Cashing in for $20K with old content

Justin Cooke

Justin Cooke

Partner @ Empire Flippers
BuSo Pro
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Jan 31, 2015
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I'm Justin Cooke - partner at Empire Flippers and host of The Empire Podcast. I saw some posts that were referencing us and thought I'd join to see what was going on over here. After having read through about a dozen posts, this definitely seems like a good place to be!

I wanted to share a tactic we used last year I thought you might find helpful.

We were, at one point, creating tons of small niche sites each week/month. Some would do well and others would die out. If they weren't making enough to be worth renewing the domain, we'd just let them go.

We decided to change our tactics and, instead, we saved that content and started dumping it on another domain we'd purchased. Keep in mind this content wasn't even niche specific and covered anything from hair dryers to video games - we just thought it might be better than losing that site completely.

Over time, we ended up with hundreds of articles on the site and the pageviews continued to increase. We got it up to around 20K pagviews per month.

We did nothing but montize via AdSense and, by the time we were ready to sell it, the site was making around $1K per month net profit.

We ended up selling the site through our marketplace for just over $20K.

If you've got some of the niche sites that turned out to be duds, don't let the content go to waste! Instead, copy all of that content over to one main site and watch it build up. Over time, you'll have something of value out of all the "losers".
 
Hey Justin, welcome!

Curious - did you wait for the content to disappear from Google's index before repurposing it, or just delete the old sites and pop it up on the new one right away?
 
We did wait for the content to disappear, but we're not exactly sure whether that was required or not...we just did it as a precaution.
 
This does work guys. Just remember your on-page and to interlink.

Alternatively, you can sell me all your old native written English content for pennies on the dollar.
 
Man... I had considered this and then let the idea go when the "farmer update" came out that smacked all of the article directories like Ezine. I wish I'd have just gone with it. It wouldn't have taken long and I'd be sitting on a site with a couple thousand articles. Oh well.

Great tip, thanks for the share, and welcome aboard!
 
I have a lot of old articles sitting around collecting dust, makes sense to toss them up somewhere... maybe snag some long tails... cheers.
 
Hey Justin - been following you guys since the Adsense Flipper days.

Quick question: What's your process for checking if old content is still indexed or not? Personally, I'm just searching for random snippets from the content contained in quotes. Is there a better way?

Also, how did you organize the catch-all site. Did you have different silos for different categories....or was it just one big blog roll?



Justin Cooke said:
I'm Justin Cooke - partner at Empire Flippers and host of The Empire Podcast. I saw some posts that were referencing us and thought I'd join to see what was going on over here. After having read through about a dozen posts, this definitely seems like a good place to be!

I wanted to share a tactic we used last year I thought you might find helpful.

We were, at one point, creating tons of small niche sites each week/month. Some would do well and others would die out. If they weren't making enough to be worth renewing the domain, we'd just let them go.

We decided to change our tactics and, instead, we saved that content and started dumping it on another domain we'd purchased. Keep in mind this content wasn't even niche specific and covered anything from hair dryers to video games - we just thought it might be better than losing that site completely.

Over time, we ended up with hundreds of articles on the site and the pageviews continued to increase. We got it up to around 20K pagviews per month.

We did nothing but montize via AdSense and, by the time we were ready to sell it, the site was making around $1K per month net profit.

We ended up selling the site through our marketplace for just over $20K.

If you've got some of the niche sites that turned out to be duds, don't let the content go to waste! Instead, copy all of that content over to one main site and watch it build up. Over time, you'll have something of value out of all the "losers".
Click to expand...
 
This thread just made me want to cry at the lost opportunity.

I guess that's what you get for being disorganized. I'm sure there's tons of people in the same boat.
 
That's awesome. I've done similar things with old articles I have laying around from years ago but never really had results like that. I never threw them up on established domains, though. I just made new properties with them.
 
Hey StackCash,

Awesome - thanks for the support!

That's what we did to ensure the content wasn't indexed. (Random searches for content snippets) I'm sure there's a better way, but this was the quick/dirty way our team would check.

We had the content categorized by main industries (Health, Home & Garden, Automotive, etc.) but it wasn't a big priority. Because the content was all over the place in terms of niches/industries we just didn't think it was that important.

We used an aged domain we'd purchased that was sort-of vague and around "content". (Won't share exact domain, but think something like contentrack.net or contentrush.com)

If you're in the position to do it, I think we would have done even better having an industry-specific domain and all our content in/around that one niche. You might have even more success if all of your content was in the medical niches, for example.
 
@Justin Cooke nice!

I think I might be in a good position for this. Do you remember how many total articles you had on the site? I'm just wondering if my archive is anywhere near the size of yours.

Good call on the niche-specific sites. I'm not sure if I'll have enough in any one area - I guess I need to start getting organized! I haven't touched that stuff in 2 years.


Justin Cooke said:
Hey StackCash,

Awesome - thanks for the support!

That's what we did to ensure the content wasn't indexed. (Random searches for content snippets) I'm sure there's a better way, but this was the quick/dirty way our team would check.

We had the content categorized by main industries (Health, Home & Garden, Automotive, etc.) but it wasn't a big priority. Because the content was all over the place in terms of niches/industries we just didn't think it was that important.

We used an aged domain we'd purchased that was sort-of vague and around "content". (Won't share exact domain, but think something like contentrack.net or contentrush.com)

If you're in the position to do it, I think we would have done even better having an industry-specific domain and all our content in/around that one niche. You might have even more success if all of your content was in the medical niches, for example.
Click to expand...
 
