How To Sell A Website in 2024 For The Most Money Possible

Welcome to the ultimate guide on selling a website in 2024. In our previous articles, we discussed some of the most expensive website and blog sales of all time, some strategies to increase your website’s value, and some tips on where to hire a broker to help you sell your website.

Now it’s time to give you the tools to sell your website. What you need to know:

• 5 Reasons To Sell Your Website Right Now
• How to Value a Website – What You Need To Know When You Sell A Website
• How and where to sell your website
• How to Create a Great Auction for Selling Your Website

Now, it’s time to dive into the nitty-gritty of how to sell your website and why it’s a great time to do so. Whether you’re looking to cash out or move on to new ventures, selling your website can be very lucrative. 

Firstly, why should you sell your website right now?

5 Reasons To Sell Your Website Right Now

1) Selling Your Website Gives You Cash To Spend or Invest Right Now!

Selling your website gives you a near-instant infusion of cash. Whether your business is profitable or experiencing financial trouble, selling can give you months or even several year’s worth of income at one time.

You may be in a jam and tired of investing everything back into your business; whatever the reason for needing money, selling your site is a way to make that happen with relative ease.

You have done the hard part and built an attractive business. Is now the time to reap the rewards?

Cashing in on your hard work is your next best move.

2) Selling Your Website Allows You to Try New Things

Selling your website frees you up to follow other business interests.

This exit strategy can benefit you if you have lost interest and are no longer passionate about your business. What started as a dream can sometimes become a complicated, costly nightmare.

If you do not love what you are doing, you will find it difficult to profit.

By selling, you can walk away from a ‘job’ you no longer love while securing a little or even a lot of money in the bank.

Sometimes, selling a business is about more than a lack of interest in what you are doing; it is about having more interest in doing something else.

If you have an idea for a new business or have found one you want to purchase, the money you make from selling your current site can help you move forward with these new projects. 

3) Freedom from Control

Sometimes, you have done all you can for your business, and it may take a new owner to take your website to the next level!

That is not a bad thing.

You will hopefully be well rewarded for your Big Idea, and the new owners will have the hard job of taking the website to the next level.

In any case, if you are struggling to get to that next level, you could have reached the end of what you can do within your particular skill set.

When growing and nurturing a new business, it is easy to become protective and try to do it all yourself. Success requires a wide range of skills, such as customer service, design, marketing, programming, and copywriting, to make a real go of it. Even if you have these skills, your business may become limited in scope and resistant to change when your perspective is the only perspective.

Outsourcing is a valuable tool for enhancing proficiency in areas where you fall short, but only some people are willing to hand over that much control to a third party.

For some, investing time and money into finding the right outsourcing partner is simply not worth it. Instead, it makes more sense just to sell the business than to incur the risks of involving more people in the project.

If you have reached the end of your career, selling may be a way to be compensated for your work while watching your creation grow and flourish.

Did you do all that work to watch the business plateau?

Let go of the reigns!

It is someone else’s turn!

4) Reclaim Your Time – take that long-promised vacation!

Selling your website can give you back your life.

Running a business can be a time-consuming task. It can eat up all your spare time and distract you from the finer things in life.

Yes, making a profit and investing time in your business is excellent, but it is also nice to have your life back!

When you sell, you can pursue hobbies, see your family, take a long, deep breath followed by another, and relax and decompress.

From here, what you do next is entirely up to you. You can retire, travel the world, follow new passions or have a different career path.

As mentioned above, you may decide to start an entirely new business.

The time is yours to fill as you see fit.

5) Your industry is about to take a downturn

Over and over again, through history, whole industries have come and gone. 

Selling your website before a downturn can be smart to avoid losing value. As industries come and go, it’s important to stay aware of changes and trends that may affect the future of your website. Selling before a downturn can help you get the most value from your website while it’s still in demand.

How to Value a Website – What You Need To Know When You Sell A Website

There is no end of junk information about how to value websites. And there’s no shortage of so-called valuation “tools”, not to mention “gurus” with theories and formulae. For example, some of these so-called experts claim that you can arrive at the value of a website if you know the “going multiple” in the industry. Simply multiply your site’s earnings by that number, and … voila?!

For example, if the going multiple is 3x annual income, the value of a website earning $10K per year is $10K x 3 = $30,000.

Pure, unadulterated nonsense!

Put these theories behind you. If you limit yourself to thinking your website is worth 3x of your earnings, you’re placing an artificial ceiling on its value, which doesn’t help you get the best price.

