over 200 articles have already been published
Traffic is well distributed across top pages with the top page receiving just 4.21% of pageviews
Relationship niche with potential for affiliate, digital products, and private advertising

Setbacks

Despite the high traffic, the revenue could be improved. Given the monthly traffic of over 120k visits, the revenue should easily exceed $1k per month.
Weak backlink profile that needs to be strengthened

Easy Wins

There are more topics in the dating niche that can be covered with new articles
By incorporating more dating-related buying guides, you could leverage lucrative affiliate deals within the niche
Respond to HARO prompts from major lifestyle magazines to help improve link authority.
To increase revenue, consider adding more video ads via your Mediavine dashboard
To enhance on-page SEO, you can remove featured images to create space for display ads to load, add a collapsable table of contents, and add more internal links within the content
Integrate affiliate products from Clickbank or other networks throughout the content

Takeaway

This website is part of my portfolio that experienced significant growth over the past 12 months.

The majority of the content ranks well as can be seen in Ahrefs. For this site, I moved away from generic questions. While ChatGPT may provide satisfactory responses to some of the more general questions, I believe that humans will always win by playing the “emotions card.” You will not trust AI when it comes to your relationship.

I didn’t focus much on revenue generation, but if you have expertise in the niche, you should be able to multiply earnings by 2-3x in the next six months as outlined in the easy wins section.

Valuation:

My asking is 39X of the last 3 months average earnings. The site will continue generating upwards of $850/month.

Interested? View P&L, screenshots

For full details, view:

Current P&L

If you are interested in learning more, please fill out the form below to express interest. You will be connected with me directly to discuss the next steps, obtain URL, and get added to Google Analytics.

Fill Out Form

Aged Domain: PinotDays.com

Summary

Niche: Wine

Source: Odys Global (see listing here)

Age: 2005 (18 Years)

Listed Price: $4,790

Ahrefs

Notable links: LA Times, Eater.com, SFWeekly.com, MercuryNews.com

Site History

This domain was used for a wine festival for wine producers that was held in multiple U.S. locations including San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City.

There are several pages indexed in Google as ODYS has set up a website with content that is included with the purchase of this domain.

Here’s what the site looked like:

Growth Blueprint

Wine is a very popular beverage with the global wine industry surpassing $300 million in annual revenue in 2023. AHREFs shows almost 3 million keywords related to “wine” and about 19 million monthly searches.

With a good brandable name and several links from high authority news sites and wine-related sites, this domain provides a good opportunity to build a niche site focused on wine and wine tourism.

Here’s what I would do:

Publish articles about top wine festivals in different cities
Publish programmatic SEO pages providing city-based pages for winery tours
Publish articles about the best wine to pair with specific foods
Answer common questions about wine (e.g., difference between pinot vs merlot)
Publish informational articles about wine topics with low competition and high volume like “is pinot noir sweet”
Publish buying guides for wine-related products (e.g., wine storage, wine delivery subscriptions).

The main monetization opportunity would be display ads, ideally with a premium display ad network like Mediavine. Additional sources of revenue could include affiliate programs like wine delivery subscriptions and travel bookings at Booking.com for wine tours.

View on Odys Global

3-Year-Old Subscription Business Making $5,023/mo on Empire Flippers

Summary

Niche: Business

Source: Empire Flippers (see listing)

Profit: $5,023/mo from 125 subscribers

Asking Price: $231,053 at a 46X multiple using a 12-month average

Ahrefs

Due Diligence Dashboard

TWF For Blueprints › Monthly Analysis 12

Growth Blueprint

Highlights

Decent churn rate (10.8%) for this type of service-providing leads to new businesses
The number of active subscribers has grown by 34% year-over-year.
The service provided is straightforward, and the current contributors are willing to continue working on it.

Setbacks

The traffic has been dropping during the last three months (16%).
One page is getting more than 22% of all traffic.
A third of traffic is unaccounted for (34.4% of pageviews are from direct traffic).
Multiple pages have thin content (e.g., pages with a table of data and no written content).

Easy Wins

There are only about 165 pages so there is a lot of opportunity to add additional pages with similar content for different cities.
Add more content to thin pages.
Improve landing pages to increase conversion rate.
Add more calls to action on content pages.
As the current owner bought the business, be sure to protect all intellectual data used for the service, which is basically a well-edited contact list. If you purchase this business, be aware that there are already 2 people that had full access to the data, which is a huge risk.
Consider applying to Appsumo or other similar SaaS aggregators.
Consider launching new services based on the available data, such as personalized outreach campaigns or mail-warming services.

Takeaway

This is an interesting business that is not commonly found on Empire Flippers or similar aggregators. Essentially, the product is a list of contacts of decision makers at startups that can be used for sales outreach.

Despite being a niche market with only 125 active subscribers, it generates over $5k per month. However, the declining organic traffic is a cause for concern.

Moreover, due to the simplicity of the product, there is a risk that the data may be used in other people’s projects. To overcome this challenge, I recommend creating new, more personalized services that move away from solely providing contact emails.

Given the narrow niche, I believe this business would be best suited for agency owners looking to expand their portfolio of services. As a standalone endeavor, there may be too many setbacks to consider.

Valuation:

The business has been valued at $231,053, which represents a 46X multiple over the TTM profits of $5,023. However, given the aforementioned setbacks, the price is high. If you are still interested in acquiring the business, I recommend buying a majority stake and allowing the current owner to continue running it.

View Deal On Empire Flippers

🚀 Off-Market Sites

The Website Flip runs a Facebook group where sellers can list sites for sale. Here is a selection of a few sites:

$9.5K/mo Nightlife Niche Site: Nightlife and travel site earning $9,500 per month from affiliates and ads. Earns an additional $2,500 from lead gen that is difficult to transfer and not included in revenue. The asking price is $500K at a 52X multiple.
$76/mo Diving Niche Site: $76/month diving niche site: 1 year-old diving site earning $76/month L5M average via Amazon only. 179 articles published and receiving about 2K traffic per month. Asking price is $3,200.

🚀 Aged & Brandable Domains

Aged domains currently bidding from $62 to $960 at the time of writing.

FrontPorchJournal.com: Was the site for the online literary journal of Texas State University’s MFA program starting in 2006. It has a DR of 41 and is ranking for 291 keywords in the top 100 positions with backlinks from Wikipedia, AOL and UTexas.
JournalOfNaturalProducts.com: An open access journal on plants and natural health starting in 2008 with a DR of 34 and ranking for 239 KWs. Backlinks from CDC, Healthline and Wikipedia.
PowerJuicer.com: Home to the As Seen on TV Power Juicer. Started in 2006, the domain has a DR of 32 and ranks for 45 KWs. Backlinks from TheGuardian, Wikipedia and WashingtonPost.
Struum.com: Was a content streaming service started in 2021. It has a DR of 32 and is ranking for 16 KWs. Backlinks from Fortune, USAToday and TechCrunch.
GrowthMarketingConf.com: The site for the Growth Marketing Conference started in 2008. It has a DR of 58 and ranks for 12 KWs with backlinks from Forbes, Hubspot and Inc.

Branded domains bidding from $320 to $11,750 at the time of writing.

👉 Additional Resources

Make sure to perform detailed research and due diligence when acquiring any domains or websites. Here are resources you should read up on: