In late 2015, we were peaking having our best month ever of just short of 450k monthly website visitors. 

We were right around the time of our ebook completion and promoting our brand new DIY Ejuice guide to our 20k email subscribers. 

In the midst of that, we were starting to get burned out.

We had done some research and started talking about selling the website through a website broker.

Websites are similar to stock investments. Assets you can buy, sell or hold. We went through a website broker to get an evaluation on our domain, website and business. 

Based on their criteria (late 2015 industry standards) you can sell a website anywhere between 25-35x it’s monthly profit. (roughly 2 ½ years of monthly profit) based on the past 6-12 months profit generated.

Over the course of 2015, our website generated a net profit of $120,000. After including our 3,000 followers on every social channel, 20,000 email subscribers and our private website domains attached to the vaping site, we had a 28x multiplier added to our monthly net income of 10k/month.

That left us with a great website evaluation of around $335,000. That was going to be a really big investment for someone.

There were only a few people we knew in our industry that had the cash on hand to buy our site outright, but we decided to sit on our evaluation and continue to milk our web authority into 2016.

At this point, our website is starting to gradually drop in traffic and revenue because we don’t have any income coming in from our ejuice page, and we’re relying heavily on traffic and sales from our new pages for a conglomerate tank and box mod review page. 

We were also attempting to future proof ourselves in the industry with a DIY Ejuice ebook bundle for about $20.

So we were supplementing our lost revenue from the ejuice page with these new product review pages. But it still didn’t bring the margins back up because these specific items in our industry didn’t sell as frequently as ejuice because they were hardware.

They were more expensive and sales happened less frequently, and even with the same amount of web traffic we saw a drop in monthly revenue.

We eventually had to cut back on blog writers because we couldn’t keep profit up from the lack of frequent e-juice commissions we became accustomed to from our main review article.

By February 2016, we had no content writers left and had started focusing on selling banner ads, email blasts and sponsored posts for all of 2016-2017 to supplement our income loss from lack of commision sales from our ejuice page. We still had a great product and we knew it, it just looked different.

We had built up a massive source of web traffic you couldn’t pay for through traditional methods. We setup multiple package deals and offered them to our vast network of ecommerce vendors and affiliate managers working with these companies.

See, you couldn’t pay for vaping ads on Google or Facebook because it was classified as tobacco. So our web traffic was considered gold for our vendors and we had a lot of it. It almost felt like our industry went back in time where you’d reach out to the individual site owners and make a deal for traffic generation.

We continued to sell these advertising packages in 2016 and into Q1 of 2017 to different vendors old and new.

However, 2016 became a huge transition year as I started to focus less on the vaping website put more focus on other projects, opportunities and to build out other skills I had previously neglected.