eTycoon - Website Flipping | Buying and Selling Websites

Virtual Real Estate Investing - Why Websites Are Better Than Houses

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 12:54:00 PDT

As the government continues to slam the door in their faces, investors and entrepreneurs struggle to find new ways to make money in real estate. Many are finding their ideal alternative in a spot that young business owners and savvy entrepreneurs have been using for years – the World Wide Web.

While traditional real estate markets are slumping, virtual real estate is just beginning to heat up as entrepreneurs buy, develop, and sell websites. Here are a few reasons why buying and selling websites serves as a better alternative to traditional real estate investing:

1) Websites Have Higher ROI Than Real Estate Investments
Real estate investors settle for measly 5% returns, while websites average 80% - 200%.

Many real estate investors buy houses so that they can become landlords and rent out the property. In doing so, they often earn $200 - $300 per month after all expenses are paid, and they pay down the mortgage over time. On a $150,000 house, this is an annual 2% ROI.

The problem with this is that it takes at least 10 properties to replace the income from one’s job. And while there is the added benefit of depreciation, they also come with leaky roofs, destructive tenants, messy yards, and late night phone calls about broken toilets.

Websites provide much higher returns, without the hassle of being a landlord. A website making $1000 a month can often be purchased for $10,000 to $15,000, especially when the buyer is not dealing with marketplace competition. This is an annual 70% - 120% ROI, and that’s assuming that the income never increases.

2) Websites Require Less Maintenance Than Houses
Websites never complain about noisy neighbors, leaky roofs, or broken toilets.

The income from websites is often passive, and even when it isn’t, it rarely requires you to leave your house. Even if you are not particularly tech savvy, a freelance web designer can usually maintain the virtual property without you lifting a finger.

Sites with user communities that run themselves, stable search engine rankings, or established web presences in social media often require little work to maintain. Of course, you can increase the income from the website by increasing its traffic, selling more products, building a list, and scaling the site if you choose.

A website will never call you in the middle of the night because the power is out, or require you to clean up after it moves out. While some websites require more work than others, they rarely require you to break a sweat.

3) Websites Require Less Start Up Capital and Risk Than Houses
The down economy has proven that real estate debt can be risky.

Houses require at least a $100,000 investment. Even if a bank floats the majority of the cash, your butt is still on the line.

Fully functional, profitable websites can be purchased for less than what you would invest as a down payment for a house. Websites earning several hundred – even several thousand – dollars can be scouped up for a few thousand dollars, allowing you to skip the bank and not worry about a mortgage.

4) All The Same Real Estate Strategies Apply
Real estate investors will find that their existing strategies work with websites.

Websites can be bought and sold for profit, just like houses, or they can be held for long-term income. In addition, websites can be purchased on option, assigned to other investors, and they can appreciate in value. Real estate investors are already familiar with these strategies.

The difference, of course, is that your risk is lower, your ROI is higher, and “virtual real estate” investing can be done from the comfort of the home, and without need for a bank.

Until now, real estate investors have by and large shied away from investing in virtual real estate, but many are finding it to be an alternative to traditional real estate investing. As investors continue to discover that websites provide higher ROIs, require less start up capital, come with lower risk, and are easier to manage, the market will continue to grow over the next decade.

Case Study: World's Ugliest Site Sells For $21,700

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 15:44:00 PDT

Get Lump Sum Profits Here

In order to get a lump sum payday with real estate, you'd have to risk tens of thousands of dollars to buy a house, spend countless weekends of sweaty toil fixing up it's problems, and then list it with an annoying realtor while hoping that it sells for more than you paid. To get the same lump sum profits, you COULD just build a crappy website, like the one seen in this video.

Why did RefinanceMortgages.com sell for so much money? For a few reasons: first, it was positioned in a profitable niche that had plenty of advertisers. Second, it had the keyword in the URL, which helped it to rank on the first page of Google.

That's about it. A simple bidders' war drove up the price, and it cashed out for a huge lump sum.

These are the exact types of sites that you'll build after going through Lump Sum Profits. The only difference is that they'll make money as you build them, paying you a "dividend" as you hold them. Grab your copy of Lump Sum Profits here.

Flip Alert + How To Find Hidden Auction Gems

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 07:50:00 PDT

eTycoon students of Lump Sum Profits get this tool, Flip Finder, for free as part of the class. Grab your spot in the eTycoon Master Class, Lump Sum Profits

Auction Listing: http://flippa.com/auctions/98468/Number-1-on-Google-com-phrase-Order-Funeral-Flowers

This hidden gem would slip through the cracks on most people's radar, but Flip Finder was able to dig it up. Although a tiny site, this website ranks at the top of Google for a high paying advertising term, but no advertising is currently on the website.

The simple way to rehab this site would be to fill it with Adsense and push affiliate products in the content posts. With a top ranking on Google for a high traffic term, this would make it profitable immediately. It could then be flipped or scaled for high profits.

This gem was found using Flip Finder, which scrapes different marketplaces and sorts them according to certain stats. Only eTycoon students of Lump Sum Profits have access to this tool - sign up here.

Automatically Find Profitable Sites Before Anyone Else

Sat, 15 May 2010 14:07:00 PDT

IMPORTANT EDIT: Thank you for your feedback on this post! We listened, and Flip Alerts will *not* be given away for free. Instead, they will be reserved for eTycoon Master Class students. As a result of your feedback, we have decided to open a new service called Flip Analysis, an analysis of recent sites that have sold. In them, we'll explain why they sold and what should be done to improve them and flip them.

Here at eTycoon, we're strongly considering reopening Flip Alerts, a service that analyzes sites that are for sale and tells you what to do to flip them for big profits - but we need your feedback. Here's why...

There are two reasons why some choose to sit on the sidelines instead of actively buying and selling websites for profit:

1) The inability to spot a good deal, thus causing fear instead of taking action.

2) Uncertainty of how to improve a site once it is purchased, whether it be by improving the traffic, making more money, or growing its influence.

When both of these hindrances are eliminated, you develop "The Eyes" to see profitable deals and know exactly what it takes to make them profitable.

If you've ever heard someone say that buying and selling websites is "too saturated," or "too competitive," or "out of date," then you've met someone who doesn't have "The Eyes." Without them, everything looks grim, because the road is uncertain. Those who CAN see the road ahead are confident to bid more for websites, knowing full well that they will be wickedly profitable.

With that confidence, it is possible to step into a site purchase and have full confidence that it will be profitable, because the path to success if clear. This ability makes all the difference between success and failure in ANY business, and site flipping is no different.

(As a side note, this is exactly why it is important to state *in your auctions* what can be done to improve the site, because it will allow potential buyers to see the potential.)

"The Eyes" allow you bid more on websites, work harder towards a goal, and do everything with confidence.

There are two ways to develop The Eyes:

1) Trial and error.

2) Seeing example after example until it becomes second nature.

Option #1 is perhaps the fastest way to learn, but it's also the most costly. Before developing "The Eyes," I once spent $5,000 on a website that ended up making NOTHING. It was a hard lesson to learn indeed.

Option #2 is slightly more difficult to experience, because very few people are willing to reveal the websites that they found profitable, and much less reveal how to make them profitable.

This is exactly what makes the eTycoon service, Flip Alerts, so wildly popular.

Flip Alerts is a service that alerts you whenever an awesome deal has hit the marketplace, and it walks you through the process of how to make it profitable. In seeing how each specific site can be monetized, you instantly know if it is a site that you should add to your portfolio - if it's not your type of site, or if you're not ready, then you've seen one example that will help you to develop "The Eyes."

The only problem with Flip Alerts is that they are manual, meaning that each one is hand selected, researched, and produced by someone on our team, which makes it difficult to produce more than a few each week. That's why, as we speak, a new software solution is being developed that will scrape the marketplaces automatically, analyze them, find their search engine rankings, and send them to you without you having to do anything. This software solution is not currently for sale, and will likely only be available to previous subscribers.

However, in the meantime, Flip Alerts have been paused because of the difficulty in scaling them. The unselfish decision was made to stop taking recurring payments of $97/month, simply because the work involved in finding, researching, and syndicating the best deals was a large time commitment and could not be automated (except for those who will have access to the pending software, which currently does not have a name).

There is an unlimited supply of insanely profitable deals, and smart marketers will snatch them up and flip them for large profits if they knew that they existed. And that is why the idea is being considered to reopen Flip Alerts on a smaller scale.

Problem #1: The supposed lack of good deals due to the inability to spot potential.

Solution: Let Flip Alerts find deals for you and help you monetize them (service currently closed).

Problem #2: Flip Alerts are hard to scale because they are manually researched and sent out.

Proposed Solutions: See below.

Currently, it's impossible to produce Flip Alerts on a grand scale (the previous pace was three times a week) without charging an arm and a leg for them... and to be honest, unlike most big gurus, I (Ryan) am not big on charging monthly fees.

But to be honest, Flip Alerts are a lot of fun to make - they just take a lot of time and "mental bandwith." That's why opening up a lite version of 1-2 Flip Alerts per month might make sense, and it wouldn't clutter your email inbox. Instead, you'd only get one or two insanely profitable deals per month, and you'll be friggin' excited as heck to get each and every one.

The problem with this is that opening it up to the public allows thousands and thousands of people to see the same Flip Alerts when they are released, making it harder to scoop them up, but you'll still get to see them as an example. In addition, the ability for the world to see Flip Alerts would be a tremendous way to grow the community, bring more exposure to valuable websites, and encourage others to build like sites to widen the pool for buyers.

Another idea is to charge a small fee to keep them exclusive while still making them broadly available.

Flip Alerts are insanely popular - sending them out creates quite a frenzy of excitement, and this makes them fun to create. Therefore, we'd like to make the service available again, but not without your feedback on how you'd like to see them rolled out.

Your feedback is appreciate: how would you like your Flip Alert?

Turn $1 Into $1,000 By Flipping Tiny Sites

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 12:32:00 PDT

There've been a lot of questions about making your first $1,000, and it's not that hard when you’re getting lump sums from site sales. In this walkthrough, you'll see how to build small sites that can be sold for chunks of cash.

