Featured Listings

  • Website Vaulation Tools

    • Posted By: Mubashar
    • In: Advice
    • On: June 7th, 2008

    If you’re looking to sell a website, just how much can you expect to get for it? Or if you’re buying, how can you make sure you’re not paying too much.

    These tools can help you figure out just how much your website is worth:

    • WebSiteBroker : Website Valuation Tool
      http://www.websitebroker.com/valuation.php

      The Website Valuation Calculator can help with the process of determining the value of an existing website. The calculator will base it’s calculations on the information you provide it. Good, accurate information will naturally produce better results.

    • CyberWyre
      http://www.cwire.org/website-value-calculator/

      Provides estimates based only on criteria available to the domain name; It does not provide a value of the company behind the website

    As the disclaimers on the tools make clear, these valuation don’t really mean much, but they can give you a rough ballpark of the value.

    These articles provide some valuable tips on website valuation techniques:

  • Domain Name Background Check

    • Posted By: Mubashar
    • In: Advice
    • On: June 6th, 2008

    Useful post over at Search Engine Journal by Ann Smarty, covering some simple checks you can run on a domain name before buying to avoid potential problems.

    Read: Run a Domain Name Background Check Before Buying

  • 9 Lessons From Real Estate That Can Be Applied to Selling Websites

    • Posted By: steven
    • In: Advice
    • On: June 5th, 2008

    Home For SaleHome improvement and real estate investment shows are very popular on TV these days. I often enjoy watching the experts show every day people how they can make small changes to their home that will have a huge impact on the value of their home.

    Selling a website is like selling real estate in many ways. If you’re preparing to sell a website you may want to consider some of the lessons that can be learned from real estate experts.

    Curb Appeal Counts

    One of the most important factors in selling a house is creating an immediate reaction from the potential buyer. A house that has curb appeal will create a strong first impression from the street that will draw the potential buyer inside.

    Selling a website can also be much easier if the potential buyer has a positive first impression based upon the appearance of your website. You’ll need to take into consideration the curb appeal factor of your website. With real estate and with websites, curb appeal will rarely seal the deal, but it can have a huge impact on the potential buyer’s mentality throughout the process.

    Houses need to use curb appeal to stand out from others in the neighborhood that are for sale. Websites can benefit by doing the same thing.

    Be Prepared to Negotiate

    Selling a website is much like selling a house in that you will most likely need to negotiate with potential buyers. You may be fortunate enough to get your full asking price, but typically you’ll get some offers that you’ll have to consider. It’s a good idea to anticipate this and have in mind what you will be willing to accept and what you will not be willing to accept. If you get an offer that seems too low, don’t be afraid to make a counter offer somewhere between your asking price and the original offer.

    Think About the Buyer’s Interests, Not Your Own

    If you are doing some remodeling on a house in effort to get it ready to sell, you’ll typically want to keep things conservative, such as painting with neutral colors rather than something bright. Because everyone has different taste in what they like in a house, you need to keep your decisions suited to common opinions and avoid extremes. At this time you need to forget about the style that you would like for your own house, and think about what the potential buyer is most likely to appreciate.

    The same concept can be applied to selling a website. As the owner of the site you may have strong feelings about a particular aspect of the site, but the buyer’s opinion is more important. Try to take your own feelings out of the equation as much as possible to focus on what the buyer wants to see.

    Spend Wisely

    Real estate investing involves spending money to make money. You may invest in a remodeled kitchen or bathroom that can drastically improve the overall value of the home. On the other hand, you could also pour a lot of money into upgrades that are unlikely to bring a solid return on the investment.

    When you are preparing to sell your website you may want to consider what types of expenses could improve the value of your site. If you site is old and looks out-of-date, you may be able to get a good ROI by getting the site redesigned before selling. Before you invest much money into preparing for the sale, take some time to consider how it will affect the final selling price and determine if the expense is justified.

