It’s amazing to us how quickly this project has grown and how much we feel drawn to this side of our business. When we originally started here we were still focused on growing our outsourcing business through client acquisition, maintaining relationships, etc. While we’re happy to continue the current relationships we have with our long-standing clients, we’ve found ourselves saying no to taking on new customers more and more. It’s not that we’re not interested in growing that side of our business as well, it’s just that we feel such a connection with AdSenseFlippers and have so many projects we’d like to see accomplished that we don’t want to see anything stand in the way of our growth here and there’s quite a bit we still need to do.
Our AdSense earnings were up over 25% and we had our best day ever on 8/25/11 at $176.65. All in, we averaged $137.91 per day in AdSense earnings in August…a significant jump up from last month! We’ve continued our conversations with Spencer from Niche Pursuits and I’m really hoping we’ll get the chance to work together on a project or two in the future…the guy has some great ideas and is amazingly capable. As you know, it can be a little boring going it alone and we’ve made a point to reach out more to others in the industry that we look up to, think we could help, or would love to learn from. While it’s definitely possible to make money in IM “on an island”, the real value is in connecting and building relationships that can multiply your business…that and it’s just more interesting!
We’ve been debating whether we should release/sell more of our sites in the short term to build up cash flow or whether we should hang onto them and continue to stack the passive income. We have some pretty major projects we’re planning to get involved in over the next 3-6 months (both with AdSense Flippers and our outsourcing company, TryBPO) and we’d like to not come too deep out of pocket to get those up and running. It seems the market is hot right now…if we wait and are forced to sell when we need the cash we might not get the value we’d like. On the other hand, taking up short-term cash at the (potentially) expense of our long-term goals is a pill that’s hard to swallow.
AdSense
Through August, our Mar-July income seems to be on track…all except for May’s sites. We’re not sure what exactly is going on there, but we’re just not getting the rankings or the traffic that we’ve gotten on earlier and previous months. On the other hand, our February sites are still KILLING it comparatively, averaging over $21 per site through August. We’ve sold off all of our December and January sites now, so February is next on the chopping block and you’ll see some of those sites up for auction soon.
In an effort to get caught up on our linkbuilding that had fallen behind, we added one of our company Project Leads to the project as a linkbuilding manager. While she doesn’t have the SEO knowledge you might expect for someone in the position, we needed a quick fix and she’s highly capable…plus she’s going to be outsourcing almost all of the work from vendors anyway…we just need someone who’s responsible and can work well with others, managing vendor relationships.
I’ve adjusted our projections to assume we’re going to sell all of our February sites in September. Since we’ve been averaging $160 or more per day in the last week, I think it’s quite reasonable we’ll hit our $178 daily average in September…I really hope so, anyway!
Flippa
We only held two auctions on Flippa this month, but we were very happy with the value received. As mentioned last month, we decided to include a BuyItNow option as we’d had some requests from people that simply weren’t able to wait out the end of the auction. Our first auction sold within 24 hours of our listing, but the second auction went all the way towards the end where someone picked it up with the BuyItNow option.
We’ve noticed a few sellers have been copying our auctions recently, hoping to get the same results. While we encourage people to consider Flippa as their marketplace of choice, we have asked them not to copy our auctions word for word. (Aside from the fact it’s against Flippa ToS, it’s just kind of a shitty thing to do) We give away freely what we think are the keys to success anyway and it’s NOT the exact wording of the auctions! Check that post out here.
Private Sales
While we’ve continued to say no to people asking us to broker their sites for them on Flippa, (We do this because we don’t want someone piggybacking off our good reputation to rip off unsuspecting buyers…we simply don’t know whether the sites are any good, how they’re built out, etc. unless we worked on them ourselves) we did agree to some private sales this month as a test.
Private Sale 1:
We had a conversation with a guy that would like us to build out sites for him on a regular basis. We’ve said no to this arrangement in the past, but we were impressed with him and figured if we were going to test it out, this would be the perfect person to work with. We agreed to test out building him sites alongside ours to see how the process would work and see if it’s something we’d like to open up long-term.
Private Sale 2:
Someone contacted us via Flippa and said he was really interested in purchasing some of our sites, but simply couldn’t afford the price point that most of our sites were going at. He asked if we could offer a private sale to him of a much smaller network and we agreed.
Affiliates
Very little change here and we’re not planning to explore affiliate sites much in the future. We do offer some affiliate links here at AdSenseFlippers, but we’ve found it not very conducive to our process for our niche sites. We are working on a few Authority sites as a test and those will have affiliate offers on them simply to round out their earnings potential and to provide more value to the user, but I don’t think we’ll be aggressively pursuing this any time soon with our niche sites, except for expanding on the few we have up that are currently running affiliate programs.
Summary
Overall, we’re extremely happy with how this month turned out and we’re really looking forward to September. We’re really hoping to cross the 20K barrier this month if everything works out!
Sites created: 168 (135 last month)
AdSense Earnings: $4,275.23 ($3,391.25 last month)
Flippa Sales: $6,510 ($6,600 last month)
Private Sales: $3,600 ($0 last month)
Affiliate Sales: $50.00 ($189.68 last month)
Total: $14,435.23 ($10,180.93 last month)
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