In case you haven’t noticed, you no longer have to build huge websites in order to have huge paydays; sites with even very small revenues (or zero revenues) often sell for several hundred dollars and into the low thousands.

And even if you do a lot of things wrong, you can often still cash out for a cool grand.

See this site that sold for $1k on an income of $1/day: Strange Adsense Niche Sells For $1,000

Or this site that had almost no traffic and income that sold for over $2k: WebHostingReview.org

And if you’re using the Site Snowball Strategy (monetizing the free traffic that is already coming to a website) then you know that sites can sell for a few hundred bucks a pop, even without income. When you monetize that traffic, it sells for even more.

See this site that had no income, but sold for $1,500 because of it's traffic stats: Stomach Fat Site Sells For $1500

(This, by the way, makes for a great intro lesson in site flipping: buy a site that has traffic but no income, monetize the traffic, and then resell it for more.)

In fact, a case study was recently recorded with a man named John for the students of Lump Sum Profits, and in it, he revealed that his ultimate goal was to get his niche sites to make $1 per day, and then sell the website for a $1,000 lump sum, some even for $5,000, and one sold for $7,000.

Consider this philosophy: the goal is to make $1 a day and then sell them for thousands.

Best of all, it's all done from scratch. Try doing that with real estate.

Every day, you are preached that you need to go out and build a website that makes $1,000 a month, $2,000 a month, or $10,000 a month…

And sure, we’d all love to have sites that made that much money, but when you’re first getting started, getting to this point can feel like a million miles away.

But what about $1 a day? Could you do that?

When you look at it that way, it brings a lot of freedom – it’s a relief to think that you don’t have to beat your head against the wall until your investments are making full-time incomes… you just need to get the ball rolling, and then it can be sold for huge paydays.

For example, assume that you’ve built a website in hopes of selling some products – whether they be your own or someone else's products – but for whatever reason, you’re not seeing any sales. The site is getting a few hundred hits per month, but it’s not making any sales.

Instead of fretting about the fact that it’s not making money, you switch it to an advertising site – you put Google Ads on the site, sell a few text link ads, and you put a small CPA offer on the site in place of the previous links. All of a sudden, you start seeing a couple of advertising dollars, a few leads, and a small amount of revenue from the text link ads. It's not make much, but it’ll certainly be making enough to sell to someone else.

And all of a sudden, you’ve got cash in your pocket.

Sound feasible? Here’s how you can get started:

1) Build a “Tiny Site.” A tiny site is a blog with a few (4-6) posts on it in a specific niche. To get an extra bump in the search engines, put the blog on a keyword-rich domain. For an example, see one that I built for a friend: Voice Lessons Online

(Notice that it ranks on Google for ‘voice lessons online.’ That’s because the keyword is in the domain, and all the posts are relevant to that keyword.) We teach you how to build sites just like this inside of Lump Sum Profits.

Note: the research that goes into this step is likely the most important step in the process. When you find a hungry niche that buys and keywords that are easy to dominate, then you are golden.

2) Write articles, put them on EzineArticles.com, and link them back to your site. That will drive traffic back to the website, and you'd ideally structure your articles to rank high in the search engines for other less competitive search terms. If you don’t know how to do this, see BumMarketingMethod.com. At the end of your article, include a link back to your website so that people can find your Tiny Site. This will help you develop a stream of consistent visitors to your site.

3) Build links to your Tiny Site. Your articles will give you a jump start with this, and having your keyword in the domain will make link building twice as effective. Use Digg.com and/or SocialPoster.com to bookmark each of your posts, and then ping the URLs of your bookmarks at www.Pingomatic.com. Blogging and making blog comments, press releases, social profile links, and forum posts are all great ways to get links to your site. Just be sure to include your keyword in the keyword in the link so that the search engines give you credit for it.

When you have articles driving traffic to your site, and when your site begins to rank on the search engines for its main keyword, you’ll have long-term free traffic come from multiple sources. If you're on the first page of Google for your main search terms, you'll be getting more than enough traffic to monetize and sell. And even if you never grace Google, your articles will drive traffic over time. The next step, then, is to monetize that traffic.

4) Monetize your site. There are a few ways to do this:

    - Google Adsense – the simplest and most reliable way to run ads on your site is through Google’s own advertising network. Their payout isn’t the best, but it is an industry standard that buyers like to see, and it can be installed in a few seconds.

    - Adbrite – If you don’t have a Google Adsense account, it can be difficult to get one, because they have cracked down over the last year. Adbrite advertising is a reputable alternative.

    - Clickbank – The most popular affiliate resource, Clickbank has an information product for just about everything, and payouts are high. Your sales may be sparse, but that extra $30 per sale on top of your advertising revenue is nice.

    - Text link ads – SEOs will pay to have a text link ad on your site, and there are networks that will broker them for you. TextLinkAds.com is the most well-known, but they’re very picky about who they accept. TextlinkBrokers.com is another option.

    - CPA Networks – Run a Google search for “your nice + cpa network” and you’ll find cost-per-action networks that will pay you when someone signs up for a newsletter or even just enters their zip code (called a ‘zip submit’). Advertise some simple CPA offers, and they'll add to your bottom line.

If one monetization vehicle doesn’t work out, then swap it for another. Remember, you don’t have to build up much steam before you can sell the site to an investor who will scale it from there. When a website is making $20 - $50 a month, it's ready to be sold for a lump sum.

Every once in a while, you’ll build a site that really takes off, or that you really enjoy building, and those are the ones that you’ll grow into your Tycoon sites that make $1,000 a month or more. Then you can worry about scaling your sites to have mailing lists, deep search engine optimization, and selling more products.

To recap, you need the following:

1) A niche that buys.

2) Keywords that are easy to conquer.

3) A small blog on a keyword rich domain with a few posts.

4) A traffic and monetization strategy.

Contrary to what most gurus will preach, you don't need to immediately go out and build a website that replaces your current income - and even if you *needed* to, it's several steps ahead of where most people currently are. However, the ability to sell sites for a few hundred, a thousand, and two thousand bucks a pop is life changing for most.

And the good news is that your sites don't need to be making ANYTHING for you to get started. But it's by far better if you monetize the traffic that's coming to your websites with advertising revenue or affiliate revenue. As soon as your site is making a few bucks a month, it can be sold to put a nice chunk of money in your pocket.

Then, you either invest it into future projects... or do it again.

Ready to start putting lump sums of cash into your pocket at will? Start generating huge paydays inside of Lump Sum Profits.

The "Tiny Site" Strategy: Marketing In One Lesson

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 15:32:00 PDT

Let’s jump right in and talk about a strategy that I call building tiny sites. I wish I had a cooler name for it, but I don’t.

Tiny sites are really “marketing in one lesson,” because when we can build small sites that get traffic and get revenue and can be sold for good lump sums, then we can apply all those strategies to our bigger ventures.

In this lesson we’ll talk about how to build little sites that suck up free traffic and produce autopilot incomes. Let’s get started.

What exactly is a tiny site? A tiny site is a small blog with 10 or fewer posts on it. With 10 or fewer posts, that’s a tiny site, right? And it’s in a specific niche – meaning you wouldn’t want to run this strategy on a personal blog. Well, you might if you wanted to get some exposure, but you’re not going to be able to sell your own personal blog, and you’re certainly not going to be able to sell a blog that’s just a bunch of random thoughts put together.

This blog is going to be in a specific niche, and I recommend, as with most blogging ventures that you go through, that you use WordPress. So we’re going to be building a small tiny site with 10 or fewer posts on it in a specific niche.

If we were to just build that – just build a small blog with 7, 8, 9, or 10 posts on it – we could sell that turnkey for $50 to $150, more if there was Adsense put on it or if it had traffic and some income. But when we add in some promotion and some basic traffic and revenue, that will drastically elevate the value of these sites when we sell them – as little as $300 to as much as $1,000, even if there’s only a little bit of income coming in.

In fact, if your sites are earning as little as $1/day, which is easy to do when you have traffic coming to the site, they can be sold for $500, $600, sometimes even more money than that. We can monetize our sites and get them to making some consistent revenue with ads like Google Adsense, or we can sell affiliate products on there, and we’ll talk about some other ways later in this video.

The purpose of tiny sites is to develop seed cash for other projects. We’ll get them making money so that they’re paying us on a regular basis, but ultimately we’re going to sell our tiny sites so that we have a nice pool of cash so we can invest into other projects or scale our existing efforts.

Tiny sites get traffic and income very quickly, so it makes turn-around a very short amount of time. We can build a tiny site in a relatively short period of time, as little as two or three days, and sell that a couple weeks later – preferably a couple months later, because it’s nice to have an established set of stats for our potential buyer – but we can build and flip our tiny sites very quickly, which means we can do multiple ones at the same time.

But really what I like about them is that tiny sites serve as a gateway into a niche. We can put up a small blog in a niche, and if it starts to take off, then we can scale that winner into an even more profitable site. So we can sell the losers, keep the winners, and when we keep the winners we basically have an entryway into the niche, especially if we have them ranking on the search engines, which I’ll show you how to do.

I want to issue one warning, and that is to be careful not to get stuck in tiny sites mode, meaning your goal at the end of the day is not to continuously build tiny sites over and over and over again and have a big set of 100 or 200 tiny sites after you’ve been doing it for a couple months. That is not the end goal.

The end goal is to be able to have sites that we have consistent revenue and traffic from that we’re building on a regular basis, and we can’t manage 100 or 200 of them. So we sell the ones that are going to get us some seed cash, and we use that to build up the ones that are doing really well, or buy other sites that we want to grow, or scale the efforts that we’re already doing.

If we do have multiple tiny sites in the same niche, they should support one another. I wouldn’t recommend necessarily doing a tiny site in the World of Warcraft niche, and then next week doing one in organic tomato gardening. It would be more beneficial in the long run to have several tiny sites in the same niche so that they could support one another.

