When you search in google for “Sell My Website” there are over 68,800,000 results.  In addition to the natural results you also have a list of paid advertisers who include online market places to buy and sell websites, website brokers and several domain selling sites.  Even with all these resources you’re probably still asking yourself the same questions many online entrepreneurs have for years:

How do I sell my website?

Where do I sell my website?

Get The Highest Price

Step 1 – Prepare your site so it generates the highest price possible.

There are several factors buyers will look for when purchasing a website.  The first and most common is the monthly revenue.  Unlike most offline businesses, buyers will value a website based on the monthly net revenue.  In most cases you’ll see buyers picking up sites for an average of 8 to 12 times the monthly net revenue.  This should give you some immediate ideas on how to increase your selling price.

The more revenue the higher the price, but don’t be like those sellers who focus a ton of time in the three months leading up to selling and generating a lot more traffic to your site and revenue and then try and claim that as the net.  The reality is that most buyers see right through that.  You may drive a bunch of traffic by doing some quick SEO work or buying the traffic but if you’re selling on an auction with open discussion, someone will likely call you out on it.

It’s pretty easy to see if someone is buying traffic to inflate the numbers.  You can also see when someone spends a bunch of time doing SEO tactics on their site to drive quick traffic.  Many of the quick solutions don’t last, so buyers aren’t interested in paying a lot for these sites.

What’s the solution?  Have a plan before you by the domain.  If you are a builder and want to flip a site quickly, then know that you’re multiple on the site will be less than those who have a site for three or four years and have had steady increases in traffic and revenue.

Another key point in preparing your website to sell is to use only white hat techniques for SEO.  This means, no Black Hat Strategies.  Google is still king when it comes to driving traffic to your website.  They rule the search engine marketplace and if they don’t like the SEO tactics you are using they will make it difficult to keep a high rank for your site with specific keywords.

For example, if you want to rank high for a key phrase such as “Sell My Website”, you can go out and buy links back to your site from high PR (Google Page Rank) sites.  However, Google doesn’t like people buying links.  Whether you believe it or not (I do), Google knows if you are buying the links.  So stay away from “black hat” strategies like that and focus on the white hat strategies such as having high quality content on your website.  The #1 strategy for driving more traffic to your website by ranking high in Google, according to Google is to not worry about their algorithms and scoring models and focus on writing high quality and focused content on your website about the subject of your site.

Your Website Sales Pitch

Step 2 – Create a sales pitch for selling your site.

Once you’ve optimized your website to generate the most revenue over a long period of time or at least for as long as you want to before selling, then focus on putting together a sales presentation.

The sales presentation is a combination of the one page pitch, describing what your site is and why it’s worth the price you want and the back-up documentation proving what you are claiming is true.

Look at this from the perspective of the buyer.  You may be asking, how do I sell my website, but the buyer is asking, how do I not get screwed.  Buyers should always be cautious of sellers.  Why would someone want to sell their website? What’s wrong with the site that makes them want to sell?  Why wouldn’t they just keep it for the monthly revenue?

All are valid questions and if you are a going seller, you will answer those in the sales pitch.  Here is a basic format for how you can put together a presentation for selling your site on an auction or a classified ad.

Name of Website:

Type of Niche:

Avg. Amount of Monthly Revenue – last 6 months:

Alexa Rank:

Compete Rank:

Sources of revenue:

Why you want to sell the website:

What you would do if you kept the site to increase revenue:

Why the site is so valuable: (can include the revenue divided by amount of time spent on the site)  If the site generates $1,000 per month and you spend only 2 hours a month maintaining the site – you can earn $500 /hour owning this site.

Add urgency: Why should someone not wait to make a decision on buying your site?  Perhaps add some bonuses if they buy now or include a few articles or posts that you haven’t yet added to the site.  You can also include a list of sites where someone could get quality backlinks such as online forums, etc.   Essentially, if you do a lot of work for them upfront and they believe all they need to do is just implement a few strategies without spending a lot to market the site you’ll build the urgency.

Once you’ve written out the sales presentation, now you have to add backup documentation.  Always include verified analytics and screen shots of your revenue sources.  Do everything you can to show screen shots that don’t look manipulated or changed in anyway.  I hate those who take a highlighter and scratch out half the report on adsense so you can’t see what their CTR.  Why?  The buyer would certainly like to know that.

In addition take a screen shot of the one page that shows all history for your website.  Here are some examples of screen shots from one of my own websites that shows the revenue and traffic sources.  I would take the screen shots and have them look just like this.

Use something like this…

Not something like this…

Better yet, do a video.  Why not put together a video of you logging into the money accounts where your site is generating revenue and show your revenue streams.

