After a brief break Lee Dodd, Elite Retreat Cofounder was up to talk about building communities (i.e., forums) and buying and selling web properties.

- Lee has purchased websites totalling several hundred thousand dollars.
- Last year, through Lee’s various communities, generated over $1 million last year.

LEE DODD ON ACQUIRING WEBSITE PROPERTIES:

- Lee uses Sitepoint to purchase web sites.
- Lee does both (buying and selling) on a regular basis. For instance, on Friday Lee sold a forum that he bought for $4,500 for $27,500. What’s cool about this particular sale is that Lee acquired the website just three months ago - almost $25K in three months is nice.
- Lee says when selling a web property a key is full disclosure - how was traffic acquired (paid / SEO), when was it established, what’s the Page rank, use screen shots,
- Lee says SitePoint costs $20 (basic listing fee) and can be as high as $65 - in other words, very inexpensive.
- Lee talks about the very fast-paced nature of buying and selling web domains (properties)
- Lee says he uses SitePoint, DigitalPoint and his own property EarnersForum to buy and sell web properties.

- Lee mentions another website called WebHostingTalk - he says it’s a source for a range of things, including buying and selling domains.
- Lee mentions BizBuySell as another source for buying and selling.
- Lee says that two of the more important things he looks for is traffic and incoming links. He stresses that PageRank is not on the top of his list.

Not surprisingly, Lee is getting tons of Q’s from attendees - he is a real expert here and it’s pretty phenomenal to think that you can buy a website for X and then sell it for mega profits just a few months or a year or so later.

- Lee talks about the various ways to monetize web properties.
- Lee encourages attendees to really think about their goals when buying and selling web properties.

- Lee suggests that monetization is not his main motive - he believes in building the community.
- When Lee purchases a web property for under $5K he uses PayPal and escrow.com for sales over $5K.
- Lee said that he doesn’t only purchase web communities..

LEE DODD ON BUILDING COMMUNITIES:

- For starters, if you don’t like people, Lee says running forums is not for you.
- Lee said running forums is very fun and can be extremely profitable.
- Lee and one of the attendees who is part owner of a major forum talk about the benefit of user generated content, which search-engines love.
- Lee talks about needing to create a team when launching a community (he refers to this as a “Launch team”) - you just can’t do it alone. There are companies you can pay, but it general Lee doesn’t recommend that. He suggested that building a team of trusted people (friends / family) works well.
- Lee said it’s important to control how many forums you have within your community.

- Lee references one of his popular communities, EarnersForum.com, where he held a contest in combination with the launch of the website - he gave away over $20K in prizes and promoted the contest through the blogosphere.
- The best volunteer is someone who is loyal and active.

LEE DODD ON MONETIZING COMMUNITIES:

- Adsense / YPN
- CPM (Tribual Fusion, Value Click, Casell, Burst Media)
- CPA / Affiliate (works best on niche forums - i.e., Lee mentions his guitar community).
- Sponsorships / Private Advertisers
- Text Link sales
- Subscriptions / Premium Memberships (i.e., EarnersForum.com).
- AuctionAds
- Intellitext

Lee opens it up to Q & A.

NEXT UP - ME. I’m gonna talk about affiliate marketing and search arbitrage. Unfortunately, I can’t LIVE blog my own forum! However, I’m expecting to blog my reflections on the entire conference. Also - I may potentially do video on Guy Kawasaki’s keynote, which comes up after my presentation.

I hope you enjoyed my LIVE blogging of Elite Retreat - San Francisco. This was an amazing conference and I strongly consider you attend one of our future conferences later this year. (Orlando / May 2007, Chicago / July 2007, Phoenix / September, Dallas / November). CLICK HERE to learn more.

Wendy from eMoms is also blogging the event and Darren and Jeremy also put out posts.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, search-engine marketing, affiliate marketing, internet marketing, Elite Retreat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.