One thing I’ve noticed is that almost every ebook site for sale reads something like this

‘hot ebook – over $1k in sales in a week, looking for quick sale’

This should throw up all kinds of red flags… one, because 90% of the time all the sales are from ebay, so unless you’re an avid ebay trader (I’m not) your going to be shit out of luck there, also, most ebooks have a short life and limited market, they only make those initial sales then die off, especially on ebay where you will be pushing the same book to the same people after you buy the site.

You’ll need to expand the market the book more in other areas to keep the sales up.

Regardless, anyone looking to sell something that’s got 0 track record of sales, wants a very quick sale (a few days), oh and let’s not forget to mention they still want 10x revenue for it – so a $1k first month ebook they will try to sell for $10k…

I’m not writing off all ebooks here, but there’s heaps of them around, only a handful are good, but quick sales for large amounts of cash and no track record is just a dangerous investment if you ask me. If it’s made $1k in its first week or month, why not keep it for 2-3 months, grow it more and then sell for $30k… buyer beware.

There’s a forum for sale over at SitePoint, it’s actually a good forum, the url is: http://www.businessforum.net/

It’s making $0, it’s pulling over 500 uniques a day, 250,000 page views a month.

But his starting bid is $12k, and his BIN is $35k.

The reality here is that it’s over priced; it only has 7,000 members, 5,000 threads and 24,000 posts. It’s a bit, but not a lot for a 2 year old forum, so it’s been kicking along and slowly growing, but it’s not shit hot and taking off or anything. He’s put a lot of work into it, but it needs a lot more to get it really going, regardless, it is a nice foundation to start from, so it’s defiantly worthy of purchasing… but not at $12k-$35k

I think the main problem here is that he bought the site 7 months ago for $11,600… back then it has 4,000 members, 14,000 posts.

He overpaid 7 months ago for it. And he’s trying to sell it for more now, because in his eyes from the price he bought it for it’s now worth more.

The reality is that he overpaid, back then it was worth $3-4K, and now its worth about $5-6k tops.

There’s no revenue, there’s only 500 uniques a day and only 7,000 members. To really get this forum kicking and making any kind of money, it needs 20 hours a week put into it and more marketing cash invested into it, in 2-3 months you could if you’re lucky kick it up to 1,000 uniques a day, but even then from ads alone you would be hoping to bring in $500 to $700 a month. You won’t do it from adsense, you would be doing most of that revenue from private ad sales.

So after expenses, and all your time, you’re not making much. To keep it going you would be easily spending $200 a month on marketing, let’s say you profit $500 a month (after that 3 months of heavy marketing and time spent), and then you’re looking at a site worth $5k (10x revenue) probably more because there’s revenue and growth and a long history.

Still, not worth $12k minimum, if I was him, I’d spend $1k+ on promotions a month and start putting ads on the forum, sell ads for 3 months, get some revenue in and then sell, at least then you’re showing the potential buyer of the site that the investment is going to be worth it.

OK, before I start this rant, I warn you that I see something that I think is bad, I can be a real asshole, mostly because I think whatever it is I’m ranting about needs a serious reality check and while everyone around is saying good things and being supportive, I feel there needs to be someone dishing out the reality of the situation, and I’m prepared to be that person. Not out of hate, but to really give whoever a reality check in the hope that they see the error of their ways, and either change profession, or step up their game a whole heap (go back to school).

Today’s ‘why the fuck would anyone buy this’ rant, is about http://www.bidcheap2u.com/

It’s for sale over at sitepoint, http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/36780 with a BIN of $6,000… and starting bid of $2,500…

It pulls 500 page views a month – 60 uniques – which is about right for search engine bot traffic, not people… Mostly what’s being sold is the code, he custom wrote it, and honestly so what?

There’s heaps of ebay – auction style scripts around that do all that his would do – and probably more, and not to mention, since he’s the only developer and he’s selling the site with code as a once off thing, if there’s bugs, errors, issues, and anything else, then you can’t get support, you don’t have updates, you will have to hire a developer to decipher his code, and then work out the issue.

This site is a liability, not an investment.

He should be selling the code to other developers with resell rights, or an exclusive sale, not a site on sitepoint. Or he should be selling a hosted solution and a singular marketplace, a single auction site with your own code is just pointless, it’s like buying a Russian custom built one of a kind car which you will need to manually comply to drive in your own country, and then find a Russian mechanic who can fix it when there’s issues.

