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By Dean Hunt 

Buying and selling websites has been big news in 2007, and is set to become ever more mainstream in 2008. YouTube was the most high profile of the year, plus we have had the Facebook deal with Microsoft… and lest we forget about the blogging world: CashQuests sold for 15 big ones, Net Business Blog caused waves when Adrian Cooke purchased it in June 07, and there were many, many more.

So what has any of this got to do with little old me?

Well, for the past 12 months I have been buying and selling websites (Site Flipping) on a very regular basis. I am not going to discuss amounts, but let’s just say that I have been involved in 5 figure deals on an almost monthly basis, and have been in discussions with well over 100 site owners.

Over the coming weeks I am going to be showing you this world through the eyes of the three active positions in this industry:

1) The Site Seller (today)

2) The Site Buyer (coming soon)

3) The Site Flipper (coming soon, but not quite as soon as the second one )

I have had experience in all three, and I will be sharing my warnings, my secrets, my stories and my advice. If you own a website, then at some point you are likely to be in one of the above positions, so eyes forward, sharpen your pencils and let’s get started with today’s category: The Website Seller.

The Website Seller

If you own a successful website, then at some point you are likely to experience interest from outside parties in your site, or, you may hook up with a stripper from LA and have to sell your site to pay for your new addictions. In either case, you are naturally going to want to get the highest possible price for your website.

The Clash of Perspectives

The first thing you will need to do is change your perspective. It really doesn’t matter that you spent 1,000 hours of your time working on the site, it doesn’t matter that you paid some kid in Romania $3,000 for the back-end, and it doesn’t matter that the site has personal value to you.

All of those factors mean nothing in the real world!

So whilst it may not be natural or comfortable, make an effort to try and see things from the buyers perspective.

Spreading the Word…. for FREE

The next step is to spread the word about the possibility of a sale of your website. Contact your buddies on Facebook, contact the people on your IM, sell your site on forums, email friends and ex-colleagues…. utilise your contacts and spread the word about your site. There are two reasons for doing this:

1) It is Free
2) It is likely your contacts are already familiar with your site, and therefore there will be some element of brand influence in your favour.

Website Marketplaces

If you haven’t managed a sale from your contacts, then the next step is to go to a marketplace and put your site up for auction.

Sitepoint.com has a great marketplace, but it is not free to list. The team at Midascode are listing sites for free for the first 90 days of 2008, so that is worth trying before you hand over your heard earned mooney to Sitepoint.

Here is some info you will need to include when listing on a website marketplace like Sitepoint or Midascode:

* BIN or Reserve prices (BIN = Buy It Now price, and the reserve is the minimum you would be willing to sell for)

* The URL (obviously)

* traffic statistics (Focus on monthly unique visitors, and use the past 6 months average as your figure)

* Revenue details (Revenue is the single biggest factor, so make sure you list it)

* Age of site (People like to see the site’s age, so include that)

Additional Listing Information

I spoke to the team at Midascode and they said that the following is also useful information, especially on bigger sales:

* Any legal issues (if your site is called CocaColasuck.com then this is especially important. It is also an issue with Fan sites)

* Sources of revenue (include info on all revenue streams)

* Cost of advertising (If your site costs $50,000 per month in Google PPC to maintain, then make sure you include this info)

* Main Keywords (You are well within your rights to NOT share your main keywords on a marketplace, but giving access or screenshots to potential buyers may be required)

Valuing Your Website

This is a tricky area, but before you list your site you should have a BIN and minimum reserve price planned. If you simply want to list it and hope for the best, then you may accidentally sell your site for a lot less than it is worth.

I wrote a post about this earlier in the year: how much is my website worth?

