TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur's JourneyThe journal of a web entrepreneur on his journey to wealth.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

Good morning everyone! No sleeping in now, get up! It’s a brand new day! Rise and Shine!

• Sales of sites
• My gift to you
• CollegeFreebies.net
• Overwhelmed
• MovieForums update

Sales of sites

In my last post I had mentioned the acquisition of Wrestlemania.org, Smackdown.tv, and VideoCodecs.org. I’m pleased to say that in just 24 hours after purchasing these sites/domains, I resold them for a very quick and easy profit of over $600.

It actually would have been closer to $800 or $900, but there was an incident. I had bought the site Wrestlemania.org for $250. The owner wanted $300 originally and was pretty stern on it, but you know me and getting discounts 🙂 Wrestlemania.org was bought at the BIN for $800, and the payment was received and the domain and CPanel/FTP information sent quickly.

However, I then received a message from the buyer stating he was unhappy with the purchase. Apparantly the site turned out to be a ‘scraper’ site; a one-pager site where mod_rewrite and a backend system basically spam the SE’s with fake content which then point it back to the hoem page. I had never heard of this type of thing before, and since I had just purchased the site, I hadn’t even FTP’ed in or anything and was thus not aware of this. I was certainly not aware of it when I bought it.

I was upset because I had been really excited about turning over the site for an ROI of 220% in just 24 hours (Note here that this is the ROI, not profit. ROI = [(Payback – Investment)/Investment)]*100. Profit would have been $550). The buyer was very displeased and angry but you could also tell he was scared. Obviously this was because he thought he had just been screwed and wouldn’t see his money ever again. However, I talked to him honestly and calmly and fairly for about an hour and a half. I reassured him that I wasn’t aware of this when I bought it and wasn’t trying to screw him. I told him that it wasn’t worth scarring my reputation to earn a few measely bucks.

I offered him either $100 back, as that is about how much I felt the ‘scraper’ revelation damaged the value of the site, or else a full refund. I felt I did everything in my power to resolve the situation.

However, he felt it damaged it more as he explained that these ‘scraper’ sites work for a few months and are then worthless. He thinks Google already banned the site, which I wouldn’t argue against since there is no knowledge of wrestlemania.org when you search for it in Google.

In the end, he requested $200 back. I was just about to hit send from PayPal, when I had an idea. I offered him the domain SmackDown.tv in lieu of the $200. He thought about it for a little bit then accepted. My minimum asking price/bid for the domain was $200 with a BIN of $500 so he certainly got a deal there. However, I didn’t mind substituting it for the $200 as it’s still profit; I had bought it for $42 (OMG, since when did .tv extensions become so expensive? I had always thought they were regular price!) so essentially I really only paid him $42 if you look at it from my eyes.

Anyhow, that situation was completely resolved in a very professional manner. You must realize that when he first contacted me there was a lot of tension and anger in the air, and it ended with both parties happy. A rarity these days I believe when such an incident occurs.

VideoCodecs.org was sold at the BIN for $200. I had bought it for $30. Quick and easy. (Wow, I just checked and it looks like he already built up a one-page site for it. Simple site with AdSense… good for him! Internet works fast!)

Here’s a rundown of the outcome:

Wrestlemania.org: bought for $250, sold for $800
Smackdown.tv: bought for $42, sold for $0 (gave with Wrestlemania.org)
VideoCodecs.org: bought for $30, sold for $200.
Other expenses: $16 for 2-year renewal of Wrestlemania.org, $15 for Sitepoint listings

Totals:

Expenses: $353
Return: $1000
Profit: $647

Not a groundbreaking story or anything; I’ve sold countless domains and sites in the past, but what makes this different from the rest I believe is how quick it all happened. I saw an opportunity and bought 3 sites. 24 hours later, I sold them all for a quick and painless $647 profit.

My gift to you

I sometimes have ideas for sites, and usually I develop them myself, but since I have so many on my plate already, I’m going to share this one with you guys. I won’t be developing it and so the idea is completely up for grabs. Whoever wants it, it’s yours. I only ask that if it does ever go big or anything, that you mention where you got the idea in a little blurb on an ‘about’ page or something 🙂

Here it is: an Internet photo scavenger hunt website. “What?!”. Yeah! Okay, here’s the idea. The website, once a week (or whatever increment) at the same date and time lists a list of about 7-8 items. Whoever e-mails/submits photos of these items first wins a little prize. Maybe at first it’s just for glory on the website, then later for a little prize.

I honestly think this could be very popular. Think about it. There are many many many people who enjoy taking photographs. A photo scavenger hunt would be extremely fun for a lot of people. And the chance to win a prize by being first just makes it all the more fun.

Here’s how it’d work, first off, the items on the list would have to be somewhat specific, such as “An overweight woman wearing a blue or red shirt”, “An overflowing garbage can”, “3 birds in one shot; no more no less”, as opposed to “an overweight woman”, “a garbage can”, “birds”. This is basically to make it more challenging but mainly to make it so people can’t store up ‘archives’ before hand and just submit those later to claim the prize.

Now you may ask “But Tyler, how do you know if people are just grabbing images off the Internet?” Simple Watson. In every photo, you will require that they hold up a sign (doesn’t matter how big or small or where in the photo it is) saying “site.com”. This helps promote your site and removes any possibility of cheating.

Great idea huh? Well it’s yours. Just remember to give me credit for the idea – the profit is all yours 🙂

You’re welcome.

CollegeFreebies.net

I’ve had a number of people ask to advertise on my blog. However, I only allow one 468×60 ad to be dispalyed. I don’t want to clutter this site up with ads, and I like my policy of just one ad. It’s also great for the advertiser.

However, I had a guy e-mail me asking if I could mention his site in my next post. I agreed, and for $25 here it is:

His site is CollegeFreebies.net and you’re more than welcome to check it out if you like.

I promised him no testimonial or anything and that it’d be casually mentioned like that.

It’s actually not a bad deal – this blog gets around 700 uniques per day, most from bookmarks or direct type-in’s, and the visitors are obviously webmasters and web entrepreneurs themselves.

If you’re interested in getting a blurb in my next post, e-mail me at tylercruz (at) gmail.com

Overwhelmed

Man, some days I am simply overwhelmed and completely bombarded by IMs and E-mails that it’s virtually impossible to do anything. When this happens, productivity crawls to a standstill. It’s strange because this usually happens only once in a while… you’ll just suddenly be inundated with a ton of people all talking to you at once and e-mails pouring in.

A couple of days ago I had one of these days. Keep in mind that I only have about 10-12 people on my MSN list, virtually all work-related, 5-6 people on AIM, and that I usually don’t conduct personal things online much anymore so it’s not a bunch of personal e-mails or IMs pouring in.

Blogger is being a complete bitch again and it’s image uploader is down again (as it always is it seems) so I’ll have to link my image here via HTML:

Although that photo doesn’t give true justice; the left monitor’s taskbar was filled as well but didn’t show up in the screenshot. And yes, I use MSIE so I don’t have your sacred FireFox tabbing, but screw that, long live IE 🙂

All in all I had I believe about 45 windows open at that time, and was frantically trying to deal with everything. It was kind of fun actually. Fortunately this type of thing only seems to happen once in a while; usually I’m free and can relax.

MovieForums update

After talking to Terrorist #1, I got the changes to MovieForums’s skin I wanted, and the skin pre-design stage is now done. The skin should be coded and up on the site within 48 hours. Then all my new forums will finally be done.

Again, had to post the image via HTML: