How to Grow a Website from No Traffic to $100,000 Valuation In Just 4 Months With Expired Domains

The team over at Niche Website Builders has an exciting expired domain case study to share with us this week.

They reveal how they took one of their client's sites from nothing to possibly being worth over $100,000 in only 4 months. The secret? A big investment in expired domains and content – plus great strategy.

Adam and Mark from Niche Website Builders share how they do it below.

Expired Domain Case Study

This example is a Niche Website Builders client website and as such, we can’t reveal the URL. However, we will talk about the process and share the results.

These screenshots from Google Analytics show what we were able to achieve in a short period of time.

This site was built on a powerful expired domain, and we also sourced and redirected 3 other powerful expired domains to the site (learn how to find expired domains here).

We added content very aggressively to this website.

We have another 100,000 words scheduled for June 2021 – so you can see, the owner isn’t taking his foot off the gas.

The site has just been accepted into MediaVine and is expected to generate over $3,000 per month once live.

Here is more about the process we used to achieve this incredible growth.

Keyword Research

We used our propriety keyword research methods for this site (the same methods we use for all client sites).

Our approach involved 2 methods: competitor imitation and using FAQ question-based keywords.

For competitor imitation, we are essentially looking for websites:

• in the same space
• that have a weaker domain than our client
• are doing a standout job of generating organic traffic

Here is an example of a competing site's metrics in Ahrefs compared with our client's site.

Once we have identified the target site, we reverse engineer their top content – structure, H-tags, word count, etc., and create a piece of content that is similar.

For our FAQ research, we extract “entities” from Google's NLP algorithm from the competitor and then mine thousands of “people also asked” questions.

These are then clustered together and supporting content is created.

Site Structure

One of the most important aspects to consider when building a site is structure.

This can be broken down into:

• Homepage layout
• Category page structure
• Menu structure

We want to ensure that our click depth is low (ideally 2/3 max). This means no post is more than 2 or 3 clicks from the homepage.

We achieve this by linking to the category pages on the homepage (great for passing expired domain juice through), and by using custom category pages with no pagination.

When working with an expired domain, you also want to either recreate or redirect any old content that has valuable links.

This is to maintain the link juice, and to not to show a 404 error if the linking sites ever did a broken link report.

Redirecting Expired Domains

As already stated, we built the site on a powerful expired domain.

In late December (a few weeks after launch), we sourced and acquired 2 additional expired domains that were highly relevant to 2 of the main categories. You can see the number of referring domains shoot up quickly as the Ahrefs crawler discovers them.

Rather than redirect them to the homepage, we created a 5,000+ word skyscraper piece of content that covers the category subject broadly. Throughout this content, we added tons of internal links to posts within the target category.

The domains were redirected via Cloudflare to the skyscraper pieces. To help with legitimacy, the client also issued a press release announcing they had acquired the domains.

We have just acquired another powerful domain and will be doing the exact same thing again.

ROI

Here's what the client has spent to get the site to its current level.

• Domains (primary domain + redirected domains) – $24,000
• Content (500,000 words – only 400,00 currently live) – $30,000

The total spend has been $54,000.

MediaVine is about to go live with expected monthly revenue of $3,000+.

Assuming the earnings to be $3,000 at a minimum, the asset value is between $90,000 and $105,000 (at a 30 – 35x multiple).

This means the client is ROI positive within 4 months. There’s plenty of upsides still to come based on the 100,000 words published this month and another 100,000 due to go live in June.

Factor into this the ongoing monthly income going forward and this has turned into a very tidy asset with ongoing growth expected without additional spending.

Future plans?

We are continuing to add content to this site aggressively and plan to take traffic to a similar level as our imitation competitor.

Who Are Niche Website Builders?

Niche Website Builders was a content agency run by Adam and Mark.

They had been building and managing their own 6 figure portfolios for a number of years before launching their agency in 2020. Within 15 months they scaled to produce over 4 million words of client content every month.

They offered a number of services including monthly content subscriptions, one-off bulk content (like the packages used for the site above), done-for-you sites (on both fresh and expired domains), and link building.

If you want to learn more about what they did, you can read our Niche Website Builder review or listen to this podcast episode on content creation and link building.

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