Noobie questions

[sprke]

Hi everyone, I have spent the last couple hours reading through the thread and have already learned a lot. The last few days I have been searching for a website to buy and I have found one I'm interested in..a drop shipping site. The site is only one month old and the seller claims he's made over $2k net profit already. He has showed me screenshots of his commerce store earnings and has verified google analytics. It just seems to good to be true that its making that much money already and he only wants $5k for the site..so it would pay back in a couple months time. The site is not on flippa so the seller don't have any feedback.

How can I be sure the site is for sure making that kinda money and will continue making if I buy it? According to the seller he has never paid for traffic, he just put some of the products into shopping comparison sites and did some seo work himself.

[succor]

This is just my OPINION.

Only one month old and doing THAT well? It sounds too good to be true, and my Grandfather used to tell me that if it sounded to good to be true it probably was.

ANY screenshot can be faked, doctored, altered, whatever to say anything wanted.

Not on flippa, hmmm... did they contact you. How did you find this "incredible" offer?

From what I've seen, websites, especially those making money, sell for multiple times the monthly earnings not just twice the monthly earnings.

I don't think one month is enough time to get SEO to work, not on this scale anyway.

A few things you can do are:
Do some keyword searches and see where the site is popping on the SERP's. Try at least the big three.
Use an SEO plugin for your browser and see what it reports or go to woorank at http://www.woorank.com/.
Check out whois and see how long the site has been registered and to whom it is registered.

Remember this is just my opinion and it's worth everything you paid for it... nothing.

[Clinton]

I'm in 100% agreement with succor on this.

It's easy to show a net profit of $2K for one month via artificially boosting your traffic and earning stats. You don't even need to fake screenshots, you can make it look very genuine and give the buyer full access to the affiliate or other login. How do you know he didn't secretly pay to drive all that traffic and sales?

It hurts to let a "good opportunity" like this go but you've got to steel yourself that sites with only one month's earning history are not opportunities at all. The site could be benefitting from the new site boost in Google or from all the seller's "launch" efforts and promotion... factors that will disappear shortly. I would never buy a site based on less than six months' worth of earning history, preferably much more.

[sprke]

Thanks for the comments, it does seem to good to be true. The website is advertised on http://websitebroker.com/. Does anybody have experience with that site?

[crabfoot]

Hypothetically - you have a keyword domain, clogsoles.gb . You build a site on clogsoles4u.gb, and point clogsoles.gb at it using a masked redirect. You put all your SEO effort into links and traffic for clogsoles.gb .

After a while, you build a new site, clogsolefactor.gb , with a new background and rewritten articles.

You sell clogsoles4u.gb to anyone passing, at what seems a bargain price. The traffic and revenue are completely genuine. Unfortunately for the purchaser, they are also portable.

Clogsoles.gb gets redirected to clogsolefactor.gb, which immediately starts making good money - $2k a month from day one would not be unexpected.

Unfortunately, switching the redirect means that clogsoles4u.gb takes a nosedive - wth, blame the Panda. The vendor said he'd not done much serious SEO.

It would be so easy to make this work and serially sell the same traffic - but the vendor keeps all the traffic, and gets a $5k bonus every two or three months.

Sometimes Alexa data unintentionally shows when something like this is happening - if you read between the lines.

[sprke]

Wow, it looks like I have a lot to learn and could easily fall into a scam Not sure if I'm ever going to have enough confidence to buy anything after reading in this forum lol.

[Clinton]

That's not a bad thing, it's a good thing. There are too many people getting burned buying sites at the budget end of the market and that's largely because of a huge perception that interested parties (marketplaces etc) have created about profits to be made.

But don't let that put you off buying a site that has regular and established profit over a long period of time. But always post in our DD section first before making a purchase.

[sprke]

I still don't fully understand the scenario that crabfoot laid out above but lets say I would buy a website with escrow and have a one week inspection period, switched over to my hosting right away. Would one week be long enough time to really see what the traffic and revenue would be like? Or could they continue with their "tricks" as long as they need to?

[succor]

@sprke

Here is a thread you may find useful The "short" list of things to consider before buying a site. I started this thread soon after getting into site flipping, which I still haven't done successfully btw. Us newbies need to help out whenever possible.

I would have included it earlier, but the links hadn't been updated yet. Thanks to KenW3 for fixing them.

[sprke]

@sprke

Here is a thread you may find useful The "short" list of things to consider before buying a site. I started this thread soon after getting into site flipping, which I still haven't done successfully btw. Us newbies need to help out whenever possible.

I would have included it earlier, but the links hadn't been updated yet. Thanks to KenW3 for fixing them.

Thanks for that succor I was asking about the one week inspection period because the seller has agreed to that and will provide complete access to all financial transactions this site has done. ( like customer receipts, confirmation of orders with drop shipper etc. ) So far the seller has provided everything that has been asked and he seems to check out except the price seems way to low for the revenue. I should probably just walk away but its hard lol. Btw I am not looking to flip the site, I want it for another source of revenue and to get into a online business.

Anyway thanks for the help!