- Impact
- 10
Technology and Gadgets Ezine + Paid Directory
Amazing self promoting site. Easy to run.
URL: http://www.zoonsky.com/
Established: Fri Sep 12 2008
Page views/month: 15,000
Monthly Revenue (USD): 0
Google Pagerank: 4
Uniques/Month: 3,000
Listed: 14th Nov
Dom Reg: 12th Sep 2009 (name.com)
Bidding Starts at $999
Auction Ends: 7 days from start
BIN: Will accept serious offers to end auction early.
Other Bids At: http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/50754
Description:
Zoonsky.com is a Blog/E-Zine about technology, gadgets, photography, smartphones and geek stuff.
The site also includes Photo and Video content plus a Paid Directory.
You are buying 10+ years of webmaster knowledge and ideas with this website. It is based on the same template and scripting I have developed for my personal network of city-guide websites and is being sold to provide additional funds for that project.
Self Promoting:
This sale includes 22 Social Network site and blog accounts. MySpace, Tumblr, WordPress, Brightkite, Blogger, LiveJournal, Yahoo 360, Twitter, Plurk, Bebo, hi5, Xanga, Delicious, Diigo, Facebook, Rejaw, Multiply, Pownce, Jaiku, Mashable, Yammer and LinkedIn. (see links to each of these in the site footer on Zoonsky.com.)
All 22 Social Network sites are updated in one go with a click inside the site admin panel. The posts sent can be auto-generated from your databases or hand written. See an example of the auto generated update posts here: http://zoonsky.wordpress.com/
I've written a custom script to send pings for the 3 RSS feeds on Zoonsky, plus the 20 odd feeds from your social network. This can send around 1000 individual pings, over a 60 min period, with the click of a button.
A monthly E-Zine edition is also Auto-Generated and broadcast to your subscriber list with a click. Example of auto-generated Ezine.
Includes a standalone Sitemap Generator script which re-spiders the site, rebuilds HTML and XML sitemaps daily, pings Google Moreover and Yahoo, reports any broken internal links or page problems to you and keeps a log of site changes over time.
I suggest interested buyers check out the site submit page, http://www.zoonsky.com/submit/ , and go through the process of making a test submission to see the way the site encourages webmasters to link back in a multitude of different ways, and gives them a good reason to contact you back by offering 5 extra deep links if they send in an RSS feed url.
It's also worth having a look at the site detail pages, in particular the section addressed to site owners. The effort that has gone into ensuring each detail page is indexed, unlike many directory sites, means you can hand list quality sites that you would like links from and have them eventually come and find you rather than going out asking for links directly.
About The Domain History:
I bought this domain specifically to setup this site to sell. There is 4 main reasons why I chose it;
- I liked the name. I think it's memorable and in particular, unique. A search for "zoonsky" only turns up references to this site and nothing else. (the name Zoon Sky appears to be unique too if you would like to take up that persona)
- The domain was dropped about 2 months ago and has been through a PR update already and maintained it's rank.
- It has backlinks from 2 x PR8 government sites that look like they should be permanent to me. As the only backlinks the domain had when I picked it up I assume these are pushing enough juice all by themselves to power the PR4 it has. With these being archived copies of official government communiques I can't imagine them being changed, so even if Google did sandbox the site for a few months, you will eventually re-obtain the value from these backlinks.
- The previous site on the domain was an electronics retail store and just about all the old search terms it ranked for are very closely related to the Zoonsky technology theme. (G webmaster tools shows many SERPs for specific model numbers of consumer electronics products)
I will also hand over the name.com account with the domain so no ownership transfer will be needed, increasing the likely hood current rankings will be maintained.
Additional Features:
Zoonsky has been approved to host it's e-zine mailing list with the largest host of technology discussion lists on the web, freelists.org. This gives you exposure to hundreds of thousands of tech geeks, who will join your subscriber list, plus provide a great source of highly targeted site visitors. (already sent more than 150 uniques in less than a week) You also receive very valuable backlinks from their PR7 domain by way of a Hosted Page, an archive page that provides additional deep links for any stories you link in each edition plus listing in their list directory. (I can't talk up how valuable this is enough) Freelists also makes it very easy to import your existing subscriber list if you have one.
You have a Support Centre setup at GetSatisfaction.com, giving you more permanent links from another PR7 domain, and another source of potential visitors that are into giving feedback and discussing things, like the freelists.org members, which is exactly what you need to keep comments on your articles coming in regularly.