3 Simple Factors That Determine The Selling Price When You Sell A Website

1. What you’ve got to sell: (everything from your domain name to your mailing list)

2. Who you show the buying opportunity to: (presenting to and attracting the right buyers/investors is essential)

3. How you play: (Everything from negotiating the deal to creating the best deal structure – very important!)

It’s at #2 and #3 where most of the money will be made!

1) What you’ve got to sell

The assets that underpin your website’s earnings are of keen interest to the buyer. They include your domain name, your traffic, and so on. Without these assets, there is no revenue. So it’s in the buyer’s best interest to pay close attention to these assets, evaluate them, conduct due diligence on them, and satisfy themselves that they are worth what they will pay you for your website / online business.

However, your business likely has numerous assets that you haven’t brought to the buyer’s attention.

If you haven’t identified them or pointed them out to the buyer… you won’t get paid for them!

When trying to sell a website, entrepreneurs often miss out on the following:

– manuals, processes, and procedures developed in the business over the years (yes, they have value!)

– copyright in material created over the years – images, advertisements, content

– customer database/list of past customers

– list of subscribers

– the team (the people working in the business, sales, accounts, bloggers etc)

– licenses, permits, and permissions the business enjoys.

– social media engagement (no, not followers but actual engagement)

– custom software you’ve commissioned or modifications you’ve had done to off-the-shelf software – brand, logos, trademarks (you may have trademarks even if you haven’t ever registered a trademark)

– detailed traffic logs, data on your customers (from surveys conducted, for example), other data

– a long history of Adwords PPC campaigns (very valuable!) etc.

It’s amazing how often owners go to market with a sales memorandum that doesn’t include their best assets!

But it gets worse than that.

When you sell a website, you need to know this…

Many mistakenly identify some of their liabilities – you know, the bad stuff – as assets. They then proceed to spend much time and effort highlighting these liabilities and talking about them. As you will expect, this does them no favours regarding price!

Examples of liabilities often promoted heavily by sellers:

– high rankings in Google: The smartest buyers with the deepest pockets see this as a liability. If most of your earnings rely on a source of customers over which you have no control, that’s a major risk. One algorithm change is all it takes…

– the “potential” in their business: Buyers hate hearing about potential because every single seller claims potential. Buyers take that you haven’t developed the potential yourself as proof that this potential doesn’t exist!

– the fact that the business hasn’t been advertised and that a lot more profit can be made with a bit of advertising: This is naive thinking that sellers often display. Buyers know they will have to waste thousands of dollars on non-working ads before discovering what ads and channels work well for this business. They don’t want to be the ones to run these costly experiments. It is far better if you have advertised and proof of which channels work well for your business.

Making a big deal about these liabilities (in the belief that they are assets that will impress the buyer) can cost vendors a lot of money. 

These detract from value, not add to it. Each time you mention “assets” like these, the astute buyer mentally knocks another 10% or 20% off the price!

What buyers want is often the opposite of what you’re boasting about. To ensure top prices, familiarize yourself with what impresses buyers and scares them away.

2) Who do you try to sell your website to

Setting up a lemonade stand on a busy promenade on a hot day will result in more lemonade sales than if you set up shop on a freezing winter evening near the seafront.

Simple, right?

Yet most sellers go about finding buyers completely the wrong way! They list their website on an auction platform like Flippa or use various business-for-sale classified sites and portals. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

This does not target buyers who have the greatest need for your website.

It’s not that you won’t get a sale at these locations. Thousands of websites sell at these locations every year. But these are not the venues where you’ll find the best buyers, the buyers who’ll pay the highest price when you sell a website.

If you’re willing to put some time and effort into finding the right buyers, you can get paid well above the craziest website valuation.

Let’s step back and consider what we mean by the “best” website buyers.

This is best illustrated with a simple example.

You own a website selling car tyres (American translation: tyres).

You’ve been going for five years, making $30,000 a year in net profit. The going multiple in your industry is 2.6.

You go to market by listing at the usual locations and attract your typical buyer—Joe Bloggs, who’s looking to start an online business but doesn’t want to start one from scratch and happens to have some capital to make the purchase. 

He’s read various valuation guides and knows that the going multiple is 2.6. He expects to get your business for around $60K or a max of $78,000 (30 K x 2.6). He calculates that he’ll make $30K a year and recover his investment in over two years, which he considers a reasonable “payback period.”

Now, think outside the box.

