Take More Risks

1. Try to prepare for the sale at least 2 months beforehand. During this period you must log all of your traffic, earnings and expenditure preferrably with screenshots. Proving income is essential if you want to get a fair price for your site as it effectively guides them towards the true value of your site based upon multiples of monthly earnings. The first thing potential buyers ask is “how much is this site currently making?” followed by “how much traffic is getting” and then “how could I increase both of these effectively?”. If you leave the last question unanswered in the buyers mind they will be much less likely to make a bid. It isn’t enough to say that a site has potential, you must provide examples of this. For example as a guestre of goodwill you could forward on a few concrete ideas for linkbait to the buyer.
2. If you buy a site with the purpose of resale in mind, wait 2 months and create truly explosive/controversial content. Remember your reputation isn’t as much at stake as it would be with blogs that are easily attributed to you so you can get off with a lot more!
3. If you want a quick sale, don’t start your auctions at ridiculously low prices. Buyers are probably more impatient than sellers and want to resolve the deal quickly, so set a realistic start price (for me this is normally the Reserve Price – 20%). I’m tired of seeing auctions start at $5 on Digitalpoint when the seller is expecting $1,000+! This isn’t Ebay! You aren’t selling fucking lampshades!
4. Be completely honest about your site. If your site is in decline, provide valid explanations along with some suggestions to stop the rot. Be open with your motives for the sale in order to reassure buyers of the site’s stability. Everything you can do to reassure the buyer will make a BIN bid that much more likely.
5. Be realistic with the BIN price. If you can only provide proof of 2 months of income then you’ll be chancing your luck setting the BIN at monthly revenue x 10.
6. Monetize your blog properly before listing it for sale. Technology blog owners are particularly susceptible to receive poor prices for their websites especially if they have only implemented contextual advertising (usually in the form of Adsense). For example Take More Risks earnt around $2 in February in Adsense. That doesn’t mean that Take More Risks is worth $20 at most (although some would disagree). The best way to monetize tech blogs is through paid links and reviews. Experiment with as many different revenue streams as possible before creating a listing. However if you’re still hellbent on giving away your 2 year blog with 200+ posts for under $100, feel free to give me a ring. The market certainly needs a few more seonewsblog.com’s.
7. From experience Sitepoint.com bidders seem to be a little more generous with bids than their counterparts over on Digitalpoint. This alone can justify the $20 listing fee that Sitepoint imposes.
8. View your site portfolio as a sports team. Always ensure that you have at least 1 strong site that “holds the team together” during the rough periods through diverse sources of income. Don’t be afraid to buy promising young sites just to flip them on again for a premium. You can use the profit to strengthen your best sites by buying paid reviews, Wordpress plugins/templates or text links. Experiment with what formation works best for you.
9. If you acquire a blog that hasn’t been updated in a while be sure to update it regularly for a few months before selling it on again. It’ll make it easier for the new blogger to maintain the posting momentum.
10. And finally, if you’re selling a blog try offering incentives shortly before the sale for posting comments on your posts. Install the Top Commenters plugin if you haven’t already. The idea is to make the blog appear as lively as posssible in turn helping to attract more generous offers.

Last week I sold Fart Noises via private message on Digitalpoint at $2,000 which was my BIN price. People have since asked me why I decided to list the website in the first place. First and foremost I’ve realised that I pretty much suck at creating serious websites, so a lot of the money will be invested into acquiring established technology blogs.

Here are a few more reasons on why I decided to sell.

• With Fart Noises I was putting all of my eggs into one basket. If I’d have been banned from Adsense during that period my earnings would’ve been badly hit.
• It’s good to move on and rekindle your energies with a new project, especially with smaller sites.
• There are no Vista drivers for my laptop’s microphone meaning I can’t record any more farts. This is a serious drag.
• I’ve been served eviction orders for “disturbing the peace” regularly at night….

It’s been more difficult than I had anticipated to buy valuable websites. As I’ve mentioned before most of the stuff listed on Digitalpoint is full of shit. One thing you can do to increase the effectiveness of your search is to use the Advanced Search facility on DP, selecting search titles only and the type of site you are interested in (e.g. proxy blog, myspace resource site or whatever you are interested in). Also ensure that you’ve highlighted the Sites forum from the “Search in Forum(s) box before you proceed to improve the relevancy of the results.

I’m beginning to recognise that there is sometimes a massive gap between how Digitalpoint and Sitepoint users value their websites. It’s possible to acquire a website for next to nothing on Digitalpoint and to then flip it almost instantly on Sitepoint for 2x more. You need to do your research here though! DN Scoop is really useful for determining the relative value of a site. What I do is calculate the value of some of my established websites with DN Scoop and then use that as a scale to decide just how popular/valuable the site in question is. It’s important not to take the absolute predicted value seriously.

One of the biggest indicators of a site’s potential is your knowledge in the subject area. If you know nothing about past life regression how the hell are you gonna update such a site without hiring someone to help you? At least if you know the subject area in and out you can divulge the information in a refreshing format rather than resorting to rewording yet another Wikipedia article.

Cutting through the crap on Digitalpoint going solely by titles!

• “For Sale – Profitable website” – Alarm bells ring immediately! If a site is so profitable why sell it? If you see such a title you should be extra thorough in investigating the seller’s motives for listing the website.
• “New Forum – Great Potential” – There are so many of these listings nowadays. Remember most forums have potential, it’s just actualising it that is a real pain in the ass. Try to avoid new forums in over saturated niches especially i.e. webmaster/SEO unless it’s targetted towards an under-served mini-niche within that area.
• “SEO Optimised Site For Sale” – This has to be one of the most dumb things you could ever put into a listing title. Buyers are looking for websites with flaws that can be easily improved upon. An unoptimised website can easily be re-worked to bring in substantantially more traffic with little overheads. A better title would be “Completely Un-SEO’ed website for sale”.
• “Cheap site for sale” – There aren’t many titles more unappealing than this! Price isn’t the only factor we evaluate when considering the value of a deal. We’re looking for the sites with the most promise!

