We bought a website called thacash.com from the Flippa marketplace.
The website purchase on Flippa included the domain and the affiliate website hosted on that domain.
Plus, not included in the Flippa listing but valuable nonetheless, we learned a ton about evaluating and buying an affiliate website on Flippa.
The experience required:
research and analysis
live negotiating
problem solving
risk taking
and more things that only become comfortable with experience
Read below to learn more about the Flippa website we bought and lookout for upcoming newsletter articles about it, too.
At the bottom of the article is a link to the YouTube video we made showing what thacash.com looked like the month before we bought it.
Domain and Affiliate Website From Flippa
We bought a domain and affiliate website from an independent seller on Flippa.com.
The seller is an internet marketing professional who builds and runs affiliate sites and was looking to sell this property.
What is Flippa?
Flippa is an online marketplace for buying and selling websites. Someone who owns a website can list it for sale on Flippa and anyone can be a buyer.
You can buy and sell domains, affiliate websites, SaaS businesses, and really another other kind of online property or business.
SaaS stands for software-as-a-service. Netflix is an example. It sells software for watching licensed videos on demand.
Most of the Flippa website listings are for a domain plus the website linked to that domain. Though not all Flippa website listings are the same, so read the descriptions carefully.
The Flippa websites span a wide-range of business strategies. Some are content sites, like an online magazine with product reviews and informational articles around one or two topics.
Others are drop-shipping businesses. Those businesses sell products. Not all drop-shipping strategies are the same, but that is the general concept.
The Flippa websites for sale also include SaaS businesses and combinations of these money strategies.
What did we buy?
We bought a domain plus content website using an affiliate strategy.
Domain
A domain is the address for your website. For instance, the domain for Google is google.com. Essentially, a domain name is alphanumeric and goes in browser's address bar.
The domain included in our purchase is thacash.com. That includes all subdomains, too. For instance, newsletter.thacash.com is a subdomain.
Affiliate Website
With the domain, we got the affiliate website that was then-linked to the domain.
The main components of the Flippa affiliate website we purchased consisted of WordPress website building software, 50+ published and draft articles, and images.
Generally speaking, affiliate websites make money through commission-based advertising.
An affiliate website contains articles with links in them that take the reader to someone else’s product page. If the reader clicks the link and buys the product, the affiliate website gets a cash bonus or percentage of the sale.
Here is a real example.
Try Cash App using my code ZFNRMXP, and we’ll both get $5 when you link a new bank account or activate a Cash Card (people under 18 only) and send $5!
To become an affiliate, first the products you want to sell have to have online affiliate programs or applications that you can sign up for.
So if you want to sell Titleist golf balls as an affiliate, first you need to make sure they have an affiliate program.
If they do, usually you just visit the product page’s affiliate program website and sign up.
Try it. For Cash App, all users are basically signed up as affiliates because we all have a referral code.
Download Cash App and get your code. You can find it when you try to refer a friend from within the app. Your code will be in the text message to that friend. Just copy it.
Another example of an affiliate program is DraftKings. You can go to their website and apply to become an affiliate.
If accepted, they give you affiliate links. The link has an id in it that is unique to your DraftKings account so that DraftKings knows when you make a sale.
Instead of a cash bonus, as a DraftKings affiliate you get a percentage of the referring sales you make.
Affiliate Strategy
The topics of the articles on thacash.com at the time of our Flippa website purchase were money products, sports betting, entertainment, CBD, and investing.
Its most-popular article was a money product review of the Cash App. The Cash App is a popular money transfer application.
In addition to sending and receiving money from family and friends, the Cash App also has other financial functionality, like banking, investing, and buying bitcoin.
The article explained what the app is and how to use it. The made money by promoting a coupon code like above.
Anytime someone used the coupon code to sign up, thacash.com earned $5 or $10.
The Flippa website sale did not include the affiliate accounts. We had to apply for our own and replace the existing links in the affiliate site with our links.
For the Cash App, our coupon code is ZFNRMXP. 😉 Use it and we can both earn some cash.
thacash Flippa Website Listing
After years of on-again-off-again browsing on Flippa and similar online marketplaces, in the fall of 2021, we decided to buy one.
We began studying listings and contacting sellers.
Within the price range of $4,000 to $20,000 listings, we contacted somewhere between 10 and 30 sellers with content, drop-shipping, or SaaS listings.
We were primarily looking for a listing with existing traffic or the potential for it in an area that would fit in with our interests.
Anything else we considered bonus.
The domain thacash.com at the time of purchase had the potential for lots of traffic. Here are some reasons why:
it is an aged-domain — good for appearing high in Google’s search results
past traffic was good — it was getting thousands of visitors per month
homepage has good page authority (PA) — a score for predicting how well a specific page will rank on search engines
it had a decent domain authority — similar to PA but for the entire domain
the domain was short, easy to remember, and contained the word cash — on point for marketing a money club
ranked high for keywords we liked — the keywords were around money products, sports betting, and related topics — things that would draw an audience that we could create for
the seller is a professional SEO and affiliate website marketer — should only help stack the odds in our favor, right?
The actual traffic at the time of purchase was very low for an affiliate website. We are talking hundreds of visitors per month, not thousands or tens of thousands.
So this purchase was more based on potential than actual traffic.
Flippa Website thacash.com: December 2021
Check out the video we made showing what the website looked like when we bought it.
The next article will focus on our post-purchase reaction in the two weeks following our takeover of the domain and affiliate website.
Stay subscribed to our newsletter to learn more about our purchase of thacash.com as we document our activities of buying and remodeling the site.
Plus, our newsletter has other money topics you will like.