Now if you’re just getting started and you don’t know what niches you want to be in and you want to throw up some tiny sites in some different niches so that you can get a feel for different ones and where you want to be, that’s fine. But at the end of things you’re probably going to keep just a handful of niches, so we can sell the ones that aren’t contributing to the entire net of sites that are supporting one another.

But remember, our end goal is not to have tiny sites or to have to keep building tiny sites to sell. The end goal is to be able to sell these to have a nice lump sum that we can invest into other avenues.

Here’s the tiny site strategy and how it works. First we’re going to build a WordPress blog on a domain. We’ll write content-rich posts on that blog – 10 or fewer posts – and you can write those yourself or you can outsource them. The service that I use to outsource my articles is www.Articlez.com. Then we’ll promote the blog with links to get them up in the search engines, and by writing articles for links and to get more traffic back to our blog.

We could also run press releases and we could do a lot of bookmarking and other traffic generation strategies, but the really essential ones are building links and writing articles to get them high in the search engines and to get traffic going on a consistent basis to our tiny site.

Then we’re going to take that traffic and we’re going to monetize it in a variety of different ways, and when it’s making us some money we can keep it for the long term or we can sell it for a nice multiple.

A really nice way to get a bump in the search engines on our tiny sites is by getting our keyword into the domain. So if we actually build a tiny site on a domain name that has a keyword in the domain name, then we’re going to get traffic much easier, because that website is going to do better in the search engines.

Here’s how this works. Domain SEO basically means that when the keyword is in the domain, our tiny sites will rank highly in the search engines, so we’ll get free traffic for as long as that website stays in the search engines.

That’s also a benefit when you go to sell the site, because if it’s getting a lot of free traffic, that’s an incentive for other people who will see what you have done and will want to capitalize upon that free traffic. That is something that is eye-catching in the mind of a potential buyer.

When we’re using this domain SEO bump, meaning it would have the keyword in the domain – which I’ll show you how to do – we will focus all of the content of the blog posts around that one keyword and other relevant keywords. We want the content that’s on the site to be relevant to that keyword, and we want to use that keyword in our blog posts.

When we post an article to the blog it will be optimized for it, and also when we go to build links we obviously want our links to have our keyword in the actual link so the search engines see that as a vote for our tiny site and rank it accordingly, meaning higher in the search engines.

I’ll show you an example of a site that I actually built for my girlfriend. It’s at www.VoiceLessonsOnline.org. Let me take you on a little tour of that site.

This is www.VoiceLessonsOnline.org. It’s a website that I built for my girlfriend, and no, this is not a real picture of my girlfriend. This is not her real name. It’s a pen name and it’s a stock photo that I have rights to, so don’t go trying to stalk my girlfriend.

As you’ll notice, there’s only three posts on this entire website, plus an About Me page. So it’s only got three content posts on there, yet this website ranks very, very high in the search engines for the search term voice lessons online.

Actually let me show you a little report. This is SEMRush.com and this will pull up where our website is ranking in the search engines. If I put in VoiceLessonsOnline.org, check this out. These are the keywords that this site ranks for.

It’s #3 for voice lessons online with good traffic. Online voice, take voice lessons, and if we were to optimize them even more and throw some links at these search terms, we would get a nice bump in the search engines from that as well.

But just from these rankings, this website is getting about 1,000 unique visitors a month, and I haven’t even really built a lot of links to this site. There’s a couple articles, a couple social profile links, but I didn’t go stressing about this link building. The key here was good content and time, just waiting for Google to see it as relevant.

This is the site and it’s good quality content and it’s getting good traffic and it’s promoting an affiliate product called Singing Success. You can go look at this if you like at www.VoiceLessonsOnline.org. This is ranking well in the search engines, getting free traffic, and you can take that traffic to push it to whatever monetization strategy we want to use. In this case it’s just affiliate products.

If I had a lot of incentive to be building up this website, I’d probably put on Adsense and some other ads, maybe some text link ads, and some other ways to monetize it as well. But right now this site is just promoting an affiliate product. When you have traffic coming to your tiny sites, you can push that traffic to whatever is most profitable for you.

If you build a tiny site using the domain SEO bump, here’s what that outline would look like. You would pick one keyword and you’d buy the domain with that keyword in it. Then you would post 4-10 keyword-specific articles on the blog that you put on that domain.

Then you’d start to build links to the site for SEO purposes. You’d monetize the traffic that started to come with it, with ads and affiliate products, and once you started to have consistent revenue and traffic, you would either scale it or sell it for a nice lump sum.

Note that this is not an overnight process. Sometimes it takes seven days for it to rank in the search engines and sometimes it takes two months for it to rank in the search engines. Google’s weird like that. It all depends on how quality they see your content and how many links you’re getting to that site.

There’s a great write-up on this strategy of using domain SEO to use blogs to get high in the search engines, and it’s written by a mentor of mine named Kelly Felix. You can find it at www.eTycoon.net/tiny.html. That will redirect you over to a blog post that he did that’s a great write-up on using domain SEO with the tiny site idea.

He puts it into some more detail, like how to install the WordPress blog, and goes into some real specifics that I don’t want to cover on this video, so go check out that post at www.eTycoon.net/tiny.html.

Once we have it ranking in the search engines, here’s how we might monetize the traffic that’s coming to our tiny site. The easiest way is to monetize it with Google Adsense. In some cases this may not bring in the type of income that you want to see, but remember we only need it to be making about $1/day for us to be able to sell it for a nice large amount of money.

Adsense is Google’s advertising platform and you can find it at www.Adsense.com. It’s a great easy way to get some money coming in from the traffic that’s already there.

Adsense is a little picky on who they approve. They’re getting more and more picky as time goes on, so if you just Google ‘adsense alternatives,’ there’s a lot of other similar networks. One of them is www.Adbrite.com. That’s something that I have a little bit of experience in, and it’s got the same platform that Adsense uses, so that might be a good alternative for you.

The second way is to use text link ads from either a text link broker or www.TextLinkAds.com. Some of these networks again are a little bit picky on who they will allow into their network, so you’ll have to have some traffic or Google page rank before you start to get approved on those types of networks. That might not be available to you right away, but that is an option for you to use as you begin to build up traction with your tiny sites.

You can make a lot of money if you start to use your tiny sites to build a list, especially if you have multiple tiny sites within the same niche. As your traffic starts to come to the website, if you build a list and start to email that list with offers for affiliate products and you start to make affiliate sales from your list-building efforts, you’re building up a following, a consistent customer base that you can sell to over the long term.

So if you want to really scale out your tiny sites, take the traffic that’s coming to it and get those visitors onto a list and start to market affiliate products on the back end of that list.

You can find affiliate products that you can sell from Amazon, or my favorite, Clickbank.com, CJ.com, Linkshare.com, and a host of the other hundreds or thousands of affiliate networks out there.

If you can’t find a product that is relevant to your niche on something like Clickbank, then go to Google and type in “[niche] + affiliate program.” So if your niche is basket weaving, type in “basket weaving + affiliate program” and you’ll find something for whatever it is that you want to promote.

Let’s talk about how we would actually go and get the site ranked on the search engines so that we can start to use these monetization strategies. We want to start link building to the site in order to get the attention of Google and get it to rank our sites according to where we want it to be.

The first step is to bookmark our posts using something like www.SocialMarker.com. Social Marker will allow you to bookmark your site to a variety of different places. You don’t need to submit to all of them. Pick five or ten and that will be enough to get the attention of the search engines. Right after you make each post, go and bookmark it at SocialMarker.com.

The second step is to use what’s often referred to as Angela’s links. They’re social profile links. If you’re outsourcing your link building, the person you’re outsourcing to should know what Angela’s links are or social profile links.

Basically that is either a forum or a social site where you can build a profile, similar to MySpace or Facebook, but they’re often niche-specific or topic-specific. If you can build a profile, you can include a link back to your site from that profile, and they’re very, very powerful when it comes to search engine optimization.

Step three is to write articles for promotional purposes, because we get a two-fer with those. First, they provide a link back to our site, and they also rank high in the search engines themselves, so we can actually funnel that traffic back to our site. We’ll cover that in a little bit of detail here in a second.

Step four is we’re going to ping each link at www.Pingoat.com. You actually take the page that has the link on it and ping it at Pingoat.com.

If this sounds laborious to you, don’t worry, because this entire process can be completely outsourced and you just need to manage the process. It’s really not a problem once you’ve done it once or twice. Angela’s links, bookmarks, articles, and pinging can all be outsourced to someone else who can do it quicker and cheaper than you probably can, and you can spend your time doing other efforts like building traffic and researching niches and building new tiny sites.

I want to talk about article promotions, because they’re a really important piece of our tiny site strategy. If you want to be perfect, then I recommend that you write other articles that don’t go on your tiny site but that you submit to other article directories, preferably www.EzineArticles.com.

Let’s say that your domain name is VegetarianSoupRecipes.com, and I just made that up. Obviously your blog will be optimized for the term vegetarian soup recipes. If you’re building links and providing good content, then that blog is going to rank high in the search engines for the search term vegetariansouprecipes.com.

We can use articles to target other sub-keywords, meaning you can write an article about vegetarian chili recipe. If you put it on something like EzineArticles.com, it will get ranked in the search engines, get its own traffic, and we can send that traffic back to our website.

Another sub-keyword might be vegetarian chowder recipe, which may not be targeted on our blog, but it can be targeted very easily with a one-shot article that gets high in the search engines. People find that article and then they come back to our website.

As we have several different articles that each get their own traffic from the search engines, that traffic can be funneled back to our tiny site, so that’s a great way to get traffic to our website, even if it’s not already ranked in the search engines. The articles can get ranked very easily, especially if we’re using high-traffic low-competition keywords that the articles will easily rank for and funnel that traffic back.

There’s actually a service called InstaCashKeywords that will send you a list of really easy-to-dominate search terms that you could write articles for to start getting traffic in a specific niche. They’ll send them to you either every day or every week, depending on what your subscription plan is.

