Buying & Selling Websites has been a very popular, helpful resource for those wanting to learn about the art of buying and selling websites. There has always been a real lack of good training for those interested in purchasing a website, sell an existing one, and answer all the questions in between.

BASW was put together to address the who, what, when, where, and how to an industry literally begging for quality information on the topic. We’ve received rave reviews from our members, and I’m excited to announce that we’ve only just begun.

In the coming months, BASW is going to be revamped with even more material, videos, and training so we can continue to be on the cutting edge of all things related to Buying & Selling Websites. With these new additions, we wanted to give the site a brand new look, and I wanted to share it with you today.

Admitedly, this may not be the final design, but it’s the direction I’m leaning, and I wanted to share it with you. For those of you who haven’t joined, now is the time. Due to the nature of the content we provide, and the fact that we even had one student tell us he would have gladly paid $2000+ for the material (that was great to hear), we are going to be raising the price of the training back to around its original pricepoint (but not anywhere near $2,000 so don’t worry – even though it is worth that many times over we want it to be reasonable enough for the “average joe” to be able to participate).

So for the next 30-60 days, you’ll be able to get the entire training + ALL the new material (when it is released) for the insanely low price of $99. This wasn’t meant to be a sales pitch, but as I started writing about the new design, I got excited with thinking about how great the new material will be. If you want to be “grandfathered” in at the $99 level, I suggest you join soon. Obviously, this is not a “You have to join by midnight tonight.” We’re not going to officially launch this for a couple months – and the $99 will be in tact until then – but it would be a great time to get your feet wet with the content and videos we already have and browse through our mastermind forum.

So here is a preview of the new design (click here to enlarge). Let me know what you think. And for those considering joining our BASW Community, let me encourage you to take that step. We’re passionate about this material, and we look forward to proving it to you!

August 10, 2009 Update: It’s been a couple months since we posted first design idea for BASW, and we appreciate the positive feedback and the many, many new customers we’ve received as a result. To keep you current on the latest “goings on” at BASW, I wanted to show you what WILL BE the final design for the new BASW.

Since we’re adding new content and reshooting/updating the current content, we don’t have a firm date on when BASW 2.0 will be released, but one thing we know for certain is that the price will be higher than the $99 price point it is now. If you join now, however, you will be grandfathered in, and all of the new content, material, and training will be included at no additional charge. Just because we’re updating and adding material does not take away from the fact that this is still remarkable, relevant, current, and meaningful training, which customers from all over the world can attest to. We’re just going to make it even greater. The picture is a little fuzzy, but this will give you an idea of the final design. Click to enlarge.

Join Buying & Selling Websites

]]> http://bloggingexperiment.com/archives/buying-selling-websites-2-0.php/feed 42 http://bloggingexperiment.com/archives/buying-selling-websites-training-returns.php http://bloggingexperiment.com/archives/buying-selling-websites-training-returns.php#comments Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:00:31 +0000 Max http://bloggingexperiment.com/?p=534 Our “world class training product” (well I think so anyway) is now available to the public again!

I have been getting a bunch of emails from people who missed out on my training class from 3 months ago. I’ve also had people asking me for resale rights to the course since I was no longer selling it.

I got to thinking, since the videos are just sitting in the members area, why not let other people make money from them since the content is already made.

So, I’ve decided to open up the course again and let affiliates make money from it.

I won’t be advertising the website myself, so you will have no competition from me.

I’m basically just opening up the existing content so you and other affiliates can make money from my hard work and knowledge.

Since I’m not going to be as involved with the day to day training like I was before, I’ve dropped the price down to $99 and I’m paying a 60% commission to affiliates who want to promote the course.

If you have a website related to making money, have a blog or email list, you can make about $54 for every person who signs up for the class.

I’ve set it up through Clickbank, so it’s very easy for you to get started making money from the course.

You probably know by now that the value of the education I’ve provided to students and you know it’s worth WAY more than $99. But, since I dropped the price, it will make it a lot easier for you to sell.