Here is a snippet from that post:

the main set of factors we will look at when assigning a value to your site:

# Site Revenue - It is always a good sign if you are making money
# Site overhead - Hosting, designers, moderators, staff, ads etc….
# Search rankings - How much traffic do you get from Google and co?
# Stability of search rankings - How long have you had these rankings for?
# Legitimacy of search rankings - Do you do anything that could get your site penalised?
# Current and future revenue potential - Current is more important, but we don’t fully ignore future potential.
# Loyalty of user base - have you had many members for x years? etc
# Size of the site - in terms of brand and pages
# Unique Content - where does the content come from?
# Yahoo linkdomain: - How many backlinks do you have?
# .edu and .gov links - Do you have any genuine .edu and .gov links (comments do not count, as they use the nofollow)
# Affiliate relationships - Do you have any affiliate deals with related sites?
# Content relationships - Do you get links for content? do you use other peoples content in exchange for links?
# Site Profits - Making $100 is not good if you are spending $200 on ads
# Earnings per visitor - Unique visitors per month divided by monthly profit = earnings per visitor
# Costs per click - Do you use PPC? what is your average cost per click?

12 Reasons Why I Don’t Want to Buy Your Website

Here are some factors that generally make me NOT want to purchase a website: (note: these are not strict rules, but I am extra cautious when dealing with any of these)

* Your website is Banned from the search engines
* Your website has not been promoted
* Has a bad reputation in the industry
* Huge amount of competition
* Little or no room for growth
* is turnkey
* is a site with a low expected life span (e.g a site for a new computer game)
* is a site that can be easily replicated (e.g arcade sites, proxy sites, myspace sites)
* is hosted on Blogspot or related sites
* has a potent copyright infringements in the domain
* is very expensive to maintain
* requires a lot of work to maintain (e.g a blog where the seller is the only author)

Site Selling Summary

Selling your website can be a great idea, especially if you are short of cash, or are looking for a new and more exciting project. I hope this article will help you if you ever decide to sell your site or blog, and you can contact me directly with any questions at my blog, or you can speak to the team at Midascode.co.uk.

Website Selling/buying Interview: I recently interviewed Adrian Cooke (the guy who highly controversially purchased NetBusinessBlog.com), if you want to hear his thoughts on the sale and buying/selling websites, then you can read the full interview for free here: Net Business Blog Interview

Did You Download Your FREE Copy of "How to Build a Business NOT Just a Blog" Yet? Click Here Now to Get Your Copy!

28 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Dean Hunt here again from the RetiredAt21 live, buzz experiment.

Recently I showed you the net’s first ever Live Buzz Experiment.

I put my balls well and truly on the line, and I am glad to say that it was a complete success!

See for yourself:

The Results

Today I am going to be showing you the results and effects of this experiment, everything from the traffic, the links, the viral path, the effect it had on the blog, the server, opt-in numbers etc…

The Traffic

Let’s start with the juicy stuff: The Web Traffic

(s20retiredat21)      -- Site Summary

---VisitsTotal ...................... 155,745

Average per Day .............. 6,083

Average Visit Length .......... 0:13

This Week ................... 42,583

Page Views

Total ...................... 234,901

Average per Day .............. 7,655

Average per Visit .............. 1.3

This Week ................... 53,587

This was sent to us yesterday and it shows an overview of the “average” stats per day.

It is certainly impressive, but we have to take into consideration that the 5 days prior were pretty dead in comparison. So let’s look at the daily figures:

This was from towards the end of the first day, around 11pm. The final total was around 46,000 visits, but we can really see the spike here:

Average per day = 179

Today = 40,924

Going Viral Baby

Most people focus solely on the initial spike that Digg provides, but for me, this is shortsighted and shows a lack of understanding. The real value for me is what happens AFTER the Digg traffic has died down.

Here are some examples:

Del.Icio.Us

Most of you should be aware of del.icio.us, here is the page for our buzz article: delicious page

At the time of writing it has had a whopping 90 people tag the story.

The story was at one point top ranked for tags like: Funny, humor, advice, inspiration, self improvement and numerous others.

