Website investing and digital properties are becoming a little bit more like physical property investments, especially when it comes to the ways people are profiting from the assets.

Just as physical real estate properties are flipped, renovated, rented, or invested in for passive income, we see similar trends with online digital properties.   

We’ve covered flipping websites in a previous guide, but what if you want to hold onto the digital asset as a long term investment but don’t want to manage the day to day operations?

In real estate, this type of arrangement is completed by a property manager. An investor would invest in a real estate piece and hire a property manager to run the day to day operations. 

Website investors can run their website or digital asset investments with a similar strategy. With online properties, the person who would run your websites’ day-to-day operations, similar to a property manager, is often referred to as an “operator.”

Whether you are looking to purchase a website as an investment opportunity or have someone take over your current website, an operator service may be a great option. 

We caught up with Mo Mullah, a website operator specializing in flipping and investing in websites for some website investment advice. 

Tell us a little about you and your website investing background?

Hey, I’m Mo, I’ve been buying and flipping websites for a few years now. I run a bespoke site operator service that gives clients the opportunity to work with a professional and well-rounded site operator. 

I usually work with a variety of clients, including those that have just started in the online business world, and also cater to more experience websites flippers who have larger portfolio’s and need a professional site operator to successfully manage their sites.  

Today I own a variety of business in the online marketing world and by diversifying my income across multiple niches have a sustainable income that helps me travel the world, live in the Caribbean and importantly sustain a big family. 

What’s your backstory, and how did you start making money online?

I graduated with a law degree about a decade ago but ended up turning away from a career in Law. The hours were long, and most tasks were very monotonous. I longed for a more time-friendly way to earth passive income and spent years looking for it. 

Prior to operating in the website investing world, I set up a lucrative email marketing business that still pays dividends now. I promoted numerous affiliate campaigns that regularly profited me over $30,000 a month by promoting bespoke high ticket affiliate products.

Now I spend the majority of my time growing and investing in websites (both content and affiliate sites) The ability to exit at over 30 times monthly revenue is a powerful reason to get involved in buying and running content sites online. 

What has worked for you to drive traffic to your website investments?

The best way to grow traffic to your sites is by doing very good SEO. Traffic doesn’t just end up on your website without having to first put the time in. My specialty lies in very good keyword research, a systematic approach to onsite SEO, and a meticulous approach to building backlinks. 

An excellent example of this is when I recently purchased a website for $2800 and flipped it for $24000 in under a year.

My approach to this was efficiency, scalability, and keeping costs low by doing all the hard work myself. 

When I first picked up the site, it was in poor shape, so I immediately did a link audit and a content audit to strip away any broken parts.

I then rebuilt parts of the site, including content and built new links over a 12 month period in a systematic way.

Website Investment Example

Spike in backlinks in June: 

Here are the trending months: 

March-May – Pageview went up 5x

I also diversified the monetization outside of amazon and used additional affiliate platforms as well as ads to create more revenue. 

Additional affiliate network: 

New Ads Network: 

Amazon Sales:

March 

April

May

June

Lastly, I carried out extensive backlink building using guest posts and used a fine-tooth comb to go over all my link prospects. Link building ended up being the main reason why the website sold for a 10x increase.

Upward growth in referring domains from 2019 – 2020

Through your website investing have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

The biggest thing to watch out for in this industry is buying websites that you don’t fully understand the risks.

Doing the correct level of due diligence is vital to having a sustainable asset and business. If you do the correct amount of due diligence, ask the right questions and negotiate correctly, you can very smartly bag yourself a bargain.

If you, however, fail to do this and get shiny eye syndrome or only focus on the top line revenue or the potential to grow it, you risk buying something that is destined to give you more trouble down the road. 

Examples of this are knowing your risk profile and avoiding any deals that fall outside these lines. PBN (Private Blog Networks) are a perfect example here.

Also, asking the right questions to the current owner, like, “if you decided to keep the website, what would you do to continue growing it?”

Google Algorithms and affiliate commission cuts are just a few things that are outside of your control but should be factored in any serious website investment. 

I learned the hard way the importance of due diligence and nearly got burnt buying my first website without doing proper due diligence.

I purchased the site on the strength of the revenue but when a major Google update hit this page lost it’s page rank in the SERPs and the website loss value immediately. I struggled to get recover from it, and ultimately, it was a bad investment. 

The lesson I learned…. Never buy a website that relays too heavily on 1 or 2 pages. (30% of traffic going to 1 page is too much for me) 

What types of website investments are there?

Website investing can be broken down into 4 main investment categories. The first is the cost of the website itself. The second is the cost of content. The third, the cost of backlinks (or the outreach to obtain those links), and the last is the cost of plugins, tools & other VA costs to help manage and run it. 

The highest cost is, of course, the cost of acquiring the sites (including broker fees and wire fees), next usually the cost of links and costs of content will take up a large chunk of your budget. Lastly, the costs of tools (i.e., AHREFS) will take up the remainder of your budget.  

