I know what you're thinking; get to the point already Bryon! Well this is the final post about my thousand dollar fluke, and I just know it's going to help you have some light bulb moments of your own.
There comes a time when you have to ask yourself: “Is this all worthwhile?”
In terms of starting your own business, you probably wonder that every single day (apart from the days when sales just seem to keep flying in). I'm not talking about entrepreneurship in general though, but more specific strategies or websites.
This website I've been talking about for three days was starting to drain me. It was depressing me that I couldn't make money from it, taking up too much of my thought processes that could be better spent elsewhere, and basically, wasting my time.
I wanted to either find the answer, or just stop caring about the site.
Like I said in the previous post:
Enough was enough.
How do you just walk away from all that traffic though? There must have been something I could do. I just knew that a better marketer than me would be able to do something with the site.
That's when the light bulb moment happened. “Eureka!” and various other exclamations entered my brain.
Why not just sell my site to one of those people?
This opened up a whole new set of questions. Could I do it? Did anyone want it? How much would I get for it? What if it didn't sell?
Flippa provided the answers
For those who don't know, it's like the eBay of website selling. You buy or sell sites on there, sometimes for tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes for less than a hundred.
Now, I'm pretty experienced with Flippa these days, but this time last year I had barely even heard of the site. I was pretty naive about the site, and that worked out in my favor.
Rather than just typing up a well thought-out pitch, offering bonuses, and tweaking stats to make my site look like the best thing since Amazon, I basically just listed it, put a rough price that I thought might be nice (based on sites I'd seen being sold with similar traffic/income stats), and closed my eyes.
I put the site up for about $2,500 USD at first. Ridiculous now that I think about it. About the third day into the auction, I lowered the “Buy It Now” price to $1,000 and carried on with my other projects.
Two days later, after a brief due diligence process, somebody bought the site for $1,000. Maybe I should have kept it at $2,500.
In all seriousness though, it felt absolutely amazing!
I didn't bother going into details of the auction with you all too much here, because I'm really trying to illustrate how “easy” it all was. Yes, so there was some tweaking with pricing and a few days of answering PMs and questions from would-be buyers, but essentially I just got incredibly lucky that the right buyer came along.
He paid the money, I delivered the site files and transferred the domain, the rest is history.
The point I've wanted to make over these three posts is that it wasn't really all that lucky. I had been setting myself up for success all along by constantly researching, learning, and trying to improve my site. I had got marketing training, learned how to develop a site, and learned how to get traffic.
Really, all my hard work was paid off.
You have to make your own luck in this industry.
I know people like to think that they can get rich overnight online (ha!), and that they just need a lucky break. Well, lucky breaks do come, but they require hard work to be done first. Hard work, training, and patience.
I really do believe though, that every person who puts in the work, is willing to learn, and willing to be patient, will find their lucky break, whether it is through selling the website they've built up, or through some other kind of fortune coming their way.
The Internet rewards quality in the long-run.
That Flippa Sale – A Legacy
I guess you could say that this is where Human Proof Designs was really born. It wasn't a case of “Wow, let's see if I can repeat that feat” that led me to create HPD though. Actually, it was my failure to repeat that fluke that led me here.
I ended up developing a love-hate relationship with flippa – realizing that there is just too much garbage on there, and too many would be Internet Marketers are taken advantage of.
How many times have you thought you've found some wonderful online income stream, only to find out that it was just another scam?
Unfortunately, a lot of ready-made websites are just like that.
This is where Human Proof Designs was born. I realized that there were people out there who wanted a ready-made niche website, that understood it would take work to grow it from there, but didn't want to be subjected to junk site after junk site.
And this is where we come in.Â