Where to Sell My Website

Step 3 – Find the right marketplace.  The marketplace you select in many cases will determine at which multiple you may be able to sell the site for.  There are some auction sites that you can sell a website for 4-8 times monthly and others where you may get as much as 8-18 times monthly net revenue.

So what is the true value of your site?  What multiple should you get?

The price you will get for your site is only equal to what someone is willing to pay for it.  What they are willing to pay is based on what value they put on the site.  When I say “value” I don’t mean the price.  I mean what can they do with the site.  Some people may be willing to pay 25 times the monthly or even 36 times monthly revenue.  Buyers will pay that much for a website if they see something that will allow them to increase the revenue of the site, increase traffic to the site or they may just see value in the content.

I recently paid 30 times the monthly revenue for a site.  Why?  The sellers traffic had dropped off significantly because of the latest Google panda update.   He must have done something in marketing the site that they didn’t like.  So why would I buy a site google doesn’t like?  Simple – he was selling three online courses for managing your money that was all original content.  He hadn’t sold a single one in three months.  I didn’t care, because I own three other websites in that niche that all have a ton of traffic and all are currently promoting other people’s product where I get a commission on.
Why promote someone else’s product for 60% of the revenue when I can sell my own for 100%, especially if I don’t have to create the content?

You see for me the value wasn’t in the revenue of his website it was in his products.  So you can sell a site again for whatever anyone is willing to pay for it.

Although I’ll list for you a few online marketplaces and a quick review of each, I still believe the best way to sell a site is probably the hardest.  (That’s why it’s the best.  Most people don’t take the hard approach.)  The best way in my opinion is to search for the buyer rather than have the buyer come to you.

Private Buyer Network to Sell Websites

If you want to look for buyers and not go through the auction process here is where you want to go.  Full disclosure – I (David Gass) am one of the buyers in the network along with my business partner on this site, Chris Yates.

FlipWebsites.com : Great resource for selling your site.

Auctions to Sell Your Site

Flippa.com : The claim to be the number one marketplace for buying and selling websites.  I can’t argue with that.  I personally search this site daily looking for deals.  It tends to have the highest volume of sites for sale.

Ebay.com : I believe you know about ebay already but you may not know it is a place to look for websites for sale.  However, I will warn you.  Ebay has become the site for several website builders to create a site and immediately post it for sale with no traffic or revenue.  I think this provides an opportunity for those looking to sell a website.  You’ll certainly stand out if you have something of true value.

Sedo: One of the largest marketplaces for buying and selling domains.  There are a few gems mixed in with all the domains you can buy.  Certainly worth looking in to.

Brokers for Selling Websites

Quiet Light Brokerage : The tend to have a small inventory of sites but have a decent amount of quality sites.  If you want to sell a good quality site for high amount this may be a good option.

Website Properties : They have a pretty good online system for searching for sites to buy and for the sellers they tend to get top dollar.

We Sell Your Site : Seems to have a selection of higher priced sites with high multiples.  Could be a good place to sell.

Classifieds for Selling Sites

BizQuest : Great place to list websites for sale.  You’ll certainly standout with a quality site that is asking for less than $25,000

WebsiteBroker.com – Pretty good selection of sites and a good site to get some exposure to your listing.

DealASite – They offer a free listing service which leads to having a lot of junk sites but again if you have a quality site to sell this may be a good option because you’ll stand out.

Forums for Selling WebSites

Digital Point : This is one of only two forums I personally look at for sites to purchase.  You can find some quality sites among a lot of junk sites.  If you are selling on this site expect to have experienced sellers.  So don’t try and pull the wool over on someone with fake traffic.  Be warned.

Warrior Forum : Same as Digital Point.  Experienced buyers and sellers hang out here.  This is a great forum and well managed.  You’ll get kicked out quick if you don’t follow the rules.  So read the rules first for listing a site before you do.

Leave a comment with any experiences you’ve had in selling your website.

Here are a few websites, tools, forums and even a mastermind group you can join, all for those interested in making money buying and selling websites.

You should certainly take a look at each of these sites below and bookmark them if you are serious about getting involved or more skilled in this business. Of course you should be joining our membership as well, but at the very least take a look at a few sites below and take some action to start making money today.

Recommended Tools for Buying Websites and Selling Websites

Website Flipping Forum (Now open to the public for select sections)
Buying and Selling Website Mastermind Group
Buying Websites – Blog
Selling Websites – Blog
Building Websites – Blog
Website Flipping Tools
Beginner Strategies for Buying and Selling Sites

Full disclosure. We own all the sites we are promoting above, but needless to say if we are out buying all these sites and are in the business of buying and selling, then you should pay attention to the content. You should even consider joining the mastermind group to work with us (Chris Yates and David Gass).

