EightMedia Rip Off Scam

A few months back I started to investigate the possibility of doing some freelance work. You know small items like coding a wordpress theme, skinning a psd for vbulletin etc etc. Since I live in the UK I quickly found a great website which offered short term, quick freelancing tasks and more appropriately I found tasks which were perfectly aligned with what I do on a daily basis.

The site in question was freelancers.net, sure it’s not a pretty site but it’s free, active and project owners respond pretty quickly.

EightMedia

Anyway I started working with an Irish guy who went by the name of Chris and owned a small print and design agency by the name of eightmedia. A really nice guy on the face of it and extremely flexible at first. The projects were simple PSD to XHTML coding tasks for wordpress. I’m pretty much an expert when it comes to Wordpress coding so I thought I’d give it a shot.

So what happened, first project no problems, paid on time via paypal, second project no payment because his paypal account got suspended. I was quite compassionate towards his situation as I too knew of the delays and problems a suspended paypal account brought. So despite this I carried onto the next project and decided to collect payment for project 2 and 3 in one go. I trusted the guy, it’s as simple as that.

Wire Transfer Saga

A few weeks later he asked me for my bank details so he could wire the funds to me due to having no luck with his paypal account. No problem I said, certainly a wire transfer was something that I was more than comfortable with.

Unfortunately neither the wire transfer nor the responses to the emails I sent him after that were ever received. (4 months now and still waiting for the promised payment.)

Clever Rip Off Tactics ?

The guy walked, with no intention of ever paying up. In fact just before I stood my ground asking for him to check up on the wire transfer he even tried to get another project out of me. Was this a cheap tactic of paying for one project and the getting 3-4 more out for FREE ? I really don’t know but it pissed me off so much that I no longer feel like collecting payment on delivery. It’s hard to trust anyone on the net and despite this experience I still deal in extremely large sums of money when it comes to buying and selling online.

I guess this post is just me venting and warning others about this guy but more importantly a reminder that doing business online requires careful thought and the ability to accept that you’ll be ripped off from time to time. All the protection and experiencce you get doesn’t mean you won’t get ripped off as I experienced with good old Chris.

Shorter Blog Posts

Having started this blog some time ago, and only having time to post 3-4 articles per year has kind of got me down recently. I have a lot to share but with my full time portfolio management activities formatting long articles, reports and case studies can often be time consuming. In fact that’s the main reason why updates to this site have been limited.

This morning I took a step back and realised that maybe I was blogging about stuff in the wrong way. In fact the more I think about it, the more I’m realising that i’ve been treating my blog not like an online diary which is what a blog is, but a formal website filled with one off articles.

Looking at twitter and the various other micro blogging platforms has pushed me to shift my direction with this site. From now on, I’m going to write more frequently and worry less about how correct the article is.

Yes I’ll still post longer articles like the signaturebar story every now and again but in between I’m going to write about everything else that goes on in my webmastering life. From being ripped off by a seller and being pissed off about certain members of the web community to what sites I’ve purchased recently. Short simple posts that tell you guys about what’s going on. Oh and I don’t care if the grammar or punctuation is a little off, the main objective is to share and get things out there.

A blog should ooze with the authors character and share what’s going on in his or her life and that’s what I’m going to do from now on. Wish me luck!

Website Buying Tips #2

If you’re reading on from part 1 of my website buying tips series you’ll know that this post will be covering the art of haggling and bringing down the asking price. It’s a skill that despite being more of a common sense thing is still over looked by many of the buyers and friends I work with on a daily basis.

This post aims to clarify and remind everyone about the little tips and approaches one can follow in order to grab a website at the best possible price.

Keep a Level Head

The first tip is simple, don’t follow the hype. Most sellers for some reason or another always seem to over rate their websites. They’re trying to grab your attention with fancy figures and wild reports of traffic. So always take their reports with a pinch of salt.

If you play defensively like this, there’s a much lower chance that you’ll get mesmerized with their sales pitch. I’m not saying look down upon the seller and his estate for sale, but just presume the worst and never let on that you’re absolutely amazed with their property.

