Today I’ve gone ahead with my plan to list AdvisorTweets.com for sale on Flippa.com. Here’s the link: https://flippa.com/145875-financial-niche-site-with-break-out-potential-pr3-extra-domains

Flippa is the world’s largest marketplace for Websites and I think it’s the right place to cast the broadest net. It is one big tent, however, so if you check it out, please don’t be put off by the lower-quality sites that dominate the listings.

Thanks to some feedback I was given last week, the site will be offered as a private sale—meaning that bidders and bids will not be disclosed. There will be no sequential bidding such as you see on the public sale auctions, and no one but the buyer and seller will know what the site sold for.

In a private sale, bidders are asked to simply submit their best offer. The seller has 72 hours to react. Acceptance of an offer ends the sale. Alternatively, in the absence of an accepted offer, the sale ends when the sale time expires, which will be one week from today.

For more information, please see Flippa’s explanation of the difference between a public auction and a private sale. In essence, I’m using the Flippa infrastructure to surface interest and process bids in lieu of having to develop my own ad hoc process.

And, although some of it is repetitive from last week’s post, what follows is the listing in its entirety:

Financial Niche Site With Break-out Potential, PR3, Extra Domains

This site’s modest traffic and lack of revenue belie its current authority (including #1 position in Google for “social media regulation” and #7 ranked personal finance Twitter account) and the value and potential of the site to serve as a social media magnet for financial advisors and those interested in what financial advisors are thinking, in real-time.

Background

Included among the millions of Twitter accounts are accounts that belong to U.S.-based financial advisors (i.e., SEC and FINRA-regulated registered investment advisers, financial planners and registered representatives) using Twitter to share perspectives on the economy, investing and personal finance. The availability of Twitter and other social media self-publishing tools came along just at the right time for financial advisors eager to build their personal brands and share what they know in the wake of the market and economic collapse of 2008-2009.

Advisors use Twitter to call attention to what they’re thinking and saying on their blogs, Facebook pages, YouTube channels, etc. AdvisorTweets heightens the visibility of advisors using social media. The site offers:

• Curation—We follow only U.S.-based financial advisors using Twitter for a business purpose. This provides a useful content stream and provides a level of assurance to potential sponsors or advertisers. Each advisor included in the database has his or her own profile page.
• Aggregation—The AdvisorTweets stream includes tweets from advisors with a range of experience and specialization, representing a variety of firms. The aggregation yields the trending topics and tags that provide a (navigable) snapshot of what’s being discussed and by whom. Listings of the advisors by state enable another way of filtering the tweets.
• A searchable archive with more than one year’s worth of advisor-only tweets.

AdvisorTweets provides a window into the pace of social media adoption for the thousands of others in the investment business that remain on the sidelines, pending their firms’ development of social media strategies, policies and procedures and enabling technologies. The site is visited by domains representing Wall Street and Main Street money management firms, media seeking to source advisors and other financial services providers.

For more about why the site was created, see this blog post.

Growth potential

The site launched in September 2009 following about 70 advisors and today follows 565 mostly independent advisors. Financial firms’ adoption of social media has been on lockdown, pending regulatory guidance and firms’ establishment of policies and procedures. This is changing. Guidance is in place and firms are moving forward, as suggested by these datapoints:

• Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, the country’s largest wirehouse firm, becomes the first major wealth management firm to announce that its 17,800 broker force will be given access to Twitter and LinkedIn (May 25, 2011). See the AdvisorTweets blog post.
• The CEO of Raymond James, one of the country’s largest broker-dealer, confirms that its 5,300 financial advisors will be “actively participating” on Twitter, Facebook and other social sites (May 2, 2011). See the AdvisorTweets blog post.
• Charles Schwab survey reports that advisors consider social media the new frontier (August 2010). See the AdvisorTweets blog post.

Unique value

Advisors with Twitter accounts recognize that their inclusion on AdvisorTweets.com contributes to overall awareness of their online presence, particularly on the state listing pages (which have been under-leveraged). In addition, many are interested in what other advisors have to say but don’t want to explicitly include other advisors among the Twitter accounts they follow. Those who pick and choose advisors from this aggregation to build their own Twitter list still value the AdvisorTweets archive.

The vast majority of investment firms and advisors today do not have Twitter accounts. Many will never have Twitter accounts—even once their Compliance officers approve the activity, some are not interested in initiating their own activity. They are interested, however, in what other advisors are saying. For these “shadow” advisors, AdvisorTweets is an increasingly useful reference site.

There are some sites published by the media and vendors that describe advisors’ social media activities, but no site puts the advisors and what they’re saying front and center.

