Ben Aston is joined by Chelsea Clarke—Founder of HerPaperRoute Media. Listen to learn how to successfully flip niche sites for six-figure earnings.
Interview Highlights
- Chelsea’s background [1:18]
- She worked in events management for the Donnelly Group.
- She was also a bartender and waitress there for a long time.
- Also worked in the marketing side of their head office, promoting events and planning different parties and things that would happen at the restaurants and the bars.
- The thing that she always loved to do was blogging. She always had a blog as a hobby but wasn’t monetizing it at the time.
- When she left the Donnelly Group, she went on to work at a business brokerage and she started to use her different marketing and events planning background and applied it to that job.
- She left her work when she was eight months pregnant.
- She worked in events management for the Donnelly Group.
- What is a website flip and how did Chelsea do it? [4:38]
- Website flip—you buy a site, you fix it up, and you’re intending to sell it for more than you purchased it for.
- You don’t have to make a big investment.
- You can actually buy a starter site or a site that is under $10,000.
- Chelsea’s process of preparing for the flip [6:12]
- When she started, she leaned on her marketing degree and her marketing experience from when she was in the corporate world.
- She read a lot—read people’s blogs, read books, participated in online forums, went to networking events, and watched virtual summits.
- In the first two years, she did everything herself. That’s also a great way to start because then you get to learn every little corner of the business so that when you do have a budget and you do get a team, it’s going to be easy.
- Her big focus was SEO. She made sure that all of her content was high quality, and that it was written with really good SEO foundations for on-page SEO.
- While waiting for organic traffic, she took the blog post link and posted it in Facebook groups, Pinterest communities, Cora, etc.
- She started networking, and then that’s really how it took off. It started to slowly snowball. People started subscribing to her email list and they started buying things from her affiliate links.
- How Chelsea decides when it’s the right time to flip a website [9:23]
- It’s a personal thing for each person on their site. You get to decide when it’s the right time for you.
- For Chelsea, when she sold her first site, it was because she wanted to reinvest the money into the project that she really wanted to work on.
- The one that she sold was the subscription box review site, which was fun but it wasn’t her million dollar idea.
- She wanted to focus on the thing she was really passionate about, which was marketing (teaching marketing, showing people how to get into content marketing, etc.)
- That’s when she started her other business—HerPaperRoute.com.
- It was the right time to sell her subscription box review site because it was making good money, it had good traffic coming in, it was ranking very well on search engines as well as Pinterest search engine. It was in a good position to sell to a new owner.
- Usually, when she decides to sell a website, it’s always because there’s something else that has caught her attention.
- The criteria for buying a site versus building it from the ground up [13:00]
- Chelsea doesn’t build sites from scratch anymore.
- But she does recommend that anyone who has never built a site before, does it.
- You should always build your first site so that you can understand the ins and outs of your WordPress installation, Cpanel, domain registration and all of that tech stuff.
- Now she just buys sites.
- She did build HerPaperRoute from the ground up.
- She’s not just buying some established sites that are their own thing. She is actually buying sites that are related to HerPaperRoute niche or to the other sites that she’s holding.
- She’s purchasing sites that have traffic, that have really great content, and she’s moving all of that content to her main sites and redirecting those links, so all the traffic and all the rankings were eaten by the niche sites that she’s planning to hold for now.
- Buying to flip, or buying to hold—either way is great and it’s a personal choice. Neither option is right or wrong.
- What to look at when assessing the value and the health of a site [15:33]
- The first thing is content.
- It should be written by a human—not AI generated.
- It’s not using PLR—Public License Rights, where you can purchase content and it can be used on millions of sites.
- It should be original, quality content.
- Next is traffic.
- Where is the traffic coming from? Is it ranking on Google?
- Chelsea tends to personally have a traffic minimum. She wouldn’t buy a site that has less than 10,000 page views a month. Unless she’s buying a starter site just for the content, then the traffic doesn’t really matter. It could be zero as long as the content’s really good.
- Another thing to look at is monetization.
- Where does the income come from? What are the revenue streams?
- Chelsea wants to see that it comes from a few different places, not just on Amazon affiliates.
- Ideally has revenue from affiliate links, digital products, and ad revenue.
- When doing due diligence, Chelsea looks at the backlinks too.
- Make sure that it has some quality backlinks and it’s not getting linked from any poor or toxic sites.
- Being able to talk to the seller or the seller’s broker and get a really good understanding of what the site looks like, and what their history of the business is.
- Were they the first person to start it? Are they flipping it?
- The first thing is content.
- Some screw ups that Chelsea had along the way in the process of buying and flipping websites [18:06]
- She has overvalued before when she purchased a site. Once she got it, she realized that the traffic wasn’t as valuable or the email list was dead.
- Her mistake was that she didn’t ask the seller about the open rates and things like that. That’s something that you should consider when you’re doing due diligence – ask as many questions as you can, or talk with the broker.
