Is your business or blog about to close? Your website may be more valuable than you think. Here are 10 things to consider before selling your website.
There are many reasons for selling your website. Maybe you’ve spent the time to build it up into something profitable and now you’re ready to move on to the next big thing. Or maybe your business is about to close and you’d like to sell the website domain name.
No matter why you’re selling your website, you should take time to think before you put it on the market. Your site might be more valuable than you realize.
The last thing you want to do is accidentally leave money on the table!
We’ve rounded up the top ten things to consider before selling your website. Read on to find out more.
1. Think of the Long-Term Value
There’s one common mistake people make when selling websites — they only think of the site’s current value.
If you’re only thinking of how much your site is worth right now, you’re selling yourself and your site short. Instead, think of the website’s long-term value.
What’s its potential for earning? How could it grow in the future?
Those are the numbers you want to keep in mind when creating an asking price.
2. Do Your Research
If you still feel like you need a little more guidance to start the process, it’s always helpful to research what other successful people have done. (Of course, you can also research sales that failed to find out what not to do.)
Find out if there are any sites similar to yours that achieved successful sales. What type of data did they provide? What information did they put front and center?
That can help you to figure out what will be important to your potential sale. Then you can go back and look at your website with a critical eye to see if there’s anything you need to improve.
3. Optimize Your Site
No matter what, you should make sure that your site is fully optimized before it goes on the market. If you don’t do this first, your sale is almost sure to fail.
Just having Google AdSense is great, but it isn’t enough. Have you tested different layouts to see what gets the best ROI? If your website includes a blog, do you have affiliate links?
What about your ? Are you getting traffic from a variety of sources?
Optimization will look different depending on your site, but you can’t skip this step.
4. Improve Your User Experience
This might not seem like an obvious task when selling your website, but it’s just as important as optimizing your site. Why?
Improving your user experience will improve your audience engagement. Potential buyers like to see an engaged audience.
You can improve the experience for your audience by testing things like different website layouts or even different colors. Once you see what gets the most engagement, stick with it!
5. Create A Transition Plan
Odds are you’ve been the driving force behind this website for awhile. Maybe you’ve worked on it during all of your free time, or maybe you just put in a little bit of effort here and there.
Regardless of how much time you put into your website daily, you need to be sure that it will still thrive without you there. After all, there’s no guarantee that you’ll still be around as a consultant after you sell.
Figure out what needs to happen to make sure your website is still successful with you out of the picture.
6. Know Your Market
Selling to other marketers is a lot different than selling to your Average Joe. Marketers know all the tips and tricks, and they’ll see through you immediately.
You should also change your tactics depending on the you’re selling. Someone looking to buy a travel blog is going to be looking for different information than someone who wants to buy a website like Brixly unlimited web hosting.
Understanding who will be looking to buy your website will help you out in the long run.
7. Know Your Worth
So once you’ve taken all those steps towards selling your website, how do you know how much to sell it for?
A good rule of thumb is to look at your yearly earnings and how much risk a potential buyer would have to take on. A site with low risk would have a high multiple.
So, if your website makes you $50,000 a year and is low risk, you could set your asking price at $100,000, or a 2x multiple. If it was high risk, though, you could ask for $50,000 instead.
8. Gather Your Data
After all this, you still wouldn’t quite be ready to put your site up for sale. You’ll still need to make sure that you have all of the relevant data in place.
If people ask for statistics, you’ll need to have them available.
Know exactly how much your website has made in the past and what your traffic stats are today. It will help you later.
9. Understand Why You’re Selling
If you have a strong website that’s making money and doesn’t seem to have any issues, people are going to wonder why you’re giving it up. They’ll also ask questions if you’re selling because it’s not doing as well as you wanted.
Do you have an answer for them? If not, make sure you have one prepared.
This will also help to make sure that you have a good reason for selling and aren’t jumping into something too soon.
10. Choose the Right Platform
Once you have all of this information together, you can start looking for places to sell your website.
The right platform depends on your asking price for the website. Smaller sites can sell at auction or in a marketplace, while sites that have asking prices in the millions will probably want to use a broker or an investment bank to complete the sale.
Selling Your Website Doesn’t Have To Be Hard
No matter what stage your business is in, we can help you find the information you need to make the important choices.
Whether you’re looking for business forms, sample business plans, or market analyses, we can help. We are here to support business leaders from all industries.
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