    DIY at Your Own Risk

    Many real estate investors make the mistake of having an overly aggressive Do-It-Yourself approach in attempt to save some money. Have you ever seen a TV show where the investor tries to do plumbing or electrical work without much knowledge in those areas? Sometimes they wind up doing more harm than good, and then they have to hire a professional anyway.

    If you’re trying to prepare your website for a sale, be sure that anything you take on yourself is something that you can do effectively. If you think your site needs a redesign before being put up for sale, don’t attempt to design the site yourself if it is not one of your strengths.

    Find the Right Agent

    When it comes to buying and selling houses, a quality real estate agent is critical. Most website owners sell their site themselves, but where you list the sale of the site can have a similar impact. There are a number of different places where you can list a website to be sold (Most-Listed, SitePoint Marketplace, BuySellWebsite, Website Broker).

    In addition to finding the right place to sell your site, there is also the option to use a broker, which is more common for high-priced sales. Of course, much like with real estate, you could always try the for-sale-by-owner route and see if you can make the sale by contacting people you know or those that may be interested rather than posting the sale somewhere like SitePoint.

    There is no right or wrong approach to selling your website. You’ll simply need to look at the pros and cons of your different options and base your decision accordingly.

    Staging Counts

    Furnished houses tend to sell much better than empty houses. Some real estate investors will even bring in furniture simply to stage the house even though no one will be living there. The staging helps potential buyers to see the house as a true home. Without the staging it can seem impersonal and they may have a harder time picturing themselves living in the house.

    Make an attempt to put the potential buyer of your website in ownership mentally. Show them the potential of your site and get them to feel like they are already there.

    Know Their Buying Triggers

    Most home buyers tend to buy on emotion. Something about a particular house causes them to fall in love, and they just don’t want to live anywhere else.

    Website buyers are less likely to buy on emotion and more likely to buy for financial or business reasons. Knowing what triggers the buying decision, give them what they want to see. If you think the buyer will be triggered by business factors, don’t focus on how long it took you to build the site or how much your visitors like the design. Rather, focus on numbers and the details of how much the site makes for its owner.

    Location, Location, Location

    We’ve all heard the three most important factors for determining the value of real estate. Unfortunately, there’s really nothing you can do to improve the location of real estate that you currently own.

    With websites location is still a critical factor, but it’s much different than with real estate. The website’s location is determined by factors like its domain name and the inbound links to the site. If your site has a strong, valuable domain name, it’s essentially the same thing as having a great location for real estate.

    Fortunately, with websites there are some things you can do to improve the location. Links are like roads that lead visitors to your website. If you can build quality and quantity of inbound links coming to your site, it’s essentially the same as building a new road that leads directly to a piece of real estate. Getting links from large, respected sites can have the same impact as building a major road that drops people off right at your store.

    What’s Your Opinion?

    What similarities do you see in selling a website and selling real estate?

  • wtfsigns.com

    • Posted By: Mubashar
    • In: Websites
    • On: May 24th, 2008

    wtfsignsInteresting little community powered site popped up on Sitepoint, and with a starting price of $55 or BIN of $325, you could pick up a nice little gem.

    The idea is nice, and content is the sort that could go viral.

    Not much traffic or revenue to speak of, so keep that in mind when bidding, but keep an on the auction and you could pick this one up cheap.

    WTF Signs takes user submissions of direct information, mainly in the form of photos of signs, and builds content and contextual advertising around the community’s content. It’s an easy site to run and an easy way to earn ad revenue. You can tailor the site to make it hyper-local, and thus sell direct local ads, or you can build a global audience and use traditional sharing programs to earn ad revenue. It’s the customization and flexibility that can make this site a valuable part of your online portfolio, but easy enough to be your first foray into generating income via the web.

  • spoilers.us

    • Posted By: Mubashar
    • In: Domains
    • On: May 19th, 2008

    Despite not being a .com domain, this single word domain with a very lucrative keyword is going cheaply at only $125, over at DNForum.