- She had a site for about four or five months until she realized that the previous owner or herself didn’t notice that the homepage was de-indexed. So it was blocking Google from the homepage.
- She has overvalued before when she purchased a site. Once she got it, she realized that the traffic wasn’t as valuable or the email list was dead.
Every failure is actually a really great opportunity to learn and you probably won’t make that mistake again.
Chelsea Clarke
- What Chelsea was looking for when working with a website broker and how that led her to actually start her own brokerage [20:16]
- Before she launched her brokerage, she was doing off-market deals. She would see a site that had potential and would cold send an email to the seller.
- She doesn’t recommend that because that’s a good way to get taken advantage of if you don’t know what you’re doing.
- Working with a broker is always going to be your best bet.
- If you are a buyer and you’re going to buy a site, you don’t have to pay for the broker’s services. When you go to Niche Investor, as a buyer, the brokers work for you for no fee. So you can ask them any questions.
- All of that is taken care of, and you do not have to pay for it. It’s on the seller’s side. The seller pays the broker a percentage of the sale. So that’s something that as a buyer, you don’t have to worry about.
- Before she launched her brokerage, she was doing off-market deals. She would see a site that had potential and would cold send an email to the seller.
- What percentage can people expect to pay for brokerage services? [22:15]
- The commission, also known as a success fee, ranges from 5% of the sale price anywhere up to 20%. And that just depends on how much you’re selling the site for.
- A site that sells for more will have a lower commission. So if you’re selling like a six-figure site, you’re probably only going to spend 5% to 10% of the commission.
- What are the important things to get in order before you put your site up for sale? [22:51]
- No matter if you’re intending to sell or not, always have your Google Analytics connected to the site so it’s tracking all the traffic that’s coming through. Because when you put it up for sale, buyers will want to see that. They will verify any traffic claims that you say it’s making. They want to be able to see it for themselves.
- Keep a profit and loss sheet every month, tracking what the site earned and how much you spent. Buyers want to see that too.
- Make sure that you keep the site updated. So publish new content. Until you’ve actually sold it and that payment is in your bank account, you still need to be running your site as if it’s a normal day, as if it’s not for sale. This is because you want to keep the site active.
- Have your social media still active. You still want to be posting there because when buyers are looking at your site in the marketplace, they’re going to look at your social media. They’re going to see what the date the last time you publish something on the blog.
It’s going to be your best benefit as a seller to keep your site running at the best that it can, all the way until that day that you’re no longer owning it.
Chelsea Clarke
- How Chelsea has grown her website flipping enterprise [24:32]
- She has a team of four listing agents, not including herself. They’re all content creators themselves. They are bloggers, they know the ins and outs of the blogging world.
- The tech that they use is HoneyBook. It’s a CRM where they can manage all of their emails, contact forms, contract signing, and e-signing online.
- Chelsea’s goals for the brokerage moving forwards [26:32]
- She’s focused on updating her courses. She has courses on blog flipping and helping buyers and sellers get their sites ready.
- She’s also focused on video content, launching videos to their YouTube channel and having interviews with sellers, interviews or conversations with the listing agents where they just casually chat about new listings that come up in the marketplace.
- Some skills and practices that Chelsea’s trying to develop to be a better content creator, marketer, CEO [28:32]
- She has a morning routine, and gets up at 5:00 AM.
- Before she opens any emails or does any work, she opens up a doc and writes down a gratitude list. Just writing out big or small, anything that comes to mind that she appreciates.
- She also started writing a daily trailer. She’ll take two minutes and list anything that she wants to do that day, any intention that she has for the day.
- Then she’ll have her coffee and start writing. She’ll do about an hour of creative writing (a new blog post, a newsletter, a new lead magnet or a product launch or something that’s coming up).
- After that, she’s getting her kid ready for school, and then she’ll run on the treadmill.
- Then it’s time to get to official work. And that’s when she’ll open her emails, respond to customers, clients, team members, and all of that stuff.
- Since doing her morning routine, she’s much more organized, happier, and more chill, and things just get done a lot better than they used to.
- She has a morning routine, and gets up at 5:00 AM.
- Chelsea is offering a giveaway [31:47]
- For anyone interested in flipping websites, go to HerPaperRoute’s Instagram, and DM the word “free kit” or “freekit” to receive access to Chelsea’s niche site sellers’ startup kit.
- It includes all of the things talked about in this podcast, all of the resources, a workshop bundle that walks you through how to prime your site to put it in the best position to attract buyers for when it’s time to sell, or if you’re looking for a site to buy.
- It’s got a due diligence cheat sheet that shows you what to look for and what to avoid.
- It also has access to a really nice streamlined step-by-step process for what you can do to make sure that you have all your ducks in a row before you put the site up for sale.
- All of that is included for FREE. They sell it for $197, but it’s free for everyone who is listening today.
