Whether you’re going to keep or flip a site, one of the most important things you should be doing is making the site profitable. A site with revenue will sell for a great deal more money on Flippa than a site with no revenue, so it’s well worth your time to attempt to make that site profitable. Here are some ideas on how to increase the revenue of a site.

Create your own product. Creating a well written, informative ebook on the topic of your website and selling it for 100% of the profits can produce a great deal more profit than just offering affiliate products for a percentage of the sale price. You can also sell a service from the website rather than an info product. Test the best pricing strategy. Increase your price, even if you have to repackage or edit the product to increase it’s value. You’d be surprised how many times I’ve heard people say that sales increased when they increased the price of their product. Don’t be afraid to charge more.

If you do offer a higher priced product or service, also offer a “light version” of your product. Sometimes people aren’t buying simply because they can’t afford it or they think the price is too high. You can overcome this with a light version.

Add great bonuses to your product. Don’t add a low value bonus that no one really wants. Make it a dynamite bonus so that people will buy your product for the bonus if they aren’t interested in the actual product. A valuable bonus can make your product irresistible.

Increase the traffic to your site. Don’t be dependent on just one source of traffic. If it dries up, all of your traffic is gone. If you’re trying to rank in Google for your keywords, make the same effort in Yahoo and Bing. Don’t forget social bookmarks such as Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon and many others. They are not only a good source of traffic, but provide backlinks as well. A viral post in Stumbleupon, Reddit and Digg can get thousands of visitors in a short period of time. If you use paid traffic, buy more paid traffic. The point is to increase your efforts to increase the traffic.

Another good way to increase traffic is to become an authority on the topic of your site. Provide really useful information and you’ll find that not only do people visit, but they come back time and again for updates.

Launching giveaways and contests are also a good way to get repeat visitors and increase traffic. Make your prize or giveaway something really spectacular that most people would want. Giving away junk won’t get the traffic that a dynamite offer will. Visitors will tell other people if the giveaway is really great. Nothing better than word of mouth for increasing traffic. Launching contests and giveaways not only increase your traffic and encourage visitors to come back, but it can also increase your product sales.

Adding a Twitter account and Facebook page and getting people to like your page are excellent ways to get additional traffic. Tweeting your posts to your Twitter account and posting your posts on your Facebook page are good ways to increase interest in your site and to increase the value of your site should you list it for sale.

Make sure you’re building a list. If you’re giving something away, make them opt in to download it. Not only is a list invaluable for marketing to your list, but the list itself is a great asset to list on a sales listing for the site and increases the site’s value.

If you’re selling affiliate products, experiment. Don’t just sell one product. Add others to the mix and test, test, test. If you can sell one product, you can sell more than one.

JV with others. Do ad swaps with others in like markets, make friends and get noticed by super-affiliates. Getting links on authority sites or getting affiliates to promote your products can greatly increase both your traffic and sales. Attracting the right affiliates can make a huge impact on your business. Making friends and giving or helping others in your business is one way to do that. Build up a reputation for helping others, expecting nothing in return, and you’ll be much more likely to get people who want to promote your products.

One way to meet and make friends with potential JVs is on social networking sites. They aren’t called social networking sites for nothing. Contrary to popular belief, they are actually for networking with like-minded people and are a great way to make friends in your market.

Most of us have heard and may have even been affected by Google’s changes in it’s algorithm. The latest update, called Panda, has been out for awhile. We’ve seen the demist of blog networks like Build My Rank and others that just post links to the network for themselves and their customer’s backlinking efforts. Well, those links could now hurt your site instead of help it rise in the serps.

This means, that in order to do due diligence when buying a website, you now have to take into consideration what kind of SEO has been done to the site. Things like checking backlinks, site load time, unique and fresh content, anchor text links, and much more. You’d be well advised to read this (a href=”http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/253550/keep_your_website_off_of_googles_naughty_list.html” target=”blank”>PC World article to get up to speed on the latest Google algorithm changes.

This will give you a good list of things to watch out for when buying sites. It’s no secret that when a site is on the decline in traffic or revenue, that many sellers will opt to dump the sites in Flippa or elsewhere as quickly as they can unload it for as much as they can get for it. A site that was once successful may now be a site that is doomed. It’s traffic and revenue could already be in decline and it may also be running the risk of getting deindexed by Google. How sorry would that be to buy a site only to have it deindexed in a short period of time or to buy a site that was making good revenue and will soon be making nothing?

Due diligence
has to go beyond just checking the stats that are listed on a website auction. You now have to check historical data such as backlinks … how many there are and where are they? Are they just blasted onto blog networks with spun content or thousands of social bookmarking sites with the same anchor text? Other things you have to check for that Google will now penalize sites for are:

• Keyword stuffing

• Anchor text heavy links
• Slow load times
• Building links on link farms
• Too many ads and too many ads above the fold
• Autoblogging: Lack of unique content
• Stale content: site not updated frequently

There are of course many more Google changes and only Google knows most of them, but the above are some to be aware of and watch for when buying a website. Not checking could be a costly mistake.

