GradSchoolForum.com - Unique custom features! 4k uniques/month - PR - active forum

Grad School Forum is an established forum with an easy to remember url, http://www.GradSchoolForum.com, and a PageRank of 5. This is a great site for the webmaster who wants to develop a forum that has real potential but doesn’t want to start from the ground up. With existing traffic, good inbound links, PageRank, unique enhancements, and over 1200 real posts you only need to promote this site to make this community come alive. I’ve tried to disclose as many details as I could in the below description, but feel free to ask any questions you might have and I’ll do my best to answer.

ENHANCEMENTS

This site includes a fully customized and polished template, complete with a custom header/logo area and good integration throughout the site. We created this design ourselves to help the site to be similar in design to the type of sites that are generally seen in the educational world, and the design has been very popular with the user base.

In addition to a variety of standard phpBB add-ons for spam control, ability to upload attachments and ad rotation, this site has two complete custom add-ons that make it a unique offering in the gradschool/education space:

1) Private Study Groups: This feature was designed and created just for grad students! It uses the standard phpBB login/registration system to allow any user to create their very own private forum and give it a name. Then, they can invite other users either through the forum or by email, and those invited users can join the study group and participate in their own private study group forum. It works just like a forum, but the system will automatically make the study group forum private and available only to invited members. Users will automatically see the study groups that they belong to displayed as forums at the top of their page.

The system handles all invite/acceptance through emails, the content of which can be changed by the administrator. Users who aren’t part of a study group won’t see them at all. This feature was specially requested by grad students and was intended to be used as a marketing tool to drive the whole site! Grad students are generally tech-savvy and are expected to take advantage of this feature once it’s promoted, bringing a very sticky and potentially viral element to the site.

2) Admissions results database: This feature allows users to enter the results of their gradschool applications into a database, and browse/read the results of others. This kind of system is seen on other sites around the internet, and has proven popular with college students of all levels.

PLATFORM

The forum runs on a professionally maintained and frequently updated phpBB, using a modified version of the NoseBleed template.

REASON FOR SELLING

This site shows a lot of potential, but we just haven’t had the time to invest in bringing the forum traffic up to the point where it needs to be. Since we’ve already added the study group and application results database, the site has a unique edge and should be able to compete with the small handful of competing sites out there. There is good reason to believe that if the forum get’s a good boost of activity, it will really take off – there are lots of users who snoop around the site and read other threads, but don’t post because there just isn’t enough activity to draw them in. We just don’t have the time so we’ve decided to let it go.

TERMS

Payment in full, preferably through PayPal, must be provide before site transferred. Buyer will receive a zipped copy of the entire site including a mysql dump, or the site can be manually transferred from server to server using cpanel. The entire website, including contents/design and all other elements of the application are sold as is. All sales are final.


Revenue Details:
The forum was never optimized to generate income, although a basic Adsense banner was placed in-line with the forum posts as a test. The ads that displayed proved not to be very targeted (or eye-catching) so no significant revenue was generated. It’s recommended that the new owner try CPA or a very targeted ad network, as the educational world can be very lucrative and lots of good programs exists. So, we are essentially selling this forum without making any revenue claims, but for the sake of disclosing as many details as possible here is the actual revenue that was earned simply by adding an Adsense banner to the topics and letting it sit all this time:

Adsense Earnings by Channel & Date: http://www.gradschoolforum.com/sp/gsf_by_channel_and_date.csv
Adsense Earnings Totals: http://www.gradschoolforum.com/sp/gsf_channel.csv


Traffic Details:
TRAFFIC / SEO

This site has been around since late 2005 and has a series of quality inbound links (including several links from very strong .edu sites) which keep the PageRank steady. This includes several links from university pages, accepted.com, several popular educational sites, and even a mention in the New York Times from last year. With really no promotion but a steady flow of traffic still visits the site with an average of about 4000 uniques/month since January 2007.

Google Analytics: Google Search Phrases: http://www.gradschoolforum.com/sp/google_keyphrases.pdf
Google Analytics: Referrers: http://www.gradschoolforum.com/sp/google_recent_refer.pdf
Google Analytics: Search Engine Traffic: http://www.gradschoolforum.com/sp/se_traffic.pdf
Awstats Overall Traffic for 2007: http://www.gradschoolforum.com/sp/traffic1.jpg

Even with no marketing or promotion, and nobody really ‘taking care’ of the site or developing the community, loads of legitimate users have created over 1000 posts, and those posts are keyword rich. We have a surprising amount of traffic coming from Google right into forum topics after matching an obscure phrase, so there is already some good natural seo occurring.

With over 5000 users registered, you could very easily kick start the forum simply by sending a mailing to the users and promoting the new features, doing an offer, and just reminding them about the forum.

 

What are your expectations regarding a price for this? (I'd need to know this otherwise I might be wasting your and my time with a list of supplementary questions.) Thanks!

 

Currently $650 at Sitepoint. I dont have any specific price in mind, and will sell the site to the highest bidder.

 

Is the BB Licens INcluded?

 

phpBB is free, if that's what your referring to...

 

whats the highest bid and when does this auction end?