- For anyone interested in flipping websites, go to HerPaperRoute’s Instagram, and DM the word “free kit” or “freekit” to receive access to Chelsea’s niche site sellers’ startup kit.
Meet Our Guest
Chelsea Clarke is a Business Intermediary, content creator and investor. She is the founder of HerPaperRoute Inc., an entrepreneurship blog, academy, podcast, and entrepreneur community. Chelsea is the founder of NicheInvestor.com, a boutique business brokerage that connects investors with niche online businesses for sale.
Whether your goal is to buy to flip or buy to hold, while you have it, it’s still a revenue generating asset that you can control.
Chelsea Clarke
Resources from this episode:
- Apply to join the Indie Media Club
- Subscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcasts
- Connect with Chelsea on LinkedIn
- Check out HerPaperRoute and Niche Investor
Related articles and podcasts:
Read The Transcript:
We’re trying out transcribing our podcasts using a software program. Please forgive any typos as the bot isn’t correct 100% of the time.
Ben Aston: Welcome to the Indie Media Club podcast. I'm Ben Aston, founder of the Indie Media Club. We're on a mission to help independent, bootstrapped media entrepreneurs succeed, to help people who create, promote and monetize through content—do it better. Check out indiemedia.club to find out more.
So today I'm joined by Chelsea Clarke. And Chelsea is a content creator. She's an investor and a business intermediary as well. She's the founder at Niche Investor. If you haven't heard of it, it's a boutique marketplace that helps investors and content creators buy and sell niche websites, online businesses, digital assets. And we are gonna be talking about this world today.
The world of buying content websites low, selling them high. She's personally flipped more than 25 of them, so she really knows what she's doing and facilitated a sale of hundreds more. She's on a mission to help entrepreneurs make more paper. She teaches how to buy, scale and sell businesses online at herpaperroute.com.
They've got a blog, an academy, a podcast, an entrepreneur community worth checking out. We'll touch on that later too, but keep listening to today's podcast to learn how to flip niche websites for six figures.
Hey Chelsea, thanks so much for joining us today.
Chelsea Clarke: Hey, thank you so much for having me, Ben. This is an honor.
Ben Aston: Well, I wanna start at the beginning. You were working in Vancouver, I guess, because it was for Donnelly, a pub chain. And tell me how you go from marketing strategist to the world of blogging and selling blogs and teaching people how to do it? How did that happen?
Chelsea Clarke: Yeah, it was a long, slow process. It wasn't overnight.
I was working in events management for the Donnelley Group, so our fellow Vancouver rights will recognize that group. I also bartended and waitress there in their bars for a long time, way too long. And then just working in the marketing side of at their head office, promoting events and planning different parties and things that would happen at the restaurants and the bars.
I really was always just feeling very, like I enjoyed doing events planning. But the thing that I always loved to do was blogging, and I always had a blog as a hobby. I wasn't monetizing it at the time. And when I left the Donnelly Group, I then went on to work at a business brokerage and I started to use my different marketing background and events planning background and things, and I started to apply that to that job.
Now, I wasn't a business broker yet. I was still working in marketing for the brokerage, but it really sort of lit the fire of excitement for me of what is possible. Because the brokers there, they were all very focused on brick and mortar businesses only. They were not selling digital businesses. But me, knowing about blogging and content marketing and affiliate marketing, and by now I had monetized my site, I was like, no, there's really a market for selling digital assets.
And then I was eight months pregnant and I was, it's time for me to get out of the workforce and go and have the baby. And then when I was on maternity leave, there was like this ticking countdown of when I had to return to the workforce when my maternity leave was running out. I didn't have any savings and I didn't wanna put my baby into daycare.
He was just a few months old. So I really had to figure something out quick. And it was blogging. I knew it was blogging. I didn't have any guarantee. I didn't see anyone being successful in it yet to follow. But I just had the idea that it could work. So I started to really just focus on content marketing, growing my site.
It was a beauty blog at the time. I was reviewing subscription boxes and then earning for affiliate sales by promoting those boxes. And that was going well. It was making about a thousand to $2,000 a month. And then on its one year old birthday, like the site's one year old birthday, I decided to sell it and I got a $40,000 profit from that sale.
And then that was like, oh, that's it. Okay. I'm into blog flipping now. And so I just started buying, growing, and selling niche sites and pretty soon people started asking me how to do it. I was blogging about my journey on my personal branded site, and people were just really interested in that. And so I was answering all of these questions and I thought eventually, okay, well, I should probably put this into a course.
I should probably put this into a more streamlined way to help people than just answering random questions on Facebook and then over time, like I say, it wasn't overnight, it was over time. I built out a course, I built out a mentorship program, and then I launched the niche investor marketplace specifically as a safe place for our community to buy and sell sites.
And it just grew from there. But that's in a nutshell.
Ben Aston: Nice. And so let's dig into website flipping. For the people who haven't heard about this before, what is a website flip and how do you do it?
