Deal Flow (May 11): 4 Websites, 6 Aged And 12 Branded Domains

This week’s deals feature 3 Flippa sites in the photography, insurance, and environmental niches, a site on Investors Club in the outdoors niche, and an aged domain in the photography niche from Odys marketplace.

For domains, we share findings on 5 other aged SEO domains and 12 branded domains live at GoDaddy auctions.

Let’s get into each deal!

Domain: NYCFoodPhotographer.com

Domain Summary

Type: Aged Domain

Niche: Photography, Cameras

Source: Odys Global (see listing here)

Age: 2010 (12 years old)

Listed Price: $2,320

AHREFS

Backlinks: Eater, Flickr, Business Insider, Yahoo, Bon Appetit, Insider, Thrillist, Skillshare, Racked, Chowhound, and many other authority sites

Site History

This used to be the portfolio site of a famous New York City-based food and portrait photographer. he has been active in the NYC area since 2011.

Here is what the old website looked like:

Growth Blueprint

The photography niche has a combination of die-hard hobbyists, lucrative physical & digital products, and low-competition keywords.

This aged domain would act as a great 301 redirect to more branded authority site or domain in this niche.

Here is what I would do:

Recreate the website as-is with the various pages that existed on the site in the past. You can use Archive.org to find out what the site looked like
Perform 301 redirects to ensure all 404s are captured
Add 10-20 low competition keyword targetted content
Let the site index for 30-60 days
Perform a 301 redirect into a more branded domain/site that you acquire or own already

The reason I would use this as a 301 is because of the branding. It’s not well-tuned to be an authority site. Can you still make it an authority site? Of course.

View on Odys Global

Flippa Site: Pixinfocus.com

Website Summary

Type: Existing Content Site

Niche: Photography

Source: Flippa (see listing here)

Revenue: $435/mo over last 6-months from Amazon Associates and Google Adsense

AHREFS

Due Diligence Dashboard

Growth Blueprint

Highlights

Quality content is written by the owner themselves
Diversified traffic to top pages; highest is 7.25%
Quality backlinks from Detailed, Pro Blogger, among others
Well-designed website
Includes an email mini-course
8,000 email subscribers
Good mix of info vs commercial buying content

Setbacks

Traffic is steady but revenue is on a decline from Amazon Associates
Can be a difficult niche to find expert writers

Easy Wins

Improve comparison tables on buying guides. Add links to product images in tables.
Move to Ezoic display ads
Add more content

Takeaway

This is a website I wanted to purchase for my own portfolio. It’s still a very quality site that passed ALL of my due diligence. Let’s break it down.

The content on the site is written by the original owner who is also a photography expert. The content is great. The site is well-diversified receiving over 25K+ pageviews. A portion of that is from social traffic, and the rest is organic. The site has excellent backlinks as a bonus.

The easy wins include adding proper comparison tables, affiliate links in product images, and just overall improving the buying guides for conversion rate optimization. Switching out Google Adsense to Ezoic is one of the easiest of easy wins here.

The major issue with this site is that the revenue is dropping monthly over the last 3 months while the traffic is steady. Amazon Associates is the primary revenue driver which is the one decreasing. I am unable to understand why this is. Here are my guesses:

Amazon Associates change commissions for certain categories
Amazon products are out of stock, especially cameras
Tracking links are broken

This is the primary reason I stepped away from this deal.

Another minor reason is the email list. It is not monetized however the email service provider is ConvertKit which charges $80/month. This reduces the profit significantly.

Valuation:

The reserve for this site is $12,000. After back and forth with the seller, he agreed to sell it to me for $12,000. However, you will need to check on this as that may have changed.

At $12,000, it’s a good asset. However, the profit is less than actually listed due to ConvertKit fees (he missed adding that on) plus the fact that the revenue is dipping.

Make sure to do your full P&L due diligence on this one.

View on Flippa

1-Year Old Outdoor Site Making $834/mo on Investor Club

Website Summary

Type: Existing Content Site

Niche: Outdoors (bikes)

Source: Investors Club

Revenue: $834/mo from Amazon Associates and Ezoic

Asking Price: $29,774 at a 34X multiple using a 6-month average

AHREFS

Growth Blueprint

Highlights

Traffic is on an upward trajectory
Decent EAT for an affiliate site of this size, even though the personas seem to be fake
Has both informational and money content ranking

Setbacks

Young site, under 2 years old
Needs affiliate disclosures
Limited scope due to it being a partial match domain (PMD)
Content quality could be improved

Easy Wins

CRO opportunity on money pages to increase affiliate revenue up to 20%
Improve interlinking to increase rankings
Produce more content and expand to other sub-niches
375 keywords ranked 11-20 to push to the first page for a traffic increase

Takeaway

This particular outdoor sub-niche is growing quickly and is projected to increase by 1.5x by 2030. It’s a very lucrative website with plenty of expensive products. Although the site is young, it has been steadily increasing over the past year.

