I Sold 11 Niche Websites. Here's What I'd Do Differently If I Started Today

When people find out I’ve sold 11 niche websites, the questions come fast.

How did you pick them? Where did you sell them? What’s the secret?

I get it. Selling a website for five figures sounds like a magic trick. You build something out of words and links, and one day someone wires you real money for it.

But here’s what I don’t hear people ask nearly enough: what did you get wrong?

Because I got plenty wrong. Some of my mistakes cost me real money. And the playbook that worked for me over those five years? I wouldn’t use most of it today.

So here’s all of it. What worked, what didn’t, and what I’d do if I were starting from zero right now.

How I Picked Niches: Passion First, Trends Second

Most of my sites started with something I was genuinely into.

That’s not some grand strategy. It’s just that writing hundreds of articles about something you don’t care about is miserable. When you actually love the topic, the work feels a lot less like work, and honestly, it shows in the writing.

But I’ll be fair here, not every site came from passion.

Sometimes I’d hear about an emerging niche, the kind of thing people call an “exploding topic.” Something that was just starting to pick up searches before most people noticed. Those were bets on timing more than love.

And some of those bets paid off big. My Carnivore diet blog is the best example. I got in early, and it sold for low five figures after only 12 months.

But here’s what I learned comparing the two: the trend sites could make money fast, but the passion sites were the ones I could actually stick with. And sticking with it matters a lot more than people think.

What Actually Makes a Niche Site Sell

Here’s something that surprised me when I started selling.

Buyers don’t just look at income.

Income matters, sure. But what really moves a sale is stability. Consistent traffic, or traffic that’s on an uptick, tells a buyer the site isn’t going to fall apart the day after they take over.

Think about it from their side. They’re paying a multiple of what the site earns, betting that it keeps earning for years. A site with steady, predictable traffic is a much safer bet than one with a big income spike and a shaky traffic chart.

In other words, a stable site with modest income can sell better than a flashy site with no consistency.

That changed how I built. I stopped chasing quick wins and started caring more about whether the traffic would still be there in six months.

Where I Sold Them (and Where I Wouldn’t)

I sold most of my sites through Motion Invest who had a fairly decent streamlined process that ensures the website and funds are transferred and your not at risk of being ripped off.

For the size of sites I was building, it worked well for me, and it’s where I’d look first for a small to mid-sized niche site.

If you’re dealing with higher end sites, a lot of people love Empire Flippers. It also covers a lot more than niche sites alone: FBA, dropshipping stores, ecommerce, blogs, and digital products.

And where wouldn’t I go?

Flippa.

That’s my own opinion, but from what I’ve seen, most of what’s listed there is template starter sites. Cookie cutter builds with little real traffic, made to look like a business. If you’re buying, I’d be very careful there. If you’re selling a real site with real history, I don’t think it’s where your site belongs.

My Biggest Mistake: Holding On After I Stopped Believing

If I could go back and change one thing, it would be this.

I held on too long.

There’s a moment with every site where you realize you’ve hit the end of your belief that you can scale it any further. You’ve done what you know how to do. The growth has flattened. Deep down, you know.

That’s the moment to sell.

Instead, I’d hang on. Maybe one more update. Maybe one more batch of content. Maybe it’ll turn around.

And while I was waiting, the multiples dropped. Traffic slipped. The site I could have sold at its peak ended up selling for less, or worth less than it should have been, because I didn’t let go when my gut told me to.

The other version of this mistake is timing a sale badly. Selling in the middle of a big shift, like a Google algorithm update when everything goes crazy, is one of the worst moves you can make. Traffic swings all over the place, buyers get nervous, and your site suddenly looks a lot riskier than it really is.

If an update is rolling through, wait for the dust to settle before you list.

What I’d Do Differently Today: Build the Brand of You First

Here’s the part that matters most if you’re thinking about starting now.

The old playbook was: pick a keyword-rich niche, build a site, write a ton of content, and wait for Google to send traffic. That worked for nearly a decade.

It doesn’t work like that anymore.

Search has changed, and it’s moving away from the keyword spamming techniques that used to win. So if I were starting today, I’d flip the whole thing around.

First, I’d only build around something I’m in love with or exceptionally passionate about. Because a site today takes a lot longer to pay off, and passion is the only thing that keeps you going through that kind of wait.

Second, I’d build around the brand of you, not a faceless site. People trust people. A real person with real experience stands out in a sea of sites that all sound the same.

Third, I’d grow the idea on social media before I ever launched a website. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, wherever my people already are. Build an audience there first, so when the website launches, it launches with a traffic source already behind it.

That does two things. It gives you readers from day one instead of waiting a year or more for search. And it makes you more credible to Google and search in general, because real people are already showing up for what you make.

And when you do write, write things only you can write. Non-commodity topics with true information gain. Your experience, your results, your take. Not another rewrite of the top five search results.

That’s the stuff that holds up as search keeps changing.

Skip the Courses

If you take one thing from this post, let it be this.

Don’t buy a niche site course.

I know how tempting they are. Somebody shows you their income dashboard and promises the exact system. But the niche site world changes too constantly for any course to really help you.

By the time a course is built, recorded, and sold, it’s teaching what worked 8 to 12 months ago. You’re paying for a version of the game you aren’t even playing anymore.

And here’s the part that bugs me. A lot of the people selling these courses are selling shovels in a gold rush. The real money for them is in the course, not in their sites. That’s usually a sign their own sites don’t make much at all.

If their system worked as well as they claim, why would they need to sell it to you?

So, Should You Build a Niche Site Today? My Honest Answer

Only if you truly love the topic.

If you’d write about it for free, if you’d happily talk about it on camera, if you can see yourself still at it in two or three years, then yes. Build it. Build it around you, grow it on social first, and write things only you can write.

But if you’re only in it for the money, I’d look somewhere else. The math just isn’t what it used to be, and I talked more about that in my post on the side hustles that flopped and the ones that actually work for me now.

I learned a lot from those 11 sites. Most of it the hard way.

You don’t have to.

I’m putting together free courses on this stuff over on my YouTube channel, built on what’s actually working now, not what worked a year ago. If you want to catch them when they go up, you can subscribe here.

No shovels. Just what I’ve learned.