Matt Coddington

The closest you can ever get to predicting the future is by coming up with an educated guess. Even then, at the end of the day, it’s just a guess.

This time of year is exciting for me. It’s draft time. Soon I’ll find out whether or not the Cowboys will finally fix their weak secondary or if the Panthers will finally get a decent complement to Steve Smith. But I digress.

With draft time comes the mock draft. The mock draft is as far from an exact science as you can be, but then again so is online business. Predicting the draft is tough, and so is predicting the next big online earning avenue or niche. Here’s why.

Writers try to take in so many factors when coming up with a mock draft to make it as accurate as possible. They look at overall performance, year-over-year improvements, combine numbers, and personality. They take this all over the place data and try to quantify it and put a value on each player.

Analyzing a new online business is similar. Rarely you’ll find specific data that will tell you exactly what you will earn with each site you produce. Sure you can take certain data - competition, total searches (estimated traffic from those searches), growth trend, available monetization methods, etc. But at the end of the day, it’s an educated guess.

Even the pros make big mistakes with their draft picks (*cough* Leaf *cough*). But that doesn’t stop them. They do the best they can with the information available.

They make the call on draft day and wait for results. If they’re good they continue - if they’re bad they cut it and move on.

Food for thought.

I’m not sure if it’s just me or if it’s a more widespread habit, but I tend to watch over my projects long after they’ve changed hands forever. I like to see my sites succeed even after they no longer belong to me. Unfortunately, that rarely happens. Most buyers in today’s online market are lured in with promises from the occasional article in the business section of their local newspaper heralding a home-town star making $100,000/mo online. They think it’s easy money.

But I digress. This isn’t about buyers in general, but about the buyers who are now running what I used to run.

Forum Rank - http://www.forumrank.net

This was my first project of 2007, and probably the most ambitious (at least at the start). The idea behind the site is simple but very complex at the same time. It is a forum ranking system, similar to Big-boards.com but with a much more sophisticated algorithm powering it. The algorithm weighed various options rather than size alone such as average users online at a given time, average registrations per day, etc. It made it so that fast-growing forums could compete in rankings with monster forums.

This project is where I learned that a good product is only about 15-20% of creating a successful website. Despite the work I put into the site it garnered little to no interest. No support. But that’s the way things go.

I sold the site a few months later for a few thousand profit to a British fellow. He hasn’t done anything with it since. A shame.

Net Business Blog - http://www.netbusinessblog.com

NBB was really just an experiment to see if I could dazzle the “make money online” sheep the way gurus had. It worked. People enjoyed it. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize how much of a drain it can put on you when the vast majority of your audience is a mindless zombie, buying into any and every easy money idea they can get their hands on. Sure NBB had a lot of quality readers with strong input and a good head. But of NBB’s readers were just DP kids pushing their turnkey sites and CPA scams. So I sold.

The sale went fine (was the most I ever made from a single site sale) and since the buyer had eCommerce experience I thought it was going to be in great hands. Unfortunately the site has grown zilch since the sale and from what I can gather, the income is in the pooper. A shame.

Creep Colony - http://www.creepcolony.com

Now we finally get to a success story. Creepcolony.com was your standard gaming fansite (based on StarCraft). Due to the fact that SC2 is really not going to be very good, I decided to sell. I just can’t run a site unless I’m passionate about it. Anyways, some young fella bought it and man did he hit the ground running.

Since the sale he has totally revamped the forums, had a very successful contest, and seemingly doubled traffic. That’s awesome!

I did more in 2007, but these were the biggest I guess. They’re all I can remember right now at least.

If any readers out there have some more success stories of what has become of their sites after sale, I’d love to hear them!