I'd honestly avoid Flippa unless you know exactly what you're doing, there's a lot of sharks on there. I have limited experience with Flippa, but I haven't seen any evidence that contradicts my feelings for it.

I look at Flippa with some regularity, and in the past year I saw maybe a dozen sites that were worth a damn. And they all sold for ridiculous multiples. So even if you find a legit and relatively safe business, too many people will be jumping on it. (I'm mostly looking for entertainment, and for the domains.)

The site above is probably for sale because Google has been making tons of changes to Google Shopping making things more expensive for merchants and making it even harder to show up in results.

If you know how to run the site and know the ins and outs of PPC and how to play Google Shopping, then it might be worth it. If you don't, it's just a waste of money and time.

I would be wary to any seller that says:
They make it sound as if the only thing you need to do to double your earnings is double your PPC budget, which is nothing but BS.

Idea: I've been thinking of scraping all the sites listed on Flippa. Then, at some point down the road, taking a second look at what is on those sites. I have a feeling that a lot of these "profitable" sites get sold, the new owner can't make any money, and the site gets taken down.

I would have to think of the methodology for this and what would make sense and wouldn't be too difficult to make.

Anyone sell items through their site? Any suggestions for E-commerce service similar to Shopify/Volusion that might be cheaper?

Any "guide" to buying websites from other webmasters? I have never done so and haven't the faintest clue as to how I would go through with it.

Also, what things should I check for valuing a website? The website I am buying is the exact same EMD as I have on another site I own, its just a different extension (I have [keyword].net, I want to buy [keyword].org). He put this site up for sale about 1,5 years ago for $1600, no takers. I tried to PM him at the forum he tried to sell it, and asked to buy it for $1000, and he agreed. However, after checking some places in google a couple more times, it seems that he has dropped out of the rankings almost completely for many keywords, including the [keyword] in the domain name (maybe panda ipdate?).

Disregard all guides and checklists and just use your head and common sense.
You're much better off asking for 2nd opinions than looking at guides.

If you already have the .net and presumably making money in the exact same industry doing very similar things, it should be pretty clear what your site is worth to you. From that valuation you can take a good guess on how much their site should be worth. In essence, you have a great "comp/comperable" for valuing the other site.

Of course the valuation is just a basis for your top end price limit and you should buy it for the smallest price possible and that will depend on your salesmanship and personal circumstances of the present owner.

I have a t-shirt site ltdex.com that I sell t-shirts through. I host it myself, and it cost about 250$ (maybe a little less). I used wordpress, wp-e-commerce plugin, and a theme from getshopped.org. Easy to setup CC procesing and paypal, handles coupons, inventory etc.

What's everyone's plans for 2013?

I only have two sites that are actually viable entities right now, a racing forum that is hosted for free through a friend and brought in $65 from Adsense this year, and my MFA site which brought in $47 from Adsense, and another $13 from Amazon.

For 2013, I want to get the MFA site off of Godaddy and on to a decent hosting site, and then optimize the crap out of it. 2,484 page views from 1,327 unique visitors and only 51 Adsense clicks for a 2.05% CTR. Pretty craptastic CTR no? I have pulled another 283 clicks for Amazon, but my conversion rate once clicked is super crappy, and the product that I refer doesn't pay well at all. Still, I think I can do some things with layouts and design to up my numbers significantly.

Anyone else here wanna share their 2012 numbers and plans for 2013?

If you are doing this to make money you should move away from MFA sites and go into affiliate marketing.

Choose a topic that you are interested in and start writing your own content. You can pick almost any niche and put together a little site that features news/reviews/helpful tips/shopping advice and make waaaay more money then you would on a MFA site. You don't even have to be that active with updates and stuff.

Find products/services that you care about.
Find online shops with affiliate programs related to product.
Find a good domain name related to the products.
Write helpful articles with BuzzFeed-ish headlines about products.
Make money in your sleep.

