Today I am really excited to share the details and process on how I sell my first website for 5100USD. Personally, I know buying and selling of websites have been ongoing for at least the past 15 years. However, the amount of information I can get from google search is still quite limited.
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Project Selling Website
Honestly, I really have no idea how much money I can make when I kickstart this project selling website. I know absolutely nothing about it and everything was so foreign to me. I have tried to build a website from scratch in the past but I am unable to even make a single dollar. It was sometime in Mar 2019 that I went for a digital marketing Bootcamp organised by SIRS.
I will not go into details on what is being taught over there but you can find out about their course here. It is free if you are selected but the criteria are that you will have to take up a digital marketing job if there are any offers from potential employers taking part in the programme.
Long story short, I was inspired by one of my classmate who bought a domain and hosting plan which he felt will aid him in his learning for Search Engine Optimisation(SEO). If you have not heard of this term, it is mainly using keywords to driving organic traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc to your website.
Buying A Domain and Hosting Plan
Since I am a father of 2 young kids, I decided to choose a niche for young fathers. I bought a domain name from Namecheap. Currently, most of my domains are housed with them. I would normally recommend people to host them separately to prevent all your digital assets to be at the mercy of one hosting provider.
For the hosting plan, I went for Hostgator as it is one of the reputable ones out there. Nowadays, web hosting competition is very strong and for small websites, it will most probably cost you max 7-8 usd/month which is even lesser than your NetFlix subscription.
Total Damage at this point of time(Apr 2019)
Domain Name: USD$9.09
Hostgator hosting: USD$142.21
Keyword Research
I did not do much planning from the start on how do I want to monetise the site as I know that the chances of success are not high. I am more in an exploratory mode to see what works and what don’t. However, I do know that the quality of the content and competition of keywords for the niche is very important to be able to at least rank in 1st or 2nd page of google search.
The first thing I did is to find 30 long-tail keywords using the golden keyword ratio made popular by Doug Cunnington. The video below will explain clearly the concept.
I also used another tool kwfinder to find low competition keywords. It is a very powerful tool and they will offer you lots of alternative low competition keyword suggestions after you key in a long tail keyword or just the domain name. The good thing is they offer a 10-day free trial to try out their software. You can try it out below.
Content Writing
Even though I could have written all the articles myself, I have also decided to try to outsource some of the writing to 3rd party content providers. The main thing is to fasten things ups due to my limited time for this project and also to assess the quality of these 3rd party sites. You can check them out here.
Total Damage at this point of time(May 2019)
Domain Name: USD$9.09
Hostgator hosting: USD$142.21
Textun Articles Cost: USD$281.80
It took me around 2 months time to finish uploading all the content in the site and also adding some amazon affiliate links within some of the content. I am pretty much done with the site in early Jun 2019 and will just need patience for the site to break the google sandbox.
Just in case you have not heard of this term, for new sites, google will only gain trust in it and display the content in their search engine after around 6 months. This is something everyone has to go through and you may not see any results of your efforts until at least 6 – 12 months down the road.
I would rather focus on what value can my site provide to my readers once it starts ranking in google search. Google algorithm is always changing. And sites that answer directly or help resolve queries to what users are searching for are greatly rewarded.
Buying and Selling Websites
While waiting for my father parenting site to slowly rank in google, I was getting bored and decided to go window shopping at one of the largest websites auction house, Flippa.com
Before you get too excited, my experience with them is that 95% of websites listed there are quite scammy and not profitable. In order for you to be able to fish out the gems from the 5%, I would suggest looking what are the recent sites sold. The price sold for and which types of sites have the highest bid. This will allow you to have a feel on what type of niches are popular and what kind of price can you fetch if you decide to cash in on your website in the future.
In the end, I found and bought a baby and pregnancy site niche which is quite close to the father parenting website I created. Do note that currently there are additionally 2-3% fees when you are buying a site in flippa as they use escrow.com to reduce scammy transactions happening.
Total Damage at this point of time(Jun 2019)
Domain Name: USD$9.09
Renewal of Domain Name: USD$9.06
Hostgator hosting: USD$142.21
Textun Articles Cost: USD$281.80
Upwork Articles Cost: USD$30
Buying of Website in Flippa: $1.440.60 USD
How To Sell A Website To A Client
Before you can sell a website to a client with a higher value then you have bought it for, the most important thing is increasing the traffic organically and also optimising the monetisation of the site. Below is what I have done so far for the site I have bought from Flippa.