Two types of websites that seem to always have a lot of bids and activity are Adsense sites and autoblogs. I can understand the popularity of Adsense sites but not autoblogs, other than people generally being lazy and not wanting to bother to add unique content to their blogs. Personally, I look for unique content when thinking about buying a blog from somewhere else. That’s a minimum requirement for me.

In addition to having no unique content, autoblogs can come with some built in problems. They are obviously scraping other people’s articles and possibly other people’s copyrighted photos, so the potential for a lawsuit or at least a cease and desist are high.

Then there’s the Google Panda thing … Autoblogs aren’t high on Google’s list of what it considers to be relevant and many are getting deindexed from Google or are disappearing so far down in the serps that they might as well be deindexed. All in all, if you’re browsing Flippa for sites to buy, I’d avoid autoblogs.

Beware the Cookie Cutter Business in a Box Sites

There’s also a very disturbing trend of cookie cutter sites (business in a box) being sold with a lot of success. The listings are all hype and have dubious income claims, especially since they are all start-ups. The income claims are in the copy since Flippa doesn’t even allow income claims on start-ups. These sellers sell the same cookie cutter sites over and over again … only difference is the domain name. Just copy the site to a new domain and they’ve got another listing. These low quality cookie cutter sites range from autoblog selling businesses to traffic selling businesses to social media selling businesses (buy Facebook likes and Twitter followers, etc.). People, there are a lot of these sites listed on Flippa. Please do some due diligence before spending your hard-earned money.

These types of sites often appeal to newbies who have little experience in buying websites or even in operating an online business. They think it’s going to be instant cash as soon as they buy it. Most are sadly disappointed to say the least, when they discover they’ve forked out a bunch of cash for a site that is not making an income as was claimed. Making money online simply isn’t as easy as all that. Spend $1,200 for a site without doing any work yourself and sit back and watch the Paypal receipts pour in.

Be certain to do due diligence when thinking about buying Adsense sites already making a passive income on Flippa or anywhere. They are hot sellers. Browsing the Just Sold section on Flippa, there’s listings like this, $630 per Month Adsense, High CTR, 2 yr. Old, PR2, Grants & Scholarships Niche, that just sold for over $9K. Listing looks good and has plenty of Adsense screenshots for income proof and Google Analytics.

So some research before investing in an Adsense site and make sure that the sites primary keywords are actually high paying keywords for Adsense. There are many Adsense keywords that are very low paying, making only a few cents per click. Also be certain that if the site advertises a certain placement in the Google serps, that you actually do a search for those keywords and the site does show up in that spot in the serps.

For more information on how to do due diligence, see my guest post on Flippa.

Together, we beat SOPA in a huge victory for internet freedom.  But this Saturday, internet freedom protests are breaking out in over 200 cities across Europe.  Why?

Because the companies behind SOPA are using international trade agreements as a backdoor to pass SOPA-style laws

SOPA’s supporters are pushing two agreements: ACTA and TPP¹.  ACTA would criminalize users, encourage internet providers to spy on you, and make it easier for media companies to sue sites out of existence and jail their founders.  Sound familiar?  That’s right, ACTA is from the same playbook as SOPA, but global.  Plus it didn’t even have to pass through Congress².

TPP goes even farther than ACTA, and the process has been even more secretive and corrupt.  Last weekend (we wish this was a joke) trade negotiators partied with MPAA (pro-SOPA) lobbyists before secret negotiations in a Hollywood hotel, while public interest groups were barred from meeting in the same building.³

Trade agreements are a gaping loophole, a secretive backdoor track that–even though it creates new laws–is miles removed from democracy.  Trade negotiators are unelected and unaccountable, so these agreements have been very hard for internet rights groups to stop.

But now the tide is turning.  Fueled by the movement to stop SOPA, anti-ACTA protests are breaking out across the EU, which hasn’t ratified ACTA.  The protests are having an impact: leaders in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia have backtracked on ACTA.⁴  Now a massive round of street protests in over 200 cities is planned for this Saturday February 11th.

We’re planning an online protest this Saturday to support the protests in the streets.  Why?  Because together we can drive millions of emails to key decision makers–and start tipping the scales like we did on SOPA.

Can you take part?  Click here to get the code to run on your site!

We just built an ACTA & TPP contact tool, and it’s not just a petition.   It’s code for your site that figures out the visitor’s country and lets them email all their Members of European Parliament–the politicians who will be voting on ACTA in June–or the trade negotiators behind TPP.  This direct contact between voters and their officials, driven by websites of all sizes, was instrumental in the fight against SOPA.  

We can use the same tactics to defeat ACTA & TPP, but we need your help!

Support the street protests with a flood of emails to the officials responsible for ACTA & TPP.  Get the code for your website!

Don’t have a website?  Tell officials in your country to scrap ACTA & TPP!   And spread the word about Saturday’s protests! 

This is going to be tough fight.  But we need to make secretive trade agreements harder to pass than US law.  If we don’t, our internet’s future belongs to the lobbyists behind SOPA.

This is just the beginning,

–Holmes Wilson, Tiffiniy Cheng, Joshua Blount & the whole Fight for the Future team.

P.S. This map of ACTA street protests in Europe is amazing. The largest has almost 50,000 RSVP’s!

Sources:

1. For more information on ACTA, read these excellent articles from Techdirt and La Quadrature du Net. For information on TPP, read this Ars Technica piece. For video, watch this.