I’m letting you know about this first so you have the first chance to begin promoting it before anyone else. Usually the first people to promote an affiliate program are the ones who make the most money.

I let the buyers of the course have first crack at this affiliate program last week, and one of my students has already made $378 in commissions from the product in the first 4 days!

Here is the sales letter so you can see where your visitors will go after they click your affiliate link:

Buying & Selling Websites

Anyway, just wanted to let you know what is going on.

If you have any questions, let me know.

Talk soon…

The Search

This can be easy or hard depending on the market. The internet does go through little spells of ups and downs and in the process some good websites get sold quickly at a bargain price. This would obviously be an ideal choice for the flip. You buy it, hold it for a bit, get some revenue on record, and then sell it when the market gets stronger. Unfortunately you will not find this too often. You’ll have to fight some of your base instincts and look for a bad website.

The Exam

This doesn’t mean you should buy complete trash. You’re going to have to look for a website that has some horrible mistake, one that just jumps off the screen and makes you want to close it. This can be a poor design choice, an awful color scheme, an incomplete menu, etc.

If you find this then take a minute and examine the content to see if it’s any good. In general you won’t find it worthwhile to fix bad content. Adding new information to a half-decent website makes sense, so don’t be turned off if the website doesn’t have enough. Rewriting the entire website is going to be incredibly time consuming though. Unless the domain name is golden then you would be in almost the same place as if you just started from scratch. In all honesty, there isn’t an ugly site or blog out there that can’t be repaired with some tender loving care. So, if the content is decent and the domain name is workable the next step is to start working the math for it.

The Math

Doing the math will help you to figure out how much the site will actually cost. I can’t really work out a scenario that will apply to everyone. Different problems require unique fixes with unique costs and no two websites are going to present the same problems. You’ll just have to work out the estimates as best as you can. The important step is to etimate the damage the last owner has done to it and decide whether you can fix it yourself, and if not, how much the proper coder will cost. You’ll probably want to have a better design and make the menu look more stylish. The header and logo almost always need a revamp on flipped sites too. Also include the cost of any marketing you plan on doing as well as any operating costs (paid authors, hosting fees, licenses etc) and you’ll have a pretty good flip estimate.

The Finish

Use your estimate to decide what you’ll bid and set a firm cutoff in your mind. While you’re at it see if there is a similar finished site for sale somewhere else and get a realistic idea of the possible sale price once you’re done with it. Flipping depends on selling the website at a good profit. This is obviously much easier if you don’t pay an arm and a leg for it in the first place. All that’s left for you to do at this point is watch and wait for the auction to wrap up. If you lose, just move on to the next opportunity. If you win, throw your plan into action and let the flip begin.

As I said, this is a VERY basic overview of site flipping and I’m far from an expert. But if this sounds like the type of thing you’d like to try, consider signing up for the course Max is offering. A small investment early on will save you a lot of time and money in the long run.

For those of you interested in learning the real life, step by step process my partner and I use for buying and selling (or building and selling) websites, the training class registration is now open.

A quick recap:

The class starts on Monday, April 28th 2008.

Only the first 20 students who register will be part of this “test class” (explained here).

Since this is a test class, the tuition is reduced from $400 to only $200 (with full money back guarantee also).

Registration closes on April 27th or once 20 students register, whichever comes first.

You can register for the class at the link below

Buying & Selling Websites Training Program

(Sorry, there is no super slick sales letter for the class. If you’ve been reading my blog posts, you know the class will have killer content. If you need a professionally written sales letter to convince you, then you probably shouldn’t sign up!)

I’ve been getting some great questions about the class, so I’ve posted my these and my responses on this FAQ page.

This class in and of itself will be a great internet business lesson. What you are watching right now is how you can start from nothing, build credibility in a new market, launch a new product and make money all in less than a month (class students get to see the behind the scenes stuff I’m doing right now).

