Selling 6 years of age - gardening - $400 mo/adsense

Hello and thank you for viewing my listing.
 
I am selling the first site I built when I began learning about SEO in 2005. This site is truly a hands-off moneymaker that requires no work to maintain its rankings in the search engines. I've sporadically worked on the site over the years, leaving it completely untouched for long periods at a time. Despite my inconsistent effort and newb-ish SEO skills, the site has become a stable earner that holds the #1 ranking for "indoor gardening."
 
SITE DETAILS:
- Domain established in 2005
- PR 3 home page / most internal pages are PR 2 or 3
- Static HTML site with 42 original pages and 215 republished articles from article banks.
- $413.82 average monthly Adsense income for last six months
- 9,724 average monthly uniques for last six months
- 18,259 average monthly page views for last six months
- #1 ranking in Google for indoor gardening, hydroponic nutrient solution, and plant growth factors
- Top 10 ranking for numerous other gardening/hydroponic-related keywords, like cfl grow lights, garden climate controllers, grow light movers, inorganic fertilizer, and more.
- Maintains current income level with no work, but still has plenty of room for growth
 
POTENTIAL:
Here are a few possible changes that would make the site far more profitable:

- Add more original content. 73.5% of July's income came from the 42 original pages vs. 26.5% of income from 215 republished pages. The site also gets a tons of long-tail traffic (4,503 keywords to 245 pages in July), so there are plenty of good search terms that need an optimized page.
- Rewrite the existing pages to take advantage of the traffic they already get. Six of the top-15 most-visited pages have a CTR under 3%. That's a lot of revenue the site is losing simply because the text on the page is not giving the visitor an appropriate ad to click.
- Expand the site to add a blog, forum, and opt-in mailing list for a newsletter or e-book. Either a gardening tips blog or an equipment review blog would probably work well on this site.
- Join an affiliate program for hydroponics supplies. I played around with some Share-A-Sale banners a few years ago, but didn't make a sale and switched back to Adsense after a couple of months.
- Revamp the site's layout. It's still on the same free template I downloaded back in 2005 and it really looks terrible. A CMS would also make it a lot easier to add new pages or change the menus and ad layouts.
- Build more links. Most of my link building has been free web directories, with a few article submissions and manual blog comments thrown in over the years. A quality link building campaign should make a huge difference in the SERPs.
 
WHY AM I SELLING?
I need money to move my mom to a retirement home and clean/remodel/sell her house. SEO is just a hobby and I won't have much time to expand the site in the next year. I'd rather have a lump sum of cash now to pay for this move instead of barely scraping by while waiting for the $400 to come in each month.
 

TRANSFER DETAILS
The domain is registered at Go Daddy and expires on July 21, 2012. I will push the domain to your Go Daddy account once payment is complete. 
I will include 3 months of hosting if you need it. The site's hosted on Go Daddy's basic shared hosting account, so you'll probably want to move it somewhere else if you plan to add a lot of features. I can also change the Adsense codes to yours and/or upload the files to your FTP server if you would like me to. 

REVENUE DETAILS
2006 annual earnings: $125.83
2007 annual earnings: $381.88
2008 annual earnings: $745.55
2009 annual earnings: $1,147.67
2010 annual earnings: $2,039.05
2011 earnings through July: $2,984.03
 
Aug 2010: $108.79
Sept 2010: $154.62
Oct 2010: $152.06
Nov 2010: $314.33
Dec 2010: $504.79
Jan 2011: $483.90
Feb 2011: $439.11
March 2011: $402.93
April 2011: $422.97
May 2011: $438.98
June 2011: $350.69
July 2011: $428.26
 
From 2008 to 2010, I did very little work on the site aside from some manual link building. I started working on the site again in Oct. 2010 only to discover that the text was unreadable due to formatting errors. So the site had been earning $100/month for a couple of years even though my visitors couldn't read any of the content. After I corrected the formatting and changed the Adsense layout, the monthly earnings have been consistently in the $400-500 range.


TRAFFIC DETAILSI didn't put Google Analytics on the site until late October, so these are the only stats I have:
Nov 2010: 7,498 uniques, 14,018 pageviews
Dec 2010: 6,543 uniques, 12,995 pageviews
Jan 2011: 8,718 uniques, 17,384 pageviews
Feb 2011: 8,548 uniques, 16,645 pageviews
March 2011: 10,096 uniques, 19,524 pageviews
April 2011: 10,723 uniques, 20,243 pageviews 
May 2011: 10,677 uniques, 19,494 pageviews
June 2011: 8,998 uniques, 16,284 pageviews
July 2011: 9,300 uniques, 17,357 pageviews

89.49% of traffic was from search engines, 6.37% direct traffic, and 4.14% from referring sites. All traffic is organic. No PPC ads or paid links have ever been purchased for the site. If you want the analytics then please post or pm and include your email so I can send it over to you.

Adsense:
http://i48.servimg.com/u/f48/12/98/67/73/jan-de10.png January-December
http://i48.servimg.com/u/f48/12/98/67/73/jan-ju10.png January-July
http://i48.servimg.com/u/f48/12/98/67/73/july10.jpg July 
http://i48.servimg.com/u/f48/12/98/67/73/june10.jpg June
http://i48.servimg.com/u/f48/12/98/67/73/may10.jpg May

Starting bid is $400 and the bids will increase by $50, happy bidding!

 

Please send adsense and analytics info. Thank you!

 

Updated the thread with proof of adsense earnings.

 

can I have july adsense screen shot?

 

Can you verify ownership of the site.

 

http://indoor-gardening-guide.com/confirm.txt uploaded that file for confirmation.
Updated the thread with proof of July earnings. http://i48.servimg.com/u/f48/12/98/67/73/july10.jpg 
Also verified site ownership on digitalpoint! 
Multiple people have offered to purchase the BIN so I'm going to keep the auction going and try get a higher price for the site. 

 

Bidders are getting this message: This auction has ended and is no longer accepting additonal bids.

Is the site sold?

 

Site sold to me.

 

You should probably get your money back because this sale is a scam. I am the actual owner of indoor-gardening-guide.com, not this verbat guy. He sent me a message on Flippa asking me to upload that confirmation file under the impression that he would be bidding on my site, not turning around and listing it on Digital Point for sale. The sale is being handled through escrow and the auction is still open for another 6 days. Sorry you got scammed by this jerk, but there's no domain transfer happening here.

 

Thanks for this. All is well since no money has changed hands.

Here are the facts based on the research I did before sending a payment:


1.
Verbat doesn't own the site:
http://who.godaddy.com/whois.aspx?domain=indoor-gardening-guide.com&prog_id=GoDaddy


2.
The site is listed for sale here as an escrow deal:
https://flippa.com/2632498-6-yr-old...oor-gardening-400-mo-passive-adsense-earnings


3.
Verbat is on this scammer list:
http://exchangemoneyforum.com/showthread.php/95053-verbatim29-SCAMMER.

 

Verbat has been reported and will hopefully be banned from DP.

Then he will likely sign in again and try something again, so always be on the lookout for scam sales.

 

@Rod thanks for posting the information about this spammer and educating us about this scams/spams

 

In six years of buying and selling sites on DP I have never had a problem before this.

As long as you do a few checks, 99% of sellers are genuine and easy to deal with.