It's a fully working amazon/adsense site with ~$300/month income for the last year or so. I've had analytics access and the traffic is as advertised. Not sure what it'll be selling for, but over $2k is likely.

I'd just like someone with more experience to take a quick look at the listing to see if any alarmbells go off.

Standard stuff like the owner buying things he would have bought from amazon anyway through his own affiliate links and fake traffic. But for the owner to do this for a full year before trying to sell it seems unlikely.

How do you maintain it going forward? Do you need to regularly add content?

Make sure you get all the source code.

Yeah, doing that for over a year and buying 700+ items seems unlikely. Think I'll ask for an overview to see if they're mostly the items advertised on the site just to make sure, thanks.

Maintenance is limited to checking if links are still working and no new content is required. Though I do intent to add some extra content to get more traffic from related keywords.

Thanks for the advice.

Definitely check the traffic sources. I saw this guy on Flippa who was buying tons of traffic through Reddit and Facebook and then claimed that his three month old site of mostly autogenned crap had "gone viral" thanks to his friend being a "social media expert." He wasn't lying when he said that his traffic came from social networks, but wasn't being honest about the fact that he was paying hundreds if not thousands a month for it. So his business model was to buy real traffic and generate real revenue over a few months, but pretend like it was organic and sell the site for several times his ad spend.

tl;dr: make sure you don't have to pay $300 in PPC to make that $300 bucks.

Serious question, would anyone here ever really sell a site making $300/month for $2000 without having some kind of knowledge that it was unsustainable in some way? (not being rhetorical or passing judgement on the site in question, really curious as to why someone would do this).

I don't know about others but if I have too much stuff on my plate, I would. It's too important to be in a positive mindset and energetic every day to not to.

The reason is once you have so many things going on, you only have so much energy and brain power in a day to take care of things. You have to choose whichever revenue stream that bring in the most cash and subtract whatever operation that isn't worth the time/headache even if it's making money. Thinking about it can suck the energy out of you as well.

To put the example at an extreme, would Warren Buffet want to operate a site that brings in $1,000/month? His opportunity cost is much higher doing other things than worrying about this site.

I guess what you can do is hire a manager to take care of all your sites for you but then you have to make sure the sites are making enough to pay the manager and now you have to deal with the manager, which takes time/energy/etc.

well, obviously if the website requires work or might be more valuable in someone elses hands (such as higher affiliate % tiers, which might be in play here?) there are a billion reasons to sell.

but, for a nearly passive income business that can be managed from anywhere in the world with virtually no overhead, the only reason to i can only think of is a financial emergency. i'm sure that's not terribly uncommon but it's not something that's easy to verify.

also, insaint, I thought of another way you could be getting screwed. it sounds like this site lives off of organic search traffic. you need to see where the links come from and whether they are permanent. if someone rents links for 12 months and generates good traffic/'revenue off of them, then goes to renew them in month 11 and finds out the price has been raised high enough to eliminate profit, they might decide to just sell the whole thing and not mention that the backlinks are going to vaporize shortly.

Overall thoughts on the book? I starting reading the Kindle sample a while ago and Ries somewhat rubbed me the wrong way, so I passed, but left it on my wishlist. Should I pull the trigger?

Yeah, I made sure of that, ~95% of the traffic is organic search. No PPC campaign has ever been run according to Analytics.

That is a good point, I did check the links and most seem normal. No links coming from unrelated high PR/authority domains. But I'll look into it some more to be sure.

Thanks, I really appreciate the advice.

Look at links from sources where normally the revenue comes from affiliate ads, but somehow there aren't any. For instance, poker strategy tips sites that aren't blogs with no obvious affiliate banner ads generally makes money by selling links.

Be wary of the Flippa username is "2Robusto.". Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Ah, that is a good one, thanks.

Haha, I'm not really into buying a month old website.

Ries' language (MVP, pivot, product/market fit etc.) is standard now, so I'd read it to at least understand the language.

I agree with most of the the book, especially the theme of launching early and having data instead of guesses steer your business.

For $11 on Kindle, it's worth it.

EDIT: I skip the rest of his stuff though. He seems to have turned into a standard "guru".

Yeah, I wasn't worried about the price, just if it was worth spending my time reading it rather than one of the other dozens of books waiting for me.

Thanks for the reply. I'll give it a read. Cheers.

I'm starting an online English tutoring service and repeatedly see that in terms of Alexa rank EFL sites have much lower traffic than sites related to poker. For instance, this site http://www.download-esl.com/index.html, a popular EFL Ebook site with PR5 has much worse Alexa rankings than some top poker Ebook site(s), all of which have lower PR. I would think EFL has a much larger market than poker. Do you think these sites really get lower traffic, or more poker players have the Alexa toolbar installed?

If poker really is bigger than EFL for web traffic (incredibly hard to believe) and one can charge a lot more for poker products than for EFL products, makes me really wonder if I should continue with my current plan.

If anyone here is interested in starting a website PM me. I am currently in planning phases to start a soccer goalkeeper blog/forum. If this interests anyone here whos into websites etc let me know as I would like a partner to help run it. l8er.

Poker absolutely crushes EFL in terms of traffic. Poker has been on TV for years and is an incredibly popular game. Someone that wants to learn English isn't going to be searching for that information in English.

PR doesn't matter for traffic and Alexa has a biased sample because you have to have their toolbar installed to count. I would think that poker players that have/play on the internet are less likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed.

I don't understand why you would want to abandon your plans to start an EFL website/product because you could potentially make more money selling poker products. Poker is one of the most difficult and competitive markets on the internet.

You would be better off refining your EFL plan to get estimates of what you would be able to make. If you want to make $X per month and you can do that with EFL, why not do that with the topic you are more interested in?

Your post was pretty helpful actually.

For a niche like that the biggest money is in selling your own product to consumers. Next would be selling consumer leads to companies that sell EFL courses. After that would be selling a course as an affiliate. And last would be just having related advertising (adsense, etc...) on your sites.

What's one of the keywords you're targeting? I'll run a SERP IQ report on it and post it here and we (the forum) can discuss it.

Thanks. I'm targeting the keyword "learn business English." Actually, I'm using the method of picking some low traffic keywords, some of which we have no shot at ranking for in the early periods, and then sprinkling LSI keywords and related long tails throughout the text to try and pick up traffic from related long tails. I picked this method up from the keyword academy and x-factor. If there are better methods for this project though, I'm open to those though.

Right now, I'm in Manila, and I see a ton of online English training centers (skype/webex/etc.) serving corporate clients. A bunch of them are terribly run, but make a lot of money. They have good sales teams in their target countries, but horrible products and with the right sales teams can make multiple six figures a month in profit. I'm trying to figure out if one can achieve their success promoting primarily online, or if the only way to do it is to pitch to big companies in the target countries.

I'm not coming here to say "I want to make a site making six figures a month in profit;" that would be unreasonable. Rather, I just want to get into an area with enough growth and size that a decent number of players see this.

Insaint,

I'd cross check the site's SERP rankings with the estimated amount of traffic for the ranked KWs along with the CPC/Amazon % numbers and make sure it's on point. I would also expect the site to easily sell for $3k and possibly more if there's room for growth.

Why are you trying to sell a product in English to people who don't speak English? If you want to promote online, you need to do so in people's native language.

I was planning to do so?

In retrospect I'm likely confused. The example of "learn business English" threw me off. Sorry!

No worries. Going to have my site done in several languages and do keyword research for at least a few of them. There is a decent amount of traffic for EFL in English, so I think it's still worth having an English version.