Huge History Site Making Money

URL: medieval-castles.org

Age of site (months): 10

Monthly revenue: 400

Revenue details:
This website makes about $350/month through Adsense and an extra $50 with occasional link sales.

Monthly page views: 200,000

Traffic details:
Traffic comes mostly from Google, MSN and Yahoo. Many websites have linked to this site bringing in some notorious traffic including Wikipedia.

Description:
Medieval-Castles.org features plenty of information about the Middle Ages. I personally wrote all the content last year because of my fascination toward this magnificent epoch.

I am very sad that I have to let go of this site, but I need more money so I can finally move to my own apartment; hence the reason of the sale.

Medieval-Castles was originally built purely out of .html files, but I later realized that updating it was very difficult, so I modified the Evolution Blog to make it easier to update. I focused mainly in making it SE friendly so I removed commenting functions, etc.

Google truly loves this site. Check any article and I can almost guarantee that if you type its keywords, it will come within the top 20 Google results. The keyword Medieval Castles per se brings this website anywhere between the 7th and 14th position. I am sure that with time, it will move to #1 which brings an additinal 1,400 visitors per day.

Unique and helpful content has been my sole purpose ever since I began the creation of this website. I believe that's the reason why it does so well with Google!

The interface is not good. I am sure that with some planning, this site could be easily fixed and attract many more visitors. Too bad I don't have the time to do it or else I would!

This website's Adsense Ecpm is very low, somewhere around 3 or 4 dollars per thousand impressions. I truly believe that someone with good monetizing skills could go much further - even better, I am sure YPN could bring a lot more.

Medieval-Castles.org has a DMOZ listing and is linked from many websites. Most links were naturally acquired, though I did request some link exchanges from very similar sites. The PR of this site used to be five, but it dropped to four. I acquired many more links and I am sure it will be 5 again.

History is the one topic that never runs old. You can simply let this website sit and it will continue to generate income endlessly. I even get one or two article submissions every month from my users! You could simply upload those and let the website age. I am sure it will continue to acquire backlinks and will ultimately achieve better rankings even if you do nothing. Check "Castles" in MSN and it comes in the first page of results. By the way, for the term "Medieval Castles" it's been #1 in MSN for as far as I can remember. As you can see, this website is loved by the Search Engines.

I am selling this website exactly as it is. I will not be making any modifications, etc. I leave that to the new owner.

I will be very honest. I literally learnt how to write properly with this website. The first articles I wrote are of low quality, but nevertheless I did plenty of research on every article and they are very accurate. I even rewrote some of the older ones to make them better.

Today, this website makes on average about $15/day. Before, I used to embed Adsense ADS within the actual article, which brought up to $25/day. Ultimately, I had to remove the ADS due to complaints from my users.

Note that the first days when I placed Adsense, income was around 0 so the average is a bit reduced.

List of Unique Articles:
http://medieval-castles.org/index.php/medieval?disp=arcdir

Adsense Proof: http://www.medieval-castles.org/adsense.JPG

Traffic Proof (note that I changed from .html to Dynamic URLS in February so traffic dropped a bit):
http://www.medieval-castles.org/traffic.JPG

More Stats:

http://www.medieval-castles.org/morestats.JPG
http://www.medieval-castles.org/morestats2.JPG
http://www.medieval-castles.org/nationalities.JPG

Note that about 24% of the visitors bookmark this site. I didn't know! Seems like a great number.


The possibilities for this website are endless. You could place a forum, make it more user-oriented, etc.

I reserve the right not to sell this website for any reason.

Also note that all the 180+ articles contained within the website are UNIQUE. Not republished anywhere else, not sold to anyone - they are property of medieval-castles.org and they will stay that way. I transfer FULL rights to distribute, etc. to the new owner because I wrote everything, so in a way it'd be like if you wrote them.

Price (or starting bid): 800

BIN: 10,000

Is an auction?: Yes

I will transfer site to auction winner along with full transfer of the MySQL database, modification of the "About" page and replacement of Adsense ADS.

 

TheHoff bids $800.

 

Thanks for your bid, TheHoff you are currently the high bidder

 

...and a BIN?

 

auction is three days. There was another 1k bid from a PM @ Sitepoint. I will set a BIN tonight.

 

TheHoff offers $1200 and distracts Aaron with a cheese danish.

 

bin pls

 

Thanks for the interest guys! Top BID 1.3k @ Sitepoint. BIN coming up tonight! I will make a low bin so first one who catches it wins...

 

Forgot to mention - this site receives an additional $2-$4/day from Adsense for search. Add that to the amount previously stated.

 

$1350 because I wish to one day live in a castle and this will help my research.

 

lol TheHoff is high bider

 

i saw so many people bidding here. Will there be any Bin??

 

$1500

10 chars

 

$1400 from me.
maybe if i buy the site i can buy a castle and rent it to Thehoff
Just noticed Dirtydog posted his offer at the same time

 

Really nice site, wish i had the money to bid

 

$1550 here.

Notice Amillo is so tight he bids in $50,s

 

great bids! However I received 2k @ SP.