How Much Is Your Website Worth? & How To Sale A Website ?

It is a joyous time when you are ready to sell your website. While you will be fraught with questions and unknown variables when ultimately you decide to sell your website it can be like winning a jackpot and a big change to your life. You might have been building your web business for years, consistently working on it day after day and night after night. When it finally sells you get a (hopefully) big cash injection and move on to new projects feeling renewed and excited about your future prospects. But before this can happen you have to make the sale, which in and of itself is a tricky task.

Solding a website Is a pretty big deal. Many Of Us had built the site for a hobby. Through different domain name and site name , We all put in thousands of hours working on it over a years, but damn it was fun most of the time. Eventually it became time to move on and pass our baby on to new hands that would keep it growing and moving forward.

The funny thing was we didn’t really think about selling our site because it was making money so consistently. It had become so routine that it was just part of our life and One day it dawned on your mind that; Why dont I sell it? It produces revenue so has a value & let’s give it a go! We really wanted to move on to other projects and just the idea of not having to look after the site was a huge relief ;We know selling a Site is the right thing to do. But how on earth do you sell a website?

So,

How To Sell A Website

The process to sell a site By considering some guidelines. Remember that there are many ways you can go about the processess and you should explore all your options before deciding to sell.

How Much Is Your Site Worth?

Your site is worth as much as someone is willing to give you for it. Simple answer really. We 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 as your virtual property it just seems a little bit strange doesn’t it.
So ,

How To Calculate Yourself The Value Of Your Site

Well take the average revenue the site was earning and minus the costs of running the site and then multiplied by 2.5

As with traditional business, website business or even just a hobby site that brings in money, it’s hard to determine a selling price. What you need to consider are what you will be happy to walk away with and what the numbers tell you. Other variables that will come in to play are the industry your site operates in (competition too), how much labour and technical skill is required to manage the site, the costs (hosting, marketing, staff, etc), whether the business is growing and how fast, the future potential and whether the industry is a buyers or sellers market (supply vs demand). And that’s just part of it.

According to some brokers, generally an e-business website is worth three to six times earnings before interest and tax, so if your site profits are $200,000 you have an asset worth $600,000. For social networking sites this figure could be even higher.

The figure of 2-3 times yearly revenue will went through your head as a fair valuation given if the new owners kept things at least constant they would recoup the buy price in 2-3 years and you would be happy, very happy, to get that sort of price for your hobby site. “Doesn’t You ?”

Hmmm.. But your site is worth how much someone is willing to give you

So If Your website operated in an industry and had a target market that would be hard to extract much more revenue beyond what you already was getting from your Site Advertising. Yes it certainly was possible, but it would take a new income stream to make significant gains.Your small niche operated website would not present you with a lot of buyers but you won’t really know demand until you try and sell of course.

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.

Most web servers come with a statistics package.
Ask your web host if you don’t know. The most common are Awstats (demo) and Webalizer (demo) which often are preinstalled on many hosting packages. Become familiar with these packages so you can accurately assess your site traffic.


• Your financial figures:
  
  If you run a proper business then you should have these in some form of accounting package. The profit and loss statement is a popular choice for potential buyers but of course the more data you can provide the is better.
• And You need a “Good sales spiel email letter”
  
  (Meaning-an elaborate or glib speech or story, typically one used by a salesperson.) 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.

Finding Buyers:

Once you have decided a rough figure you would be happy with you can head out and find buyers and see how much demand there is. So with Yourself estimated 2-3 times revenue figure firmly planted in your mind as a goal to work for you can go to find a buyer.

Find a local buyer in Your home country and in your industry or your marketplace (In which your Site is Mainly Focused or Based on) Just Suppose You having a Site For “Clothing”

When you first head out to find buyers you should look to contact individuals that will understand the value of your site because they will be the easiest to sell too (they won’t need to be taught about your marketplace). They will also be the most excited about the prospect because most likely they already sell to the same target market and you will be bringing them a lot of potential new customers.

Searching Outside Your Industry

Once you search locally with no success you might want to try and search simply for a buyer looking for a website. This could be a web entrepreneur that sees the potential in your site or simply someone interested in running a website and would prefer to buy one rather then build from scratch. Obviously with this method you are going to have to do more explaining if the potential buyer doesn’t understand your industry and even worse if they don’t understand website hosting at all you will have a lot of technical training to do if they buy it. You will also need a really good sales pitch and the numbers (financial details) will count for a lot more since that might be the only part of your web business the buyer will understand.

There are a handful of online places you can try and sell your site.
Ebay Business/Websites for sale section is a popular choice but remember eBay is an auction so the negotiation and haggling is all automated. Your auction listing page will have to be very good to get a good price and you will be very much at the whimsy of eBay’s traffic which might not be ideal for what you are selling.

A better option in Our mind is try a few forums like the :- SitePoint site sell area where you can list your site for sale and get some exposure. The best thing about this is you can go in and search the archives to see what other sites have sold for in the past. By comparing the details of previous sales you can get a feel for what your site might sell for. Try hunting around in other forums such as SearchEngineForums buy my website and businesses for sale/brokerage sites such as BusinessBroker, BuySellWebsite, WebmastersMarketplace.com and eBizBrokers) to drum up some interest in your sale and conduct research.

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.

1. How and when will the money be transferred?: We suggest an upfront partial payment of (50%) and a final payment once the transfer has been made.If You Are you going to use cheque ? 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: 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.

Moving Forward Post Sale

You’re all smiles, your pockets are laden with cash and the world is a wonderful place. Now don’t screw it up and blow all your money on partying too hard, stupid investments or get rich schemes. You’ve learnt what it takes to build a web business and sell it. No doubt you would like to do it again and you have more business ideas to test. Remember how hard it was first time round with no capital available? You had to bootstrap your business, provide your own funding or beg family/friends/the bank for funds. Now you have capital which you can use and invest wisely. Sure celebrate a little, have some fun and enjoy the moment, but remember you didn’t get to where you are by wasting money and you’re not about to start wasting it now.

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