Back in February of this year something amazing happened on the Established Sites Marketplace on the Sitepoint. A site just over 30 days old sold for $6200. This site was just old enough to be listed in the established site section which is restricted to sites over 30 days old.
The site was in the console/gaming niche and claimed to have made $1700 profit during January, it’s first and only month of business at the time of the sale. This profit was achieved through a PPC campaign which the seller claimed cost $10 a day or $300 a month to run. Pretty remarkable if this was the case.
People were interested, believed the sales pitch and stats and somebody bought the site.
Two months later the site was listed again on Sitepoint by the new owner! She had spent $6200 on a profitable site that she was now willing to let go for $5000 so she could “concentrate on more important projects”. What’s more important than a site that takes 30 minutes a day to run and brings in $1700 a month profit?
If a profitable site is relisted within weeks of being sold, something is off!
Obviously regulars to the marketplace would have been instantly suspicious of this relisting and the site reached a maximum bid of $3000, which was below the reserve. It didn’t sell second time around.
Smelling a rat, I ran the domain through keywordspy, a cool resource for all kinds of ppc and keyword research. Low and behold, the spend shown for adwords by the first owner in January was a long way off the $10 a day claimed in the listing. The actual daily ad spend for the site during January was $116.
I haven’t revealed the site because I feel sympathy for the new owner who as you can see from the graph below continued during February to pay the $10 daily ppc budget she believed the site was profitable on when she bought it, increasing her spend in April (when the site was relisted on SP) to over $30 a day but continuing to claim as $10 a day ppc budget.
The guy who sold this listing first time round obviously took a huge risk. He ran up over $3K worth of adwords for a month to make a profit of $3000. Not bad for a months work if you are prepared to dupe innocent people into buying a site that is likely not profitable on ppc campaigns or only just breaks even.
Sitepoint Scammer Sniffout Lesson Number One …
Investigate any claims of ad spend, especially when they seem to be good to be true! There are numerous tools to help you with this. For me, keywordspy is about the best. The basic functionality is free and gives you enough information to research scams like this.
