“I just broke up with this girl and the last thing she said to me was “You’ll never find anyone like me again!” I’m thinking, “I should hope not!“

The first website that a person sells is almost always a site they’ve developed from scratch. And, while there are a ton of resources out there to help you sell your site, I haven’t come across one yet that walks you through the process of detaching yourself from a site you’ve worked so long and hard on.

Well, it just so happens I’m an expert on ending relationships (admittedly usually on the receiving end) and I’ve put together a iron clad 4 step guide on how to break up with your blog.

Be Sure

“You’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon and for the rest of your life.”

Before actually putting your site up for sale, pause for a moment and make sure that you really want to sell. Go over the reasons you decided to sell and make sure that they still apply and aren’t likely to change any time soon. While selling a website and finally cashing out on all your hard work can be thrilling, it can be just as humbling to realize that you’ve parted with a site you shouldn’t have.

Contrary to what you might expect from a site flipper, if you have any doubt about whether or not to sell, I’d suggest holding off. A delay of a couple of days or even a week isn’t likely to affect your final sale price drastically, so take the time to be sure. Otherwise, as Bogey said, “You’ll regret it”.

Be Honest

“You can’t handle the truth!”

With so many parties potentially involved in the break up (yourself, your readers, the buyer) honesty really is the best policy. It might seem like a good idea to improve on the truth a little, but trying to keep track of even the smallest lies will drastically complicate the entire process. Believe it or not, the first person you need to be honest with is yourself. If you’ve carefully considered your options and still decided to sell, it’s more than likely the right choice.

Don’t try to fool yourself into think you’ll start posting again when you’ve let the blog sit dormant for 6 months. Don’t downplay the amount of work it requires from you or over estimate your willingness to actually spend that time. Also, be honest with yourself when determining the value of your blog. Just because you’ve put in hundreds of hours of work on the site, that doesn’t automatically make it worth thousands of dollars to a buyer. By being honest (or realistic) with your expectations, you’re much less likely to be disappointed with your final sale price.

If you announce the sale to your readers (perhaps hoping to find a private party buyer amongst them), be honest with them about your reasons for selling. If you’ve lost your passion, tell them, besides they probably already picked up on that fact from your writing style. They might not be happy to see you go, but if they enjoy your blog chances are they’ll wish you only the best.

And last, but certainly not least, be honest at all times with the buyer (or potential buyers). Don’t fudge the subscriber or traffic numbers, don’t lie about the site’s income, and don’t conveniently downplay the amount of work it takes to maintain the site. Not only is it immoral, there’s a decent chance you’ll get caught. Most buyers and sellers prefer to use an escrow service to protect everyone’s interests and make sure no one gets ripped off. Included in the process is an examination period when the buyer has a chance to look over what he or she just purchased.

If you’ve lied about the stats, the income, or anything else, it will be easy to spot when the buyer has full access to the site and stats. Even if they don’t notice it until after the deal is closed, they’ll likely let their displeasure be known making it more difficult for you to sell sites in the future. Much like an ex, angry customers can be vindictive and embody the saying “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”.

Be Firm

“You’re nothing to me now. Not a brother, not a friend, nothing”

If you’re selling a blog that you’ve invested a lot of time in, it’s only natural for a bit of regret or seller’s remorse to creep in at some point. Maybe the new owner of the site is getting recognition or having success that you feel should have been yours, or perhaps they are taking the site in a direction that you don’t agree with. Whatever the case may be, it’s important that once the sale is final and you’ve completed your end of the deal, you realize the site is no longer yours.

While everyone has their own way of dealing with breakups, my best advice is to make a clean break. Take some time off, don’t visit the site, don’t keep tabs on the RSS feed, don’t comment on posts, and avoid reading articles about the site. Not only will it be easier for you to make the transition away from thinking of it as your site, it will also allow the new owner to make the site their own without your influence or interference.

Be Happy

“Show me the money!”

