SocialElves.com Social Digg Marketing. $5,600 Revenue In October!

Selling: http://www.socialelves.com/
Monthly Revenue: $5,600
Starting Bid: $10,000

What We Do
http://www.SocialElves.com is a Digg Marketing service. We help websites/blogs etc. gain exposure by taking them to the front page of Digg.Com

How We Do It
We have hundreds of contacts via IM (Gtalk, MSN, AIM) of Digg users. (over 300 people total) When we get a submission, we ask contacts to check them out. They Digg only if they like the submission. In exchange, we Digg whenever they have a story (again, only if it's actually a good submission.) Some also help out more with submissions (via Shouting etc.) when we need them to. You will get all these contacts and all the information upon purchase. I have a personal Digg account but I do not do SocialElves jobs with that account for obvious reasons. We only end up doing jobs that we think will do well on Digg and reject all bad stories. We also work with some clients that want to be on Digg but need help getting "Digg worthy" content. I also have a custom IM mass messanger that I will include but I stopped using it as it's much more affective to talk to people personally.

I Will Help You
I will help the new owner adjust to the website. I have learned little techniques while running this website that I will teach.

Legality
We were contacted by Digg lawyers, demanding us to stop using software to generate votes. We assured them that we do not use any software. They then contacted us to stop paying people to Digg. We again assured them that we do not pay anyone to Digg. They stopped contacting us because we are not breaking any Digg TOS or anything.

Why Am I Selling?
SocialElves is a great source of income and is only becoming more and more profitable. However, I am a college student and do not have time to handle the increasing volume. SocialElves is getting more and more sales and I can't handle a much larger increase without it really interfering with my school work. I think it's best that it gets a new owner.

Expansion
I started SocialElves just to support Digg.Com because it is the biggest of the social bookmarks. However, around 9/10 of our contacts also have reddit, mixx, stumbleupon, sphinn etc. so it would be easy to use the same strategy to also support other social bookmarks. Some of our clients have asked us if we could help with the other social bookmarking sites so there is a market for it.
Revenue Details:

Recent Spike In Sales!
SocialElves has been getting 1-2 sales per week until recently. This is due to a few things.

1. Clients reordering multiple times. (we have had clients that have purchased from us 3 times) SocialElves is well worth the $300 and many clients see that once they have purchased. Thus, they have came back to us and have plans to come back to us when they have something new to submit.

2. Social exposure. Many social marketers have learned about us and blogged/twittered about our service. Although they presumably had "bad" intentions (bad business for social marketing consultants that charge thousands), they actually increased exposure and sales for us. SocialElves also appeared on some blogs.

3. Press Releases. We bought 2 press releases that helped with our exposure and were later [by random people] submitted to many social bookmarking sites.

Revenue
18 Sales In October, totaling $5600. (mostly in the 2nd half of the month as potential sales etc. just keeps on increasing) Also used contacts to make several of my own (and close friends) stories popular. Will not list that as revenue because no money was directly exchanged.

Expenses
- Paypal Fees.
- $12 Google Adwords Search that provided us with 2 sales.
Also used Google Adwords Content but did not give us any sales so we stopped.

- Refunds. There were 2 stories that I refunded because they were not something that would work on Digg. I worked with both clients and they are expected to reorder from us again. There were more stories that we did not take. (were never ordered since I talked to them via email before the order) There were 5 partial refunds in October because I did not get to the story fast enough. (you get 24 hours so you have to start helping a story asap) Again, something that being a student in college has limited me since there are days that I am just too busy.
- $200 Blog Post on JohnTP to help us with our launch. Did not provide sales but helps with general exposure.

- $70 or so for Press Releases via DigitalPoint. One was writted for us and submitted and the other one we wrote ourselves and just had submitted.
I Wrote: http://www.prarticle.com/press-rele...Digg’s-Control-over-Their-Own-Website&pr=5351
They Wrote: http://www.newdesignworld.com/press/story/4735

- $50 Web Design: I designed the website myself but then paid someone to improve it a little and CSS it.

- $15 SitePoint Advertise Your Services Listing.
Traffic Details:

The traffic comes from:
- Search Engine and Direct Type-In: people here about socialelves in twitter, digg, forums, etc. and usually search for it or just type it in
- Google Adwords
- Blog/Twitter/Plurk: Many social users/bloggers have started talking about our website.

You can basically search "socialelves" on Digg and see all the hype going on about our website is.

Any Questions?
I tried to hit on everything you guys might want to know. If you have any more questions feel free to ask me!

Attachments
http://socialelves.com/forsale/

Bidding
I have this website also listed on Sitepoint: http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/49786 but feel free to bid and ask questions here.

 

Are you sure that your contacts will work with new owner?

 

i think you would be better of offering this on sitepoint, i would love to make the offer of 10k that you ask, but cant. i could make an initial offer of 5k

 

Vntutor, good question. Yes, I am sure that they will work. I can even go as far as giving you my screenname username and password until you get all the contacts transferred to yours.

Luousneil, thanks for the offer but I am sorry that is too low for me to accept. It is under 1 month revenue which is too low for me to consider. Sorry.

 

the site is not working mate

 

I really wonder that this works and they didn't find a pattern of or a footprint of your users. Good luck with selling.

 

Can you try again because it's working (and has been working) for me.

Well the thing is that there is no pattern. Different people are always Digging and Shouting etc. the stories... just like every other story on Digg becomes popular. Out of 300 contacts, we get a random 70 or so (whoever is online) to Digg. Then maybe a couple will Shout. After that, it's pretty organic unless the story needs an extra push or so.