2. Obama’s signing of ACTA may have been unconstitutional. See Anti-counterfeiting agreement raises constitutional concerns and Techdirt.

3. Hollywood gets to party with TPP negotiators, public interest groups get thrown out of the hotel.

4. Ars Technica: Czech, Slovak governments backing away from ACTA, too.

Have you accumulated tons of PLR that is just sitting around on your hard drive gathering digital dust? Or do you have a large batch of new articles that haven’t been posted to your WordPress blog yet?

If you’re like me, you have little time to manually post batches of articles to your blogs, so your blogs get neglected ;(

Maybe you’ve got blogs with little or NO content and NO time to update them.

If only you had a blog that automatically posted the content that you already have sitting around. If this sounds like you, you will LOVE this plugin.

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Introducing AutoPostWP

Automatically drip-feed your content over weeks or months. Upload your text file original articles or PLR that you have accumulated and they will be automatically posted to your blog and tagged.

AutoPostWP is so simple that anyone can easily use it to import your articles into WordPress. Takes only minutes to get your articles posted.

AutoPostWP does all the work for you.
Just upload the plugin, choose how often you want the plugin to post your articles and the AutoPostWP does the rest.

You can also choose how often your articles get posted, every hour? Every Day? It’s all possible.

What can I do with AutoPostWP?

• Import PLR or other articles to WordPress.
• Automatically drip-feed content by setting the article dates to future dates or import them all immediately.
• You can even backdate the articles by setting them to dates in the past.
• Choose the category the articles are posted to.
• Import articles into different/multiple categories. Just upload your articles into different folders under /thearticles/ folder and AutoPostWP will automatically create categories based on the folder name.
• “Randomize” your post times so they don’t have the same timestamp every x amount of hours. This helps make your blog look more natural for visitors.
• Automatically tags the new articles.
• Automatically create links (affiliate or otherwise) from your keywords in your posts.
• I’ve included a copy of Pretty Links to cloak all of your affiliate urls before automatically creating those affiliate links in your posts.
• Automatically Bold and Underline all your Keywords in all posts.
• Add tooltips to your keywords to give them detailed info about the link.

Set It And Forget It

Improve your blog traffic and your SEO rankings by automatically adding new content to your WordPress blogs, bolding all of your keywords automatically, linking them to your affiliate or other (such as internal pages of your blog) urls and adding tooltips to prompt your visitors to action!

How Does AutoPostWP Know What Articles To Upload?

Just upload your articles that you want posted to your WordPress blog in “thearticles” folder. Those are the articles that get imported. Couldn’t be easier. Compatible with almost all servers.

What Format Do The PLR Articles Need To Be In?

They should be text files with a .txt extension.

Each text file should have the article title on line one and the article on the lines below that.

These are standard PLR formats and AutoPostWP supports the standard.

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I run a couple of membership sites and protecting your membership content can be challenging and expensive. If you sell digital downloads from your blog, that too can be challenging to protect your download page from thieves. I recently bought a plugin that takes care of both of these problems quite handily … and won’t cost you a fortune. I really like this plugin. It makes offering subscription/membership content and protected digital downloads from your blogs easy as pie.

WP Sales Buddy automates your business without having to pay a fortune for the software to do it. Not only is this plugin affordable (actually, dirt cheap), it’s easy to use and set up from start to finish.

All This is Included with This Easy To Use WordPress Plugin:

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• Product Sales Log: Product sales page overview shows you the products bought by each customer plus transaction information and referring urls to track your campaigns.
• Subscription Log: Subscription overview page shows the date of sign-up, duration and whether or not it’s a recurring subscription.
• Download Management: Protects your product downloads with encrypted links that hide the product location, time limited or maximum download counts.
• Content Protection: Protected content for members with just one click of the mouse. Visitors without a subscription cannot access the membership content. You can protect categories, posts or pages and leave other categories, posts, or pages unprotected for visitors.
• Teaser Content: Box for an excerpt that is displayed to visitors and in search results to encourage visitors to sign up to your membership. When visitors click on it to access the rest of the content, they are given a link to the subscription options and asked to sign up.

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The Funniest

There were many sites that blacked out, went dark or just had anti-SOPA/PIPA messages on them for the protest, but there were some that deserve special recognition for being just plain out hilarious. The Oatmeal page, above was my favorite.

Then there was FARK:

While a bunch of other sites are going “dark” to protest SOPA/PIPA, we’re over the moon about the whole thing. Why? Honestly, we’ve been bringing you the latest news happening across the internet for 12 years, and we’re tired. And SOPA/PIPA is the perfect excuse to quit. While SOPA might be “almost dead,” it’s not quite all the way there, and under various drafts of both SOPA/PIPA, Fark could have its DNS assignment (the thing that turns an IP address, like 10.0.0.1, into words like Fark.com) revoked without notice simply for linking to content that could come under foreign copyright claims. This means, even if it is actual news in and of itself, if we link to it, we can be shut down. And thank God, cause we’re about ready to crack under the strain of being on top of the news all the time. Here’s a helpful video we’ve put together to explain why you should support SOPA/PIPA:

Most Visually Appealing

American Censorship.org

Others

Wikipedia
Mozilla
Google.com
Wordpress.com
Reddit.com
Warrior Forum
Full list here

There are some Internet Marketing courses floating around that advise you to register an exact match domain name for trademarked products to promote those products. There are numerous reasons why this is a bad idea.

