How to Sell Your Website?

Buying and selling website with content, domain and apps is a popular business. This field is occupied with brokers who handle bulk buy / sell orders as a profession business. It is difficult task for individual site owners to find an appropriate seller and transfer the complete site. In this article we will discuss how to initiate the selling of your website and find a suitable seller.

Evaluate Your Website

Before thinking of selling your site, the first important thing you should be aware of is the approximate worth of your website. There are many online tools available to calculate the estimated worth of a website. The general rules are simple:

• Traffic data – number of unique visits per month is an important factor to judge the worth a site. It is important to have Google Analytics integration on the site to prove the traffic data to the seller.
• Search engine or organic traffic – everyone prefer organic traffic from search engines. The more the referral and direct traffic the less the value of your website. So ensure to have a decent presence in search engines before trying to sell your site.
• Advertising revenue – if you have general blogging site, then the only revenue you can generate is through advertising programs like Google AdSense. This is also an indication that your site is in good standing status with Google so that the seller can implement his / her ad code without worrying much.
• Ecommerce or product offering – if you are selling an ecommerce site then the target seller could be of different type altogether. Because they need to further support the products you already sold as well as continue concentrating on new sales. List down the value of all your products and the historical sales you made at least for six months of time.

The other factors like Alexa rank, Google PageRank and traffic from United States / UK are considered to increase the worth of your website.

Display “For Sale” Banner

Once you have an expected value of your site then start displaying an ad banner to show your interest of selling the site. It can be a top notification bar driving the users to a detailed sale page. List down the following information in details on the sale page:

• The purpose and scope of your site.
• The reason for selling the site.
• Traffic and revenue data.
• After sales support details.
• Email and contact form to get in touch with you.

Finding a Marketplace for Selling

If your site is relatively new, then displaying banner may not help much as there will be less buyers reading your content. The best way is look for marketplaces to put your site on auction. Flippa.com is one of best marketplace for selling your site formally to the interested buyer.

Register for a new account and get an evaluation for your site as a first step. Flippa group the sites into two categories:

• Established sites – older than 3 months sites with traffic and revenue data.
• Starter sites – less than 3 months sites with no or less traffic and revenue.

You have two ways to sell a website – on public auction or through a classified listing. Public auction will cost you $19 and $9 for established site and starter site respectively. Classified listing is free but may take longer time to get a suitable buyer.

On top the auction fee, the seller also needs to pay a success fee of 10% of the sale.

Factors Behind Website Sales

Besides finding a seller there are many other hidden factors involved in this process which makes it very difficult to strike a deal:

• Price of domain – if your domain is expiring soon then the buyer needs to renew it which is a hidden cost for the buyer. Also the domain needs to be transferred to the buyer account at first.
• Cost of hosting – often overlooked is the cost of hosting a website. As a seller you need to clearly specify your current hosting plan and the support for transferring your site to other hosting companies.
• Email accounts – any email accounts linked to the domain and hosting should also be transferred. If you use Google Apps for business then mention this clearly as it needs additional cost for continuing.
• Content and design – sites having duplicate content and selling affiliate links will not have much value on the marketplace. If you have unique content then the buyer needs to update it continuously to keep the search engine ranking and traffic.
• Theme and Plugins – premium plugins and theme used on the site might have been sold under single license to seller. This will be additional cost for buyer to maintain the theme and plugins in order to run the site.

Conclusion

Building a website is a passion and should not be a time pass activity. It also needs investment of lot of time and money to bring the site into a decent shape. But when there is a situation to sell your website, it is rather more difficult than building a site. As an individual site owner with limited traffic, you may not be able to get the right price for your site in public bidding. If you decided to sell your site then prepare well before with the expected sale amount, provide all necessary details to the bidders and wait for suitable strike price to complete the sale. Though the selling process looks difficult, definitely it is possible to sell a good website on the marketplace for good value.