Tips on Selling Your Website

February 4, 2009 by Pablo Palatnik

Usually, most things I come up on is tips on what to do when planning on purchasing a website, what are the values, etc. I guess if you know what you’re looking in the purchase of a website, you’ll know what other people are looking for so you know to provide that information.

I stumbled upon a great thread on Digital Point on tips of selling and buying a website. Here are the tips of selling which I thought would be helpful to anyone who is looking to sell their website:

Do: Do give a URL to the website that you are selling. If you’re afraid of a person stealing your content or whatever. That’s going to happen anyways, and the person is buying your website because they themselves don’t want to do it. Not giving a URL makes you look seedy.

Do: Give point form summarizations of what your website does. No need for a 1000 word essay. People don’t read.

Do: Give an auction end date, or a BIN. If you don’t, it’s just obvious you want the most money possible. Which isn’t wrong, but doesn’t come across well.

Do: Give statistics about the income. Take a screen shot (Blurring out things that are against TOS of course) and of course provide long term income. At least 4 months, if your website is newer than that, give as much information as you can (i.e. the day that you added monetization)

Do: Give statistics about the traffic. Provide a link to your stats generation page. Or a screen shot. Again, as much information as possible

Don’t: Get angry with people if they start questioning things such as, where your content is from, is it copyrighted? Do you have full copyrights? If you can’t answer these questions, just hope that your buyer is really stupid.

Don’t: Spam the forums to get the required number of posts. People do check your history before purchasing.

If you’ve been in this game for a while, you probably have a few properties lying around that you may not use but did work hard at one point. Maybe its time to bring that site out of the closet and put it in the market.

If you havent messed with it in a while, try to tune it up for about 1-3 months with some SEO and design which will give it value and there is ONE key value a buyer will look for more than the monetization of the site at THIS particular point, and that is traffic. BUILD TRAFFIC. BUILD TRAFFIC. BUILD TRAFFIC.