5 Steps To Attract High Bids When Selling A Site

Posted on 26. Aug, 2007 by Adam in Websites

Hi, I’m Edward Dowd. I own and write for my site The Blog Beat. The site focuses on marketing and promotion but covers all aspects of blogging.

There can come a point in your site’s existence where you can no longer put all your heart, energy and effort into the project. You may want to move on, your interest may have changed. Selling your site is a definite exit strategy not only to see your efforts continued but also to earn some extra cash instead of letting your site sit and get old.

The best place on the web to sell a site seems to be Sitepoint. It costs $20 – $40 depending on how successful your site is to post the auction. I’ve seen auctions posted and receive bids a few minutes later on Sitepoint, so there are definitely people attentively watching. When you go to sell a site the most important part of a site to buyers are traffic and revenue. Hopefully you’ve been successful at both.

A good place to get a site estimate is dnscoop.com. The price dnscoop will probably be more than what you can get and from auction I’ve tracked in the past, you’ll get around half of the number DNScoop gives.

1. Description
You want your description to be detailed describing all the positives of your site. Give a good background of what your site is about and reasons for selling the site. A strong relevant domain name helps too.

2. Site Stats
To entice potential buyers, you’ll want to have good traffic. This isn’t the article to tell you how to get more traffic, but you’ll want to share high pageviews and unique visitors when you go to auction. Your bidders will want documented past stats and one of the best stats tools to share stats is Google Analytics. They let you export very nice PDF’s and even allow you to let people log in and view your stats. I would say share as much data as you can. Don’t forget to share RSS subscribers as well.

3. Monetization
You’ll want to give great detail on how much, how you earned and what you earned on the site, but be careful you don’t want to violate your advertisers’ terms of service. For example, Google Adsense prohibits the sharing of actual money made. Give rough estimates if you deal in ads, but include all your revenue streams in your estimate.

4. Buy It Now
Many potential buyers want to know a BIN (Buy It Now) price. I would advise against posting a Buy It Now Price right on the auction page. Get people who contact you to throw out a number, and try pushing them up a bit more. If the price they suggest is anywhere near what you will settle for, give them a higher number than you will settle for because they’ll probably come back with something in between the number you gave and they gave. It also helps to know who exactly you are deal with. If your dealing with a company of some sort, they’ll probably willing to fork over a good price.

If you do decide to settle for a Buy It Now price, close your auction. Another person out of the blue might contact you offering to pay more than the other person, in which case you can go for that offer. Try to make the actual transaction as slow as possible to make sure something like that doesn’t happen.

5. How Long To Put An Auction Up For?
Sitepoint allows you to put a bid up for a month, but I would advise against going for the full 30 days. I would suggest a week or two at most. This is because possible bidders will lose interest and might forget by then and your auction will fall below newer auctions on Sitepoint. Try to end the bid on a Sunday, because most people can attentively watch the auction end at that time.

Adnan’s Thoughts:
After reading through some of Edward’s points, I’ve decided to post a little snippet at the end detailing my own thoughts about selling a site.

Firstly, there are other places where you can buy and sell sites. I’ve had reasonable success with DigitalPoint in the sale of a forum and a proxy. For blogs and high established sites then I would recommend Sitepoint, but for smaller sites which you want to flip, DP is just as good.

In terms of information, I agree with Edward in that make sure to give the most relevant details about your space which could help to shift a site. Google rankings, affiliate income and place of domain registration are all good things to include. Make sure when you are disclosing Adsense income to blockout most of details like CTR – you don’t want your account getting banned.

Finally, I have a few issues with the Buy-It-Now price. In my own personal experience, it’s always best to put a BIN so that people know what you’re realistically expecting. But do exactly that, make the BIN realistic. In most cases, the BIN price won’t be used, but never undervalue yourself. A normal site is worth at least 10 times the monthly revenue and proxies are worth 6 times the monthly revenue. Set a high BIN just in case Mr. Rich comes along.

Another point:

If you do decide to settle for a Buy It Now price, close your auction. Another person out of the blue might contact you offering to pay more than the other person, in which case you can go for that offer.

Please don’t do this. Once you’ve received a bid that you are satisfied with and have closed your auction, you can’t pick and choose when a better offer comes along. Stick to your guns, as a few extra $$ won’t make up for the hard feelings that the first buyer will have (who will then leave negative feedback). Your reputation is everything online.

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