I Sold a Starter Site For $2k. Here’s Exactly What I Did!

One of my goals for the year was to sell 2 blogs for $50k. That didn’t happen because I did 0 work on either of the sites, BUT I did sell one for $2k USD.

Now that might not seem like a lot. You’ll find people on Twitter hyping their $250k sale.

But this was a site with 12 posts getting 1,700 pageviews per month with a DA of 2, making $0.

The whole site flipping thing was and still is very new to me, so I want to share the steps I followed and what I learned along the way.

I am definitely not a site flipping expert. You won’t catch me on Twitter suddenly selling a site flipping course or launching a marketplace to sell sites. And I’m also not gonna help y’all sell your sites by promoting them to my list – sorry!

I’m going to teach you what I know now and leave it to the actual site flipping experts to help you do flip those $50k+ sites. I know my lane and I’m sticking to it.

About the Site

Niche: Mocktails

DA: 2

Domain Age: Purchased a new domain in June 2022.

Posts: 12 (3 zero volume, 9 recipes. 50% original images, 50% AI images)

Earnings: $0 – Not Monetized

Monthly Pageviews: 1,700 in 30 days and trending up significantly. It was at 1.1k when I first listed the site for sale but get to 1.7k before I even started sharing the domain with interested buyers!

I was really excited to start this site, to be honest.

Not only is the recipe niche known for its amazing RPMs (and ads are my favourite way to monetize, even if they’re not my highest earner on any of my current sites), but I’m actually a certified bartender. And since I don’t drink anymore, I do often make mocktails.

However, I started the site because of shiny object syndrome and a membership I now know was the biggest waste of money ever. But the membership hyped domain hoarding and site flipping, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

via GIPHY

Why I Sold the Blog

I didn’t have the time to run it, and although I tried to find a recipe developer to take over for me, none of my hiring attempts worked.

So I gave up on it and let it languish with 5 posts until 2 weeks before the sale when I uploaded another 7 in a couple nights.

With my minimal attention and 0 backlinks, the site is already ranking in the top 10 for most of the keywords I wrote for and is getting picked up by the recipe carousel on Google for more general recipes, too.

I’m sure I could have grown it to 50k sessions decently easily, but I just don’t have the time and the guilt was eating me up inside.

How I Sold The Site

I was venting to my friend Tae of The Freelance Hustle about how annoying I am with all these sites I never work on, and she recommended I try listing it to my audience.

Tae has a ton of experience flipping sites and builds amazing starter sites, so I knew to shut up and listen to her expertise. (You can get her expertise in this blog post.)

I created a Facebook post in my free group and a Tweet about the site sharing the niche (at first I said “drinks” but realized it was too vague so I got more specific), the number of posts, and the traffic with GSC and GA screenshots:

I got some inquiries but most people upon finding out it wasn’t a cocktail site said no. Ergo, I added in that it’s mocktail specific.

I also tried to sweeten the pot by offering $100 for anyone who connected me with a buyer. I figured I’d rather give the money to one of my audience members than spend it on ads or broker fees – which I didn’t think I could do since the site wasn’t monetized yet.

I was sending an email a couple days later anyway, so I added in a PS about the sale – and that’s what cinched it.

The Technical Details

How I Got Paid for the Sale

This isn’t the typical way you’d deal with escrow for a site sale, but I set up a Thrivecart sales page where I gave details about the course and the first person who wanted to take it could buy it.

The buyer did email me first and we chatted a bit before they paid for the site.

My understanding is that usually the money wouldn’t be transferred over until the site was partially sent over, or it’d be put in escrow with a broker while the transfer was completed.

I think that makes sense if it’s a 5 figure or more deal, but for $2k, this was really easy.

How I Transferred the Site Over

Tae came to the rescue again and gave me some tips.

Step 1: Remove myself from the site (in name, not in accounts).

I only had my name on the About page and the Homepage in 1 sentence, so I just swapped it out with an alias. (Yes, I could have done this before listing it.)

Step 2: Add new owner to all accounts.

I added the buyer as an “owner” of the Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts. This also allowed them to verify all the data.

If you’re selling a site for $10k+, the buyer may want to deep dive more into these before buying an I was prepared to give viewer access if people had asked, but no one ever did.

I also added the buyer as an owner on the site and changed the Pinterest account’s email to theirs (it had 1 click in its history, but since it was branded with the name, I wanted to ensure they had access if they wanted to use it).

Step 3: Backup the site with Updraft.

I took a backup of the site and stored it in a Google Drive that I gave the new owner access to.

Since I wasn’t transferring the hosting account, I have to migrate the site to them and since they planned to use a different host, this was the easiest method.

They then just had to import the backup to their site, and bam it was migrated over.

You can also send a .zip of the wp-content file depending on the host they’re going to use.

And if you plan to use the same host, they’ll often help with the transfer between the two accounts.

Step 4: Transfer the Domain and redirect Nameservers

This was the most “technical” part of the process.

Since the buyer was going to use the same domain host I used for this site, I was able to “change ownership” of the domain within the system. Then they just had to point the nameservers to their new version of the site.

But if we’d had separate hosts, we would have needed to unlock the domain and transfer it to the new domain host as well.

I’m glad we didn’t have to cause after migrating two of my domains to a new provider earlier this year, I’ve realized I hate domain tech.

Step 5: Delete My Content

Now that they have their version of the site and the nameservers are directed to that one, I can delete my copy of it so it’s all theirs.

