How Ivan Ranked and Sold an Amazon Affiliate Site for $200,000 (Interview Case Study)

[hurezannat]

I would like to introduce Ivan Gordiyenko to you. Ivan is a client of mine and one day he emailed me about a site he was knocking down – a site he sold for $200,000.He ended up telling me the story of the site and how he ranked, monetized and returned it. As he told me about his site, I thought to myself what an interesting case study it would be. Graciously, Ivan agreed, and not only that… he's reversing just about everything he's used to rank the site. Enjoy. Hello Hello. Thanks for joining us today. Today I'm sitting with an SEO named Ivan, who recently sold his affiliate site for $200,000.
I wanted to talk to Ivan about his experience and it turned out to be a super cool story. I convinced Ivan to do this interview and even better, Ivan agreed to share pretty much every secret on how he ranked, monetized and sold his site. Let's start. Ivan my friend, tell us a bit phone number database about yourself. How old are you and where are you from? Ivan Gordiyenko: What's up guys? I am 23 years old. Originally I'm from eastern Ukraine, but now I live in the United States of course, in Virginia. cool cool. You are very young, man. Did you go to college or just jump straight into SEO? It's funny, Matt, I went to college if you want to count it I guess.
It was seven or eight days and then I left. Then pretty much after that I decided to go ahead and find a way to make money because it was such an important thing to do. Bad jobs, yeah. Morning work at Arby's. It was horrible. Working in warehouses in the freezing cold and in the winter – it really sucked. Probably the best jobs I've had have been driving for Uber and Lyft in Washington DC.
You can still call it a job, but you have all the flexibility in the world to earn money. I really enjoyed that. You can talk to a lot of people and meet some really interesting people. Okay, so I still had a few laughs here and there, but nothing really stood out in terms of funny. Wise fool, yeah. Alright, it happened this year, man. In April, end of April. I was having a very big week. I was just going back and forth between DC and the suburbs. I picked up this guy at Union Station. It was a train station in Washington, DC I had to drive it home like an hour. Really, really cool guy. Very business oriented. He was around 35/36 years old. We just started talking about business, cars, and what I want to do with my life and stuff like that. It was really the conversation. Then he said he bought a new Ferrari. I was like, holy shit. Dude, that's awesome. He showed me a picture and stuff like that, so I believed him. Then, as we approach his house, he's like, hey man, wanna check it out? I'm like, no problem, man. Yes. He opens the garage and there he is. I was like fucking shit, you weren't lying. We took it out, started it. Revd. it a bit. I was like, wow that's awesome, man. He was like, you wanna take it for a test drive? I was like, no bullshit, man. Yeah, wanna take it for a test drive? I was like, man, yeah.
What do I have to give you? My license ? Money? What should I do? He's like no, walk down the street, man. I ended up three or four miles down the road from 7-Eleven. I got myself a sweet tea. Came back right away. He obviously gave her the keys. It was the first time that I drove a Ferrari and went alone, and really experienced being inside a Ferrari. This is the first time someone has trusted me with something so dear in my life. I was dazzled. I also made a friend. It was a very, very interesting experience. Probably by far the craziest thing I've had happened to me being a driver. That's one hell of a story, man. I would definitely have killed myself in that thing. You are a car guy, right? You really like sports cars. Is not it ?I probably got into SEO - can't really put my finger on the exact date, but let's say late 2010, early 2011. I just started looking into affiliates, doing random funnels and affiliate stuff. I had no idea what I was doing. That's how I started. Okay. Did you end up taking classes or did you follow free blogs? What was your training in SEO? Ivan Gordiyenko: My SEO training didn't really start until around 2012.
I would say – that's about when I started doing SEO. I just started reading blogs, like Smart Passive Income, Niche Pursuits, etc. A whole bunch of other blogs and I kind of put some acquaintances together. I started filing a few things here and there. It wasn't very effective when I did. I was just making these crazy blog comments and thinking these things were going to make my sites rank. Matt Dignity: OH okay. In your opinion, when did you start to understand things? Iván Gordiyenko: By far, my first successful project that I did was to create a website about The Walking Dead. It was half illegal, half legal.
I was just providing a slideshow of the free comics for free. I just built a very basic back lease, but traffic started coming to the site because it was obviously free. In about three months, I went from a thousand visitors a day to about 12,000 visitors a day. I built like, no backlinks. I was getting 150-250 visitors to the site at one time. Obviously, I had no idea how to monetize the website, so I forgot, meaning. It's also where I made my first $3,000 in a month, which was crazy. I have never made so much money in my life before. It made me more confident in what I was doing. It was closed, by the way. In October, the lawyer sent me a letter saying, hey, quit and quit. I'm fucking like. Matt Dignity:Ah damn. Tell me more about the site you actually sold. You don't have to reveal the exact niche or anything, and certainly don't mention the URL or anything. What was the general theme? What niche was it in? The high-level niche and how did you imagine it? Iván Gordiyenko: Sure. I sort of thought about that niche – it's kind of the automotive niche.
The general automotive niche and stuff like that. What I did was I kind of thought of a random name. Something that looks catchy and I was like, okay, cool. It should be something cool. I could make an e-commerce site out of this or something. I just started working on it bit by bit. Over time, I ignored it a bit because I was working on other projects. Then I was like, man, I should really start digging deeper into this site. It was random – I didn't really want to work on it, but I had no other projects to work on. I just went ahead and dove into it. I was like if I could make $100 from this thing in a month, I would be satisfied. I started following other blogs, like Source Wave and stuff like that. I started buying Fiverr gigs and others to get the site ranking. I got $100 a month in two months.