The posts were to encourage many of you to get started – buying, selling, building…Anything to get you moving along in the world of buying and selling websites.

We are going to break away from the updates for a period of time however.  The reason is not that we don’t think they are valuable, but rather because we are in talks with another site to provide more in depth content from multiple auction sites.  The new stats will cover more of the market and provide a broader look at what’s happening.

This may take a few months before the stats are back up on the site, so keep checking back to see the updates when we start them again.  And thank you to everyone for leaving such great comments about the posts before.  Continue to let us know what you think with your comments.  We do read them. 

The deal sounded almost to good to be true. We would be netting mid six figures per month with a 7-8 times monthly net to purchase the site. All revenue was generated from adsense and didn’t require a lot of work. In fact we did some basic due diligence to see what keywords the site was ranked in. All were top three. Things were looking good.

Then with one basic check about an hour in to our due diligence we realized the whole thing was a scam. If we hadn’t known to check some basic ownership criteria for the site we could have been out a very large amount of money. What happened was the seller listed a site on one of the major auction sites (don’t want to say which one to give them a bad name because normally you find good deals on their site). However, the site wasn’t his to sell. With a quick call to the real owner the listing was taken down within a few hours.

I bring this up only to tell you that I normally don’t walk away from a competitive game a Candy Lane to learn about these type of deals and never again will I. I’ve always told myself to watch out for those deals that appear just too good to be true and never be in a rush to buy a site. The more rushed you are the less time you will take to do your due diligence on a site to purchase. Flipping websites is a great business but just like anything there are those looking to scam people.

With a look at this weeks sellers on Flippa.com you’ll see what’s hot and what’s not in the buying and selling websites market for the month of November.

November 12-18, 2010

November 19-25, 2010

If you are selling a site keep this in mind.  It will happen to you if you sell enough sites, the buyer won’t come through.  It’s always good business to keep good communication between you and all the other bidders.  You never know when you need to go back to them to see if they want to pick up a site you previously sold.

• Zeerk was relisted because previous buyer was unable to bring in the required funds. Site was sold for a relatively lower price of $52,000. The info is different now from last weeks’. Site now has lone bidder as compared to 42 last week. Site has 3000 members and visits skyrocketed to 62,668 from previous 15,000. Table shows no profit but site claims to have a $5000 monthly profit just like last week so I opted to compute the multiple based on that.

I’m not sure I’m buying that NewEggCode.com sold for 1 month multiple of profit and that it was doing $9,000 in profit after just 4-5 months online.  I’m not saying that a site can’t make that kind of money that quickly.  However, based on the look of the site I really can’t believe it is doing that kind of net profit that quickly.

Whoever bought HealthRuns.com got a good deal at 8.4 multiple.  With good traffic and a site that’s been around for at least a year it looks like the buying made a good choice.

Any other thoughts on this week’s update?

David and Chris

*Stats are from Flippa.com

• Facemash was created Oct 2003 but no definite info was given regarding its registration. It’s the first website prior to facebook by Mark Zuckerberg.
• Traffic is said to be 600/month on a regular basis but it’s not indicated in the field where it should appear. Same with profit.

Give us your thoughts on what you see.

David & Chris

It was an interesting week for buying and selling websites and for those flipping sites. There were 389 sites sold for the week with an average price of $944.

The top selling site was MyDellmini.com which sold for $56,500 and had 51 bids on Flippa.com The site has 360,000 unique visitors a month and reports that it generates $2,320 net profit per month. Not bad for the seller on this site. The multiple was 24 times monthly net.

Let us know what you think about these sites that sold in the comments.

The following stats are from Flippa.com and provide a good insight on what is being sold in the market. There are several other marketplaces online for buying and selling websites or flipping sites, but the stats here are Flippa.com provide a good benchmark. During the week of Oct 8 – 14, 2010 there were 374 website sales with an average sale price of $918.

Provide a comment below to let us know what you see in the market place for buying and selling. What do you think is selling best? What is getting the best multiple?

You’ll see what types of sites are selling, the multiples of those sites and a few more fun facts. The site content will come from various sources but mostly from the top online flipping site for websites (Flippa.com).

If you would like to continue to receive these updates do nothing. If however, you have decided that buying and selling websites is not for you simply unsubscribe to our emails by clicking the unsubscribe link at that bottom of this message.

BuyingandSellingWebsites.com Weekly Update for (Oct 1 – 7, 2010)

If you would like to see your site featured as a (Site of Interest in our Weekly Update) – send us information at support@buyingandsellingwebsites.com

Also, leave a comment below just to let us know if you are a buyer, seller or developer