But I found one site that says it's for sale. They won't say how much they're willing to sell it for, they want me to make an offer, and I don't have a clue. The site could be worth a lot of money, but I'm just doing this in my spare time and don't have a lot of spare cash floating around.
The factors favoring a high offer is that the site has an easy-to-remember and easy-to-spell URL (so I could advertise it on the radio, say) made up of a small number of keywords that are highly relevant to my planned content.
Factors favoring a low offer is that it is very low pagerank, and by searching at Yahoo, Google and MSN I've only found a couple of backlinks. Even though the URL has great keywords, Google Rankings doesn't find it in the first thousand hits in a search for those keywords.
The site that's there now has nothing but paid advertisements on it. There doesn't appear to be any content that wasn't put there for a price. Given that and the low PageRank, I can't imagine that he's making any money.
My estimation is that he'd be doing well to be paid enough to cover what he's paid in hosting and domain registration for the several years it's been registered, plus a modest profit, so I'm thinking of offerring a few hundred dollars.
I've never bought a domain before, so any advice you can give me is greatly appreciated. -- Lou
Some websites are very valuable because they have a lot of good content, repeat visitors, lots of backlinks and good position in the SERPs. The site at this domain has none of that. I'm pretty sure the paid ads he has on the site don't even cover his hosting bill.
[webmasterworld.com...]
After reading here and elsewhere that I found by Googling for domain appraisers, I paid for two appraisals of the domain by an appraiser that seemed to have a good reputation. There was an automated appraisal for about six bucks, and a "live human" appraisal for about fifteen.
I paid for both so I could get SOME idea quickly.
The automated appraisal said the site was worth quite a bit less than I anticipated - the high estimate was less than three hundred.
DNJournal is a good place to start for historical sales data, though my own experience tells me that the reported sales are likely a very small percentage of actual sales.
Another somewhat useful resource is BuyDomains as they have many of their domains priced. Approach with a jaundiced eye as they sometimes are off the mark.
The appraiser I used was cheap enough that I wasn't concerned about wasting my money. It was also from an outfit that ought to have good historical data to base its estimates on. And I do understand it's just an estimate.
All the sales I saw at DNJournal were for much higher prices than I think I will have to pay. I was looking at comparable domains at the various auction sites, and it looks like there's no question that a fair price would be in the hundreds, and not thousands.
But in my research, I found a couple domains whose asking price is quite low and might well be better domain names - shorter, easier to remember and spell and so on.
Everything that you said about low traffic, low pagerank, etc. relates to the latter. Suppose that you're right and the site is worth (approximately) nothing; the domain name alone could still be very valuable.