If you have any questions for me, please leave a comment below or email me using the contact us form on this site.

On A Different Note:

I’ve been testing a super easy money making strategy the last couple days and it looks promising. You may have heard of it before, maybe not.

I wouldn’t call it a full blown internet business, but so far in my testing it looks like it has the potential to make at least $1,000 per month with about one hour per day in “work”, if you can even call it work.

I’ll put together a video explaining this business and showing you REAL LIFE RESULTS in the next couple of days.  Just want to let this experiment run a little longer to make sure the income is not some kind of fluke.

Talk with you soon…

The concept was to share every ounce of information in my brain regarding buying and selling websites. In other words, the exact same knowledge we used to sell over $700,000 worth of websites in the last 2 years.

As I was preparing my outline for the course, I was checking out some of the typical buying and selling related websites such as Sitepoint, Ebay, BuySellWebsite.com, etc. That’s when I found out BloggingExperiment.com was for sale. We had NO INTENTION on buying a website that day, but it was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up.

Now, a few weeks later, the dust has started to settle and the chaos of managing this new blog venture is much calmer now.

So, it’s probably a good time to pick up where I left off a few weeks ago and continue planning the outline of the buying and selling websites training course (hopefully I don’t find any more great website deals and get thrown off track again!)

Here’s the basic outline for course that I’ve put together so far…

General Website Business Investing Overview:

1. Why prior experience is not necessary.
2. I’ll explain the types of projects you should focus on for maximum profit potential.
3. I’ll share the price ranges of possible deals you can expect.
4. We’ll go over legal issues such as starting a company vs just doing it on your own.
5. Who you should have on your team when it’s time to sell.
6. Explain the timeline of ownership & taxes.
7. Should you use a broker to buy or sell websites?
8. How risky is this business idea?
9. Why should you sell a site when it is making good money?
10. How to plan the sale of your site from day one.
11. Get your mindset right, motivation, take action, and focus on the end prize.
12. Why buying and selling websites is the best business to be in and will continue to be for many years
13. Why there is no such thing as competition in this business and why there is an unlimited supply of customers/buyers.
14. Other business opportunities that exist in this market buying & selling website market.

Buying Websites:

1. Quick overview for what kinds of sites to look for and what to avoid.
2. Why buying a website is such a good idea.
3. Where to find websites for sale.
4. Best types of sites to buy.
5. How much to pay for a website.
6. How to transfer the funds to the seller.
7. Fraud checklist to make sure you don’t get “taken”.
8. How to verify the facts & figures the seller provides (due diligence stage).
9. How to write a purchase agreement to protect you.
10. Should you use a lawyer and accountant?
11. How to find rundown sites and buy them for pennies on dollar.
12. Negotiating tips for getting the best deal (cheaper prices, payment terms, etc).
13. See case studies of my most recent three website purchases.

Selling Websites:

1. What types of sites do buyers want to buy?
2. How to make websites 2-3 times more valuable to a buyer.
3. Ways to fix up websites that you bought.
4. Where to sell your websites.
5. When to use a broker.
6. How to collect money from buyers.
7. How to transfer ownership to new owners.
8. Get a copy of the purchase agreement written by my highly paid mergers and acquisitions attorney.
9. How long it takes to sell a website.
10. What kind of buyer should you be looking for?
11. Should you consider owner financing/taking payments?
12. How long to hold a site before selling it and why.
13. Explain the various taxes associated with selling websites.

Building New Websites (Show The Process As outlined Below):

• Pick a niche topic first (choose 3 of your favorites)
• See how many ads in google for each niche
• See if there are any affiliate programs available
• Is there something you can create that’s unique only available through you
• Are there other websites with traffic/mailing lists you can partner with
• Are there enough things to write about continuously.
• Do some quick keyword research
• Only pick something that is proven…new, never done before = failure
• Buy domain name
• Buy hosting
• Setup website on hosting account
• Make an outline of topics you are going to cover on your site
• Start creating a product and/or writing content
• Setup autoresponder if your niche would benefit from one.
• Start getting links to your site.
• Start buying PPC ads for cheap traffic in google (depending on your site topic)
• Have some decent graphics made to make your site look more professional
  (easier to sell that way – my “dream team” can help with this).
• Should you build a network vs one site?
• How to build value for your website visitors & ultimately the buyer of your website.