While breaking up with your site can be a surprisingly difficult thing, it can also be exhilarating. Now I don’t know about you, but I’ve found the quickest and easiest way to get over any seller’s remorse is to look at what you’ve gained instead of what you lost. Now that you don’t have to worry about creating content for your blog or promoting your site, you’ll have more time on your hands for other activities. Once the sale is over you won’t have the weight and stress of finding a buyer, coming to an agreement, transferring the site, and all the other things required when selling a site.

And best of all, if you’ve played your cards right you’ll have a nice lump sum sitting in your bank account. Whether you pay off debts, reinvest the money into other projects, go out to dinner, or buy yourself a new car, I’ve found no better cure for a case of seller’s remorse than spending the money.

Even if all else fails, the barrier of entry for blogging is so low that you can always create another fish in the sea!

While these 4 steps work for me, there are certainly more ways than one to dump a guy blog. For you experienced dumpers and fellow dumpees out there, what are some of the ways I missed?

I’ve already covered the “traditional” or more established business models of site flipping, but this industry is still developing and new opportunities are popping up all the time. In fact, I recently stumbled across a new business model for buying and selling websites that has so far, flown largely under the radar in the flipping industry.

A Website Broker

The opportunity I’m talking about is that of a website broker. Much like the other business models of site flipping, this one also has a direct parallel to the real estate industry: the real estate agent. Just like REALTORs or brokers in other industries, a website broker is acting as a middle man. Essentially you would be using your experience in listing and negotiating website sales to sell someone else’s site in exchange for a percentage of the sale price.

As I said, I essentially stumbled on the idea when a friend approached me asking for help selling her site. Since then I’ve been approached to sell to other sites, receiving offers of up to 15% of the final sale price in exchange for my services selling their site. I suspect that as more and more people realize their websites have monetary value and look into selling them, opportunities like this will become even more abundant. In fact, a quick Google search displayed a few sites that are already tapping into the opportunity and establishing themselves as the authority website brokers.

The appeal of this business model should be fairly obvious; while you wouldn’t make as much money as if you were selling your own site, you also wouldn’t have nearly the amount of time or money invested on the front end. You don’t have to spend any time creating or promoting the site, you’d only have to spend the time it takes to sell the site. Offering other services such as marketing the auction or sale, or providing tips on how to maximize the return for the seller could help a would-be broker get an even larger percentage of the sale price. And of course the beauty of any broker relationship is that the broker has a natural incentive to get as much for the site as possible. The larger the final sale price, the more money the broker makes!

It’s Not Complicated But…

You see, while you and I might find the actual act of selling a site to be the easiest part of an entire flip, most website owners have never sold a site and many would be willing to pay you a percentage to save them the hassle of trying to learn all the ins and outs of an entire industry just so they can sell a single site.

A great, non-real estate, “real life” example of this would be buying a car. I worked as a car salesman for a short time a few years back and, even in that short period of time, I negotiated the purchase of more cars than many people will buy in their entire lifetime. In reality, the entire process from start to finish isn’t all that complicated (it took me about 2 weeks to learn) and yet, most people HATE dealing with car salesman. In fact, I know several people who prefer to take someone with them just to help talk turkey with the salesman. Why? Because they know that a mistake in negotiating can end up costing them thousands of dollars in the long run.

The same holds true when buying or selling a website. The experience gained from past negotiations and sales can make hundreds if not thousands of dollars difference in the final sale price.

Will being a website broker become the next big online money making craze? I don’t know, it certainly looks like a promising potential business model. But the industry of buying and selling websites (site flipping) is still quite young and new opportunities are cropping up all the time. Whether you pursue becoming a website broker, create and sell websites, or stick with the buying and flipping model, remember to keep your eyes open for new emerging monetization methods.

I hope you’re all having a happy holiday season! There are a lot of exciting things in store for Flipping Easy in the coming year but I wanted to provide one last useful post for 2008.

While researching the topic of buying and selling websites, I was struck by how little information is offered for free in this industry. There are more courses and eBooks out there than you can shake a stick at but only a handful of sites are offering what I would consider quality information without making you fork over a chunk of change first.

