How To Sell A Website - How Much Is Your Website Worth?
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It is a joyous time when you are ready to sell your website. While you will be fraught with questions and unknown variables when ultimately you decide to sell your website it can be like winning a jackpot and a big change to your life. You might have been building your web business for years, consistently working on it day after day and night after night. When it finally sells you get a (hopefully) big cash injection and move on to new projects feeling renewed and excited about your future prospects. But before this can happen you have to make the sale, which in and of itself is a tricky task.
I sold a website back in 2004 and at the time it was a pretty big deal for me. I had built the site for a hobby in 1998. It went through 3 different domain name and site name changes, at least 4 major design changes and I put in thousands of hours working on it over 7 years, but damn it was fun most of the time. Eventually it became time to move on and pass my baby on to new hands that would keep it growing and moving forward.
The funny thing was I didn’t really think about selling my site because it was making money so consistently. It had become so routine that it was just part of my life. One day it dawned on me - Why can’t I sell it? It produces revenue so has a value - let’s give it a go! I really wanted to move on to other projects and just the idea of not having to look after the site was a huge relief - I knew selling it was the right thing to do. But how on earth do you sell a website?
How To Sell A Website
I’m going to recount the processes I went through to sell my site. By no means should you consider what I did as hard and fast rules but they should give you some guidelines. Remember that there are many ways you can go about the process and you should explore all your options before deciding to sell.
How Much Is Your Site Worth?
Your site is worth as much as someone is willing to give you for it. Simple answer really. I know, that doesn’t help when you go out advertising a site for sale and everyone is asking how much you want for it and you don’t know what to say. You don’t want to undercut yourself especially after years of hard work, but then again, you are selling a website - virtual property - it just seems a little bit strange doesn’t it. That’s what my friends told me after I sold my site.
Friend: “You sold a website?!?”
Me: “Yeah”
Friend: “But a website isn’t anything, how did you get money for it?”
Me: “Well I took the average revenue the site was earning minus the costs of running the site and then multiplied by 2.5″
Friend: “Ahh, okay, well, umm, that’s great (walks off muttering about geeks…)”
As with traditional business, website business or even just a hobby site that brings in money, it’s hard to determine a selling price. What you need to consider are what you will be happy to walk away with and what the numbers tell you. Other variables that will come in to play are the industry your site operates in (competition too), how much labour and technical skill is required to manage the site, the costs (hosting, marketing, staff, etc), whether the business is growing and how fast, the future potential and whether the industry is a buyers or sellers market (supply vs demand). And that’s just part of it.
Some people will tell you a business should be sold for ten times it’s gross profit, or 5 times average revenue or 2 times last years total revenue. EBizBrokers state that generally an e-business website is worth three to six times earnings before interest and tax, so if your website profits are $100,000 you have an asset worth $300,000.
When I first decided to sell the figure of 2-3 times yearly revenue went through my head as a fair valuation given if the new owners kept things at least constant they would recoup the buy price in 2-3 years. I would be happy, very happy, to get that sort of price for my hobby site.
your site is worth how much someone is willing to give you…
In my case my website operated in an industry and had a target market that would be hard to extract much more revenue beyond what I already was getting from advertising. Yes it certainly was possible, but it would take a new income stream to make significant gains. My website operated in a small niche that would not present me with a lot of buyers - but you won’t really know demand until you try and sell of course.
I had a special personal consideration to think of as well, I didn’t want my site to go to just anybody, it had to go to someone that would look after it and keep the dream alive. I didn’t want some overseas buyer to absorb the site into their business and lose the great community that I had. The new owners had to share the passion I had when I first started and hopefully take the site to new heights. (In the end though I would have taken anything if I exhausted all options to find good owners - I wanted to walk away with something for my hard work even if it meant the site would die a slow death under new management. Yes this might sound heartless but I’m being honest and I didn’t really believe I would be forced to sell to a potentially bad owner.)
Preparing To Sell
The more information you can provide to potential buyers the better. Raw statistics are especially important to most buyers and if they don’t ask you for certain numbers then they don’t know what they are doing and are probably not really interested. You should prepare at least these figures:
- Your website traffic statistics including unique visitors (averages and totals), pageviews (averages and totals), growth rates over time, which countries they are from, how much traffic comes from search engines and direct bookmarks, which keywords your site is popular for and the PageRank of your site. I made available direct access to my log files with a statistics package like Awstats or Webalizer so serious buyers could get a good grasp on my site’s performance.
- Your financial figures. If you run a proper business then you should have these in some form of accounting package. The profit and loss statement is a popular choice for potential buyers but of course the more data you can provide the better. Because my site was a hobby I didn’t have any detailed bookkeeping records however I did record some figures including all the money advertisers had paid me for the last 18 months. I also had bills for expenses such as hosting and domain names and given those were the only costs and income for the site I provided those figures to serious buyers.
- You need a good sales spiel email letter introducing your website and you, your site’s history, why you want to sell your site, what your site offers to the new owner (current financial and future potential) and any other important factors. Don’t give away your asking price up front but certainly make note of the important factors, such as traffic figures and if your site is profitable.
Most web servers come with a statistics package. Ask your web host if you don’t know. The most common are Awstats (demo) and Webalizer (demo) which often are preinstalled on many hosting packages. Become familiar with these packages so you can accurately assess your site traffic.
Finding Buyers
Once you have decided a rough figure you would be happy with you can head out and find buyers and see how much demand there is. With my 2-3 times revenue figure firmly planted in my mind as a goal to work for I went off to find a buyer.
Searching Your Industry
My initial thoughts were to find a local buyer in my home country (my site was focused on the Australian marketplace). I figured the best place to start would be the retail outlets that sold products that my market was using. I emailed all the stores I could find contact details for, some of which I had already established relationships with because they advertised on my site. I also emailed some of the largest overseas online stores and websites that I thought I should at least notify that I was looking for a buyer to get some interest going.
When you first head out to find buyers you should look to contact individuals that will understand the value of your site because they will be the easiest to sell too (they won’t need to be “taught” about your marketplace). They will also be the most excited about the prospect because most likely they already sell to the same target market and you will be bringing them a lot of potential new customers.
Searching Outside Your Industry
Once you search locally with no success you might want to try and search simply for a buyer looking for a website. This could be a web entrepreneur that sees the potential in your site or simply someone interested in running a website and would prefer to buy one rather then build from scratch. Obviously with this method you are going to have to do more explaining if the potential buyer doesn’t understand your industry and even worse if they don’t understand website hosting at all you will have a lot of technical training to do if they buy it. You will also need a really good sales pitch and the numbers (financial details) will count for a lot more since that might be the only part of your web business the buyer will understand.
There are a handful of online places you can try and sell your site. EBay’s Business/Websites for sale section is a popular choice but remember eBay is an auction so the negotiation and haggling is all automated. Your auction listing page will have to be very good to get a good price and you will be very much at the whimsy of eBay’s traffic which might not be ideal for what you are selling.
A better option in my mind is try a few forums like the SitePoint SiteSell area where you can list your site for sale and get some exposure. The best thing about this is you can go in and search the archives to see what other sites have sold for in the past. By comparing the details of previous sales you can get a feel for what your site might sell for. Try hunting around in other forums such as SearchEngineForums - buy my website and businesses for sale/brokerage sites such as BusinessBroker, BuySellWebsite and eBizBrokers) to drum up some interest in your sale and conduct research.
Making The Sale
Eventually you should find someone interested in your site and the negotiation will begin. As with any negotiation the mindset and “state of urgency” of the buyer and seller play key roles in determining who has the upper hand. If the buyer is not desperate or the seller is then the power can rest in the buyers hands and she can dictate the terms and price. Of course it can be the other way around with the buyer very eager and the seller not so desperate, or any combination. Each case is different but as a seller remember to stick to your guns and don’t sell unless you are happy with the terms. No regrets.
In my case I had my set price in mind but I was also new to selling websites so to be honest I was a little star struck to think about the numbers I could get from my site. In the end I presented my price, we negotiated terms and eventually I was discounted down $1,500 off what I presented, which I was quite happy with. We agree on details such as where the site would be hosted, how long I would make myself available to train the new owners and the transfer of ownership record changes. It took about three months for the new owners to get the hang of things and for about a year after the sale I would jump in and help now and then with technical matters.
When finalising the details of the sale I suggest you keep in mind these points:
- How and when will the money be transferred? I suggest an upfront partial payment (we did 50%) and a final payment once the transfer has been made. Are you going to use cheque/check? Direct bank wire? Cash in hand?