Integration with the Paypal IPN (Instant Payment Notification) interface to add and remove submission account passwords automatically as subscriptions are started and ended.
Custom coded RSS feed of the directory detail pages.
A Google Video Sitemap compatible RSS feed of the video database.
An awesome standalone RSS feed caching and aggregating script that is used for multiple jobs across the site. (several hundred dollars worth of commercial scripts come with the site)
On the site Detail Pages site thumbnails are cached locally and only checked for an update at the thumbnail provider once per week. This not only avoids slow page loads caused by unreliable thumbnail sites, but gives you a new local image that can be indexed by image search engines for every new website you list.
The Google PageRank figure shown on the site detail pages is also cached locally the first time someone views the page, and only rechecked once per month, to avoid annoying Google with lots of automated queries like many directory sites that show pagerank for listed sites do.
Individual site's RSS feeds linked from their detail pages are cached for 4 hours to reduce bandwidth and load on their server.
The Photo Galleries are auto-generated from Flikr feeds. Which may not sound that great on the surface, but the reason I love these as site content is threefold. First, some of the Flikr groups provide very interesting and high quality photos that visitors enjoy. Second because if you mouse over each thumbnail you will notice a nice descriptive alt tag on most photos. This provides a constantly updated supply of relevant on page keywords. And thirdly, each of the images is also cached and served from the Zoonsky server, again providing hundreds more images Images Search engines will potentially index and serve as results for your site.
The site template has been carefully SEOed and integrated across Wordpress, the link directory script, video and photo gallery scripts, and other standalone pages.
I've setup the template so the new owner can just edit 8 images to easily change the logo and basic look of the site if they like.
I have setup a site administration panel that allows the owner to manage all the common site functions, like managing your links database, plus a number of unique custom features including; Updating your Video database, Editing Adspots and Featured Site listings, Manage the password database used by the PayPal IPN management script, send pings, send ezine and social network updates, manage the sitemap generator and a number of other functions.
The admin panel IS NOT full of complex sub menus and lots of options. All scripting is simple and effective, not fancy looking or difficult to understand. I have also written simple help screens to remind you of what each function does inside the admin panel.
I've setup a Gmail account with labels to file Alerts of new Backlinks and Indexed Pages for the domain name as they are found.. so you can see at a glance during what periods and how fast your site is growing in search engine credibility. There is also a weekly report estimating the domain value giving you another easy to follow metric of your site's ongoing growth performance.
I won't go on any further here, but as you can see many finer details a new webmaster might not think about have been incorporated into this website, probably more thought and consideration than you could possibly pay for if you tried to order a site like this custom built.
Marketing Already Done:
Accounts are setup with Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer with all options configured correctly and your relevant feeds and sitemaps submitted. (you get also the zoonsky gmail account associated with them)
The site has been hand submitted to around 100 quality directories, each with at least PR4.
You get forum accounts under the ID Zoonsky at 12 webmaster forums established with at least 10 posts on each forum, with links in place to Zoonsky and the Submit Page in the signature of the 120 odd posts.
You are setup with great new permanent links from the 2 x PR7 domains mentioned above.
I had a friend, who is very much into surfing Hi-Tech and Gadget sites, add the best 50 websites he knew of to the site directory.
I then emailed each site owner personally with a link to their detail page offering to add 5 additional deep links if they wanted to send back their RSS feed URL, or offering to upgrade their listing if they decided to link back.
If I was keeping this site, the next thing I would do is spend $100 with a PR firm I use for a professional Press Release campaign that gets me hundreds of relevant and very high quality backlinks that appear over a period of weeks rather than instantly. I'll give the buyer contact details for the firm if they want.
Zoonsky.com already has more than 100 other sites republishing the site and social network RSS feeds or linking back to us in less than 2 weeks: http://www.google.com/search?q=zoonsky.com
Content Creation and Management:
I designed Zoonsky with someone in mind who wants to run a Tech Geek Site without having to learn how to attract good traffic or setup a site that will generate income. Basically so a person could write their blog articles and only have to spend an additional 10 or 15 minutes per day approving link submissions and clicking a few buttons to effectively promote their website, with very little seo or marketing knowledge needed.
But I have also included options that would allow a site investor type person to use semi-automated content creation methods effectively.
