Recently, over the course of the last few months, as the economy has taken a nosedive I’ve seen a similar drop in the number of quality sites being listed and sold at these sites. You can take a quick look yourself and see that people on SitePoint and DP that are selling anything are more or less pushing spammy junk for cheap prices. It’s a rare occurrence when something good comes along and when it does it isn’t on the market for long before someone snatches it up.

Finding Good Sites For Sale

Since the people normally involved in the buying and selling of websites trade are slowing down their activity it’s time for people looking to buy in this market to get proactive.

If you’re looking to buy a real, quality web site you should no longer be looking on SitePoint and Digital Point with any hopes of success. Instead, go out and find sites you like and contact them directly and ask if they’d be willing to sell.

You might be surprised to discover not only the number of people willing to sell their site to you but their asking prices as well. I certainly recommend giving it a shot and seeing how things go. The worst thing that can happen is someone says no.

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When is it too soon to sell a site? A lot of people worry about waiting too long to sell their websites. They’re concerned if they don’t strike while the iron is hot, and cash in on recent revenue stats, that they might not make the most possible from the sale of their sites.

An Example of Selling Too Soon?

There’s a great Mac-only piece of software out there called GrabUp that lets you quickly take snapshots of your screen and upload them to the web for you to share with others. The program is snappy and the system for uploading is extremely fast and efficient. It’s a great product that just recently launched an extended version that, for a small cost, lets you get even more out of the software. The future looks bright for GrabUp.

That future, unfortunately, is going to belong to someone other than the program’s creator.

GrabUp is currently up for sale over at SitePoint. This sale comes only one week after the “pro” version of the software has been available. In that week the profit has been $1,060. That’s certainly nothing to sneeze at and the owner is using that figure to justify their “Buy It Now” price.

It feels to me like the seller might be rushing into this one a bit. I obviously don’t know, or pretend to know, their financial situation of course. But with sales figures like that so early in the game, with little promotion from what the seller is claiming, it seems like they’d be better served holding on for at least a few more months.

Here’s the other problem with selling so fast. It makes potential buyers skeptical. You immediately ask yourself, when first seeing this sale, “Why is he selling already? What’s the problem?” If you do a little research, you find out GrabUp has actually been up for sale before and then the deal was cancelled. That’s going to raise concern as well.

Software is a tricky game to play. I know that from experience working at the enterprise level. It’s just as hard at the consumer level, of course. But when you have an apparent hit on your hands it might be best to stick to it and see where it leads you. As opposed to jumping ship for your next project at the first sight of a payday.

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A big problem myself and other affiliates within the program saw was a serious decrease in the amount of ACRUs our sites were getting. eBay continuously denied their was a problem.

Well, guess what? We were right and eBay was wrong.

From the eBay Partner Network blog comes a post, on July 3rd during the news vacuum of the Fourth of July holiday here in America:

As we mentioned on the discussion boards, we’ve identified an issue affecting the way ACRUs were being attributed to affiliates. Although on the eBay Partner Network we use the same underlying tracking system as on Commission Junction (Value Click’s MediaPlex), when we switched to the eBay Partner Network a small issue was introduced where in certain circumstances ACRUs were not credited to the right affiliate. Many but not all of our affiliates were affected.

So there you go. At least they’ve admitted their mistake and are starting to make amends. The bad part of this mess is that they’ve denied there was a problem since the program launched even though all of their affiliates knew something wasn’t working right with the ACRU tracking.

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Since the switch my stats are all over the place. One day I’ll have no clicks at all and then the next I’ll have 70+ on one site seemingly at random. The next day we’re back to no clicks.

I’ve read in a lot of other places that people are not happy with the numbers they’re seeing as well. They’ve reported this to eBay and have basically been told they’re wrong and that everything is going just fine. One of the big points of argument with affiliates seems to be the number of new signups they’re seeing. It just so happens new signups are one of the biggest money makers for affiliates but I’m sure this sudden drop is just a coincidence…

My eBay revenue was so small to begin with that I’m probably in no position to really argue but some of the bigger players in this field feel something is amiss. When enough people start to see smoke there probably is a fire.

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Some of you might remember that I put my auction aggregator up for sale back on the 15th of February. I decided to list the site on the SitePoint Marketplace to see what kind of reaction it would get. I promised I’d give a recap when the site was sold and even though the sale only ran for seven days the site wasn’t officially sold and transferred completely to the new owner until March 31st.

It took me nearly six weeks to sell my site.

The Auction

The act of listing my site at SitePoint cost $20 and was a pretty painless process. I should note that I did all of this before their recent updates to the Marketplace so I can’t say one way or the other if the experience is any better.