10x Monthly Income

Buyers like myself, like to start on the 10x monthly income rule. It’s a basic rule which simply states you’re willing to pay them 10x their current monthly income. Not only has this rule worked really well for me but I suggest all of you carry a similar benchmark in terms of how much you’re really willing to pay for a site or what the highest price you’re willing to bid to in an auction.

Of course there are times that sites for sale are truly worth well over the 10x monthly income figure. I recall paying $5000 for a site in 2007 that was making around $50 per month but because I knew what to do with the site once I had acquired it, there was no pressure on my side and I was 100% comfortable and confident that it would go onto recover my initial investment. This however is not the norm and should only be done if you’re 100% sure about what you’re doing. In most cases you should stick to your benchmark rate.

Private Offers

I know it’s generally frowned on from the sellers and watchers of public auctions but getting to negotiate a price privately is a great way at picking up a good bargain. There’s two approaches to this.

1.) Get in early before any major bids have come in and offer them close to their BIN price but still maybe discounted. For example the auction opens starting the bids at $50 and the BIN at $1000. If you absolutely want this site, private message (PM) the seller and offer them say $750 for a quick sale and instant payment. In my experience this type of startegy works 60%-70% of the time and presuming the $1000 price is about 10 months income, you’ll have picked the site up for around 7-8 times the monthly income.

2.) Watch the auction keeping an eye on the bids, if the sites still up for sale after 3-4 days that means you can get in there and throw in some low ball offers, which are higher than the current bid but still significantly below their asking price.

I once did this with a pair of wallpaper sites that were both getting in excess of 1000 unique visitors per month. The guy didn’t really know how to monetise them but nevertheless wanted $800 for both sites despite the highest bid sitting at around $200.

After a couple of days the bids dried up completely and I pm’d the guy with a $350 offer. He tunred down the offer and wanted at least $600 for it. I walked away and two days later he came back to me with a counter offer of $400. I accepted and walked away with a bargain (it was a bargain because I know how to monetise wallpaper sites, and 3-4 hours worth of work was all I needed to increase the sites monthly income by almost 100%.

Final Words

There’s loads of ways to make offers and grab bargains and the above mentioned tips will definitely bring you some great savings. However if I had to summarise my buying strategy into a single sentence, I would have to say “Be Stubborn and Play Hard To Get”.

What I mean here is don’t let the seller play you around with his fancy figures and assurances of quality. You Play the prices and game you want to play. If they don’t like it, they can keep there site because you’re not paying.

If you play with this attitude, yes you’ll lose a few good sites here and there but over the long term you’re gonna pick up bargains left, right and center. So stick to your guns, come up with a benchmark buying price (e.g. 10 times monthly income) and just get out there making those offers.

Website Buying Tips #1

Following up from my last post it seems people got quite excited about the three sites I picked up in January 2009; not only was the response a positive one but it was great to hear the enthusiasm and excitement in peoples emails.

Now despite the positive feedback one issue which did plague most readers was the lack of real life tips and methods that people can actually follow to secure such sites for themselves. In line with this I thought I’d kick off a weekly post covering some of the techniques I personally use when picking out my websites.  Part 1 will cover where we should buy our sites, and how we identify these hidden bargains, so without any further delay let’s get stuck in.

Choosing A Marketplace

To keep things simple the first thing to lock down is where you buy your sites from. I personally use DP for 90% of my buying and despite many feeling that it’s just filled with clutter you’d be surprised at the types of bargains that simply pass through the system without being sold. My suggestion to most people entering this game would be to stick to one marketplace and in this case my recommendation is DP.

Narrowing Your Scope

The core challenge on DP is learning to identify which sites are worth looking at and which aren’t. DP has a huge throughput in terms of new sites for sale, so it’s easy to get lost in the never ending threads popping up every hour. Checking DP daily is essential, and there’s no automated script that will do this job for you. You can’t program code to help you select a winner and the sooner you get that into your mind the sooner you’ll start to see success.

Manual Selection

So how do we manually select sites, well the biggest tip I find is to check the site daily but start on Page 3-4 rather than page 1. You’ll find that page 3-4 has those threads that have been posted today but haven’t been picked up by any eagle eyed buyers. Those are where the bargains lie and in my last post all but one of the sites were picked up using this technique.