Admin panel includes a script that can import threads from any Vbulletin based forum, with the original thread post formatted as a new blog post, and any follow up forum thread posts converted to comments on your blog. See an example here:
http://www.zoonsky.com/iphone-game-review-skizzle/
Also installed is a uniqefier script that can make any non-unique content you publish (like PLR articles, public ezine articles, imported forum threads and reprints of Press Releases) appear 100% unique to search engine dupe content filters.
The template and scripting is also compatible with the "feedpress" plugin if you wanted to use that for fully automated content.
If you own an existing struggling tech blog that runs on wordpress, you could import the database and 301 redirect all your old pages to the new ones, transferring all existing traffic and link juice over to your new site instantly if you wished.
Server Requirements:
This website will not run on a windows server.
It's tested on a linux server running PHP 4.x
Payment:
Through the Sedo.com escrow service only. I will split their 3% fee with the buyer. Sedo allow the buyer to pay with PayPal, Credit Card, Wire and a bunch of other options.
Revenue Details:
Site revenue comes from Paid Site Submissions, Upgrades to Featured Listing and adpsots that can be sold, used for affiliate programs or Adsense.
Personally I like to minimize any advertising and lowball prices until a site is well established, so I have set Submit Pass prices at 99 cents for the first day, recurring to $9.99 per month if they want to keep access ongoing.
Upgrades to Featured Listing in each category is set at $1.99 per month.
I think you are best to run affiliate programs targeted to the content of your most recent posts in the 3 125x125 adspots on each page, but think these could also be sold for around $25/mth each initially too. It's very easy to slot an adsense block into the spot too if you prefer to go that way.
When you build up a few subscribers, advertising to the E-zine Subscriber list should also prove lucrative.
Obviously you could also sell text link adspots and blogroll links and do paid posts if you wished.
The way I run my sites, I would be expecting revenue potential to be $1000 to $1500 per month after 12 months of spending 15 minutes per day running it. If this was your sole focus and you carefully selected affiliate program ads to match your content and traffic, I'd expect you could multiply that several times.
Traffic Details:
The site had virtually no traffic a week ago. It received more than 150 uniques yesterday and is growing rapidly. http://www.zoonsky.com/stats/usage_200811.html
Google analytics reports about 20 unique visitors and 200 unique pageviews per day so far
http://www.zoonsky.com/wp-content/uploads/analytics.gif
Amazing self promoting site. Easy to run.
URL: http://www.zoonsky.com/
Established: Fri Sep 12 2008
Page views/month: 15,000
Monthly Revenue (USD): 0
Google Pagerank: 4
Uniques/Month: 3,000
Listed: 14th Nov
Dom Reg: 12th Sep 2009 (name.com)
Bidding Starts at $999
Auction Ends: 7 days from start
BIN: Will accept serious offers to end auction early.
Other Bids At: http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/50754
Description:
Zoonsky.com is a Blog/E-Zine about technology, gadgets, photography, smartphones and geek stuff.
The site also includes Photo and Video content plus a Paid Directory.
You are buying 10+ years of webmaster knowledge and ideas with this website. It is based on the same template and scripting I have developed for my personal network of city-guide websites and is being sold to provide additional funds for that project.
Self Promoting:
This sale includes 22 Social Network site and blog accounts. MySpace, Tumblr, WordPress, Brightkite, Blogger, LiveJournal, Yahoo 360, Twitter, Plurk, Bebo, hi5, Xanga, Delicious, Diigo, Facebook, Rejaw, Multiply, Pownce, Jaiku, Mashable, Yammer and LinkedIn. (see links to each of these in the site footer on Zoonsky.com.)
All 22 Social Network sites are updated in one go with a click inside the site admin panel. The posts sent can be auto-generated from your databases or hand written. See an example of the auto generated update posts here: http://zoonsky.wordpress.com/
I've written a custom script to send pings for the 3 RSS feeds on Zoonsky, plus the 20 odd feeds from your social network. This can send around 1000 individual pings, over a 60 min period, with the click of a button.
A monthly E-Zine edition is also Auto-Generated and broadcast to your subscriber list with a click. Example of auto-generated Ezine.
Includes a standalone Sitemap Generator script which re-spiders the site, rebuilds HTML and XML sitemaps daily, pings Google Moreover and Yahoo, reports any broken internal links or page problems to you and keeps a log of site changes over time.
I suggest interested buyers check out the site submit page, http://www.zoonsky.com/submit/ , and go through the process of making a test submission to see the way the site encourages webmasters to link back in a multitude of different ways, and gives them a good reason to contact you back by offering 5 extra deep links if they send in an RSS feed url.
