Hi from someone who wasted 30k and learnt some hard lessons

[aaronc]

Hi everyone (Warning: 500 word story below),

My name is aaron and I am so glad to have found this forum. I have not heard of this site until Clinton mentioned it in Pat's site. After spending hours reading through the forum, I wished I had found this site before wasting 30k on website buying.

My first site purchase was those that were introduced by Amy from her niche blogger course. These were generic sites that used the genesis templates but had no traffic. At USD197 per site, my foolish self thought that it was a good buy. The worse thing is I bought 2 of these before realising that the money was not coming in as expect.

I then lay off buying websites for a while and educated myself on how seo works. Luckily, I found the keyword academy which is responsible for me learning how to make money online. Things got better and I learn how to rank websites and make money off adsense. My main niches were in cosmetic surgery and home decor.

In 2011, I managed to save some money from my adsense sites and wanted to go back into buying websites . I bought a 4k news site with the buyer promising to continue to write the content for the next 3 months. He lied and disappeared after collecting the money. Fortunately, the traffic was real and I did make some money. Unfortunately, the adsense account I used for this site was banned because there were some articles with nude pictures in them. I didn't realise this as the site had 2000 articles and I didn't bother to scan through everything. Now, I can only used infolinks which can bring in money but it is half of what adsense can generate.

I didn't get deter from this experience and continue to look for investments. I did manage to buy a 2k site from a fellow member in the keyword academy. The site was in the cosmetic surgery niche which is something that was very familiar to me. This site did great and I will break even this month even with the site taking a slight hit from panda in oct 2011.

Seeing the success of this site, I bought another site from the same seller. Again, this site was in the cosmetic surgery niche but it cost me 20k as it was pulling in about 1.4k per month through adsense. The first 2 months was ok until panda 2.6 hit and the traffic was lost. The site currently earned about 300 per month, meaning I need to wait for about 5 years before breaking even LOL.

So, that is the story of my website buying adventure. I had no info and simply stumbled around. Now that I have found this forum, I am sure I will be hanging around here quite often.

Cheers!

[TheodoreK]

Hello aaronc and welcome to EP!


I would be really interested to hear more about your first two purchases. We often hear about how turnkey sites don't deliver but rarely do we inquire further. So here are some questions I would like to ask you

-What were your expectations, as a newbie, when you bought these turnkey sites?

-How much did thenicheblogger influence your initial decisions about online businesses?

-How long did it take you to realize that something is not right with the sites you've bought?

-How much of a letdown were those two turnkey sites exactly in the end?

-How far off the mark and/or misleading do you think Amy's "Completely Foolproof Step-by-Step Niche Blogging BluePrint That's So Powerful Even a 50 Year Old, Computer Illiterate Grandmother Was Able To Take It, Follow Exactly What It Said And Build Her Own Hugely Profitable Niche Blogging Empire!" (sic) was after all you have learned?


Please forgive me for this deluge of questions. I believe many people could benefit tremendously from your experience and from hearing true, post-mortem opinions about such sites so your answers could make a difference

[Kay]

Hi Aaron and welcome from me too.

Thanks for sharing your experiences and creating the opportuntity to discuss what happened. I'm sure there'll be lots to learn! (I mean for us as well as you.)

When I read your post, loads of questions popped into my mind too, but Theo beat me to it. You talk mostly of buying sites and earning from them, but (unless I overlooked something) you didn't mention sales. Therefore my additional questions for you are:

- Did you sell any of these sites that didn't work out as you'd hoped?

If you still own them, then maybe we can help with ideas of how to turn things around. All is not yet lost!

- Did you do anything to try to get G's ban lifted?

I hope you won't feel overwhelmed by all these questions we've fired at you on your first day. We're just iinterested in your story and want to help if we can.