The logic in the above method lies in the simple fact that people can’t be monitoring DP all the time so it’s eventually going to happen that a decent site pops up but doesn’t get any responses so slips down in terms of visibility and exposure. It’s at this point that you need to PM the guy and start probing him with questions and ideas of what his Buy It Now (BIN) price is going to be. Using the above technique is essential if you don’t want to waste endless hours searching through crappy, useless sites.

More Filtering

Ok so now that you’ve started trawling through pages 3 and beyond, how do you find the sites that offer some potential ? Well, a few things come to mind, firstly unless a site has a great domain, ignore all sites that don’t have any income. It’s usually the sites with a BIN between $10-$50 that are worthless so simply ignore those.

Secondly if the site does have some income then start doing some checks. I generally don’t rely on the sellers proofs, since experience has shown that they usually over inflate and fake their stats. I’m not sure why they do that but 90% of them cheat so watch out for that.

The key here is to do your own checks which despite not giving you 100% accurate numbers will at least give you an approximate idea of how much the site is really worth.

What To Check ?

Check the domain name, check it’s age, check it’s PR and check it’s history on archive.org. Is the site being sold the same site that was on that domain 2 years ago. Doing all of these checks will help you build a quick picture of

• a) The credentials of the seller
• b) The general character of the site

I always do these checks and you should too! A good site that I personally use is checkpageranking.com (and no, that’s not my site). In terms of traffic, I guess you could use alexa.com to run some traffic checks, but in many cases this doesn’t tell you much other than the sites general traffic levels (Alexa stats, can be faked so use it but don’t put too much faith in it).

I once purchased a wallpaper site with an alexa ranking of 150,000 which to me indicates traffic of around 500-1000 uniques per day (I can gauge that based on sites that I own ranked at a similar level) . In reality the site was getting only 10-15 uniques per day, the seller had purchased paid traffic to help boost the rankings, so just be careful when using alexa.

Lastly check the sites referrer stats, ask the seller what keywords the site is ranked for and which of these get the site the most traffic. Take these keywords and manually verify where on google the site is listed for those keywords. In some cases this is a straight forward process but in other cases it can be a little more complex. Use common sense and if the seller is wishy washy with his responses and details then move on and ignore the site.

Using Your Gut Instinct

Depending on what the site is about, using your natural gut instinct and common sense is the last and most important check. If a site looks like it’s a piece of crap and doesn’t quite line up with the traffic and image being portrayed by the owner then once again move on. The old saying, “if it looks too good to be true, it probably is” holds true with most types of buying and selling, and websites are no different.

Content Sites (Informational)

If the site is a content site use copyscape to check if the articles are unique and above all, actually read the articles. Just remember that more than copyscape the manual reading is essential, never ever skip that step, because many times a sites will pass copyscape perfectly but in reality the article is just a bunch of jibberish (i.e. the articles are so poorly written that no one in their right mind would ever read them).

As much as before always look for quality. A site with low earnings but sitting on a good domain with quality articles is far superior to a site with higher traffic and PR but loaded with spammy articles.

Conclusion & Next Weeks Tips

Buying sites is a skill, and like most skills you’ll need to practice and work hard at it. I can skim through 3-4 pages on DP in 30 minutes quickly pulling out the sites that in 90% of cases are winners. A person new to the game might spend 3-4 hours doing the same thing. Don’t be afraid of this work as the more you do it, the easier and quicker it will become. If buying and selling sites were easy then everyone would be doing it and that just wouldn’t be fun for anyone! Learning to quickly lock down sites will only come with practice so don’t give up.

Next week I’m going to cover how to haggle and negotiate the best price possible. See you all then and keep me updated on any cool sites you pick up.

Buying Websites In A Credit Crunch

It’s true, we’re in a recession, the economy has gone into a never ending slump and many are doing what most clever investors and business owners never do; that’s selling up and off loading your websites and domains during what is possibly one of the worst times to do so.