- Write up some form of formal contract with dates and agreed upon price and have all parties sign it. Of course if you are completing a big bucks deal then get yourself a lawyer to make sure you stay on top of the legal concerns.
- Define how long you will provide support for. I chose to make myself available for a long time and even today I still help out occasionally. You might want to play it safe and document the mandatory period you must provide support.
- Stay on top of all the technical little things. Web business is a complicated task and there are a lot of web tools that you might be using and have even forgot about. Don’t forget web hosting, domain names, autoresponders, mailing lists, software, subscriptions, paid directory listings and any of the host elements that might be used by your web business that you need to transfer to the new owners.
Moving Forward Post Sale
You’re all smiles, your pockets are laden with cash and the world is a wonderful place. Now don’t screw it up and blow all your money on partying too hard, stupid investments or get rich schemes. You’ve learnt what it takes to build a web business and sell it. No doubt you would like to do it again and you have more business ideas to test. Remember how hard it was first time round with no capital available? You had to bootstrap your business, provide your own funding or beg family/friends/the bank for funds. Now you have capital which you can use and invest wisely. Sure celebrate a little, have some fun and enjoy the moment, but remember you didn’t get to where you are by wasting money and you’re not about to start wasting it now.
Yaro Starak
Internet Entrepreneur
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[...] Yaro Starak: It is a joyous time when you are ready to sell your website. While you will be fraught with questions and unknown variables when ultimately you decide to sell your website it can be like winning a jackpot and a big change to your life. You might have been building your web business for years, consistently working on it day after day and night after night. When it finally sells you get a (hopefully) big cash injection and move on to new projects feeling renewed and excited about your future prospects. But before this can happen you have to make the sale, which in and of itself is a tricky task. [...]
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[...] The search results are very “fresh” and act much like the Google News service that provides live news reporting by collecting headlines from news authority sites around the web. No doubt Google is using it’s ranking algorithms to give relevancy weighting to blog search results in a similar manner to what it uses for all of its search services. An example of this is when conducting a search for the title of one my recent articles How To Sell A Website the first result was Dane Carlson’s Business Opportunities Weblog where he linked to my article. Dane’s site has a PageRank 6 so is the top result for this search while my article doesn’t show up. [...]
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QuickBits: September 16, 2005
What a wild and whacky week it’s been in the blogosphere. The laidback style of life that is professional blogging errupted this week when the issue of content theft and referencing was raised - here, here, here and here.
But with the release … -
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[...] How To Sell A Website - How Much Is Your Website Worth? [...]
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[...] Taking over a mature site (at least 12 months old) will mean you avoid the Google sandbox, a significant perk of buying established web property. Of course it really depends at what stage you take over a website as to how much of a step-up you gain and will no doubt reflect how much the owner will expect to receive for it (traffic for cash in simpler terms, but there are other variables to consider when selling a website). [...]
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[...] How to sell a website [...]
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[...] How To Sell A Website-How Much Is Your Website Worth?: Yaro’s number one rule? “Your site is worth as much as someone is willing to give you for it.” [...]
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[...] Entrepreneurs Journey - How to sell a website [...]
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[...] How to sell a website - How much is your website worth: Yaro’s number one rule? “Your site is worth as much as someone is willing to give you for it.” [...]
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[...] Estimator Zetetic.com Stuntdubl.com Seoworkers.com URL Trends Domainstate.com Ventureplan.com Entrepreneurs-journey.com Compete Toolurl Alexa [...]
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[...] My favorite method of determining how much a website it worth is the one by Yaro Starak: Your site is worth as much as someone is willing to give you for [...]
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[...] Re: Where to sell your website? Yaro wrote a good article on this: How To Sell A Website - How Much Is Your Website Worth? - Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak [...]
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[...] how much is a website or blog worth? The basic answer, which my friend Yaro Starak gave a while ago, is the following: Your site is worth as much as someone is willing to give you [...]
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[...] help you. Tutorials - Selling Your Site - Learn how to sell your website and not get ripped off! How To Sell A Website - How Much Is Your Website Worth? - Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak It sounds great that your website rank is increasing in Alexa,I hope very soon few people will [...]
Iv allways valued a business by its potential. Not its worth.
Basicly to get a rough estimate you can take its monthly revenue, mulitply by 12 and thats it sell value.
This would need to be adjusted for a few things:
Is there potential of growth?
