PROGRESS THREAd: stlsmoore (Offer my first ebook for free?)

[stlsmoore]

It's been a looong time since I made a post on this forum, back when the name of the website was different and before MJ released the Millionaire Fast Lane book lol. My expenses for hosting the city guide website greatly out weighed the income I was bringing in so I eventually scrapped it but it was a great learning experience. The last few years I've been playing with VoIP and networking in general along with being involved with the IT certification community. I never gave up on the fast lane dream but I admit I've been watching from the side walk for a while.

Even though I'm 25 years young and approaching the 100K salary range I know there's a better way. I just can't imagine doing this for another 15-30 years of my life going through the daily grind. I've made some bad decisions (not horrible) such as buying a newer performance car and renting instead of buying. I've made some good decisions too, such as paying of the majority of my student loans and investing on increasing my income in my career. I'm committing the next 12-18 months to buying house (with a mortgage less than my current rent), paying off the little bit of student loan debt I have, and paying off my car. The last 6 months I thought EVERYDAY at least about my strategy of getting out of the slow lane. Something about generating income from websites excites me so I'll stick with that.

I've learned a TON from building a few websites in the past but I'm going to make another approach. I'm going to build web site portfolio buying websites that's already generating income. The left over income from not having many expenses should allow me to get started fairly quickly. I have 3-5 plan for the income from my web sites to completely out pace the income from my 9-5. Wish me luck!

 

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[PatrickP]

What was this forum called back when you made your first post?

What came first MJ's book or the forum?

 

[stlsmoore]

What was this forum called back when you made your first post?

What came first MJ's book or the forum?

The website was created way before the book, it was called the fast lane to millions or something like that. I've just now purchased the book and going through it.

I ended up buying a house and getting out of my little apartment, all things equal I'm spending the same a month. I got a $10k bump in pay coming in so the extra is going in the separate account I have for my game plan. I'm also just making double payments on my car and student loan debt instead of spending all my extra on debt. Now I have a business email address setup and I've set it up to have Flippa send me automatic email alerts with the following minimum criteria:

Sell price between $100-3000
Offers Escrow
Website must have been up 6 months or longer

Out of these I have more criteria that I look for:

Must produce a product or provide a service on its own, i.e. it doesn't depend on adsense or piggy back off of being an affiliate
The website must make sense, I shouldn't have to guess how to navigate the website,what service it provides, or how it generates income

I just started spend hours a day after the gig looking for opportunities and I'm excited to purchase my first after due diligence. Any suggestions are welcomed.

 

[stlsmoore]

I spent 10 hours this week so far if not more reviewing websites for sell on Flippa and evaluating them. I'm learning a lot just from this small amount of time so far and added a few additional things to my criteria:

1. Check the seller's profile! Very important, while not all members sell more than one website the ones that do have reviews similar to Ebay accounts. Something neat is that Flippa can also determine if a member's profile is semi related to a fraudulent member that sold on Flippa before. This saved me from purchasing a site the other day once I check his profile, he was linked to not 1 but 2 fraudulent accounts.

2. 9 times out of 10 a sites built within the last 6-9 months can't demand four figure prices or more. I seem to notice this more on sites where the owners have emotional attachment to them. I see a ton of sites bringing in only $100 a month but they're trying to sell them for $7k+. Unless there's ungodly potential that's beaming from the website, it's probably not worth the time. Especially if it was built in 2012 or maybe even 2011 in some cases.

3. The website should be profitable no less than 12 months, I'm not sure if I should increase or decrease this time frame, only time will tell or sound advice from experienced website buyers on here lol.

With that said I found a website that fits all of my criteria except for offering Escrow, I'm shooting emails back and forth with the owner now regarding the reason why plus asking for some add-ins such as moving the website to my host provider. Hopefully it all goes well, if not oh well on to the next. I'll keep you all posted.

 

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[stlsmoore]

Finally went through and purchased my first website! The transaction is finishing up now, just a few issues with dead webpages since the move that I'm seeing that needs to be addressed by the seller.

