How to Sell a Website

How much is my site worth

The most simple answer is your site is worth however much someone is willing to pay for it. Finding out how much that is is the challenging part.

Take for instance a DVD player. Would you pay $1000 dollars for one? Absolutely not, because you know they are worth much less than that. On the other hand, buying and selling websites is a relatively new division of business and not many people have experience with it. Since that is the case, websites usually either get sold for much more than they are worth or much less. You obviously would rather fall on the "much more" end of the spectrum and hopefully with my help you will.

A general formula to follow

A general rule of thumb to finding the worth of a website is:

(yearly revenue - all costs)*3 = Websites worth

My first website sold for $150 which was exactly 3 times my profit. My only source of revenue was from google adsense and I was making approximately $50 dollars a year from it. I had approximately 2,000 unique visitors a month and a pagerank of 2.

I tried to convince buyers that the potential for revenue was very high and that should be added to the websites worth, but most people's response was "if it has all that potential how come you haven't done it yourself" and I didn't have a good answer for them. The person that bought the website added a forum, membership access, and charged a few dollars for a premium membership. And within one year turned around and sold the website for nearly $10,000.

That experience taught me a very important lesson which was proving buyers of "high potential" is very hard to do and if you want more money you have to actually have to go do the work yourself and increase your yearly revenue.

What if my site has no revenue?

Even if your site has zero revenue it can still be worth a lot of money although convincing a buyer to pay top dollar is going to be very challenging. I have sold sites that just had conent and no ads or revenue. What makes these sites valuable are their member lists and page views/unique visits and that is what you will have to focus on when selling. I have used the following formulas when selling these kinds of sites:

Unique visits per month = Websites worth

or

Number of members = Websites worth

In my experience with using these formulas for zero revenue sites, they usually end up selling for about half of what I was asking.

Maximize your revenue and growth

Whenever I am going to sell a site I try to maximize my revenue and growth before posting it for sale. Growth is one thing that is proof of your site's potential and can really increase its value. Some things that I have seen work are: Offer discounted prices, add a forum, add membership accounts, offer limited time free memberships. Growth in any business adds lots of value

On numerous occations growth has been my number one selling point and I have used it to triple what my website is "worth". If you have any opportunity to spend extra time on your site before selling it, you will be happy you did.

A small side note

Lately, I've been testing the validity of these websites that state they can tell you how much your site is worth. Two that I have come across that work pretty well are www.urlappraial.net and www.websiteoutlook.com They at least can give you a starting range for your asking price and if you think they are well priced they are a great resource to use in making the sale.