A member here who is bidding to buy this site and doesn't want to be publicly associated with the bidding has requested I start this thread.
It's about this auction at Flippa for nichesinabox.com
This isn't about the type of businesses the website does, it's about due diligence. S/he would like to sound you out on your opinions. I look forward to seeing how we can help one of our own who's a regular contributor.
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The sales letter is awful - spelling mistakes all over the page. I can't see this page convincing anyone to buy, but then this is just my opinion. If he's making that much, why not hire a copywriter who can spell?
Strangely, the site isn't indexed in Google, despite having received search engine traffic.
A big warning is the 90% feedback this guy's received. If the feedback is anything to go by, he's been dishonest in the past. That was on a low value purchase. If he's dishonest for the sake of $199, the motivation is much greater for the sale in question. Also, the fact that his previous transactions were mostly in the order of the $100s make the current big ticket item seem out of place.
Not got time to investigate this but there are listed here other similar sites that the seller (Jean-Philippe Schoeffel) owns: sales.ethiccash.com/copyright.htm.
Claimed UVs is wrong. It's more like 4K/month when you take off the two obvious promotions in the stats. One of the referrers is visit-tracker. What's that? I can see Traffic Swarm in the list of referrers (to boost traffic numbers?), so is visit tracker another way of inflating stats? I think that's worth investigating. That could amount to 30,000 dubious visitors who don't convert and are just bumping up the numbers.
Odd that he's not got GA on his thank you page. I don't know anything about measuring goal conversion in GA, but don't you have to track visitors to your "goal" page?
I've got a bad feeling about this auction but maybe that's because I'm tired. Off to bed!
Reading what I wrote last night, maybe I was being a bit cynical. The discrepencies I found might not have any impact on the claimed sales, and the "thank you" page that didn't have Google Analytics on it was for the free subscription, not the paid subscription - maybe that does have GA on it.
Good stuff from hooperman!
Some random thoughts:
1. Trying to open their site I get a warning from the spyware program about conversion.7search.com
2. Is ALL their traffic coming from affiliates? Or are they paying elsewhere?
3. His sales page says that all his testimonials are genuine and held on file. Ask to see every one? Is he lying?
4. To a new webmaster that looks like a fantastic package and just the ticket to get him started. But how easy is it to get ranked if thousands of others are signed up to the program and all launching competing sites with pretty much the same (rehashed?) content, site design fingerprints etc? I took one of their example niches and an ebook product in there about everything you wanted to know about alternative medicines. I did a search in quotes for the product name and came up with about a thousand results - 1000 sites talking about alternative medicine all with the same ebook. Are any of his customer actually making money? Or is he relying on the old fallback of blaming the customer for giving up too easily?
From his sales page:
I'm always wary of anything that uses a lot of hype.Destroy the competition in ultra profitable niches
Rake in the cash from 8 different income streams
Receive floods of traffic from day one
Instant, Push Button, Laser-Guided Visitors
I wouldn't buy a business like this because I detest hype and won't personally get involved with anything this hyped up. But I won't knock the concept of helping newbies get online and start their own internet business, that's something I'm all in favour of. If this website does that and makes a profit then it's a valid business model.
Putting aside my puke for the sales copy and all the promises it makes, ultimately the question isn't about that. It's about whether the business is viable, whether it's worth the price. And, specifically, in this thread, the Big Question is this: "Where's the flaw?"
For me, it's likely in that the business probably relies on hype to continue making profit. I'd dig into past customers - pick out a random sample who signed up a year ago - and see how they're doing. That's the ultimate test of whether the company's products work.
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I seem to be obsessed with the goals reported by Google Analytics at the moment (probably because I don't yet understand them). On one of my sites I was able to set the goal to be simply reaching a particular page, assign it the monetary value of $29.50 and hey presto, I've got a goal value of $29.50 reported in GA already. Just because somebody visited that page. And I didn't collect that $29.50, it was an arbitrary value that I set.
I'm still a newb when it comes to goal setting in GA, but if I was interested in the site being sold, I'd need more details about how the seller had defined their goals. I couldn't just look at the reported Total Goal Value and accept that the site had made $865,350.00.
These meanderings go out the window on the emergence of real proof of income, though.
Using the magic of Goal Conversion in Google Analytics, I was able to generate $898.50 in two days!
goal-value.jpg
I see this site uses Google Analytics. We'd we'd be able to give much better due diligence feedback if we had access to the GA stats. Since we can't do that would the person who PMed me to start this thread kindly send me a PM to state whether you have guest access?
And would you PM me the answer to hooperman's question/s.
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