How to Sell a Website

By Bradly

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.

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.

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.

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.

When finalising the details of the sale I suggest you keep in mind these points:

1. 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?

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

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