There are few major changes I have done to the site include changing the theme and layout and adding more SEO optimised content. The content length is between 1k to 5k word.
The site was only having around 50 articles and I managed to add another 77 SEO optimised articles using the golden keyword ratio to target easy to rank long-tail keywords. Most of the articles are mainly written by myself and some from guest posts. I have also redirected close to 30 articles from my own site(Created in Apr to Jun 2019 period) to this site since Sept 2019 and monetise these 30 articles using amazon affilates using a different id. The following is a screenshot of the amazon affilate earnings from the website I bought from Flippa.
I also grow the site traffic organically by growing the number of followers and putting more pins on Pinterest. To save time, I scheduled regular pins using a free software tailwind.
How Much Is My Website Worth
This is really quite difficult to judge. On one hand, sellers like us want to be rewarded for our hardwork and resources put in for your site. On the other hand, buyers are only looking at the earnings of the site and how long would it take for them to get breakeven.
The most common way of accessing a website worth is their total gross earnings per month x 25x – 35x. For example, the site that I sold is earning on average around 215USD per month in Amazon affilates and 10USD per month in google adsense. Based on the figure, I can derive that my website is worth anywhere from 5625USD – 7875USD
However, there are some other factors that may determine how much more your website can be sold for.
- Consistency of your traffic and income on a monthly basis.
- How much time do you have to put in to maintain the website?
- How much more potential is there to monetise the site further?
Based on my experience selling this site, your website is only worth what the buyers are willing to pay for in the market. It is always advisable to grow your income as much as possible with different optimisation methods before putting it up for sale.
Sell Website For Free
Recently, a website that is gaining into prominence is motioninvest. They operate quite similarly to the more popular well established Flippa however they are only focused on buying and selling niche content websites and not other genres. What I like about them is that they are run by a group of very savvy and experienced website investors. So a scam site would not pass through them easily as compared to Flippa.
Based on their site, there are no fees when you sell your site to them and the turnaround time is much faster. If you are in need of cash and just want to sell your website fast and for free, this is a site that you can consider. You just have to fill up a form here in their site.
They will ask you for some traffic and earnings proof of your site and will email you with their valuation if they are keen to buy it from you.
Best Place To Sell Website
There are not many reputable places for you to sell small niche sites like what I am doing. So far, I have only tested 2 when trying to sell my site which is Motioninvest and Flippa.
Just a quick introduction about Flippa, they started in 2009 and their wide network exposes you to more than 120k potential buyers in their site. However, do note that they charge a listing fee of between $15-$49 USD and success fee of between 5% – 15%. You can check out latest flippa fees here.
I would say that it is one of the best place to sell your website as you just have to create a listing and provide all the information like earnings and traffic statistics and you are good to go. You can have the option to have a Buy it now price or reserve price.
Flippa Pricing Options
Based on the picture above, if any buyer bids $5,5k and above within the next 21 days and there are no other competitors, he/she will win the bid. However, if a buyer comes in and pay $24,500, he/she will win the bidding and end the listing early. If after 21 days, the bidding is less than $5.5k, then the website will remain unsold.
You should be able to get a better price as compared to motioninvest but because the listing period is for 30 days, you will need to spend quite a bit of time answering queries from potential buyers.
I got a better deal from Flippa when I sold it for $5100USD while Motioninvest offered me $4000USD. However, after the 510USD success fee, the difference is not that huge anymore.
Total Damage at this point of time(Apr 2020)
Domain Name: USD$9.09
Renewal of Domain Name: USD$9.06
Hostgator hosting: USD$142.21
Textun Articles Cost: USD$281.80
Upwork Articles Cost: USD$30
Buying of Website in Flippa: USD$1.440.60
Flippa Listing Fee: USD$49
Flippa Success Fee: USD510
Website Brokers
However, if your niche site grows into an authority site and bringing in 4 to 5 digits income monthly, I would highly recommend big website brokers like empire flippers or FE international. They charge a higher brokerage fee of around 15% but normally will be able to help you fetch a higher price in the market.