[Expired Domain Case Study] $0 to $15000 Exit in 6 months - Body Building Supplements

Learn how a $27 expired domain in the body building supplements & steroids niche sold for $15000 in under 6 months.

I like creating websites. I’ve been doing this for the last 10 years for an agency that I ran until 2022. 

Building expired domains has been one amazing ride, I’ve sold multiple websites built on expired domains by restoring, ranking and generating revenue from them.

The most amazing aspect is this: 

If you have a site that generates $100 a month, it’s valued at around $2400-$6000, depending on many factors:

1. How competitive is the niche
2. How much effort would it take for the buyer to increase the revenue in coming months
3. Are there any obvious (simple) steps that can be taken to substantially increase the revenue post purchase
4. Links acquired on the domain
5. Estibot.com value of the domain

Just to name a few. That means you get the revenue that the site would have generated in the next couple years or more, right now.

Enter: Expired domains. Now imagine being able to get your site indexed, ranked and generating revenue in under 6 months!

This post walks you through:

1. Process of finding an expired domain that was bought from godaddy auctions for $27
2. What we did to restore the site and avoid any legal issues
3. How our content strategy, site structure, pagespeed and publishing velocity helped gain rankings quickly.
4. Tools used throughout the process
5. Affiliate programs used to monetise the site
6. Finding a buyer
7. Completing the deal

Let’s start!

Finding an expired domain

For this particular site, we were not looking for a specific niche, but wanted the most chances of success.

Key factors to consider when buying expired domains

To find an expired domain that will start getting traffic soon after you buy it, keep these key factors in mind:

1. Find an expired domain with recent traffic If it had traffic 2-3 months before it expired, great. You can use SEMRush or Ahrefs to scout domains for traffic.
2. Check if the backlinks are good and relevant. Avoid sites with profile links, web 2.0 or link directories. Lower DR, number of links and relevance is better than higher DR, more links and irrelevance.
3. Check archive.org to see if the domain had any history of abuse.

Now that we know what we are looking for, let’s get into how to find these domains.

How to shortlist expired domains using expireddomains.net

Expireddomains.net is an online service that keeps track of all dropping domains. Over 200000 domains drop everyday! Oh and also, it’s free to use. There are paid alternatives available as well such as domcop.com, spamzilla.com and freshdrop.net if you would like more bells and whistles.

1. Goto expireddomains.net
2. Signup for an account
3. Goto Deleted Domains

You should see something like this on your screen:

This is a list of domains that expired in the last 7 days. We are going to filter this list so we can catch domains that would be of use for our site. Click “Show Filter” to see all the filters available. Here are 3 filters that have consistently found me useful expired domains:

1. Enter Min. Trust Flow = 10, under Majestic>Trust Flow

2. Check “Only GTLDs”, Additional>Original gTLDs. You could additionally include the ".io” extension as it’s popular and generally desirable.

3. Sort by TF, high to low, and you would see a list that looks something like this:

We are down from 200000 to about 4138 domains. 

4. Lastly, add 100 as Min. ACR in Common>Common SEO. This is to ensure that the old site on the domain has a sufficient number of pages that can be restored or redirected.

5. Now click on “Apply filter”. You would see a screen similar to this:

1176 Domains, not bad. Next, you can use a tool of choice to see if any of them had any historical traffic. I recommend Ahrefs as it provides bulk analysis of upto 200 domains, which, in our case, we’ll have to run 6 times.

Next, it’s time to visit each of these domains, and check history using archive.org to see if there has been any spam or abuse in the past. 

Just enter the domain name in the search field and start looking at how the website looked like in the past. Here are the key indicators to see if the domain is good and will work:

1. Ensure no new websites were built  between when the domain expired and now
2. Ensure the website has low amount of commercial intent content and higher amount of informative content
3. Expired ecommerce sites are a goldmine for affiliates, as you can just rebuild the same pages as the expired shop, but with your affiliate links
4. Check if the backlinks are relevant and contextual and not PBN, comment links,  web 2.0 or profile links.