AdvisorTweets enjoys the support of the financial advisor ecosystem. See the AdvisorTweets Twitter account followers, names of Twitter lists the account is added to and read the comments to the blog posts. My hope is that this sale will identify a buyer that will enhance what’s delivered to the advisors and early users of the site.

Other recognition/acknowledgement includes:

• @AdvisorTweets’ appearance on more than 150 Twitter lists–most of which are personal finance-related– ranks it as Sulia’s #7 most followed personal finance Twitter account
• In January 2011, AdvisorTweets is cited in an SEC sweep letter in which the SEC is seeking documentation that identifies adviser’s involvement with or usage of

“social media web sites, including, without limitation: Facebook; b. Twitter, including, without limitation, AdvisorTweets.com; c.LinkedIn; d. LinkedFa e.YouTube f. Flickr g. MySpace h. Digg i. Reddit; RSS and j. Blogs and micro-blogs.” See the AdvisorTweets blog post.

• AdvisorTweets named a Killer Startup, September 2009
• AdvisorTweets singled out by keynote speaker futurist Gerd Leonhard at the Financial Planners Association (FPA) Business Solutions 2011 conference. See the AdvisorTweets blog post.
• AdvisorTweets included among five great resources for financial planners on the Financial Planners Association (FPA) Practice Management blog

Why am I selling?

It may seem counterintuitive that I am selling the site just as I believe it’s on the brink of break-out growth. But I started the site as a proof of concept. My business is not Web site development and I don’t sell any services to financial advisors. Growth of the AdvisorTweets database will drive added traffic to the site, raise visibility and interaction, I can say with certainty and confidence. But for me it will represent a distraction from Rock The Boat Marketing, my digital marketing strategy consulting business. A buyer should be able to leverage the potential that I have been building toward.

Who might this appeal to?

I can think of four potential buyer types:

• A media company that seeks to support an online community where advisors are front and center. A publisher might combine AdvisorTweets as a subdomain or subdirectory to its own site as a means of offering a social media awareness opportunity to advertisers.
• A business or organization that seeks to tap into the industry’s high interest in social media by aligning itself with a social ecosystem that includes not just financial advisors but also financial services service providers.
• An individual brokerage or planning firm seeking to use the AdvisorTweets domain and publishing platform to promote its own advisors’ tweets.
• An Internet-focused business seeking to earn off the site with the addition of sponsorships or text and display ads.

How much work is it?

In order to continue to grow, this site will require attention and marketing. Day-to-day publishing to the site is automated, via the Twitter API. Changes to the database are made at the convenience of the site manager. They are straightforward and follow a process that can be explained. Blog posts have been published at least once a week and can significantly drive traffic—more posts would drive more traffic. If the buyer doesn’t have writing resources available, I’m sure that a calendar of freelance and guest posts could be developed. The Twitter account will need to be used. I have limited the tweeting to weekdays and work-hours only, more tweeting could conceivably drive higher awareness.

Site assets

The site’s assets include:

• A publishing platform and account management admin capability built in PHP with some javascript.
• All files including html code and source code, a search capability, a searchable archive of more than a year’s worth of tweets and an admin capability for managing followers and report-running. The site is being sold as is.
• The WordPress blog and all files
• Three domain names—AdvisorTweets.com and AdviserTweets.com and CFPTweets.com (CFP = certified financial planner). The latter domains today redirect to AdvisorTweets.com.

Social media presence

Twitter account—1,905 followers follow @AdvisorTweets as of June 13

3 public Twitter lists:

• U.S. advisors—the first 500 followed–unfortunately, Twitter caps lists at 500 so post-500 advisors added to AdvisorTweets can be followed only on AdvisorTweets.com.
• Investment advisors—RIAs
• Financial planners—CFPs

Private lists tracking advisors from various firms will enable additional filtering.

• Google Page Rank (PR3)

• Facebook page (lightly used)

Revenue details

No attempt has been made to monetize the site. Here are some possibilities:

• Selling sponsorships
• The site’s use of widgets accommodates the introduction of advertising zones for targeting AdSense and banner ads. The state listings, too, might also be targeted.
• Email newsletter advertising
• Adding AdSense to the WordPress blog

Traffic details

Traffic is reported in two separate Google Analytics reports—one for the aggregation site and one for the WordPress blog. While the blog receives more visits (attributable to the fact that I tweet about the blog posts), the site has almost twice the page views. This is a site that visitors return to.

