Alright, I have a plan.

Make an eBook landing page with some make money fast junk, and make sure to promote ClickBank and such as much as possible. Make it look really nice and make sure it converts well. Run with it for a few months, take screenshots of all of your earnings with the site (eBook sales and CB leads) and then make the layout really ugly and bad looking, but keep all the content the same, and then list it on Flippa. So now you have an ugly-as-hell site that shows up as earning lots, so people will think "Wow, I could make this site look nicer, may as well buy it and maybe it'll convert even better!" and then they really want to buy it.

So would this technique work? Just hope it doesn't get indexed by waybackmachine and hope nobody takes screenshots of the site, or is there a way that they can find out and get mad at you?

Why wouldn't you just sell the site without trying to rip somebody off?

If you can do all this once, you can do it again and sell another similar site - This just seems like you're ripping people off for the sake of ripping them off and i personally don't think that it will make more people willing to buy or bid.

Just my opinion.

Originally Posted by carlx

Why wouldn't you just sell the site without trying to rip somebody off?

If you can do all this once, you can do it again and sell another similar site - This just seems like you're ripping people off for the sake of ripping them off and i personally don't think that it will make more people willing to buy or bid.

Just my opinion.

It's not really ripping people off IMO. It's just making it seem like it's worth more than it really is. Just simple black hat marketing, not illegal AFAIK.

I personally would say that by removing the proven theme design from the site you are ripping them off as they are bidding to the potential they see in the site. - I personally don't have a problem with people doing there best to maximise profits, but what i would do in your situation is this...

DO exactly as you plan to with a minor change (may also increase interest in your auction)

Setup the site, make your money with your clean good looking theme, then remove it as you plan to andreplace it with an ugly theme but in your auction say "I commissioned a custom made theme for the site, it has only just been completed and is ready to be used on the site" - tell them it will be included free with the BIN price (or if BIN isn't met you will sell it for 50% of what it cost you (make your own price)

That way they never notice a dip in leads once they install the clean theme and they get exactly what they paid for.

That is what i would do if i was going down the road you want to go down!

Originally Posted by JasonZ10

It's not really ripping people off IMO. It's just making it seem like it's worth more than it really is. Just simple black hat marketing, not illegal AFAIK.