It's also worth having a look at the site detail pages, in particular the section addressed to site owners. The effort that has gone into ensuring each detail page is indexed, unlike many directory sites, means you can hand list quality sites that you would like links from and have them eventually come and find you rather than going out asking for links directly.
About The Domain History:
I bought this domain specifically to setup this site to sell. There is 4 main reasons why I chose it;
- I liked the name. I think it's memorable and in particular, unique. A search for "zoonsky" only turns up references to this site and nothing else. (the name Zoon Sky appears to be unique too if you would like to take up that persona)
- The domain was dropped about 2 months ago and has been through a PR update already and maintained it's rank.
- It has backlinks from 2 x PR8 government sites that look like they should be permanent to me. As the only backlinks the domain had when I picked it up I assume these are pushing enough juice all by themselves to power the PR4 it has. With these being archived copies of official government communiques I can't imagine them being changed, so even if Google did sandbox the site for a few months, you will eventually re-obtain the value from these backlinks.
- The previous site on the domain was an electronics retail store and just about all the old search terms it ranked for are very closely related to the Zoonsky technology theme. (G webmaster tools shows many SERPs for specific model numbers of consumer electronics products)
I will also hand over the name.com account with the domain so no ownership transfer will be needed, increasing the likely hood current rankings will be maintained.
Additional Features:
Zoonsky has been approved to host it's e-zine mailing list with the largest host of technology discussion lists on the web, freelists.org. This gives you exposure to hundreds of thousands of tech geeks, who will join your subscriber list, plus provide a great source of highly targeted site visitors. (already sent more than 150 uniques in less than a week) You also receive very valuable backlinks from their PR7 domain by way of a Hosted Page, an archive page that provides additional deep links for any stories you link in each edition plus listing in their list directory. (I can't talk up how valuable this is enough) Freelists also makes it very easy to import your existing subscriber list if you have one.
You have a Support Centre setup at GetSatisfaction.com, giving you more permanent links from another PR7 domain, and another source of potential visitors that are into giving feedback and discussing things, like the freelists.org members, which is exactly what you need to keep comments on your articles coming in regularly.
Integration with the Paypal IPN (Instant Payment Notification) interface to add and remove submission account passwords automatically as subscriptions are started and ended.
Custom coded RSS feed of the directory detail pages.
A Google Video Sitemap compatible RSS feed of the video database.
An awesome standalone RSS feed caching and aggregating script that is used for multiple jobs across the site. (several hundred dollars worth of commercial scripts come with the site)
On the site Detail Pages site thumbnails are cached locally and only checked for an update at the thumbnail provider once per week. This not only avoids slow page loads caused by unreliable thumbnail sites, but gives you a new local image that can be indexed by image search engines for every new website you list.
The Google PageRank figure shown on the site detail pages is also cached locally the first time someone views the page, and only rechecked once per month, to avoid annoying Google with lots of automated queries like many directory sites that show pagerank for listed sites do.
Individual site's RSS feeds linked from their detail pages are cached for 4 hours to reduce bandwidth and load on their server.
The Photo Galleries are auto-generated from Flikr feeds. Which may not sound that great on the surface, but the reason I love these as site content is threefold. First, some of the Flikr groups provide very interesting and high quality photos that visitors enjoy. Second because if you mouse over each thumbnail you will notice a nice descriptive alt tag on most photos. This provides a constantly updated supply of relevant on page keywords. And thirdly, each of the images is also cached and served from the Zoonsky server, again providing hundreds more images Images Search engines will potentially index and serve as results for your site.
The site template has been carefully SEOed and integrated across Wordpress, the link directory script, video and photo gallery scripts, and other standalone pages.
I've setup the template so the new owner can just edit 8 images to easily change the logo and basic look of the site if they like.
I have setup a site administration panel that allows the owner to manage all the common site functions, like managing your links database, plus a number of unique custom features including; Updating your Video database, Editing Adspots and Featured Site listings, Manage the password database used by the PayPal IPN management script, send pings, send ezine and social network updates, manage the sitemap generator and a number of other functions.
The admin panel IS NOT full of complex sub menus and lots of options. All scripting is simple and effective, not fancy looking or difficult to understand. I have also written simple help screens to remind you of what each function does inside the admin panel.
