BullishBankers.com: Established and Popular Investment Research Website for Sale
http://www.bullishbankers.com/
Sold at Public Auction
$4,100
Bidding History: 34 bids- Started:
- Wed, Dec 30, 2009
- Completed:
- Wed, Jan 20, 2010
Website Statistics and Collected Data
Site Visibility
| Google PageRank | 4 |
|---|---|
| Alexa Rank | 1,845,806 |
| Links in Google | 36 |
| Links in Yahoo! | 3,298 |
Domain
| Registration Date | 16th Jun, 2008 |
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Compete Stats
| Compete Ranking | 1,001,707 |
|---|---|
| Trust | 2 |
SEMRush Stats
| SEMRush Rank | 0 |
|---|---|
| Keywords in Google | 0 |
Site Content
| Possible Copies Found | 0 |
|---|
Description
Welcome to the auction of Bullish Bankers - We're the Best Bulls on the Street!
BullishBankers.com is one of the web's premier investment research providers, and was started by a group of Wall Street-bound students from the Pennsylvania State University. Having operated the website/portal successfully from July of 2008 to May of 2009, the website has not been updated in awhile due simply to time constraints from the owners. As students entering the job market, we were unable to continue to run the website... and decided to sell it instead to a new owner that we think can run it as well as we did. However, all of the web presence remains virtually untapped... and our immense resources, rankings and subscriber base makes this company a bargain!
We operated out of a Limited Liability Corporation, and every business matter was handled professionally and with the highest quality. Thus, Bullish Bankers has forged exclusive content partnerships with the most well-respected financial websites on the internet -- including theStreet.com and Seeking Alpha!
While the website has been out of use for 6 months, we still have a database of more than 50 professional writers that have published material appearing on major news websites such as Jim Cramer's "Real Money" and TheDeal.com. We have almost 650 posts, of which 90% are completely original and average around 1,250 words. We have over 750 comments from interested users. Finally, and potentially the most impressive, is that we have three high-quality 10-15 page .pdf newsletters that have been out to our subscribers and are used as perfect marketing bait material for additional subscribers.
This niche has POTENTIAL because it is in one of the hottest niche areas around. The world is in a recession, and everyone wants to know what is going on. Bullish Bankers has been one of the primary news sources for covering the stock market... which has been Hot! Hot! Hot! as of late.
What's Included?
· Domain Name
· Fully Customized Website, Custom Design & Coding
· vBulletin Licensed Forum
· Aweber Subscriber base of more than 1,500 readers
· Twitter Account with almost 4,000 followers
· RSS Feed with 1,750 Readers
· Partnerships with numerous financial resources
· 3 PDF Newsletters for resale or marketing (or reading!)
Website Customizations:
Our website has been fully customized from the ground up, and is based off of a WordPress platform to make writing/editing/modifying as easy as possible. On the frontpage, there is a built-in aweber subscription form. The most recent article will be in the "featured" position on the front of the page... which can be easily modified to make a "featured" article appear there. On the let-hand side... we have customized a stock ticker lookup -- this means you can check any stock quote that you want live!!! Finally, there is an author recruitment page that dynamically pulls information from interested writers... and can even automate bringing their blog feed into publication on BullishBankers.com! There is a lot going on here, and everything flows perfectly together.
Interested in purchasing? We are more than happy to hear from you over the phone and talk to you about our business. We even have a nice bound customized business plan for Bullish Bankers that we can send to you after purchase. We prefer speaking over the phone, and will give access to each and every one of our accounts for full disclosure. Thanks in advance for your interest!
Revenue Details
Bullish Bankers was set up as a cash cow, and we saw excellent revenue stream throughout operation. Most of our revenue came from affiliate sales (TradeKing, eTrade, theStreet.com, MorningStar, Forbes, Zecco, INO.com, etc), with our largest single affiliate manager being Commission Junction (CJ.com).
We have set up a user account on CJ.com so that you can verify the revenue coming from there is legitimate (if necessary). Over the course of six months, we earned $4,000 from this website.
