Selling a website
Discussion
My wife runs a website. It was founded in 2005 and currently has a couple of hundred paying members. It is a female website (so has to be fronted by a woman) and brings in £5-6000 pa with no advertising.
There are a couple of things on the table: a book deal and we get quite a lot of media interest (over the years, the website has been in all the main newspapers, on radio and TV).
My wife now doesn't have the time to continue to run this website (she currently does the admin side, plus try to post in the forum on a daily basis but we haven't had chance to get any press releases out for ages) and so she wants to sell it.
1. what value do you think we can put on the website? (including its nine domains).
2. where is the bast place to sell it?
Thanks!
There are a couple of things on the table: a book deal and we get quite a lot of media interest (over the years, the website has been in all the main newspapers, on radio and TV).
My wife now doesn't have the time to continue to run this website (she currently does the admin side, plus try to post in the forum on a daily basis but we haven't had chance to get any press releases out for ages) and so she wants to sell it.
1. what value do you think we can put on the website? (including its nine domains).
2. where is the bast place to sell it?
Thanks!
Does most of the income come from recurring payments? If they do... your website might be worth next to nothing as depending on how you take the payments, you won't be able to transfer them to a new owner. And asking everyone to sign up again with a new payment inevitably results in a huge drop off in member numbers as people then question whether its worth the money.
Without knowing any real details I'm going to take a guess at the website being worth anything between £1k-20k. If you want some advice I'd be happy to look at the url in private... I've sold some websites of my own for mid 7 figures and currently run several more doing 7 figures a year profit. So I feel I'm reasonably qualified in this field
I wouldn't advise selling on Flippa, its nearly all trash that gets listed there. Plus it has the USA bias which certainly won't help. My first port of call would be to try and sell the site to one of your advertisers, if you have any. If thats not viable, look and see who is bidding on Google Adwords for your main keywords and approach all of them. Then you're working with a pre-qualified list of people who already understand the value of paying for good quality traffic.
One hurdle you are going to need to overcome though. If it only generates £5k a year and your wife has no time to run it properly, how much is she actually earning per hour? Its going to be hard to convince someone to give you a lot of money when all they're effectively doing is buying themselves a below minimum wage job. A better option might be to hire someone to run it for you while you work out how to grow the income to a level serious buyers might be interested in.
Without knowing any real details I'm going to take a guess at the website being worth anything between £1k-20k. If you want some advice I'd be happy to look at the url in private... I've sold some websites of my own for mid 7 figures and currently run several more doing 7 figures a year profit. So I feel I'm reasonably qualified in this field
I wouldn't advise selling on Flippa, its nearly all trash that gets listed there. Plus it has the USA bias which certainly won't help. My first port of call would be to try and sell the site to one of your advertisers, if you have any. If thats not viable, look and see who is bidding on Google Adwords for your main keywords and approach all of them. Then you're working with a pre-qualified list of people who already understand the value of paying for good quality traffic.
One hurdle you are going to need to overcome though. If it only generates £5k a year and your wife has no time to run it properly, how much is she actually earning per hour? Its going to be hard to convince someone to give you a lot of money when all they're effectively doing is buying themselves a below minimum wage job. A better option might be to hire someone to run it for you while you work out how to grow the income to a level serious buyers might be interested in.
Edited by icetea on Monday 23 July 03:11
Thanks for the reply.
It's not pig farming! But it is something female, and so HAS to be headed by a woman.
icetea said:
Does most of the income come from recurring payments? If they do... your website might be worth next to nothing as depending on how you take the payments, you won't be able to transfer them to a new owner. And asking everyone to sign up again with a new payment inevitably results in a huge drop off in member numbers as people then question whether its worth the money.
Think Facebook, but with paid membership. There are new members daily, and that will not change (they sign up for at least a year).icetea said:
Without knowing any real details I'm going to take a guess at the website being worth anything between £1k-20k. If you want some advice I'd be happy to look at the url in private... I've sold some websites of my own for mid 7 figures and currently run several more doing 7 figures a year profit. So I feel I'm reasonably qualified in this field
Thanks: struggling to see how a website which can can bring in £1,000 every other month (with NO costs apart from Paypal charges) can only be worth £1,000.....?icetea said:
I wouldn't advise selling on Flippa, its nearly all trash that gets listed there. Plus it has the USA bias which certainly won't help. My first port of call would be to try and sell the site to one of your advertisers, if you have any. If thats not viable, look and see who is bidding on Google Adwords for your main keywords and approach all of them. Then you're working with a pre-qualified list of people who already understand the value of paying for good quality traffic.
