I love experimenting with small side hustles. It’s a great way to learn and also make some extra money on the side.

My latest experiment is creating websites from my old articles. I have had some early success, as I sold my first one for $395.

Where do I get my articles from?

I previously wrote about how I earned over $7,000 writing on Medium. Unfortunately, the good old days of Medium are over. In my best month I earned almost $1,700. Last month I only earned $48, with half of that being from referrals.

As most articles won’t earning anything at all, I decided to delete them from Medium and move them to a series of blogs. There were over 500 articles.

Another source of articles is from some old blogs that no longer exist. I have around 200 of those.

That means I have over 700 articles that are already written that I can use to build a series of blogs.

How do I build the websites?

This is super-easy and takes me 3-4 hours to have a website with 50 articles up and running.

Step 1 – Buy a Domain

First of all I choose an appropriate domain name. As you can see, the domain I chose for this site is articlevault.net. It cost me around $12. A .com domain will cost around $10 and maybe even half of that if you’re a new customer. Namecheap, GoDaddy and Google Domains are popular places to buy a domain.

Step 2 – Buy Hosting

The next step is to buy a hosting account. In the past, I used to use Bluehost. Many people use them for their website hosting and it’s a good option. Lately though I prefer to use Siteground.

I find Siteground much easier to use and they allow you to host multiple websites for one price. That means that each additional website that I build doesn’t cost anything extra to host. Packages start at just $1.99 a month for the first year.

Click here to buy a hosting package from Siteground.

Step 3 – Build the site

I now follow a similar process for each site, so I can get them up and running quickly. First I install WordPress and then add a theme. The theme for this site is Baskerville, which is free. With Siteground, it’s just a matter of clicking a few buttons to add WordPress.

Next I add the plugins I need. At the moment I have the 3 Siteground plugins that get installed automatically and also add the following:

  • WP Legal Pages
  • Site Kit by Google
  • Yoast SEO

That’s it. I like to keep things simple.

Step 4 – Add the articles

I do this step manually by just cutting and pasting the articles. I usually use a free image from Unsplash.com, as I’ve done on this article.

Once I’ve used all the articles I currently have, I plan to continue writing one or two articles a day so that I can build a new blog every month or so. That should give me a regular income of $495 a month if I can sell each site, which I think I can.

Step 5 – Set up Google Search Console & Analytics

This is a simple process that I do via the Site Kit plugin. I just follow the simple steps that the plugin provides. This step is important because I need Google to index the pages and start ranking the site.

Step 6 – Sell the site

I usually wait a couple of months until all or most pages are indexed and start receiving traffic. I then offer the site for sale to my small list of people that are looking for starter sites to buy. My last site sold within 3 days to $395.

I plan to sell this site and all future starter sites for $495, as I think that is fair value, especially when you consider that I usually charge $25 for article writing. Assuming a site has 50 posts, that’s $1,250 worth of articles. That doesn’t even include the site and all the set up, including adding the required legal pages.

I usually leave it up to the buyer to add more articles, get backlinks and start monetizing the site.

Sometimes I’ll do some basic monetization though. For example, this post has a few affiliate links.

The steps above are just a general overview, but note that each step requires a little more work than mentioned. But I can get the whole lot done in 3-4 hours.

If you’d like to buy one of my sites, they’re $495 each. However, anyone reading this post can get a 10% discount. See About Us for contact details.

The two sites that I currently have for sale are this one and KitchenCountertopTips.com. Both have around 50 articles and have already been submitted to Google and the pages are starting to be indexed.