Selling or flipping websites, is becoming increasingly popular for those who are confident within the online world. A high-quality website with good content and a healthy amount of engagement can make the seller a large profit. The bonus of selling a website, rather than real estate for example, is that the site can make you money whilst you are preparing it for sale. Creating and selling a website for profit will, however, take time, effort and a bit of money. Here’s 7 tips for creating and selling websites for profit.
1. Understand how much you will be investing
Getting a website up online is very simple and will likely be the easiest part of the process. With free hosting sites, such as WordPress, you can create a free site and have it up and running within an hour or two. It’s important to remember however, that this doesn’t mean you won’t be investing a lot of your time or money.
Building and maintaining a valuable site requires a lot more time than building it does, from ensuring the site is optimised for search engines to making sure the content is engaging and elements on the site can be monetised. It should be possible to get the site online with a budget of around $100, however, building up an audience and advertising can be much costlier.
Research is crucial throughout the process of selling a website, and that holds true even before you have a live site. Research your options and understand how much time and money you’re willing to invest in the new business. It’s important to remember that no investment is guaranteed, so consider what will happen if your investment isn’t returned.
2. Niche selection
Again, researching before you dive into building your site is important. You obviously need an idea that’s situated in a niche that you can enter whilst ensuring it’s still a competitive and profitable area. While being an expert in the area you choose will be greatly beneficial, it’s not necessary. As long as you’re willing to learn about it, or can outsource quality content you should be ok, although it’s important to provide original, insightful and valuable content. This is what will make your site appealing to potential buyers.
Research the niche, analyse competitors and ensure there’s a gap that an audience is looking for which you can fill. Having a clean, relevant domain that utilises a keyword of the niche you’re entering is also crucial to the value of your site. There’s generally three types of blogs that will always sell:
- Content
Content sites are the most popular websites. They involve lots of high quality content which can be in the form of blogs, videos, news and forums, for example. These sites mostly earn revenue through selling advertisement space.
- Product or service sales
Most of the time these are online stores or ecommerce sites. These websites usually sell certain products or services. Because of the higher level of maintenance and time required to run these types of sites, they can be harder to sell.
- Affiliate sites
These types of sites sort of combine the two previous examples. They usually create content focused around specific products or services. This can be in the form of reviews or even personal blogs and are monetised through affiliate sales.
3. Create valuable content
This might be the most important part of the process. It’s important to ensure that your site has fresh, relevant and insightful content that has value in your audience’s eyes. Your content is what will draw and maintain your audience and the more successful you are at creating this sort of content, the more value your website will have. This content could be product or service reviews, technical support, consulting or even personal experiences.
4. Employ simple monetisation methods
Once you have chosen a niche and a type of site and then populated it with valuable content, it’s time to turn your hard-earned traffic into a revenue stream. There’s many ways to do this and it will look different depending on what type of site you have launched. A content site might make money through selling advertisement space or using Google AdSense and doing so is easier than it might seem. Selling services or products or making sales through affiliate links are other obvious but effective ways to generate an income. The more money a site is pulling in, the more value it has.
You should ensure you optimise content for both readers and search engines. A site must rank well for its keywords for it to have value in the eye of a buyer, but so too must the site look clean and function efficiently. Learning at least the basics of SEO and content marketing is key here.
5. Plan a smooth transition
Once your site is up and running with consistent views and visitors and is generating some revenue, you can begin planning the sale. The easier and smoother you can make the sales transition, the more attractive the site will look to a potential buyer. Be prepared with all the relevant financial and legal information and be honest about any issues surrounding the site. A high-quality website broker, such as Digital Exits can help you organise this process. A website broker will be able to help you from valuing your site, to advertising its sale to their database of potential buyers. A broker will ensure you get the maximum value for the sale, whilst completing the sale correctly.
Creating and selling websites for profit may seem like something reserved for the business and tech savvy, however, it’s accessible for anyone with an internet connection, a good idea and a keen attitude. Understanding what’s involved and selecting an appropriate niche and website type is crucial. With valuable content and effective monetisation of the site, a seller can make an attractive profit from their website.