The number one reason why it is a bad idea is that using a company’s trademark can get you into trouble with the company that owns the trademark. They can send a cease and desist through their legal department, they can sue you for big money or they can file a UDRP to get the domain from you.

Of course, there are legal uses for trademarked domains, but you would need to hire a trademark attorney to determine that for you to avoid trouble. There’s parody and fair use, but most of the time, your use will not fall under either one of these if you plan to use it for commercial use.

One place on the Net to check for US Trademarks is TESS. You can check for international trademarks here. It’s still a good idea to get a trademark attorney to search for you, especially if you are creating a long-term brand and want to be absolutely sure there are no trademarks on the name you choose, but these two sites are good for a quick check for trademarks.

There are occasions when a company that owns a trademark will allow you to use their trademark. It never hurts to contact the company and ask them for permission and get it in writing if they allow it. It’s the quickest and safest way to find out if using a trademark will be safe.

Another reason not to use trademarks in domains is that quite a few affiliate programs, like Amazon for instance, does not allow you to promote their products with trademark domains. They will close your account right up if you use one.

There are other types of trademark infringement that are also a bad idea. One of those is called Cybersquatting.

Wikipedia: Cybersquatting (also known as domain squatting), according to the United States federal law known as the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cybersquatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price.

This not only includes a company brand name, but can include celebrities names and typo domains where the misspelled domain is very close to a trademark.

One thing I hear frequently in forums is “there’s a million domains registered with iPad in it.” Don’t take that for permission to use Apple’s or anyone else’s trademark. They’ll get around to you sooner or later. Most companies that have gone to the trouble of registering and getting a trademark, are going to do what they need to do to protect that trademark, so don’t be stupid. Either hire a trademark attorney or just don’t register trademarked domain names.

Contacting your representatives is easy!

Contact your Represenative. – All you have to do is enter your zip code in the box on the right and hit “Submit Zip”. Your representatives information will be displayed, then all you have to do is CALL THEM or FAX them! You can use this FREE Fax service to Fax them.  I’ve even included a template letter to send at the bottom of this post.

Contact your Senator by using this look up tool. – Simply select your state from the drop box on the left. CALL BOTH OF THEM!

How long will this take?

3-5 Minutes per representative if you keep to simple talking points. 9 – 15 minutes for all 3 representatives.

Will my representative actually listen?

YES!…Well maybe. Most have no idea what SOPA is. Mine didn’t, his aide had some ideas but not a clear understanding. But that is beyond the point, he now knows someone in his district cares about this bill being defeated. I HIGHLY DOUBT ANYONE IS GOING TO CALL IN TO SUPPORT THIS BILL. The more negativeness this bill generates, the better.

What are some talking points?

I would recommend reading up a little on SOPA, as it has changed in the past few weeks from its original version. The EFF has this PDF with a very basic summary of the bill.

 
Source: Warrior Forum
Stop SOPA … or else you could find many of the sites you use on a regular basis permanently closed to you. And maybe find your sites closed to many of your regular visitors.

The Basics

SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) is a bill currently in the US Congress that would allow the US Government to add sites to a blacklist, preventing anyone in the United States from accessing them. The stated goal is to limit access to pirate (“warez”) sites, and sites that sell counterfeit physical products. Fake Rolexes, designer clothes, prescription drugs, etc.

The intent of the bill is something we strongly support. Piracy affects those of us in the Warrior group more than most, as a lot of us make our livings selling our own intellectual property. Our membership includes tens of thousands of authors, musicians, graphic designers, photographers, programmers, copywriters, videographers, public speakers and others, from nearly every creative field.

We feel the impact of digital thievery first hand.

This bill is not the way to handle the problem. It is a disaster in the making.

It would damage the Internet’s basic security infrastructure, possibly require ISPs to monitor every site you visit, and make the operation of any website that contains user-generated content (blogs, forums, digital marketplaces, and social media sites) too risky for investors and new developers.

Wikipedia has posted a good basic summary of the potential problems. Read it. It is frightening. And you need to be scared.

How It Would Work

Here’s the simple version: If the Justice Department or any copyright holder accused a site of “encouraging or facilitating” piracy, the government could order that site removed from US-based search engines and ad networks, forbid payment processors from handling transactions for them, and require ISPs to block access to those sites by their customers.

Let’s consider how that might apply to this forum… There are currently over 335,000 pages on this site. If just one of those pages contained a single post promoting an illegal download, or one WSO seller has used graphics or code from a copyrighted product without permission, or we miss just one Chinese spam for counterfeit goods, we could be blocked.

Would it matter that we actively look for and delete those posts? Maybe, but only after the process had begun. And we’d probably never know about it until the block was in place.

The amount of time that it would take to correct such an unjustified blocking would cause permanent damage to any interactive site. Shifting the membership away from a destination for that long nearly guarantees the site would never recover.

