We sold a website for $76,000 – here’s how we did it (5-step guide for beginners)

We recently sold a health-related website for $50,000 USD (around 76,000 AUD). It took three years to go from 0 to a 5-figure sale!

Also, we’re not healthcare professionals. We’re an ex-FIFO and a social worker. 

Below we share how we did it, where we learned the skills, and what was the hardest part of building a profitable website.

7 years ago, the thought of building a site from scratch, making it profitable, and eventually selling it for a lump sum seemed IMPOSSIBLE to us. 

Back then, we wanted to leave our 9-to-5s to be able to travel full-time. However, doing so through building and selling websites seemed complicated and risky. 

It sounded like you needed to be a web developer or a gifted journalist to make decent money out of it.

But after learning how to do it, we realised this couldn’t be further from the truth!

You don’t need to be a tech wizard or the next Zuckerberg to make a consistent income online. 

This is an example of how everyone can do it, regardless of skill level, background, or age!

Key takeaways

We learnt how to do this with the eBusiness Institute. They remove all the overwhelm while accelerating the process! Find out if it’s right for you here.

Step 1 – Pick a niche

Picking a good niche is the most important step. 

What is a niche? A niche is the topic or industry that your entire website is about and what your content is all about too.

A niche is usually more than just “pets” or “travel” people need to have an edge which attracts people to their website. Some niche examples include, “Apartments and pets”, “Vanlife travel family”, “Growing your own food at home” and “Barista tips at home”.

Why is niche selection one of the most important aspects of choosing a website?

Because, it dictates how you will make money, how MUCH you will earn and the audience you attract. It can also limit your growth, which can be a pro or a con depending on your goals.

We share in this article the pros and cons to the niche we chose. So that you can learn from us too.

Also, it should be a topic that at least interests you. You’ll be married to this niche for years, as websites need 12-18 months of consistent work to grow.

After LOTS of research, we decided to create a website around knee pain. We chose this specific niche for a few reasons:

• Market demand: Knee pain is a problem almost everyone goes through at some point in their lives, regardless of age. It’s an “evergreen” niche.
• Recurrent issue: People tend to have knee pain over and over. It can be a chronic problem which needs a lot of support.
• Audience potential: Knee pain sufferers actively search for causes, solutions and prevention, ensuring a consistent audience. 
• Content potential: There are hundreds of topics related to knee pain – causes, treatments, injuries, exercises, prevention, supplements, products…
• Underserved: There weren’t many high-quality blogs dedicated exclusively to knee pain out there. 
• Evergreen content: Knee pain-related topics won’t drastically change in the next 10 years. The content published would need little maintenance.
• Potential for monetization: We could earn money through ads on the website, selling products like knee braces, creams, courses, equipment, supplements, etc. We could even team up with physical therapists to send them patients, earning a referral commission.

Now, we are not healthcare professionals.

So, we had to hire experts (physical therapists and doctors) to write our articles.

However, had we chosen a different niche we wouldn’t have had to hire such specialised people.

That said, we don’t recommend using a medicine-related niche for your first website, as it falls into the category “Your Money, Your Life” (YMYL). 

YMYL topics are those that could potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety. Examples of these topics include finance and medicine. 

Google evaluates them more harshly because of their potential impact, which generally slows down the growth of the website. You can also be affected by regular Google updates in this area which can either positively or negatively affect your reach.

Step 2 – Publish content

Our experts wrote articles using SEO practices and keyword research to bring traffic from Google to the website. (Confused? You can learn everything here).

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. In a nutshell, it’s a strategy that helps your website to show up on the first page of search results like Google. Otherwise, people won’t see your business!

Once the content writers finished their articles, an editor would double-check them to make sure everything was correct. 

Then, it was all about publishing articles consistently.

We aimed for 10-15 articles a month, because:

• More articles = more entry points for readers into the website
• To establish the website as an authority in the knee pain field
• Google slowly starts to share your articles, so the more chances of being noticed the better!
• People might share our articles or link back to us if they love them!

Publishing articles while following SEO practices helped bring more people to the website. 