As I was sifting through a bunch of long winded sales letters and product pitch pages, I decided to start collecting all the useful posts and articles about site flipping from across the web into one long list. In the spirit of the holiday season, I figured I’d share that list with you (after checking it twice of course), so without further ado…

Flipping Overviews

1. How to Buy a Website and Flip it for Profit – Entrepreneurs Journey
2. Flip a Web Site Fixer-upper – Sitepoint
3. How to Invest in Websites in Your Spare Time – Entrepreneurs Journey
4. How to Make Money from Website Flipping – Net Business Blog
5. Buying and Selling Websites Offers Quick Profits – Guardian.co.uk
6. Find an Under Valued Asset. Fix It Up. Flip It. – NYtimes.com
7. Flipping Websites – An Additional Income Stream for Freelance Writers – All Freelance Writing

Buying Sites

1. Buying a Website 101 – BuyEstablishedWebsites.com
2. A Few Things to Consider When Buying a Website – WebsiteBroker
3. What You Need to Know Before Buying Websites – DigitalWebTalk
4. One Tip to Double Your Flipping Profits – BuyEstablishedWebsites.com
5. Finding, Evaluating, and Buying a Site – WebsiteBroker

Valuing Sites

1. The Ultimate Web Site Valuation Guide – Sitepoint
2. How To Sell A Website – How Much Is Your Website Worth? – Entrepreneurs Journey
3. Valuation of Websites – WebsiteBroker
4. What’s Your Website Worth? – Sitepoint

Selling Sites

1. The Website Seller – John Cow
2. How to Avoid Being Scammed by Fraudulent Buyers – Suite J
3. Selling Websites 101 – BuyEstablishedWebsites.com
4. To Flip or Not to Flip? – All Freelance Writing
5. Hunting Down Buyers – Suite J

Case Studies

1. Flipping a Site for Profit – Sitepoint
2. The Anatomy of a Website Flip – BuyEstablishedWebsites.com
3. Lessons from an Acquisition – Ask Shane
4. Once I Bought a Website – Sitepoint
5. Flipping Websites (Week 1, Week 2 and Week 3) – All Freelance Writing

Free eBooks

1. Site Flipping for Wealth – SmarterWealth.net

I’ll continue to maintain the list in the coming year so if I’ve missed any, or you find newly published posts that I might not catch, please feel free to drop me a link for inclusion. Just be sure to mention the Resource List in your email so my filter catches it.

(Note: please only send me links to free resources, I’m not going to promote someone’s product with this list).

While going to the “school of hard knocks” is often seen as a badge of honor, attending means making and learning from a lot of mistakes. Unfortunately when it comes to buying and selling websites, making mistakes almost always means losing money and all of the sudden the school of hard knocks doesn’t sound so glamorous.

While you should always learn from your mistakes, in flipping being able to learn from the mistakes of others can literally pay huge dividends. To help in that endeavor, I’ve compiled a list of 5 common mistakes people make when flipping sites that will absolutely cost you money.

1) The White Elephant

If the website in question is being sold to you and your purpose is to re-sell it, remember that there is always a reason the site is up for sale. It may be that the site is not and never has been profitable. The site may be more work to maintain than it’s worth. The sale may be the current owner’s last-ditch effort to recoup some of his or her losses.

Whatever the reason, it’s important for you to know as many of the risks and challenges that you’ll face with a site as possible. Doing your research, reading up on the site, and asking the seller questions will help you avoid buying someone else’s white elephant.

2) Dead on Arrival

To measure the potential value of a site you must ask yourself these questions:

• “What market share does this site have and how difficult would it be to gain market share?”
• “Is this subject already saturated?” or “Do we really need another [fill-in-the-blank]-type site?”
• “What would make someone interested in (the site’s niche) visit this site?”
• “Can the site’s traffic be monetized more effectively?”

The answers to these questions may sometimes talk you out of a good investment but they will most certainly talk you out of many more bad ones, and you don’t want to be the “greater fool” (See #5 below). The last thing you want to do is buy a site that’s “dead on arrival” and has no chance of being resuscitated.