However, the biggest investment isn’t usually financial. For me, the biggest investment was my time in each project.

You can always make more money down the road, but you can’t get your time back. This is why growing or purchasing the correct website is essential. 

There are many ways to pick a niche. If it’s your first time setting up a website and running it, then my advice would always be to pick something that you have an interest in.

While you don’t need to be an expert in it, chances are you’ll be spending a ton of time figuring things out, writing some content and doing some type of outreach. If you pick something that you understand, it will make this process a whole lot easier. 

I run websites full time, so for me, that’s 8 hours a day 5 days a week. This works for me as each website has a specific growth plan and exit timeline.

Also, importantly my time is compounded down the road as the revenue starts to trend up. 

Having a smart exit strategy is a must and most full-time website flippers know roughly when and for how much they are looking to exit their website or portfolio before they spend all the money or time to set it up. 

How long did it take you to begin making money with online websites?

The first website I created took a few months before it made any revenue. It made about $12 after around 5 months. While that sounds like a kick in the teeth, for me it was a milestone.

Making your first few dollars is always the hardest part. Once you do, the strategy is just to continue to replicate what you did to generate that first few dollars, but on steroids!

A smart strategy for those starting out is to focus on a commercial post and monetize it with amazon. This is a very predictable way to make money and will help to prove the concept works.

Once you’re making a few hundred dollars a month, then it’s time to start looking into additional affiliate networks and also checking your traffic to see if you qualify for ad revenue.

There are multiple ways to monetise a website. The more established website dip their toes into as many monetization streams as possible. Video ads, sponsored posts, email marketing, and selling digital ebooks are just a few you could incorporate.  

What platform/tools do you use for your websites?

There are a plethora of tools and plugins you can use to fast track your growth and success when buying and selling websites. These 5 are ones that I would recommend:

• AHREFS – For competition analysis, Site auditing, Keyword research, and a variety of other incredible tools. 
• HUNTER – For outreach and obtaining and verifying email prospects and link targets. 
• TOTAL UPKEEP – For website backup and security. 
• WP ROCKET – For website speed and optimisation 
• AAWP – For quick and easy amazon comparison tables 

What is your philosophy or strategy when it comes to link building?

Link building is the hardest part of any successful campaign. It’s one of the most critical growth metrics and is very often done incorrectly. It’s difficult and very time-consuming and even when done correctly can still be very expensive and eat into a large budget.

There are a variety of services that will build links for you and these services offer a wide variety of things.

However, my advice is to try to build links yourself first to understand the process. Only once you have some experience in what it takes to build a single link, will you understand if or why it’s worth paying someone else to.

The key to link building is correct prospecting and fine-tuning an outreach process that allows you to stand out from all the noise in the inbox.

The most creative link builders have an airtight strategy for each niche. Each website is unique to that campaign. 

I do 80% of my link building myself and pay an outreach manager to do the rest. I also pay for a VA to “clean up” my inbox and only leave in up to date and relevant link prospects.  

Advice for other online entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out in website investing?

Making money online by flipping website is a long, tiring process that sometimes doesn’t bear any fruit. It’s riddled with traffic fluctuations, site’s crashing, hosting issues, affiliate terms changing, revenue instability, and dealing with large teams who may not always follow precise instructions. 

On top of that, you are constantly in competition with other website owners who are working diligently to knock you off the top SERP positions and steal your revenue away. 

It can sometimes be a daunting task where the odds are stacked against you, especially in highly competitive niches (ever tried to build a website from scratch in the hosting niche! OUCH!)

With that said, with the right strategy, the right team, and a realistic exit plan, buying, growing, and selling websites have a huge potential, and as an industry, it’s only getting started.

It’s a young asset class, and more and more investment firms are entering the space to take advantage of the growing ROI’s

My advice will always be to start out slow, build one project from the ground up, make a ton of mistakes, and then iterate and solve problems as you go along. This is a practical way to learn the industry while keeping your risk level low. 

Sign up for a few free (or paid) courses and video courses and find a mentor. This will fast track your success and enable you to learn from other people’s mistakes, which will shortcut your learning curve and increase your chances of more revenue faster. 

Mo is offering a site operator service for anyone interested in a hands-off investment to building their affiliate business.

This operator service is perfect for an investor who has picked up a website and is looking for a passive income investment and a great fit for a website portfolio owner who doesn’t have the time to scale up 1 or more of their businesses. 

For a set fee the website operator service includes: 

• Hands off Project Management 
• Full On-Site SEO, including a full site audit. 
• Full content audit and additional Keyword research, 
• Finding Content, Formatting & Adding content 
• Finding reputable links agency or webmasters & Ordering it 
• Theme, Plugin & Site speed optimization 
• Overall site maintenance & monitoring
• Full Scalability and growth plans
• CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) across all high traffic commercial & Info pages/posts.
• Premium Content & Premium Links (included with the premium package – please inquire for more details

For more information please contact Mo here:

Email: [email protected]

Messenger: https://www.facebook.com/mo.mullah.77