In the midst of the economic depression, while traditional real estate was plummeting in value, School-Grants.org sold for $80,000 on Flippa.com, even though it did a lot of things wrong. In this case study, we’ll break down why this tiny site was able to pull so much for a sale price, and we’ll examine how you can duplicate the results by providing valuable assets to investors.

Note: the seller of this site, Cary Bergeron, reveals some secrets behind this successful site sale inside of Lump Sum Profits.

It should be noted that the website had only 61 pages indexed by Google – that’s $1,311.48 per web page – and it sold no products of it’s own. It was paying for zero advertising, and the site was not effectively building a list. And the site was downright ugly. In other words, School-Grants.org was not scaled to its full potential, and it settled for what it could get on an auction site.

Most importantly, while the had a decent income, it was only through Google Ads, which is by no means the most profitable way to monetize a site. The customer list was not being mailed with opportunities to buy anything, nor was the site selling links or running any form of advertising apart from Google Ads.

While the site doesn’t appear to be anything special, the webmaster did several things right that resulted in his big payday:

1) The website was in a large, buying market. School grants have hungry searchers, which means return visitors and people who seriously research the information on the site (and likely clicked around on advertisers’ links). Advertisers pay a lot of money to attract these type of searchers in the grants niche.

2) The webmaster picked a monetization strategy and milked it. Even though Adsense is far from the best (or most profitable) way to make money from your website, he found a way that worked for him and maximized it.

3) The site had steady, consistent traffic (and a lot of it!). This particular site receives its traffic from its search engine rankings, but all that really matters is that the traffic is targeted, steady and heavy. Some people buy their traffic, others use articles, some use Google traffic – it all works as long as it’s consistent and attracts the right type of visitor.

4) The seller listed the site for auction, rather than as a private sale. Without the auction format, buyers would not have been stretched to increase their bids, and it would not have received the competitive bids that it did.

Steady traffic, a large niche, and even steady income is not enough to fork out twenty-two times monthly revenue, though. So when School-Grants.org is valued “as-is” (assuming no work is done to the site), the seller got far more than what is standard. However, the site could have sold for even more if sold offline instead of on an online auction.

Therefore, what was it about this site that commanded twenty-two times its monthly revenue?

If our assessment is correct, the buyer valued it so highly because the site was vastly undermonetized. In other words, the shortcuts that the seller took actually worked to his advantage, because other investors saw the potential in the website.

From an eTycoon analysis, School-Grants.org was a “Tycoon site,” because it was making well over $1,000 a month and getting consistent traffic, but it was being monetized like a Snowball Site.

The revenue and profit point to it being a site that you’d like to hold onto, but the owner was not using it to its full potential. This is likely why the buyer found it worthwhile to pay the full BIN price of $80,000.

Click here to learn how to build and sell sites just like this one…

For example, the seller explains that an attempt was made to use affiliate links to further monetize the site, and they were bringing in additional revenue, but “in the end [I] didn’t want to spend the time messing with it.” This is an obvious sign that there is revenue to be captured, because there are many affiliate programs that pay large amounts for leads, clicks, and sales into scholarship programs.

The best way to capitalize upon this would be to bolster the existing newsletter and promote affiliate offers to the subscribers. As it stands, there is no lead magnet encouraging people to sign up for the site, and conversions would be much higher if there was a free report or video that explained some “secret” to getting scholarship grants.

Apart from including a lead magnet to encourage people to opt into the newsletter, it’s clear that no testing has been done to the design or location of the newsletter. The webmaster could move the opt-in to the top right of the page, include a lead magnet, and make it stand out, and this would instantly double or (probably) triple the opt-in rate without losing any advertising clicks (assuming that the thank you page redirected back to the homepage).

Even without a lead magnet, the site is getting ten to twenty opt-ins per day, but that could be tripled with some simple marketing. Promoting affiliate offers to those subscribers could double the existing revenue overnight.

While the new webmaster would do well to focus on building the list and marketing affiliate offers on the backend, the advertising revenue can be boosted if he or she preferred to stick purely to an advertising model.

Renting banner adspace to private advertisers is significantly more profitable than it is to run Adsense, because Google takes a large cut. The new owner could instantly increase the advertising revenue by contacting Adsense advertisers in the school grants niche and offer to let them advertise on the site for less than what Google is charging. Since Google takes about 50% of Adsense revenue, there will be plenty of wiggle room.

If the site owner was dead set on advertising with Google Adsense, he or she could design the site to encourage more clicks. Right now, the advertisements scream, “Advertisement! Do not click me!” Tying the ads into the content of the site would be more effective.

The site can also sell text links in the footer, run ads on the blog (which is completely unmonetized), and redesign the site to keep people on the site longer.

$80,000 is a lot to pay for just about any website, especially when that makes up twenty-two times its monthly revenue. But the buyer of this website did a very smart thing: when recognizing that the site was extremely undermonetized, he grabbed it for the full Buy-It-Now price.

If the new webmaster starts selling ads privately and redesigns the site to encourage subscribers, and when he or she begins promoting affiliate offers, the revenue of the site will quickly triple, and the price that he paid will look like a steal.

While this site has already sold, truly incredible deals appear on auction sites all the time. Furthermore, they can be built and sold for huge lump sum profits. Learn how to make huge paydays selling these tiny websites inside of Lump Sum Profits.