3) Starting Low

When selling a site, if your asking price is too low it can suggest to potential buyers that you see no value in the site and will let it go at any price just to be rid of it. Any product for sale must be presented to display worth, but also within limits (See #4 below) to appear to be delivering value. Obviously a price of $100 implies much more value than a price of $1.

As such, you must think carefully about where you start the bidding for your auction. I usually start my auctions at 75% of the reserve price to give people at least a ballpark idea of where I’m hoping the auction will end up. Others start the bidding lower to attract bidders’ interest and get the action moving on the auction. There are pros and cons to each approach, just be aware of the implications your starting price might have on perception and participation.

4) Starting High

On the other hand, starting the bidding or your asking price too high can often deter potential bidders or prevent your site from selling all together. Remember, the value of a product is not determined by the price asked, rather, it is determined by the price one is willing to pay for it. Obviously you want to get as much as possible for your site but you also have to be realistic.

Before listing the site for sale, ask yourself what a reasonable final sale price would be. Decide before hand what your best and worst case scenarios will be, and then stick to your guns during the auction. It’s easy to get caught up in the heat of the moment and suddenly decide that your site is worth more than it really is or panic and accept less than your site is really worth.

5) The Greater Fool Theory

The “Greater Fool” theory is often used to justify questionable investments, assuming that no matter what, you’ll always be able to sell to the “greater fool.” This theory is popular among momentum investors and plays on the fact that as more and more money is made, there will be people jumping on the bandwagon hoping to make an easy buck. Even if the property you’re buying isn’t worth the price you’re paying, as long as you’ll be able to sell it for an even higher price, it’s a good investment.

The problem with this theory is that you’re relying not on the quality or value of your property (in this case a website) but instead on the gullibility of others. While actually works quite often, I for one like to be able to stand behind my product. I’d prefer to have buyers so happy with the transaction that they become repeat customers.

Also, bubbles always burst, momentum always shifts and if you’re caught on the wrong side of that swing, the greater fool theory will have once again been proven true, but you’ll be playing the part of the fool.

These principles are not absolute rules, they simply offer a guideline to success when buying and selling websites. As with any learned skill, you’re going to make mistakes while flipping sites. And, you absolutely should make sure you’re learning learning from those mistakes and getting better with each and every transaction.

However, if you can learn from the mistakes of others and avoid these 5 common flipping mistakes, you’ll learn the ropes of this industry while making money, not losing it.

I recently listed Private Party sales as one of the only two places I would suggest selling a website. Not only can private sales save you the time and money involved in listing a site for auction, they also often result in a much higher sale price and thus, a bigger profit on your flip. Unfortunately, finding people that want to buy their site outside of a marketplace listing can be difficult and sometimes intimidating for people that are new to site flipping. To help you overcome that initial fear or hesitancy, I’ve compiled a quick list of three easy places to find private party buyers for your website.

Businesses in your Niche

If you’ve picked a profitable niche for your website, chances are there are businesses that are in the same niche or at the very least, would be able to serve your reader base. While many businesses are becoming more and more web-savvy, their web presence almost always leaves room for improvement. By contacting these businesses letting them know what your site is and how it could benefit their business, you can quite often create an interested bidder that wouldn’t have otherwise been involved in the process. And, businesses will usually have a built in method for monetizing your site’s traffic so the site may very well be worth much more to them (read as: much higher sale price), than it would be to a random SitePoint bidder.

Previous Buyers

In the business world it’s a tried and true statistic that once someone buys from you, they’re MUCH more likely to buy from you again. That’s why customer lists are so valuable and why companies will often break even or lose money on low end products just to acquire another customer who will purchase higher priced items from the same company later on.

While websites are often higher dollar transactions, the same principle holds true. If someone has purchased a site from you in the past, they are much more likely to buy one from you in the future. By keeping a list of your buyers and their contact information, you can often sell your site with a simple email or two, without ever having to put it up for auction. Some site flippers that focus on creating and selling turnkey sites will even get requests for other sites from their previous buyers. Now I don’t know about you but I think having ready and willing customers requesting sites from me would be a lot better than having to go through the trouble finding buyers or creating auction listings.