Is it in the middle of a marketing campaign?
Why are the owners selling it?
There are many people that specalize in internet real estate, and its a booming business.
People are prospecting like its the Wild Wild West.
How much the content and website is worth is also dependent on how long the content is valid. If you have a lot of reviews of consumer electronics gadgets such as TV or mobile phones or whatever, the content will be close to worth less after a couple of years. How many are searching for names of mobile phones that were hot 5 years ago?
Very good point Jon, thanks for bringing that up. Definitely worth considering if you operate in an industry that advances in short periods of time. I’m glad I’m not covering computers or mp3 players.
Good post. I would add this: Selling a blog is a little different from an ecommerce website.
A blog needs regular updating to maintain its value over time. Also, the updating has a certain personal flavor to it, and not everyone can maintain readers’ interest.
The ebizbrokers site is quoting a price for an ecommerce site with a product line to sell.
As a buyer I would think twice before paying a traditional “multiple of earnings” or “multiple of revenues” purchase price calculation for the typical ad-supported blog site.
As a seller I would want to add in some projected future revenue/earnings potential under the argument that the future money-making potential would grow.
Great article Yaro. There’s some really useful points in there, particularly the part about providing after-sale support.
Wow I hadn’t even considered half of these things - I’ve bookmarked this for future ref. Thanks for the tips Yaro.
Great info Yaro!
A few additional points. You should never provide a potential buyer with sketchy or incomplete information – after that you’ll play catch up the entire time and the buyer will most likely lose trust in you. Once trust is lost, it is seldom regained.
It is not smart to assume you will sell your website fast, for all cash and for full price. Plan on being flexible somewhere and also plan on negotiating with any serious buyer.
Don’t believe your own hype – a serious buyer certainly will not. Don’t waste your breath telling a buyer a website could be worth millions in a short period of time. Most serious website buyers will not pay for promise – unless their analysis indicates promise.
When you are ready to sell your website, go to http://www.VotanWeb.com
I think the most important thing is the traffic.
Because nobody is going to pay for a website that does not bring visitors.
Just started reading your blog. Thanks for all the wonderful information.
You brought up some excellent points there. One thing you might want to mention is using an escrow service. I have sold a few websites in the past and have always used escrow unless the buyer (Or repeat buyer in my case) doesn’t mind wiring the funds straight to you.
Would love to know what site you sold, but I guess you had to sign an NDA. I have also found no better place than Sitepoint to sell sites.
Great article.
Thanks again.
Dave
Hi Dave - good point, yes escrow services are certainly valuable. I probably forgot to mention them in this article because I’ve never actually used one, but that’s probably because I’ve had some form of relationship with the people I traded with and we trusted each other.
Escrow though is certainly something worth considering, especially if the parties have no prior history.
The first big sale I made is not secret - you can find the story in my business timeline and the site is MTGParadise.com
And yeah, sitepoint is fantastic, although it’s getting a bit too popular - hard to find a bargain
Any other places to post a site for sale? I’ve just purchased a listing at SitePoint but not sure if it’s the right place to be.
Just for your reference:
http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/393?
Thnx,
Michael
Hi Michael - Sitepoint is certainly the market leader but that doesn’t always mean you will get the best price. The sitepoint audience is by no means all inclusive so depending on what type of site you have it may be worthwhile trying elsewhere to get maximum return. Sitepoint will do good things for your exposure though.
Digitalpoint.com is another similar forum to try.
Having looked at your auction I think Sitepoint is the best bet. If that fails you may want to try a deal broker as well as they might have some alternative avenues for finding buyers. I know Jeremy Wright from http://www.ensight.org/ has brokered some deals in the past for big sales, but I’m not sure if he wants to keep doing it.
To sell your site, you could always try the old eBay.
Some sites actually mention it on every page of their site–that they’re selling it. By that, the trust of the visitors may leave the site–and then the site is worthless.
I know this article is a little old, but I found it at the perfect time. Thanks for the tips. Trying to unload a few of my many sites.
I love this entry. One of my sites just reached 300,000 Alexa traffic, and I got the idea to sell it. However, I don’t think I’ll sell it because it’s not very targeted.
My new site is a weight loss community that was built to sell. Hopefully I will get this one sold one day.
Thanks for the tips.
