How to sell a website and make money

If you want to know how to get more money when selling your website, here are some tips that you might want useful. These are questions that are being asked by a reader so I thought it will be a good idea to share the answer to everyone.

Is it better to try to sell them all at once, group sites that are in similar niches or just sell one by one? Which alternative do you think will be able to give me the maximum profit?

It depends. If you have sites that generate significant income i.e. anything above 50, it is better to sell them one at a time. Bundling also reduces the average price per site.

That being said, if most of your site are making less than 50, it is better to bundle them so that as a whole, the revenue is significant enough to attract buyers’ interest.

If you want to bundle, it is better to do so in similar niches.

I've often heard that adsense sites usually sell for around 10x their monthly earnings. What is your experience with this and how could I get more for my sites?

Age and total earnings level will affect the kind of multiplier you can get. For young sites (less than a year) with small earnings (less than USD50 per month), the multiplier might be less than 10. For aged sites with proven earnings record of above a few hundred dollars per month, you can get somewhere between 18 to even 24 months.

I have sold and purchased sites for 15 to 20 months before. Most of these sites earn at least USD500 per month and a year of earnings record with rankings for multiple keywords.

If you have some high traffic keywords that are close but not yet at the top, it might help to push your valuation higher as well.

Just don’t expect a high multiplier for an average site.

If you really want higher valuation, look for niches where there are not many sites that people can buy. One such niche is the amazon sites. If you look through flippa, quality amazon sites are hard to find. Most of what is available are autoblogs with no proven earnings record.

Other minor factors might include the PR, the quality and design of your content.

One thing that I got worried about is when i'm advertising my site for sale on flippa for instance. Since the sites that I want to sell all have adsense blocks, I'm worried that people might start clicking on the ads which could cause me to be smart price or even worse, banned from adsense for invalid clicks. Any tips on that?

It is better to turn off your adsense during auctions. You can take a screenshot of your site with adsense on it and post that as an attachment.

Besides invalid clicks, there are tools that can use your adsense ID to find all your sites that use the same adsense codes.

Same thing goes for your google analytics account as well. Take the code out when you are selling on public marketplaces.

Do you know good resources (paid and free) that you could point me out so I could learn more about it? I've seen those two guys on, what's called, adsense flippers or something like that, but I still haven't managed to read their site.

Selling and buying websites is relatively new so there isn’t too much resources dedicated to it. What I can recommend are domain blogs. These guys are used to buying and selling domains. Use their sale techniques and apply them to websites.

Here are a few that I like:

http://morganlinton.com/
http://selfmademinds.com/200812/my-domain-buyers-guide/
http://www.domainstryker.com/2010/

If you have more questions about selling your websites, please feel free to email me or post them in the comments sections.


Have a merry Xmas 2011!!

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Selling sites to make money

Just a quick note to say that I have put up a new page that will list out the niche adsense sites that I am selling.

After taking to quite a number of beginners in this online money making game, motivation is a really issue. Not everyone has the faith and determination to continue to work on a site for a a number of months without seeing any returns.

I have try to create na online partnership with 10 beginners but things didn't work out. Even with keywords already supplied to them, it is still hard to motivate people as there is no money to be seen.

Hence, this is my latest approach to helping beginners. Buying sites that are earning are great stepping stones as you will be learning and earning money at the same time. In terms of motivation, it will be easier and hopefully, that will let you see more success down to the road.

The sites I am going to sell are not based on just one keyword. Going forward, I am going to create more adsense sites that will not have trouble with Google. They will be keywords that really needs information. Moreover, I want to make sure that they can be expanded so that the new site owners don't get stuck on the same revenue after buying the sites.

If you are interested, take a look at the websites for sale page.

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How to make money by buying sites with passive income

It has been an exciting April as I achieved one of the highest earnings so far in my IM career. Sorry for the lack of posting as I was so busy with starting new projects. I decided this month to slow it down a bit as I have enough on the plate for the entire year .

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I mentioned about site investing in my previous articles and I will talk more about it this time. However, I am still learning some of the nuts and bolts of buying sites so don’t take my word as the holy bible. It is just my learning points so far in this investment journey. I am sure there will be more in the coming months.

What to look for when buying a site for passive income

• Search traffic: I don’t invest in sites that have majority of their traffic from twitter, youtube and what’snot. I only look for sites that have at least 75% of their traffic from search. This is because search is passive and doesn’t require too much work unless you want to grow. One of the earlier site I bought was a social site and the things you need to do maintain the traffic is just too much work.

What keywords are driving the search traffic: It is not sufficient to just look for sites with good search traffic. Go down deeper to see what keywords are driving the traffic. Be aware of sites that used trend keywords such as events or news. These kind of sites will not have substainable search traffic once the trend dies off.