Chelsea Clarke: Yes, great place to start. So a website flip is you buy a site, you're gonna fix it up, and you're intending to sell it for more than you purchased it for.
So just an HGTV TV show where you see people buying a house, working on it, and then flipping it and they're getting a profit. It's really the same, but on a digital platform, just on an online platform. So you don't need a team of renovators or contractors, you don't need to take out a big mortgage, although you can actually get a business loan if you wanna purchase a bigger site. But you don't have to make a big investment either.
You can actually buy a starter site or a site that is under $10,000. And the idea is that you would purchase a site that you personally have some interest in with the niche or some experience in you understand the revenue stream or you're just going to become very excited and obsessed to learn everything that you can about that niche.
Then you're gonna grow it. Maybe you'll hire an operator to help you with the day-to-day with publishing new content. Or you can bootstrap, do it all on your own. That's how I started. I did it all on my own with no budget. And then you just grow it. You monetize it better. You create better digital products and lead magnets, and you grow a community around it. And you're keeping track of the revenue at every single step.
And then when you're ready to sell it, you put it up for sale and then someone who wants to buy it and doesn't wanna do all that work that you just put in will come in and take it off your plate. And you can sell a site for up to 36 times the profit, sometimes 40 times the monthly profit that a site is earning.
Ben Aston: Easy peasy, right? So, I mean, it sounds fun, home redesigns and, but it's redesigning or renovating a home, but on a website. But I mean, you talked about growing the site, and I wanna dig into, yeah. As you're preparing for the flip, you're buying low, you want to sell high, you're doing your website renovation, or you're doing your growth sprint, or whatever it's gonna be.
You're trying to get more traffic, you're trying to monetize it better. But you started doing this on your own without a team, like you said. So how did you, when you started out, know what to do? Yeah, what was your process and plan and how has that kind of evolved now having done it many times?
Chelsea Clarke: Yes. So when I started, I really leaned on my marketing degree and my marketing experience from when I was in the corporate world. But that doesn't always apply to the online space because it's can be very different. And so I read a lot. I read people's blogs, I read books, I participated online forums.
I went to networking events and watched virtual summits and I really just became a sponge to learn as much as I could. And because I didn't have a team yet or money to put into a budget for advertising in that first year to two years, I was literally just doing everything myself. And that's also a great way to start because then you literally get to learn every little corner of the business so that when you do have a budget and you do get a team, it's really gonna be easy.
You can have your SOPs and you can train people really easily and you can know what success looks like because you've already done the job yourself maybe a couple times or a million times over how long, depending on how long you do it yourself. But my big focus was SEO. So I wanted to make sure that all of my content was super high quality, that it was written with really good SEO foundations for On-page SEO.
So making sure that I did my keyword research and I had those keywords all throughout the article where it made sense. And had alt tag images with keywords and everything was just very thoughtful in that for what that I could do, even though it takes a while for SEO to kick in. It takes a while for Google to pick up on a blog post, but I would still publish it to the best ability that I could.
And then while I was essentially waiting for that organic traffic, I physically took that blog post link and I went into places where I felt the right audience is hanging out. So I would go into Facebook groups, Pinterest communities, Cora, anywhere that I could find that I thought there would be the right person to read that article.
I went and I started networking. And I started just talking to people and where it was allowed or appropriate, and I was allowed to share a link, I would share a link to answer a question for someone to get them back to that blog. And then that's really how it took off. It started to slowly snowball.
People started subscribing to my email list. People started buying things from my affiliate links. And then like I say, within that first year, it was making good enough profit that I was able to, one, not have to go back to my job, and two, I could sell it and then reinvest that money into the next site and the next site. And then down the road, I eventually did have that budget to hire a few people to help grow from there.
Ben Aston: Cool. I it's a fun process. Creating the content, seeing it grow, building an audience, building engagement to it. And I think, I'm curious as to, one year later where you decided, okay, I'm gonna sell this thing. Why did you decide to sell it rather than hold it? How do you make that decision when the right time to flip it and why was that the right time for you?
Chelsea Clarke: That's a great question. And the thing about that too is that's a personal thing for each person for their site. You guys will get to decide when it's gonna be the right time for you. For me, when I sold that first site, it was because I wanted to reinvest the money into the project that I really wanted to work on.
So the one that I sold was the subscription box review site, which was fun but it wasn't gonna be my million dollar idea. And it did take a lot of time taking photos of the products and reviewing them and awaiting for shipping and things like that. And I just really wanted to focus on the thing I was really passionate about, which was marketing, like teaching marketing, showing people how to get into content marketing.
And so that was my other business, which is called herpaperroute.com. That's my corporation, my main company. And so that's why I decided it was the right time to sell the subscription box review site because it was making good money, it had good traffic coming in. It was really ranking very well on search engines as well as Pinterest search engine.
So it was just in a good position to sell to a new owner, and it was just the timing was right. And then I had that chunk of change to then utilize and grow and invest into the next thing. And then other sites that I've sold over the years, I still am always met with that question is it the right time to sell this site now?