Wanted to get some advice on ways to increase the revenue to my site that I just started recently. I recently developed a site which provides information on local poker tournaments in my province (not sure if I can post a poker related URL on this forum?). The site provides details on casino based tournaments, meetup group tournaments, and other local tournaments. There wasn't a site that tracked all of these tournaments together in one place, so I figured that most local players would find it helpful to find poker tournaments in their community. The site has a searchable database that allows a user to look for tournaments based on date range, buy-in or tournament type. It also has a forum area to discuss local poker tournaments.

My plan was to generate revenue from affiliations with the major poker sites. I have been approved by four of the major poker sites for their affiliation programs. I have their banners on all of the pages on my site and as players open accounts and make deposits with these sites I get paid a certain amount per player.

I have also arranged with one of the poker sites to run satellite tournaments to events being held at the local casinos in my area. I figured this may help stimulate some interest in my site and lead to some accounts being opened. There are no satellites currently available to these tournaments so I expected some interest from local poker players. For the first satellite I arranged, I even got the site to kick in over 50% of the buy-in to the satellite to motivate players to join the poker site. So far the interest has not been what I had expected. I have received a lot of exposure from friends that run local meetup groups and they have notified their players of the satellite.

What do you think I can do to improve the revenue potential of this site? Is it very difficult to generate revenue from these poker affiliation programs? should I look at other non-poker affiliation programs? One thing I need to focus on is getting my site higher up in the search rankings on the various search engines. My site does come up when you search by its name but not when you do a search by other key terms. Any advice on improving the search ranking for a site? Any other things I should consider to improve the revenue capability of my site? I appreciate your feedback.

Even if you significantly increase conversions you will still be making just a couple of bucks. MFA sites work on volume. You need to build up a network of sites that each bring in $50, not trying to increase conversions from $50->$60. You can work on that later when you have a 100 of these sites. I think that would be time better spent...

You can't promote your own stuff on 2+2 forums, but admins have been kind enough to allow mentioning your sites here for discussion purposes. If you are here to contribute and have some history and the link really is posted for discussion, then you should be fine.

You should have a look at BravoPokerLive app. It may get you thinking about what you may want to do, give you ideas on how they make money, etc.

Is it possible to measure traffic to a specific domain name, if that domain doesn't yet exist? For example, if you wanted to register www.abc.com but wanted to know if it got any seach traffic before you registered it, is this feasible?

What is the best way to measure visits to your site? what info can you obtain on visitors to your site?

Flippa is running a little award contest for sites listed in 2012.

It is somewhat interesting what is considered the cream of the crop on Flippa. The categories are as follows:
Best Site Content
Best Domain Listing
Best Blog Site
Best E-Commerce Site
Best Site Monetization
Best Web/Mobile Apps

You can look at all the auction details and see how much they are making and what thy sold for. Most of the sites sold for some pretty darn high monthly profit multiples. We're talking 20x-40x or more. See here.

I think google adwords keyword tool is what you're looking for, just type in keywords and it will tell you the search traffic, related searches and more.


Example: (copy/ pasted the data is much more readable in their tool)

Keyword
Competition
Global Monthly Searches

Local Monthly Searches
Approximate CPC (Search)

abc
Low
30,400,000
11,100,000
$0.41

abc.com
Low
450,000
368,000
$0.52


Save all
Keyword ideas (800)
1 - 100 of 800



Keyword
Competition
Global Monthly Searches

Local Monthly Searches
Approximate CPC (Search)

the abc
Low
30,400,000
11,100,000
$0.42

abc abc
Low
30,400,000
11,100,000
$0.42

abc news
Low
2,740,000
1,830,000
$0.49

news abc
Low
2,740,000
1,830,000
$0.50

abc alphabet
Low
6,120,000
1,220,000
$0.41

abc tv

What I done in 2012 was a waste of time and money. I learned a few things I guess but I spent a bunch on MFA sites which actually used to be decent money when you made a lot of them but it was bad timing considering as I was just getting mine set up and building backlings Penguin, Panda, EDM updates and so on came out.

It's a hard thing to learn and 90% of what you read don't work. The IM forums are full of newbs like myself and people full of **** that in some way is trying to sell them/us something and if they are not trying to directly, then they are posting to build their repuation for when they try and sell at a later date.

