I’m writing this because probably a lot of my readers are newbies who buy sites and may be buying from Sitepoint and other forums/auction sites. I use Sitepoint to sell my sites and occasionally buy some sites from Sitepoint.

If you buy sites on Sitepoint, you really need to do some homework. There are a lot of sellers who are purchasing MMR products that cost $10 or less, setting it up on a domain, and selling it for $167 more or less. When I say a lot, I mean a lot.

Some of them even try to pass these MMR sites off as unique. They advertise them as unique, but they are far from unique. I saw yet another one of them two days ago that advertised the site as unique. I found it for $49 by Googling and this scammer was charging $797 for this site. I pm’d him and gave him the $49 link to the exact same site. His response? He gave me a link to the exact product that costs $5.99. What can you say to that kind of arrogance and pure rip-off mentality?

Apparently this type of thing is not against TOS, so it is up to YOU to research the site before investing your hard-earned cash.

How to Flush Out the Rip-Off Artists

Use Copyscape.com for starters. It will tell you if a site has duplicate content. In addition, you can use Google.

Take a headline or paragraph and do this

“place headline here or paragraph or sentences” in Google with the quotes. It will return any content within the quotes. When you look at the results, look for Master Resale Sites listed and check it out. You may find that there’s a Master Resale Rights product for a couple of bucks identical to what is being sold as a unique product on Sitepoint for over $100 or you may find that the site being sold is using PLR articles that are already all over the Internet.

Here’s another tip on how to spot the scammers. Click on their profile and check all the sites they’ve been selling. Click on each of them to see if they keep selling the same sites over and over. Right now there’s a little scammer on Sitepoint who is selling the exact same “traffic selling” site over and over, just changing the template and domain name, but it’s the same site and he’s listed well over 20 of them so far. And people keep buying them. Not only is the market completely oversaturated with this BS site he’s selling, but Sitepoint is now overrun with people trying to sell “traffic” from these clone sites.

Take the time to do the research.

13 Comments »

I have close to 300 domains … some of them crappy, but quite a few domains that are worthy of developing. In my experience, the quickest way to sell off my domains is to develop them. Quite a daunting task when you have a lot of domains. My problems are solved. I just purchased the unlimited version of Autoblogged, the best damn autoblogging plugin for Wordpress I’ve seen, bar none. Check out this site I put up yesterday using it. TekPop.com. It has nearly 200 posts being pulled in from the top technology blogs on the web, all citing the sources, pulling in the images and saving a local copy, tagging and categorized. You just set this up and your domain is good to go … instant quality content on a regular schedule. Check it out below.

No Comments Yet »

In a heated bidding war, ToysRUs bought the domain name Toys.com at auction for $5.1 million. ToysRus really wanted the domain, for obvious reasons. Everyone except ToysRUs and domain holding company National A-1 (owner of domains such as free.com, boys.com, girls.com, and divorce.com) bowed out of the auction at $3 million. The last $2 million was just those two companies going back and forth for hours.

ToysRUs really didnt have much choice. If it wants to be the first thing people associate with toys it really couldnt afford to allow anyone else to own that domain, even in this economy. Who says real estate is dead?

1 Comment »

3 Comments »

With the current state of the economy here in the US some of you might wonder if domaining is still a viable means of online income. Here’s my experience. I have a lot of domain names just sitting parked right now, but one by one, I am developing them. I choose the best, most interesting names, develop a site, get it indexed, get some traffic and sell them at a nice profit. All this, of course, takes work. So many people want to just buy a domain name and sell it at a huge profit without doing anything to it. That works for some really high-powered domain names, but for the average portfolio, it doesn’t … at least not for me.

Even if you don’t want to develop, in order to get more than reseller profit from a domain name, it’s going to take work. In order to make a real profit from a domain name, you need to sell it to an end-user rather than a reseller. Finding and contacting those end users takes time and work. I’ve done it both ways … finding end users and developing. I enjoy developing more than cold calling (via email) end users.