Most of you will know the long term power these tags will have, and I expect a steady stream of daily traffic for the coming months from this.

StumbleUpon

Stumbleupon seems to be the big dog these days, it has had over 4 million downloads and the largest social userbase of all the social media sites.

You can see the current Stumbleupon page for the article here: stumble page

It has had a huge 29 written reviews, and has maxed out the number of voters shown on the page (40 is the max).

At one time it was the number one “recently popular” article on the entire network, I made a screenshot, but it is not very good quality, see it here: top of the recently popular charts

The Viral Seed is Spreading

The site has also been linked on numerous blogs and forums, far too many to list here, but here are a few of the bigger sites:

Yes, one of the biggest newspapers in the UK linked to one of our stories… more on this PR6 link later.

MIXX.com

Many say that Mixx will be bigger than Digg, I am not so sure, but either way, we did well on there and were top ranked for numerous tags. This didn’t bring much traffic, in fact, the link from The Times newspaper got a lot more.

Another Digg Style Site

Perhaps someone could translate this for me? In any case, it did fairly well at Balatarin.com - I put this in purely to show you how fast and far your viral seed can travel on the net.

I can’t list all the blogs and forums that linked to the article, as there are too many, but two big traffic referrers were Hotair and Popurls, each brought over 600 unique visitors in the past 36 hours.

Getting Your Site and Server Prepared

Preparing for a global buzz success is not something many people think of, but if your site hits the Digg homepage, you have two choices:

Longterm vs Short term

Each webmaster will have a preference, and I am not claiming my way is the best, but it suits my game plan, and that is very much a longterm strategy.

For me, branding and link strength will always outway things like Adsense. In fact, on Dean Hunt.com I have no adsense, zero affiliate links, no banners, no popups and I promote no products… to many of you this may seem insane. But I know that the BIG money in this industry comes from reputation, perceived authority, site strength, respectability etc… and I know that plastering my site with ads make make me a few hundred dollars extra per month, but it may lose me the six figure deals, and the networking I have recently been doing with many of the industries A-listers.

Remember, you can get a few hundred dollars in 24 hours quite easily from a Digg success, but is it worth it?

You also run the risk of Digg users not voting for you because you have the ads.

Anyway, my advice to the site owner was the long term strategy, and by the time the article had only 7 Digg votes, he had removed all traces of Adsense from the site.

The Server

I am pretty sure the server is a dedicated server, but we all know that Wordpress and high traffic are not a good mix. So 10 mins before the article hit the frontpage, I had installed this wordpress plugin and effectively made the site a static website.

For the first time ever the server coped perfectly, and as far as I know, it had a 100% online uptime.

RSS Feed Readers

Getting Feed reades is huge for any blog, so I was shocked to see that there was no Feed button on the site. I spotted this at least 6 hours too late, but here is the fruit of my labour:

It is not overly eye-catching, but it was better than nothing. That said, the site wasn’t setup for Feedreader, so the feed link was just the standard retiredat21.com/feed - this means I don’t know how many people subscribed to the feed.

Opt-Ins

Opt-ins are another great benefit to a viral spike. We all know that the money is in the list, but at R21 the call to action seemed pretty weak. The offer is for future blog updates, but I think we are going to change that to a free gift very soon.

I checked the opt-in stats 12 hours after the Digg traffic started, and to be honest it wasn’t impressive. The total at the time was 64 opt-ins. On a normal day that would be amazing, but I feel a better call to action could have trebbled those figures.

Other Cool Stuff

Over the next few weeks we will likely see the start of the links having an effect on the site’s Google rankings, but I thought I would show you this:

Google Ranking

This is actually really useful. It is a search term that the site owner was keen to rank for, and now his article is 2nd in the rankings. He should get steady traffic from this for potentially years to come.

Super Cool Stuff

Ok, not the most technical of sub-headings, but you may remember that we got a PageRank 6 link from The Times. A top 1000 Alexa ranked website, and one of the leading UK newspapers.

