Lessons Learned from 175 Website Flips: Mushfiq’s Easy Win Strategies for 10x Growth
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Mushfiq S. is a name I keep hearing more and more about. I've been aware of his work, but had never connected with Mushfiq until now.
Mushfiq is the owner of a popular website flipping newsletter and EasyWins.io. To date, he has completed over 175 website flips, whether buying, selling, or brokering website deals.
Even more impressive, he's done all of this while still holding a full-time job.
How did he manage to flip so many websites? He's created systematic processes of “easy wins”. These easy wins are tasks, or site improvements often overlooked but take relatively little time to complete and provide a big impact.
He then took the processes and bundled them into a resource you can purchase at EasyWins.io. It's not a course, but a growing database of 100+ strategic wins for website creators to 10X revenue and traffic
This week Mushfiq is giving Niche Pursuits readers $50 off. You can get EasyWins.io right here.
Get $50 Off EasyWins.io
100+ battle-tested strategies applied to 175 websites over 12 years to increase website valuations
- 100+ strategies and growing!
- Sort by category, impact, and effort required
- Lifetime updates
- Guaranteed impact or 100% money back
Watch the Entire Interview
How did Easy Wins get started?
Mushfiq started his first website as a college student in 2008. Then in 2010, he got an offer from an Australian company to buy his website.
At the time, Mushfiq didn't even know you could sell a website. This was just around the time Flippa and other website marketplace platforms were just getting started, and there wasn't a lot of information on website sales.
The sale of his first site netted him $25k. The company that purchased his site is now known as Slashdot Media, the company behind SourceForge and other popular brands.
As other college students were going into debt and working minimum wage jobs, Mushfiq got his first glimpse into website flipping and found his passion.
Mushfiq says browsing websites for sale on sites like Flippa and Motion Invest is almost like a hobby for him now. Whenever he has a little downtime, he finds himself scrolling website classified listings.
Website Flipping Examples
Mushfiq's website flipping hobby is paying off big time. In the last few years, he's been able to 10x a handful of sites.
Example #1: Outdoor Website
In April, he bought a site in the outdoor niche from Flippa for $23,000. At the time, the site was only making $300, about a 70x multiple. By just about any standards, this meant the website was notably overpriced.
As most people passed the site over as of the high asking price to revenue multiple, Mushfiq saw the potential.
The site was receiving over 100,000 views a month. Mushfiq knew it was under-monetized. In just a few short months after adding advertising and affiliate links and applying several of his other “easy wins”, the site began making $3,000 a month.
Ten times the original monthly sales, but he didn't stop there. Last month the site did $7k in monthly revenue.
I would maybe just chalk this up as good luck, but this wasn't the first time Mushfiqs has 10x revenues.
Example #2: Relationship and Dating Website
In 2019 Musfiq had similar results when he bought a relationship and dating website for $25,000. At the time, the site was making $1,000 per month with 30,000 pageviews. Again Mushfiq believed the site to be under-monetized and had plenty of potential. He was able to bring the site from making a mere $1,000 per month to over $8,000.
Using his systematic approach of applying his list of easy wins, he was able to quickly grow this site in less than a year.
What makes a good deal?
Mushfiq spends hours looking for great sites. He's says finding these opportunities for a 10x revenue flip typically only happens once per year. There are a few very particular things to look for to make this happen.
- Previous Owners.
Mushfiq loves to find amateur bloggers or hobbyists that are writing about their niche because they love it. People who start a passion blog have great content but lack the experience to generate significant revenue from their online presence. - Lots of traffic, low monetization
Low monetization can mean a lot of things, and different industries have different benchmarks. It could also mean other monetization channels, whether that be from advertising or affiliates. - Quick deals
Mushfiq prides himself in fast deals. If there is enough potential in the site, he's ready to strike a deal. Mushfiq won't spend much time negotiating. If he can get the deal done quickly and the opportunity is there, he is willing to pay the full asking price.
Mushfiq's Website Flipping Process
Each deal is held anywhere from 3 months to 1.5 years. Each site is different, but the operational aspects of Mushfiq's website flipping process have been boiled down into a few categories: growth, stabilization, and maintenance.
Growth:
As a developer, Mushfiq says he loves to work in sprints. Each time he purchases a new website, he will put together a sprint of easy wins to build momentum for the project.
The growth stage is when he is focused on income. This is where is putting in the changes to take the site from, say $300 to $3,000.
Stabilization:
At this stage, the focus is on infrastructure. Maybe a new website theme is needed, removing or adding plugins, site speed, or structuring keywords.
Maintenace:
Depending on whether he is planning for a quick flip or keeping the site in his portfolio, maintenance may look a little different, but ultimately at this stage, the goal is to look at page keywords, content, etc. Essentially he wants to keep doing the things that made it a great website in the first place.
Using EasyWins.io Strategies for OwnTheYard
Each phase will leverage different strategies found in the EasyWins database. To show exactly the type of strategies that are in the list, Mushfiq gave my site OwntheYard.com a quick audit and shared exactly what he would do to improve the site.
I knew there was room for improvement with my site, but what surprised me was just how quick and easy the suggestions Mushfiq suggested would be to implement.
These suggestions were things I could do once and be effective for the life of the website.
I've included just a few of the recommendations he provided. You can see all his recommendations with the Youtube video here.
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Sticky Side Bar Ad
I was already using Ezoic on my site and have been monetizing quite nicely this way, but Mushfiq shared a way that I could optimize to earn even more.
The sticky sidebar ad is one of the highest-earning ad placements. On a handful of my pages the sticky sidebar ad was not enable. By enabling I should instantly see a spike in revenue.
- Minimizing Featured Image
Above the fold is one of the most valuable places on the page. By reducing the large featured images to be smaller, I could get more content above the fold and provide a better user experience.Making featured images smaller would also result in more ads being shown higher up on the page, providing additional revenue.
Mushfiq also recommends using tools like Canva to add a customized logo or making the images unique as he's seen a better performance than when using custom vs stock photos.
- Adding Link Text
I used the AAWP plugin and the AmaLinks Pro plugin to push traffic to my Amazon affiliate links, but one area that I wasn't linking was the link text.A quick, easy win would be to add link text when mentioning products and brands. Both text and image links are high converting links. By adding the link text we should see a significant increase in the number of on-page clicks.
- Replace Amazon Native Ads
At the end of many pages, I include a “Shop Related Products” option using Amazon's native shopping widget.Historically this native shopping widget provides low conversions. Mushfiq's recommendation was to replace the native ad with AAWP product comparison or telling the readers my best product suggestion at the end of the article as a call to action.
Implementing EasyWins.io
Anytime I start thinking about optimizing my sites, I start feeling overwhelmed. Owntheyard.com has over 500 pages. Optimizing feels like a never-ending task.
Mushfiq recommends only looking at the top 10 revenue pages or pages with significant traffic, and the suggestions like updating the themes featured image position would only have to be done once and implemented across the site.
Mushfiq also sees some of his Easywins.io customers leverage the database of strategies to provide the list to a virtual assistant to complete the tasks.
These just scratched the surface of the strategies Mushfiq and EasyWins.io have to offer. There are over 100 and the list keeps growing.
You can check out EasyWins with the NichePursuits link here!
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