Along with that, there is no requirement that payment processors re-accept a site that has been blocked this way. You know how these guys work: They don’t care if the site is eventually found innocent. They’d label it as “high risk,” and never deal with it again. And they’d probably start creating whole new categories to lock out, just to avoid the headaches.

“You let visitors post on your site? Sorry. We don’t accept interactive services in our network.”

And, unless the ISPs are working from a centralized and regularly updated database, it’s unlikely most of them would ever remove the blocks once they were in place.

Mistakes would almost certainly be fatal to the target sites. We’re talking about legitimate sites that provide real value for their visitors and real incomes for their operators and their families.

It is unclear at this point whether the legislation would affect sites based in the US, or if it applies only to “foreign” sites. Even if it doesn’t start out applying to sites hosted in the United States, do you really think it will stay limited to “offshore sites” for long?

And how do we justify sitting by while our friends around the world are subjected to this potential for arbitrary blocking within the US?

Don’t Think This Will Affect You?

Maybe you aren’t involved in a market where this would seem to matter, and you’re not interested in the principle of the thing. Consider a few possible examples that might make the reach of this Congressional folly clearer.

Any blogs you like? Keep in mind how many of them are hacked every day. One of the main activities for those hackers is pointing the victim sites to online shops selling illegal drugs.

*POOF*

Gone.

Hang out at any scrapbooking sites? A lot of them let the members share their original page themes and other digital scrapbooking elements. If one clueless designer uses graphics from a catalog or other copyrighted source, your fun little hobby community could be taken away from you. And the site owner could lose their income.

Use shareware or freeware? Legitimate software libraries, like CNet’s, would be prime targets. After all, it only takes one mistake.

Do you surf using proxies to protect your privacy? Forget that. It’s only a matter of time before that’s marked as a refuge for pirates and they’re blocked.

Have you ever tried to keep track of which sites are pirating your products? If you live in the US, you can forget that, too. Once they hit the blocklist, you can’t see them. Which means you can’t take any action to reduce the damage.

That’s just the tip of the virtual iceberg.

The real damage will begin when the pirates implement new systems for distributing their warez. Evading a domain-based list is child’s play for experienced people, and pirates really don’t care if it’s illegal. If they did, they wouldn’t be pirates.

And it won’t just be the traditional pirates who join in. Anyone who’s studied history knows that prohibition just romanticizes the suppliers and users, and creates networks dedicated to serving that “heroic” image.

And, of course, there’s the problem of retribution. If the US starts arbitrarily blocking access to foreign sites from within our country, how long do you think it will be before other countries develop similar approaches to advancing their political goals, and block their citizens from accessing sites they don’t deem suitable?

At that point, it isn’t even nominally about piracy any more. It’s about politics, pure and simple. If you doubt the temptation, consider how quickly nations in the Middle East tried to block their citizens from accessing western social networks at the first sign of unrest over the past few years.

Think about how this would look to the world after all our comments about the Chinese “Great Firewall.”

If you believe our bureaucrats would be careful enough to only list sites that existed for the sole purpose of piracy, remember: These are the same bureaucrats who listed a then-sitting US Senator (the late Edward Kennedy, of MA) on our anti-terrorist “no fly” list.

What’s your recourse if someone accuses you of “encouraging or facilitating” piracy and you’re found to be innocent? Good luck with that. The only way you could get any satisfaction there would be if you could prove they wilfully and knowingly made false allegations.

Ask your lawyer what the chances are of proving that. Be prepared from them to laugh and say “Zero.”

This is the single most dangerous piece of legislation to regulate the Internet that has ever had any real chance of becoming law in the US.

What Can You Do?

If you live in the US, contact your Senators and Representatives and encourage them to vote against SOPA (H.R. 3621) and PIPA, the Senate version (S. 968).

When you contact them, be calm, clear, and concise. Tell them that you support the goal but oppose the legislation, because of the damage it will do to small businesses and the security of the Internet in general.

If you feel the need to cite a source for them, point them to the Wikipedia article, which lists a number of US government studies and reports that show just how much damage the legislation could do.

And be clear that you don’t want to see an edited version of the bill passed. This thing is not just poorly implemented. The concept itself is flawed and dangerous.

Emails count a little. Phone calls and faxes count more. A short, clear printed letter mailed to them counts the most.

If you’re contacting your representative, mention H.R. 3621 (SOPA). If it’s your Senators, the bill number to mention is S. 968 (PIPA).

You can find the contact information for both Senators and Representatives at Contacting the Congress. Just select your state, type in your zip code, and click the “Submit It” button.

When contacting them, be sure to either mention your name and address to the person you speak with on the phone or include it in your correspondence. They want to know you’re actually one of their constituents.

Remember to be polite, clear, and brief. These folks are trying to protect your interests. Most of them simply don’t understand the potential problems the bill would create.

Calling them, or typing a brief letter and putting a stamp on it, will probably take less time than you were about to spend in this forum today. And it could make a huge difference.

If every US citizen who reads this takes that few minutes’ worth of action, we can generate a ton of pressure against the bill. If we all just leave it to everyone else, we’re likely to be stuck with this as law, along with all the problems it brings.

It’s up to you. Choose wisely.

Source: Warrior Forum

Contacting your representatives is easy!