The traffic is 100% free and a result of a mix of:

• Direct (representing the growing awareness of “AdvisorTweets”)
• Campaigns (representing my use of Twitter to drive traffic to the blog posts)
• Search
  • 3,820 pages are indexed by Google
  • 19 organic keywords (Semrush.com) drive traffic to the site including the #1 position for social media regulation (see the extended due diligence data for this listing)
  • Referring sites (68 domains link to the site)

As can be seen in the verified Google Analytics documents, traffic in the first 5.5 months of 2011 is a significant improvement over the last six months of 2010. Visits to the site and blog combined are up 164%, views are up 161% and unique visitors are up 164%. My approach to the site hasn’t varied in the last six months. I attribute this growth to heightened interest, which will only build.

But while the general direction is positive and encouraging, the overall level of traffic is modest. Traffic is muted for these reasons:

• Relative low awareness, attributable to at least 1)It’s been widely assumed that regulations prohibit financial advisor participation 2)There has been no marketing of the site.
• Social media domains have been blocked by investment-related firms prior to their adoption of enabling policies and procedures. This is changing.
• My focus has been on a business-to-business use of the site. A new buyer might broaden its value to and use by consumers.

Because my goal was raising social media-using advisor visibility and not monetization, I made no express effort to drive traffic. In fact, I made two deliberate decisions that had the counter effect:

• Each advisor followed by the AdvisorTweets account (whose tweets were added to the aggregation that appears on AdvisorTweets.com) was also added to a public Twitter list. This enabled people to follow the list without needing to rely exclusively on the site.
• The AdvisorTweets Twitter account has been used to share content, especially related to financial advisors and social media and to support advisors new to Twitter. Its tweeting of AdvisorTweets.com content has been light, limited to a few times a week at most.

When an offer is accepted

Upon acceptance of the offer, my attorney will send the successful bidder a bill of sale to sign and return within 24 hours. The attorney will then follow up with a request for payment to be deposited in the law firm’s trust account. Payment will need to be made within 48 hours. The property transfer will begin immediately after funds are verified.

Thank you for your interest.

The Morningstar Investment Conference opened in Chicago today with PIMCO’s Bill Gross as the keynote. My apologies if the @AdvisorTweets account got too chatty. Gross is a quotable fellow with more than a few cautionaries about the economy and U.S. investing opportunities.

Here are a few additional notes from the conference’s first day. Use the #MIC2011 hashtag on Twitter to follow Thursday and Friday tweets from the conference.

A Precious Metals Play?

I had a moment of distraction while listening to Gross detail the burden of the mounting federal debt, negative real interest rates and financial repression. He has been talking about financial repression since May. Has anybody registered that domain, I wondered and then had to chuckle when I checked it out: Financialrepression.com redirects to SilverStockReports.com.

Non-U.S. Bonds, I Mean

As he has been for months, Gross was categorically negative on U.S. bonds. Toward the end of his remarks, he even named a few stocks that paid attractive dividend yields. Later in the Exhibit Hall, a friend of WiredAdvisor’s Steph Sammons showed the program Gross signed for him immediately after the keynote.

Steph twitpic-ed it and as you can see, old habits die hard—he’s still signing “Buy bonds.”

Investors Get The Best Treatment

In the session that followed, Morningstar’s Don Phillips said U.S. investors are treated better than any other investors in the world. He was referring to transparency and oversight and fees. But I was struck by the irony of that statement coming on the heels of Gross saying that U.S. Treasury investors were about “to get cooked like frogs” and their pockets picked.

“We’re telling investors to go overseas with their bond funds, their safe money,” noted CNBC’s Tyler Mathisen.

Meanwhile, What Was This All About?

While advisors were meeting in Chicago for the investment conference, the White House was hosting a Personal Finance Online Summit that got almost no advance publicity. Below here’s a look at the #PFOS tweets that were sent from what looks to have been an intimate get-together that included an update from Elizabeth Warren of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and even featured a drop-by by the President.

The tweeting gives us an idea of some of the online writers invited—there were representatives from Minyanville, Business Insider, Polycapitalist, Investor’s Business Daily and Consumer Reports. These are personal finance writers?

Earlier in the week, I wrote about the effect of social media participation in elevating financial advisors’ visibility online. To add a dose of reality from people who navigate personal finance challenges with their clients daily, a subsequent summit might consider a seat at the table for one of the blogging (and tweeting) advisors followed by AdvisorTweets.com.

On Monday, I announced that AdvisorTweets.com and its assets will be offered for sale via auction next week. For details, please see the AdvisorTweets blog post.

