In earlier posts I mentioned I was looking to buy adsense generating websites and I managed to buy 4 of these websites. In this post I will discuss them and see if it was a good investment so far or not.
I searched to buy Adsense websites and bought 4 so far. It is not easy to find these sites. Adsense generating websites are not often for sale. It seems everyone is keeping their Adsense generating websites and not putting them up for sale. Who would sell their websites bringing in passive income, right? I did manage to buy 4 sites in 3 transactions.
I think I overpaid
The sites I bought are running for a couple of months now and I think I might have overpaid. First I will share some statistics of the sites:
Website 1: TR
I bought TR for €2800,-. I think this is the most I ever paid for a website. In the past I bought a xbox forum for €2100 and I just checked, it is a blog now. Weird… I sold this site for €3500 so made a nice profit in a short period of time (I think I had it for 3-4 months). Anyway; TR. TR is a recipe website. I am not into cooking or recipes and I am not sure I am still happy with the buy. I also got caught up with the bidding war that was going on and think I overpaid for the site.
I am running the site since October ’18 and so far the statistics are:
Costs: €2800,-
Adsense revenue: €687,84
Monthly average: €137,57
This might look good for 5 months, but December is the top month for this site bringing in €400,- in that month alone. On average it should bring in €1200,- a year, that would take me well over 2 years to get my investment back.
Website 2: VV
Bought this website for €400,-. The domain is good as well. It is an EMD (exact match domain) and a .com domain. I would pay this alone for the domain if I really wanted it. It is good it has a site and generating a bit of income. The plan is to work on this website and let it generate more Adsense revenue.
The site is running since September ’18 and so far the statistics are:
Costs: €400,-
Adsense: €63,94
Monthly average: €10,66
When calculating the monthly average this site is not really a good investment. But considering the domain is good, this investment is not that bad. I don’t regret buying it.
Website 3 & 4: B-E
These 2 websites was a package deal. The 2 sites are connected to each other and are in the same small niche. The sites need work and SEO. I see potential in these two. The total amount I paid for it was €950.
These sites are running from October ’18 and so far the statistics are:
Costs: €950,-
Adsense: €175,76 (€164,77 & €10,99)
Monthly average: €35,15
Paid almost 30 times the monthly revenue for this. That is a bit too much for these sites. Sites got potential but need work. Not sure if I can give it to them at the moment.
Summary
Costs: €4150,-
Adsense: €927,54
I paid €4150 for 4 websites bringing in €927,54 so far. These buys are not great deals. I think I even overpaid a bit. The plan is to work on the sites and get them up in rankings in the next 3-6 months. I hope the Adsense revenue will go up and my return on investment will be here quicker.
I am still looking to buy more websites to build my passive income. For the last 6 months I am looking for good Adsense websites to buy but there are barely good listings. The good listings seem to go for really high prices, I am talking about 40x monthly revenue. When I get my hands on a new site I will share it here with you. There is 1 website that I am looking at this moment but the auction will run for another 14 days. If it doesn’t get too high I will join bidding in the last day.
I am interested in your thoughts about these buys. Let me know in the comments.
Hi The Nomar, I think that it will take a bit more of patience and work to get the results you expect from your recent purchases.
Just a quick question: where did you buy these websites?
Thanks!
Alex
I hope so Alex. The plan is to work on them and get higher rankings.
The websites are bought on a dutch webmaster forum. I bought 2 through a thread were I asked people to contact me if they wanted to sell their website. And bought 2 on listings on the same website (auction style).
At the moment I am looking at 1 auction at flippa.com. If the price doesn’t get too high I will start bidding in the last day.
Hey, how come you can manage to work on so many sites? Do you just add new content and then leave them or you actively write content, build backlinks, etc?… I can hardly manage one website. 🙂
I actively write content and try to market them. It takes up a good part of my free time but the plan is to do this fulltime and leave my day job.
On my main site I try to publish at least 1 new post a day. Others I update weekly and others even monthly. I try to work on my sites at least 1 or 2 hours a day.
Nomar, that sounds like a good plan!
However, I should warn you to be as careful as you can, because sometimes things go in a different way than we hope.
I am telling you from my recent experience… this is my quick update on my blog redesign “adventure”.
I’ve been making a decent amount of money with adsense for the past 10 years. The money I earned through Adsense program was not big enough for living solely from it, but good enough for a side income.
My regular job income, plus adsense side income have brought me enough cash on a monthly basis to afford a “comfortable” life without constantly looking at my expenses. The lifestyle of mine was slightly above average for the country where I live in. All good.
At that time, I spend roughtly 2-3 hours blogging per day (weekends excluded). And I started thinking: if I can earn that much money with 2 hours of blogging each day, what I could achieve in 8 hours or more…
That was so tempting that I left my job (about six months ago) to go “all in” blogging.
I decided to completely redesign the blog which was responsible for 90% of my income. The blog was 10 years old and wasn’t mobile friendly, so it started to fall in rankings at Google.
It took me a couple of months to really put the website into pieces, upgrade everything from A – Z. I spent 4k Eur on a makeover, plus another 1k eur to update the content.
Finally, I put adsense ads back at the blog. My goal was to achieve at least the same CTR and similar amount of $$ per days as before.
But, things went quite the opposite way and my CTR fell by more than 70%. That means my earnings are down more than 70% percent as well. So, I am now earning less money than ever before.
Not nearly enough to cover my cost of living, not to mention investing in new content and further website development.
I still hope that things will turn for the better once everything settles in a month or two…
So, my advice for you is to keep your job as long as you can and simultaneously develop your webites. I did this for about 10 years quite sucessfully.
Best,
mike
Damn, that sucks. Redesigning websites is dangerous looking at rankings. Hopefully you get rankings & traffic back in a few weeks / couple of months when everything settles. You know the money is there and the blog generated the revenue in the last 10 years.
It should be good that you redesigned if the site wasn’t even responsive. I would think Google would give you credits for that…
I also have 1 big earner that brought in like 90% of all revenue. Last few months that is around 70% but I would rather have it under 50%. The ‘not all eggs in one basket’ thing.
4k on the redesign is serious money. What did you change exactly? Did you also change URL structures? How big is the site? Is it an option to put the old design back on and make that responsive? Just thinking out loud…
I really hope Google will give you the rankings back you had before. Maybe it just takes some extra time… Fingers crossed
Hi The Nomar, my name is Michael. I have a couple of websites that are already bringing in adsense income. I currently have 5 adsense-niche sites but I’m looking to sell two of them. You can access the Google Analytics account, if you’re interested, please email me: mikechimikolo [at] gmail .com
Hi Michael,
Thanks for reaching out, I am mailing you!