2018 is almost over, so we would like to thank all our members for sticking with us and allowing us to thrive. Before we start nagging you with boring stats, we would like to wish you a happy new year party and a prosperous 2019 (and beyond). Stay healthy and wealthy!
How did SWAPD do in 2018? Here are our accomplishments and stats!
We’ve been opened for +/- 20 months now.
4m page views since we’ve opened our doors.
We currently average around 210K page views per month.
We average around 13k private (user to user) messages per month.
We have 3600 members (of which 800+ are banned/suspended)
Our mobile apps have over 500 installs, with around 300 active users.
We had over 4000 listings come through our doors.
We’ve closed over 400 transactions this year.
The lowest transaction was for 10 USD.
The highest transaction was for 45,000 USD.
Currently, we’re averaging 50,000 USD in sales volume per month.
Our database takes up 3.9 GB.
Users with most sales (it’s a tie at 15 sales each) are @Hussey and @md1986.
Most tickets (90%) get an initial response time of 5 minutes or less.
We survived a negative SEO campaign against our website! (Dirty competition or a disgruntled employee)
It’s not always pretty, though. We’ve had some really dead months. However, the past 3-4 months things are really picking up fast and the stats are growing faster than ever. We’re are also happy to say that SWAPD no longer fully relies on ViralAccounts (our sister site) to be alive. While we still funnel most of our VA leads here, the website is getting enough organic activity to where it should self sustain, which is another great milestone.
What’s in store for 2019?
We’re planning to make starting tickets easy for non-tech savvy clients. We realize forums aren’t most user-friendly platforms for buying/selling. But at this point, we’re rolling with our setup and instead of switching platforms, we will try to improve this one. In a week or two, we will introduce a super easy way to start tickets, so outsiders have an easy understanding of how to make a sale. It will make sales super easy to understand, even for unregistered users.
We will finally introduce auctions. Yes, I know. I’ve been promising that for a while, but we will make it happen in 2019.
We will open a currency exchange shop. Need PayPal to BTC? No problem, we can arrange that for you. Need bank wire to PayPal? No problem too.
We plan to make tickets easier, by adding things like custom fields for giving admins the credentials without the need of starting a new PM.
We plan to make ID verifications easier on new users (by creating an automated wizard).
We plan to add a clear fee calculator, so new members can understand easily what the charges are for, and how much they are.
In mid-June, we plan to change our tax classification so EU companies no longer have to worry about VAT.
And finally, we plan to pump money into advertising our service. We want to increase our sales volume up to 100K per month, that is our goal for 2019. In order to do that, more people need to hear about SWAPD. We will start an active campaign to make SWAPD a household name in the field of buying/selling social media assets.
We are also considering dropping the SWAPD fee a few points for all members, but that will depend on whether we reach our 100K (sales volume) per month goal. If yes, we plan to drop our fee to 8% for regular members, and 7% for VIP. We want to share our success with you, so if we keep doing good, so will our members. Thanks again to each and every one of you (except the banned members). I wish you a happy new year and thank you for using SWAPD!
Just wanted to add that on average, around 60-70% of tickets are never completed, mostly due to bad audits or a change of mind during checkout. SWAPD staff does a lot of legwork to get a sale closed. Currently, it’s not uncommon for an admin to juggle 10-14 tickets at a time.
A large number of tickets are related to properties not even listed on SWAPD. People come here from outside to do their deals here.
We’re noticing a trend of people shying away from PayPal (too expensive) and moving to TransferWise and BTC payments.
Oh, and one more thing. Scams really are at a all time low on SWAPD compared to when we started. I guess the regular scammers who kept trying to game our system finally gave up, and fraudsters aren’t such a common occurance anymore. We don’t keep track of wronged people, but I am willing to bet it’s less than 10-15, and in 90% of cases we’ve helped each and everyone to the best of our ability. Whether it was getting the property back, refunds, giving away freebies, to helping file police reports. Don’t get us wrong, we still catch many fraudsters, it’s just the numbers have gone down significantly, which makes us very happy! This is also thanks to you all, as many members here help us actively pursue known scammers, by cross checking data on other sites that do what we do. Literally half of the people we ever bust on scams were caught thanks to the collaboration of STAFF and other honest users who help us thwart these attempts.
SWAPD truly is a community that looks out for each other. Thank you to all the members who keep reporting suspicious activity and help us bust scammers.
SWAPD already does better than VA, mainly because:
I’ve neglected VA ever since SWAPD opened. I still send almost ALL leads to SWAPD.
Since the Fanpage prices crashed due to all these major FB changes this year, sales came to a crawl.
Not only did I neglect the sales part of it, but I also let the site go SEO wise. On top of that, someone negative SEO’d our website and actually got it fully deindexed. It took me a month to get back on Google, but the rankings haven’t been the same since then. But, nothing of value was lost during the down period, as Fanpages crashed anyway, and they amounted for 90% of our sales volume.
But, two months ago I’ve said I would rebuild the stats, and I’ve started working on VA again. In the two months, traffic is starting to spike, so things are looking good: https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/viralaccounts.com
All it took is a subscription to SEMRush.com and good old-fashioned hard work. VA is getting more leads now, and just like SWAPD, the stats keep growing. Hopefully, the sales will resume soon because as of now, we maybe host 3-5 auctions per month (on a GOOD month). Last year we were doing 5-6 actions per week. So, VA is not dead yet (we’re actually in the middle of the biggest potential sale on VA totaling 1m USD, hopefully it will work out), but I have a long road ahead of me to rebuild it back to the way it was.
I also have to admit that I’ve gotten a tad lazy and I am unwilling to track down and negotiate good properties like I’ve used to on VA. Every time I get a good lead but a difficult seller, I just give up and send him to SWAPD instead of negotiating. Let you all deal with him (I am talking about sellers who want ungodly amounts for their properties, I just don’t have the willpower to explain to them anymore).
Sorry, forgot to answer this. I will have to contact our hosting provider admins, as our software doesn’t show this metric from our end. Discourse (the software this site runs on), is complicated to use. This is why we use a managed hosting provider, they basically do all the work for us, but we aren’t able to see the back end of things. But our SEMRush panel is showing us 7-12K uniques per month, depending on the month (SEM pulls the data from Google, so it’s accurate).
SEMRush is FANTASTIC. I basically used their “do this to improve rankings” tool, followed each point, and poof, rankings improved. Now everyone can be a SEO expert for 99 USD per month.
That’s what I’ve heard too, but people say their strong point is mainly backlinking. SEMRush (supposedly) is a better rounded, all-in-one tool. I’ve used Ahrefs briefly but for some reason liked SEMRush better. I guess they both pretty much do the same so it’s a matter of PC vs MAC type of thing
My main job is affiliate and SEO, and I have all I need with Ahrefs. People say that only because SEMrush has affiliate and they can grab commission
But that is not the point of this topic
ID’s will still get approved manually, just the whole process will be less painful for users/staff. And glad you had a great time here! Thank you for your kind words.
I’m truly excited for the upcoming year and have high hopes for the site taking off with all the hard work of both members and staff! Its been an amazing experience so far!
Sidenote: Really liking the sound of that currency exchange shop, can’t wait for that to be introduced!
Have been pushing for a long time although mediums are very limited especially after Facebook Ban. But still a lot more platforms are there to get robust exposure.
fk yeah
people here bug me a lot about BTC. and i hate BTC.
looking forward to these services
we def need more sellers here.
i’m still looking for some deals on things i joined here for
oh, and what about some stats from there? just curious
(I am talking about sellers who want ungodly amounts for their properties, I just don’t have the willpower to explain to them anymore).