Contact your Represenative. – All you have to do is enter your zip code in the box on the right and hit “Submit Zip”. Your representatives information will be displayed, then all you have to do is CALL THEM or FAX them! You can use this FREE Fax service to Fax them.  I’ve even included a template letter to send at the bottom of this post.

Contact your Senator by using this look up tool. – Simply select your state from the drop box on the left. CALL BOTH OF THEM!

How long will this take?

3-5 Minutes per representative if you keep to simple talking points. 9 – 15 minutes for all 3 representatives.

Will my representative actually listen?

YES!…Well maybe. Most have no idea what SOPA is. Mine didn’t, his aide had some ideas but not a clear understanding. But that is beyond the point, he now knows someone in his district cares about this bill being defeated. I HIGHLY DOUBT ANYONE IS GOING TO CALL IN TO SUPPORT THIS BILL. The more negativeness this bill generates, the better.

What are some talking points?

I would recommend reading up a little on SOPA, as it has changed in the past few weeks from its original version. The EFF has this PDF with a very basic summary of the bill.

LETTER TO YOUR CONGRESSMAN

Dear Congressman xxx,
I am deeply concerned about the potential passing of both the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. The Internet is an absolutely amazing creation that has connected people together from all parts of the globe in ways we once never imagined could be possible. Not only has it connected people, but it has also encouraged the sharing of knowledge, information, and ideas.

I understand that piracy is an issue that affects not only large industries and their businesses, like Viacom and NBCUniversal, but also smaller companies and individuals, including songwriters and authors. However, there are already measures in place to protect copyright holders, and there are actions that they can take when they see violations involving their copyrighted work.

The passing of these bills would have a severely negative impact on websites where people go to look up information, share ideas, learn, and connect with others. Websites such as YouTube, Tumblr, Facebook, and Google, along with our Internet Service Providers, would be overburdened by having to police their users. Such stringent regulations against them would hinder technological innovation and make innocent service and information providers be held liable for copyright violations committed by users of their services. Focus for these companies would have to go towards censoring and policing users instead of further innovations with their services, and I do not believe it is the place of any company to act as Internet Police looking for copyright violations uploaded by third parties/users of their services if they do not wish to.

Such legislation is unlikely to be effective because American Internet users will simply switch to offshore DNS providers. And at a time when American jobs are desperately needed here in our country, the passage of these acts will encourage companies to simply move their bases offline so that they do not have to bother with such restrictive and disruptive legislation.

Furthermore, the technological and security implications of this legislation remain unknown. It would leave both websites and consumers open to hacking, phishing, and identity theft. Again, instead of encouraging innovation, companies would instead be forced to deal with such security matters instead of furthering technological advancements.

I implore that you not only vote against the passage of these bills, but that you passionately defend technological innovation, Internet security, economic growth, free speech, and creativity through vehement opposition of these acts and the encouragement of your fellow legislators to oppose these acts as well. The future of the Internet is at stake.

Sincerely,
name

Address and zip

It takes a lot of hard work to get your website to the point where it is profitable and has a lot of traffic. You might want to cash in on all that time and money you’ve spent, but you want to get the most out of your investment. Before you list, make sure you do any housecleaning that needs to be done. Any broken links or glitches that you’ve been putting off… now is the time to fix those. Make sure you do all the SEO and everything is in good shape.

The Auction Listing

Why can some sellers get big money for their sites and some get barely noticed at all? It’s important that you create a site that offers value, but it’s not always the quality of the website to blame. Your listing headline and copy can make the difference between getting the price you want for your site or having it sink into Flippa oblivion.

With too many listings, the biggest mistake I see, other than a boring headline is not enough information about the website. Potential buyers want data. They want to know everything about the website and they want screenshots to prove it. They also want access to Google Analytics.

When writing up your listing, include everything including traffic, revenue, costs to maintain the site, outsourcing costs if any, how much content it has and whether or not it is unique content, whether or not it has a list, the number of back links, social media accounts, special programming or design, etc. Don’t leave anything out. Highlight the most important information in the headline. Grab their attention with revenue or high traffic figures if you have it, PageRank, etc.

You want to build trust with potential buyers and providing accurate data on your website will help to do that. Make sure that you break down all of your revenue streams by the source of the revenue and the revenue history. Go back as far as you can. The longer the site has been earning, the more you will get for your site.

Promote Your Auction

If you have a blog or website that is related, mention your auction. Some of your readers may be interested in the auction. Same with a list. Put your auction in your signature file if it’s allowed on forums that you participate in. I do this on the Warrior Forum. You can also get additional exposure with the Featured listing on Flippa. I don’t recommend doing this until the last couple of days of the auction, since most people hold off on bidding until then. You will get a lot more views doing this. If you have a Twitter account, tweet about your auction or mention it on your Facebook or Google Plus page. If the site you’re selling gets good traffic, put the link on that site too to let your visitors know the site is for sale.

You’ll get a lot more attention by getting your auction on the “Most Active” page on Flippa. You can do this by accepting all the very low bids. The more bids you get, the higher up on the Most Active site you’ll be.