No advertisers. No keywords. As I said, we spend ZERO on advertising. People find us through press releases and SEO website. Every time we get a good press release out which is pubished, membership jumps by £few hundered - £couple of grand, depending on the size of the releaseicetea said:
One hurdle you are going to need to overcome though. If it only generates £5k a year and your wife has no time to run it properly, how much is she actually earning per hour? Its going to be hard to convince someone to give you a lot of money when all they're effectively doing is buying themselves a below minimum wage job. A better option might be to hire someone to run it for you while you work out how to grow the income to a level serious buyers might be interested in.
Let's say the website is a website for female pig farmers (it isn't!). Other female pig farmer will find the website if they search on the keywords "female pig farmers" or if they read about us in the press. The person who will buy this website needs to also be a female pig farmer (that is why we can't just approach anyone out there).It's not pig farming! But it is something female, and so HAS to be headed by a woman.
JumboBeef said:
Thanks: struggling to see how a website which can can bring in £1,000 every other month (with NO costs apart from Paypal charges) can only be worth £1,000.....?
Because you are saying your wife doesn't have time to run it any more - its not passive income. It all comes down how much work is involved… would you buy a website for £5000 if it was going to mean doing 20 hours work every week for effectively minimum wage? JumboBeef said:
Let's say the website is a website for female pig farmers (it isn't!). Other female pig farmer will find the website if they search on the keywords "female pig farmers" or if they read about us in the press. The person who will buy this website needs to also be a female pig farmer (that is why we can't just approach anyone out there).
It's not pig farming! But it is something female, and so HAS to be headed by a woman.
It doesn't necessarily have to be run by a woman, or even a pig farmer. If its all done online then it could easily be ran by a bloke using a womans name, who can google any pig related questions before answering. Though that might make the first point about time taken to earn that £6k even worse, if he's got to spend time researching things that your wife could just answer instantly.It's not pig farming! But it is something female, and so HAS to be headed by a woman.
If you've been mentioned in all the main newspapers and they have included links to your website then you must have quite a lot of domain authority… so to only be able to turn that into £100 a week makes me thinks its really badly monetized. The chances are if you sell it like it is just now you're going to get next to nothing for it and then someone like me will buy it and convert the site into something else completely and make a load of money. So really if there is an opportunity like that there… it needs to be you who takes it before selling the site, not the buyer after. Extreme example but I bought the website of a gay holiday company that went bankrupt (Respect Holidays if you want to google it, site is borderline nsfw depending on where you work i suppose) and turned it into a payday loans site…. 5 figure return on a £100 investment and took me about 3 days.
That was obviously going way off topic and the site ended up penalised but by then I had already cashed in. Are there any sort of related pages or sections you can add to the site that would be easier to monetize? i.e. site about Cardiff thats impossible to make any money from all its random traffic = add a 'cardiff hotels' section and pull in highly targeted traffic that is very easy to monetize via affiliate links.
Valid points, thanks.
My wife spends no more than a couple of hours each month on Admin. We know that with a big push then the website could do so much more. It has in the past but she (we) just don't have the time to push it forward any more.
It does need to be a woman. I'll send you a link so you can understand: please keep it to yourself.
My wife spends no more than a couple of hours each month on Admin. We know that with a big push then the website could do so much more. It has in the past but she (we) just don't have the time to push it forward any more.
It does need to be a woman. I'll send you a link so you can understand: please keep it to yourself.
No problem, just had a look - it could still be run by a man though I think. It would be easy to just make up replies as you go along lol.
If the site only takes a couple of hours a month and is making £500 every month then thats not bad... you might be able to get a years revenue as a sale price. But if you are confident it could do a lot better with a push to promote it, then you're selling yourself short if you get rid of it right now. Can you not use the £500 a month to hire someone to work on it? With the demographic of its users you should easily be able to find someone who sits at home with their kids all day... pay them next to nothing to work on it and do it as a self employed position so you don't even need to pay them minimum wage. Or hire someone outside of the UK.
If you've done all the hard work of getting the site established it seems a bit strange to offload it just before it starts making any real money...