I think we started the site off with a couple hundred articles (200-400?) and added to it over time. Eventually it ended up with 1K+ posts on the site.
 
Hey Justin can you shed any light on what you did in terms of backlinks? Did the domain already have some decent links in place? Can you maybe give a rough idea what some of the metrics were on the domain? Curious what the domain started like in terms of links and what you did afterwards. Were you building links to any specific inner-pages, just to the main domain, not at all...?

Thanks man!
 
We didn't do any linkbuilding to the domain, but there were already some links in place. Joe was the one that searched out and found the domain, so I can't speak to the specific links it had or why he selected that domain - it was mostly his project. I'll see if I can get him to stop by and answer, though.
 
Ok, I'm definitely doing this. I have about ~3k articles to post. All unique, American written.

I think the key here is definitely the aged domain. We'd really appreciate it if Joe could give us a little insight on his domain selection process, and how much he dropped on it @Justin Cooke
 
Hi all! New here and this is my first real discussion, so be gentle! ;-)

We actually used three domains for SEO purposes for this project.

The first was a generic aged domain with a clean backlink profile, but not much in the way of links and no history of content being setup. Think something general that can be picked up at auction cheaply (under $20).

The other two were expired domains with a lot of links. We paid $400 for one and $700 for the other at auction. We used a 301 redirect from these domains to the the clean domain to carry through the link juice and then redirected all 404 pages on the main domain to the homepage. So effectively all links from the aged domains were pointing at the homepage of the new domain. This lead to a greater domain authority fairly quickly, which means we could rank interior pages for niches with less competition easily.

To find these two domains, I used Jon Haver's great guide on expired domains:

http://authoritywebsiteincome.com/ultimate-expired-domain-guide/

Hope that helps! Please let me know if you have any questions.
 
Oh and let me add the sheer amount of content we had (over 1,000 posts) led to some content just getting lucky and ranking in the right place at the right time. If you are going to use old content (that is no longer in the cache) it's important to over do it.

Plus you never know when a piece might go viral. One article we had was the focal point of a dispute between some b-rated rap stars on Twitter. The content didn't covert much, but we did get a whole lot of links and social activity, that I'm sure Google picked up on and helped the the site's domain authority overall.

Not something you can depend on, but sheer numbers will increase your chance of getting lucky.
 
Joe Magnotti said:
Plus you never know when a piece might go viral. One article we had was the focal point of a dispute between some b-rated rap stars on Twitter. The content didn't covert much, but we did get a whole lot of links and social activity, that I'm sure Google picked up on and helped the the site's domain authority overall.
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LOL, Joe, I'd forgotten about that!

Yeah, some B-rated rap star was trying to show some "bling" on social media. Someone did a reverse image lookup on the image he'd posted and realized he'd used an image from our site and was trying to pass it off as his own! Social media blew up about it with people calling him out! hehe

We got a ton of traffic and a bit of earnings, but mostly it was just funny to see. I do wonder if it helped establish the site a bit, as Joe mentioned.
 
LOL. Good stuff guys. You never know when a rando-article like that will blow up.

Thanks for that guide too - It's always interesting to see how different people approach grabbing expired domains. Looks like the aged domains + clean linkjuice did the trick here.

I had bought a brand new domain with a name I liked, but I think I'm going to go your route since it's proven.

The one mountain I'm trying to climb right now is figuring out an efficient way to get all of these articles (somewhere between 2k-3k) online, running pyscape / dupe content checks, formatting/adding images, interlinking, and outbound linking without making it my full-time job over the next month. I know there are some batch uploaders for Wordpress, but I think the amount of tweaking they'll need for my usage will negate their benefits. My only other option is to manually post/check/publish 10-20 articles here and there over the course of a few months.
 
stackcash said:
LOL. Good stuff guys. You never know when a rando-article like that will blow up.

Thanks for that guide too - It's always interesting to see how different people approach grabbing expired domains. Looks like the aged domains + clean linkjuice did the trick here.

I had bought a brand new domain with a name I liked, but I think I'm going to go your route since it's proven.

The one mountain I'm trying to climb right now is figuring out an efficient way to get all of these articles (somewhere between 2k-3k) online, running pyscape / dupe content checks, formatting/adding images, interlinking, and outbound linking without making it my full-time job over the next month. I know there are some batch uploaders for Wordpress, but I think the amount of tweaking they'll need for my usage will negate their benefits. My only other option is to manually post/check/publish 10-20 articles here and there over the course of a few months.
Click to expand...

Have you thought about letting someone else do it for you? I don't know about costs but I'm sure you can find someone who's doing it for cheap on elance or odesk.
 
Saiten said:
Have you thought about letting someone else do it for you? I don't know about costs but I'm sure you can find someone who's doing it for cheap on elance or odesk.
Click to expand...

Yeah, outsourcing it is in the works. I have to map everything out as a process and see if its something that I want other people seeing first.
 
Really nice, I did this a while ago and worked out rather well. I managed to picked a "howto" domain that had around 40 articles on it, was a decent site not sure why it dropped. I then created a program that would crawl through dropped domains that were in the how to niche and I would check them in the way back when machine. If decent grab all content and put it on my domain, ended up with nearly 1k posts before selling :smile:
 
It's posts like this that make me feel like I've never had a good idea in my life.


Styx said:
Really nice, I did this a while ago and worked out rather well. I managed to picked a "howto" domain that had around 40 articles on it, was a decent site not sure why it dropped. I then created a program that would crawl through dropped domains that were in the how to niche and I would check them in the way back when machine. If decent grab all content and put it on my domain, ended up with nearly 1k posts before selling :smile:
Click to expand...
 
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