Pay attention to your auction while it is listed. Answer any questions potential buyers might have and don’t take a lot of time doing it. An interested buyer may lose interest if his questions go unanswered for too long. Give accurate, detailed answers. Don’t be evasive. Good communication with potential buyers will help to build trust and help you get the most for your website.

If you’re thinking about buying a site on Flippa, you must … must …. I repeat, must do due diligence. This Flippa scam I’ve seen so many times it isn’t funny. The seller will buy some cheap crap blog from Tradebit for less than $5 and put it on a $10 domain and then list it on Flippa. This is allowed because the seller isn’t claiming that it is unique content or design, but it is a scam none-the-less.

Here’s an example. The listing below is a Flippa listing with a BIN of ONLY $1,500.

Here is the same blog on Tradebit for $3.97.

Obviously, with no income and no traffic, it’s not likely that they’ll get $1,500 for it, but it’s not worth more than $15, which is what you can get it for through Tradebit and a domain registrar. Now look at the sellers profile on Flippa. Look at their listings closely. This person sells the same sites over and over again only with different domain names. Here’s another listing with that same blog.

This seller loads these listings up with all kinds of “bonuses” which should justify the high cost of these duplicate sites, but I highly doubt that there is any real value in those bonuses. The listings of this seller reads like the script for a sleezy used car salesman.

Be sure to check out the sellers profiles before you buy and look for duplicate listings. Also do a Google search and see if you can find a Tradebit blog that is the same, as this is a very common Flippa scam.

Paypal is so convenient and so many people use it, that it is very tempting to buy and sell websites using Paypal. Sellers have to be very careful when using Paypal to sell websites. Paypal does not support the sale of digital goods, and a website is a digital good that is downloaded after payment. All a dishonest buyer needs to do after the domain and site has been transferred is to file a Paypal dispute saying “Item not received” and often, Paypal will decide the dispute to the buyer’s advantage. That leaves you, the seller, without a website, domain and without the payment for your site. Occasionally, with enough documentation, Paypal will decide in the seller’s favor, but that’s not the norm and is very risky to rely on that happening.

What can you do to reduce the risk of using Paypal for selling websites? Since the issue with Paypal is digital goods vs physical goods, turn your website into a physical good. Get your buyer’s address and send the site to him via Certified Mail on CD. He has to sign for it and you have proof of delivery.

Another thing I’ve done for a larger sale is to put it in the listing that the domain will be held by me (pointing at the buyer’s nameservers) for 60 days if Paypal payment is used. If they dispute the transaction, just point the nameservers back to your own host and you haven’t lost your site or your domain. After 60 days, they cannot file a dispute in Paypal so it is safe then to transfer the domain to them.

One final thing that helps when you need to win a Paypal dispute over a website sale is to have a sale contract for the transaction. I use the one that Flippa sells and just fill in the details of the transaction. It’s not as good as one an attorney would draw up for you, but it’s good enough. I actually won a Paypal dispute where the buyer tried to say that they did not authorize the transaction and I escalated it to a claim and submitted all of my emails and pms plus the website contract to Paypal. That was enough proof for them to decide in my favor.

For large transactions, it is best to use an escrow service to handle the transaction. A couple of good ones that I’ve used are Escrow.com and Safefunds.com. Both will provide you with a much safer transaction, however, Safefunds.com does it a lot cheaper than Escrow.com. When using a escrow service, I always stipulate that buyer and seller with split the escrow fee. Both of us are being protected, so why should the seller take on all of the costs of that protection? Using Escrow.com’s premium service over their standard service literally doubles your fees for escrow.

Although I’ve taken a risk numerous times and accepted Paypal for transactions of around $2,500, I recommend against doing that. To be safe, use an escrow service for transactions of $1,000 or more. You can use it for smaller transactions too if you want to and with Safefunds cheaper fees, there’s really no reason not to.

When I first started flipping websites, I basically created my own start-up sites and flipped them on Flippa at about $300-$320 each. That was a couple of years ago and the start-up market on Flippa has become very saturated and the quality of start-up sites on Flippa has decreased to a large degree. There are many sellers who think you can throw a blog together in a few hours and dump it on Flippa and make a profit. Some do, but many don’t. I’ve seen site flipping courses that profess to tell you how to do this and make a killing with a 3-hour website.

Buyers have become better educated on Flippa. They have needed to with all the junk being sold there. There are still good deals, but buying on Flippa requires a lot of due diligence to keep from getting scammed. If you want to sell start-up websites on Flippa these days, you have to offer more than just a 3-hour blog thrown together and listed.

The Domain is Important

Register a good domain for your site, preferably a dot com. An aged domain would be even better if you can find a reasonably priced aged domain in the niche that you are building. You can find aged domains on Godaddy auctions, Sedo, Afternic, and even Flippa. Shorter domains are preferable unless you are going to use an exact match domain for a good keyword. Brandable domains are good too if you create a consistent brand throughout the site, Facebook, Twitter, and any other social networks you use with the site. Having a great domain can increase the value of the site by hundreds or even thousands, depending on the domain name.