I'll throw it all out there I'm not too ashamed:

I purchased a deal that included 3 websites for $850, the site that I really cared about and is currently monetized is called UltimateAOM.com - The best Associate-o-matic theme!. This website offers web templates along with custom designs for Amazon Affiliate Websites. It actually ties end to a well known easy to use Amazon Store Builder called Associate-O-Matic, my website is already a partner with them.

The site claims to have 910 views per month with 514 uniques averaging 2 sales a month at $39 each. I guess I'll see how true that is in the upcoming months. If the average stays the same I should break even within a year but that's not what I'm striving for. My plan right off the bat is to create a sales page on some of the internet marketing forums to drum up interest. But the end goal is to bring the product on to Click Bank to get affiliates pushing the product. I'll do a little bit of SEO but I want to focus on actually going after my target market and not just praying to the Google Gods hoping that they'll push the traffic I want to my website. I'm on the fence if I want to pay someone to write an amazing squeeze page and sales page on the forums or try to do it myself. The really good guys are charging $300-500.

My purchase also came with two Amazon Affiliate Websites setup with the UltimateAOM themes. They're www.sockboot.com and www.instantgps.com. I haven't decided what I wanted to do with these, I may just sell them separately down the line.

 

[stlsmoore]

The website made a sale!


So far I've been doing a little clean up on the website and basically re-learning SEO and more importantly online marketing. I had to do a little PR on some of the forums as the previous owner didn't respond to customer complaints. I engaged the customers and let them know and understand that I want to resolve any of the frustrations and lack of support they've had.

For some reason the last owner was manually emailing the customers the web template whenever a purchase was made. I changed this right away, I'm using e-junkie to handle this portion for me. I have Google Analytics installed on so far I've had 78 hits and 1 sale, I need to up targeted traffic and up the conversion rate and the site should be able to function on its own. Eventually I'll find someone to make some new templates and possibly redesign the page to allow customers to pick which theme bundle they want to buy. My very next steps:

1. Attempt to add a blog page on the website, I think this will help for optimizing SEO since I'll have a page that will have content on it.
2. Create Social Media sites, I've never done this to much and it seems like a pain to constantly update and get friends, like, or w/e. It may be worth the trouble though.

 

[CTamme]

I have only discovered flippa this month through a thread here and have been combing through all the sales. Thanks for the insight into the searches. I am still digesting what all the stats mean and what I should be looking for. The information you are providing is great keep it up.

I was born and raised In the STL. Do you still own the stl city website that you started? I really love the area and hope to return someday.

 

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[stlsmoore]

Nah, I executed that idea bad from the start. It looked way better than any other Saint Louis directory site but I went in with the thought that I could just throw money at it and other people and all the work would be done for me. I was using some directory platform that was charging $300 a month to host everything and provide the website front and back end.

I enjoy STL as well, it's pretty underrated but that keeps the prices around here low lol, I always wanted to go to the Quad-Cities and check out the skate park I always hear about.

 

[CTamme]

Actually there are a couple nice skate parks in the area. The one in Davenport is pretty big and there is another in Bettendorf.

Sounds like the city guide would have been difficult to lift off the ground at that entry price. Some things sound better in your head then in actual execution.

 

[stlsmoore]

I hope I'm not updating this thread to often...

So I made two sales so far ($80) which is right on par on where I want to be to break even within 8 months. I've been brainstorming on how to increase conversion rates as right now it's pretty awful, 143 unique hits and only two sales. I don't think I'll truly know my conversion rate until I get about 1,000 unique hits total though. I had someone offer to buy my website but it wasn't enough to at least make my money back but it does show that the site has value on its own. I'm also working on increasing traffic but the product is in a pretty small niche, I think it would be waste to spend a lot of time and $$$ on SEO, I am testing out some PPC campaigns since there's very low competition.