Next Tuesday I intend to take a step in a direction that I will hope will be positive for users of AdvisorTweets.com. I plan to offer the site, related domains (AdviserTweets.com and CFPTweets.com) and all assets for sale by auction. Update and clarification: The site will be offered as a private sale. This will enable an interested bidder to submit its best offer once and in private. The sale price will never be disclosed nor will the identities of other bidders.

Some Background

I started AdvisorTweets two years ago in my enthusiasm for finding advisors on Twitter and seeing the value in what many were saying. Included among the millions of Twitter accounts were accounts that belonged to independent U.S.-based financial advisors using Twitter to share perspectives on the economy, investing and personal finance and, increasingly, to network with one another.

From the site in 2009: A look at some of the earliest adopters

The availability of Twitter and other social media self-publishing tools came along just at the right time for these advisors eager to build their personal brands and share what they know in the wake of the market and economic collapse of 2008-2009. But because they were independent, the tweeting advisors lacked any home office or marketing support to amplify their work.

At first, I added each advisor account I found to a list that I was keeping on my desktop (this predated Twitter lists). Then I published the list on my Rock The Boat Marketing site. But I thought that I’d love to have somewhere to go to see and compare what advisors were actually tweeting—and I thought that others might value that, too.

AdvisorTweets.com was built not just as a labor of love but as a proof of concept. The site followed just 70-some advisors using Twitter for business when it launched in September 2009. Other independents followed, and name after name was carefully added to get to today’s database count of 570. The AdvisorTweetsOnDeck Twitter list tracks an additional 126 accounts.

Advisor Visibility Online

At the highest level, AdvisorTweets has been about advisors’ visibility online. Advisors’ tweets have provided a window to the early adopting advisors’ use of Twitter to comment and network—and to also call attention to their other social activities including blog posts, Facebook pages, YouTube videos, LinkedIn discussions, etc.

Today, advisors’ gravitation to social media as a low (hard) cost and high engagement marketing and communications channel seems undeniable, even by the regulators.

Policies and procedures are being developed along with enabling technologies being tested and implemented to comply with FINRA and SEC guidance. I share others’ views that the floodgates may soon fling wide open. Recent news about Morgan Stanley Smith Barney and Raymond James’ intentions alone may mean that the hundreds of business-purpose advisor Twitter accounts now tracked by AdvisorTweets could shoot into the thousands.

That is awesome. But I’m not the one to take this any further. This work has been an unmitigated pleasure, a career highlight. However, my involvement is without context—I run a digital marketing strategy consulting firm for asset management firms. I offer no services to financial advisors. Surely some other entity, possibly entrenched in the advisory world, could do a more effective job building and marketing an AdvisorTweets 2.0, which is overdue.

Casting A Wide Net

How would I extract myself? I pondered this a long time, I approached a handful of firms and I’ve finally concluded that an auction is the way to go.

I’ll admit to being a little uneasy about ceding the go-forward decision to the marketplace. The worst conceivable scenario, to me, would be to have to unplug AdvisorTweets.com altogether. My hope is that casting a wide net, such as what’s possible with an auction site, will identify someone or company that finds value in what’s here and can envision a direction that will be even more useful and robust.

Who might AdvisorTweets appeal to? I can think of four potential buyer types:

• A media company that seeks to support an online community where advisors are front and center. A publisher might combine AdvisorTweets as a subdomain or subdirectory to its own site as a means of offering a social media awareness opportunity to advertisers.
• A business or organization that seeks to tap into the industry’s high interest in social media by aligning itself with a social ecosystem that includes not just financial advisors but also financial services service providers. See HardAssetsInvestor.com for an example of how Van Eck uses a standalone Website to support investors’ interest in hard assets.
• An individual brokerage or planning firm seeking to use the AdvisorTweets domain and publishing platform to promote its own advisors’ tweets.
• An Internet-focused business seeking to earn off the site with the addition of sponsorships or text and display ads.

I expect the auction to start on Tuesday, June 14, and end on Tuesday, June 21.

If you have questions about AdvisorTweets between now and Tuesday, please send an email to info@advisortweets.com, which comes directly to me. Once the site is listed for auction, no communications can take place outside the auction site.

This isn’t the last you’ll be hearing from me at AdvisorTweets. The Morningstar Investment Conference is being held in Chicago this week (#MIC2011), and I’ll be tweeting (maybe even squeezing out a blog post) from there, courtesy of one of my early Twitter buddies Leslie Banks. I’ll post the link to the auction listing when it’s live. And once AdvisorTweets’ future is known, I’ll be back with the outcome.

It’s with a lump in my throat that I publish this post. My thanks to all of you, financial advisors and others in the ecosystem, for the support you’ve shown AdvisorTweets and for the friendship you’ve extended to me.