How to Purchase a Website and Grow it to $10k/month [Case Study]

📝 How We Grew a Website to Make Just Under $10,000 a Month: A Case Study

Are you interested in learning how to grow a website to make five figures a month? In this article, we'll share the tactics and strategies we used to grow a website that we purchased and grew from making just about $2,000 a month to making just under $10,000 a month. We'll cover everything from the technical repairs we made to the site to the content plan we used to build topical authority.

📋 Table of Contents

- Background on the Website

- Technical Site Repairs

- Content Plan and Building Topical Authority

- Diversifying Revenue Streams

- Sticking with It: The Importance of Patience and Persistence

Background on the Website

We purchased the website at the beginning of 2021. At the time, it was making around $2,000 a month, mostly through direct ad sales to vendors in the niche. The website had been around since the mid-2000s and had a great backlink profile, but the content had atrophied and become out of date, causing rankings to slip. The site was a mid-DR50, but it had a lot of technical debt that needed to be addressed.

Technical Site Repairs

We started this project with a comprehensive site audit and a strategic content plan. The site audit yielded a lot of mistakes and problems with the way the website was set up. We needed to properly canonicalize the HTTP and HTTPS versions of the site, remove redirect chains, remove links to 404 pages, and add titles and meta descriptions. We also had a lot of cleanup to do on articles that did not rank. The hosting was with a poor host and was throwing off a lot of 500 errors, so we made changes in the host scene right away and went with a good hosting plan. We changed the navigation in the menu to improve the crawl depth and make it so that Google could crawl the pages that we wanted to rank. We added categories that we strategically planned so that content was put in a category that made sense for the type of article that it was. We added an SEO plugin, Rank Math, and updated the footer, privacy policy pages, disclaimers, and about page.

Content Plan and Building Topical Authority

We deleted over 3,000 articles that were not receiving any organic traffic and updated 54 articles. We published over 400 new articles to get us to this point, focusing on building topical authority by publishing lots of highly relevant and high-quality content. We identified specific topical silos that we wanted to rank for and set out to write all the content in each silo, going one silo at a time. We also diversified our revenue streams by adding Amazon Affiliates, other affiliate programs, and ad Thrive.

Diversifying Revenue Streams

We inherited the site when we bought it, and it was getting money from direct ad sales. We added Amazon Affiliates and other affiliate programs, ad Thrive, and built out the email list. We sold to the email list with a course we purchased and launched several ebooks. In the end, none of these were making over half of the revenue, but all of them were contributing in some way or shape.

Sticking with It: The Importance of Patience and Persistence

We stuck with it, even when growth was slow. It took almost two years before this site started having that hockey stick growth that you want when you purchase a website. We had to continually reevaluate things, stick with it, and keep digging our heels in and going forward.

🎉 Highlights

- Purchased a website making $2,000 a month and grew it to making just under $10,000 a month

- Conducted a comprehensive site audit and a strategic content plan

- Deleted over 3,000 articles that were not receiving any organic traffic and updated 54 articles

- Published over 400 new articles to build topical authority

- Diversified revenue streams by adding Amazon Affiliates, other affiliate programs, ad Thrive, and building out the email list

- Stuck with it, even when growth was slow

🙋‍♀️ FAQ

Q: How long did it take to grow the website to making just under $10,000 a month?

A: It took almost two years before this site started having that hockey stick growth that you want when you purchase a website.

Q: How did you build topical authority?

A: We identified specific topical silos that we wanted to rank for and set out to write all the content in each silo, going one silo at a time.

Q: How did you diversify your revenue streams?

A: We added Amazon Affiliates, other affiliate programs, ad Thrive, and built out the email list. We sold to the email list with a course we purchased and launched several ebooks.

Q: What was the most important factor in growing the website?

A: Sticking with it, even when growth was slow. We had to continually reevaluate things, stick with it, and keep digging our heels in and going forward.

Resources:

- [Kinsta](https://kinsta.com/)

- [Cloudways](https://www.cloudways.com/)

- [Rank Math](https://rankmath.com/)

- [Ad Thrive](https://www.adthrive.com/)

- [Low Fruits](https://lowfruits.io/)

- [Ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com/)

- [VOC AI Chatbot](https://www.voc.ai/product/ai-chatbot)