Case Study: Buying A Site on Flippa for Profit – Part 2

It’s been about 12 days since I started this Case Study (check out Part 1 here), so I thought it was about time for an update. Unfortunately due to the holidays, I haven’t been able to spend as much time working on the site as I wanted to.

I really haven’t made many changes to the site itself at all, other than some small on-page SEO fixes. The main things that I have done are link building and social bookmarking. If you don’t have the time to do social bookmarking yourself (like me), I highly recommend Red_Virus’s $25 package. I have used Amit for several projects and he always does a great job. I’ve had a site get ranked just from these bookmarks alone.

Here’s what the traffic has looked like since I took over the site:

Case Study - Traffic Stats

Click to enlarge

As you can see, the site has a good amount of Pageviews and a decently low Bounce Rate. So the people that get to the site seem to be sticking around and browsing for a bit. I just need to continue increasing the traffic. The good news is the trend is definitely upward for overall visitors.

As far as monetization, the affiliate banner I put on it has failed so far. It gets barely any clicks and it has not generated a single lead. I’ll have to test out different banners or offers to optimize this. For AdSense, it’s averaging about $0.75 – $1.00 a day right now. So at this rate, if I leave it alone, it will pay back the money I spent on it in about 2 years. Obviously that’s no good, so more optimization will follow!

The next step is to start an email list so that I can capture addresses and send them relevant articles and affiliate offers on an ongoing basis. That’s all I’ve got to report for now!

Real Money On Twitter?

I was able to sit in on a few of the panel discussions at the first Affiliate Convention in Denver this week, and one of the things that came up over and over again was the power of Twitter.  By now, pretty much everyone in the Internet Marketing world has a Twitter account, but how many people are really making money off of it?

Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker was quite adamant that there is an “imbalance” right now in the realm of monetizing Twitter.  Similar to Facebook and some other new ad platforms when they opened up, he feels like there is a lot of inventory to be had for cheap that can be arbitraged very effectively.  That being said, action needs to be taken now because this won”t last forever!

One of the tools that has come to my attention this week (and was mentioned at the conference) is RevTwt.  One of my friends is a prolific Twitter-holic, and he has played around with putting some RevTwt ads in his feed to make some extra money.  They pay out on a CPC basis, similar to Google AdSense.  This is all well and good, but I think that the real potential to make money with Twitter is in doing the advertising, not the publishing.

You can sign up for an advertiser account at RevTwt and their clicks start extremely cheap, as low as 8 cents.  Any marketer worth his salt should be able to arbitrage that into something that makes much more money.  Maybe some of those campaigns that you have paused because clicks got too expensive on Google?  A campaign that makes you an average of 60 cents per click is a loser if you are paying a dollar a click, but if you are paying 8 cents then it becomes profitable again very quickly!

The thing I like about RevTwt, or just ads in general on Twitter, is that there is a possibility for implicit trust built in for the end users.  If their friends are the ones that are tweeting, they are much more likely to click on the ad because they feel that it is something that was personally recommended.  Couple this with those oh-so-popular Flog landing pages, and you”ve got a potential goldmine.

So there you have it, the time is now, I would love to see more people get out there and experiment with advertising on RevTwt and Twitter!