If you’re reading this, chances are you might not be ready to sell your website. At FE International, we have years of experience selling websites, both big and small, in a variety of niches. We have clients who come to us with the possibility of a sale but their websites are not quite what our extensive network of buyers would want to acquire… yet. With some tweaks your website could be ready to sell in a few months. Below are some points to consider and some actionable advice to help improve your website in preparation for a sale.
Is Your Website Old Enough to Sell?
All websites we sell at FE International have been in continuous operation for at least 12 months. This provides enough history and sustainability to create value for buyers and to ensure sellers are not leaving value on the table. We don’t tend to deal with website in their infancy that have hyped sales, such as the Ship Your Enemies Glitter sale. The website was only a few weeks old and sold for $85k. These are the exceptions and not the rule and in our opinion this was not good value for the buyer.
Are You Selling a Website in a Suitable Niche?
We’ve sold websites in every niche imaginable such as health, fashion, fitness, writing, career, photography, sports and travel. However, we do not sell websites in certain niches with legal or commercial risks, regardless of how profitable they might be. These include:
- Borderline legal sites (e.g. streaming)
- Pornography
- Non-English sites
- Businesses that aren’t actually web-facing
Is Your Website Generating Enough Income?
The average sales price at FE International is in the range 2-3x annual net profit for websites in the $20k-$2m range. To be more precise we use “seller discretionary income” instead of net profit. This is where we ‘add back’ costs that are not requisites for the new owner but have been taken for personal benefit, for example, a company car and owner distribution.
Profit is therefore the key factor in website sales with an array of other factors that affect the sales multiple. As a minimum, your website would need to generate at least $500 per month in profit before we can consider selling your website. If you would like to learn more about the valuation process, you can read this detailed resource on online business valuation.
How Can I Increase the Value of My Website?
The value of a website is dependent upon a variety of factors. It might take a few months to increase the value of your online business and start seeing results but if you are serious about selling your website the best time to start is now. Here are some of the more important factors to take into consideration when determining the value of your website:
- A history of stable or growing revenue
- A growing niche or industry, upward trends for a specific topic
- Solid backlink profile
- Frequent posting and updates over the past 6 months
- An engaged and active mailing list that is monetized
- Website is correctly optimized for mobile
- Diversified traffic sources e.g. PPC, organic, referral and social
- Streamlined and scalable systems and processes
- No past or present legal issues
- Hands off and minimal owner input
To implement the above there are several resources we would suggest to help you achieve your goals.
Increase Your Traffic
The more traditional school of thought on increasing traffic is through the use of SEO. If you are still learning or need a refresher, Moz has a Beginner’s Guide to SEO. On a lot of websites we see some quick wins such as removing thin content and ensuring all posts have appropriate meta descriptions and title tags (Yoast is a good WordPress plugin that can help with this). There are also many free seo tools that can help with keyword research, link building analytics, diagnostics and content. You can also increase your traffic by developing a multitude of referral sources. This method is outlined in this post.
Monetize Your Website
There are numerous ways in which you can monetize a website which include:
- Advertising
- Affiliate marketing
- E-commerce
- E-mail marketing
- Lead generation
- Membership sites
We wouldn’t suggest implementing all of these at once but one or two would help increase your website’s profit and therefore value in preparation for a sale. MonetizePros has a collection of in depth how to make money online guides covering these topics and will help you make more money.
Tune Up Your Blog
Whether you operate a blog or have a website that has a blog, there are some quick wins to be had. We created a free 50 point blog audit checklist that covers the fundamentals of operating a blog and the ways in which bloggers are missing out. It covers everything from strategy and design to content and SEO. Read the Blog Audit Checklist.
Lead Generation
Generating leads is essential for maintaining and growing a profitable online business. Sometimes original or out-of-the-box thinking is required but inspiration can be hard to come by. That’s where we come in: 35 tried and tested lead-generation ideas, each of which we’ve seen our brokerage clients use time and time again.
Increase Your Website Speed
“We’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.” – Google, 2010
Although the announcement is a few years old, site speed still remains an important factor in web search rankings. We recently put together a resource on how you can increase your site speed. The advice starts off simple and progressively becomes more technical. Even a few basic tweaks could dramatically increase your page load speed.
Improve Your Conversions
Unless your conversion rate is 100%, whether that be on sales or e-mail sign ups, you always have more work to do. Marketing psychology plays a big part in influencing website readers into taking a course of action. Would changing the color of a button increase conversions by 10%? Testing is vitally important when it comes to optimizing your website. You could try implementing one of these marketing psychology strategies to help boost your conversions.
Attend Conferences
If you are able, attending conferences can be great for two reasons. Firstly, world class thought leaders normally speak at conferences and you can gain valuable information and insight by attending their sessions. Secondly, running an online business can be isolating and conferences is an excellent way in which you can meet likeminded people, build a network and make mutually beneficial connections. See our list of top conferences for inspiration and also this article on how to be an awesome networker at conferences.
Website Sale Inspiration
If you want to read about some of our other clients, their successful website sales and some selling advice, see the interviews below.
· How an Entrepreneur in His 20’s Built and Sold Two Online Businesses
· Six Figure Online Business Sale for Family Man: How to Get Niche Quick
· Successful Website Sale: The Seven Figure Listing Interview