Actually, I might start valuing things for sale on sitepoint and wherever else I see them, because as a designer, developer, investor, business owner, and whatever else I am / have been, I think I have a good grasp on the value of a site for sale. I’ve built them, sold them, bought them, invested in them and disowned them.

eBay is now only accepting PayPal for online payment – citing that your 4 times safer using PayPal than any other payment method.

Which is bullshit, it’s so easy to receive goods and then reverse a payment on PayPal it’s not funny, it’s so hard to get your money back from people who reverse charges for a bullshit reason it’s crazy.

This is just another move from eBay to jack up its stock price and profiteer since their stock has been crashing over the last few months – well years overall (it was almost $60 in 2002, $40 4 months ago and about a week ago it was down around $25).

It wasn’t too long ago they raised their percentage fee from like 3% to 10% in one hit, they make shitloads off PayPal as it is and locking every other payment provider out of the eBay market isn’t just a monopoly within eBay, but it’s unfair trading as a whole.

So much commerce is done via eBay now days that there needs to be other options for people who don’t want to pay through PayPal – either with an account or with their credit card.

Google is desperately trying to gain some traction with their Google Checkout, but it’s getting nowhere because of moves like this, if you could use Google Checkout on eBay I’m sure heaps of people would be using it.

My plan this year is to do away with clients totally by the end of the year. Be 100% self reliant income wise.

How am I going to achieve this? The same way anyone else can. By investing my time and energies into my own business ventures, building web based applications based on subscription models and by investing my excess revenue into offline businesses.

I have a whole bunch of targets I need to meet financially, but with the right planning and by putting the right steps in place I should be able to get there.

The same goes for anyone, and anything. Work out what you want to do with your X (X being your website, business, blog, life, whatever). And then sit down and research ways to achieve this.

For example if your goal is to make money from your blog, you really need to work out how that’s going to happen, why would people read your blog, what hooks are in place to get people to register to your mailing list or subscribe to your RSS feed, what value are you delivering to the end reader that they can’t get somewhere else?

In my opinion for a blog it really comes down to content and hooks, if your content delivers value people will read and search engines will index, if your hooks are of value people will take the bait and refer other people to it as well.

If the goal is to build traffic to the site to sell ads or something, then work on small targets, 100 a day, 200 a day, 500 a day, 1,000 a day etc. But don’t just set random targets without ways to achieve them, for every target put in place a set of actions that will make that target achievable.

It’s easy to say I want 5k visits a day and you’ll get that from writing good content. Well you might but you probably won’t, it’s better to say I’ll get 500 a day from writing good content, and search optimising my site, networking with others in my industry, buying ads on related sites and building some link bait.

And then go from there; work on sustaining that traffic and then growing on it to reach that 5k, it’s the same old story on the internet, once the traffic is there the ad revenue will follow.

For me in my position I’m working on building web applications that generate revenue, I’ll be building them with my team of developers in between client projects, and once they are ready for the public we’ll start small with some basic marketing, and no fees for usage, grow the user base, and start working on ways to monetise once the application has a healthy number of active users.

Until there’s a good amount of users on the system, just like high traffic numbers to a site, there’s no point of trying to monetise, you’ll make shit all and you’ll only drive people away.

Having everything organised is important to me, and it should be for almost everyone. There’s nothing worse than having a server die, or system crash and not knowing what’s affected, not having a backup and not knowing what has to be restored.

Aside from a system restore point of view, it’s important in case a server becomes hacked or heavily loaded; it’s good to have your heavily loaded sites on servers that can handle the traffic, or at least have a location for them to move to in a short period of time if one of your sites does become busy.

I’ve spend the first 4hrs of this morning moving sites off 2 of my old dedicated servers and into new virtual server environments. My new virtual servers won’t have hardware failures and won’t need hardware upgrades, additional resources are 1 click scalable and the hardware is spread across multiple servers.

Another part of organisation I like to do with my servers is to remove any sites that are unused, or dead, I like to prune old sites off my servers, rather than letting them linger around for no real reason, I either sell or just delete and let the domain drop.

The fewer sites floating around on my servers the more focus I have on the sites that are actually worth spending time on, rather than having to maintain sites that are a waste of time.

I have a few hundred domains, but actual sites that are operational are around 40. I have designs and systems for close to 100 domains, but I don’t have the time to maintain or market the rest of them, the designs are sitting on our local server for the day when some of the current batch that are operational are shut down or sold off.

I talk about this because my friend just had server die with about 40 sites on it, took him over a week to restore all the sites on a new server, mostly because of bad backups and not knowing what was actually on that server. It was all a bit of a mess, but at least now he’s running on a dedicated virtual server that shouldn’t die anytime soon.