Additional sources of revenue came from our email newsletter (where leads were translated into payments to our affiliate accounts), corporate branding (for example, MorningStar paid us $300 for a page in our newsletter), direct sales (we have our own advertising section) and a few mixed social media sales from sources like Twitter.
In total, we will say that we averaged around $700-750 per month when we were operating the website. This works out to around $9,000 a year, which is great for a startup. We were more than happy with the fast growth of our website... and simply are forced to sell it because we do not have time to manage it as students. Again, any information will be fully disclosed, and we did our best to eliminate any shade of doubt that this is a great website to own!
Traffic Details
Our traffic has slowed as of late, as we have done literally nothing with the website since mid-June of 2009. However, it is still receiving several thousand views per month and should be extremely easy to revitalize with a few new articles.
All of our traffic data is available upon request from an AWStats package. We have Google Analytics and StatCounter as well, but these have not tracked hits as well as AWStats because of the dynamic aspect of our website. This login data is available upon request.
Most of our traffic was through SEO efforts, subscribers and word-of-mouth referrals. We averaged around 27,500 unique views each month over the course of operation. Even though, again, we stopped operating the website... Google keyword placements remain strong!
A Few First Page Rankings to Note:
"investing ideas" #2
"bullish" - #6
"stock market ideas" - #8
"bullish bankers" - #1
"top stock trends" - #1 (BING)
"top stock trends" - #9
"investing ideas" - #4 (BING)
"top stock market trends 2009" - #1
"stock market analysis 2009" - #1
"top ten stock" - #8
"investing in ideas" - #2
"top stock market" - #3
As you can see, this website has well penetrated the market... and is definitely seen as an expert across the financial resource spectrum. We will get you any details that you need upon request!
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Claimed Traffic
| Page Views Per Month | 40,000 |
|---|---|
| Uniques Per Month | 27,500 |
Claimed Financials
| Gross Revenue (per month est) | $700 |
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| Net Profit (per month est) | $700 |
| Warning: The seller has provided estimates (read more) | |
Monetization Methods
| Advertising Sales | Yes |
|---|---|
| Product or Service Sales | Yes |
| Affiliate Income | Yes |
Site Uniqueness
- Content is claimed to be unique
- Design is claimed to be unique
Seller
Attachments 3
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One of many Articles on BullishBankers.com!
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A view of the Bullish Bankers Homepage
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2008 Commission Junction Payments
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Some of the 2009 Q1 Earnings from CJ.com
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Our Aweber Readers!
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Bullish Bankers User Forum
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First six months of Traffic
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Next six months of trafic!
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Over the past six months, we have not been operating the site
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Our Twitter Fanpage, 4,000 Followers!
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Verified Google Analytics PDF (30 Dec 09)
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UPDATED! List of Partners
txt file
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Google Analytics: Nov-Dec09
pdf file
Tags 4
Contextual Help
- The winner of this listing will be required to pay a 2.5% success fee to Flippa.
More Information ^ - Ownership transfer is safest when using Escrow.com (more information)
Seller also accepts payment using: PayPal, Cheque ^ - These attachments have been added to the listing by the seller to give extra information to potential buyers ^
- The seller has added these tags to the listing to describe the site ^
Hello Flippa.com Users!
Bullish Bankers dot com is a fantastic website and we will be more than happy to answer any of your questions here. Please feel free to post your comments or shoot emails containing questions to "sales@bullishbankers.com" and we will reply within 12 hours. We were originally going to sell this at a rate above $20k, but have to reduce our sale proceeds today because we didn't manage the business for a few months. Regardless, we feel that it makes a great buy and would love to see it in the right hands.
It's too bad you let this die off over the last few months, because it is a great looking site. What is the revenue and profit currently, and do you have Google Analytics stats for the last few months?
Can you provide details about the partnerships in place, either here or by PM? It's an impressive list (what is with the Morningstar entry?), but if all the partnership entails is you giving them content, it's not worth a lot.
Benitez17-
Thanks for your question. Yes, it is certainly a shame that we let it go a bit stale... but please, by all means, let that be your opportunity to get it way cheaper than it ever would have sold for in the past. Currently we make around $100/month, but that is with (again) absolutely no promotion at all, or marketing, or updating. The potential is very much there, and I would be surprised if it didn't make $500+ for you after you own it for a month.