Who will benefit most from acquiring your business when you sell a website?

I will offer one suggestion:

A national chain supplying automotive parts. Let’s call them XYZ Cars Ltd. They sell everything from engine oil to wing mirrors, brake shoes, and tyres. They are well established with brick-and-mortar outlets in several towns but don’t have a great online presence. All they have is a basic website with no online ordering facilities. What benefits can they derive from buying your website? First, even if they sell the same number of tyres that you do, they’ll make a lot more than $30K on the tyres. They buy in larger quantities and get better prices. If they ran your site, they’d make an additional $10K a year in profit without making any changes, just on tyres.

But they see an opportunity here to use your infrastructure to load tens of thousands of their SKUs – engine oil, brake shoes, and everything else – to your online shop. Now they’ve got a complete, operational online shop (and saved the $15K in development costs they were on the verge of paying to create a new website for them). They figure that visitors coming to your website – your visitors, customers they wouldn’t otherwise have access to – could be persuaded to buy other car products. The number crunchers calculate an additional $60K in profit from your visitor flow.

It doesn’t end there.

XYZ has some smart cookies working for them, and they recognize that customers who previously ordered from you are valuable resources. They can notify your customer database of all the new products the site is stocking. These customers like you and will come back to you the next time they need tyres, but handled well, they can now be converted to customers for all the other products, too. XYZ plans to run a bit of a promotion – a special discount offer – to get these customers to buy their first non-tyre product. New sales from these past customers are expected to generate another $50K in profit.

Let’s do some adding up. If they buy your business, XYZ Cars Ltd will see the original $30K you were making. They’ll also make an additional $10K + $15K + $60K + $50K in the first year as described in the previous paragraphs. That’s a total return of $165K in the first year and $150K in subsequent years (as the $15K web dev cost savings is a one-off).

Remember that such a return will be unique to a company like XYZ Cars Ltd. Other buyers won’t see anywhere near that kind of return from your business. But, if XYZ expects the same payback, i.e. to recover their investment within 2.6 years, they could justify a price of $165K + $150K + ($150K x 0.6)= $405K.

So instead of getting $78,000, you sell a website for $405,000!

OK, a somewhat simplified example – but more than the so-called normal valuation is what the entrepreneur is looking for!

In reality, larger firms don’t think in terms of a two-year “payback period.” Their strategic plans tend to have longer time frames, which presents an opportunity for you to negotiate even more than $405K. If you play your cards right with the deal structure (see the next section), you could add further value to the deal to ramp up the price another notch or two.

XYZ Cars Ltd wasn’t actively looking to make an acquisition. They never even considered the idea. It took some legwork to find them. But if you invested in the research, identified companies like them who could benefit from the synergies, and convinced their head honchos to take a look at the opportunity, there’s a bounty to be had far and beyond what you’d get at the usual website-for-sale or business-for-sale outlets!

It’s not always possible to find the perfect strategic buyer match. But even if you didn’t, small synergies can still be worth a lot more than the $78K type pricing you’d get from “typical” buyers at the marketplace platforms.

3) How to negotiate when you sell a website

In one of the blog posts on my website, I offer to buy any business for double the owner’s asking price, whatever the figure the owner has laid on the table.

So, if you’ve valued your business at 5x your earnings, I’ll pay you double that. I’ll pay you double if you’ve valued your business at 50x your earnings. You get the picture.

There’s just one caveat: I decide the deal structure in the contract.

And here’s the deal structure I have in mind: $1 will be paid today, and the remainder will be paid in $1 instalments for as long as the business is running at a profit.

Not such a good deal, is it?

But if you want a high price for your business, you must be willing to play the game the way big businesses do. Sellers of small businesses often expect to get the agreed price paid in cash on the day of completion. That’s not how it works in the biggest deals. The biggest deals involve some form of seller financing, i.e. the seller defers part of the payment.

Offering credit when they sell a website is anathema to most small business owners.

“No way,” they cry. “How can I trust the buyer to pay me for my website?”

Or, “I need the money now; that’s why I’m selling my website!”

And that’s fair enough. If you want an all-cash deal, that’s entirely your prerogative. However, if you want the best price, you’re going to have to be flexible on not just payment terms but also on a few other things.

If, instead of demanding $500K for your business, you’re willing to take $300K upfront with the balance securitized on the business’s stock, the buyer’s house, or some other asset, you will be opening up the opportunity to a wider range of buyers – those who can’t quite raise $500K in cash.

