All Hype, No Details

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I saw this auction last month and was stirred by the sales pitch! But not in a good way. I don't know about you, but the spiel really gets my back up. The information about the site being sold is presented with plenty of hype, but misses important details that any buyer should be interested in. It reminds me of how children talk to each other. Maybe that tells us something about the target audience.

What's Missing

What important details do you need to know when assessing whether it's worth your while to buy a site to make money? How much time and money you have to put into it to get your return, and also how much return there is. There is no point putting in 5 hours of hard work every day if you're only getting $100 / month in return (excepting circumstances where you have a plan to build something up). Are these details present in the auction? You guessed - no! The hosting costs are especially important with this being a proxy site. Not only does the seller omit the time and money investment (costs) he is making, there is no revenue, only potential values.

Bad Style

But look at the style of the pitch:

I'm going to make this short and simple.

Dramatic effect! This style of presentation is ok in the movies if you're a hard talking cop, but if you are presenting to make a sale, keep it professional. And if you are going to make it short and simple, you should include all the information buyers need to know. Like costs.

So I would like to see this site sell to a good owner that could take good care of it.

Ah. I see what's going on here. This guy really cares about his site. He's not some fly by night cowboy. He cares more about his site than just getting your money in his pocket, and he's prepared to select just the right buyer for it. I do hope it's me. More fluff, that has no bearing on the sale.

Last but not least, I would like to tell you that you can probobly make tons of moneyif you add adsense in a better place than it is right now. Also, selling links would probobly bring in a decent sum of $250+.

This is just plain bad, and buyer's will see straight through this. Probably is worth diddley squat. Probably, but probably not. Any claims of potential revenue signal risk to the buyer. It's a shame the seller didn't want tons of money himself, because he could have learned how to better place adsense and made a ton of money. I wonder why he didn't want to earn $250 selling links...

I'm having some financial issues and need to sell some of the sites on my server.

Wouldn't adding adsense in a good position and selling links go some way to resolving these financial issues. I believe you could make a ton of money doing this.

I know that these aren't heinous crimes being committed by the seller, but they just annoy me. Don't these people want to sell their sites? Don't they care enough to present themselves well?

But... these are just my opinions. What matters is whether this kind of presentation sells. If it does, then my thoughts are immaterial. The purpose of the sales pitch is to sell: if that objective is met, who cares about my grouchiness? However, my hunch is that this style rubs a lot of people up the wrong way.

</high horse>

This post is a perfect example of selecting only the evidence that supports your existing beliefs. The site didn't sell.

100k+ Uniques/month Proxy! Endless possibilities! Good Google Rank! Low BIN!

Sitepoint Auction

100k+ Uniques! www.UnblockedProxy.net

• URL: http://www.unblockedproxy.net/
• Established: Wed Dec 26 2007
• Page views/month: 115,000
• Monthly Revenue (USD): 0
• Google Pagerank: 0
• Uniques/Month: 93,000
• Listed: Today 22:42

Description:

Hello Guys,

I'm going to make this short and simple.  I started this proxy site back in December of 2007 and worked hard on it.  But I had some recent problems with the server that the proxy was hosted on.  I have the awstats from October that show that from October 1st to October 17th, the site recieved 93k uniques.  Then the server went down so the site was not up until yesterday.  I checked the site yesterday and still was recieving over 2k uniques.  If the server didn't go down, the site would recieve around 150k uniques.

I'm having some financial issues and need to sell some of the sites on my server.

So I would like to see this site sell to a good owner that could take good care of it.

Last but not least, I would like to tell you that you can probobly make tons of moneyif you add adsense in a better place than it is right now.  Also, selling links would probobly bring in a decent sum of $250+.

Good Luck,

Thanks

Revenue Details:

If you add adsense in a good position and sell the links, with over 100k uniques, this would make a ton of money!

Traffic Details:

Most of the traffic is from the US.