There’s usually 10-30 keywords included in an InstaCashKeywords list, and you could take one of them and use it as your domain for that domain SEO bump, and use the other keywords as topics to write your articles about.

Submit them to EzineArticles.com and get those ranked in the search engines, and all the sudden you could dominate all of the different key phrases that are in that micro-niche, and it all funnels back to one central location, which is your tiny site, where you’ll be either selling advertising, building a list, or selling Clickbank products – or preferably all three of those.

Let’s take a look at some results that you may see if you were to follow this strategy. Let’s say you found a keyword that got 3,000 searches a month and you built a tiny site on that keyword.

Your blog, after some link building and some good content writing, gets into position 3, and you’re getting about 1,000 uniques a month. You may not get 1,000 unique hits a month from just that key phrase at 3,000 searches a month, but in my experience, as I showed you with the VoiceLessonsOnline site, I’ve seen that sites like this will get ranked accidentally for a lot of other keywords as well.

You noticed that the VoiceLessonsOnline site wasn’t just ranking for the search term voice lessons online, but it was ranking for other search terms as well, ones that I hadn’t even targeted. So a keyword that gets 3,000 searches a month could easily get 1,000 uniques a month from the search engines, or even more, because it’s going to rank for multiple keywords, not just the one that we’re targeting right away.

Let’s say that you’re building a list on this site, just for example purposes, and 10% of your visitors were opting into your list. That means you’re getting 100 new leads per month on one site.

Let’s say that those 1,000 hits and those 100 leads a month are resulting in only five sales a month. You make $30/sale and you’re now getting $150/month in affiliate commissions from this site.

If you’re getting 100 leads/month and you’re getting 1000 hits/month to your blog, you should be able to get 3-5 sales, especially if you’re managing your list well.

What can you do with a website that’s making $150/month? You can either keep that in your portfolio or you can flip that for a lump sum to invest in other projects.

Again, these are just example numbers. I just made these up. But if you’re able to make 5 sales/month, what happens when you start selling advertising as well? And what happens when you really get good at monetizing that list, or you sell text link ads?

You can monetize it several different ways, get it making a good decent amount of money that will pay us over the long term, or that we can sell so that we can invest it into other places.

That’s what we can do with a tiny site. Because they rank very quickly, they’re easy to set up because it’s just on WordPress, we can target one specific keyword by using the domain SEO bump and we can target other ones with articles.

The real beauty comes in when we start to funnel that traffic into profitable avenues, whether that be list building or a ClickBank product or just selling Adsense.

I have one friend, John, and all he does is build these blogs, write articles to send traffic over to them, gets them making $1/day, and then he sells them. That’s all he does. That’s his online business, and he does very, very well. He’s gotten really good at it.

So that’s the power of tiny sites. In fact, John specifically doesn’t even use all the strategies that we talked about. He doesn’t put the keyword in his domain all the time. He doesn’t get it to sell affiliate products. He doesn’t build a list. He just uses Adsense, so there’s some flexibility in what you can do, but using this strategy you can get your blog on the search engines, getting traffic, and you can do a lot with that traffic.

I promised that I would show you how to find keywords to put into your domain, so let’s close by showing you that. This is the Google Keyword Tool, and if you just go to Google and type in “keyword tool” it’s the first one that comes up.

Let’s stick with the same niche that we used earlier in this presentation and I’ll say vegetarian soup recipes. I’m going to go into the Advanced Options and say I only want keywords that have at least 1,000 searches globally per month, and we’ll search. What this is going to do is bring back all the key terms that are getting at least 1,000 searches globally per month.

One other thing that I would add to this is I’d click on Views, Customize Columns, and I want to see what people are actually paying for this traffic, so I’m going to add in Estimated Avg CPC and this is going to tell us what people are paying for on Google AdWords for this traffic.

The average advertiser is going to pay $0.43/click for vegetarian soup recipes. If you can find keywords that are over $1, that’s a good indication that it’s a good paying niche and that you can make some money by using Adsense and other cost per click advertising.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t still make money just because it’s only $0.43. It just means that our amount of money that we’re going to be getting from Adsense specifically might not be too crazy high.

Still, this term of vegetarian soup recipes is getting about 15,000 global searches a month, but what I want to do is find key terms that have domains available with high traffic. So I’m going to go and select the keywords that are relevant to my niche.

You could just select all by clicking this, but I’m going to actually go through briefly and find keywords that are actually targeted to this vegetarian soup recipe. I click soup recipes, easy soup recipes, healthy soup recipes, barley soup, and not all of these are going to be relevant, like quick recipes isn’t exactly relevant. I’ll get a couple in here. Beef recipes was up top. We obviously don’t want beef recipes if our blog is about vegetarian soup recipes. This should be good. I’ll add in easy soup recipes.

That should be enough. There’s 16 or 20 selected. Now we’re going to download these. I’m going to hit Download Selected and csv for Excel is fine. Save this file. Open it up.

I’m opening up the Excel file that Google gave to us, and these are the keywords that we selected, and I’m going to copy these. Now we’re going to take these keywords and we’re going to go see if the domains are available for these key phrases, so that we know if we can register a domain name to get that domain SEO bump.

I’m going to go over to a tool called the GoDaddy bulk registration tool, and you can find this just by searching on “GoDaddy bulk registration.” This is going to allow us to enter in keywords and it will tell us if those domains are available. We want to select .com, .net, or .org, and ignore the rest -- .com, .net, and .org rank the best in the search engines. We can ignore the other ones, so let’s search. This is going to tell us what domains are available.

A lot of them are taken, but look at all these that are available – vegansouprecipes.com, vegetariansouprecipes.net, quicksouprecipes.org, barleysoup.net, barleysoup.org, vegetarianlentilsouprecipes.com, blackbeanrecipes.org and .net, easysouprecipe.net.

Any of these can be registered for a few bucks with GoDaddy or NameCheap – that’s who I use, www.NameCheap.com – and we can register any of these domains and start building a tiny site on this domain to get it ranked in the search engines to start building traffic.

That’s how we find domain names with the keywords that are available, and we can start building tiny sites and start making some money and start selling affiliate products, start building lists, and ultimately sell our sites for nice lump sums.

Case Study: Marketing and Selling Autoblogs w/ Shaye Michaels

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 13:36:00 PDT

Ryan: Hi, this is Ryan from eTycoon, and I’m really excited to be joined today by Shaye Michaels from www.MShayeM.com. Shaye, thanks for hanging out with me.

Shaye: Hi!

Ryan: I guess the first thing I should say is congratulations. You just sold an autoblog for a tremendous amount of money compared to other autoblogs, so congratulations.

Shaye: Thank you.

Ryan: Can you talk a little bit about that process? You had an autoblog, and autoblogs usually sell for $200-300 or sometimes $400, and yours sold for over $1,600. Tell us about your process.

Shaye: I haven’t been doing autoblogs for that long, probably only a couple months. I just recently discovered it. I really like fitness products, and I like the product P90X, which is a Beach Body product, and I saw that it had huge potential and was really popular, so I decided to make a blog relating to that.

I first decided I wanted to keep it and just make affiliate commissions off of that, and then I have so many other things I’m working on, it just got too much, but I knew there was a lot of potential for it, because fitness is just huge.

Ryan: Sure. And what about building the actual blog? How did you actually go about doing that?

Shaye: I found a free template, and I can’t think of it now, but I always Google “free premium Wordpress templates,” so I found that and it was free. I had the Wordpress Robot plugin….

Ryan: Just the autoblogging plugin from WP Robot?

Shaye: Right. I’ve messed around with that for quite some time. That was probably the first blog that I actually did it right, because I’ve tried a bunch of other blogs and I just didn’t do it right, so the content was just kind of dumb and non-related. So I messed around with that for awhile and figured it out. Really that’s it.

I had an autoresponder. I have a ton of PLR materials from bonuses I’ve bought from affiliate marketing products, so I just added that to the autoresponder. I paid like $5 for an ebook related to fitness and weight loss, and threw that on the autoresponder, and then just put a bunch of ads up.

Ryan: Could you elaborate a little bit more on what you said about this was the first one you did that was right? What do you think you did differently than you did with the other autoblogs that you had set up?

Shaye: For one, I spent more time on it. It’s really research on what people are looking for, like the keywords I typed in for the autoblog feature. You can’t just type in “weight loss” or “fitness.” I really took it down to mainly products. I did a lot of products.

So I would have keywords for TurboJam, P90X, Insanity, and all the popular fitness products, and I’d have categories for that. Then just more long-term keywords I guess.

Ryan: So you were just targeting on more specific keywords that were about your blog.

Shaye: Correct, yeah.

Ryan: Okay. I noticed in your auction that you kind of were able to push the domain as a selling feature, because I think you said that the domain was several years old. Is that correct?

Shaye: Yeah, I actually got it from GoDaddy auctions. I discovered that recently too, and it was only like $10. If you go to GoDaddy auctions they have a ton of old domains, and I think I was the only one that bid on it for $10, and it already had backlinks to it.

Ryan: So you got an aged, old, solid domain, and then you put the autoblog on, correct?

Shaye: Correct.

Ryan: Okay, and do you think that played a role in the traffic being higher and getting some exposure to the domain?

Shaye: Yeah actually, because when I was searching – and that was the very first domain name I bought from GoDaddy auctions too. I’m obviously buying more now, but when I was searching for domain names, I searched by traffic. Granted, it said it only had like 20 or 30 traffic, but I wanted something that was already a little bit established.

Then I went to the backlinks checker and I checked all the backlinks for the fitness domains I was interested in, and that one had the most backlinks too, so this was just like a no-brainer.

Ryan: So the niche kind of picked itself, because you looked at the domain name being BetterFitnessPlan.

Shaye: I typed in fitness, so I knew I wanted something with the word fitness in it, so I typed the word fitness into the GoDaddy search box.

Ryan: I noticed that site was ranking for several key terms. Was it ranking for that before you bought it or after you bought it?

Shaye: No, it wasn’t ranking for – well, pretty much just the domain name. That’s about it. Everything else I put on there.

