I wish I would have seen this thread before, I don't know how I missed it. Anyway, I'm the one who owned these sites and sold them on Flippa, so I want to clarify some things since some of you seem to think the auction and the sites were all BS.
No the bids were not fake. The winning bidder has already wired the money into my bank account and the sites are performing just fine for him.
No No. The revenue is not as much as stated. You can see they have 5 kws ranking with very low cpc (0.05$) with low search volume. It's impossible to earn 400$/month with that.
As he said that we all know that these sites cannot earn a lot from the first months running, actually. So people on flippa are really noobs??
The revenue was in fact as much as I stated. I don't make shit up in my auction listings to trick people into buying sites.
You can't look at the CPC of the keyword itself, you need to look at the CPC of the entire market since those ads are the ones that will be showing. In the case of these 3 sites, they are in the "coupon" market which is huge online, so therefore the CPC is pretty good.
Plus, as you should know, the CPC that Google tells you is never accurate to what you can expect to get for your clicks. The CPC they show you is for running the PPC ads with Adwords, it has little to do with Adsense.
Also, the search volume for all of those keywords is pretty good. It was 3 sites total that I sold and the keywords got over 1k Exact searches per month. The Blue Buffalo site got close to 3k if I remember correctly.
[blue buffalo coupons] 0.8 2900 2900 $0.04
[meow mix coupons] 0.72 1300 1000 $0.51
I agree - the traffic doesnt add up as well as the earnings.....backlinks are spare to say the least, but for these keywords and competition you wouldn't need many. Even with the inclusion of long tails I am pretty confident the levels of traffic and therefore income will not realise the claims made.
That said, the old adage applies "if its too good to be true then....."
See above. The CPC Google shows you means nothing. And again, the claims were not inflated, all numbers were real.
I noticed his AdSense earning pics blackout the CTR and eCPM. Some of his click through rates are insane, 25-40%, do you think he's clicking on his ads?
It's against Adsense TOS to show certain parts of your screen, so I had to black them out to avoid getting in trouble with them. And do you honestly think I was clicking my ads for 4 months, generating $700+ per month from them, and never got my account banned?
His Analytics show 94% of traffic from search engines, Nov through Feb, so unless he was paying people to find and click his listings in Google, it's not paid traffic.
... but his CTR seems too high to be natural... 108 clicks from 271 page impressions? Right.
The CTR is high due to a combination of the market that the sites are in, and the theme I was using. That theme is really good for Adsense and if you set it up right, you will see some nice CTRs.
Sorry, but 40% CTR on MFA site is asking for manual review and (usually) ejection.
I agree it may seem like a high CTR, but if the advertisers and Google are both making a profit from the clicks, then they wouldn't care about a high CTR. Adsense is there to make both Google and the advertisers money, so if I'm doing both, everyone's happy and I have no reason to get my account banned. (At least it hasn't happened yet).
Anyway, I hope that clears some things up for you guys and you realize there is still in fact money to be made with niche sites like these. I will admit, the Blue Buffalo site was a rare case for me seeing as it started earning money so quickly. Normally I don't see a decent income from my niche sites for a month or so, but every once in a while, 1 of them will shoot up to the top of page 1 with ease and start performing very well in a short span of time. Rare, but it can happen.