Here is the thing… it wasn’t for the self improvement article, it was for this article which many blogs (including John Cow) displayed on their blogs earlier this month.

What I want to show you here is that although many Digg users will read your article and then leave, there will be a % that will check your site for other cool stuff. If your website sucks, then you are destined to fail regardless, but if you have a few gems on your site, they WILL find them.

In this instance they found the World Clock post, and that got submitted to StumbleUpon. It now has a whopping 21 reviews, and at one point was top of the Science Buzz page at Stumbleupon, this clearly lead to an editor at The Times seeing it, and we got our PR6 link and International mention from a high authority source.

You can see the Times post here: Times Post.

The SEO experts will know exactly what sort of longterm effects this link may have.

Summary

It has now been almost 48 hours since the story hit the home page, and traffic yesterday was around 13,000 unique visitors. It is too early to tell what today’s will be, but it looks set for around 10,000

Some people have asked what effect having a Digg top user had on the story, to be honest, this is the first time any top user has dugg any of my stuff, but I did notice an improvement for the first 15 or so Diggs, but after that, I felt it made little difference.

I hope this insight has been interesting and helpful, obviouslly I couldn’t cover everything, partly because I don’t own the site and don’t have access to all of the stats etc, but I believe this was the net’s first EVER real time buzz experiment, so I am glad I could share it with you.

Web Traffic Orgasm FREE Case Study and More….

If you want:

* a copy of my previous FREE buzz case study in PDF format
* THIS live experiment (coming soon)
* a world exclusive interview with the Top Users of StumbleUpon that will be sent to subscribers FREE in the next 10 days….
* and FREE Beta access to my book

Simply click the image below. Thankyou

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22 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

****UPDATE**** - Since publishing this article, the Devil story has reached the Digg.com homepage and has had almost 15,000 unique visitors today thus far

Yesterday I had a phone call from a client who said: “Dean, Self improvement seems really popular, can you do a self improvement article for my site and make it a global viral and buzz success?”

Sure, I thought, I will walk on water while I am it.

But I like a challenge, so I agreed.

It is now approx 18 hours later, and the buzz article has been created.

What I am going to do today is not only show you my thinking behind creating this article, but also, I will show you in real time, the progress of the article, and whether it becomes a viral success or yet another blog post for the Internet scrap heap.

My Buzz Self Improvement Article

Let’s start by showing you the buzz, self improvement article I created: self improvement advice from the devil

I will explain my thoughts behind the concept and the buzz angle in a moment. But first I want to show the article in action, live, as we speak: Digg Article - 100 Diggs thus far

Before I show you some of the stats and where it has started spreading to, I would like to talk a little behind my thinking for the article itself.

The Concept

There were two things that struck me when I was given this assignment:

1) There are zillions of self improvement articles already clogging the net

2) They are pretty much all the same

So I wanted to use these two factors to create some buzz, and to help give me article an angle.

So I did this by starting my article with the following introduction:

“The Internet is full of self improvement advice. You can’t browse a blog these days without someone telling you how you should be living your life.

Well it is about time we shook things up a little…

Allow me to introduce to you: Self Improvement Advice from the Devil”

In these few short lines I have already made the reader angry about the fact that there are so many crappy self help tips on the net. If the reader agrees, then we have invoked emotion, and that emotion is anger (possibly the most powerful viral emotion).

So now I have got an emotion with the intro, I can lead to the content itself.

The Content

There are already thousands of 10+ page articles on self improvement. We don’t need another, and I don’t fancy spending all afternoon writing one. It is better to work smart and not hard, so I went through my notes for the past two years and found a section that I call “Inspirational Stuff”. Essentially this is a few pages of quotes that inspire or amuse me.

I gathered all the quotes that were different from the norm, and I made a few tweaks and bang, 6 minutes later I had my content.

