In the previous post on this topic, I have outlined a few general categories of sites that a person can buy online:
- Honest and successful sites
- Leftovers of successful sites AKA spent shells
- Other people’s failed websites
- Low-end clones
- Expensive clones and high-end fraud
Today, I will continue to elaborate about low-end clones and quick templates that people are selling — and. most amazingly, buying! — everywhere.
These are the sites that comprise the majority of what’s for sale on Ebay and a big chunk of what’s sold at Flippa. They are sites that are made with a script, with zero research and present absolutely no value to the potential buyer. None of these have a chance to ever become successful, yet they are sold by the thousand each day and people are shelling out around $150-300 for the simple ones and way more for the ones that are in the high-paying niches, such as hosting, insurance and such. The latest fashionable way to get cash from the unwashed masses is by selling sites selling Facebook invites.
A typical site would be an autoblog on a certain topic, a quickly thrown together Amazon affiliate store, but the topics can really be wide. The subjects often are expensive keywords or something that may be personally interesting to the potential newbie buyers: hunting, golfing, beauty tips, weight loss and so on.
On Ebay, these sites go for cheap — the sellers are mostly interested not in selling you the site, but in selling you web hosting of that cookie-cutter templated crap. The site can go for as little as $10, but they often subscribe you to one year of hosting for $60. Given that the site is produced in 2 minutes flat, including the domain registration, it’s not such a bad business model, especially if you can cut and paste quickly enough and provide sufficient exposure for all the goodies, which Ebay does well.
A lot of time, the seller will ask for more money for installation and support, which adds to their bottom line. I’ve seen business that operate on strictly pushing cloned sites showing profits of over $10K a month. Stop and think who is shelling out all that money and who is sponsoring all that success? That’s right, wide-eyed newbies, who don’t know the difference.
This kind of sites at Flippa is typically of slightly different caliber: people are on average a little more experienced and a lot of times they are not interested in getting hosting. So, the sellers pretty up the site a little, provide not just copied/pasted content, but perhaps a few pieces of original content, maybe an article or two. The ones, aiming to sell the site a little higher may even do some promotion or start building links. These are the sites that sell for $150-$300.
Why buy cloned sites like this?
Beats me. The only reason they sell is because the target buyer is a complete newbie, who heard that people make big bucks on the internet and decided to try. Because they have no idea how to approach the task and obviously have done no research, they think getting started with a site like this is a good idea.
The truth is, the cookie cutter sites have no value whatsoever. Whatever you pay for a site like that is a total loss, which may be good for a tax deduction, but that is money much better spent on content creation, real site promotion and, generally speaking, adding value. If you are serious and determined to start a web site and make money from it, the templated site is a setback for you, and an expensive one, too.
Recognize the templated crap
Not the last reason people shell out their hard earn money for templated crap is because sales pages for sites like this go out of the way to impress: they have a lot of talk about the potential; they may include some calculation of potential profit, citing keyword pricing, clicks and blah blah blah; they discuss how great their wordpress theme is, what plugins are installed and so on; they always include a sentence or half a page about the post-sale support and “secret” marketing methods. In general, there is often a mentioning of something secret, unusual and uncommon, which is designed to instill confidence in the potential
buyer.
The bottom line is, these sellers are peddling useless shit to the uninitiaded. So, it’s very important for the seller to present the site in as much details as possible, even enumerating things that make no difference. Some lies are frequently present in the sales descriptions, but they usually are about the potential of the site and other topics that are hard to verify.
A template like this will always be underscoring how well established a site is, how it’s “already getting traffic”, often how “the SEO and site promotion” has already been done. An invariable part is often the fact that the site requires little to no maintenance.
Most of the time, the registration date for the domain name of the tempalate site is within the past 30-60 days. Some providers of this crap, especially on Ebay, will only show you a sample site and will create and register one for the buyer once they buy the site — at the time of the listing the site doesn’t even exist. On the contrary, on Flippa, some sellers are trying to get an edge on their rival sellers, so they create a bunch of sites and age them for a few months before selling them. Of course, then noone can dispute their claim that the site is “aged” and “well established.”
I will probably take a sales description of a site like this and go through it line by line in one of the following posts to illustrate how much bullshit people are being fed. I most certainly plan on showing how easy it is to make a site like that without having to pay $200 for it, stay tuned.
If you find this site useful or educational, I would appreciate you spreading the word. I am spending my time on providing what I think is useful information and a way for newbies to save some money. I also don’t get anything in return at this point: see how there is no advertising and I am not selling anything. So, mention this site on forums or click those Facebook like buttons, please.
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Tags: cloned-sites-for-sale