I just bought a new content site. What to do next?

I always start with monetization - I wrote a piece on the Flippa blog on how to generate upside https://blog.flippa.com/how-to-generate-upside-from-acquiring-established-sites/

I recommend improving existing content with keyword optimized headings and also do outreach to get authoritative and relevant backlinks

@Dealsflow - If you're looking for ways to grow the traffic, the most common ways people attempt to do that are:

1. Find competitive websites, and see what keywords/phrases they are ranking for, using tools like Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, SEMRush. Search for those keywords/phrases on Google, see which articles from the competitive sites are ranking, and create better versions of those articles.

2. Google Search Console is a super helpful tool. I've discovered cases where certain search words/phrases result in landing on an article that doesn't really address the searcher's intent. So, I had articles written that addressed the search phrase intent, and after several months, the new articles started getting a notable amount of traffic for the correct search terms.

3. Use Google Search Console to see what search words/phrases are driving traffic to articles, and see if you can find any opportunities to include information related to certain words/phrases that aren't fully addressed in the article.

For example, if people are searching for a particular product by name, and find your article, but your article doesn't have that product. Take time, and include a section about that product in your article so you can address the searcher's intent.

4. Find popular older articles, update them with more current or more helpful information, and republish them with a new date under the same URL.

5. Thoughtfully consolidate articles about the same general topic, and put in 301 redirects from the original article(s) to the new combined one.

6. Find articles that don't get a lot of traffic, and delete them. I just posted some information about content purging on Reddit, which may be helpful.

Content purging doesn't immediate help grow traffic, but it's a good practice to make sure your site has relevant content.

Here is a good piece as well by @HumanProofDesigns published on Flippa: https://blog.flippa.com/what-to-do-once-youve-taken-over-a-new-website/

As per some of the other comments, I think content is where you can really begin to make a difference. If you already have some decent SEO and traffic, you can increase and automate some content across platforms and consistently drive more traffic and in turn, sales/commissions.

See where your quick wins are to optimize existing content and see some ranking improvements.

You could use paid tools like Ahrefs for this (if you send me the site I'd be happy to take a quick look for you), but you can also do it for free in your Search Console account.

Here's an example on my affiliate site - if sort the keywords I rank for by Impressions, I can quickly see what pages have some good potential for quick wins.

https://imgur.com/a/Knj6WFn

The posts that rank somewhere just after Page 1 are already getting a decent amount of impressions and ranking fairly well, so if I improve those, they're probably going to see a good jump in impressions and clicks (assuming the improvements work).

My efforts there would probably be better than optimizing for the ones where I'm ranking in position 50 (that post is relatively new, and will likely improve over time anyway so updates now probably won't lead to big jumps).

turn your website into a content generating machine and watch your traffic grow

Can't say it should be anyone's first thing, but it was mine: Google Automatic Ad Placement.