I also delete my access to the site (we changed the admin account to their email), and removed my GA and GSC access.

How I Sweetened the Pot

Now, $2k is considered high – which many people on Twitter felt the need to tell me time and time again – for a site that’s not monetized with only 12 articles.

I’ve seen sites listed on site flipping marketplaces for $1k USD with 50+ articles making a few dollars a month!

So how did I manage this “high” price?

Simple: I sweetened the pot.

I had already mapped out a year’s worth of content for the site that I just hadn’t had time to actually write yet. I’d even organized the topic clusters and had themed content for seasons.

It cost me absolutely nothing to throw that in, but considering I’d usually charge $400 for 10 keywords and I gave them 100, that’s $4k value thrown in for free.

I also gave them a tutorial on how to generate AI images for each recipe.

I’m terrible at photography so while I tried to include some original images and even bought some original ones a couple times to spruce up the site, I used AI images for most of the featured images and recipe cards.

I also taught them how to create AI recipes if they want, although the ones on the site were originals I’d created.

I definitely think these two things coupled with the fact that this was an email subscriber who was already in my sphere, knew my expertise and that I’d have set up a legitimately solid foundation for the site, and that I’d already gotten the site ranking so well so quickly upped the price.

I’m sure y’all want to know what market rate would have been for the site otherwise.

Honestly, I’m not sure.

Most sites are valued at a 30-40x multiple (average income from the last 6 months * 30).

But starter sites like this (I call them “baby” sites but that caused confusion from people thinking it was a parenting site. …y’all I’m actively afraid of children. I would not start a site about babies. It’s just a term I learned from that membership I took that unfortunately stuck in my brain) have no income to do that calculation.

I’ve seen people sell them for $200 to $4k before, so it really depends.

My Profit

Let’s be real, revenue doesn’t matter nearly as much as profit.

So let’s calculate it:

Hosting: Free (I already had unlimited hosting with Lyrical by the time I created this site so it technically didn’t cost anything to host)

Domain: $20 (It was $23.92 CAD, so I’m doing a high exchange rate just in case. But it looks like it was closer to $18)

Theme: $0

Plugins: $0 (I used a couple Shortpixel credits but I’d already bought those. And it was less than the free monthly amount would have been. I also already had the 5 site license for Link Whisper for my 4 other sites so kinda free.)

Content: $100 (I bought two packs of photos from a VA in a Facebook group)

AI Writers: Free (I used my existing ChatGPT 4 account. It would have been $20/mo otherwise, but based on usage divided by my sites it would be about $0.05 for 2 months for this site so not worth including)

Time: I didn’t calculate the hours, but considering I wrote 5 recipes in about 3 hours, I’d say about 2x 8 hour days on this site in its history would be very liberal.

Profit = $1,880

Hourly Rate = $117.50

Not a bad return for a shiny object!

How Can You Do the Same?

Honestly, I’m not sure you can.

I definitely leveraged my skills, experience and audience to make this happen and I’m very fortunate to be able to do that.

A true beginner isn’t going to be able to magically create starter sites that are well branded, have a clear audience, and have a proper keyword plan.

And more experienced bloggers don’t always have an audience of bloggers to sell to.

Option 1: Leverage your audience

I’d suggest that if you’re interested in selling a site for any price, you do try offering it to whatever audience you already have first. Digital Nomad Wannabe did this last year when she was offloading some starter sites.

I’d start with your email list, especially if it’s the list of that site (although you do risk alienating readers who may not want to stick around if you sell), or to a site in a similar niche.

Option 2: Facebook groups

You can also check out Facebook groups. There are so many flipping or “blog for sale” type groups out there.

I don’t know how well they work though, because it seems like a lot of spam gets put up.

If you’re on a premium ad network like Raptive, I’ve seen a lot of people listing their sites for sale in the Facebook group. Most of them are monetized with Raptive though, so I think this is a mid-premium site option.

Option 3: Blog brokers and marketplaces

There are plenty of blog brokers out there, but I’ve never worked with any myself.

I’ve heard the best things about Motion Invest, but I believe The Website Flip is also a good option. Flippa gets not so great reviews, but it does seem to accept more low-priced sites.

Option 4: Referral reward

You could also do what I did and offer a referral reward if anyone helps promote the listing and gets you a sale. I ended up selling direct in the end, but I did get lots of retweets because of it and Matt Merrick kindly shared it with his newsletter (thanks Matt!).

To sell, you’ll need to get the site generating some traffic. I did so with SEO!

Will I Sell Again?

Yes! I have 4 sites still in my portfolio and my goal is to get down to 3 (ideally 2, but I’m not sure if I’m ready to part with 1 quite yet) in the next 12 months.

My goal is to profit $50k USD for the sale (so sell for $60k). I anticipate it needing to earn $2k a month for this to happen since it’s a hyper specific niche that may be harder to sell.

I’ve decided to document the process of growing the site for the sale on my Youtube channel in a brand new series. Check out the first episode here!

Read More About Monetizing Your Blog

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• How I Made $110k in a Month in June 2023 👀
• 19 Best Ad Networks for Bloggers to Make 6 Figures
• How to Make $6k on a Digital Product Flash Sale
• I Sold a Starter Site For $2k. Here’s Exactly What I Did!
• How to Use Link Whisper to Increase Affiliate Conversions
• Selling Digital Products with Email Marketing for Beginners ft. Kate Doster
• Growing a Niche Site to $50k Series
• How to Make Your First $10 From Affiliate Sales in 7 Steps
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