Readers

The final often overlooked source of potential private party buyers is your site’s readers! If your website has been up and running for a while I’m going to assume that it has a bit of traffic and probably a few frequent visitors. If your site is a blog, chances are you’ve developed a group of loyal readers or subscribers. Whether this group is 5 people or 5,000, they’re also a pool of potential buyers.

These people already see the value in your site, otherwise they wouldn’t keep coming back. While many of them might just be there for the infomation you present, chances are you’ll have a few people that have considered starting a site of their own. By letting your visitors or readers know that your site is for sale, you’re alerting them of the opportunity to own the site they’ve been visiting, without having to do all the work of creating their own site or starting their own blog.

If you rely stricktly on marketplaces auctions, you’re not only severly limiting the size of your pool of potential buyers, but you’ll also be leaving a lot of money on the the table in the sales you do make. While you may not find a private buyer for every site you sell, these are three very easy ways to give it a shot.

Have you ever tried selling a site privately? If so, did you make more or less than you would have listing it for auction?  What were some problems or challenges you faced? If you have any other tips or questions about finding private buyers for your sites, please leave them in the comment section below!

One of the question that comes up a lot when people first hear about buying and selling websites is “Where should I sell my site?”

To be honest, I find this to be a very simple question, as there are really only two places I would ever, EVER, sell a website. Now obviously there are a lot more than two places out there that will let you sell your site, so chances are I’m going to be stepping on some toes with this post. It’s not that the other places out there are horrible, or that you’d never be able to sell you site. The issue is simply that when selling things, you have to go where the buyers are. And in my experience, the buyers of websites are in only two places.

I should also mention that I’m talking about selling websites. Domain names are entirely different and there are several different places that I would suggest selling you domain names.

Now that I’ve got those qualifications out of the way, the only places I’d suggest you sell your website are SitePoint and in a Private Party sale.

SitePoint

This one’s no surprise to many of you. SitePoint has one of the most active marketplaces for websites and more importantly, the sites that sell tend to go for higher prices! SitePoint has become known as the place to buy and sell quality sites and that very perception will help you sell your site.

However, I should also mention that when selling a site here, you’re going to be side by side with other high quality sites, so it’s important to have a quality offering that you can stand behind. SitePoint has some of the savviest buyers around so if you’re trying to sell a low quality site or you’re trying to pull a fast one and get away with it, chances are you won’t be able to do it here.

Despite the savvy nature of the buyers, it’s still critical that you have good sales copy for your listing. As I said, a lot of sites come through this marketplace and your listing is going to need all the help it can get to stand out. Your sales copy is a perspective buyer’s first impression of your site so spend time on it, and make sure you’ve got your bases covered. Sell the idea or the dream behind your website but make sure you can back up every single claim or it will come back to bite you in one way or another.

Private Party

While SitePoint is great, their marketplace falls far short of having universal reach. What this means to you is that the person or company that might value your site the most, might be unaware that it is for sale or even exists. That’s why, as I mentioned earlier, you have to go where the buyers are. Sometimes, that means approaching a perspective buyer privately. While this can be a bit of a hassle since it requires individual contact, it can also pay off in a big way when it comes to your final sale price. These private party sales tend to intimidate new site flippers but there are three easy places to find potential private party buyers of your site that I’ll be discussing in my next post. Make sure you’re subscribed to the blog through one of our two different options (RSS feed or RSS by Email) so that you don’t miss 3 Easy Places to Find Private Party Buyers for Your Website.

While there are plenty of places that allow you to list your website for sale these are the only two “places” I would recommend you sell your site. Disagree with me? Have I left out your favorite place to sell sites? Weigh in with your opinion in the comment section below!

One of the most common questions about selling a website is when to pull the trigger and actually list it for sale. There are so many unknown elements when selling that even once you’ve decided to sell, it is incredibly easy to begin second guessing yourself. In the end, the decision to sell is ultimately one that you will have to make for yourself. However, I thought it might be useful to discuss a few of the questions to consider, that will hopefully make the decision making process a bit less stressful for you.