The outline above is the “foundation” for what it takes to be successful in this business. Obviously as I get feedback from you and other members, I’ll add additional training sessions to cover those topics as well.

This class will be strictly based on our real life experience of buying and selling websites, not some theory of what you “could do”. The content of the class will be based on my specialized expertise (buying and selling websites in the $10,000 to $575,000 range). I’ll probably also touch on a few smaller deals for those just starting out.

IMPORTANT

I’m not going to turn this blog into a “Buying and Selling Websites Sales Letter” for the next few weeks until the training class begins. This will likely be the only blog post about the class itself.

If you are interested in joining me for this class, you must signup to receive the Special Report at the top right of this page. By doing that, you will be put on a special mailing list specifically for buying and selling websites. That’s where you’ll find out more about the class, when it starts, etc.

If you’ve been reading this blog since I purchased it, you know I always over deliver with top quality content. This blog is a sample of my “free content”, so you can imagine how valuable the content will be for a full blown training class that I develop.

I don’t have all the details worked out yet as far as pricing goes, exact start dates for the class, etc. My plan is to have a “mini class” first (maybe 20 or so people) and see how it goes. I’ll use this mini class to start getting feedback from these first 20 “guinea pig students” and make sure I have answered every one of their questions.

Once this first mini class is over, then I’ll probably use that content and do a second class to a larger group of people, probably about 200 or so (or however many I think I can support without sacrificing quality).

I’d like to start the first mini test class either the last week in April or first week in May, so it’s coming up quickly…

When the class is released to the larger group, the price will be much higher than my little test class, probably about double. So, if you are interested in buying and selling websites and the enormous opportunity there is in this business, make sure you sign up to get the Special report in the top right corner of this site.

If you can get into the first mini class, you’ll not only have more one on one attention, but you’ll also save a lot of money vs waiting to take the second class later.

I’m thinking the class will be about 3 weeks long. The lessons will be a combination of video recordings, audio lessons and written articles. The videos and audio recordings will be transcribed so you can read them if you don’t like videos or MP3s. The original plan was to charge $400 for the 3 week class because I want everyone to be able to afford it, yet make it worth my time and be able to provide extreme value. So, based on this price range, the early “mini class” will be around $200 or so I’m thinking. And the mini class will only be offered to those who have signed up to the Special Report (ie – BloggingExperiment.com readers only).

I could just as easily create one of those $2,000 home study courses for this topic, but I’m not a big fan of those overpriced courses.  I want to make sure anyone can take the class, not just the people who are ALREADY successful and have that much money to throw around. I guarantee it will be the most valuable training you’ll ever find online, so even at $2,000 it would be a bargain. At $200 (90% off), it’s a no brainer…

If you have any questions about the training class, feel free to leave a comment below (or email me if you have a private question).

I like to pay close attention to which websites are selling and how much they are selling for. It helps me pick potential niche markets and business ideas, and helps me determine what types of websites we should be focusing on.

While doing some research this morning, I found a press release that said this website was sold on May 7, 2007 for $33 million in CASH! Here’s the article from the New York Times that explains the details.

Usually when you think of a website worth $33 million, you think of something that is cutting edge. Something that would be extremely difficult to compete with. Something “unique”.

That’s why I was so surprised when I checked out ConsumerSearch.com to see why it sold for $33 million.

Just by going to the homepage, it looks like a home made type website you or I could have made using Frontpage. It has big obnoxious Google Ads on the right hand side of the page and just a bunch of categories listed on the left.

