By: RH
The website BetterTravelGuide.com sold for $80,000 on Flippa.
The sales pitch went like this: Better Travel Guide – $40K in 7 Months – ZERO Work ! – 2 Million Uniques/Month.
These types of headlines that there is no work to make $40,000 in less than a year always make you wonder. Of course there was work.
The owner did map out the gameplan for the site in the listing:
BetterTravelGuide.com it is a travel related website with travel stories and hotel listings.
I started the website in April this year with the sole purpose of
testing the Agoda Partner program (http://partners.agoda.com/).
The Agoda principle is simple: you direct people from your website
interested in booking a hotel to them and you receive a commission of a
booking made within 60 days.
In short, here it is right from the beginning:
Step 1:
- -Bought a Domain and setup website
- -Hired a designer for the theme
- -Outsourced travel stories
- -Outsourced hotel listings
Step 2:
- -Registered for the Agoda Partner Program
- -Got accepted without problems
- -Added the affiliate links
Step 3:
- -Started advertising the website
- -Optimized advertising
- -Got 500% ROI and $40K in less than 7 months
Sounds easy right? Well it wasn't THAT easy:)
I didn't want to rely on search engines for traffic since I knew that
ranking for travel related topics is not easy and will take lots of
efforts and time, so I didn't even considered that. Instead I chose to
find an advertising method that will do the trick.
I've tested a couple ad networks and advertised on a couple of websites until I found the solution that worked like a charm.
The key: The right ad network, the right ads, the right landing pages. The result: 500% ROI
For the last 6 months all I did was to make sure my advertising
campaign doesn't run out of funds. Outside of that I did absolutely
nothing. It is completely hands free!
On average I spend $1K/month on advertising. This sends ~2M visitors/month to the site.
I always like to read the comments on any website sale on Flippa. There were a lot of good questions in this listing and to be fair the owner answered every prospective buyer.
One question was how the owner was able to generate this much traffic on $1000 a month ad spend.
The commenter said: I think you need to give us a bit more information regarding how you
drive traffic to your site. With 2.1M Unique hits each month and you
shelling out about $1000 USD for this traffic, you are spending 1 dollar
for each 2100 unique visitors, this is not normal…. at all. Comparing
the results you are receiving to a legitimate and well known program
such as Adwords, begs the obvious question of how on earth are you doing
this, as not even the most productive blackhat methods will achieve
this kind of result, let alone the conversion rate you have. It simply
does not add up. I cant imagine anyone spending 22K+ on your site
without a descent understanding of how you are doing this, the risk is
off the charts!
There were 24 bids with the website selling for the buy it now of $80,000.
Phil says
flippa is screaming scam. Whoever is the buyer needs to contact me, i’ll same him $80K, this as well as all other sales are a complete scam.
The traffic to this website is generated because the seller has a scam wordpress plugin http://www.earnitup.com that is used to manipulate ads and place his ads instead.
Jason says
I’d like to know where the listing went. You should email Flippa about it. Sounds like the site was a scam if there is no reference to the sale available.
Peter says
Have you ever sold a website on Flippa? Itβs called a public hide upgrade which you apply to your listing after the sale.
As for calling this a scam you are so wrong. the sale ended and the new owner is more than pleased with it.
Ophelie from Flippa says
Hi Jason — indeed, Peter is right: the listing was hidden by either the buyer or the seller after the sale occurred. This is not at all unusual.
Phil says
@Peter,
I’m sure the new owner is very pleased right up until you shut off traffic from earnitup.com
On the other hand you don’t have to do much, that traffic is running dry, people are realizing that you are stealing their traffic and ads revenue.
I can’t believe you actually found a buyer that believes you can buy 1,000,000 visitors for $1,000 per month.
Will says
@ophelie, have you read earnitup.com it does not drive traffic to the website. all it does is search queries of that domain to increase the page quality and good pays more per visitor. Just read what the website says.
Peter says
@Phil: Earnitup has nothing to so with this website.
The sale ended and everything is going great.
As for your traffic questions, there are several ad networks that provide such traffic, just because you don’t know how everything works, it doesn’t makes it less credible.
Phil says
@Peter
You own earnitup.com don’t you?
@All
Just search google earnitup.com scam and everything will become clear
Sara Paul says
I think he using facebook to advertise ?? π
Peter says
Phil, is you the one who wanted to buy the website but didn’t afford? lol.
MK says
@Phil I’d like to believe you, but do you have any proof I can see ?
Peter says
It seriously makes me laugh when I see all this people who just can’t figure how exactly everything works. And they try…hard.. but it’s just too much for them.
And when they can’t figure how it works, they go and claim it a scam. Just because their tiny brains can’t think outside of the box. They are stuck with their 2 dollars/day adsense.
If it was a scam, we wouldn’t have the biggest travel affiliate company talking about the sale, we wouldn’t have bidders fight for xx.xxx prices, we wouldn’t have flippa confirm our auction stats.
We wouldn’t have now a happy new owner π
So everyone can say whatever they want. The more they say the better. As noone got a clue about the business model.
Haters gonna hate π
Phil says
@Peter
You are Petre Coman, you took the name of a former Romanian wrestler born 8 June 1944
Your website earnitup.com is promoting services that would increase google ads payout but instead show hidden ads that take users to your websites and BetterTravelGuide.com in particular.
Just search google for “earnitup is a scam” and you will find a ton of links of people that have used your super secret money making machine that instead steals traffic
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&tbo=d&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=earnitup+is+a+scam&oq=earnitup+is+a+scam
You recently used Whois Privacy Protection on your domain with Enom in order to hide your gypsy heritage
but not to worry, here is the last whois history of EarnItUp.com
Registration Service Provided By: Namecheap.com
Contact: support@namecheap.com
Visit: http://namecheap.com
Domain name: earnitup.com
Registrant Contact:
Coman Petre
Petre Coman ()
Fax:
Eremia Grigorescu
Ploiesti, STATE 2000
RO
Administrative Contact:
Coman Petre
Coman (petrecomanjustme@gmail.com)
+40.768372465
Fax: +1.5555555555
Eremia Grigorescu
Ploiesti, State 2000
RO
Technical Contact:
Coman Petre
Petre Coman (petrecomanjustme@gmail.com)
+40.7620686705
Fax: +1.5555555555
Eremia Grigorescu
Ploiesti, STATE 2000
RO
Status: Locked
Name Servers:
ns1.comanhost.com
ns2.comanhost.com
Creation date: 06 Jun 2009 07:59:31
Expiration date: 06 Jun 2012 07:59:31
Anything else i need to prove here?
Peter says
@Phil:
Dude I don’t know WTF you are still talking about. What Romanian wresler? That’s my name you moron.
I bet that if you google your name there’s someone named just like you! you dumb!
Now please stop bitching around. The sale ended, everyone is happy. What do you still need?
Jesus…some kids just can’t stop.
To whoever owns this website, please close comments on this post, as I am not going to waste any more minute with this kind of people.