Ryan: And you were promoting the site with good solid hard work. I know you were writing articles and doing bookmarking and such. Can you talk a little bit about that promotion process?

Shaye: I first was just focusing on P90X, because that’s what I wrote a bunch of reviews on and I learned a lot about it, so I submitted probably three articles to a few different article directories.

Then I also wrote a couple about abs, like ab workouts, so maybe five to six articles to maybe three different directories. Then I wrote press releases I think for FreePressRelease.com. I paid $1 for each.

Then the Twitter account actually really helped in traffic. I bought a program that automatically gets Twitter followers, and a lot of my traffic was from Twitter too, so it was just a combination of all that.

Then social bookmarking, I did quite a bunch of that from SocialMarker.com. I don’t even know how many I bookmarked, but a lot.

Ryan: So the traffic was coming from a combination of social bookmarks, the search engines, your articles – was the auto-generated content creating any of its own traffic through any bookmarking plugins or anything like that?

Shaye: Yeah, actually. I noticed that when I would go to see what backlinks I had. I did notice that ones that I didn’t bookmark somehow got bookmarked. I tried that auto-bookmarking thing for Wordpress and I didn’t like it, so I just prefer manually doing it. But apparently somehow it got bookmarked and I didn’t.

Ryan: Did you bookmark the posts that you liked manually?

Shaye: The posts, yeah. Not the actual domain name, but each individual post.

Ryan: Got it. So anytime the autoblogging plugin would find a new post that you liked, you would go and manually bookmark it.

Shaye: Correct, and I did write my own posts too at the beginning, and I would bookmark every single one of those. Towards the end, especially right when I listed it on Flippa, I didn’t really do much with it after that. But in the beginning when I was writing my own posts and what not, I definitely bookmarked those.

Ryan: Okay. So you got a domain name in a niche that you wanted to promote. You put an autoblog up on that domain name. You started generating content and bookmarking that content. Traffic starts to come in. Then you start to see some sales. Talk about those sales a bit.

Shaye: They were sporadic. I’d have like one sale a day, three sales a day, and then actually right after I sold it, before I transferred all the guy’s info over I had like three sales.

Obviously I worked in the beginning, but even after I wasn’t working on it there were still sales coming in.

Ryan: Nice. And do you know where it was coming from, or did you just have a bunch of traffic coming from a bunch of places and you’re not really sure where it came from?

Shaye: They were all P90X sales, because that’s what my featured articles were about, and a lot of them were from the search engine, people searching on P90X reviews and what-not.

Ryan: Were you targeting those keywords in the search engines? I wasn’t aware that you were ranking for something like P90X reviews.

Shaye: Well, it wasn’t that common. I mean they were long-tail P90X, but yes, I was ranking for them, some less competitive ones.

Ryan: That’s pretty impressive, because that’s a pretty highly competitive keyword, especially right now. It’s a hot fitness product. In fact I’ve got it on my calendar for 5:00. [laughing]

So Shaye, it’s starting to make some sales from the articles and such that you were writing, and I think it was getting up to about $150/month. Is that right?

Shaye: Yeah.

Ryan: Okay. $150/month from your P90X sales, and it sold for $1,600. That’s a nice amount – 11 times income for an autoblog is a nice amount of money. It’s a good payday.

But what really surprised me was that even the domain was several years old, I believe you said that the actual blog, your work on it, had only been for about 30-45 days. Is that right?

Shaye: Yup.

Ryan: So you did all that within less than two months.

Shaye: Right, yes.

Ryan: What do you think was the factor for it selling for so much money in a short amount of time, because a lot of savvy website buyers will look for 5-6 months of establishment. And even though you had an established domain, you only had established traffic and income for 30-45 days, so what made the difference?

Shaye: Actually I think it’s the time. I really took the time to make it look good. I tried a bunch of different themes, and I wrote a lot of the content, and I researched it a lot more than I have other blogs.

I really just think it’s a hot niche and it’s kind of after the whole New Year’s weight loss resolution. Everyone wants to get fit. I think timing had a lot to do with it.

Ryan: Timing in the sense of you selling it?

Shaye: No, in the sense of what’s hot right now, trends.

Ryan: That’s an interesting point, but it’s rare that you hear people talk about, “I set up a blog to capture a really hot idea, and then I sold it.” That’s an interesting perspective. I never heard someone talk about focusing on something that’s really hot and getting the sales, and then selling it while it’s still hot. An interesting strategy.

So it’s making money, and it sells for 11 times the monthly revenue. That’s evidence of a compelling auction listing and people being engaged in the auction.

I know that you had a considerable amount of bids. Can you talk about how you structured your auction and why you think you got more than the average number of bids?

Shaye: Actually I had no idea what to expect, because it was my first site listed on Flippa, so I researched a lot of other sites that were for sale before I did anything. That’s what I always do. I like to look at other people’s stuff before I start something.

It was surprising at first that that many people were interested. I guess it was just all the information that I put on the listing. I tried to not leave anything. I tried to put everything I could on the listing. That’s why it was kind of long, but I really don’t know what else to say.

Ryan: Let me ask you this, Shaye. Was there a main point on the site that you tried to highlight as your hook in order to get people interested?

Shaye: I guess the autoblog feature and the fact that traffic was increasing every day, or if not increasing I was getting more followers on Twitter. I was doing nothing and I was still getting steady traffic. I guess that’s the main thing.

Ryan: So you were talking basically about the trend of the website and how it was increasing.

Shaye: Right.

Ryan: I know you had decent search engine rankings and you had good traffic, and you even had an autoresponder working. Were you highlighting those as bonuses?

Shaye: Yeah, and I also added PLR articles. I gave the guy who bought it I don’t even know how many, over 2,000 articles that he could use. So I tried to make it enticing for people to want it, because I had more bonuses than other people.

Ryan: When you say giving out PLR articles, you mean that you’d gotten from other sources that didn’t cost you anything?

Shaye: Right, they’re free. I have a ton on my Mac.

Ryan: You mentioned that you were giving out several different bonuses. What were the other ones that you were giving?

Shaye: Free transfer, like I handled everything else for him.

Ryan: I noticed you did free support as well for one, so just standard good old, “I’ll help you out” bonuses.

Shaye: Right.

Ryan: Do you know anything about the buyer – what type of expertise he had, what he was looking for or his reasons for buying the site?

Shaye: Yeah, I do. I’m pretty sure he’s new at this. He has a full-time job, so he hasn’t even been able to spend a lot of time with it, because he has commitments to his other job too.

He’s really big into fitness and health, and that niche was interesting to him, and he wanted something that he really could just set and forget and make money.

I told him that he’s going to need to do some work to keep more money coming in, but it definitely helps I guess, because when he’s new he doesn’t want to have to take care of all of that.

He asked a lot of questions about how I was getting traffic, so I told him what to do. I told him the easiest way was to start writing articles, bookmark them, and I told him what sites to go to and all that. So I think he’s pretty new at this whole thing.

Ryan: I’ve noticed that autoblogs are often very attractive to people just starting out, because of the fact that they take so little time – not no time, but little time – to grow and maintain. That’s something for people who are listening.

When you’re selling an autoblog, keep in mind your target audience of that type of a person. You can structure your auction according to the potential buyer.

Shaye: I noticed a lot of people are interested, because it’s like a full-time job keeping up with all these messages and stuff on Flippa. I’m like, “Dang, this is a lot more work than throwing up a website and getting affiliate commissions.”

I noticed a lot of them – I’d say 85-90% -- were newbies who just didn’t know much, and my other two blogs I sold too, they were both newbies. I think those autoblogs, like you said, are really attractive to people who are just starting out.

Ryan: Shaye, I’ll put you on the spot here. Are you keeping those people on a list you’re maintaining, because they’re going to want your other stuff as it comes up.

Shaye: Yeah, I have been keeping contact with them, and a couple of them want me to do work on the side, like random people just message me and say, “Hey, can you do this? Can you do that?” so yes, I have been keeping track of all of them.

Ryan: Cool. Good work on that. I’m proud of you for that, Shaye.

Now you did all this in 45 days. You had money coming in throughout the process. You sold it for $1,600. Would you say that you were satisfied with the end result?

Shaye: Yes, definitely. I did not expect that much. I had my reserve at $500, and I was like, “Well, I’d take that,” so I was ecstatic when I saw that people were interested.

Ryan: Was there a point in the auction when it really started to tip over and bids really started to jump up and you started to really get excited?

Shaye: Yeah. I remember it was at $710, because I was talking to my friend about it. It was right before I left to go on my cruise, so I was pretty excited that I’d have money to spend right before.

I remember it was at $710 and I woke up – I don’t know if it was the next day or a day later – and someone had bid $1,000 on it. It was this random guy that came from nowhere, like I had no idea who he was. He hadn’t been bidding before or asking me questions or anything. So once he bid $1,000, then it just took off from there.

Ryan: With each bid, I bet you got more and more excited.

Shaye: Exactly, for sure.

Ryan: Shaye, just two more questions before I let you go. First, if you could go back and redo anything, what do you think that you would correct? I know you got way more for the site than you expected, and you were really satisfied, but is there anything that you’d correct if you could go back and do it again?

Shaye: First of all, there was a discrepancy from the date I said it listed and the date that Flippa said it listed. That bothered me.

Ryan: You mean the domain name?

Shaye: Yeah, the domain name. It’s not really a big deal, but that’s one of them.

I guess I would just change the layout and how I listed it pretty much. I don’t think I’d really change anything about the blog itself, but probably since it was my first blog listing, I can’t give you specific examples right now because I don’t have it up, but I’d probably change more of the listing and make it more user-friendly.

And the bonuses, maybe more bonuses or more enticing bonuses, just something to make it stand out more.

Ryan: And last question, you mentioned that you’re buying more expired domain names now, and based on this experience you’re probably going to be following this process again.

Could you give us a little bit of a glimpse into what you plan on doing from here, based on the success that you just had?

Shaye: Because of this site that was for sale, a guy contacted me and I’ve been doing work for him on the side for his blogs, and we’re kind of going in on some more affiliate marketing related blogs and getting our products.