HI guys,
Excellent article. Im currently wanting to sell one of my sites - http://www.egaragesales.com.au - but am unsure of its value. Its currently first page Google, NineMSN and Yahoo for the search term “garage sales” and has been for the past 2 years. Its making roughly $1000 a month, and I love have enjoyed enhancing and developing it, however I want to move onto other projects.
Would anyone have a template “for sale” letter that i could possibly use?
John
If anyone is interested - here it is!
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/Garage-Sale-Business-For-Sale_W0QQitemZ200134741930QQihZ010QQcategoryZ80350QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
Yaro,
I’m currently selling a web address (not a developed site) and I’m having trouble determining how it’s actually done. My web hosting company wants me to simply go into my account, modify the account “contact” information to the new owner’s name/address, and give them access to that portion of my overall account. This just doesn’t sound right.
Are there any ICANN forms or procedures for the legal transfer of specific web addresses between two parties?
Thanks,
Bob
Also i am interested to hear your answer to Bobs Question. I thought there was some sort of legal transfer that needs to be undertaken. Hope to hear your reply Yaro
Hi Bob,
Generally you just need to transfer the hosting account and the domain administrator ownership into the name of the new owner.
They can then change the passwords if they like so you no longer have any access.
I’ve never submitted a form or anything like that. A website is just a domain name and a place to host the files, so whoever owns that, owns the site.
I intend to sell http://usgirl.org. This website is hosted by my reseller account, If I transfer to the potential buyer the full archive and I change the name servers from my godaddy account it’s enough ? how do I sell the domain from godaddy? I can sell it ?
Yaro, thanks for the great post.
Please could you explain how you gave buyers direct access to your web stats without giving them your cpanel login?
Thanks, Rosie
There is actually one more site called WebSiteBroker.com at http://websitebroker.com/ where you can list existing websites for sale as well as look up listings of site currently for sale. From what I understand it’s one of the oldest existing marketplaces for existing web sites.
I prefer to buy a website that is
a) rather new but has potential to grow (because it is cheaper).
b) useful to everyone (more traffic).
c) simple (because I do not want to do much data and code cleansing).
My next target for the next few months, haha: http://www.tipskey.com/
All roads lead to Yaro…:)
Just researching this subject for a few of my sites and here you are…. again…. Love reading your blog. Thanks for the tips… See you at Blog Mastermind!
Ok, but what if the site is selling an off-the-shelf product and it’s revenue depends on how much marketing work you put into it?
I have this accounting software website I’m looking to sell now, but I can’t really make estimations. If I spend a week chatting to clients and sending e-mails, i can make with it like $2000 or so… otherwise nada.
Also, traffic doesn’t matter in this case, nor the expenses ($20/month hosting)
Any ideas?
Thanks
Sean - what you are talking about basically is the amount of effort required to create a result.
Time and energy are resources so if they are necessary to make a website profitable, then they definitely impact the valuation of the site.
The more marketing required to make it work, the less it will sell for.
I want to sell my site if anyone interested …..
Yaro,
Just come across this post today - I can’t believe I missed it out before… - thanks to your random featured article at the top of your blog
To comment, I’ve tried to sell one of my investment with no luck - perhaps because it is a niche market (webmasters stuff) - so not really many people want to buy such site - I have to agree with you - the price of a website equals how much people are willing to pay for it.
Cheers!
My biggest concern in selling a website is a scam. I am afraid to run into a scammer who will pay me by a bad check, or money order, or will do a wire into my bank account with money stolen from another victim’s account. When I read repsonses on these forums where sites are listed for sale, so many are obviously left by Nigerian scammers, I can tell from the way they are worded. I am afraid to lose my site and not get any money for it. I heard many escrow services are run by scammers, too. How to protect yourself and make sure that a buyer gives you the real money? The problem is, even banks cannot determine those fake checks and deposits right away. Sometimes they bounce back as fraud a month later, after you’ve already cashed the check and transfered the site!
I started my website back in December 2007 and have already changed the design 3 times.
I found the best design is the current one, just simple and not overloaded with flashy design etc.
Since April this year, I’ve had approximately 100 visitors a day, and I haven’t really done much to advertise it apart from YouTube and my students in my school. I also give out business cards or leave them anywhere with my site URL on.
My long term aim for this site is that it will become one of the well known ones in the ESL (English as a Second Language) field. There are several good ones out there at the moment, who went the same way: mes-english.com; english-4u.com; genkienglish.com and others.