I've setup a Gmail account with labels to file Alerts of new Backlinks and Indexed Pages for the domain name as they are found.. so you can see at a glance during what periods and how fast your site is growing in search engine credibility. There is also a weekly report estimating the domain value giving you another easy to follow metric of your site's ongoing growth performance.
I won't go on any further here, but as you can see many finer details a new webmaster might not think about have been incorporated into this website, probably more thought and consideration than you could possibly pay for if you tried to order a site like this custom built.
Marketing Already Done:
Accounts are setup with Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer with all options configured correctly and your relevant feeds and sitemaps submitted. (you get also the zoonsky gmail account associated with them)
The site has been hand submitted to around 100 quality directories, each with at least PR4.
You get forum accounts under the ID Zoonsky at 12 webmaster forums established with at least 10 posts on each forum, with links in place to Zoonsky and the Submit Page in the signature of the 120 odd posts.
You are setup with great new permanent links from the 2 x PR7 domains mentioned above.
I had a friend, who is very much into surfing Hi-Tech and Gadget sites, add the best 50 websites he knew of to the site directory.
I then emailed each site owner personally with a link to their detail page offering to add 5 additional deep links if they wanted to send back their RSS feed URL, or offering to upgrade their listing if they decided to link back.
If I was keeping this site, the next thing I would do is spend $100 with a PR firm I use for a professional Press Release campaign that gets me hundreds of relevant and very high quality backlinks that appear over a period of weeks rather than instantly. I'll give the buyer contact details for the firm if they want.
Zoonsky.com already has more than 100 other sites republishing the site and social network RSS feeds or linking back to us in less than 2 weeks: http://www.google.com/search?q=zoonsky.com
Content Creation and Management:
I designed Zoonsky with someone in mind who wants to run a Tech Geek Site without having to learn how to attract good traffic or setup a site that will generate income. Basically so a person could write their blog articles and only have to spend an additional 10 or 15 minutes per day approving link submissions and clicking a few buttons to effectively promote their website, with very little seo or marketing knowledge needed.
But I have also included options that would allow a site investor type person to use semi-automated content creation methods effectively.
Admin panel includes a script that can import threads from any Vbulletin based forum, with the original thread post formatted as a new blog post, and any follow up forum thread posts converted to comments on your blog. See an example here:
http://www.zoonsky.com/iphone-game-review-skizzle/
Also installed is a uniqefier script that can make any non-unique content you publish (like PLR articles, public ezine articles, imported forum threads and reprints of Press Releases) appear 100% unique to search engine dupe content filters.
The template and scripting is also compatible with the "feedpress" plugin if you wanted to use that for fully automated content.
If you own an existing struggling tech blog that runs on wordpress, you could import the database and 301 redirect all your old pages to the new ones, transferring all existing traffic and link juice over to your new site instantly if you wished.
Server Requirements:
This website will not run on a windows server.
It's tested on a linux server running PHP 4.x
Payment:
Through the Sedo.com escrow service only. I will split their 3% fee with the buyer. Sedo allow the buyer to pay with PayPal, Credit Card, Wire and a bunch of other options.
Revenue Details:
Site revenue comes from Paid Site Submissions, Upgrades to Featured Listing and adpsots that can be sold, used for affiliate programs or Adsense.
Personally I like to minimize any advertising and lowball prices until a site is well established, so I have set Submit Pass prices at 99 cents for the first day, recurring to $9.99 per month if they want to keep access ongoing.
Upgrades to Featured Listing in each category is set at $1.99 per month.
I think you are best to run affiliate programs targeted to the content of your most recent posts in the 3 125x125 adspots on each page, but think these could also be sold for around $25/mth each initially too. It's very easy to slot an adsense block into the spot too if you prefer to go that way.
When you build up a few subscribers, advertising to the E-zine Subscriber list should also prove lucrative.
Obviously you could also sell text link adspots and blogroll links and do paid posts if you wished.
The way I run my sites, I would be expecting revenue potential to be $1000 to $1500 per month after 12 months of spending 15 minutes per day running it. If this was your sole focus and you carefully selected affiliate program ads to match your content and traffic, I'd expect you could multiply that several times.
Traffic Details:
The site had virtually no traffic a week ago. It received more than 150 uniques yesterday and is growing rapidly. http://www.zoonsky.com/stats/usage_200811.html
Google analytics reports about 20 unique visitors and 200 unique pageviews per day so far
http://www.zoonsky.com/wp-content/uploads/analytics.gif
