How To Successfully Flip Niche Sites For Six-Figure Earnings (with Chelsea Clarke from HerPaperRoute Media)

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.
  • 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?
  • 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.

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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

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.

Photo of Chelsea Clarke

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:

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