I actually remember when each of these sites first came on to the internet. I don’t expect my site to be popular over night, but it IS already showing many many visitors, despite the fact that it’s a work-in-progress. (And will be for a couple of years or more yet, as ESL sites require a LOT of content and popularity before they can be considered a ‘normal’ site and my time is limited for adding to it, etc, due to my J.O.B. but hey, one day I will NOT have to go to a J.O.B. because of this site (and it’s links and ads too I hope).) Oh yeah, and you HAVE to believe in yourself and believe in your vision for the future as far as your site goes.
Don’t put ANYTHING on your site that you wouldn’t want on someone else’s! And that includes MUSIC that plays automatically or other sound bites. People, 99% of the time, BACK CLICK from such sites, never even letting the first page load up!!
Make sure your site works for you, not YOU working for your site!
This means you should be able to go on holiday for a month and know that your site is working while you are away.
Take the time to learn software you can use to build the site.
Take the time to learn software you can use to improve your site.
Take the time to MARKET your site.
Take the time to realise that your site is NOT going to make you rich overnight. Over several years, maybe.
When choosing domain names, remember, NO ONE except the Japanese, likes biglongun-necessarynameswith(&strangesymb#ls_them_.com.co.strange.countryhere.
Choose one by actually taking the time to view a dictionary and find the
meaning behind a word and its mix.
Make sure the domain name is COMPLETELY relevant to your site!
I can’t say that enough!
Your domain name is your first point of advertising. People remember
your site for it’s name, logo (if any) and content.
At the end of the day, your site is only going to be worth something, even if it has a million squidillion pages, IF it something society can use, and indeed, DOES use.
(I know a guy who has over 9000 (nine thousand) adsense pages and barely makes $200 a month!)
GET NOTICED!
Put your site URL in sites like THIS for example!
http://www.englishnowtv.com
http://www.lonevideo.com
http://www.fatshock.com
http://www.inyouriphone.com
PS) All the sites above are for sale except EnglishNowTV.com
That’s my baby right there, riches or not…I am building this one to make a difference in the ESL market, given that I live in Japan and know the English market here sucks!
If i own a website that has contents on various topics and are unique, then how should i determine how much the we b is wroth for? You said ebusiness sites are usually 2-3 times worth of its oprating revenu, but can u tell us about content websites?
Ah, wow. I just realized I have several sites I could sell, and haven’t really considered before reading this article. I haven’t yet tried to monetize the site, so do you think there is any traffic/subscriber barometer for how much a website is worth?
Hi, Any one have idea how much i can sell it this website for??
My daily unique visitors : 500-600
My monthly Average income by ads : $450
My month income in sales : 180
http://www.fastrecharge.com
hi nice post, I want to ask, is there any site which automatically tells the value of your site instantly?
Although this article is written in 2005(3 years ago), the advice and suggestions are still useful today.
Great information- I agree with the posters that feel the market sets the price. “The market” includes many things such as current rev. and future (potential) rev., how locked up the asset/site is (do you own all domains?), brand awareness (future brand awareness), and many other things…
Awesome stuff-
Chris
The Senior List
http://www.theseniorlist.com
Great Info Mate. But I think even Digitalpoint Forums Buy Sell Section works great. Most of the Webmaster Forums do.
there are website value calculators that will give you a rough idea on how much your site is worth. just type in your website value into a search engine. There are a few of these calculators which all give different estimates. so i recommend getting results from a few then averaging your data.
Thanx Yaro for the good information!
Right now I am selling a web hosting review site which I have had since 2004.
The reason I am selling it is I have lost interest in the site - and so I am no longer maintaining it.
Years ago, I would never have thought of selling it, since it made me up to $2000 per month rather easily…
However, I have never been too interested in web hosting and I got bored with the whole thing. And as I lost interest in the site it also made me less money.
Right now it is listed for sale at Sitepoint - they provide a really nice ad code to be put wherever you please:
– Also, I strongly recommmend using Escrow.com to handle the payment, unless you know the person you sell to.
Though I’m not planning to sell my site.. It is worth knowing about it… Thanx for your article..though it is lengthy I loved it..
Thanks. I’ve have seen sites that claims to have $43,000 revenue a year and the owner will sell the site for $10,000..hmmm it just don’t sound that good for some reason! Thanks for your solid advice in this article.