What you should do is to use a spreadsheet to analyse the top keywords the site is bringing in. See where the site is ranking for these keywords so that you know whether there is any upside to the site. For example, if a keyword is number 8 and is driving a few hundred people per month, you know that by bringing this keyword to the top 3, you can potentially enjoy a few thousands.

In addition, I go a layer deeper and see what big traffic keywords the site may be ranking for but is not showing in the analytics because they are buried in page 3 or 4. For example, a site might be ranking for cheap white ipad accessories. I will take a look to see if it is ranking for ‘white ipad accessories’ or even ‘ipad accessories’. If that site is ranking for these higher keywords, it will be a good push for me to buy the site as I can push these keywords to page one and enjoy.

• Source of backlinks: Check to see if the backlinks can be removed by the site owner. Certain site owners have multiple sites and they used these to support each other. It might be likely that if you buy such a site, the site owner might remove the links from their own network once the sale is completed. This will seriously pull the ranking of the keywords down and reduce the overall search traffic to the site.

• Check the history of the domain: Make sure the domain has not been used to do anything that Google might frown upon such as sex, gambling, drugs etc. You want to buy a site that has a clean history so that you have a good foundation to work on.

• Authority site: This is a personal preference. I like to buy sites that are recognised as authority. This means sites with indented listing such as this example http://www.google.com/search?q=keyword+academy&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a. I like authority sites because they are legitimate and are also easy to introduce new keywords to expand its potential.

• Diversified income streams: It is also a good practice to buy sites that have a different monetisation model. Rather than adsense, you can diversify your income base by buying sites that make money off affiliates such as Amazon or Commission Junction. I bought one recently that is selling software products and I have found that the margins are much much higher than what you will get for adsense.

Where to buy sites from

Most people tend to use flippa to buy sites but this is not where I have gotten the best deals. Hence, this will not be a post about how to buy sites from flippa. This is because there is too much competition and the good sites tend to have over valued prices. The best deals I have gotten come from private sources. This includes hanging out in forum as well as using innovative ways to find good sites. Below is one strategy I used.

I look at the sites listing in the buysellads site and contact those that have good authority but are charging about USD10-30 dollars for their ads. The lowly priced ads means the site owners are not making much money and you have a chance to buy them at a much better valuation than sites that are listed in flippa.

How much do pay for sites

The average norm for me is around 15-24 months range. I never have the luck to buy sites that can break even in 10-12 months. Fortunately, I was always able to push the ranking of the keyword higher than the original owners, which fastens my breakeven.

I find that for higher quality sites, they tend to command a much higher premium than the 10 times industry norm. I agree with such pricing because it is much difficult to build a site that brings in 500 per month than a site that brings in 100 or less a month. This scaling factor is where I think the premium is and is something I am willing to pay.

How to negotiate with site owners

When talking about the price, always stick to revenue as the basis for valuation. Don’t consider potential of the site or how much it cost the previous owner to build it. All these are irrelevant. You are buying the site for its current benefit, not for what it could be or to cover the expenses of the previous original. If you stick to this principle, then the negotiation will be much quicker and the results tend to be more favourable to you.

What are the logistics of site buying

After the deal has been agreed, there are a couple of things you need to do before the whole transaction is completed.

First you need to pay for the site. The most secure way is through an escrow service. It is not complex to use but you might some time to navigate it if you are doing it for the first time. The most irrating thing is that you need to go to the bank and wire transfer some funds from your bank account to the escrow account. Once that is done, the rest can be completed via an online platform.

Next, you need to receive the domain from the buyer. Depending on where the current domain name is registered, the process for domain transfer will be different. This is again a learning process but it is not difficult.

At the same time, you should start to move the site to your own hosting account. If neither the seller or yourself know how to do this, it is better to engage a technical person to do it. I have no technical skills what so ever and I always a freelancer to help me do it to prevent any mishaps from happening due to site transfer issues.

Once the site has been transferred to your hosting account and you have also received the domain names, remember to change the name servers on your domain to your new hosting account. If not, your domain will show a parking page rather the site. Do not drag this for too long as you never know whether Google will penalise the site for having no content and you can potentially lose all your rankings. To avoid this issue, it is always better to transfer the site first, then change the name servers once the content is up for hosting account.

That is all for site buying. I am sure I missed out some points. Please feel free to ask me questions via the comments.

What is next making money experiment

I also want to talk about a new experiment in my next post. I want to see how to make money with a general article directory site, rather than a site that is focus on a niche. There are reasons why I want to do this and I will outline them in more detail in my next post.

Thanks for reading and have fun in learning how to make money online.

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