WestfaliasForSale.com Is For Sale!
It’s been a long six years of growing this amazing website and its presence in social media. I’ve recently sold my Westy, and have moved on to different hobbies. With that being the case, I’m considering selling the website too. If you’re reading this, it’s likely because I sent you an email about it, so here we go….
The website gets ~600 visits a day right now. I do almost nothing to it, or with it, anymore. Except approve comments. When I spend time posting about vans, the site can get as many as 1,500 visits a day. I have a Google Analytics account with all data to show since the site was created. Almost all of this is from organic search. Google “westfalias for sale” or “statename westfalia”, etc. The site has quite a few natural backlinks from authoritative sites and content, like this one from Bloomberg, and this one from Inside Hook magazine.
There are 600 unique posts about Westfalias on this blog. They include images, VINs, descriptions, all kinds of content I could find about the van. My goal was to build an index of every Westfalia I could find for sale, and over time, the site would capture results for all of the VINs too, so when someone google’d a VIN, they would see the last time the van was for sale, and details surrounding it’s condition, price, etc.
The site generates advertising revenue through the eBay affiliate program, and Google Adsense. The best performing month of all time is $1,500, currently it’s at ~$100/mo. When I generate buzz and post about vans a couple times a week, revenue goes up dramatically. You’ll have to apply for your own eBay Affiliate account, and a Google Adsene account, and swap out your unique affiliate/partner IDs in the code on the site. Not too difficult. I’d transfer the ad accounts if I could, but it’s not allowed.
The main feature of the site is the craigslist search. This is secret sauce and discouraged by craigslist, but I’ve found that if I only ping their server once a day, they don’t block my IP address. Basically, there are 430 regional craigslist sites. I have an RSS feed search for the term “westfalia”, so any listing that contains westfalia will show in this list. I used to hit their servers every two hours, then they blocked my IP, so I moved the site to a new IP, and only ping their server once a day, been this way for a few years now and it works fine.
The site is currently hosted on my WP Engine account, which I pay $120/mo for. You are free to host it where ever you’d like. WP migrations are easy. You can probably host it as a stand alone on WP Engine, or similar, for $30/mo or so.
The sale of WestfaliasForSale.com includes…
- The domain WestfaliasForSale.com
- The website and all of it’s functionality, theme and plugin licences, etc.
- All social media profiles, including over 6,000 legit Facebook fans. Instagram, Twitter and Google plus are much smaller.
The price for all of the above is $5,000. This very reasonable considering what the right person(s) could do with it. I’d be happy to share further details with interested parties.
Please email mikekansa@gmail.com if you’re interested in learning more.