[aaronc]

wow, I didn't expect so many questions for my first post. I feel welcomed already : )

@TheodoreK
What were your expectations, as a newbie, when you bought these turnkey sites?
- the seller promises that all the work has been done and all I have to do is to wait for the results to come in. She explained that ranking in google takes times so I need to be patient. She is not exactly wrong but she didn't tell you 2 things: (i) the keywords she selected have low search volume so even if the sites do manage to rank later on, the traffic will be minimal and (ii) the keywords don't have any commercial intent so making money off them will be hard.

This is the url of the first site that I bought: fishoileffects.com

How much did thenicheblogger influence your initial decisions about online businesses?
- I did feel a bit cheated about the whole thing. However, I didn't give up straight away and was actively searching for an way to make the sites work. I key in this phase "how to make money online' and found a blogger who was known as grizzly bear. He really saved my butt through his honest writing. During that time, his blog was really top notch and he prove that a blogspot blog can dominate the make money niche. Unfortunately, that blog has been retired now. It was only through him that I know all the seo and make money tricks. It was also through him that I found the keyword academy.

How long did it take you to realize that something is not right with the sites you've bought?
- It wasn't long. After 2-3 months, I realise that the site wasn't bringing in any traffic.

How much of a letdown were those two turnkey sites exactly in the end?
- As mentioned, the 2 biggest letdown was the fact that the keywords the sites were targeting had very low search volume and not non commercial terms. I didn't earn a single cent for the first site. For the second site, I had to revamp the entire thing and target a whole new site of keywords before it starts to make some money.

How far off the mark and/or misleading,.....
- To be honest, I was so angry by the whole thing that I 'steal' a copy of the course through a forum. After going through it, I find the information to be shallow. In fact, all I need was grizzly's blog which was free. The thing I didn't like about the nicheblogger was that she was encouraging members to sell these turnkey sites to folks like me who didn't know better.

@Kay

Did you sell any of these sites that didn't work out as you'd hoped?
- I didn't sell any of these. I am still hanging on to them to see if I can bring their traffic back. The good thing about these sites is that they have age, original content and links to them so I believe they can be saved. I only sold 2 sites before but these were built by me from scratch and not sites that I bought.

Did you do anything to try to get G's ban lifted
- I deleted the articles that contain the nude photos and submit an appeal to the adsense team. It was rejected and I wasn't able to put adsense on that site. It was making around 350-400 when the site had adsense. Currently, it is earning about 200-250 from infolinks, contextweb and lately, amazon. This particular site is 10 years old and putting up content that targets amazon product seems to work so I am focusing on that for this site.

[PatFlynn]

Glad to see you here AaronC! I've already learned quite a bit here, and I'm sure you as well. Thank you for sharing your experiences as I too learn how to navigate in this world of buying websites. If there's anything I can do for you, please let me know. Cheers!

[Denny]

Hi Aaron and welcome aboard. I too am sure you will find this forum very educational and informative. I've written about similar experences to yours as well, just not to the monetary degree as you. The Panda update was my main downfall on 2 sites as well. Although I haven't purchased any sites since (almost a year), I've learned to do far more DD than in the past. As Clinton has mentioned several times too, do NOT depend heavily on G for traffic, it will bite us.

[ChrisGuthrie]

Hi Aaron and welcome aboard. I too am sure you will find this forum very educational and informative. I've written about similar experences to yours as well, just not to the monetary degree as you. The Panda update was my main downfall on 2 sites as well. Although I haven't purchased any sites since (almost a year), I've learned to do far more DD than in the past. As Clinton has mentioned several times too, do NOT depend heavily on G for traffic, it will bite us.

That's actually partly why the sites I've been buying are either really old with a long history of earnings and/or have traffic from regular readers, pinterest, stumble upon, facebook etc. (blogs mainly falling into that later category)

@AaronC sorry to hear about that drop in traffic that totally sucks

[JockP]

Hey mate glad to hear your making some mistakes rather than sitting on your hands.

I sure you'll find plenty of war stories of monies lost etc.

Personal example my best deal ever came after my worst deal ever. Stuff happens