A lot of people sell their working money making sites on Flippa for miserable money. Can you imagine selling your business for 6x monthly profit? This is insane! Why do they do it? Some of them are idiots. Some need cash urgently. Some sites require a lot of ongoing work.
But in the majority of cases these guys simply have no idea how to sell a site for good money.
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No matter if you use Flippa, some forum, other sites marketplace, there are several things you need to do to ensure you’ll get good price for your site:
Show Me The Traffic!
You have to be really detailed about your site traffic. The best thing you can do is to take screenshots from your analytics software (Google Analytics probably, or the one your host provides – usually Awstats). Don’t try to hide the traffic sources and search engine keywords – experienced buyers will find them anyway, but you’ll push away those who don’t know how or have no time to dig.
Healthy traffic is huge benefit when selling a website. Even a site without any revenue can sell for 4 – 5 digits if it has high organic traffic.
Prove The Revenue
If your site is making any money, put some effort into showing this. Screenshots from your paypal account, Adsense or other ad networks are the minimum you should provide. If you are willing to share your screen (via GoToMeeting or similar program) and prove your revenue, this will be a huge boost of your trustworthiness.
People say sites usually sell for 6 – 12 months of they monthly revenue. Forget this. If you play your cards well and prove your traffic and revenue you should aim for 20x or more monthly revenue. Sites with entirely passive income can shoot even higher.
Share the Incoming Links
Here’s a cliche: links are the currency of the web. The cliche is absolute truth. Good, strong, natural incoming links can make your site priceless. If you have any of these, make sure to point them out to potential buyers. Those who want will find them anyway. So use good inbound links for your benefit.
Tell Them About The Growth Potential
Having great ideas about the site but never had the time to implement them? There is no point in keeping them anymore. Share the ideas with the potential buyers. This will get them even more excited about the site. More excited buyers means more buyers competition and higher bids.
The Outsourcing Contacts
One thing that scares many website buyers is the potential work involved in maintaining the site. This is true especially when the site provides some service or is a blog where someone regularly writes articles.
If you have used any contacts to outsource part of the work, be ready to offer them to the future buyer. Or maybe you are willing to keep writing posts for the blog for some payment, or making those graphics or whatever. Make sure to include all the options that may make the life of the potential buyer easier.
After Sale Support
Do offer after sale support. Usually this means just to help the buyer transfer and run their site properly. Sometimes they’ll have some questions how to add article, how to handle service etc. It will be few minutes work for you and huge relief for the buyer. Offering after sales support can add quite few bucks to the sale price.
Offer Several Payment Methods
Don’t be a jerk saying you’ll only take Paypal. Some people don’t have Paypal, others don’t want to use it, and there are those who will feel unsure. As a very minimum accept paypal and Escrow.com. I recommend you also bank wire, Western Union, and why not even Bitcoin.
Respond to Comments
Make the effort to give proper and detailed responses to every public comment you receive. This is very important on marketplaces like Flippa. Never delete anyone’s comment unless you explain under it why it is deleted. There is nothing more suspicious than seeing several deleted comments under a site sale. I avoid these listings like plaque.
Oh yes, and if you have a really good site for sale, and are willing to follow the above recommendations, you can contact me first and see – maybe I’ll just buy it 🙂
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