While every site and site owner are different, I’ve found that almost all of them fall into one of the following three scenarios:

The Pet Project

The Pet Project is a site that someone created from scratch and likely spent a lot of time and effort creating. And whether the owner realizes it or not, they almost certainly have some emotional attachment to it as well. Most often the site owner has come to the realization that their site holds some sort of value but may not be sure how much or whether they actually want to part with the site.

In my most recent site sale, I found myself in precisely in this position. I had built the site as a labor of love and really hadn’t given much thought to how much it was actually worth. However, when the offer to buy came in, I found the following questions to be helpful in the decision making process:

What benefit do I currently receive?

Pet Projects usually allow the owner to do something they benefit from even if it isn’t monetarily. For example, the site might allow them to learn or teach a topic they love or to connect with like minded people.

How will selling the site affect that benefit?

Once you’ve established what kind of benefit you’re getting from the site, ask yourself if selling the site would change or put an end to that benefit. If the value is in the community surrounding your site, will you still be able to participate in it? Also, if you do decide to sell, is there any other way you can gain the same benefit, perhaps at another site?

Can I handle the change?

This is one of the most questions that somehow seems to fly under the radar but it’s a critical one. Can you handle watching your site change dramatically? You’ve spent a lot of time and effort creating the site and yet once you sell it, chances are it will change significantly. It can be very difficult watching this transition, especially if you don’t agree with the direction the new owner is headed. What would your reaction be if the new owner stopped updating the blog you’re considering selling? What if they decided to plaster it with ads and post lower quality materials? Remember, once you sell your site, you no longer control it’s destiny.

The Business

If your website is an online business, the questions that you have to answer are a little bit more cut and dried. You know how much income the site brings in every month and you also know how much time and effort it requires to maintain. My first site sale fell into this category and while it wasn’t an easy decision to make, the answers to the following questions helped me put things into perspective.

How much am I currently making per hour of work?

This seems like a fairly obvious question but many online entrepreneurs focus solely on the amount of money coming in, not how much time they’re spending bringing it in. For example, if your site makes $1,000 a month and requires only 5 hours of your time, you might be much less willing to sell than if it required 20 hours to maintain.

What will take your site to the next level?

One statement I’ve read countless times when people sell their site is that with a “little work” the site could “easily” be making twice as much. While that pitch might work on less experienced buyers, more seasoned site buyers will see right through it. However, if some extra work would in fact increase your earnings significantly, it might well be worth the added effort to drastically increase your final sale price.

Is Outsourcing an Option?

One of the most common reasons people decide to sell their money making site, is that they lose interest in the topic or get burned out. If your site requires a lot of time and effort, it can be a really daunting task to maintain it day in and day out for months or years on end. However, if that’s the only reason you’re considering selling, outsourcing that work might be a viable option for you. Writers can be hired to take over your blog, students or other freelancers can often be hired to take care of the monotonous day to day activities, the possibilities really are endless in today’s wired world.

The Flip

While a website that you’ve purchased with the intent to “flip” or resell will often have originally fallen into one of the previous two categories, it’s an entirely different situation when you’ve purchased the site. Chances are you don’t have the emotional connection to the site that we see in Pet Projects and you may already utilize outsourcing methods that were discussed as an option for The Business sites.

When deciding whether to list a flip for sale, the questions are pretty simple:

What return will I see on my investment?

Now remember, we’re not just talking financial investment here. If you buy a site and sell it the next day with the only work being a listing fee, you won’t need to make as much from the sale before you turn a profit. On the other hand, if you buy a site and spend 40 hours improving it, you’re going to need to get significantly more from the site to cover the cost of your time.

Depending on the investment, you might also have to ask yourself whether or not you could make more by listing at a later date, whether you should cut your losses and sell now, or several other questions but in the end, they all boil down to maximizing those three little letters, ROI.

Have you considered selling a website recently? If so, did you ask yourself these kinds of questions? Experienced site flippers, what kinds of questions do you consider when debating whether or not to sell? Weigh in with your opinion in the comment section below!

My two previous site sales have involved sites that I’ve worked on for a long period of time. One site was 8 months old at the time of sale and the other was nearly three years old. While I think selling older, more established sites will generally be my M.O. , I’d be remiss if I didn’t attempt to capitalize on the shorter term site sales as well.

