Picking individual stokcs requires a lot of time , energy and knowledge.
Since I need to put my focus on the things that is working and brings income, I do not want to distract myself.
If this method can be broken down into steps, it would be
1. Decide your Asset allocation.
eg : US stocks 20%
US bonds 20%
Developed market 20%
Emerging Market 10%
REITS 20%
2. Pick low MER ETFs for each category.
3. Check & Rebalance your portfolio regularly.
4. No matter what happens stick to your asset allocation.
There are many books explaining this. "THe blogleheads' guide to investing" would be good start.
You cannot become like a next Warren Buffett with this strategy. But you can focus on the things you are good at, while your money is growing.
I listed one of my site on the site(to sell), I set BIN(buy it now) price to a reasonable one, considering the revenue and the effort required to maintain the site. The site is a legitimate one, making passive income, a good domain and more than 2 years old.
I decided not to reduce the price even if I couldn't sell the site. (I spent around $60 to list the site).
I couldn't sell it. For me it looks like buyers assume that reported income and traffic of any listed site is higher than the actual figures. So they expect a ridiculously lower price for sites.
There are so many listings that wants to sell for 2 - 3 times monthly earnings. Why would anyone want to do that? Can't they just keep the site themselves for another 3 months and earn that money.
Is it organic traffic from Google? or Direct traffic?
You mentioned both in your question.
If it is organic traffic from Google, we too noticed a change in Google traffic around that date to our various sites. It may be a recent change in Google algorithm worked in favour of your pages.
"We do need a competitor"
I think that's the core issue here. I run a portfolio of sites, did a series of experiments on Google's quality guidelines. Frustratingly, they are nowhere closer to finding the quality content as humans do, but they think they know it and implementing it.
My experimental sites(the contents that I made sure they are crappy in the eyes of humans) with cheap content ($3/100 words) without any editorial control marked as quality sites and perform well in searches. While the sites that we spent thousands of dollars with strict editorial control were punished for some reason.
At one point a scrapper site that picks up one of our sites partial feed with 150 words excerpt out ranked us in the search results. What kind of quality guideline is that, a 750 words post is bad quality while a 150 words excerpt of that is good.
Google's motive may be good, observing it for the past 7 months, I found their approach is wrong.
As you do I use BIng/DuckDuckGO these days. Google has so much market share (around 85% in my observation ), if it goes down to 30% then we don't need to worry about pleasing Google, but focus on pleasing our customers/visitors like normal business do.
How many times of monthly profit you are willing to pay for a site, that doesn't need any maintenance? But with only 'search traffic risk'(the possibility of search traffic drop/increase due to algorithm changes by search engines)
If I could give you a suggestion, as a user who is very much interested in a service like this (both seler/buyer) the filters are pretty much worthless to find a good project.
A mechanism is needed to weed out the listings that reports earnings/traffic which is practically impossible compared to their site age, design, content, functionality, rankings(comcast,alexa,compete)