    A great name for anything spoiler related, movies and/or television shows.

    If you’re not into movies and television you could even use the name for a car parts website.

    Having multiple potential uses makes the domain even more valuable.

  • I Wish They Hadn’t Sold

    Yes this blog is about the buying and selling of domains and websites, and it is a natural thing for websites to change hands. Peoples interests change, situations change, and people sell and move on to other things.

    As a visitor to some of these websites, there are a few that I wish had not been sold, they changed so dramatically after the sale that I and many other loyal users abandoned them. This is in no way meant be disrespectful to the new owners. A website is often a reflection of the personality of the person running it and after a sale the personalities sometimes just don’t mesh anymore.

    Without further ado, here is my list of sites that I wish had not been sold…

    CSS Reboot
    cssreboot.com

    CSSReboot was a premiere community for web designer, who would gather twice each year and collectively reboot their websites to make use of CSS.

    The CSSReboot event took place in May 2005, and site was sold in June of 2006.

    Unfortunately since the sale the new owner has had difficulty keeping the event going and the website has devolved to a web design gallery that has not been updated in months.

    Stylegala
    stylegala.com

    A premiere Web Design gallery and community has not maintained its quality content and vibrant forum community since its sale in June 2006.

    CSSVault
    cssvault.com

    Another CSS gallery, one of the first started by Paul Scrivens (of 9rules fame) in 2004, was sold in January 2005, and resold in 2007, now owned by HostGator. After the sales the site lost its persona and much of its following.

    WPDesigner
    wpdesigner.com

    WPDesigner was a great place for designers and developers building websites using Wordpress, but since its sale in March of this year, there have been no updates to the website, one that used to update many times a week. I hope its just a temporary delay as the new owner settles in.

    YoungGoGetter
    younggogetter.com

    This one makes my list despite the fact that I’m still active at YoungGoGetter, the new owners are doing a good job of maintaining the blog and forum, probably due to the fact that the new owner was a member of the forum before making the purchase. However, the previous owners where such a great group of individuals I wish they were still around and more active in the community than they currently are.

    What sites are on your list?

  • How To Invest In Websites In Your Spare Time

    Nice post by Yaro Starak on his website flipping activities, and how you can get in on the game.

    I remember my first website sale. I made $13,000 Australian dollars selling a website that I had built from scratch myself. That sale was a big windfall for me and a moment I won’t forget because it was the first time I saw the real potential of online property investment.

  • JoystickNews.com

    • Posted By: admin
    • In: Domains
    • On: May 14th, 2008

    After launching just a few days ago Flipsquare has some nice sites and domains up for sale.

    A domain that peaked my interest was JoystickNews.com, as the listing says a great domain for a video gaming related website, with a minimum bid of $25 and BIN of $75 seems like a real bargain.

  • adobetutorialz.com

    • Posted By: Mubashar
    • In: Websites
    • On: May 12th, 2008

    Its unusual to list a site for over $50k without providing revenue details, but that’s just whats happening with adobetutorialz.com over at sitepoint.

    Tutorials sites are big business and this one is no exception, with 240K monthly unique visitors and 1.4M pageviews. The over 600 original tutorials help drive the entirely organic traffic.

    You can PM the owner for revenue details and judge if the $51-55K asking price is bargain or not.

  • 13styles.com

    • Posted By: Mubashar
    • In: Websites
    • On: May 11th, 2008

    13stylesNice little site being offered up on Sitepoint.

    13styles is all about css menus. The menus are list based, very light-weight, easy to implement, and cross-browser compliant. Some of the css menus are free and some require you to purchase rights to use them.

    The sellers states that the site has not been updated for over 5 months, but continues to pull in significant traffic, with a little TLC this website could do very well in both traffic and revenue.

    There is no BIN listed and the reserve has not been met at $1K, with 9 days left you could still get your hands on this little diamond in the rough.

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