After completing the steps above, you should have a clear idea on what to bid on. If not, plan an hour of your time to scout domains daily, it might take upto a month to find the right domain that has everything you need. 

The important thing to remember is consistency, and understanding that you will hit gold soon and to not give up halfway.

In our case, we bought an expired domain in the steroids and bodybuilding niche, that was a shop and had about 300-400 visitors a day 4 months ago. No new sites were built in the last 4 months on the domain and the backlinks seemed okay, so we went ahead with it. 

The domain cost $27, which is amazingly cheap and I think that because it was in the steroids niche, it shooed away most buyers. This was a good opportunity and you will find many like these if you keep at it.

How to restore the site from archive.org to ensure you start getting traffic

Now that you have acquired the domain name, it’s time to put it to good use. We want to ensure the following while doing a restore to avoid any legal issues and ensure you start getting traffic asap:

1. Don’t use content from the old site as it is, rewrite all content. 
2. Make sure you keep the url structure the same. If not possible, ensure you redirect any old pages to new pages and make sure they have relevant content.
3. Don’t use any images from the old site
4. Consider this an opportunity to redesign and fix flaws from the old site. Improve UX, design and mobile-friendliness.
5. My go-to is WordPress, but you can use any platform of choice. If using wordpress, don’t use these pagebuilders:
   1. Elementor
   2. Wp Bakery
   3. Zion
   4. Breakdance
      As these are super bloaty and will result in a slow site.
6. If you are using WordPress, I recommend using Oxygenbuilder or Bricksbuilder so your site loads super fast and you can benefit from Google’s Pagespeed as a ranking factor.

To make the restoration easier, I recommend checking out archivarix.com, which is super cheap and will save you a lot of headache when restoring large websites.

This is how a well developed website looks like in the search console’s page experience report (98.4% urls had a good page experience on mobile!):

Provide value when you restore your website

Now comes the difficult part. To ensure you have a long-term and viable business, you need to provide value to the visitors who visit your website.

In our particular case, as it was an expired shop in the steroids and bodybuilding niche, we proceeded to create the biggest directory of steroids and body building supplements in existence.

This directory had more than 1000 products, organized by type, form, use case, primary substance, and a handful of other taxonomies. To make this happen we also needed to signup to a bunch of affiliate programmes on the following platforms:

1. Shareasale
   1. Crazymass Affiliate Program
2. Healthtrader
   1. MaxGains Affiliate Program
3. Purerawz Affiliate Program
4. Peptideswarehouse Affiliate Program
5. Paradigm Peptides Affiliate Program
6. Steroidforce Affiliate Program

Since the old site was a woocommerce shop, we created a /shop page and a custom post type “product”, so all the old product urls can be used like so: domain.com/product/product1/

For the filters we used Filter Everything Pro from codecanyon, and It came in handy for creating filters for all the products with its taxonomies and terms. 

To expedite the process, we rewrote the single product descriptions using AI, as our primary ranking pages would be the archive pages.

And the results did not disappoint. This is what good engagement looks like:

For every visit to our sites, people visited an average or 3.37 pages, Average time on page was at 2 minutes 23 seconds and bounce rate was 35.78%. 

Site architecture, and On-Page SEO

1. We had 80% of the same urls from the old site, the rest, 20% were redirected to relevant new pages
2. Most important pages were:
   1. Home, that consisted of links to all terms on the site so the user could jump in through either use cases, brands, etc.
   2. /Shop that consisted of all the products available on the site, with filters
   3. /[taxonomy]/[term] Pages: these were our primary money pages and looked like this: domain.com/brand/xyz, or domain.com/use_cases/knee-health. 
   4. /blog consisted of all the blog posts that were rewritten from the old site.
   5. domain.com/product/product1 was the url structure for single products that contained a short product description, price, image and affiliate link.
3. We opted for wordpress with the following plugins:
   1. Oxygenbuilder to design all page/posts/taxonomy templates
   2. Filter Everything Pro for product filters
   3. CPT UI for custom post types and taxonomies
   4. SEOPress pro for dynamic term titles, sitemaps, breadcrumbs and schemas
   5. Hydrogen pack for oxygen for easier page and template editing
   6. Automaticcss.com for utility classes
   7. Gravitec.net for push notifications
   8. ACF pro for product custom fields like price and affiliate url
   9. Relevanssi for search
   10. WP all import to import and schedule products in bulk
   11. Oxyextras for additional oxygenbuilder goodies.

