How to Sell Your Website

If you are reading this, you have either failed with your Internet business or you believe your website may be quite valuable and would like to sell it.

The most important step in selling your website is determining the value. If you offer it for sale for $1million and it has 5 pages and costs you $2.99/month for hosting, you are not going to have any serious offers.

So let's evaluate the primary factors in determining website value.

Of course as in any business the success is an indicator of value. But not in every scenario. If you have an apartment building with 50 empty units and are loosing money, the property is still valuable and can make money under better management.

Maybe your website has traffic. Online, traffic is king. If you have it, you are a winner. If you don't then you need it. In either case, the more you have, the more you can get for your website.

If your website has5000 people a day visiting, you have quite a successful website. If you have 5 people a day, one of them being you, then the traffic value is $0. But as a base value you can average the traffic value at about $0.05 per person per day. So a website with 5000 daily visitors has a traffic day value of $250.00. The site value incorporates a full year of traffic or 365x250=$91,250.00.

The annual traffic value is based on the value of the advertising that can be generated using the daily traffic. In the case of the 5 person a day website that would only be $91.25 per year.

The traffic can be further qualified by paid traffic and search or natural traffic. If you are paying for traffic via advertising, the traffic value is offset by the amount of resultant traffic via your ads. Anyone can advertise, this does not increase the value of your website unless the visitors continue to use the site after the advertising is stopped.

The next factor is programing. If your website is hosted on pageBuzz.com although it is an awesome hosting system, you do not own any of the programing. The new owner will need to use pageBuzz to run their business. If the programing is portable and can be moved or modified by the new owner, the value is much higher. In general generic programing that has been installed will increase the value but not significantly. For example if you install a generic shopping cart you will increase the vale by a few hundred dollars. If that cart is populated with inventory, then it could be several thousand dollars. Solely based on how long it will take to do the work.

If you have custom programing, needless to say you have invested a great deal of money in it. But having something that is manageable and can be modified is of great value. Also having a system such as pageBuzz.com could be worth millions where having a shopping cart would not be worth much at all.

The next factor would be the website name. If you do not have a DotCom, you don't have anything. If your domain name is something.biz, the value of the website just fell through the floor. On the other hand if you own something.com you can keep adding numbers in the dollar collum. A good domain name can increase the value of a website by several hundred thousand dollars. Since each name can only be owned by one person, owning the right name is huge.

Names like "myhomeproductsstore.com" are pretty useless as far as name value. But "store.com" has great appeal and you can pretty much name your price. Also names that are unique such as "squigglebot.com" have no real value unless that have branding power.

If you have had millions of people on and using your website and it is a recognized brand, then the value is not based on the website but the branding power of the name or image. Obviously a brand such as McDonalds is worth more than myuselessstore.com. For the sake of argument we will assume you have no branding power.

Next is graphics. How much did you spend, how much is it worth. It is not unusual to spend tens of thousands of dollars of design and graphics. You will no doubt want to get that money back. Average website graphics (not using templates) including a unique logo would be $1500.00.

Now, take those values, and estimate the value of your website. Find your market and advertise the website for sale. There are many ways to sell your website.

You can advertise it on ebay.com or sites that specialize in websites for sale such as websitebuzz.com.

Wherever you decide to list your website, don't get caught up in a dream. Ask a real number for the site or people will not take you seriously. An average failed website will run from $100 to about $1500. That being based on search engine placement, minimal traffic and no real sales.