Tired of the daily grind of managing your webshop or website? Have you been offered a new job that is difficult to combine with your daily online business? Or do you even want to break free from the urban jungle and live somewhere offline in the countryside? Then selling your website might be the next best step.
If you’re worried that selling websites isn’t worth it, then you need to reconsider. You can usually sell a website for 20 to 40 times the monthly net profit. But how to make sure that you are asking the right price? Thanks to a great free validation tool called Flippa, website owners can now find out how much their online business is worth in just a few clicks. After that it is up to you to decide whether you want to list your website with them or not. But before you do that you should optimize your website first to get the best price out of it. Let me explain what you can do.
Optimize your website in 5 steps in order the get the best prize for it
1. Get traffic from different sources
If your business currently relies on paid traffic and ads, it’s a good idea to first attract traffic from other sources before considering a sale. It is especially wise to focus on attracting organic traffic.
Organic traffic sources have higher profit margins, but that’s not all. Experienced buyers and intermediaries place a high value on long-term stability and ease of management.
There is a big difference in the value of an ecommerce store that relies on micro-influencer promotions and a store that attracts thousands of organic visitors every month.
Stable organic search traffic from Google shows buyers that they won’t go out of business on advertising costs.
2. Clearly map your website traffic and revenue
No one is going to invest in a company that doesn’t keep proper records of their finances and most important assets. When an important asset for your company is the organic traffic or your social media followers, you must make sure that you record this transparently.
Keep in mind that platforms and intermediaries generally require multi-month financial and traffic reporting.
So make sure you install Google Analytics or an alternative to it on your website in time. Other important tools for traffic are Google search console and Google- or Facebook ads
3. Make a persona of your potential buyers and adjust your selling page accordingly
When you create a page to sell your website, you should already know who your most likely buyers are and what they are looking for on a website. You can do this by creating so called persona’s of potential buyers. A persona (or benchmark) is a very detailed description of a user of your product or service.
With the help of personas, you create ‘real’ people instead of general audiences that are difficult to target in practice.
Also, consider factors such as traffic sources, reliable documentation, and necessary website management. You may soon see a pattern where a certain aspect is important within your niche.
86% of consumers are interested in products from companies that offer them relevant content.
If you can provide all this content, reports and details to your ideal salesperson, you are already one step ahead of the competition. As a result, buyers will bid on your website with more confidence, and their maximum price will be much higher than if they still have all kinds of worries.
4. Use respected apps and automate all processes where possible
Certain types of websites and webshops simply require more effort and investments than others. If you have an e-commerce store and currently fulfill all orders yourself, you need to change that before you sell the business. You should minimize any personal involvement in the business as much as possible before selling.
Potential buyers who have the capital to buy a business for tens of thousands of dollars are certainly not looking for a new full-time job.
To allay such concerns, you can go through some automation tips I listed down below:
Some examples of processes that can be automated:
- Set automated reply to messages in your chatbox, e-mail or facebook business page.
- Train a virtual assistant for all daily tasks (customer service, execution, administration, etc.).
- Have the orders handled by an external service provider?
- Outsource the creation of new content to trusted writers and designers.
- For software products, have some freelance developers.
- Automate CMS updates and backups.
- Use CMS plugins to optimize your website and clear the cache automatically
5. Offer your website on the right platform
The best place to sell your website is through trusted website brokers, or website selling platforms. This is much more effective than marketing yourself on your website or via social media pages. In addition, they also function as intermediaries between you and the buyer, with the sale usually being handled through an escrow account.
Since reliability should be your number one priority when completing a transaction since you obviously don’t want anyone to run off with your site or your money let me propose my number one personal choice.
Flippa is an open auction site, like eBay but for websites. By default, everyone can see and bid on your website. To avoid giving your competitors good ideas and revealing your unique competitive advantage, you can also choose to make your ad confidential. Users have sold more than 38,000 websites on Flippa since its inception. This because your website is offered globally, and Flippa is a so-called peer-to-peer platform where you can meet the buyers and negotiate one-on-one directly.
So this is all you need to know before you put that advert up to sell your website.
Be patient, invest in your website prior to selling it, and make sure you improve everything enough BEFORE you start selling. Find out who your potential buyers are, and make sure your website appeals to them.
Good luck on selling your website!
