Selling websites is a tricky business because surprisingly, up until recently, not many people valued them as tangible business assets. Instead, they thought that something which could fit on the size of a CD couldn’t actually be worth a great deal…
These days, websites are amongst some of the most valuable business assets a company can possess. Many companies wouldn’t even exist without their website. Think Google… Websites valued at anything from a nothing at all to billions of dollars!
When it comes to knowing your website’s value, how do you calculate it? Do you workout the time you’ve spent in hours developing it? Do you base its value on how many visitors it gets? It’s actually very complicated, and it depends on a number of factors. One rule of thumb is the more valuable a site is the more difficult it is to value!
Looking at the monthly profits is an important aspect of figuring how much your website is worth. One of the best rough calculations you can do in order to get a rough appraisal is to calculate the monthly profits for the past three months, then multiply by three + the age of your site. i.e. if my website generates $10,000 a month in profit and is 4 years old then I’d want to sell for $10,000 *(3+4) = $70,000.
But that’s just a general metric. It’s important to take into account other factors such as how many daily visitors you get. Chances are you’ve not went to great lengths to monetize your site, in which case, you can ask more based on the monthly visits. A good way to calculate is to add $1 for every hundred visitors your site gets, but remember to work this out based on an average over a reasonable period of time so you’re not basing you’re sites value on inaccurate information.
One of the other most important aspects of selling a site is its domain name. Usually domain names have separate value and it’s important to get a domain appraisal before you start to sell. In some cases, the domain can be worth more than the website, so take this into account when selling.
Ordinarily speaking, domain names need to be aged i.e. a few years old and they also need to have quality extensions. This means .com .net and .org. If your site is based on a .info domain then this will reduce how much you can ask, because .info domains and other ‘novelty’ domains are neither valuable nor attractive.
But the bottom line in selling a website for sale on the internet is that it is only ever worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it. Don’t think because you spent 1,000 hours working on it that a site is worth $5,000 dollars because whilst it may very well be worth that much, it could also be worth less or alternatively more.
Don’t make the mistake of selling yourself short, and most importantly, don’t try to sell your site for more than it’s worth. If you can’t get a good price, hold on to it for a bit longer, because someone will buy it, eventually.