After 1.5-2 years of doing this consistently, we had 20,000 new visitors to our site per month. 

Some of them bought the products we promoted, others clicked on the ads… Long story short, we were earning $1500/month on average. 

$1500 USD per month sells at a 30x (sometimes 40x) multiple so our website was valued at approximately $45,000 USD ($70,000 AUD).

If you are wondering why we are talking in USD, it’s because the Flippa marketplaces operates in USD!

Step 3 – Create an alternate way to bring readers

Rather than solely relying on Google to bring readers to your website we recommend also focussing attention on the following:

• Social media – Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, etc
• Paid ads
• Emails

We invested in an email list for our website and it functioned parallel to publishing content on our website.

We did this a bit late in the process, approx 1.5 years in. We wish we had done this earlier because:

• An email list brings more people to the website
• It’s key to know your readers better and create more helpful content for them
• It’s an opportunity to promote products, increasing income

To build the email list, we created a free resource they’d get in exchange for their email. 

Then, we’d send 3-4 emails each month with our latest articles and helpful products to ease or prevent knee pain.

Step 4 – Monetise your website

It’s all well and good having a website, working hard at sharing awesome content but…

1. How are you selling on your website? Ads/affiliates etc?
2. What product/service can you offer your readers?
3. Where can you find affiliate commissions and partnerships?
4. Have you got a good deal on your affiliate commissions?

For our knee pain website, we later realised the issue with growing income on our website.

Knee braces cost around $30 a piece so our product of choice was considerably low cost. This is an issue unless you have HIGH volume customers.

We had arranged a really good commission on our affiliates, but the cost we were earning was hard to grow into big numbers.

We realised we aren’t the right website owner for this niche. Because someone else could expand with courses, coaching, physiotherapist referrals, YouTube videos and creating a huge community.

However, this was not going to happen for us in our foreseeable future.

Step 5 – Decision to sell

After two years of publishing consistently, we were making $1500 in monthly profit. 

We had +300 articles published and 3500 email subscribers (and growing). The problem? We weren’t passionate and interested enough to maintain the site. 

There were other projects we wanted to focus on, and that website was taking up our time, effort, and resources to continue to grow it.

If we wanted it to grow more, we’d have to double down on it, which we didn’t want to do.

We wanted to focus on this blog – Salt and Charcoal instead.

Truth is, we are OBSESSED with teaching others how to leave the rat race to become full-time travellers. 

We wholeheartedly believe the best way to do this is by working online. 

It gives you the income to fund your travels, save, etc. without tying you down to any location – you just need internet and a laptop!

You can focus your time and energy on things you are passionate about. You can create a huge blog, help people and inspire them at the same time. How amazing is that? (Have we convinced you yet? Click here and watch the free webinar to begin!)

So, it didn’t make sense for us to use our energy and money to keep growing a website about knee pain. I might add here that the cost of a knee brace is only $30, whereas other niches we have are earning in the hundreds (even thousands) for their products and services.

We could use those resources to grow Salt and Charcoal instead. 

After realising that, we decided to sell the website. Doing this would give us a lump sum we could reinvest in Salt and Charcoal. 

The selling process

We sold our website through Flippa.com, a huge marketplace to buy and sell websites.

It’s common to sell a website for 30 – 40 times the monthly profit. The profit is the total earnings minus the expenses to run the site. 

Our website was doing $1,500/month in profit, so, a reasonable selling price would be…

$1,500/month x 30 = $45,000

However, we were able to ask for more because we had other things that increased the value of the website such as:

• An engaged email list. 
• An online store where we sold knee sleeves through dropshipping.
• A good domain rating. Domain rating is a measure of how trustworthy the website is, the higher, the better.

Taking those and other factors into consideration, we decided $50k was a fair price to sell the website. 

Then, it was time to create the listing.

I will add, you can hire people to help manage your sale on Flippa but they take a cut.

There, you have to show potential buyers a few things, like:

• Basic stats of the website – number of visits per month, sources of traffic, etc
• A profit/loss statement for the past 12 months
• We also did a video explaining the potential of the site for interested buyers

Once that was done, we had to wait a bit until the perfect buyer came along. And they came!

