There are hundreds of reasons why you may want to sell your website, a few examples could be to invest in a car/holiday/home, invest money into other ventures or just because you simply could do with the extra cash.

Whatever the reason, there are certain things you should ensure to increase the chance of finding a potential buyer.

 Backup what you are claiming

When you are advertising your site for sale you will want to let everyone know how it’s currently performing in the leading search engines.  A good starting point it to collate all of details regarding revenue for as long as possible, try to aim for at least 6 months if it has been running that long.  If your website makes an income in a number of ways try to list each one with how much it makes in the average month.

Be sure to remember to create screenshots to prove anything, simply saying that it earns £5,000 a month isn’t enough to bring in honest and genuine buyers.

You should also provide traffic details.  Take a screenshot from your tracking software to show how many unique visitors and page impressions you receive as this can be a major deciding point for people in the market to buy a website.  It helps if you can state which search engines your traffic comes from, the length of the average visit, countries they come from and anything else you feel may be beneficial to potential customers.

If your website ranks well for any keyword or phrases be sure to include them into your sales pitch.  Ranking high for competitive terms can add value onto your website because it shows that you have put in the time, effort as well as money to make it succeed.

If your website requires very little maintenance make sure that you mention it.  If you wanted to buy a website and couldn’t pick between two very similar sites in regards to revenue/profit and potential, you would let the level of maintenance be the deciding factor – everyone loves websites that you can leave running which is guaranteed to make money each and every day without doing any work.

Where to advertise your website

One of the key factors to successfully sell your website is to get the right exposure, the more places you can list it for sale the more chance of finding a genuine buyer.

There are two main types of places you could attempt to sell your website.  Firstly you could visit webmaster forums such as DigitalPoint and go to the buy, sell & trade section of the forum and list all of the relevant details.

You could also sign up to websites like sitepoint and list your site for sale in the marketplace.  It doesn’t hurt to do both but ensure that you mention it’s listed elsewhere so you have the right to stop the sale at any point if you find a buyer from the other source.

You would be best off auctioning your website for sale as you may get more than expected, set yourself a realistic starting bid that you would be happy to sell it for and anything over  that amount is a bonus.  You could set a BIN (buy it now) price so if someone decides they want the website now they don’t have to wait until the auction ends, just make sure you set a realistic BIN.