Easy hey?!?

Content Formatting

Content formatting is basically the way you display your content. We all know that huge chunks of text all crammed together look awful, and will basically lose the attention of the reader. So sites like Johncow.com use a decent sized font, a lot of white spacing and colourful images to help the content formatting.

Personally, I also like to do shorter paragraphs than the norm, this helps make the content more skimmable.

Anyway, unfortunately for me, I know from first hand experience the theme at Retired at 21 is a bit of a bitch! It doesn’t align images very well, the font is not great, and it all looks a bit of a mess.

So all I could do was add one small image to the content. Luckily I found a good image that matched the theme of the blog, and was amusing/unique enough to stand out.

Digg.com

The article was submitted to Digg a few hours later. The added bonus was that it was submitted by “SuperNova17″, who is one of the top 5 users of Digg.

As we speak it is now 19 hours since it was submitted, and the article has 101 digg votes.

Digg traffic

The vast majority of Digg traffic comes from getting on the main page, but my stats show that I am getting an average of 31 Digg referrals per hour (from the past 19 hours).

Also, the article is currently in the “Offtopic - Hot News” section. So that helps give it a boost.

Sowing the Seed Crappy Analogy

With viral marketing you are essentially sowing a seed. You want to make that seed as unique and strong as possible, and then you have to hope that some wind comes and spreads your seed.

Luckily my seed has been blown to numerous sites already.

Stumbleupon Success - as you can see, it has been a huge hit at Stumbleupon.

Mixx Success - It also has started to do well at Mixx.

In fact, it even got onto the main buzz page at Stumbleupon at one point.

Statistics Thus Far

Personally I doubt it will hit the Digg main page. But I don’t want you to think that it is a case of all or nothing, here are the stats for today since midnight:

What I want you to focus on here are two sets of numbers:

Average per day = 179 (not a huge amount, but it is still a small blog)

Today = 11,184 (That was from one hour ago)

Summary

The purpose of this LIVE case study was to show you the effects as they happen. So many people wait until something is successful and then edit out the rubbish parts, I want to show you all of it, warts and all. I don’t know if it is brave, or stupid, but it is certainly different, and that is the message I always try and portray: there are millions of blogs and sites on the net, you have to find an angle to give your content the buzz factor.

I will let you all know if anything big happens with this article. I hope you have enjoyed this insight into a live viral experiment.

Note

I previously published a three part buzz marketing guide to Johncow.com, I have since had some fancy designers turn it into a PDF package and make it look all fancy and bright

If you would like a free copy of the case study, and would like first beta notification of my “Web Traffic Orgasm” book, then you can get this for free here: Web Traffic Orgasm Free Case Study

By Dean Hunt - If you would like Dean to guest blog at your blog or website, then contact him at: deanhunt08@gmail.com

Did You Download Your FREE Copy of "How to Build a Business NOT Just a Blog" Yet? Click Here Now to Get Your Copy!

34 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Did you know that A pig’s orgasm lasts for half an hour?

Well today I am going to show you a powerful copy writing technique, and I guarantee that you will be able to master this technique before a pig finishes it’s orgasm.

This is a trick that master copywriters have been using for decades, but don’t think it is resigned solely to sales letters and high priced adverts. It is effective in any form of written content (especially blog posts).

So why is what I am about to show you so effective?

Good question.

The reason is that most readers of articles, blog posts, newsletters etc will flick through the first few lines to decide whether or not to read the full article. You get the point… crappy intro = no readers.

People are being bombarded with more information than ever before, and our brainbox likes to sift out all the crap. It does this be glancing over the first 2 or 3 lines of content, and from there it will decide whether the rest of the article is worth reading.

Today I will show you a trick to ensure that you grab the reader’s attention every time. I call it: “The fact jump“.

The essence of this trick is to start with a fact or piece of interesting trivia that is designed to interest the reader. Ideally this should be something that appeals on a global scale.

