After a career as a professional musician and band leader in the Miami South Florida Area I decided to see if I could make some money with this new internet thing. After years of trial and error I started to get the hang of it and now I am completely financially independent because of my various online businesses. The goal of this blog is to chronicle my continued marketing experiences. I focus on real examples of what works and what does not work.
Google does not give us a recipe for getting our sites ranked. We have to use our own experiences to see what actually works rather than theory.
I hope you enjoy the blog. Please let us know what you think in the comments area. We appreciate your feedback.
Selling a website can be difficult. Key to finding the right buyer is discovering the right place in which to advertise your website. Five of these include auctions, classified and market listings, website brokers, online forums and Craig’s List. Each offers different possible rewards and risks, and not all of the online auctions sites operate in the same way as others. In other words, there is no simple “auction marketplace,” but a myriad of online businesses offering auction services for selling websites. Some of these businesses even operate using a number of these sales strategies.
Online Auctions
EBay has helped make online auctions one of the easiest, quickest, and most efficient means of linking buyers and sellers together within the internet. Cars, cosmetics, iPhones, books and so much more is placed on EBay to be sold to the highest bidder. The online auction is one of the best tools to get prospective buyers to bid on your site. Of course, despite such a vast pool of buyers, they are not all coming to purchase a website. Flippa is one of the internet’s most prestigious and trusted auction sites for websites with troves of buyers spending tens of thousands of dollars on websites, domain names and apps for iOS and Android.
Auction sites can either add value to your website if it is highly desirable or be a big disappointment. If you’re overvaluing your website because you haven’t adequately valued the traffic, domain and other assets or account properly for potential long-term earnings based on current sales, then you may receive few to no bids.
Classified and Market Listings
Flippa’s auction feature also costs $19 to list an established site and $9 to list a starter site. Luckily you can post your site for free within their Classified Listings. You will not receive the same coverage, and your website will not be broadcast to as large a pool of Flippa’s 600,000 buyers, but it is a useful, free means of putting your website up for sale in a place it is still likely to be seen.
Other classified and market listings can be found at WebsiteBroker.com, which offers a valuation calculator to be used for valuing your business. Do not use it. Though this is a good place to list your website, automated valuation calculators are untrustworthy arbitrary number generators that should not be used to value or sell a website.
There is also Buysellwebsite.com which offers professional appraisal value for your business at varying rates based on the revenue of your business. There is really no need to elicit this service, however, because there are more reputable sources for website and online business valuation including website brokers.
Website Brokers
A website broker is best used when the value of the website exceeds $20,000. At this point, the professionals will have the proper networks and sources to bring this website to a final sale with an investor. And that is essentially the broker’s job: value, market and sell your website for a commission.
Digital Exits is a website broker that specializes in the sale of online businesses. They only make money, however, if you make money and offer a very beneficial feature: free online business valuation. Yes, they will value your business for free and only make a commission of a final sale if you decide to solicit their services. Other brokers that can be used for more general websites include Website Properties, Empire Flippers.
Forums
Forums are another useful tool for buying and selling websites and virtual assets. There forums, however, are not made specifically for the purposes of buying and selling websites like auction sites and classified listings. Many of them, such as Digital Point and Warrior, do include sub-forums that link together buyers and sellers of websites, domains and the like. These can be useful, but if you don’t already have a presence on these forums, then you will lack the rapport and credibility many of these technocrats respect. For this reason, it might be better to stick to the expert brokers or the classified ads if you don’t spend hours on internet forums debating the pros and cons of the latest software to be released by Google. Of course, some subtopics are useful even if you don’t mean to comment on it, such as this one from Warrior which points toward useful online locations to sell your website.
Craig’s List
The one benefit of Craig’s List is that you can advertise websites specific to a region to people who live there. Of course, anything can be sold on Craig’s List, and there is no section for “websites.” You can post them, however, in other areas related to computers, software and the like. This should be considered a possible tool for selling businesses, but its utility is much lesser than those of the others listed in this article.
Conclusion
Selling your website means finding a place to sell it. Luckily there are a myriad of locations including auction sites, classified and market listings, website brokers, forums and Craig’s List.
You must be logged in to post a comment.