I'm working with Associate-O-Matic to get an Ad placed on their home page but I think this might be the extent of it, the market is almost too small for trying to get any affiliates going but I may be wrong? I learned two more valuable lessons for my self with this website and to be honest if I had to do it again I probably wouldn't of purchased it.

1. I'll only purchase websites that sells or provide a service that can be easily reproduced. In other words I don't have to be specialized in the service in order to provide it. In this case I have no clue on how to build a website so I'm searching for someone that wants a part of a commission for work I pass to them.

2. Preferably look for websites that doesn't depend to much on another product or service unless that other product/service is huge and will probably not go a way soon i.e. Amazon, Ebay, Lego's, etc.

With that said I'm kind of at a cross roads, I think I'm going to optimize the site a little more and try to get a little more traffic going to it but if I can get 3-4 sales on average a month I'll be happy and ready to move on to the next site.

 

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[stlsmoore]

Well, it feels like I'm changing direction too much as I start something have a little success and then decide it's not right for ME no matter if its working for the customer. I need to get my mind in the right place me thinks but in other news I'm in the final process of selling the website.

As I held on to the website I started to realize more and more that I wouldn't be able to keep up with the speed needed to keep my website up to date. More so being able to constantly add new themes, I could hire out to get some custom designs but the ROI just didn't work. Seeing as I still had about 6-7 months before the site would even break even. It just didn't make sense to me to spend 20%-50% of what I paid for the site on new templates from a freelancer. I could of attempted to learn this my self but the ROI of my time for a half cooked designed compared to my competitors didn't seem worth it.

Good news is I made out into the black on this one like my last project. Made 4 sales which was on par with what was described on flippa and sold the website for what I paid for it just about $900. After the nickle and dime deductions I'm walking away with a little under $300 profit. Not that great but I learned that this is possible.

It's kinda making me rethink investing in real estate instead, taking a serious look at it currently. If nothing else this gave me a confidence boost that even me can buy, hold, and sell at a higher price. Going to be reading every single post from people on this forum who currently invests in real estate, flips house, etc and figure out what my next action is going to be. I'm pretty sure I have enough saved up to get started, we'll see.

I really need to find something and give it my 110% focus instead of this half way attempts that I only spend a few months on.

 

[andyhaus44]

I'm still chugging along! With my new job role and extra income I've been investing pretty much all of it into my student loan debt and the rest into my website project Saint Louis City Guide . Over the years I have become very interested with the history, present, and future of my home town Saint Louis. I decided to base something around this little bit of passion and create a city guide website. This is for sure one of the oldest money making types of websites in the online world but I found many short comings in areas that the other local city guide websites didn't have. Mainly more options and ways for a business to promote it's business under the listings section and ease of use to navigate city guide websites. It's fully integrated for use with Facebook, Twitter, and the customer can even upload promotional video's when they purchase my fully featured business listing plan.

I'm still in beta stages and I'm offering free listings for the first 10 businesses to help get the ball rolling and "fill out" the website. I have marketing plan in effect and I have a designer finishing up a WAY better looking header than the temporary one I currently have. I'm really not sure if my pricing is to low, I would love to hear what you all think about that or any other suggestions! The site should be live on November 1st, again the website is Saint Louis City Guide

Shawn, I am from St. Louis, MO too.. Would you be interested in starting a STL Fastlane Group?

 

[BrooklynHustle]

Well i think you should do like this guy did with LEED Exams.
Take a look at his December income: My Monthly Report - December 2009 | The Smart Passive Income Blog
Also look at his LEED exams site: Green Exam Academy - FREE Online LEED AP Exam Study Guide Resource for LEED Green Associate GA LEED AP Specialty Exams LEED Prep

Here's a podcast on how he did it: How Pat Flynn Lost His Job Then Made $203,219.04 In His First Year Online - Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Since you're an expert on CCNA maybe you could make it like this guy did...

I was thinking exactly the same. Best of luck!

[EDIT] Completely missed that this was from years ago. Hope things are going well currently [/EDIT]

 

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