But more importantly, making this one concession when selling a website could result in a significantly higher price.

$600K wouldn’t be unreasonable.

That’s a whole 20% more than you would have obtained before.

However, “seller financing” is just one of several tools available in the deal structure. If you are willing to accept some personal responsibility for driving sales and meeting projections for a year or two post-handover, you could bump the price up by another 20% – 30% when you sell a website.

A seller can mitigate the risk inherent in any transaction in numerous ways. There are warranties and indemnities you could extend that could add another 20% to the price. Or you could take part in the payment in the merged company’s stock.

You could also collect a ‘salary’ or consulting fee to stay around!

Detailing how a seller can add value to the deal is beyond the scope of this article, but I’ve hopefully whetted your appetite and spurred you to investigate the thoughts shared in this post.

Above all, please know…

Your website may be worth a lot more than you think, but what you obtain for it will depend on how you sell it.

You do not have to settle for the “going multiple” when you sell a website or any business!

How and where to sell your website

Now that you have decided that you want to sell your website. Where should you go to sell it? 

Below are the three best places to go to sell your website:

1) Connect with a website broker

The largest website I have sold was through a website broker. I like this option because it’s easiest, I simply left them to it. They wrote a listing, advertised it, found buyers, talked with them and then took a 10% at the end. I would definitely recommend this option if you have a larger website.

2) Flippa website marketplace

Another way I sold a website was through the Flippa marketplace. The first website I ever sold was for $21,000. 

It was simple enough. I listed the site, answered some questions, and then received the money once the auction was over. 

3) Empire Flippers marketplace

Sort of a mixture of the two other options. 

EmpireFlippers is said to be the number 1 curated online business marketplace, with over $450 million worth of online businesses sold. 

Definitely a great place to list your website if it’s medium to large. If it’s a smaller website, I would just list it on Flippa. 

How to Create a Great Auction for Selling Your Website 

What makes one website sell for more than others?

Sure, it almost always depends on a website’s revenue and popularity.

But it also comes down to how well you lay out your auction listing.

The difference between creating a regular listing versus a great listing could be thousands of dollars or even 10 to 20 times your monthly earnings.

1) Post Your Auction on Your Web Site

Who knows your website better than your audience? Depending on the type of website you are selling, it might be a great idea to inform your visitors that your site is for sale. If you have an internet marketing blog, there is a good chance your readers might be interested in buying your site. However, if you run an entertainment or celebrity website, it is less likely your audience would want to buy your site.

2) Provide All Web Stats Reports and Google Analytics

I can not stress how important it is to ensure all of your web stats are up to date and in order. Google Analytics is the platform of choice for web stats, and Flippa – the website-selling business- also verifies the legitimacy of Google Analytics. If you use a different tracking system, I advise you to include Google Analytics. By providing analytics, potential website buyers can see where your traffic is coming from based on search engines and geographic location, along with how long they stay on your website and other criteria.

3) Breakdown All Revenue Methods

Just as important as your website stats, the revenue and financial earnings of your website will play a big part in the final sale price of your website. Break down your monthly revenue by source and as far back as you can possibly go. Many websites sell for 15-20 times their monthly earnings. This can vary depending on the niche and quality of your site, but providing as much financial information as possible will help you get the most for your website.

4) Always Reply to All Questions and Comments

Personal contact and correspondence go a long way when buying and selling websites. More than anything else, it’s a business transaction, but trust also comes into play. Make sure you take the time to answer all questions and comments in detail and as quickly as possible. Website auctions have a time limit, and not everyone will have time to wait for their answers before placing a bid. Don’t miss out on a high bid because you were too busy to respond to questions and comments in your auction thread.

5) Reach Out to Webmaster Forums

As I mentioned, it’s sometimes a good idea to post on your website that an auction is for sale; visiting a popular website and webmaster forums is also a good idea. Website owners are always looking to expand their business and portfolio of websites, and your site may be a perfect fit for someone else. If you are already active and have a good reputation in a forum, it can go a long way with other members and users, helping in the potential sale of your website.

Conclusion to selling your website 

Are you considering selling your website or business in the near future? If so, now is the time to start preparing. Selling your website can be a lucrative decision, but to get the most value out of it, you need to work hard, invest money, outsource, and show that the business can continue to work without you. Don’t wait until it’s too late to start preparing for the sale of your website or business. Follow the tips outlined in this guide to ensure that you get the most money possible for your online business.