I’m working on those with him right now, and then I’m trying to do things on the side too, but there’s only so much time in the day. I don’t know when those are going to be ready. Probably not for a couple more weeks or so.

That’s one thing I did learn, because I sold a couple other blogs and they didn’t really have much traffic to them, and they only sold for like $200 or $100. One thing I did notice is that when you have established traffic coming in, and maybe even a few sales, it’s a lot more enticing for people to buy.

In the future, every blog I’m going to sell I’m going to have a Twitter account with incoming traffic, good traffic, and at least a few sales.

Ryan: Are you going to follow that same process of using the autoblog plugin and put them on those established aged domains, and then just bookmarking the content you like and following the exact same process?

Shaye: Yeah, I will. Not all the ones I’m getting ready to do are old established domains, but yes, I’m going to be doing that, as well as newer domains. But the same process goes for all the domains, even if they’re new or not.

Ryan: What’s your user name on Flippa, so that people can follow you and bid on your auctions when they’re listed?

Shaye: It’s shayemichaels.

Ryan: Okay. Well Shaye, I’m really excited for you for your first ever flip, making $1,600 – about three times what you expected. That’s great! I’m really excited for you, so congratulations.

Shaye: Thank you!

Ryan: Thanks for hanging out with me. I really appreciate you.

PowerPlyos.com Demo: Auction Sale Walk-Through

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 09:56:00 PDT

Hi everybody, Ryan here from eTycoon, and in this video I’m going to be listing a site for sale, completing a case study that I started when I purchased this site.

This website is www.PowerPlyos.com. It’s a ClickBank product that I purchased. It actually wasn’t a ClickBank product when I purchased it. I made it into a ClickBank product, and I’ll be listing this for sale to hopefully turn a profit.

I’m going to show you the sample listing that I created, then I’m going to go ahead and put it up for sale.

Here’s the little write-up that I created, and I’ll just read it straight to you:

Thanks for taking the time to view this auction. PowerPlyos.com sells a unique original ClickBank product about increasing vertical leap. This site absolutely kills in the search engines, as evidenced by its high listings for a variety of keywords. A sample list of keywords is provided below.

When I took over this site back in September, I had visions of rehabbing it into a top-selling ClickBank product. While I was successful in increasing the income and stats, it’s taking up mental bandwidth and my more profitable projects have taken precedence. Hence, I have decided to sell.

The reason I put that in there is because on every listing when someone is interested they’re going to ask, “Why are you selling it?” It’s a common question. Why are you selling a site that’s making you money?

So I put that reason up there right in front. I’m selling it because my other projects are more profitable. This is taking up mental bandwidth. I haven’t gotten around to doing things that I want to do. Now I go into why it’s a good buy.

This site averages over 100 unique visitors per day and it has a Google page rank of 2. Most importantly, this is an aged seasoned domain that has been registered for over 7 years. All of these have played in role in getting it to the top of the search engines for the following terms: [and then I list them]

Included with this auction is a list of over 19,000 prospects and buyers who are interested in increasing vertical leap, managed in iContact. You can have the entire account if you wish. [I’ll explain why I put that in there in a second.]

This list was accumulated when there was an opt-in on the actual sales page. I’ve since removed the opt-in in order to increase sales from organic traffic.

This list has never been sold affiliate products, never been invited to a webinar, never invited to a teleseminar, and it has been responsive to promotions for the product. The list was generated from the site, not purchased or rented.

It’s a fairly green list, meaning that it’s not been burnt out with promotions, but it is still responsive and contains a heck of a lot of buyers.

I’m trying to create the idea that all the hard work has already been done, but that there’s potential that they can tap into. I never come out and say, “This site has so much potential!” In fact, I come out and say that you shouldn’t buy a site on potential, because that’s what I believe, but I do try to create the image in the buyer’s mind that I’ve done all the hard work, this is going to be an easy transition, and you have room to grow the website.

That’s why I subtly say things like, “You can just have the account if you wish. I’ve already got the traffic there for you.” Then I say, “I’ve never done this,” to plant in their mind, “Hey, I could go ahead and do that to increase the revenue from the site.” Let’s keep going.

In January I ran a simple 4-day cash machine to the list and it brought back about $550 in profit. A few days later I ran a survey to the list to see how the product could be improved, and I offered the survey takers a 50% discount. This brought in an additional $190 in profit.

Without any promotions, cold traffic brings in a few sales a month and about $100. Two promotions brought in a total of about $750 and took all of 20 minutes to write and send, bringing the last two months’ revenue to about $850. ClickBank stats are below.

Therefore, the $250/month claimed revenue is a low estimate. [I’m actually going to move this to the end. ClickBank stats are below. I’m claiming revenue of $250, but still it’s a low estimate.]

I always knew that the list would respond extremely well to affiliate promotions, especially on a teleseminar or webinar, but I simply never got around to doing it.

One promotion a month would do wonders. Heck, replicating the first promotion of $500 would be no problem.

Again, I put this in here to create the idea that there’s easy work that can be done to increase the revenue of the site, and it’s 100% true, but I put that in there in kind of a lighthearted way to plant in the buyer’s mind that there is room for growth that I haven’t taken advantage of, and I’m telling him what they are.

If they see themselves doing work in order to increase the profits, then obviously they’re going to be in a better position to bid on the site because they can see what they’re going to do to make money from this. Let’s keep going.

If I had time, here’s what I would do to increase the profits of the site.

Move the sales page to a sub-page and capture leads on the home page.
Develop an autoresponder and lead funnel to drive leads to purchase.
Do one affiliate promotion per month.
Interviews with product vendors would do wonders.
Test different headlines and images to increase conversions.
Create an upsell for the product.

I know that I could do this in less than a week’s time, but when I’m honest with myself, I’m just not going to get around to it.

Again I’m trying to allow them to picture themselves doing this work, so they can see that it’s going to be an easy transition and an easy way to make more sales and make more money with this purchase.

I don’t believe in selling a site based on potential alone, so I won’t try to B.S. you a pitch about how much potential there is in this site. You can see that, based on the stats that are already in place.

There’s a list that is profitable – 19,000.
It’s got wicked awesome search engine rankings.
Tons of traffic.
Very low refunds – only 2 that I’m aware of.

The site needs to improve its sales page conversions, update the product, and develop a backend lead funnel to monetize the leads that are already on the list.

The product is not only listed in ClickBank, it has sales. It has solid search engine rankings, and heck, you get the list of 19,000 included when you buy the site.

One more thing – no reserve.

You can see my strategy of a lighthearted, honest, upfront listing, and I’m showing exactly what can be done to the site. A lot of sellers say, “The winner of the auction will be shown what can be done to improve the site.” I say tell them right up front. That way they’re going to be able to see themselves actually doing the work.

I’ve also created two videos which will be included in the listing. Here’s the first one. I just did them in Jing and ran through the website. I ran out of time on the first one, so I put in a second Jing video as well just so I could get in all the information that I wanted to get in there.

I’m on Flippa.com and I’m going to sell this website. The URL is www.PowerPlyos.com. The site was established in 2003. I don’t remember what month it was registered, so I’m just going to say December.

Content is unique. Design is unique. For my average uniques per month and page views, I took a screen shot of my stats. I came to my Cpanel on my host and I’m looking at my AWStats for the last month. You see I’m averaging here about 3,500 uniques per month, and my page views are about 4,600 to 4,800, so let’s say 3,800 uniques and 4,800 page views.

Now auction or private listing. I’ll be honest with you, I usually go with auction because that’s going to get the most number of bids, which gets people into buying wars.

I don’t usually do private sales because I hate them as a buyer, so I figure that there’s probably other people out there who are in similar situations. When you can’t see what someone is wanting for a website or what it’s currently selling for it’s frustrating, so I’m going with an auction.

With the title, I like to highlight all the benefits that the buyer is going to get when they purchase. I’m going to talk about how there’s sales, I’m going to mention that there’s great traffic, that there’s a list, and that it’s listed on ClickBank.

So my listing title is, “ClickBank Product with sales. List of 19,000. Top Google rankings. No reserve.” I’m actually going to move this, because I think this is more of a benefit, the top Google rankings – for a buyer anyway.

My subtitle is, “Established product listed on ClickBank. Has traffic, income, and a huge list. No reserve.” I’m happy with that.

For my listing length, I want to sell this site and I want my results quickly. I don’t want to list my site for just 48 hours, because that’s not going to maximize the number of buyers that we see, but I don’t want to extend it for more than a week or two, because I don’t want the buyers to delay bidding, so I’m just going to list my auction for 7 days. Then I’ll add a description.

We’ll spice this up a little bit. We’ll create a header that says, “Established ClickBank product. Has tons of traffic and sales,” and I bolded – “Important: List of 19,000 subscribers is included with this auction.”

And here’s our listing. I’m going to link in these videos here. Here’s the first one, and I’ll put it right here. So I put the videos right in here as my walkthrough to verify the stats and ownership of income. Now I’m just going to bold the benefits of the site.

I went ahead and bolded some of the features of the auction. It’s pretty simple, nothing too crazy here. I’ve got my videos listed as well. Now I’m going to edit the revenue details. I’ll punch these in and then I’ll show you what I did.

For revenue details I just put –

The revenue comes from sales of the product, and all the sales come from either organic traffic from the search engines or mailings to the list. The list is included in the auction and you can just take over the iContact account if you prefer.

There have not been any affiliate promotions sent to the list, although there are plenty to choose from. There’s a good selection of jump higher programs currently listed on ClickBank and other affiliate marketplaces.

Again I’m leading them closer to picturing what they could do to the site. Once they start to picture themselves doing this to the site, they’re more likely to bid on the auction.

Under traffic details I just put –

All the traffic comes from organic listings in the search engines. I have included a screen shot from SEMRush.com, which provides a sample of the keywords that this site ranks for in the search engines.

Finally on Flippa we get to put in these tags. I’m going to put in ClickBank, organic traffic, and I could either put a tag about lists or about that it’s a product. I’m going to say list building.