The stark reality is that most people trying to make money online never actually succeed. There are a whole host of reasons, lack of effort, paralysis by analysis, information overload, etc. but the biggest culprit I’ve seen is lack of action. People won’t actually put the methods and information they’re learning into practice. With that in mind, rather than spending all my time planning, plotting, budgeting, etc, I’m simply going to jump in.

Also, there has recently been quite a bit of discussion that the market is saturated and/or that the economy has reduced the number of interested buyers for younger sites. To put it bluntly, I believe there will always be a demand for high quality, profit producing websites. Site flipping has been growing more and more popular over the recent months and unfortunately, I think many of the new recruits are focusing more on quantity, rather than quality.

So, over the next 30 days I’m going to be starting a website (likely a blog) from scratch, promoting it, monetizing it (as best I can in such a short time period) and then selling it off. Not only will 30 days give me a chance to really launch the site properly, but it will also allow me to list in the Established Sites section of Sitepoint when it comes time for the sale. The entire time I’m working on the new site, I’ll also be chronicling my efforts here so you can follow along and use it as a game plan for a short sale of your own. I’m sure I’ll make a few mistakes along the way (that I promise to share here) but at the end of the 30 days, I’m also sure that I’ll prove there is a large market for quality sites and make some money along the way.

How much? Well, you’ll have to follow along to find out…

• Day 1: Choosing a Niche & Finding a Domain Name
• Day 2: Creating Content & Choosing a WordPress Theme

One of the most common questions I’ve run into in this industry is whether or not to set a Buy It Now (BIN) price when selling a site. Rather than answering that question directly, let’s explore the issue a bit and I think you’ll come to the same conclusion I did.

For those of you that don’t know how a BIN price works, it’s basically setting a price at which you’re willing to not only sell the site, but also end the auction immediately and accept no further bids. For example, if I’m selling a site and the starting bid is $200, I might set the BIN price at say $1,000. If a buyer comes in and bid’s the BIN price, the auction ends and I sell the site to that buyer for $1,000.

From a buyer’s perspective, there are only a few reasons one would want to bid the BIN price.

1. You want to get your hands on the site immediately and don’t want to have to wait for the auction to end.
2. You don’t want to deal with all the hassle of bidding and tracking an auction.
3. You are worried that bidding will push the price of the site higher than the BIN price.

The Eager Buyer

Now, the question at hand is whether or not you should, as a site SELLER, set a BIN price. And, while those three reasons are perfectly valid if you’re the buyer, they aren’t all that favorable to the seller. I don’t know about you, but if someone so desperately wants to buy my site (reason #1) that they can’t wait for the auction to end, that’s not the kind of buyer I want to left off the hook easily.

I tend to keep my auctions short (that’s a whole other post) and I highly doubt a buyer that is interested in the site will give up simply because they have to wait a few days. Chances are, they will bid at some point in the process and I don’t need to tell you that the more people you have bidding, the higher your final selling price is going to be.

The Bargain Shopper

Along those same lines, if a buyer thinks that the final selling price is going to wind up being more than the BIN price (reason #3) why in the world would I, as a seller, want to stop the bidding process early? Could the bidder be wrong and in actuality the site will sell for less than the BIN price? Absolutely. But, if one buyer thinks your site is worth more than the BIN price, chances are others will as well.

Discouraging Bidding

The next question everyone asks about BIN pricing is almost always “What should I set the BIN at?” The question is asked because if you set it too low, you’ll be leaving money on the table, and if you set it too high, you’ll show buyers that your expectations are high and you might very well discourage bidding in the auction. If a buyer would normally be willing to bid up to $1,000 for a site, but the BIN is set at $10,000 do you think they’ll bother? I know I wouldn’t.

If this all sounds like I’m not in favor of using a BIN price when selling websites, you’re absolutely correct. I simply don’t want to risk putting a damper on the bidding process that’s going to drive up the price of my site.

Do you disagree with me? Tell me so! Share your opinion in the comment section below!