2018 has kicked off with a bang and leading website investors Liz and Matt Raad have two high-value types of websites that they’re firmly focussed on this year to build and grow their online portfolio of assets.
Hi everyone, it’s Matt and Liz Raad here, and what we want to do today is quickly talk about our Top Website Picks for 2018.
In particular, what Liz and I are going to be looking at ourselves, and hopefully you’ll get a great insight into the sites that we love buying!
So, 2018, this is a boom year for tech. I’m sure you’ve heard in the media, there is a lot going on in the tech world and we’ve got a lot of growth – there are some big opportunities coming up to build your passive portfolio massively.
And for us, our focus this year is going to be on buying leveraged incomes. By that, we mean both in time – buying website assets that don’t take us a lot of time to manage and create that income; and also in money, as there’s been a big rise in website evaluations and we can still buy websites and get a great return on our money.
One of the other trends that’s coming up and why we’re so interested in these more passive sites is because valuations in passive sites are going up now, which means they are fantastic for a long-term buy-and-hold portfolio of websites.
So let’s have a look at the two types of websites that we’re going to be focussing on and that we think are the top picks for 2018.
Number #1 – the Amazon Affiliate Websites – now, Amazon is on an incredible growth trajectory at the moment. They have nailed it with fast delivery, especially in America – and remember we’re talking about investing in websites mainly in the US and not generally in Australia, although Amazon has recently launched here of course so there are some great opportunities as well – but we’re talking sites based in the US, where Amazon has incredibly fast delivery, within hours for a lot of their products; at competitive prices and they have captured a market with the use of Amazon Prime, which is like their membership club – where you get free delivery and lots of member benefits by being part of Amazon Prime. So that means they have got a really captured marketplace and people will prefer to shop on Amazon. That’s born out of the stats that they have approx. 44% of the total eCommerce or online retail sales – which is just incredible market share, just phenomenal.
What we saw happen last year in 2017 (it became very clear) that Amazon is the massive disrupter of the retail industry. So for Liz and I, we’re really interested in this, however, we don’t want to be working on these sites all the time, so what we look for is the Amazon Affiliate Websites.
What we do is we buy websites that review products that are listed on Amazon, so we don’t own Amazon eCommerce stores; we don’t own stock. We buy websites that talk about the products, that compare them and then we get commissions for any sales if someone clicks on these products on our website if someone buys something.
The very cool thing is that they don’t even need to buy the product that we’re reviewing. With the Amazon Affiliate program, you get paid a commission on pretty much all products that the person buys for the next 24 hours! Once they click on that link, it’s tracked through to Amazon and you get a commission for anything they buy in the next 24 hours. Now that’s a pretty cool commission structure and affiliate program!
Now, so you understand what we’re talking about, this is one that just sold on Flippa. It’s CuddlyHomeAdvisors dot com and they review furniture – so you can see recliners, bedroom furniture, kitchen furniture – and here’s an article about the best sleeper sofas and the best sofa bed reviews. And if you click down here, these are the Amazon links – so lets say they want to buy a sofa and they click through on that link but they end up buying something else, we’ll get paid a commission.
We didn’t have to have the stock; we didn’t have to have the product, we are simply sending people through to Amazon to buy. So all we’re doing is getting the person to click on that blue link, and I’m sure you’ve all seen these sorts of sites that review these products reviews. For us, these are beautiful passive sites that we don’t have to be working on them every day. All you have to do is put some content on there and get them to click on the link.
So, just to give you an idea, this one was making about $1,700 per month and it was bought for $27,000. So that’s about a 15x monthly price income which I think is a very good price there.
Now, the second #2 type of sites that we’re going to be looking this year is definitely the Adsense Websites – websites that are monetised with Google’s advertising program.
Basically, when we buy sites that are monetised with Adsense, we get to revenue-share with one of the world’s biggest companies – a big blue-chip company – and they are very highly valuable long-term passive assets.
All you have to do is keep up the content and we get paid for people who go to that website and click on an ad.
So, let’s give you an example of an Adsense website.
This is one that just recently sold on Flippa as well and it’s called German Shepherd World and you can see that it’s not a fancy website, it’s quite plain – but it’s about a topic that people are quite passionate about and that’s the niche places we like to go into… and you can see over on the right side of the page the Adsense – so if someone clicks on this ad, then the owner of the website will make money.
This is only a little one, but you can see it makes around $303 per month and was bought for $6,000 so that’s about a 20x return monthly, and in this market right now, Adsense websites are valued a bit higher and we’re happy to pay a 20x multiple for a good, solid website that’s got good consistent history – because we know that longterm that’s a valuable asset day-in-day-out that’s going to generate those returns – but more importantly, down the track, we can sell this easily if we want, and hopefully we’ll be selling this for a higher multiple as Adsense sites are always regarded very highly in the online space.
So there you go… these are our top website picks for 2018 that we’re going to be focussing on this year, and we would love to wish you all a very prosperous 2018… it’s an exciting time to be taking action and building your digital portfolio of assets… we believe that the valuations of those are going to rise and we’ve got a phenomenal opportunity right now… it’s one of those rare moments in history where we as individuals that we can own these incredible portfolios of assets.
So get into it guys and we look forward to speaking with you soon!