There’s a trend to develop mini-sites rather than park a domain. That’s a good start, or at least a better alternative to parking sites, but I develop full sites rather than mini-sites. It’s all about the end user. As an end user myself, someone who purchases sites, I never throw money at “made for Adsense” mini-sites. Number one reason is that I could throw that up in no time myself. Number two reason, I don’t find them fun or appealing in any way. If they make you some money … good, but people pay pretty well, even in this economy, for a well-developed and designed site in a hot niche.

Here’s some sites I’ve sold recently:

Land of Shopportunity
Anime Zoo
Dot Com Mogul

Here’s some I have in development:

eMovieTrailer
Simple Yoga

That’s just a few of them. I have more in different stages of development. Once they are developed, I get them indexed and get traffic going to them. How do I do that? Simple. I own Firestorm Forum, a social bookmarking exchange community and when I exchange bookmarks, let’s say Stumbles (that works best for me), the site is indexed within 48 hrs .. usually 24 and has great traffic stats immediately (unless, of course, the site is a real dog). It works beautifully and having the site well-indexed in Google and traffic stats to show off adds a great deal of value to the site and gives you some selling points for listing.

Where to sell?

I have my best luck selling on Sitepoint. It costs money but has been well worth it for me. One tip for selling a site on Sitepoint is to make a great sales page. Be sure to mention all of the assets of the site … how many posts, how much traffic, revenue if any, site features, potential to make money (ie … do you already have Adsense and ads in place?). Here’s one of my listings to give you an example of listing the site’s selling points.

One thing about developing nice sites to sell … you can even flip a weak domain name if you have a great site established on it … not a really crappy domain name … just a bit weak. Of course, if the site is really great, it might even sell to someone who purchases a better domain name for it.

What kind of sites to develop?

I have two favorites … Wordpress blogs and Joomla sites. Many people know how to set up a Wordpress blog, so that is probably the easiest site to get established. Joomla sites are a bit more complex and often the best components to add features to your site are commercial, so you have to sink a little money into the site. To tell you the truth, 6 weeks ago I wouldn’t have been able to put a nice Joomla site together to save my life. Then I bought one really cheap and had to buckle down and get to know Joomla in order to add value to the site and fix some problems. It didn’t take long to become a Joomla enthusiast and all in all, it was a pretty short learning curve.

So that’s it …my advice for selling domains in a bad economy. Works well for me. Hope it does for you as well.

2 Comments »

With more than 64 million active users and around 250,000 new users joining every day, you can tap into the social networking revolution with a free page on Facebook for your blog or business … yes, I said free.

Previously you had to be BIG business with a BIG marketing budget to create a corporate or company Facebook account. Blockbuster Inc., CBS Corp., The Coca-Cola Co., Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., are examples of well known companies that have a corporate presence on Facebook. Facebook members could then become “fans” by adding your company as a friend.

Now, this option is open to any business. Businesses can add any content they want, including photos, videos and music. Facebook users can share information about a business directly with the company by adding reviews or other information to that business’ page. Small businesses now have the advantage that only Fortune 500 companies could afford previously. It’s simple: here’s how you do it:

Creating A Facebook Business Page

1. Visit this URL

2. Choose the best category for your business.

3. Just enter your business name and then click “Create Page”.

4. Now you can add a description of your business and a website address. You can also add a photo or logo. There are sections to add more photos, video

5. Then click on your hyperlinked business name in the top left corner and click “publish this page.”

6. Finally, from your new profile page, become a fan of your business. This is important as all of your “friends” will now be able to see your page when they visit your profile and it will be shown in the news feed that “Suzanne is a fan of Dot Com Mogul”. With some social networking, some of your Facebook friends will also add your business as a friend and then their friends will see a message… and on and on.

To the left is a screenshot of your admin panel. You can send updates to fans of the business and there’s a link to Promote Page with an Ad. You can also use the pages’ discussion board to start topics, list events, or write on “the wall”. I’ve just added a page for my blog, Dot Com Mogul. You can see it here. (While you’re there, add it as a friend I plan to add more interesting info and a video to it, but this is the beginning page with minimal information. If you’re wondering why you should do this, just check out the Facebook statistics below, and did I mention …. it’s free.
Read the rest of this entry »

4 Comments »