Ugly Sites Don’t Sell as Well

There are plenty of people around who tell you that ugly sites make more money, convert better, blah blah blah. That’s true for some sites, but not for start-up sites sold on Flippa. If you don’t put any time or effort into a good looking theme and some graphics to spice it up, you’re not putting your best foot forward. Buying a developer’s license for a nice looking premium theme is a worthwhile investment and one that will pay you back over and over again. For my blogs, I mostly use one customized Woo Theme and change the color scheme, headers and sidebar graphics for each site.

Content is King

One way to differentiate your start-up blog is to fill it with high quality, unique content. This is the very core of your site and you should not cut corners on content. The more unique content you add, the more valuable your site will be. I would have at least 20 unique articles on the site before listing it.

Adding Value

You can add value to a start-up site by creating a Mailing List, Facebook Page and Twitter Page for the site and getting followers for the social networks. A mailing list is particularly valuable for any site, but having a lot of Facebook fans and Twitter followers are also a significant enhancement. Try to design these in the same style as the site. If you can’t do that, outsource it. Someone can create a nice Facebook Fan Page and Twitter background for your sites.

Promote the Site

Now that you’ve built it, promote it. Buy some social bookmarking gigs on Fiverr to get it indexed and get backlinks. Use other reputable backlinking services for more backlinks. Don’t make the mistake of buying “backlink blasts” of thousands of low quality links which could put your site square in Google’s sandbox for some time. Slower link building is better.

If you’ve done the on page SEO for your articles and you’re building backlinks, you should start seeing some traffic. Have some related affiliate ads and/or Adsense on the site and try to get a little revenue going. That’s a huge plus when selling a site on Flippa. In particular, buyers on Flippa love Adsense sites. Even a small Adsense income for a start-up site will increase it’s value.

Do these things and you’ll be way ahead of the competition on Flippa. Much of the work involved can be outsourced if you can’t or don’t want to do it yourself.

PageRank: Wikipedia: Principles of PageRank

A PageRank results from a mathematical algorithm based on the graph, the webgraph, created by all World Wide Web pages as nodes and hyperlinks as edges, taking into consideration authority hubs such as cnn.com or usa.gov. The rank value indicates an importance of a particular page. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it (“incoming links”). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page.

There are a lot of forums and domain selling sites that are offering high PageRank domains for sale, but are they really high PageRank? There is a loophole in Google’s algorithm that scammers can game to make it appear that any domain has a high PageRank. These scammers simply redirect the domain with a 301 redirect to a high PageRank site and the redirected domain will pick up PageRank of the site that it is redirected to. There are numerous ways to do this. Some use cloaking to redirect it only when a Googlebot visits the site and some simply use a 301 redirect.

They then remove the redirect just prior to putting it up for sale. The unsuspecting buyer purchases a domain that he thinks has high PageRank and will give him a boost in the serps. The scammer could also be faking the PageRank in order to sell links on “high PageRank” sites.

Digitial Point forums has a domain selling section of their marketplace with quite a few “high PageRank” domains for sale. Take for example, this one: betsafesverige.com on this page http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2375739. I ran this one through a rank checker at http://www.rankchecker.com. See in the screenshot below that it says the PageRank is valid. However, there are ZERO backlinks to the site in any of the search engines, the Alexa rating is very high, it’s not listed in DMOZ, and it has only one parked page listed in Google. The person who buys this domain will have a ZERO PageRank on their hands by the next time Google’s PageRank changes.

Here’s another interesting Digital Point forums scammer selling a fake PageRank domain, http://www.coolestaudiobooks.com/ at this listing: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2373472. Take a look at the blog below with one post, Hello World.

This little gem allegedly has a PageRank 6. All that and ZERO backlinks anywhere, one Hello World post, Alexa rating through the roof, not listed in DMOZ or Yahoo. It’s not rocket science. If this site is really a PageRank 6, then PageRank is truly meaningless. Checked it at a PageRank Checker here, and you can see it says the PageRank is valid. Another interesting thing about this domain, when you search for the domain in Google using site:coolestaudiobooks.com, and then click on the Cache, you get a 404 Not Found error. Previously, one way to tell if a domain had fake PageRank was to check the Google cache and the cache would be the real site with the PageRank that the domain had been redirected to. That can’t be relied on as a way to check for fake PageRank, since this one has no cache and the one above this one is showing the correct domain in the cache. I can only assume that these scammers have found a way to get around the Google cache thing.

There are a ton more for sale on Digital Point that are highly suspicious. Exercise extreme caution when buying a domain from there with PageRank or anywhere else for that matter. Before I was aware of the fake PageRank scams out there, I bought one on Flippa that was fake and the PageRank rapidly disappeared after I bought the domain.

Before buying a domain that allegedly has PageRank, check it here and use whatever your favorite tools are to check for backlinks. If, like the site above, it has one Hello World post in a blog, and no backlinks, I would advise you not to buy that domain. If it has just one parked page and no backlinks, same thing. PageRank is assigned to pages, not domains and if that domain has no real pages (just a parked page or Hello World post), common sense will tell you that the PageRank is fake.

How Important is PageRank?

PageRank played a much larger role when Google was first launched than it does today. When Google was launched, there were just a few dozen ranking factors that were considered in Google’s algorithm, so each one carried more weight than they do today. Today there are over 200 ranking factors considered when ranking websites, so each ranking factors carries a lot less weight than they did previously.