by: Matt Dobinson
There are hundreds and thousands of websites on the internet today being bought and sold and there are many places you can sell your website such as ebay and website brokers. Though this article we will explore each of these possibilities in greater details.
Ebay - Selling a website on ebay can perfect for some and completely useless for others. As most people know ebay, it gets millions of hits every minute from people looking for everything from hair nets to race cars. For starters this is a great way to get word out that your website is for sale. It has lots of people viewing your ads but keep in mind your competition is feirce as so many people post sites for sale on ebay. To sell your website on ebay it has to stand out from the rest.
Forums - Forums tend to be a great place to sell websites. They tend to ask alot more questions about statistics and revenue than most other places but if you have a quality site you can sometimes get alot more for it buy selling your website in forums. Good forums for this include sitepoint.com, geekvillage.com and webhostingtalk.com.
Website Brokers - Website brokers normally go out and try to get you the best possible price for your website. They tend to have contacts in the industry and will get into contact with people you can't or dont even know exist. They generally charge a fee of around 10%-15%. There are a few websites around where you can post your website up to brokers - kind of like a cross between ebay and a brokers firm.
Sell to your visitors - A commonly used technique to get a good profit from the sale of your website is to post a 'site for sale' link or image on the frontpage of the site for sale. This targets the audience to people interested in the topic of the site. But be warned not all of these people are or want to be webmasters.
Personal Contact - If you have a low budget, selling your website though your personal contact can be very rewarding. This takes everyone else out of the equation and you pay no broker fees or ad fees. If you plan on selling your website this way make sure you know enough people who would be intrested in the site.
Website Checklist
Before you get to putting up website for sale ads and hiring a site broker, there are a few things you will need. Firstly, find out in detail your statistics. This including unique visitors per day or month, bandwidth used per month and current and past revenue for the website. Most people who are in the industry will ask for the pagerank of the website too. You can find out your page rank by downloading the google toolbar and re-visiting your website. A pagerank is considered by most webmasters as being a large factor.