Our buyer wanted to purchase the website and focus on it himself, as it’s a topic he’s passionate about. 

It was a no-brainer for both parts, so we sold it to him. We passed the site over to him, did some back and forth for a smooth transition, and it was done.

Where to learn how to build and sell websites?

We learned how to do this after doing the “Digital Investors Program”, a course taught at the eBusiness Institute. Watch this free masterclass to know if it’s the right fit for you.

It’s a 12-18 month course that teaches you everything needed to build websites and sell them for profit. (We also took on the focussed Champions program after for more coaching).

Matt and Liz, the teachers, take you through each step:

• How to pick a profitable niche.
• Setting up the website.
• The content strategy.
• Digital marketing strategies to grow your website – SEO, email marketing, social media, etc.
• The entire sale process, setting the right price, etc.

They specialize in teaching absolute beginners and non-techie people how to build websites and sell them for profit. 

We were their students 7 years ago. What we learned helped us become full-time travellers by 2020, and now we turn over $300,000/ year from our websites.

Why building a website is much easier than it looks

You don’t have to be a tech wizard to do this. You don’t have to write the content yourself. You don’t even have to show your face on the website. 

You can hire others to do all of that for you!

Matt and Liz teach you how to hire people to do the things you don’t want to do (like writing or techie things) for cheap.

Take the website we sold as an example. We are not healthcare professionals – Chris is ex-FIFO and Bec is a social worker. To create the content, we hired:

• Physical therapists and doctors to write expert content for us.
• A graphic designer to create unique images. 
• A web developer to create custom things for the website and do troubleshooting. 

That said – you don’t have to hire experts, designers, or developers to sell a website for $50k. This is just to show that you don’t have to do every single aspect of the website if you don’t want to. 

Matt and Liz teach you how to do this yourself as well if you don’t want to outsource anything. They tell you all the basics for free in their masterclass:

What’s the hardest part of building a $50k website?

Most people think that the hardest part of building a website will be:

• Learning the strategies. This is not hard, but there’s a learning curve (as with every new skill). Once you get over it, you’re good to go.
• Picking the niche. It’s not hard once you know what to look for, but it is so important you pick the right one or learn some pros and cons of each niche.
• Hiring / Outsourcing. Also time-consuming, more so if you have to train your outsourcers, but it’s not hard.

The truth is that anyone can learn how to build and sell a website.

You don’t need Matt and Liz for this, either. There are LOTS of free YouTube videos where you can learn. 

The hardest part is… being consistent.

It’s hard to publish month after month when it feels like you’re giving your best content to an empty void at first.

Also, you must work on your mindset to stay positive and confident in your entrepreneurship endeavours and skill building.

You need to listen to podcasts, read books, watch webinars, network, hire people. You must become a CEO for your small business (but the sky is the limit. Manifest that one day it will be HUGE business!)

You can do all the right things, you’re pumping out 10 articles per month, but it looks like your website isn’t getting any traction. 

The hardest part is to push past those feelings and just keep going!

Because at some point, your website will grow. It’s a snowball effect where the growth is exponential. 

…But you have to keep showing up for that to happen. It took us 18 months, remember?

Also, keep in mind that it wasn’t our first website either. We had the funds to hire a team while we worked on other sites, too.

The bottom line

7 years ago we wouldn’t have imagined selling a website for $50k! Not to mention the monthly profit we got before the sale. 

It requires a bit of strategy, yes, but the truth is that everyone can learn how to do this. Even for free – there are lots of YouTube videos about it!

We decided to learn with the eBusiness Institute 7 years ago and haven’t regretted it one bit. It is why we recommend them to you, because our lives changed – so can yours!

You don’t need to learn with them though, but doing so will x10 accelerate your learning process. Matt and Liz will show you what to do so you don’t waste any more time. Just go straight to money-making strategies!

So, the question is – where will you be 18 months from now? Selling your first website? Or wondering whether to give it a try?

Take a risk-free step today. Watch their free masterclass on building and selling websites for profit: