SitePoint

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Bid History

Top 10 Wedding Portal, $25,000-$30,000/month Revenue, Finance Plan Available

Multi-Million Dollar Potential, Established Wedding Business, Down Payment & Percentage of Monthly Income Finance Plan Available

• URL: http://1weddingsource.com/
• Established: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 14:00:00 GMT
• Monthly Revenue (USD): 27,500
• Google Pagerank: 5
• Listed: Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:09:16 GMT

Description:

Serious bidders ONLY!

We have proof in the form of tax returns, accounting records, and so forth.

I am open to a financing plan wherein you make a down payment and pay a monthly percentage of the income until the full price has been paid off. However, down payment should be reasonable considering the monthly income. FULL PAYMENT UPFRONT IS NOT NECESSARY (BUT PREFERRED AND MORE ATTRACTIVE) SINCE WE ACCEPT DOWN PAYMENT CONTRACTS.

If you are serious about buying this website, you will need to be able to meet in person. So either we fly out to you or you fly out to us. I live in the USA and I'm on Pacific time. Please PM me for my cellphone number. I prefer email since I do consulting work during the day, and I cannot always pick up the phone out of respect for my clients. I hope you understand.

Now, on to the details of the website...

The website is http://www.1weddingsource.com/

The site is among the top 10 sites in its niche. It is a portal website for bridal and wedding needs.

The site is continuously expanding with new features. One of the latest features is the ability for users to create their own wedding website: http://1weddingsource.com/tools/
We also create and aggregate content related to wedding news, ideas, etc. Essentially, we have built a one-stop source for everyone's wedding needs.

OVER a quarter of a million dollars ($250,000+) has been invested into the website alone (not the business, but the website alone).

The portal and directory are the main source of income. You earn residual income primarily by expanding these sections. Once vendors sign up for a listing, they will subscribe and you will earn monthly residual income for each subscriber. We used to have salesmen working in call centers here in the USA, but the operating expenses were too high. It's obvious employing staff in the USA would be the MOST expensive route, and you can probably afford 10-20 able foreign marketers for the price of one USA employee. We recommend the new owner look into outsourcing as we feel this was one huge operational mistake we have made in the past.

The sales team works on a B2B basis. They contact businesses to list in our directory for $50-$100 per month (depending on the market). Every new customer your sales team gets means monthly RECURRING income for a one time sale. To offline businesses, $50-$100/month is pocket change, so it's a very easy sale. So if you expand sales efforts, you can be adding tens of thousands of dollars to your current paycheck every month.

We get about 2-3 vendor sign ups per day requesting free listings. We don't put in enough effort to convert these leads into sales. One idea that comes to mind would be to integrate an email autoresponder to convert these free listings into paid subscriptions.

We are currently only operating in the following markets:
- Atlanta
- Chicago
- Columbus
- Dallas
- Detroit
- Hartford
- Houston
- Las Vegas
- Los Angeles
- Miami
- Orange County
- Philadelphia
- Phoenix
- San Francisco

Expansion should be easy since salesmen work on commission, so they don't get paid unless you're profiting. You can hire able salesmen from DigitalPoint, Craigslist, etc.

These primary 14 markets alone are already generating us $20,000-$25,000 net profit per month. You can imagine how much money you'll be making by expanding into other metropolitan areas such as Seattle, NYC, etc.

We recently executed an agreement with GLAM Media, the premier distributed media company focused on content relevant to women. This partnership will bring us premium advertisers, increased visitors, and branding power which means greater revenue streams! Our top competitor is making $150,000 per month through GLAM alone. We get a $6 CPM from GLAM, so increasing the traffic and SEO efforts will have a substantial impact on profits (details on that later). Serious emphasis should be put into taking advantage of such a rare and high-paying CPM offer.

If you wish, you can also expand to international markets. For instance, we are only operating in a small number of US cities right now. We have yet to create a noteworthy presence in "super cities" like NYC, or other large cities outside the USA like London, Paris, Vancouver, and so forth. The biggest idea that comes to mind right now is the China market. Internet business in the China market is largely untapped, and you would be keen to dominate this booming market with billions of citizens before any competition develops.

Search Engine Optimization has been neglected as our focus was on offline marketing. We have a "natural" PageRank 5 meaning we have not done any actual work to increase our PageRank. If you get #1 on Google for important keywords, that means FREE long-term advertising for you, and, obviously, I don't need to go over how much this can endlessly benefit you in the long run. The main hurdle keeping this site from making $100,000/month net or higher is the lack of time devoted to SEO. The biggest mistake we made in the past was focusing too much on promoting to offline businesses versus establishing stronger search engine rankings and traffic. Our competitors' multi-million dollar businesses and their success are 100% attributed to their search engine visibility.

Previously, we had been pre-occupied with offline marketing mediums. We had marketers in call centers, and this was very expensive. We have invested almost no money in SEO, and we're just now starting to look towards SEO/PPC. We have someone who has been doing extensive research for our PPC campaign, and he's building a list of long-tail keywords and researching how to lower our CPC. This is very important as we feel having someone who is lowering our CPC to about 5-10 cents per click is very valuable in the long run, and our investment in this "long-run" research can be provided to the new owner. Essentially, we have shifted our focus from offline to online. Our expenses have been cut considerably as a result. We feel someone who is knowledgable in online marketing will really be able to take this business over the top, as the SEO/PPC aspect is what will probably turn this business around from $20,000-$25,000/month to maybe $100,000/month net.

We are also under-financed. We do not have the budget to compete with our competitors. In fact, we don't even know exactly how much we need to spend in terms of marketing (we're researching that as we speak though). As a result, this business has not been growing at the pace we would like. We have been conservative and calculating in our expenditures. A buyer with large cash reserves will be able to drive a much more aggressive marketing campaign than we can and bring in significantly more revenue.

The reason I think this is a good investment for anyone that has the money is the simple fact people are moving from "offline" to "online." For instance, our salesmen advertise the benefits of having a listing with us on our online website. This benefits the businesses in question because while most brick-and-mortor businesses are using mediums such as the Yellow Pages which costs around $800/month, people are not really using the Yellow Pages anymore (not to mention our offer only costs them a mere $50-$100/month). Instead, people are much more likely to use Google to find what they want. In fact, a poll by "USA Today" showed that more than 80% of the 2 million+ couples that married in 2001 (7 years ago) used the internet to plan their wedding.

So as you can see, not only is the site and revenue itself growing, but the market itself is growing. Everything is moving online, and the value of this website will only go UP unlike most of the websites you buy that will constantly depreciate. With our business model, you have salesmen responsible for EXPANDING while the market itself is naturally EXPANDING. By hiring commissioned salesmen, their income is dependent on how much they help you expand.

Also, the wedding niche is RECESSION-PROOF. Don't worry too much about the economy because people will always be looking to get married.

This website and market will only grow and expand. It's inevitable. More and more people are looking to the internet for their wedding arrangements. This niche is moving more and more towards the internet. Wedding businesses understand this, and whatever you sell to them will end up being an EASY sale.

Right off the bat with your investment, you will have $25,000-$30,000/month recurring subscription revenue to work with. All you have to do is seek out new subscribers and your income will continue to grow. Since we have low search visibility compared to our top competitors and we haven't focused on SEO at all until recent months (no SEO/PPC campaign launched yet, only researched thus far), anyone that knows what they are doing should be able to dramatically increase the revenue within a short timespan with a small amount of SEO or PPC traffic boosts. Also, expanding the marketing to areas such as NYC, London, Seattle, Paris, China, and so many other markets can easily make this a multi-million dollar business (our competitors' multi-million dollar businesses are a testament to just how much money can be made in this industry). We're already making well into the 5 figures every month operating only in 14 markets. Just think about the size and magnitude of markets such as NYC and China, and you'll have an idea of just how tremendously you can expand profits.

Once again, you're looking at a $25,000+/month net profit automated website. Opportunities like these are few. Unfortunately, we've been unable to sell this site for a few months now due to the fact most buyers do not have the funds. Most of the bids we've received so far have been tire kickers.

So if you are serious about buying this website, let me know if you have further questions. I am open to a financing plan wherein you make a down payment and pay a monthly percentage of the income until the full price has been paid off. However, down payment should be reasonable considering the monthly income. Minimum down payment we will even entertain (not accept) is $100,000. Minimum down payment we will accept is $200,000. If you can only come up with $100,000 down, you must either be able to take out a loan or be open to partnering with another potential buyer offering $100,000 down so your combined down payments reach our $200,000 down price. Tax returns can be shown when we meet in person.

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