The most immediate thing the new owner should work on is optimizing the money pages for conversions. While the pages aren’t bad, there are several things that could be done to get more affiliate revenue. For example:

Creating simpler comparison tables with product images and call-to-action buttons
Linking product images to Amazon Associates
Adding multiple places to buy the product via affiliate links

Another thing to do is to improve the interlinking. This could greatly improve rankings on all of the pages on the site, but realistically we wouldn’t be surprised if a good job on interlinking increased traffic and earnings by 30%.

Finally, more content will help fuel more growth. There are more topics to hit in the current sub-niche, but the new owner will definitely want to start doing research and publishing content in related sub-niches and get these new silos ranking.

Valuation:

The site’s valuation is 34X the last 6 months’ average monthly revenue of $834 which leads to a buy-it-now price of $29,774.

We actually think this is a solid price for the business and are surprised it’s not listed at a higher multiple. That said, you should be able to negotiate a lower price. Start your offer in the high 20s, citing its young age and lack of history and you should be able to get a sweet deal. The only caveat is that there may be a number of people gunning for this site and may lose out to a higher bidder or someone willing to pay the full price.

View Deal

🚀 Other Sites For Sale

Here are a few sites that are listed on Flippa. I have not done a detailed analysis on these. Do your own due diligence!

BreakdownCover.org.uk: an interesting UK-based affiliate site promoting UK insurance products for cars. The major issue here is the main money page that also generates the most revenue gets more than 30% of organic traffic. This does pose a risk if Google decides to penalize this page. If this can be mitigated, then it’s a good asset in a lucrative niche.
EcoWut.com: a quality environmental/energy content site with content written by an engineer. The traffic is growing monthly. This is a no-reserve auction.

Did you know I offer due diligence services? Once you submit a site for review, I perform an in-depth video recording where I walk through the history, SEO, P&L, and much more. Check out my services here!

🚀 5 SEO Domains & 12 Brandable Domains

My team and I sifted through the marketplaces and found 5 aged SEO domains with quality backlinks and 12 branded domains that are live at auction.

5 SEO Domains

A group of three and four-word authority domains this week in the app, movie, fitness and beverage niches. Bidding from $450 on up to an eye-popping $21,000+.

We share the AHREFs stats and also what the past site was about. View them below:

SketchMyPic.com: Starting in 2017, it was a mobile app to turn an image into a pencil sketch. AHREFS Domain Rating of 27 and ranking for 858 Keywords in the top 100 positions with backlinks from Apple, Google Play and AOL.
EnterTheSourceCode.com: It was a site for the 2011 movie Source Code. Has a DR of 35 and is ranking for 111 KWs. Backlinks from Wikipedia, IMDB, TechCrunch and Wired. Ranks well for the term “source code” so it may be a useful domain for a coding site.
FoodFitnessFreshAir.com: Was a fitness, food and health blog starting in 2011. Has a DR of 33 and 594 KWs ranking with backlinks from NYT, HuffPost, Healthline and Berkley.edu.
EastWestCoffeeWine.com: A info site from 2019 covering two very popular niches, coffee and wine with a DR of 37 with 21 KWs ranking. Backlinks from Eater.com, Untappd and Virginia.edu.
GreatNorthernFood.com: Was a site for a restaurant in New York’s Grand Central Terminal from 2015 onwards. Currently has a DR of 37 with 10 KWs ranking. Backlinks from Wikipedia, NYT, Bloomberg, and BusinessInsider. You’re going to need deep pockets to bid on this one due to the high authority backlinks.

For a detailed guide on how to repurpose these domains the right way, check out my Course on Aged Domains.

12 Brandable Domains

A strong list of four-letter, single-word and double-word brandables this week. Bidding at $150+ to $4,500+ at time of writing.

Additional Resources

If you are interested in any of the deals this week, go through the specific platforms and contact the sellers. Make sure to perform detailed research and due diligence when acquiring any domains or websites.

Here are resources you should read up on:

Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Email Messenger Buffer