Within about 15 minutes of posting my auction bids started to come in. In about two hours my (apparently very low) reserve was met and things just continued to escalate. At the end of the seven days it had basically boiled down to a three-man race for the site with the eventual auction winner taking it for a last minute bid of $900.

Sealing The Deal

Now that the site was “sold” the fun really began. The initial winner of the auction was pretty clearly in over his head. I suspected as much from his questions he asked during the seven day listing but he wasn’t in the running late so I didn’t think much of it. Until he made an 11th hour bid that won the site.

We went back and forth via private messaging at SitePoint about transferring the site. Then one day all communication just stopped completely. The winner had gone AWOL on me so now I was left with a finished auction and no buyer.

Reserve Champion

In the show cattle industry the second place winner is called Reserve Champion. Well, I decided that after my first buyer vanished I should contact the second place bidder and see if they were interested. Luckily for me they still were and even at the first winner’s final bid of $900.

And then this “winner” disappeared from the face of the earth as well. Once again I was back to where I started about three weeks after I listed my site for sale.

Finally, We Have A Winner

I was on SitePoint trying to contact the third place bidder (whom I would eventually find out no longer was interested) when I received a message from someone interested in buying the site if it was still available.

This buyer was not only interested in the site but he was committed to actually seeing the transaction through. What a pleasant change of pace for once.

I won’t disclose what the buyer paid but I will say it was less than what the site went for at SitePoint. After a week or so of sorting out some technical issues the site is now running smoothly for its new owner. And that’s the end of my experience with the SitePoint Marketplace.

If anyone reading has had a similar experience I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a comment about it.

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Hot on the heels of their announcement of an in-house affiliate program (see you in hell, Commission Junction) comes word that they’re banning anyone from selling digital download products through auction.

I want to talk briefly about my opinion on each of these moves.

Commission Junction

The fact that a huge mega corporation like eBay ran its very lucrative and popular affiliate program through a third party provider for so long is insane. Nevermind that they picked Commission Junction who has one of the worst reporting systems known to modern man.

I think this move away from CJ and to an in-house solution is a stroke of genius and is an example of eBay understanding their users and trying to capitalize on their hot affiliate business. They aren’t wasting any time with this either. eBay’s new affiliate program will be live on the 1st of April.

Digital Downloads

This is probably a pretty devastating development for Internet Marketers who were using eBay as a mean of peddling PLR products and gaming the site’s feedback system. I personally think its a pretty great move that will, unfortunately, have some dire repercussions with people who ran legitimate business selling digital products.

This change also is coming quickly. By March 31st, anyone wishing to sell a digital product on eBay will have to buy a 30 day classified ad for $9.95 instead of posting an auction. This does open the door for someone else to come in and establish a marketplace to replace what eBay just slaughtered in an instant.

Only time will tell if this move backfires on eBay or just makes their site less trashy.

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PageRank Update Day is always fun for me. Anyone who tells you that PageRank is dead is fooling themselves or just hasn’t learned how to take full advantage of it.

Here’s the newest scores for the sites throughout Jack’s Empire:

This update was full of surprises. Here’s some quick analysis:

• As usual, each update comes with some sacrificial lambs and this time around it was the Michigan Sports Report and New York City Sports Report. And, as usual, the reason for their drop should be more than obvious to anyone who visits the sites.
• The biggest leaper in the bunch was the Northwest Sports Report going from 0 to 4. I have no logical explanation for that except that it was well linked between all the sites in the empire. Conventional wisdom from SEO experts says that inter-linking like that doesn’t pass much Google juice so believe what you want.
• It’s nice to see my free WordPress themes site get a small bump. I’ve been trying to do a bit more recently to get the word out and it seems to be paying off both in the number of theme downloads and this small PR boost.

I’m actually focusing next week’s newsletter on my thoughts and approaches concerning PageRank and utilizing it to your advantage. If you haven’t subscribed yet and are interested in that kind of information sign up when you get a chance. There’s a form in the upper right hand corner right now to make it easier on you.

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With the wild popularity of BANS and phpBay Pro these days it seems like you’ve hit a gap in the marketplace for eBay affiliates. Can you take a minute to describe what phpBayAds does for those that haven’t heard yet and who is most likely to benefit from using it?

I’ve noticed the increase in the popularity of the eBay affiliate program for awhile now and I’ve even started using phpBayPro on a few websites of mine and found great success with it. I also noticed a lot of press on AuctionAds (now ShoppingAds) and it’s shortcomings.

