Did you know that you could make money by selling your website? Let’s say you got excited about blogging, and started several blogs. Now, you want to consolidate by focusing on a select few. What do you do with the ones you are no longer interested in? You could sell it for some cool cash.
You could also earn a side income by selling websites in your free time.
I’ve sold two websites on Flippa to date. I have a third one listed for sale.
Before we go into how to sell a website, let us figure out why you should sell a website?
Here are my top reasons.
#1 Loss of interest
We start a website or a blog with a lot of excitement, we are enthusiastic for the first few years, and then we lose interest.
I know people who have blogs that make money, but the owners are sitting around and doing nothing with their blogs. Sooner or later, these blogs are going to die. It’s best to sell them to a new owner who can benefit from the blog than allow the blog to die.
#2 Consolidate your assets
I had several blogs, and I wanted to focus my energy on fewer assets, so I decided to sell the ones where I had the least interest.
#3 Can use the proceeds of the sale on other assets
If you need some capital to make improvements to an existing blog that you believe will be more lucrative on the long run, you may generate capital for it by selling a blog that you think has capped out on its potential.
What do buyers look for when buying a website?
If you look around on Flippa, the websites that attract the best buyers have these in common.
- A professional logo and design
- Unique content
- Consistent earnings
- Organic Traffic – If buyers know that the traffic will not go down if they stop advertising, it makes the website a lot more attractive to buyers.
What is the expected sale price of a website?
Most sites I have seen net anywhere from 0.6x to 2.5x of earnings. This is a broad benchmark and not a generalization that works for every website. The sale of anything depends on a willing buyer and a willing seller. If you are lucky, you may find a buyer who falls in love with your website and chooses to pay a premium to own it.
Once you’ve decided to sell, it’s time to figure out how to sell a website.
How to sell a website on Flippa?
The most popular place to list and sell your website is Flippa.
Before you sell on Flippa, you may want to have access to your Google analytics so that you verify your site analytics, and your proof of revenue (can include PayPal transactions or bank statements).
Once you have these two, it’s time to create an account on Flippa and list your website.
A few things to keep in mind when listing on Flippa:
Most websites on Flippa sell between a few hundred dollars to about $5000. If your website has more than 100k visitors and is generating a revenue of more than $10k a month, then you may want to explore other options, or Flippa’s high-end deal flow professional where Flippa has created an alternative for bigger online businesses.
If your website is making a net profit of anywhere from $100 to less than $1000 a month, then Flippa’s self-service platform might be most suitable.
When listing your blog, Flippa will ask you for the name of your business, summary, and description.
You want the summary to mention the most lucrative feature of your business. In my case, my website had backlinks on entrepreneur, Forbes, and domain authority of 36. So, my summary read “A business website with DA36, and backlinks on entrepreneur, Forbes, and 300 other websites.”
The description can be more detailed. It can include:
The purpose of your blog, target audience (some audiences are worth more than others), number of page views a month, age of domain, why a new buyer should buy it, intangibles that may not be reflected in the numbers, and anything you believe that can make your website look more lucrative to the buyer.
Once you’ve created a nice sales page on Flippa, the next option on Flippa is to decide whether it should be an auction or a classified sale. Flippa recommends a classified sale but I prefer an auction because auctions are more exciting and it makes the buyer feel like he is competing for something, competitiveness among buyers can increase the selling price of a website. Besides, auctions have an end date which forces potential buyers to take a call within a specific time.
The time frame for an auction on Flippa is anywhere between one to 30 days. I recommend a time frame of 10 days. Most bids on Flippa happen in the last one hour. So the ending time of an auction is crucial.
Most bidders are from the US, so an end time on a weekday of around 10 pm EST is ideal. I haven’t seen too many bids being placed on weekends, so try to end your auction on a weekday before 10 pm in the US, and not at 3 am when everyone is sleeping.
Conclusion
Selling your website is exciting. To get a good price for your website, ensure that you have documented earnings for the last 12 months, strong page views, and design and content that looks professional. Like many things in life, timing matters a lot.