Our Google Analytics data is actually attached above. A little disclaimer on that: the information that it is relaying is a low-balled version of the truth. Why? Well, we installed the plugin incorrectly into WordPress, which the site is based off of. We left the thing "as is" because we were using other methods of measuring traffic (Statcounter & AWStats, primarily), and could use Google Analytics stil lfor demographics breakdowns. However, it's there for you to have a look at! :)
The list of partnerships was old, and I apologize for that! We have updated the file above, and below is what it says inside:
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BULLISH BANKERS - PARTNERSHIP LISTING
Much of the room we have experienced has been through partnerships Bullish Bankers, LLC has several partnerships with leading financial websites and writers including:
· Chris Fernandez: http://peakstocks.com/
· John Mason: http://maseportfolio.blogspot.com/
· Marc Courtenay: http://www.checkthemarkets.com/
· Mark Frey: Forex writer
· Mike Havrilla: http://www.biomedreports.com
· Mark Sunshine: http://www.firstcapital.com/blogs/mark_sunshine/
· Nick Santiago: http://www.inthemoneystocks.com
· Quality Stocks: http://www.QualityStocks.net
· Ronald Sommer: http://www.measuredapproach.blogspot.com/
Bullish Bankers has several syndication partnerships set up including:
· Seeking Alpha http://www.seekingalpha.com/
o 114 Articles
· TheStreet.com and Real Money: http://www.thestreet.com/author/1140599/bullish-bankers/all.html
o 14 Articles
· Daily Markets: http://www.dailymarkets.com/
· Wiki Invest: http://www.wikiinvest.com
· iStock Analyst: http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/authorcentral/authorid/1095
· Straight Stocks: http://www.straightstocks.com/?s=bullish+bankers
We worked with Morningstar extensively throughout the life of the company. We have collaborated on a few technological developments, and they have continued to come to us back and forth to seek advertising opportunities on our website. We had them integrate their streaming news for us daily at one point in time, but chose to go with our own daily news. I'm sure you could get them to supply us with this once more if necessary. Occasionally, we would contact Morningstar for chances to buy out pages in our newsletter, and were active members of their affiliate program.
Additionally, we have a powerful newsletter with over 1,500 targeted subscribers, three professional 5-15 page research reports to distribute as content, 2,000 RSS subscribers reading our content daily and exclusive partnerships to sync our content with Seeking Alpha, Daily Markets and a few other popular on-line financial portals.
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Thanks, and let me know if you would like anything else!
Unless I am missing something, the GA stats are from February 2009.
Hmm... that's odd, sorry about that! I just re-uploaded the past two months. Thanks for pointing that out!
Is the agreement with TheStreet.com still in place (i.e. if I add a new article, will it be picked up by TheStreet.com or RealMoney.com)?
What is your relationship with all of the individuals listed? Do they provide content for your site?
Also, the stats portion of the listing is supposed to reflect the current status and recent history of the site, not its peak. It should say that you have about 2500 page views per month and $100 in revenue, not 40000 page views and $700 in revenue.
Benitez17-
The agreement with TheStreet.com is not in place only because we stopped our account because we were no longer producing contact. As it is a competitive premium service only for the top investors, we cannot guarantee re-entry, but will supply the winner with the name of our contact editor at the site.
If you look at the partnership document above, the top section (where you see the names of writers) includes some of our contributors. The lower section (with websites like seekingalpha) are websites that have judged our content to be high quality... and have agreed to post any content that we get them with links pointing back to our site & articles or added exposure.
I understand your concern about stats and revenue, but we did not use peak numbers... we used averages over the course of operations. It would not be fair to say that the site received 35,000k views a month and $1,200 in net profit (which was closer to peak value). On the other side of the coin, we are not running a website that has 2500 page views and $100 revenue... we have considered it to be not-in-operation since may, so we used data only from dates of operation.
Keep in mind that only the stats are from this period, all of the marketing, links, pagerank, keywords, partnerships, etc are from the current date. We have definitely not exaggerated our gains here, and are trying to make it as fair as possible. Thank you, and let us know if there are any other concerns!
