How to sell your website effectively
[ November 1st, 2008 ] Posted in » Webmastering
Written by: Derek
Selling a website is probably the same as selling any other things that you could have thought of. The golden rule is just “to convince” that your website is worth that price that you are selling for. I could still remember that time when i sold my first website, which is a couple of years ago, i was totally a noob. I knew nuts about how to get buyers, how to price it, and most importantly, how to convince the potential buyers to buy your website. In this blog post today, i will be sharing some of my experiences in the process of selling a website and i hope this post will eventually helps some of you out there.
There are many reasons why people sell their website. Here’s a couple of common reasons.
- They are tired of the website niche. ( No interest)
- Their main objective of creating a website is to sell it when it’s established. ( To make money )
- They may be in need of funds urgently for personal or business purposes.
- They have no time to manage the website, may be due to reasons like studying, exams, work.
So assuming that you want to sell your website. The very first thing that you should do, is to work out your target. How much do you want your website to be sold? Are you making a profit from your investment. Some factors that determine the worth of your website consist of,
- Current google pagerank
- Number of quality backlinks ( Check yahoo site explorer)
- Alexa Ranking ( This tool is crap, but you can use it to determine the number of traffic. If a website has thousands of unique daily and has a alexa ranking of 20 million, you know something is wrong.
- The amount of traffic the site gets monthly.
- The amount of revenue generated from the website.
- The type and niche of website.
- How revenue is earned from the website.
- Is the website using a custom developed/ designed script?
- The SERPS of the website. Is the website ranked highly for certain market keywords?
- Level of particpation of the users.
- More..
I would recommend you to document all the above information in advance before selling your website. All these information are the common questions probably from potential buyers and will really save you ton lots of time. However, please set realistic goals. If you have a website that is making $50 monthly, try not to set your target selling price to $1000, 000. Who will probably buy it? Unless you have the “WOW” factor in it.
After determining the worth of your website, the next step that you do is to set your starting bid, the bin and reserve price, increment bid. If you do not know the above terms, do not panick.
Below is the definition.
Starting / Minimum Bid - The start bid to get the auction going on. So let’s say your starting bid is $100, buyers will have start the bid from $100 minimum.
BIN - Short term for ” Buy it now”, i am sure no other explanation is needed.
Reserve Price - This is the price set to protect the sellers. This means that the seller will not sell the website till the reserve is met. So imagine your reserve is $2000, after the auction ends, the highest bid that you get is $1000, so reserve price is not met and you can chose not to sell your website.
Increment Bid - If the increment bid is set to $50, the first buyer bid $100, the next buyer will have to bid $150 ( increase by $50) and so on.
Getting proof of the metrics of the website is also another neccessary thing that you should do if you are serious about selling your website. You could have say your website makes $500000 per month, but how do the seller know? Getting the metrics documented is to “convince” the buyers. Remember, the key factor to sell a thing is “to convince”.
So now you have all the necessary things ready. The next step is just to list your website to get potential buyers. There are many places that you can sell your website, i would recommend digitalpoint.com and sitepoint.com. You can try other methods also, such as emailing competitors website. For example, If you are selling a hosting business, bigger players will be interested to buy your business to increase their client’s base.
Next, just sit back and wait for bids. If the website you selling has good metrics, i am pretty sure you would get bids coming in. The last thing that you will worry about will most probably be the payment methods.
- Paypal ( Would recommend for transaction below $3,000. Fees are expensive for big transaction).
- Check / Wire transfer
- Moneybookers
- Western Union
- Escrow.
I hope this post give you a heads up on selling a website, and if you sell a website following the tips successfully, be sure to email to tell me so.
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