The reserve price is $1, the starting bid is $1. I’m not going to automatically accept all bids from all bidders. I’m going to approve them. That way we can have it say $1 for longer, which will get more people looking at the auction.

We could include a Buy It Now price, but I’m hoping for a bidding war and I don’t want to list a Buy It Now price too high, because I don’t want to discourage bidders, so I’m just going to leave it open. I’m going to accept escrow. That’s all.

I didn’t say anything in my listing about the success fee. I’m not trying to use that as a sales point, so I’m just going to say I’m going to split the success fee with the buyer, 2.5% each.

Here’s a page that gets a lot of questions. What upgrades are worth going for on Flippa? This is my own opinion, but I never go for having the listing highlighted or having a border. When I’m buying I don’t really pay attention to it. I might pay attention to a listing title being in bold, but whenever I see borders and a row being highlighted, my brain just knows that it’s an advertisement.

The only ones that I think are absolutely essential are having it be listed and featured on the front page. I think that’s necessary. I think you should have it be featured on the front page. Screen shot on listing row is nice. It’s not 100% necessary.

The other option is to have it tweeted on Flippa. Myself as a buyer, I do follow Flippa on Twitter to see what their latest listings are. I haven’t tested it enough to know if there is going to be a significant bump from it, but for this particular auction I’m expecting to get a significant amount of money, so I am going to have them tweet the listing.

If you have a site that you expect to sell for under $500, I would not recommend you getting this option. If you’re expecting to get $800 or over $1,000, then you may want to consider it. I’m hoping to get over $1,000 for this auction, so I am going to tweet it to the Flippa followers. But again, if you’ve got a small site it’s not necessary for you to do.

So those are the options that I’m going to choose. The only one that’s necessary is to have it featured on the front page. Again, if you’ve got something that’s under $500 you probably don’t need to have it featured on the front page, but I’m hoping to get a good amount so I’m going to choose those options.

The last step is to pay for my listing. Again, I’m paying almost $100 because I chose to get these upgrades, but you can choose them according to what your preferences are. I’ll just pay this and then we’ll see what happens.

I just paid for my auction. It’s going to go live as soon as we verify it and upload the screen shots, and I recommend that you disclose as much as humanly possible. I’ll verify the site. This just requires that I upload this file to my host so that Flippa can see that it’s verified. I’ll upload this file. Uploaded. And Verify.

Flippa found it and now we’re verified. That means that it has gone live on the Flippa marketplace, and now I’m going to upload some screen shots that I took to verify some of the stats.

This first image is a picture of the ClickBank account to show the sales that are in there. This is the full screen shot that I took of the sales so that the buyers know that there are sales coming in to the website.

This second picture is traffic that’s coming to the site. It’s just a screen shot of my AWStats in my Cpanel. That’s what it looks like, so I’ll upload that.

Finally I’m going to put in my SEMRush, which is going to show my organic listings.

And lookie here! Before we even get done uploading everything we have a bid already. Not expected, that caught me off-guard here, so let’s take a look. Somebody bid $1. Great!

The site’s ready to go. We are good to go. We can add Google analytics here by just going to the tab that allows it to go through our Google analytics right here. Verifying your Google analytics data. This will go into our Google account and it will allow it to access the traffic stats that’s coming from that.

I am going to do that, but other than that our site listing is done. It’s out there, people are seeing it, people are already bidding on it, and we’re going to now see what happens. Hopefully we make a good profit from this listing. I bought his site for $750 and we’ll see what we sell it for.

++++++

It’s been less than 24 hours and I’m checking out my auction. So far we have six bids – a couple at a $1 and the highest at $250. It’s been about 19 hours since we listed the site for sale, so what I’m going to do is go ahead and accept these. Then I’m going to switch over to have it automatically approved so that I don’t manually have to do it.

Remember, I kept it at $1 to begin with to get the attention of people, so it was a low price to show that the price had been kept low. Now that we’ve got a couple of bids I’m going to switch it over to auto-approve. This box here will automatically approve them. I will accept those bids.

Now the bid is up to $250, but here’s what I’m excited about. If we come to the actual listing, we’ll see that in less than 24 hours there’s 31 people who are watching the auction, and it’s got 419 views. Those are really strong numbers, so that has me encouraged and excited about that.

Do you remember the tags that we added to the listing in order to let Flippa know what the site was about? That’s what these tags here at the top will do. Remember we had ClickBank as one of the tags, so if we click on ClickBank we’ll see that our website shows up here under a site that’s classified as ClickBank. That goes for the other tags as well, and when someone comes to this box and searches for it.

So right now we’ve got some strong numbers, some strong indications of excitement around the auction. I’ve also gotten several private messages about the auction, people asking if I’m willing to sell it right now, if I have a Buy It Now in mind. I’m just listing it for auction right now, but that’s another positive sign that it’s being received well. We’re going to let the auction continue, and we’ll continue to see what happens.

++++++

Hey everybody, Ryan here. We’re in the middle of my auction. Before I show you some stats I wanted to clarify something that I said. As I was watching the video thus far, I noticed that I may have misled you in one thing. I said that if we set it to automatically approve these buyers by clicking the checkbox that was down here, it would automatically approve all bids.

What I meant to say was that it would approve all bids from these buyers. For example, if these two buyers got into a bidding war, I wouldn’t have to go in and manually approve all the $10 bids that might go in one after another, especially since we’re going out and getting other people who are not looking on Flippa to buy a site – which I’ll show you in a second.

We’re going to want them to automatically be approved so that we don’t have to go in and accept every single one – unless of course you’re more comfortable with manually accepting the ones that you approve of, in order to gauge if people are serious buyers or not. You might feel more comfortable doing that, but I just wanted to set it so that it automatically approves all the bids.

So we come back to the auction and Edit Listing. Once an auction is live, there’s very little that we can edit about the site. We can’t edit the stats or the traffic details, but we can edit whether or not we want to automatically approve all bids from all bidders, and that’s down here under pricing.

I have that checked and I will save that change. That way it will automatically approve the bids that come in.

The other thing I wanted to show you was when we started this auction, the upgrades that we purchased were a tweet to the Flippa followers and to have it listed on the front page.

I did not see the bump that I thought I would get from the Flippa tweet. That might not be the case for all auctions, but in this case I did not see the bump that I thought I was going to get. It got buried fairly quickly, so if I could do it again I would have saved my money on the tweet and bought an additional featuring on the front page. We can buy multiples of these.

So when I purchased this, even though it’s no longer a new auction, if I purchase the upgrade to be listed on the front page, it will bump it back to the front page of Flippa.

I will probably purchase that towards the end of the auction, so that right before it’s going to expire it’ll come back to the front page of Flippa. That way we get some additional exposure before it goes off the market.

I did not see the bump that I thought I was going to get. If I could do it again I would have saved the money and purchased an additional featuring on the front page of Flippa.

Two days into my auction it’s beginning to pick up some traction. There’s 46 people watching it and 729 views. Now you may know that the biggest surge of bids come towards the end of the buying process, so the fact that there’s 46 people watching it is an encouraging sign to me.

But it wasn’t enough for me, and I don’t recommend it be enough for you, to just settle for the buyers that are on Flippa.com. There’s a whole host of people out there who would probably be interested in buying your site who are not looking on Flippa, because they’re focused on building their own business.

What I’ve done is I have gone out and identified who might be interested in my site, and I have gone and contacted them. Since my site is listed on ClickBank, I went to the ClickBank Marketplace and I put in “jump higher” as the keyword, and it brought back a whole host of products.

Actually, this is the third page. Let me show you the people that I actually contacted, because they had relevant products that were similar to the one that I’m selling.

This first product is Jump Mentor, The Funk Roberts 6-week jump training program, and the third one is the Vertical Jump Training System. I just went through and I opened up these products side by side. I took the domain name and I went and contacted the owners of the domain name and told them that I had a product that was for sale that was a competitor of theirs.

This is one of them that I contacted, so let me show you the exact email that I sent out. It looked like this.

Hey, Ryan Moran here. I’ve been a competitor of yours for awhile now.

I said I’m a competitor. I didn’t try and make chummy with them. I just said, “Hey, I’m a competitor of yours.”

I have a ClickBank product about how to jump higher and I rank #1 on Google for ‘learn to jump higher,’ as well as a host of other key terms. The website is PowerPlyos.com. Perhaps you’ve seen it?

However, I’ve decided to bow out of the niche and I’ve listed my site for sale on Flippa.com and wanted to let you know in case you wanted to pick up some instant market share. Here’s a link to the auction.

All the best,

Ryan from Power Plyos

I sent this same email out to every person who had a ClickBank product within my niche. I just found the ClickBank Marketplace owners and I actually took all of their email addresses and sent it out in one email blast, and I was very, very encouraged by the response. In fact, so far I’ve had about five people respond saying that they’re interested, that they’re watching it, and that they’ll be considering a bid.

The other thing I’m going to do now is send the exact same email out to those who are ranked for the key terms that I’m targeting, because they could either take over a site that already has search engine rankings or already has a list or already has sales and traffic as a supplement to what they’re already doing.

‘Jump higher’ and ‘learn to jump higher’ are some of the key terms that this site targets, so I can just go through here, take the domain names and look up the Whois information. I Google “whois information” and the second one down, NetworkSolutions, is the one that I usually use, but you can use whatever whois look-up that you want. Look up their email address and send out an email to them.

I’m going to contact these individuals, on top of the product owners that I’ve already contacted, and you may only get a couple of people that respond, but are they going to be a targeted buyer? Are they going to be interested in my auction?

You bet they are! They’ve already got products and sites within the niche. So you may only get a few people that respond, but they’re going to be the ones that are bidding and getting into bidding wars with one another.

In this case I was very encouraged. So far I’ve had a 40-50% response rate, so I’m expecting great things. Hopefully they get into a bidding war themselves, in addition to the sites that are ranking on the search engines.