If the site only takes a couple of hours a month and is making £500 every month then thats not bad... you might be able to get a years revenue as a sale price. But if you are confident it could do a lot better with a push to promote it, then you're selling yourself short if you get rid of it right now. Can you not use the £500 a month to hire someone to work on it? With the demographic of its users you should easily be able to find someone who sits at home with their kids all day... pay them next to nothing to work on it and do it as a self employed position so you don't even need to pay them minimum wage. Or hire someone outside of the UK.
If you've done all the hard work of getting the site established it seems a bit strange to offload it just before it starts making any real money...
Icetea I had a look at the website you mentioned. None of the links work and the site basically doesn't work at all. If you've sold it already I don't suppose you care, but how did you sell a site that doesn't work for 5 figures? Or has it got like that since the new owner took it over?
IanCormac said:
Icetea I had a look at the website you mentioned. None of the links work and the site basically doesn't work at all. If you've sold it already I don't suppose you care, but how did you sell a site that doesn't work for 5 figures? Or has it got like that since the new owner took it over?
After it got penalised, I converted it back to how it was before - I never sold the site again, I made the money by ranking the site for payday loans related phrases and then selling the traffic to Wonga.Very interesting.. So did they pay you per click then, every click that you got through your website that went to theirs paid you, like having adsense on there or something else? Why did you do it from a site like that, rather than just creating a new url and making a payday loans related site from scratch?
icetea said:
No problem, just had a look - it could still be run by a man though I think. It would be easy to just make up replies as you go along lol.
If the site only takes a couple of hours a month and is making £500 every month then thats not bad... you might be able to get a years revenue as a sale price. But if you are confident it could do a lot better with a push to promote it, then you're selling yourself short if you get rid of it right now. Can you not use the £500 a month to hire someone to work on it? With the demographic of its users you should easily be able to find someone who sits at home with their kids all day... pay them next to nothing to work on it and do it as a self employed position so you don't even need to pay them minimum wage. Or hire someone outside of the UK.
If you've done all the hard work of getting the site established it seems a bit strange to offload it just before it starts making any real money...
What would you do at any of the meet-ups? Wear a wig? Trust me, it needs to be a woman.If the site only takes a couple of hours a month and is making £500 every month then thats not bad... you might be able to get a years revenue as a sale price. But if you are confident it could do a lot better with a push to promote it, then you're selling yourself short if you get rid of it right now. Can you not use the £500 a month to hire someone to work on it? With the demographic of its users you should easily be able to find someone who sits at home with their kids all day... pay them next to nothing to work on it and do it as a self employed position so you don't even need to pay them minimum wage. Or hire someone outside of the UK.
If you've done all the hard work of getting the site established it seems a bit strange to offload it just before it starts making any real money...
The answer to your question is simple: just don't have the time!
IanCormac said:
Very interesting.. So did they pay you per click then, every click that you got through your website that went to theirs paid you, like having adsense on there or something else? Why did you do it from a site like that, rather than just creating a new url and making a payday loans related site from scratch?
LooneyTunes said:
I'm going to guess at number of pre-existing inbound links and, to a lesser degree, existing user traffic...
It was all pre-existing links... existing user traffic is bordering on worthless for something like this - someone about to book an expensive holiday doesn't need a payday loan. They don't pay per click, they pay per new customer.
Not so much higher end really I don't think, but even if they were £1-2k for a holiday booking its not the demographic you're looking for for a payday loan signup - you need someone who's absolutely skint so the traffic itself was completely useless from that point of view.
The site still ranks page 1 for 'gay holidays' so at some point I might switch it back to that niche and build a proper site... 3-5% commission available so it could be a reasonable earner once more.
Really I'd need to partner with someone who has a lot of experience taking gay holidays and let them deal with the content side of it while I worked on the promotional side of it... if anyone is interested feel free to pm me.
The site still ranks page 1 for 'gay holidays' so at some point I might switch it back to that niche and build a proper site... 3-5% commission available so it could be a reasonable earner once more.
Really I'd need to partner with someone who has a lot of experience taking gay holidays and let them deal with the content side of it while I worked on the promotional side of it... if anyone is interested feel free to pm me.
Interesting discussion folks, love how PH veers from women only pig farming to gay holidays in the blink of an eye!
If its not too much to ask Mr Icetea, trade secrets & all that, but where's the best place to look for such distress sale domains? Flippa seems full of people banging together site-in-a-box stuff and asking silly money.
If its not too much to ask Mr Icetea, trade secrets & all that, but where's the best place to look for such distress sale domains? Flippa seems full of people banging together site-in-a-box stuff and asking silly money.
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