I’m a huge fan of buying websites as a business model (I’ve purchased 3 more websites recently), but one thing I run into frequently are sellers that don’t know how to really sell their own property. There are a couple reasons for this with the first reason being that the property really isn’t worth any money, but the more common reason is lack of experience. I’ve been involved in transactions as low as $500 all the way up to 7 figures (as a buyer’s consultant) and 6 figures for one of my own recent website sales and I’ve learned a few things about how to sell your website for more money that I’d like to share with you:

How To Sell Your Website For More Money:

Step 1: Your Website Must Actually Be Making Money

It’s very difficult to sell a website that isn’t making money unless it has a really desirable domain name attached to it so the first step is really to actually make money (sounds obvious, but from what I’ve observed people still don’t get it). I made an entire free course on this topic so I won’t cover how to get your website to make money in this blog post. I continue to get emails from people trying to sell their website for $10,000 when it’s only a handful of articles on the-crappiest-domain-everinfohq.biz.

Step 2: Provide Detailed Analytics And Income History

I highly suggest you create a new Google Analytics account for each website you own because serious buyers like to be given access to your traffic information via Google Analytics. The biggest concern is that if you use the same Google Analytics account people can find out other websites you own when they see what your tracking ID is i.e. UA-123456789-1. I’ll explain how people can do this in a future blog post, but for now just remember to create a new analytics account for each website. Buyers are looking for a steady trend of traffic moving upward or at the very least a long period of time with the traffic at the same level.

Income history is another essential component because buyers want to know how much money the website made from each income source. For example, I bought a website recently that was making money by selling a medical eBook on Clickbank and I wanted to see the income history all the way back to the first sale over 1.5 years ago. Buyers also want to know if a seller has ever used other monetization methods along with the results from those tests because that can affect the options for future growth.

Remember, the longer your website has been making money the more money you can get for selling it. The less income history you have the more risky the investment is for the buyer and subsequently the less money you can make selling it.

Step 3: Don’t Wait To Sell Your Website Until It Starts To Lose Traffic And Money

The most common line I get from people is “I just don’t have anymore time for this project” followed by “This website has a lot of potential” or “It used to make $X,XXX and the traffic used to be XXX,XXX but now it’s $XXX and traffic at XX,XXX” A lot of these issues come down to knowing when you should sell, but most importantly you never want to try selling when everything starts to trend downward otherwise you’ll receive a lot less money then before. Buyers place little emphasis on what something could become when compared to what it already is. In other words, as a buyer I don’t care that the-crappiest-domain-everinfohq.biz could become a massive money making machine because I have to direct most of my attention towards working with what the website is doing right now (both in terms of income and traffic levels).

Step 4: Provide Suggestions On How To Improve The Website’s Traffic And Income

As a seller, you will know more about your website than any buyer so part of what can help you extract the most value from the property is by giving an action plan to the potential buyer. As I alluded to before, finding out how the website has tried making money in the past (and either failed or succeeded) will help shape a strategy moving forward. Likewise, a plan to improve the traffic to the website will help the buyer see possibilities as well. Now it’s important to remember that his is only one small component to selling your website for more money because as I mentioned before buyers will always focus most of their attention on what the website is doing at this very moment in time.

Step 5: Promote Your Website Listing

Part of the reason why I sold one of my websites in a deal worth six figures is because I used a broker to help promote my listing. Flippa has done great things for this industry, but they aren’t always the best place to sell websites. The broker’s job is to create interest in your website by shopping it around to high net worth clients and that’s why they get paid a commission on the sale; however, not all websites will be big enough to get a broker to help sell them. In most cases, you need to be the one to truly SELL your website. I’m in the process right now of shopping one of my niche sites around to various competitors that actually make the product I’m promoting as an affiliate on my website with the idea that they can gain additional market share by taking over my website along with the top rankings in Google. This strategy can work and is another way to think creatively about where to sell a website. As a seller you want to go to where the market is and make sure they know about your website listing because most often they won’t come to you.

Real Life Case Study Example: How To Help SELL Your Website

I haven’t tried doing this before, because at this point in my business I’m more focused on website acquisitions as opposed to selling my properties, but I saw one seller actively promote his website sale through other blogs related to the website niche. The website was CPAoffers.com which ultimately sold for $35,000 through Flippa. I saw this seller promote his listing through Wicked Fire where he was an active forum member, through the Warrior Forum, through another webmaster forum and even on John Chow’s blog as well as Jonathan Volk’s blog. Now with the exception of the blog posts, the rest of his promotion was probably free and those links are just what I was able to find with a little bit of research after I saw the first promotion go out about the website sale. When I first saw the website being advertised it was going for about $20,000 and eventually sold for $35,000. It’s entirely possible that due to the promotional efforts that the buyer went through to get the word out about the website that he was able to get a higher price and all because of a little bit of work he put in and potentially some money spent for the sponsored blog posts.

Buying Websites Can Be Risky!

The reason why these factors contribute towards selling a website for more money is because they put the buyer’s mind at ease. Would you feel more comfortable buying a website that’s been making $1,000 a month from Adsense since 2007 or a website where the seller says the average income is $1,000 when in fact the income history shows they’ve only ever had one $1,000 month and it was during the holidays? I’ve had a few bad purchases and I’ve also had some good ones, but there are always opportunities to make money in the area of buying and selling websites.

Reminder: We’re very close to launching our coaching/course on buying and selling websites. I partnered with some brokers who’ve literally sold millions of dollars worth of websites to help create content for the course as well as help me lead the live lessons. If you’re interested in this business then be sure to sign up on the early bird notification list here. I have a feeling that it will be a ton of fun to help teach people this business and that I’ll get to know a lot of the members as well because we will be capping the number of people to get in for this first version.

Sign up to be notified of the opening here

A Question For The Comments Below:

Are you currently trying to buy websites or looking to sell one of your own websites? Discuss in the comments below and I’ll try to share some of my advice.