ClickHereYouIdiot/ Unique copywriting-comedy-sales letter site/ PR6 / DMOZ/ $1

The Click Here You Idiot site is one of a kind. It's unique, it's a one-off, it's surreal. It's a site about how not to write sales letters.

Age of site: Seven months. When it went live in Jan via this press release, blogs and news sites went crazy linking to it and the server went down several times. There are still occassions when someone links to it and sends hordes of visitors.

It's been mentioned in thousands of places and if you do some backlink checking you'll find that it has made people laugh so much that some wet their pants, others spat coffee all over their keyboards, and some laughed so much they hurt themselves crying. Nobody has sued the owners yet.

Warning: Some get the humour (yes, with a "u", it's British), some don't.

What's it got going for it?

1. The incoming links. It's got incoming links from reputable sites like theregister.co.uk, it featured in Yahoo News in Jan 2006, and it got a DMOZ listing within 24 hours of submission. It's being used as an example in many marketing and copywriting sites and blogs and it featured on radio shows like Bob Parson's (Go Daddy founder). All the links are one-way and unsolicited.

2. The PR. It's got only two pages and both are PR6. Because of the strength of the backlinks you may find that if you add another page or two they are likely to be PR6es as well. Though this is, of course, no guarantee.

3. The content. It's unique. It's content that never needs to change. It's content that going to continue to attract that holy grail - good one way inbound links - without you ever having to beg. How cool is that?

4. In its early days it made a lot of money (but the owner will not disclose how much).

5. For some terms like Long sales letter and effective sales copy it ranks pretty high in Google. It's even in the first 100 out of 180,000,000 for increase your sales - a very competitive market. You could tweak that site to rank high for a search term closely related to any of the above.

What's it not got?

1. Lots of provable income. So, you're not buying it for the income. You're bidding because you like the site and/or can see a way of making money from it (copywriting, increase your sales type keywords costs a lot of money and those are largely the anchor text this site gets links with). Suggestion: You could put your own link at the top and claim that you are sponsoring the site.

2. Lots of regular traffic. It gets about 100 odd visitors a day but very often it gets a link in a much read blog or business website and traffic shoots up for a bit. But no regular traffic you can count on. You could SEO it or tweak the title/keywords to attract the kind of SE traffic you want. That's never been done so far.

How much?
Traditional valuations based on multiple of proven income won't work on a site like this. Think of it as a work of art albeit one that can earn you money if you're smart enough to capitalise on its strengths. I'm starting the bidding at $1. As the owner is not in a hurry he doesn't mind keeping the auction open for a while i.e. end date not decided yet.

So far this month I've sold this site for $45,000 and this one for $15,000. I would not have taken on clickhereyouidiot.com unless I thought bidding would go well over $1,000.

(Shameless plug: Want me to sell YOUR site? If you have good reason to believe it's worth over $10K send me an email - see my profile for email add)

Traffic and Earnings
All you'll get are the details above in the "What's it not got" section. Strange, but that's the way the owner is playing it.

BIN/Reserve
There is a reserve but there is no BIN at present. Make a good offer and it may be accepted as a BIN.

How to contact me about this site
One problem I notice is that people here don't always read this most important bit. For my sanity purposes I don't discuss the prospective sale via PMs in different forums and also simultaneously in various threads on various forums. I do it all at one single email address. Please contact me only by email. My email address is in the Biography section of my profile.

I will ignore all PMs on this subject.

DON'T CONTACT ME BY PM

 

Nice one. It even featured on places like metafilter. Good luck with the sale. I remember when you first took this one over!

 

Alexa traffic does not seem to be consistant .... please explain why sometime trarffic is so good and sometime not, did you use paid advertising? If yes how much per month?

 

I will start with $1

 

Absolutely hillarious. I'll bid $50.

 

This is the first time I've ever typed this: LOL

In fact, IMHO, ROFLMAO.

 

Awesome. $100.

 

150 dollar bid

 

$1500 .. and don't ask me why... I just like it

 

Well I figured you guys would want to see bidding going on at sitepoint also to know if your in teh lead..

http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/540?

Incase your intrested look at post #9. Don't know why he does not reply here.

 

Sorry, and no offence intended. As stated in my original post I'm keeping all the discussions not in SP, or DP, or any other forum, but in emails. All interested parties are best off contacting me by email.

colonel99, Nitin, etc., thanks.

Here's another angle: If you own any HYIP, Get Rich Quick or similar site, ebook, or program, a link from here will do wonder for your SEO. You'll be the only one with an outward link from these two PR6 pages and it may get your main site high enough in the SERPs to pay for your investment several times over.

Another thought: Sell 10 links per page. At $50 pm for the internal and $60 for the homepage advertisers will be queuing up. That's $1,100 pm or $13,200 per year. Bear in mind that there's no nav bar or internal links; each advertiser will get a complete 1/10 of PR6. It's very appealing to advertisers. And you can still stick Adsense on there (Google has approved the site), and keep the Paypal button (yes, it works ). But even just $13,200 a year is not bad money.

 

Just to demonstrate that people do link to this of their own accord: I've picked out some links people made completely voluntarily. Because of the nature of this site links will continue to grow. Bloggers can't seem to resist linking to it. And, increasingly, copywriter sites are beginning to link here too. The site's a link magnet.

May
http://www.allbusiness.com/blog/JustForSmallBusiness/3357/005708.html
http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=67250#c301055

June:
http://www.copywritersboard.com/cri...y-sales-letter-i-need-all-help-i-can-get.html
http://www.epublishingdaily.com/the-long-sales-letter/

July
http://kimklaverblogs.blogspot.com/2006/07/click-here-you-idiot_13.html
http://www.mrfire.com/nycu-archives/nycu-2006/july.html

Linking to this site is also being used as a way of shutting people up as you'll find here: http://groups.google.com/groups/search?hl=en&q=clickhereyouidiot&qt_s=Search (see the one on page 2). When people spam forums and usenet with their get rick quick schemes they are often told just clickhereyouidiot.com

Who knows, you could be sitting on a PR7 at some point without ever having to ask anyone for links.

 

Based on emails I've received so far please now place your bid only if it exceeds $4,200. Thanks.

 

Email sent.

 

Based on what I've been discussing with people I have decided on a reasonable BIN of $9,000. The last two sites I sold went for BINs of $15K and $45K and I'm reasonably confident this one will reach BIN too. I will pay 50% of the escrow fee.

Contact me, as usual, via the email address in my profile. Thanks.

 

This site is now sold.

 

This again is a very professional sale made by you Merkersarl.

You continue to surprise me.

 

Thanks everyone for your interest but the site is now sold. Your comments and time are much appreciated.

Thanks, SumitBahl - it's been a busy month and now I'm going to take a breather for a while.

Shameless plug: Want me to sell YOUR site? If you have good reason to believe it's worth over $10K send me an email - see my profile for email add. I'm taking a summer break but give me a nice site to sell and it may tempt me to come out and play