Selling your site: What you MUST know
There comes a time for many sites where the founder has either simply lost interest in the site they have been involved with or are looking for a quick payout to cover unforseen expenses. If you are serious about selling your site, here are some essentials you must have covered to gather interests from a buyer.
Traffic
Listen, no matter your current PR value or keyword listing in major search engines, it still comes down to traffic. How many unique visitors and page views do you have? Where is the traffic coming from and where is it going after visiting your site? How long do visitors stay ON your site and most importantly, are they repeat visitors? You should show this using a combination of Google Analytics, site meter and server logs, Alexa and Compete help as well. Nobody who knows anything about the net will touch your site with a 10 foot pole if you don’t offer this information freely.
Money
You got a great little site, you are making money but how much? Is it going up or down? What is your revenues related to number of users? Are you having to issue any refunds? Do you have revenue streams OTHER then Google Adsense or other type of online advertising aggregators? You should provide at the very least, a screen shot from paypal or bank statements backing up these numbers as well, be sure to blur out any personal or financial information.
YOU
How dependent is the site on YOU? Can the site even operate without you being involved? You will often see with forums that once the founder goes away, many of the lead moderators follow suit and in no time, you end up with a great site for spammers. If you are essential for day to day operations, selling the site just isn’t in the cards until you handle this matter. If your site was funded by Venture Capitalists, Angels, Partnerships or equity exchanges then your job can be both easier or harder depending on your approach.
COOKIE CUTTER SITES
If you purchased a cookie-cutter site, usually relating to icons, template designs or other “mass production” type thing which you “built from scratch” only a few months ago and now asking a few thousand dollars for… don’t bother. There sites are not a dime a dozen, they are beyond worthless.
Marketing Costs
You have a site pulling in a million a year, great! How much are you spending getting that million? If your answer is a million and a half a year, then you are in big trouble… you would make more money being homeless begging for change on the street… who wants that? Let’s be very frank, if you are spending more money that you are making and don’t see an end to this then you have built yourself a fantastic money burning machine and little else. Your only hope is VC, IPO or Angels who share the same vision as yourself but even they want to see the light at the end of the tunnel BEFORE they put a chunk of change down.
Price: What do you want for the site?
This is the toughest thing to come to, don’t expect a Facebook type deal where you can be worth 15 billion dollars overnight, usually, price is based on 1.5 years of gross revenue. This is highly variable as it depends on the factors listed above.
How to sell?
There are a number of sites out there dedicated towards selling other sites, I am mentioning them by name on purpose… this is a VERY shady industry, even shadier then SEM service providers. You could put up your site in a TechCrunch forum and see what kind of feedback you get, you could advertise using Google Adword but usually, the best people to sell to are your customers. Put a note out on your site saying “I want to sell, here are my reasons, anybody willing to purchase?”.
The Bottom Line
Selling a site should be equal to selling your first born, otherwise, you missed out on something.