To me, it looks like a simple “made for adsense” type content site anyone could make. If you click on a category, you can read reviews about various products. These reviews are basically just re-written reviews posted by other people and companies. Click on a link that says “Where To Buy” and you get taken to a page with 30+ affiliate links to other websites selling those products.

Scroll down and you’ll see Chitika Mini Mall ads. Hover your mouse over a “compare prices” link and an annoying Shopping.com ad box shoots out at you.

If I saw this website listed for sale somewhere without knowing their income figures, I would have put a price on it of about $50,000 max based on what I see. Obviously I have no idea how much money they make, but it must be pretty high to sell for 8 figures.

According to compete.com, this site is getting about 1.7 million visitors to it per month, which is pretty impressive given the lack of real content on this site.

It just goes to show you that even a basic website can be worth A LOT of money. ConsumerSearch.com was launched on May 19th, 2000 and was sold on May 7, 2007. So, by compiling reviews of products in their own words, this website was able to write content for about 7 years, then cash out for $33 million in cash. Who knows how much they made during the 7 years of running the site itself.

Does it look like a huge task to build a site like this? Not enough hours in the day to write all those reviews? No problem, just do what they did, hire people to write reviews for you. As seen on their jobs page, they pay writers about $350 to review a category of products.

I see about 330 total categories on their site, so paying $350 per category x 330 categories will set you back about $115,500 in content costs. Sell the site for $33 million, and I think you’ll come out a little bit ahead : -)

Not a bad gig if you ask me.

Let me start by going over some basics of buying and selling websites, then I’ll discuss our purchase of this blog.

Sales Price – This is the toughest part about buying a website. Website owners think their site is worth 20 times more than it is in reality (because they are emotionally attached to it). Website buyers think the site they are buying should be valued at 1/5th the asking price (to get a good deal). So how in the world can you come up with an agreeable asking price for a website?

The most common “formula” for calculating a website’s value is the profit the website makes each month. There is a MYTH out there that a website is only worth about 10 times the average monthly profit from the last 6 months of revenue history. This is absolutely false. Amateur sellers will sell their sites for this multiple because “that’s what they read is the norm” or “that’s what the seller tried to convince them their site is worth”.

The last site we sold (the one for $575,000) went for a multiple of 32 times the monthly net profit.

The site before that was making about $3,500 per month profit and it was sold for $100,000 (about 28x net).

So anytime I read a forum or blog post saying a website is worth 6, 8 or 10 times the net monthly profit, it cracks me up. When you learn how to sell a website the right way (ie – by NOT selling it on ebay or some forum like Sitepoint), then you will make a heck of a lot more money. I’ll share where/how you should sell on another day.

Even though site profits is a main criteria used to value a site, it’s not that simple. It just happens to be the only thing you can plug into a formula for calculating value.

- Side note: Blogs are not worth nearly as much as regular websites. I’ll discuss why below…

Other Assets – Even though the income of the website is typically used to come up with a sales price, there are many other parts of a site that are valuable to a buyer. The easiest way to picture this other value is this. With real estate, home prices are based on “comps”. If all the homes in your neighborhood are 2500sqft and are selling for $200k, then your 2500sqft home is worth $200k too. People like to use website profit as a “comp” so there is something to compare it to.
The other assets of a website (or in real estate terms, the house upgrades, curb appeal, etc) are the things that will make the website sell faster or for a premium asking price.

These can include search engine rankings, RSS subscribers, Opt in email subscribers, website traffic, amount of original content, number of inbound links, overall look of the site (graphics, layout, etc), “holes” in the site (things the new owner sees that could be fixed up or improved), age of site, type of revenue (recurring, e-commerce, affiliate, advertising), overall niche the site is in, amount of time involved in running the site, barrier to entry, and so on. Whew, there’s a lot to it!

All of these things have value, so even if your site doesn’t make a lot of money and you have a lot of these other things you can still do very well by selling your website or blog.