An update on what I’ve done with the Fart Noises money

Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve caved in and bought an Xbox 360 with Gears of War, Elder Scrolls : Oblivion and Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis. Luckily I still have almost $1000 left in my site kitty. Hmmm, knowing my luck loads of great websites will come on the market at low prices that I’ll miss out on.

One thing’s for sure and that’s that flipping websites shouldn’t be your only stream of income no matter how profitable it may seem in the short term. It seems as though I’ve forgotten how to blog in the last week!

Warning : The following post is full of pretentious psychobabble. If you’re easily offended by rambling hippy dross, please look away now.

I’m terrified of bees. I really do hate the bastards out of principle. I could give a thousand reasons why but none of them are that interesting.

Anyway, I was in KFC the other day with my friends from work when this huge bee came in and started clambering clumsily across the window pane. As per usual I freaked out like a little cissy girl. At one point I even thought about leaving the restaurant and returning to the car to avoid the fucker. Yes I really am that bad.

I arrived back at the office curious to find out a little more about bees and as per usual Wikipedia saved the day. On the Wiki entry I came across the picture above and it got me thinking. Bees do little else but collect pollen and nectar. It’s their job and they love it. Yet as humans we generally see work as a chore, something that has to be avoided. It’s seperate from our real interests in life. Yet with bees it IS their life.

If work seems like a chore then you’re doing something wrong. You’re wrestling against your conscience. Since I bought the John Chow review back in February I’ve felt obligated to update this blog on a daily basis and it soon became a strain. I was updating the blog because I felt I owed it to people, not because I wanted to as such. I lost my purpose a bit.

Since then I’ve realised that I really do love web development/affiliate marketing. When I’m writing code I don’t see it as work. Work is resistance. When I’m developing websites I’m actually enjoying myself..

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life working for someone who just sees me as another number. I mean the prospect of total obliteration after death is real. Why should we sell what little time we have on earth for a meagre hourly rate?

I want to spend the rest of my life devoted to what I love which is buying and developing new websites. The minute it becomes a chore I’m gonna quit and become a hamburger flipper….. or a Nun! I hear transgender operations are comparatively cheap these days……

I was chatting to Nate a few weeks ago about an idea I had for buying established websites on the cheap. The premise was pretty simple, I’d use Google to try to find sites that were put up for sale by their owners informally through an announcement on their website.

For example if you do a Google Search for “take over this site” you are presented with 570 results, some of which are pages that have annoucements stating that the website in question is up for sale. The reason why I’ve used “take over this site” rather than “this site is for sale” is that “take over this site” implies that money isn’t in question, the owners will often be willing to transfer the site over to you for a nominal fee providing you gain their trust (which is the hard part, after all they don’t want to see all of their hard work ruined by a babbling, incompetent lunatic who wipes everything and places ads everywhere.).

Let’s assume that you’ve found a website that you like that’s still available. You can increase your chances of acquiring the site if you can prove that you’re passionate about the site’s subject area. It’ll help to have existing websites in this particular niche that you can forward on to the site’s owner. A better approach would be to visit DMOZ and scour the niche directories for out of date yet popular websites that correlate with your interests.

For example I could visit the Dmoz Farting category and look for pages that haven’t been updated in the past few years and ask if they are interested in handing over their website in exchange for some money. Your chances of a successful handover are increased dramatically if the owner is unaware of the value of their site. You can gain a fair impression of whether this is the case or not by simply analysing their pages. If the site is well designed and features some variety of ad links then the chances of the creator handing over the site are remote since they are probably aware that there website is worth at least something.

Ideally the website should look horrendous, have no ads but a lot of content and backlinks. DN Scoop is your friend here.

Of course, part of the fun is typing in keyword phrases that webmasters will use to signal their disinterest with their current site. Here are a few ideas that return 50 or more results in Google.

This site is dead

No more site updates

Anyone want this site?

Giving my site away

Take care of my site?

Site is closed

Need a new webmaster

This is my last post ever

And finally an extra special bonus search term.. 

So far I’ve made about 5 email enquiries with no success. Have any of you tried this before? Do you think it’s ethical? How would you respond if someone asked you to hand over one of your old websites for next to nothing?

After the weekend PR update, Take More Risks has been upgraded to a PR4 from a PR3 which means that I’m now elligble to place Text Link Ads on here. Hurrah! I’d applied a few months ago but was rejected as the blog didn’t have any link popularity or real traffic. The most frustrating thing about this was that when I went to reapply I was notified that I’d have to wait until the TLA monthly review for my site to be approved. Being a bit of a chancer I emailed the TLA team and within a few hours they manually approved my site. You seriously can’t fault that for service!

Anyway here’s a screenshot of this months payment notification email -it’s increasing gradually!

Text Link Ads Tips

• Supply as many relevant keywords in the the Keyword box as you can, it’ll increase the likelihood of your listing appearing if an advertiser searches for it.
• Don’t place the Text Link Ads at the bottom of the page as this is a surefire way to halve your amount of recurring subscribers. Remember new advertisers often expect traffic as well as a Pagerank boost.
• Ad places on technology/computer related blogs are in demand by advertisers. You can find these PR3-4 blogs on Digitalpoint all the time with asking prices of between $100-200.
• Generally I don’t submit a blog until the price tag for one link until the price tag on the text link calculator is above $30. It means you’ll have to wait a month on the whole review process (unless you send them an email).