OK, fair enough, though I don't think it will automatically jump back up to $700 per month if I started adding a couple articles each day.
All I really care about is getting the entire picture before making a bid.
Last question for now: how much time did your company spend promoting the site each day?
We definitely put a lot of work into it over the course of the first few months. I'm 100% sure that this could have been done more effectively... but picture a bunch of business students typing away on their blackberries during class. We each had a twitter account, we would talk about our articles on sites like Yahoo Finance, Fool.com, SeekingAlpha, etc., we did a lot of "word of mouth" marketing at different events and even had our own business cards. One example of our strategies was going to stock pitch competitions and taking some of the competitors aside to offer them writing positions on our blog.
The website definitely had a LOT of buzz surrounding it a few months ago. I would really doubt that it is gone after just a few months of absence. After all: doing "nothing" is a heck of a lot better than spamming our email lists (we never did anything more than email rss updates), publishing ad-based articles (we only posted quality and original work that we thought was worthy) or loading up our site with advertisements and destroying partnerships.
Naturally as a site owner, I 100% approve of any further vetting you would like to pursue... we've got all our accounts wide open for you to have a look at if need be :)
It looks like most of your traffic when the site was in its heyday came from yahoo finance message boards? I assume you were posting messages linking to your articleso n the boards?
We did post on the message boards, but we also received traffic from articles that were linked through on Yahoo's related reading listing underneath each company news section.
That sounds interesting, can you show a link to one of these yahoo finance news sections linking to your site. Do you still have this relationship with yahoo? Thanks.
I'm not exactly sure how to do that, but a lot of our stuff was syndicated around the internet and showed up in Yahoo Finance... take a look way back in the history of a company like Citigroup or Boeing and you are sure to see something that is ours. I think it would take awhile for me to recover that content just because it was so long ago, we do not have any running relationship DIRECTLY with Yahoo, but we still have them through other sites that DO have those partnerships.
Can you please PM the reserve price... Thanks
Also i noticed you had some live stock quotes and charts... what is the monthly cost of owning the site? excluding hosting.
The live stock quotes and charts are completely custom coded... that is FREE, and there is no unseen cost of running the business other than hosting and a newsletter service if you wish to run one. Everything is included! :)
how many authors did this site have when it reached peak traffic (and rev) levels? How often were you adding new content? 1 new post/page per day? More?
Please PM me with reserve price.
Thanks.
Please PM me with reserve price. Thanks
At peak levels, we had around 50 authors. The great thing about this site is that we actually didn't even post that much (it was just all high quality). I would say that we averaged 2.5 posts a day, and probably 3 on peak traffic days. However, these numbers include 1 post every day that was literally just a brief market summary of what happened that day in trading... which was more of a public service than a post that would receive much traffic. If you were taking it over, you could syndicate that and then our peak traffic levels would have you trying to put up 1-3 articles per day.
PM reserve price please? Thank you
Would the sale include the account on Seeking Alpha? http://seekingalpha.com/author/bullish-bankers
Yes, of course! It's a great account with TONS of articles and a high ranking... definitely has helped us get lots of hits in the past :)
So just to make sure I am clear on this, the site is only bringing in $100 a month right now?
Yes, that is the current number... but it has been sitting with 0 updates in 6 months, so I'd say that is pretty darn good ;)
A very interesting site, as mentioned above it is a pity it had been idle for 6 months.
I checked some of the Google rankings you mentioned above, and I am getting lower rankings than those mentioned, can you re-look and comment?
Also please pm me your reserve price, thanks
TimimiTango-
Google rankings will be volatile on a day-to-day basis. All of the rankings listed are as of the time I submitted the file to this auction (~10 days ago). It is VERY unlikely that they have shifted around more than 1 spot since then, as they have been steady after 6 months of non-operation. If anything is significantly different, I'd love to know so that i can update the listing accordingly. Thank you for pointing that out!
Send me a reserve price please. Thanks.
can you pm your reserve? thx
Please PM reserve
Reserve was $2,000... it has been reached and surpassed, thanks!