So, let’s look at the purchase of Blogging Experiment…

How much is this blog worth to you?

Well, based on the “formula” price, it would be worth about $15,000 if you average the last couple month’s income and multiply times 10 months (actual purchase price was a bit higher).

Why would we pay more than $15k?

Not all buyers will share this with you, but it’s definitely in the back on their minds when they are analyzing a site to buy…

Here are the things we look at (and place a “mental value” on) to justify whatever the asking price is:

• Income - About $1500/month average for this site at time of purchase. If all things remained steady (ha, yea right!), the site will earn $18,000 over the next 12 months. If we were to buy the site for $15k as the “rule” says, we will have made a profit of $3,000 in 12 months. That’s about an 20% return on investment (ROI) in a year. Try to get that in a savings account! And once the site paid itself off, we would have a valuable asset owned free and clear that we can re-sell for 100% profit. Even if we sold it for the same price we paid, that’s a nice payday.So, just buying this site based on income alone would be a good deal, right?
• Traffic - Site was getting about 15,000 unique visitors per month at time of purchase (about 180,000 visits per year). If we were to start a new site in the make money online niche and PAY for traffic via Google Adwords, our cost would be about $0.40 per click being conservative, probably much higher because it’s a competitive niche.Let’s run the numbers…180,000 visitors times $0.40 per click = $72,000! Wow, so by purchasing this website, we are getting over $70,000 worth of traffic for free. That’s pretty valuable stuff. Still think this site is worth $15k like the “formula” says?
• Search engine rankings – Do a search in google for “make money blogging”. Looks like the 4th site down is BloggingExperiment (at the time of this writing anyway). How about “make money online”? (about #26). Maybe “make money”? (about #36). Are you kidding me? Do you know how much time, effort and money it would take to get these kinds of rankings for a new site?Granted I know SEO very well, so I wouldn’t have to hire an SEO company. If I did, the cost would be about $20,000 at the bare minimum to get these kinds of rankings. If I did the SEO myself, it would take me at least 5-6 months of full time effort to get rankings like these and probably about $6,000 in paid links. The rankings of this site are VERY valuable to us as a buyer.
• Content - I believe there were about 240 posts on this blog at the time of purchase. Again, if we were starting a new site from scratch and if we hired someone to write 240 articles at $20 per article, it would cost us $4800. ($20/article is dirt cheap for the quality of posts on this blog. Sure you can get crappy articles written for much less by some non-native English speaker, but this blog would have never reached this level of success like that).
• RSS Subscribers – I think this site hovered around 1,000 subscribers for the most part. How do you put a value on subscribers? To me, this has little to no value as a buyer, so for RSS subscribers it’s a little tricky. These subscribers join the feed because they are interested in what the author is talking about. When you buy a blog with RSS subscribers, many of these readers will unsubscribe because the person they signed up to read about is no longer there. Because this asset is so personal to the blog owner, you can’t really factor in the number of subscribers. If you are lucky, like I was, the subscribers will stick around for a bit to make sure you’re not some lunatic. You just can’t depend on keeping all those subscribers as a website buyer.
• Inbound Links – Last I checked this site had about 22,000 inbound links according to Yahoo’s backlink query. I like to be conservative with my estimates when evaluating a website. Would it be fair to say you’d pay $3 for an inbound link if you didn’t have to do any work? I think so. I’ve paid as much as $200/month for 1 inbound link on an authority site on my last project. The “Best of the Web” directory charges $80 per year for one backlink. So using my ultra conservative $3 per link, that’s another $66,000 in value just in the backlinks alone!Don’t want to spend $3 on a link? Ok, what if you just got backlinks from other blogs on your own? It will probably take you 10 minutes to find a related blog and post a comment. Do that 22,000 times to get your 22,000 links and you will have wasted about 3,600 hours of your life…pretty boring.
• Graphics/Theme – This site has a great theme that was professionally designed. I got a quote from the guys who made Shoemoney’s blog (UniqueBlogDesigns) and they came back at about $1800.