I was recently offered $6000 for a site that I bought for $3000 one year ago. The site is not making any money, so I think I will sell. However, the buyer requested to split the payment over ten months, offering to sign a letter to ICANN giving permission to reclaim it if they did not pay. Is that a valid offer you think? Does ICANN care about these small amounts?
I don’t think that letter is worth much, but you could hold onto the domain, or put it in escrow with the terms that you retain ownership and they forfeit monies already paid if they fail to pay the full amount within a certain time period.
Thanks for this… unless I overlooked, I was wondering was the site you sold a blog? i have heard that there are different ways to value blogs vs. retail shops online etc…. Any specific ideas on that ?
Well, this is one subject I haven’t had much dealings with and appreciate all the great information!
Like anything else when you try to sell something, it will always depend on what the market will bare.
Take Ebay for instance…why do certain collectibles sell for so much money? Because even though there’s no inherent value, there’s a grip of people all vying for the chance to take it home with them.
Thanks for the post. I have been wanting to sell a couple of sites so that I can focus more on what really matters to me. But have shied away from doing it mainly because of lack of knowledge in doing so. Anyway this post will help me get started. Thank you.
Nice article. There are couple of good ones from websitebroker.com about selling and buying websites as well. They also have a free valuation tool for your website although it is not very comprehensive.
You should also consider http://www.websitefact.com ; they provide a nice summary of the website performance. I find their WF rank being more accurate than Alexa.
To sell your site, you could always try the old eBay.
Some sites actually mention it on every page of their site–that they’re selling it. By that, the trust of the visitors may leave the site–and then the site is worthless.
Interesting formula for pricing a site. Means I have plenty more work to do…
Although I’m not in the position to sell an online business I would like to be in that position some day and I found this article very enlightening starting point.
You have to think about both what someone else is willing to pay for the site versus what it’s worth to you. I built my law firm around my website. We do well advertising our own services, not selling ads to others. This makes the site pretty valuable to me.
But at the same time, we get plenty of visitors who have problems we can’t resolve - perhaps they’re in another state. Someone else might get more value out of our site if they are able to monetize those visitors. Also, our site has some authority on valuable search terms. That adds further value someone else might benefit from.
The challenge is finding the buyer who would benefit most from the site. In the end it will probably be me. Few others have the ability to get value from the site and the money to pay enough to buy me out of it.
This is an interesting article and has given me something to think about. I have always found it hard to put a value to something you have put so much time adnd effort into. At the end of the day it all comes down to how much traffic and potential profit your website is capable of making I guess.
I would agree with Anita, revenue is also an important factor. Lots of great resources mentioned here. There’s also another cool thing you can do to help you towards your valuation tasks with a domain you wish to sell. One of our radio show hosts does a show each week on domain name monetization. Great topic.
His name is Monte Cahn from http://www.Moniker.com. As I understand it, they were the first registrar to be able to do a valuation on your domain asset and it be accepted by the IRS. They also handle a very large Domain Name Auction series. So when it comes to domains, they really do have a clue. I would recommend checking them out, if you need Valuation services for the domain name proper…then of course rolling that into the other considerations detailed in Yaro’s post…methinks you would be armed for bear!
Also, I would recommend using a service like theirs (there are others who handle this as well if you don’t like Moniker) to initiate domain sales, and placing the money in an escrow account…protecting both buyer and seller. Many a domain name has been lost due to not paying attention to the smallest of details as Yaro mentions.
Again, great post and awesome contributions.
How do you sell the web site but not the company and people that goes with it. ?
What people are you talking about?
If the website is owned by a company then you transfer it from one company to another or another individual. Nothing strange there.
Great info. I will bookmark this article. I am a domain trader but not yet started selling a developed website. Domaining is also a hot industry and so as website development if you have skills in it.
Thanks for useful tips, they will help me in future. From my point of view traffic of the site you are going to sell is quite important. Who is ready to bye a site having just several readers per day? I am sure nobody is.
Interesting. Despite how old this post is, I found it very valuable. It was linked from Blogterpreneur’s post: 16 Ways to Make Money Online - http://www.blogtrepreneur.com/2009/01/16/16-ways-to-make-money-online/comment-page-1/#comment-24785 This shows the power of a very written blog post. Thanks, Yaro.