I've decided this year I'm just going to focus on building 2 authority sites, high quality content, nice looking, get some keywords ranked, promote it on social media sites and so on and post on other forums in that niche and try to make something from affiliate links. I have one in mind that I think should do well. The other one may be a little harder to get going but could be nice long term.

I'd be happy to get to $500 a month to go towards rent and make life a little easier and I'd be fine.

Good luck, sounds like a much better plan.

Anyone have tips for coming up with names for websites or brands. I have the idea for my site and stuff but damn it is hard to think of anything good. I've been using the thesaurus and dictionary but still not much sticking out.

Try this site: http://impossibility.org/

Don't know where to put this, but this seems like a solid thread.

I hired someone on oDesk to do a bunch of tedious work - downloading a ton of flash-based videos from a website, converting them into AVI + GIF format, and categorizing them in a folder structure in Dropbox.

I interviewed a bunch of people and settled on someone for $2.60/hr who had a bunch of experience in video editing.

He's done ridiculous work so far (9 hours in) and I am hoping to find some other work for him in the future.

So if anyone needs a guy who does good data mining / video capture stuff, let me know. I would give this guy a really solid reference. I just wish I had realized the potential of oDesk/outsourcing in the past and pulled the trigger on it considering how low of a cost it is. Awesome for prototyping ideas or whatever.

I recently had an issue with an oDesk contractor using auto-clicking software, they had thousands of hours logged and 4.5+ feedback, but still tried to con me by working 6 hours straight all at 10/10 activity levels in the work diary...so obvious.

I reported them and they had their account suspended. I've still got to go through some long ass process to claim back the money that I was billed for the 6 hours of work now :/

How is oDesk compared to other contracting sites? I'm looking to hire someone to research and write about odd/interesting jobs. I am trying to decide whether I should use oDesk/eLance/etc or just search around different websites till I find a writer I like and approach them directly, thoughts? I know this has been talked about before but any words of wisdom when it comes to hiring writers?

I have only looked at odesk and freelancer so far. in general, it is much easier to browse contractors on odesk than freelancer. Odesk you can search specific language in profiles whereas you can only search specific location in job postings on freelancer. Freelancer also contains a lot more upsells.

I posted the same job recently on both to have a javascript made. I got more responses and of better quality on odesk. I received 3 responses on freelancer and 9 on odesk in the same period of time. Each freelancer application was from an agency, on the higher end of the budget, and towards the tail end of the deadline. Odesk was the opposite. I ended up hiring a guy who did it at the bottom of my budget in 8 hours.

I prefer elance over odesk. I didn't have very good luck w/ odesk. I've used elance for quite a few projects with good luck. When posting a job be sure to set your budget low (not so ridiculous people disregard you) because the trend is for everyone to bid at or over whatever your budget is. People want the work so you can often negotiate the price quite a bit once they've submitted a proposal.

It took me several tries but I found a really good editor/proofreader that I use.

When searching on oDesk you can use a lot of filters and narrow down the contractors a lot. If you end up with say 200 though there is no way to filter through that many and the order they are in is just some oDesk special order which can hide good contractors/cheaper alternatives. They need to add a "sort" option to the search.

Normally I make a job, invite 15 people who have great hours/feedback/rate/skills but also leave the job open to the public. Normally around 33% of those I invite accept to interview and generally these candidates are much much better in interview than those who I didn't invite personally.

I use odesk and freelancer. Ultimately, it's all hit or miss and it depends on luck of the draw. Sometimes you get good people, good prices, and good response. Other times, you don't. I just submit a project for bidding and wait. I trash BS responses immediately, and I trash high bids immediately. Then I review the leftover candidates.

Thus far, I've used people for things I knew a lot about for tasks that are either tedious or just above my knowledge base. Most people rush and don't provide great work. They don't seem to run even a basic test for their work and even for $30 project I had to have the person fix it like 5 times, which really adds a lot of days when the person is in Asia.