Content Strategy And Publishing Velocity

This particular niche did not have a lot of reference websites that we could use to formulate our content strategy for long form blogs, which was a bummer, so we started simplifying research documents in the steroids and bodybuilding space.

Again, AI was used in conjunction with editors to post 1-2 long form blog post per week for 3 months. That enabled us to tighten the interlinking across the website and gain some topical authority while doing so.

We started with adding 1 product per day, as we were using AI to rephrase product descriptions. This way, we could scale pages published to 4 products per day very easily.

Since our primary goal was to let users find the product they needed with insanely detailed filters, the descriptions on single product pages took a step back.

Hosting

I had inherent trust issues when it comes to hosting, and about a couple of years ago, we switched to Gridpane. Never looked back. 

In short, Gridpane provides an enterprise-grade WordPress-Only hosting stack for agencies at a price you cannot even make sense of. Gridpane is a feature-packed monolith, with a no-crap-given founder who exclusively focus on performance, ease of use, scalability and security. This is the bleedingest edge of hosting. Here’s how gridpane directly impacted rankings and revenue.

1. Pagespeed: Graphs are always more important than words
   

This is difficult to achieve, even with hosts like cloudways, kinsta and wpengine. 

2. Gridpane provides Redis caching, fastcgi page caching out of the box, and they can be enabled or disabled with a toggle (What?!)
3. Let’sencrypt Auto SSL
4. API integration with cloudflare (No more manual dns edits)
5. You own your hosting. You can be on vultr, AWS, Digital Ocean, Linode or a custom VPS and Gridpane will connect, spin servers and sites on it.
6. Automated hourly, weekly, and monthly local backups. Third party automated backups to blackblaze and wasabi.
7. No plugin restrictions

We opted for Vultr HF, 4GB server located in seattle. If you would like to learn more about Gridpane, head on to gridpane.com and fool around with the free plan, you will instantly ‘get’ why it’s the go-to for serial bloggers, flippers and agencies.

Finding A Buyer and Earnings From Affiliate Programmes

This one is pretty straightforward. We put it on flippa as a sponsored listing after 6 months of restoring it. At this point the site was making $400 a month in a niche that you would take at least 2 years to come even close to. This is one of the most difficult niches to be in, let alone to start something in. This gave us a little more advantage when it came to the pricing. 

Also, the fact that we were just at 120 users a day and the site had the potential to get to about 700 users a day turned many heads.

Combine that with the ballistic growth we had with the site since restore:

And we had many potential buyers talking and the site eventually sold for $15000.

Whatever you sell on flippa, make sure you take the $99 package, as it multiplies the number of potential buyers who are gonna see your site. 

Make sure you include why this is a good investment in terms of revenue, market and competition. Include as many screenshots as possible, with proof of revenue and traffic.

Steroidforce.net overview - Recommended

Purerawz Statistics - Recommended

Crazymass (Shareasale) - Recommended

Peptideswarehouse - Not recommended

Paradigm peptides - Not recommended

They rejected commissions without any explanations whatsoever:

Conclusion

Creating, growing and flipping websites is an amazing skill to have. If you are an agency, you can reduce your dependence on clients. If you are a freelancer, it’s always good to have your skills tested and earn some money on the side. Plus, what are we if we are not learning in a world full of tech that changes everyday?

If you are looking to organize your content production pipeline, give us a try!