The Underachiever Life

On being ripped off...

I've been doing a lot of thinking the past few days about buying and selling websites.

I've also been thinking about the amount of work required to establish a site with a chance of attracting decent traffic.

Let's look at the Magnificent Symphony and compare 2006 to 2009...

Two parts of the formula are much easier.

Market Research, Thanks to tools like Market Samurai, and ongoing market analysis is way easier now.

Conversion is about the same, Human Psychology hasn't changed much, so why would the fundamentals of buying decisions change...

Product Creation - is MUUUCH easier, Heck, a 900 buck macbook comes built in with all the software you need to start content creation and product development. Product Creation Costs continue to plummet. The Flip didn't even exist! Nor did, and how did life work with out, the iPhone!!!!

Traffic...ummmm, different story.

This isn't going to be popular, but it's the truth.

Getting traffic now (as opposed to 2006) takes a lot more time and effort now than it ever did.

There used to be heaps of different strategies you could use to get traffic. I get misty when I think about paying five cents a click for ANY keyword in google!

Sadly, there are no real short cuts - plenty of optimisations, plenty of opportunities for leverage, but ixnay on the magic bullet or the 5 cent click...

This is a bummer.

OR IS IT......

In 2006 selling a web site was a dangerous affair, putting your site up on eBay or sitepoint in 2006 meant, with almost absolute certainty if your site was any good at all - it would be ripped off.

Why? Because it was easy to get traffic. Why pay money for something you could recreate in just a few days.

I remember the elaborate and painful length's we would have to go to, just to prevent the identity of a site while we were selling it. Only "opening the kimono" when we had a deposit and some serious legal dead wood signed.

Fast forward to today, traffic is hard and takes real effort. It's totally worth it (It sure beats stocking shelves at Walmart in the graveyard shift!) but you have to put in solid effort - we show you how to do this for free in the Thirty Day Challenge...

Remember, 99 percent of people are nice, doing the best they can with what they have.

1% are lower than sausage dog testicles.

Fortunately, the prime characteristic of the web site rip-er-off-ere is laziness!

They want shortcuts, easy takings.

In 2009, the fuel to the rip off artists fire, free,cheap and plentiful traffic is gone, much like my beloved Crocs.

This is great news.

Look at whats happening on flippa.com - sites are being sold by the dozen and it's completely safe to do so because the rip off artists are too lazy.

If you look, sites MUCH worse than the ones we teach you how to build are being sold for at least $100 bucks.

This is because your saving the buyer of the site TIME!

Now, before you shoot off and go making a bunch of rubbish sites - be warned. The SMART way to do this is build a site of real value, Traffic, Page Rank and income are all value factors and will dramatically increase the price you will get.

The fact tTraffic takes work is going to revolutionise the buying and selling of websites.

It removes all of the crazy legal gymnastics we used to have to do to protect our sites.

It's a great thing. (Like Peter Gabriel teaming up with Kate Bush on "Don't Give Up" on the "So" album)

Some of my colleagues have been BUYING sites at a rapid clip as well.

Starting a site from scratch takes time, when you include getting it ranked and getting traffic. It makes sense for people who have the cash to buy a site and enjoy the fast start.

For Buyers and Sellers of websites, the fact that traffic takes work in 2009, is a MASSIVE opportunity.

Ed