The websites I’m talking about aren’t the cheapo variety either, many are established sites, with a history going back as far as 2003-2004 and a steady income to match. These are the sorts of sites that I wanted to buy back in 2007-2008 but was unable to do so because the owners wouldn’t accept reasonable offers. These are the very same sites that I was told would never be for sale but are now available at such great prices that I’m actually spoilt for choice

Life for me as a website buyer is as good as it’s ever going to be which in my opinion makes this possibly one of the best times you could ever imagine to buy a website. Whether it’s your first site or your hundredth, right now is as good a time as ever to buy up what you can. I personally picked up 20 adsense earning websites last month, which isn’t an impressive amount for my standards but the prices I picked them up for certainly were.

Now before I wet your appetite with some real life examples and purchases I made, let me give you an idea of what’s going on and why people are selling so low. I’m going to share with you some of the real life reasons I heard when I asked the prospective website owner why they were selling and why so low. Check them out below.

• I need to buy my girlfriend a wedding ring
• I need to pay for my car insurance, it’s overdue
• My adsense income has dipped and I just want to get out of the website business
• I enjoyed some great years with my site, but have decided to focus on my studies now, the economy has really taken a big hit
• My Xbox got the red ring of death, (basically means it curled up and died) and I need to get a new one
• …. and the list could go on

What you’ll notice about all of these comments is a general sense of pesimism and desperation for cash. All of these owners were either extremely cash strapped or simply had an extremely bleak outlook for their forseeable future. A real sense of “I need to sell up and horde my cash” or “I need some cash to buy something and I need it now”. These were the core feelings and sentiments I was getting from 90% of the sellers, which just reaffirms how ideal the situation is for buyers. Most sellers right now are interested in one thing only, and that’s getting hold of some cold hard cash (even if it means selling their once beloved website at a huge discount).

Now the above reasoning is beyond me, I don’t understand it but I don’t care either. As far as I’m concerned it’s bargain time and I’m picking them up all over the place. I’m collecting sites which I can probably sell for x2, x3 even x4 when the economy picks up (and thats without doing anything to them). If I actually work on them rather than just sitting on them, numbers could go up as high as x5 or x6. Some may argue with my reasoning but when I share with you some of the sites I’ve purchased you’ll quickly change your mind. So lets get into a couple of the outstanding bargains I’ve picked up during January-February 2009.

Warning - The Examples Below Will Excite You !!!

Just remember the below list is merely a sample of the many sites I’ve purchased during the first quarter of 2009, there’s plenty more where they came from but I’m revealing to you only a select few. Also to give you an idea of how great these bargains are, just remember that under normal circumstances a web buyer like myself pays around 10-12 months worth of monthly income. That means you’re looking at around 1 year to earn back your original investment, but many of these will be paid off far quicker! Just check the list below and you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

• UFO Videos - No daily maintainence required for this one, no article writing, it simply shows off some cool ufo videos. I bought this puppy for $100, I’ve had it for about 2 months and it’s making roughly $20 per month via adsense. In just 5 months I’ll have paid off my original purchase price but the way this site is going it’s probably going to be even quicker than that. Under normal circumstances this site would have sold for atleast $300 (total saving $200).
• Crossword Puzzles For Kids - A great little information site, which i purchased on the quality of the domain alone. This site is just a baby and only a couple of months old but it’s already picked up some great rankings on the search engines and is pulling in around $10 per month. I picked this up for just $30, meaning I’ll own it within 3 months and the income is still growing.
• Free Poems - Bought this for $300, changed the ad placement around and turned it from a $1 per day site into a $3 per day site. At even $50 per month I would recover my investment within 6 months but at the rate this is moving I’ve almost recovered it within just three.

Conclusion

If you want to build up a portfolio of sites that earn you an automated daily income, night or day then now is the time to get started. There’s more bargains out there to be had and I would suggest if you have money lieing around or simply want to increase your portfolio ownership then consider buying a website. Not only will you earn far more than the interest you’d get from your bank account but you’ll have the added satisfaction of calling yourself a profitable businessman and earning your money the smart way.

P.S Note how all of the sites mentioned above don’t exactly look impressive, but hidden within them was a bargain and an untapped potential waiting to be unlocked. If you look beyond the ugly exterior there are loads of great sites to be had. Good luck with your site buying and I hope you found this post helpful!