May 29 2020 32 mins 16
Below is part 1 of an interview with my friend Ruaan Nel on his Aged Site, Auction Domain and Expired Domain Strategy. It’s all action and no fluff. Ruaan is one of the most talented website investors I know. He buys existing sites, auction domains and expired domains, invests aggressively into new content, does some light link building (as the domains already have good existing authority) and looks to exit within 12-18 months. Full, actionable interview notes are below. Please note, metrics mentioned in terms of Amazon / RPM were before the recent April commission cut. In this part 1, free subscribers get the first 30 minutes; paying subscribers also get part 2 in their RSS feed. To access just hit the button below. Sponsored by Ezoic This podcast is sponsored by the Ezoic platform which my main software review site runs on (literally in terms of using their nameservers) to monetize through ads, maximize site speed and gain insights from their big data analytics tool. Part 1 Show Notes Ruaan started investing into websites in mid-2017 and by December of that year, his portfolio hit low 4 figures a month. That’s when he started scaling, hiring VAs and getting friends on board that are on his level. He bought a site in the fitness niche at the end of 2018 from a seller who then offered him a cheaper site he wanted to let go of, which had lower revenue but a lot of traffic and a better upward trend. Ruaan 301 redirected the more expensive site that was making more money into the new acquisition which gave him enough traffic to get onto the Mediavine program (which needs > 30K sessions a month) where he instantly started earning an RPM of $10. [Ezoic only need 10K sessions a month and have the same buying demand.] Current Portfolio Ruaan currently has around 8 money sites including some he calls placeholder sites. He has a team member who searches for existing sites, auction domains and expired domains that are brandable and are aligned with a niche that they know is already profitable. These sites can be for either PBN or for money sites (strategy explained in Part 2). They immediately purchase, throw some content on it, get it indexed and see how the site responds. They typically look to purchase sites / domains between $500-$1K. Content Creation When Ruaan first started he thought that you could just rewrite articles that were already ranking well and reference them. It’s an approach he says works, but since 2018 he has built a writing team that creates unique content, and he tries to put 50K words down a month onto his sites. He also uses Content Pit when he needs additional capacity. Average word count on his articles is high as he does not write much informational content. He focusses on (1) big buyers guides, ie best X or best X for Y, and (2) individual product reviews and vs keywords. He keeps the split 75% commercial and 25% informational (3). Ruaan states that you want to get into a niche that has a lot of potential for individual product reviews and vs keywords, because those are really good for traffic. Most people are competing for the best guides as you can simply replace a product when it’s gone out of stock, but single product reviews (such as a certain brand of coffee maker) are easier to rank as have less volume and less people targeting these keywords. And you will even rank for the actual brand product keyword as google likes to show one or two reviews (I did this with a previous content site where I ranked on page 1 for clickfunnels.com). So you can rank on page 1 for the product, and top of page 1 for the review keyword and that’s where you want to put your ads. Affiliate income from buyers guides can typically be between $40-$60 per 1000 views. For single product review pages it’s much lower, $20-$30, but they let you get enough traffic to monetize with ads on Ezoic or Mediavine which ads another $5-$15 RPM. For Ruaan, single product review content length is typically 1000-1500 words. The [...]