And usually when it is and I decide that yes, I wanna sell, it's always because there's something else that has caught my attention. And I'm a Gemini, okay? I will jump from thing to thing, but I don't wanna just let a project die out. So I love the chase. I love the time I can put into it for a few months to a year and watch it grow and see that success, knowing that it's in a great position now that someone else can take over and then just reinvest that cash.
And it's been a nice cycle that has been growing over the years. And now I'm flipping sites that are like six-figure sites and with that bigger gap now for bigger profits. And I couldn't have done that day that I had my newborn baby. There's no way. I was getting a loan on a bartender salary, and a part-time brokerage salary.
But now that I sort of created my own bank, essentially, and now I can just take loans from myself. Slow process, but worth it. If anyone's listening and trying to think of what they could do on the side that maybe could develop into something that could take over their career and they could leave their job, website flipping for me has changed my life.
It's been so much fun. It's creative. It's certainly challenging at times, but I absolutely hated when I had to go to work, even though I loved the people and I loved the actual job I was doing at the brokerage. I did not like having to leave my house. I am a homebody.
I love now that I can just work in my pajamas with my dog by my side. And really, it's cool because then I can show my son that you can work from home. You can believe in your own, as cheesy as it sounds, believe in your own dream and actually make it happen whatever you wanna do. There's so many niches out there that you can literally pick a business that's already established, already has traffic coming in, already has social followers and email list and customers.
You can just buy that business, slap your name on it, and it's like instant authority that you can then grow and build your dream around.
Ben Aston: So, we've been talking about buying websites and flipping websites, and I'm curious your perspective on, we just touched on buy versus hold. Do you keep, if you've got a cash flowing asset, do you just keep it cash flowing or do you take the asset that you've developed and reinvest that into something else? And that's, if you've got something you want more, then sure. Go and buy, flip it and go and buy something more.
But I'm curious as to buy versus build as well obviously, HerPaperRoute. Well, I think HerPaperRoute was something you built from the ground up. And how do you decide when, yes, you could buy a starter site for 10 grand or 20 or a hundred depending on what level of maturity that site is at. But what's your criteria for buying a site versus building it from the ground up yourself?
Chelsea Clarke: Yeah, and I don't build sites from scratch anymore. But I do recommend that anyone who has never built a site before, you do. You should always build your first site so that you can understand the ins and outs of your WordPress installation, of Cpanel, of domain registration and all of that tech stuff.
It's just really good knowledge to understand. And then now I just buy sites. So I did build HerPaperRoute from the ground up, and now I'm still, what I'm actually doing as well is I'm not just buying some established sites that are their own thing. I'm actually buying sites that are related to the HerPaperRoute niche or to my other sites that I am holding.
I'm purchasing other sites that have traffic, that have really great content, and I'm just moving all of that content to my main sites that I'm holding, redirecting those links, so all the traffic and all the rankings just get eaten by the niche sites that I'm planning to hold for now.
And that's been a really great way to grow fast too. So that's another option. But either way, whether your goal is to buy to flip, buy to hold, while you have it, it's still a revenue generating asset that you can control, which is my favorite part of it, right? Because if you're investing in something like the stock market, you're just putting your money out there and hoping that you get a return, hoping that you made the right decision.
Whereas if you buy a website, you actually have control over it. You can put some effort into it. You can publish new sites, you can make a great new brand partnership. You can add better products. You have that control that could potentially get your ROI back that you just don't have with other investments.
So I say buying to flip, buying to hold, either way, it's great, and either way it's a personal choice. Neither option is right or wrong.
Ben Aston: So when you have purchased sites and you know, someone's put up a starter site up for $10,000. What are you looking at when you are assessing the value of that and also the health of that? What's the first data point that you look at?
Chelsea Clarke: Yes. So the things that I like to look for, the first thing is content. Content is gonna be the most important thing to me. I wanna see that it is written by a human, so it's not AI generated, it's a real human. It's not using PLR, which is Public License Rights where you can purchase content and it can be used on millions of sites.
I don't want that. I want it to be original quality content. And then I'm looking at the traffic. So where is the traffic coming from? Is it ranking on Google? Is it getting some diversified traffic from things like Pinterest, social media, maybe forums, where is all the traffic coming from? I tend to personally have a traffic minimum.
Like I probably wouldn't buy a site that has less than 10,000 page views a month, and that's just a personal choice. Unless I'm buying a starter site just for the content, then it doesn't really matter the traffic. It could be zero as long as the content's really good. But if I'm gonna invest a couple thousand dollars, then it's gonna have some traffic.
So I'm looking at a 10,000 page view minimum. And then I'm looking at the monetization. So where does the income come from? What are the revenue streams? And ideally, I wanna see that it comes from a few different places. Like I don't want a site to heavily rely all on Amazon affiliate.
Because we've all seen Amazon affiliate change their rules and break links without telling people and it just, that would be very risky. So I like to see that a site ideally has revenue from affiliate links, digital products, and ad revenue. If it has those three revenue streams, that's probably gonna be something I'll seriously consider.
And then I also want to, when I'm doing my due diligence, I'm looking at the backlinks too. I wanna just make sure that it has some quality backlinks and I'm not too I don't care too much about backlinks, but I do just wanna make sure that it's not getting linked from any poor sites or, toxic sites or anything like that.
Something that would be really off topic or, X-rated or something. I don't want any sort of bad links. And then really that's gonna give me a good picture of the business. And then just being able to talk to the seller or the seller's broker and get a really good understanding of what that looks like, what their history of the business is.
Were they the first person to start it? Are they flipping it? There's a lot of things that can come up when you get face-to-face in a Zoom call with the seller. That can be really good for helping you make the right decision.
Ben Aston: Yeah. And in making that right decision, I'm guessing just by law of averages that you've made some decisions that perhaps you regret later.
I'm wondering if you can share, have any screw ups that you've had along the way? And in this process of buying and flipping websites where you perhaps overvalued something or paid too much for something, or you bought an asset and you weren't able to flip it because you realized, you know you had a lemon, what did you learn from them?
Chelsea Clarke: And that's a good thing too. Anytime you do end up buying a lemon, assuming you didn't spend too much money on it, it's still a good learning experience. And in a way, everybody should buy a crappy site at least once in their life because how else are you gonna learn those from those mistakes?
And I definitely have done that. I have overvalued before when I purchased a site. And then I've, once I got it, I realized that, the traffic wasn't as valuable or the email list was dead, and that was my own mistake that I didn't ask the seller about the open rates and things like that. So that's something that really comes down to when you're doing due diligence and asking as many questions as you can, or talking with the broker, they would provide that for you.
That's something. And then also just like silly things that even though I know better, things sometimes slip through the cracks. Like I had a site and I was like, everything's looking fine. Like all of the blog posts are ranking, like everything's looking good and Google Search Console, but what's going on? Something just is not right.
I had this site for about maybe four or five months until I realized that the previous owner or myself, either way, I didn't notice that the homepage was de-indexed. So it was blocking Google from the homepage for I don't know how long, but this is something that I should have checked. I do know better, but for some reason I just assumed that the seller would've had the homepage be crawlable to Google and it wasn't.
And so when I was able to fix that, then the traffic started to flow through much better. But it's just silly things like that you're, it's gonna happen. And honestly, appreciate when those things happen because every failure, so they call it, is actually just a really great opportunity to learn and you probably won't make that mistake again.
Ben Aston: Yeah, definitely. So when you were initially starting out as a website flipper, you were obviously buying from brokerages or maybe you were doing some off-market deals as well. But yeah, tell me what you were looking for when you were working with a website broker and how that led you to actually start your own brokerage?
Chelsea Clarke: Yeah, so I actually did a lot of off-market deals. I personally didn't work with a broker because I had worked at the brokerage and then I went through the International Business Brokers Association. I took all the training there and I learned how to become a business broker, but then apply it to the digital space.
So when I did that, when I was actually, before I had launched our brokerage, I was just doing off-market deals. I was literally seeing a site that I thought had potential and I was cold sending an email to the seller. And now I don't recommend that to everyone because that's a good way to get take advantage of if you don't know what you're doing.
But I had that education, I had that background, so I knew what kind of questions to ask, and I knew how to avoid scams and things that I've seen people try on buyers before. So I was able to be protected in that and it worked out for me. But yeah, I would definitely recommend if you're gonna do an off-market deal, you come prepared and you just be very wary.
But working with a broker is always gonna be your best bet. It's worth it. It's definitely worth it. And if you are a buyer and you're going to buy a site, you don't have to pay for the broker's services. So anyone who's interested and they go to our marketplace at Niche Investor, as a buyer, the brokers work for you for no fee. So you can ask them any questions.
They provide the sale agreements, they provide the escrow account. They're there to ensure the safe transaction and getting the site over to you in a timely fashion. And all of that is taken care of, and you do not have to pay for that. So it's on the seller side. The seller pays the broker a percentage of the sale.
So that's something that as a buyer, you don't have to worry about. You can literally use us to your advantage. That's what we're there for.
Ben Aston: Yeah. And what is that percentage as a, when you know, when you come back round to selling the site that you've bought as a starter site and you're flipping it, what percentage can people expect to pay for those brokerage services?
Chelsea Clarke: Yep, absolutely. So the commission, also knows a success fee. It ranges from 5% of the sale price anywhere up to 20%. And that just depends on how much you're selling the site for. So a site that sells for more will have a lower commission, which is nice. So if you're selling like a six-figure site, you're probably only gonna spend maybe five to 10% of the commission.
And you're just covered in all aspects with that, which is really good.
Ben Aston: And so when you are in that place where you're, okay, I think I'm not gonna hold this anymore, I'm gonna sell, what are some important things to make sure you've got an order before you put your site up for sale?
Chelsea Clarke: Yes. So you should definitely, no matter where you're intending to sell or not, always have your Google Analytics connected to the site, so it's tracking all the traffic that's coming through. Because when you do put it up for sale, buyers will want to see that. They're gonna wanna verify any traffic claims that you say it's making. They wanna be able to see it for themselves. So that's one.
You're gonna wanna keep a profit and loss sheet every month, tracking what the site earned and how much you spent. Cuz buyers are gonna see that too. They're gonna be making an offer, they're gonna need to see that. And you're also gonna wanna make sure that you keep the site updated. So publish new content. I know when we get to the point where we're ready to give up on our site and we're ready to sell, there's part of your brain that's gonna shut off and think it's all a done deal.
And now you don't have to look at your site anymore, but literally until you've actually sold it and that payment is in your bank account. You still need to be running your site as if it's a normal day, right? As if it's not for sale. And this is because you wanna keep the site active, you wanna have new content coming out.
And you also wanna have your social media still actives. You still wanna be posting there because when buyers are looking at your site in the marketplace, they're gonna be looking at your social media. They're gonna be seeing what the date is, the last time you published something on the blog. And they don't wanna buy a site that's like dead in the water.
They wanna buy an active site with an engaged audience. So it's going to be your best benefit as a seller to keep your site running at the best that it can, all the way for as long up until that day that you're no longer owning it.
Ben Aston: Good advice. Now I wanna talk about how you've grown your website flipping enterprise, when you started off. Yep, you were on maternity leave and it was just a team of one. Now you've got more people working for you in that website flipping process. So I'm curious if you can just talk a bit about how you've scaled this operation? Who do you have on your team, what technology you use, what tools are really helpful?
How do you, as you've grown and scaled, what's useful?
Chelsea Clarke: So we have a team of four listing agents, not including myself. They're all content creators themselves. So they are bloggers, they know the ins and outs of the blogging world, and they were actually all in my community. And then they just sort of let me know, hey, if you're hiring, like I wanna do this.
And they're amazing. So they're all remote. They live in the States and one girl lives in Mexico. And having a remote team like that honestly is just awesome. It is the best and I don't structure their days, they know what they need to do and they can do it on their time. We don't do like deadlines.
I don't put any pressure on them, although they might say otherwise, they might feel pressured sometimes. I do my best to not pressure them, but they're just amazing and it's because of them that we are able to help more people, and, keep everyone, all the listings going along smoothly. And the tech that we use that we really depend on is HoneyBook.
I don't know if you've used it before Ben, but it's, it's a great, it's a CRM. We can manage all of our emails that way and contact forms and contract signing, e-signing online, and it's not a hundred percent perfect. We still have issues with it sometimes, but of all the tools that I've used that would be comparable, HoneyBook has been the best for us.
So that's really what we're using. And just, that's really it. I mean, we do, we have all the other stuff like WP Rocket and, like plugins and things like that. But as far as like the actual platform to run the business, everything's really done on HoneyBook and it's been great.
Ben Aston: Nice. So let's look ahead to, we're now, as we're recording this, we're heading into March. And I'm curious what's on your roadmap for the year ahead? What are some of your goals for the brokerage moving forwards?
Chelsea Clarke: Yeah, so the brokerage, I'm at this place where it's like we have to make some big decisions because it's growing very fast. And I have to decide what me as a CEO, what my next kind of like visionary thing is gonna be with it, because it feels now like a teenager.
It's like trying to get outta the house. So for me, like I'm focused on updating my courses. So I have courses on blog flipping and helping buyers and sellers on either side, like getting their sites ready. So I'm updating all of those courses this year. I've really been focused on video content as well, so launched videos to our YouTube channel and having interviews with sellers, interviews or conversations with the listing agents where we just casually like this chat about new listings that come up in the marketplace.
And we're talking about, what we would do to monetize it if we were the person buying it. And just kinda coming up with ideas. I've just been recording that, putting it on the YouTube channel and that's been really great.
And it's sort of just giving another voice to our brand, and that's something I wanna really stress. For anyone listening who's maybe you're a content marketer, you're a creator, you're just writing a lot, but you're not really showing up live on video. I think that once you make that leap to showing up on live video or YouTube recording, reels, TikTok, whatever it may be, that's just gonna give so much more value to your audience and really just put a live element to your brand.
That was something that I got stuck in for so long. I was just blogging, I was behind the scenes. I didn't even have a photo of myself on my site for way too long. And when I changed that around, it became more of a person in my brand, like sharing the real me. That's when really everything took off.
So I'm just doing more of that this year and yeah, content marketing and figuring out what's gonna be next for the brokerage and what that could look like.
Ben Aston: Awesome. And as you are, growing in your skillset and developing, I mean, I love how you talk about, yeah, building your own personal brands and leveraging the humanness of yourself in a post ChatGPT world. But what are you trying to get better at? What skills and practices are you trying to develop to be a better content creator, marketer, CEO? What's on your to-do list?
Chelsea Clarke: Do we have a moment to let go over my morning routine, which I'm really loving these days?
Ben Aston: Let's do it. Yeah.
Chelsea Clarke: Okay. So up until maybe like the fall of last year, I was pretty much a mess. I got all the work done that I needed to do, but I would not say that I was a balanced individual. I was just like pushing through it every day and with really no schedule. And then in the last couple months, I've just completely changed that and I've started up by having a morning routine.
So what I do is I get up at 5:00 AM. Before I open any emails, before I do any work, I open up a doc, like a Google Doc, and I write down. It's sort of like a gratitude list, which is cheesy as it may sound. It really has helped to focus my energy onto the positive in a day before the day starts, before I think of anything that could be negative or stressful.
Just writing out big or small, anything that comes to mind that I appreciate, and it can be like big things about how I love my team and they're so helpful to little things about like I'm so happy that I have my favorite type of coffee this morning, or whatever it is. Just write it out. And then the next thing I do is I've started writing something that I call a daily trailer.
Just like a trailer that you watch for a movie gets you really excited about the movie ahead. I'll just take literally two minutes, no longer, and I'll just bullet point list anything that I want to do that day, any intention that I have for the day. It could be tasks like a couple things I wanna do, publish a new blog post or send out a newsletter.
Or reach out to a brand for a partnership, something like that, as well as intention for how I want to perceive myself in the day. If I just want to make sure if I'm going into something and I know that it could be with someone that could be a little bit tricky. I'm gonna write something out saying that I'm only gonna have positive conversations and I'm going to react calmly, or, whatever it is.
It's just having that intention. And then I'll have my coffee. I will start writing. So I'll do usually like an hour, about an hour of just creative writing. Could be a new blog post. It could be a newsletter, or maybe I'm gonna work on a new lead magnet or a product launch or something that's coming up.
And then after that, I'm getting my kid ready for school, and then I'll run on the treadmill. And then now it's time to get to official work. And that's when I'll open my emails, I'll respond to customers, clients, team members, all of that stuff. And I've found since doing this, doing like my day this way by really just dedicating that morning to intention and peacefulness has changed the game.
I'm so much more organized. I'm happier, I'm way more chill, and things just get done a lot better than they used to. So that's what I'm working on. It's a personal development. It's something that I'm gonna be working on more this year and just figuring out how I can just be the best that I can for all the people that I love in my life.
Ben Aston: Awesome. Thanks so much for sharing that. And you're sharing something else as well. We've got a giveaway. If this episode has piqued your interest in flipping, Chelsea, tell us about what you're offering listeners today?
Chelsea Clarke: Yeah, and it's a giveaway that every single person gets. It's not just like a one person will win it, it's y'all can have it.
So if you go to my Instagram @herpaperroute, we will put the links below, I'm sure. Go and you just DM, go to my DMs, like the messages, and just send the word "free kit". It could be two words, it could be one word combined "freekit", and I will send you access to my niche site sellers startup kit. That's kinda a mouthful to say, but what it includes is all of the things that we talked about here in this podcast.
All of these resources, I've created a workshop bundle that walks you through how to prime your site to put it in the best position to attract buyers for when it's time to sell, or if you're looking for a site to buy. It's got a due diligence cheat sheet in there, so it shows you what to look for and sort of what to avoid so you don't buy those lemons.
And then it also has access to a really nice streamlined step-by-step process for what you can do to make sure that you have all your ducks in a row before you put the site up for sale. And it also gives you a free valuation so you can find out how much your site could potentially sell for. You can see what it's worth.
And all of that is included for free just by going to my Instagram, going to my inbox, like the messages on Instagram and putting the word "free kit". And you will get instant access to that. We sell it for $197, but it's free for everyone who is listening today.
Ben Aston: Boom! Thanks Chelsea. That sounds awesome. I'm gonna go and check it out. I'll try the free kit and see where we get to. Thank you for sharing that. I really appreciate that. And Chelsea, where can people find out more about what you are up to and what you're doing?
Chelsea Clarke: Thanks. And yeah, thank you so much for having me. The, I was really looking forward to this call. It was so much fun.
But you guys can find me at herpaperroute.com. That is where I offer free resources on blogging and content marketing. And then you can also find me at nicheinvestor.com. That is our platform where people buy and sell websites and you can actually just go and look at the listings. You can do a deep dive, you can look at the profit and loss sheets. The traffic, you can snoop at what other people are doing and get some ideas for your own sites too.
Ben Aston: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Chelsea. It's been great having you with us.
Chelsea Clarke: Thank you so much for having me.
Ben Aston: And if you like what you heard today, please subscribe and stay in touch on indiemedia.club.
But until next time, thanks so much for listening.