Is the RSGP trade even profitable for a newcomer anymore?

I'm not a gold seller nor flip gp etc, but I would like to state that if you're thinking to compete with them, you have to dedicate it full time.

I don't believe there are any large businesses that work full time, and run the company also as i personally don't believe that you'll be capable to cope with them.

 

1. I know you can get a good amount of sales from forums alone, but you'll need to cut your margins and compete against a bunch of different sellers. I used to own a gold selling site and was making a decent chunk of change every month from minimal effort on the forums. I am not denying that anyone can start and I am not saying that is too saturated. If you work hard and provide good deals, the volume you sell will make up for the smaller margins you make (one guy recently - problemas) is doing very well despite only starting the rsgp business this year.

2. I'm sorry but SEO is the only way a website will make any money. Sure, it'll give you a more official presence and scare some charge backers away, but in the end, you will not see any significant gains from having a site over keeping an updated forum post. Because of the investment required for SEO, I do not recommend ANY beginner to make a website and expect buyers to come flocking to it.

3. The SEO game in rs gold is exceptionally easy right now. Sure, you can run a churn and burn scheme and rank first page for the search terms for a couple months until Google changes their algorithm - you'll get slapped with a manual spam penalty. I'd estimate that a measly $500/month is all it takes to rank top 10 in google SERPS for rs gold. You can easily just make a new site and continue the SEO efforts once you get deranked. And for people with starting capital it would be almost impossible to get deranked in the first place because you have the funds to create a PBN. As long as you cover your footprints and buy quality domains, a PBN will allow you to rank forever.

In response to your claim that the AD on sythe costs a decent amount of money to justify the dofollow link, I'm pretty sure the sales that you get from sythe alone are enough to recoup that cost. The link power is just a cherry on top. I'm assuming you pay 1.5k/month for that banner? If so - I would bet anything that you are getting way more than that from organic visitors to your site.

 

What are you trying to prove exactly? All I'm getting is that Arcus makes a lot from ads.

 

http://www.sythe.org/general-discus...budget-attempting-become-big-gold-seller.html
My attempt at that

 

If having a website means reduced charge backs compared to accepting PayPal directly, to me that's considered a saving / making money.

Official presence = more customers over time = more money.

 

I don't like a market where your entire stock can be wiped at any time. Jagex will eventually discover that you are RWTing and drain your accounts' GP and flag your IP. I know their must be ways to lower the chance of a wipe (probably by investing in VPSs) but the risk is always there and can be crippling.

 

It'd be profitable, trades would be slower however because of a MM needing to be brought in for quite a while. Once you do 20-30 trades however it would be much easier.