So in addition to the Flippa.com buyers who have responded favorably, I’ve now contacted the ClickBank Marketplace to get them onto my auction and bidding and viewing, and I’m going to do the same with my SEO rankings in order to get more buyers looking at my auction.

We’ll add those buyers into the pool in order to drive up the bids and drive up the buying price so we can put more money in our pocket when it’s done.

++++++

There’s a little bit less than 24 hours left in my auction. You see there’s about 23 hours left. We’re up to 13 bids, and the current high bid is $1,700, which is good news, since the website was purchased for $750 and very minimal work was done to it, so this is already looking to be a profitable flip.

My next step, with there being just under 24 hours left in the auction, is to send a follow-up email to those who were interested in the site, meaning the buyers list for this current auction.

This is the email that I sent out to the people who responded to my first email.

Hey, I don’t mean to bug you, but I wanted to give you a heads up that there’s just under 24 hours left on the auction for my jump training site. Here’s the link.

Then I say –

To be honest with you, I’d really rather sell the site to a competitor who cares about the niche and will update the product and continue to grow it. With a list of 19,000 prospects, I don’t want some schmuck to buy it who will never take care of the list, you know what I mean?

If there’s anything I can do for you, just let me know.

Thanks.

I do that because, first, it allows me to kind of remind them of what the benefits are. I get to throw in that there’s a list of 19,000 prospects within the website that comes with the sale. And I remind them that it’s within their niche, that they’re already familiar with it, and that they’re going to increase their market share by buying the site.

I also do it to just kind of build some rapport with the potential buyer, in order to bond with him and get him to pay me more money for the website. That’s why I structured it in that way, and I sent that out to those who had responded to the first email that I sent out.

I didn’t send out any dupe emails to people who had not responded. I don’t want to spam anybody. This just went out to people who had showed interest in the site after my first email blast.

I want to show you something fairly unfortunate. I hoped I wouldn’t have to show you something like this, but it came up, and I guess it’s a good thing that it did. I got this email privately. It did not come in through Flippa. It came in privately through one of my personal email addresses. I’m not quite sure how they got my personal email address. They probably did a Whois look-up on me or something.

This was from a supposedly interested buyer in the website. Now I suspect that this was a scammer. I don’t know for sure if this was a scammer, but it had all of the red flags that come along with someone who’s trying to steal money or steal some property from you.

This person obviously saw that my website was for sale, and contacted me at a personal email address expressing interest in buying the website. Actually this person said that he was just interested in buying the domain name. The email says –

We buy and sell domains. What’s your price for the domain?

An easy enough question to answer, an easy way to get in the door, no problem. I responded and I just said,

I have the site listed for sale on Flippa. I’m selling the entire website along with the domain. Feel free to bid. If you have any questions, go ahead and ask.

At this point I was not suspecting anything. My eyes lit up when I got this response right away that said –

Can you accept $5,000?

At first I got excited! I thought, “Hey, this person wants to buy my site for $5,000. I might as well let him,” but as I began to dig into this a little bit I started to see some red flags.

This person is giving me an offer of $5,000 when the site was currently going for under $1,000 – a big jump. Now this person might be just giving me a legitimate offer. That could be the case, but it’s a red flag if someone is offering you a much, much larger amount privately, outside the realm of Flippa. That could be a red flag. It might not be a bad thing, but it’s something to pay attention to.

This other red flag is that this supposed domain name buyer is giving me directions of how I can prove to him that the site is worth as much as he’s offering. He’s giving me directions that I need to follow, meaning to get it appraised, go here, do this, give him a discount, and then he follows it up with –

Hope we can come to an agreement fast.

I responded with a tough response, and this was an honest response, and I was assuming that the person was still a legitimate buyer. I said –

While the offer’s enticing, I’ve got a responsibility to the users of the site to continue to give them content.

I just said that I was looking to sell the site to someone who’s going to take over, not just someone who was going to buy the domain and let the website go to crap.

Here’s where I knew for sure that this was an illegitimate buyer. The response was as if I had given a counter offer. It said –

It’s a standard practice to show an independent valuation to buyers and resellers. Nobody will do business without it.

I just turned down his offer, and he’s telling me how I can go back and prove to him that I can meet up to his offer. So he gives me directions again, and it’s obviously an auto-response, a pre-filled-in response.

At this point my red lights are going ‘ding ding ding!’ and I knew for sure that this was somebody who was not looking to buy my site. This was somebody who was probably going to try and get either some money out of me or get my domain transferred, and then he was never going to pay up.

Those are some red flags for you to look at if somebody’s contacting you privately outside of the marketplaces, making some big claims that your auction currently does not support, giving you directions of proving your worth to him, and having an auto-generated response that does not really answer the reply that I just made.

I just wanted to give you that heads up. You might run into that. That’s why it’s safe to deal directly on Flippa rather than take offers privately out of the marketplace. So there’s how you can spot this type of a scam.

We’ll update this when it’s closer to the end. We’ve got 24 hours left. $1700 is the current price, and we’ll watch and see what happens.

+++++

This is Ryan. It’s 1:30 in the morning, so I’ve got to talk kind of quiet. I thought about holding off until the morning, but this was too important not to show you.

You might be able to see that there’s a little bit of a bidding war going on between a couple of the bidders. This was the part in the auction where I had to start considering a Buy It Now bump, and I decided to go ahead with one.

The reason I did that is because the auction was slated to end this evening, but some late bids came in and Flippa will delay the end of the auction in order to allow other bidders to come in and match the offer.

Right now it’s 1:30 in the morning. The auction is slated to end in 4 hours and 45 minutes, which would put it around 5:30 in the morning my time, and I don’t want to miss it.

If no more bids come in, then I have a problem – well, not a problem, because $2,600 would be fine – but if I totally missed it while I was sleeping and I could have gotten a couple hundred extra dollars, I’d be pretty disappointed, because I figure most of the bidders are probably sleeping at this point unless they’re really, really into this auction, so I decided to add the Buy It Now bump.

I probably should have added it earlier, but it was a busy night and I’m not married to this auction, so I just added the Buy It Now price in hopes of getting that Buy It Now price. We’ll find out in 4 hours and 45 minutes, if not sooner, what we sold the site for.

I just wanted to show you that I added that, just to try and get those who are in the bidding war to come in and swoop in and buy it, and I put it in now in the hopes that they’ll bid up the auction high enough to kind of exceed what it would have gotten if I didn’t add the Buy It Now price.

My concern is that if I don’t add the Buy It Now that the bidding will stop right here and no one will make that jump, so I added the Buy It Now and we’ll see what happens. I’m going to go to bed. I’ll wake up and hopefully I’ll have some money.

+++++

Good morning everybody! I got some good news this morning. The Buy It Now bump worked and we got our full Buy It Now price of $3,200 for this website. You can see that there were 23 total bids, and somebody scooped it up at the end for the full Buy It Now price.

Let’s take a look at the bid history here. You’ll see that the bidding had gotten up to $2,600 and that’s when we put in the Buy It Now bump. Rather than just bid it up to $2,700 or $2,800, that Buy It Now bump was low enough to entice the bidders to jump for it and to snatch it out of the hands of the other bidders.

Remember I did that because we were close to the end of the auction. I wondered if I left it at straight auction if it would get less money, so I added the Buy It Now bump in order to kind of wave a carrot in the eyes of those who had been bidding, who had kind of been in a bidding war, to make that leap to the end and give me more money.

You know what, I probably could have sold this site for more money. I probably could have placed a higher Buy It Now price, or I may have gotten more money if I had just let it stay in auction, but I didn’t want to run the risk of getting just $2,600 for the site. I wanted to get that extra jump at the end.

Could I have sold it for more? Maybe, but there’s an old principle that says, “Do not glean the fields.” Don’t try and go for the maximum each time. I’m happy with my profit of $3,200.

Remember I bought this site for $750. I made my money back in selling the product, and then I sold it, so my profit was like $3,000 or even the full $3,200. I’m not sure what my profit was, but it was way up there.

I’m definitely happy with this flip. I’m in the process of transferring it now, and it should be an easy transfer. I’ll show you what I did with the transfer process, but I just wanted to update you that we sold this site for its full price and it’s been a successful flip.

++++++

I just got this email from the buyer. His name is Jeff, and he sent the payment over via escrow. This is going to be a really, really easy transfer because we’re just going to leave it on my host, since it’s a reseller account. It’s not costing me anything, so he’s welcome to use it for awhile until he gets his own host, so we don’t have to transfer any files.

All I’m going to do is send him a list of all the usernames and passwords for the account, transfer the domain over to his GoDaddy customer number, and that’s just a simple trigger in my GoDaddy account, and it looks like this thing is about done. I’ll get a check in the mail from escrow when it’s all completed.

So if you went through this entire video, congratulations! I hope you’re not bored out of your mind. You just watched me sell a site on Flippa.com for $3,200. I hope it was helpful. Thanks for watching.

++++++

Before I go, just for kicks I might as well show you how I’m going to transfer this domain name. He gave me his GoDaddy ID, so I’m in my GoDaddy account and I’m going to look at all the domains that I have and find PowerPlyos.com, which is right here, and click on it.

I want to transfer this, so I’m going to come up to Account Change and I’m going to put in his customer ID number. I’ll say use his details from his account for the new whois information so it doesn’t come up as mine anymore, and I’ll need to put in his email address. I’ll hit Next.

It’s now transferred. It’s sending it over, they’ve been submitted, and what do you know. We’ve transferred the domain. I’m going to give him the usernames and passwords for everything. We’re done and I just made $3,200 right in front of your eyes.

Hope you enjoyed it. Thanks again.

Case Study: The $80,000 Adsense Site

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:43:00 PST

In December 2009, School-Grants.org sold for its BIN price of $80,000. Getting a full 22-times the monthly revenue is no small feat, but it is even more impressive for an Adsense-only site. School-Grants.org was monetized only with Adsense, and 100% of its traffic came from search engines.

Cary Bergeron is the mind behind this site, and his entire business model is built upon these two elements. In this revealing interview, he explains how he has built a full-time business on free traffic and the simplicity of Google Adsense.

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