All of these things got me thinking about what type of products I could develop to capitalize on the publicity surrounding the eBay affiliate program which eventually led me to creating phpBayAds.

phpBayAds lets you create adsense-styled ads that feature images and links to eBay auction products using your own eBay Affiliate ID. So when a user clicks on the ad and either makes a purchase or signs up for eBay you get the commissions.

Although results will vary from site to site, I think phpBayAds can benefit every webmaster who tries it as it adds an additional source of income to your websites. phpBayAds are fully customizable from the color of the links to the color of the border to the size of the ads and can be made to blend well with any and all websites.

What was some of your reasoning behind releasing phpBayAds for free?

When I initially set out to release phpBayAds I planned to sell it for somewhere around $20. However when I got to thinking about it I realized that at least at the start of my development that releasing it for free and getting the largest amount of users using the script is to my benefit.

I truly want this script to succeed and to do that I need people to use it and I need people to provide me with feedback. I’m hoping that as the script gets more exposure and as I add features that I may release a low cost Pro version which would include more features and functionality.

What are some of the benefits/disadvantages to you as a developer in making people run the script on their own server?

I think the main advantage of being able to run this script on your own server is that you are in full control. Your ads will always be running as long as your own web host is running. You don’t have to rely on any 3rd party website.

In the future as phpBayAds grows in popularity I would like to offer a hosted version for a low monthly cost which would let those less technical users also use the script.

What’s in store for future releases?

I have a number of features that I’d love to add as long as phpBayAds grows in popularity.

One major feature that I plan to add in the near future is reporting. I want to be able to track all of the clicks going through the ads, show what keywords are performing, what ad sizes are working best and present it all in one useful control panel.

As I mentioned above I’d also like to offer a hosted version of the script and perhaps additional ad sizes.

Lastly I’d like to make the ads more configurable by allowing you to set whether or not the ads should have images, price range of the items, geotargetting and more!

The future is bright for phpBayAds as long as people find it useful.

I want to thank Erik for taking the time to answer my questions. You can learn more about phpBayAds and download it for free over at his blog.

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Here’s what the GoDaddy site looks like after I search for ohiogolfcourses.com:

And here’s that same search after I remove all of the gratuitous advertising, worthless information and flashy graphics:

This is just the search page. Anyone with experience actually purchasing a domain at GoDaddy knows that the sales pitch gets even louder and more intense as you try and navigate through their checkout process.

Now I understand everyone wants to make a buck and I’m fine with that but this is crazy. Unfortunately, I have a suspicion that this ad assault performs quite well for GoDaddy’s bottom line and things will stay this cluttered for a long, long time to come.

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Project Wonderful is, in short, an advertising platform for advertisers and publishers based on an auction system. The system is slightly complex so I suggest that, if you’re interested, you head on over to their explanation page and learn more. Basically you bid on a spot for a set amount of money and as long as you aren’t outbid by another advertiser your banner remains displayed until you either run out of money or a certain time limit you define has been met.

I first came across Project Wonderful on the Entrecard blog and I initially only planned to bid on one of their six banner spots. Of course, once I got registered my account, deposited some funds via PayPal and got into using the system I decided to expand my advertising a bit.

I chose the Entrecard site and also a handful of blogs that had the term “wordpress” tagged as one of their topics. The banner I used is on the right and it led directly to the signup page for Jack’s Newsletter.

I’m going to now give you exact details on what I spent, the views my banner received and the clicks that came through. In an effort to keep the sites I used private I’ll only be describing their topic/niche and not reveal the actual name of the site (except for Entrecard, who are fair game in my eyes).

As you can see from my table, the cost per click was pretty good. I received targeted traffic for prices similar or even lower than what I would have gotten through a more traditional advertising platform such as AdWords.

As far as actual conversions on the traffic… well, my hunch is that the only really good converter was the Entrecard banner. I didn’t have any really good means of tracking this in place because I kind of jumped right into using Project Wonderful without a lot of preparation.

Bottom Line

I think I’m going to be using Project Wonderful again in the very near future. I’ll definitely give it one more run promoting the newsletter before the premium WordPress theme giveaway is over.

Another neat twist to using this system that I hadn’t initially planned on is the spying factor involved. You can obviously quite easily get an idea of the kind of traffic sites are getting by just looking at your banner stats. I wonder how many publishers stop to think how much information about their traffic they’re giving away by being a member of Project Wonderful.

Project Wonderful has a slightly intimidating concept and a rather difficult interface but if you’re willing to take the time and chance a few dollars on it you might see some pretty nice results. It’s officially recommended.

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