• “Holes” in the site – By holes, I mean things that I see wrong or could be fixed up/optimized. I’ve already made a few changes to this site that fit into this category such as making the header graphic smaller, changing some ads around, etc. I saw lots of room to improve the revenue of the site which I’ll be working on over the next few months.
• Age of site – This was a negative for me. Most sites we buy are at least one year old. That’s when most of the search engine optimization results kick in overdrive. Obviously it’s not a huge sticking point, but it’s not ideal either. Older, more established sites are more valuable.
• Type of revenue – Again, this site is not so ideal with it’s current revenue model. Selling WordPress themes is nice, but you have to constantly add new themes to keep the inventory fresh. The advertising income hasn’t been too exciting, so I have my work cut out for me in this respect. I have some ideas I want to test, so hopefully these will pan out like I picture them in my mind.Blogs are especially difficult to monetize due to their format. The original purpose of blogs were to be more of a personal journal type software program. They are great for sharing information, building relationships with your readers, and keeping content organized. Not so great as a business model.
• Niche of the website – The make money niche is a pretty healthy niche. Lots of people are spending money in this market, so that’s a good thing. Although I’ve not done much in the make money market, I think it’s one of the top 5 markets to be in. Here are my favorites (just FYI):- Health related (includes weight loss, diet, exercise)- Business opportunity (make money, internet marketing)
  - Small business (marketing, SEO, advertising, coaching, support services)
  - Children (babies, parenting, parents will spend anything on their kids)
  - Pets (training, supplies, people will spend anything on their pets)
• Time Investment Required – Again, this is another downside to this type of website. Blogs are notorious for taking lots of time, especially if you want to build a large readership and provide tons of amazing content. Here I’ve spent the last 1 hour and 42 minutes writing this post. Sure, I could have slapped together any old article in less time just so I could post “something” to the blog, but I’m striving for extreme value and originality. It takes lots of time to put together quality posts.This one thing alone is why blogs are no where near as valuable as regular websites. In fact, this is only our second blog acquisition out of the 50+ deals we’ve done over the last 5 years. Buyers think of blogs as HARD WORK. And who wants to pay thousands of dollars so they can work hard?
• Barrier to entry – Starting a new blog is pretty easy. All you need is $8 for a domain name and $5 for a month of hosting and you can have a blog setup and running within 2 hours. Since it is so easy to do, there is no barrier to entry against new competitors, which is a bad thing as a buyer. You can create barriers to entry using the things I’ve listed above such as the backlinks, search engine rankings, etc. Those are things that will keep competing sites from immediately destroying a business you buy, but those alone are not huge obstacles to overcome.Compare that with a unique weight loss cream you created and now have a patent on. That would be a huge barrier to entry since nobody can compete with a product like that, which makes that type of business much more valuable than a simple blog websites.

Hopefully that will help you see how a buyer thinks if you are thinking about selling your site one day.

So to recap the BloggingExperiment.com purchase…

Based on the numbers I’ve proven above:

- Income value – $18,000
- Traffic value – $72,000
- Search engine rankings value – $12,000
- Content value – $4,800
- Inbound links value – $66,000
- Theme value – $1,800

Total “mental value” = $174,600

Regardless of the actual purchase price, you can see there is an enormous amount of value in this website. This is ultimately why we decided to purchase it, even though the “profit” of the site wasn’t all that impressive.

So what’s this mean for you?

Easy, now you know exactly what buyers are looking for in a website. Your first job is to increase your website’s profit each month, and then ramp up all the “mental value” assets to support your premium asking price.

This is exactly how we are able to sell websites for 25+ times monthly earnings while most others settle for 10 times. If you like what you’ve seen so far, be sure to check out my other site that is totally dedicated to this topic: Visit Buying And Selling Websites. There’s several videos detailing how to successfully buy and sell a website.