So for example, starting an article with “Did you know that the New York Yankees hit 72 home runs last year?” would NOT work, as anyone outside of New York probably wouldn’t give a crap.

Ah, I almost forgot… to master this technique you need to lead the fact into your message or blog post, if you fail to do this, it will look stupid, so beware.

Here are some examples I made earlier

The tallest sunflower is recorded at 7.17m (23ft 6.5 in) tall which is 1.08m (3ft 6.5 in) taller than the tallest recorded giraffe, but this is nothing compared to the height of the traffic spike in my Alexa rankings. The spike is mainly due to a buzz marketing trick I use and it goes a little something like this…. blah blah

Get it?

Good!

Just to prove how easy this is, here are some more:

Owls are one of the only birds who can see the colour blue, in fact, when I am designing a website for a client, I have a blue owl image on my desk to remind me that Google cannot read flash websites… blah blah

A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off after which it dies of starvation, but a blog without regular blog posts will die faster than you can say “no more adsense”…. blah blah

Did you know you can’t kill yourself by holding your breath? It is impossible… however, you can kill your web business if you don’t have a good web host… blah blah

In certain parts of the world there are fish, particularly members of the perch family, that are able to, and do, climb trees. In business you need to do the same, branch out into other industries to ensure you are up to date with current trends and techniques… blah blah

The name Wendy was made up for the book “Peter Pan”, yet today it is a very popular name. This goes to show that it is entirely possible to invent your own buzzword and try to make it popular. E.g iPod, Buzz Marketing, MP3 etc…. none of those existed 15 years ago, but now…. blah blah

Over 1000 birds a year die from smashing into windows, they should have bought a Mac instead. In fact, personally I recommend the Macbook Pro…. blah blah

You can use this trick for any form of content, and all the masters of copy writing and marketing use it, hell, they teach this sort of stuff at seminars all over the world, many of which will set you back 5 figures just to get in.

Did you know that bats always turn left when exiting a cave? Well I want you to do the same… turn left and head straight for your blog, I want you to try this technique and create a new blog post. Then email me at contact@deanhunt.com with the url when you have finished, and I will give a free copy of my upcoming book “The Web Traffic Orgasm” to the person who is the most creative.

More: Dean Hunt is a buzz marketing authority who guest writes at these little gems: 1 2 3 4

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23 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Dean Hunt here from StreetLessons.com & Retiredat21.com

What do you do when the big cow asks you to do another guest post, but you have a sore wrist and find typing on the keyboard very painful?

Simple… you do a blog series made almost entirely out of images, with little or no actual value, but may get away with it because the images are amusing.

Carpal Tunnel Website Advice - Part one of two

1 - Keep your friends close and your competitors closer. Learn from what they are doing right and more importantly, what they are doing wrong.

2 - Money sucks! - Too many people focus on money first. Focus on your customers/readers, and the money will follow.

3 - When building a website start from the bottom and work upwards. The foundations of your site are the most important, start with the basics first.

4 - Do not be afraid of the huge mega sites in your industry. It is possible to build relationships with even the biggest sites. Remember, they are often not as scary as you think.

5 - Do not try to be something you are not. People will eventually see through it.

6 - Be clear and descriptive. Do not confuse your readers with imprecise titles and descriptions.

7 - Controversy can attract attention, it can be a great way to promote your site, but it can also damage your brand.

8 - Try to make the best of a bad situation.

9 - Don’t lose your head in stressful circumstances.

---

10 - Don’t slip up, ensure your site has all the necessary terms and conditions/privacy policy pages.

Right, I am off to put my wrist in ice. Part two coming later in the week.

Dean Hunt

PS: If you want updates of my posts, simply send a blank email to: buzz@streetlessons.com for free updates.

Did You Download Your FREE Copy of "How to Build a Business NOT Just a Blog" Yet? Click Here Now to Get Your Copy!

32 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post