Hi Yaro,
Thanks for the awesome post! I am considering selling a website/service I created, and waffling on how to do it, so this is very helpful.
I would love to know what you think of the best way to sell something like my site.
It is a website service/plugin, sold as a yearly or monthly subscription. It’s based on software, not content, and the software is complete, so there is nothing to write or produce, just a bit of marketing to sell the service - mostly adwords.
It currently has about $32,000/year income, and great growth potential.
The only expenses for it are about $1,800/year in hosting, plus marketing expenses averaging about $3,000/year. Both of these could be reduced pretty easily, and the marketing expenses are only to gain new business, the current revenues don’t depend on it.
There are no employees, no resources necessary, no programming, no copywriting, etc.
There is very little work involved - just a few minutes a day in admin time, answering email sales questions, processing refunds, etc.
There is a tiny bit of programming necessary for some features I haven’t automated, but I could automate them before selling it, so that there was no technical ability necessary to run it.
How would you go about selling something like that?
Thanks again for the post!
A couple of years ago I operated over 10 blogs… today I operate only one because - I was able to sell all the rest. The only three factors that the interested parties were curious about were unique daily visits, seo and page monitization. Each of the sites made barely $100 a month in AdSense, about 150 unique visitors a day and the pages were optimized best to what information was available to us then. And all 10 sites sold (adter we put up a “Website for Sale” page linked to our blogs.
We have a site that profits $100,000 a year and has nearly $200,000 of inventory in stock. We need about $600,000 to break loose from the site, but it’s hard as heck finding someone with that much cash on hand.
Wow! I wish my website worth at lease $1000.
If you love the website as a hobby a lot, you shouldn’t sell it. You can find many ways to continue to profit more on the website. The residual income isn’t there anymore because you sold it for a lump sum.
What if you build a site and it doesn’t produce revenue (yet). Can you still find a buyer? Have you heard of anyone selling their site after one month of building it?
Are the estimates provided by a website analysis tool, like the one available at Professional Link Building, of any good merit at determining website value? The tool defined the value of this blog at $613,048. I have been using this tool as a guide while I am executing SEO of my own.
This is a great way to make a revenue out of the sites made by you but same question is in my mind that What if you build a site and it doesn’t produce revenue (yet). Can you still find a buyer?
Great article. It really gets me into the mood to sell one of my websites. With this article I’m sure I could quite easily. It explains things so well. Once again great job.
How to Jump Higher
Thank you Yaro for such an amazing article on selling your own website. I guess this brief blueprint could help every interested person to get started with a business model based on creating and selling websites.
While it may take a little bit long time to have a cash flow in this business model, I must say that it is both lucrative and fun. You come up with a new idea, turn that into a new project called a website, build it, grow it and then sell it.
I really enjoy reading this article and took advantage of these bullet points and some criteria when it comes to selling a website.
Once again thanks Yaro and keep up the great work.
To Your Success!
Hooshmand
The value of a website is definitely very subjective, if you can find the right buyer that can make the sale much more profitable. I’ve had sites go for 2x annual revenue up to 6x. It really has a lot to do with how the site is trending and what the niche is etc too.
Thanks Yaro for a great blog post on where/how to sell a website. I have heard you say this before but to read about it again will help keep in mind for when we go to sell our website Our Path To Prosperity.
Thanks:)
This is cool! But i would still consider earning by selling using my website. Do you wanna know how to earn by selling with the increased speed of cash flow? Well i’d like to recommend this page i wrote : http://www.internetbusinesspath.com/tag/upsell
You can ask me questions too! happy selling!
How about start up websites?
Anyone want to venture a guess what my blog is worth? I haven’t monetized it much at all… but it’s doing well as far as searches on the big G.
This is some great advice. It’s likely that many people have tried creating a website and hadn’t realised how much work needs to go into it. There are also tons of places on the web you can buy/sell sites… I’ve even seen people selling websites on eBay.
I am a US small businessman in Thailand. I have been offered a Thai website for what I believe is a great price. It was opened one week ago and the developer has a medical emergency and must return to his homeland of India. I want to buy the site and then have my staff sell advertising. It is my first venture into the web - and I am a true newbie………….. I must first acquire the site in the next 24 hours and then figure out what I have……….. Can you suggest any Purchase & Sale Agreement forms to me that I could use to protect my small investment?
THANK YOU