Forum Moderators: phranque
I must admit, I was taken aback... my site is about 3 years old now and I have never thought of the prospect of selling it before... but then, I've not had anyone offer to buy it. This is a site that I have spent countless hours integrating Amazon Web Services into the content pages and creating a themed store... so if I were to sell I would want to make sure that I got a fair price for the time I worked on it...
I'm not sure what it is about the site that they like about it so much that they want to buy it. The design is very simplistic, there isn't all that much content on it (considing it's a webmaster related site about 100 pages of content at most) and it's not something I've been working on recently.
I'm not sure what they plan to do with it or if they would expect to buy the rights of all my original content... I've had work published all around the web (including SitePoint) and have been giving people permission to republish providing proper references are provided. And then there is the issue of other peoples work on my own site, how will that affect the sale as I assume that any permission I have been granted is typically non transferable?...
Utimately, I would be selling my main hobby site (so when I do decide to write articles again I won't have a site I can just upload them to). The site currently makes enough to pay for the hosting and some extra "pocket money", certainly not enough to make a living from in it's current state. Thing is, I could do with a lump sum as we hope to be moving house soon and it would help to pay for some of those things that "have to be done".
I just wondered what you would do in this situation? How would I know how much to ask for if I were to sell?
I don't bother with PageRank and don't make a habit of looking at my own site as I don't like to taint my stats... but I've just had a look, got 6 on the main page and it seems to drop by one for each level into the site I go - the content pages I look at are only a 4 so I'd be suprised if PageRank was a factor for the interest.
Of course, if I sell I won't have the extra pocket money it earns and I would no doubt have to start any new site from scratch... there is a lot of bespoke coding that powers the site so I would certainly want the price to reflect that.
If I wasn't in the process of moving and could do without the extra cash boost then this wouldn't be an issue... Ok, so I've done little to it this year... but if I sell and get the urge to work on a site I'll have to find something else to do, not to mention the fact I'll lose my meagre regular income.
Earnings are likely to remain low while I am not working on increasing revenues... but its not the loss of potential earnings I'm worried about so much - its more loss of use of the code and the content...
The more I think about it, the more I'm leaning towards keeping it... I've put so much time into it that it is hard to put a true figure on it - besides, I'd hate to hand it over and see someone else make changes. I'm to emotionally attached to it I guess.
Loads of Adwords banners everyehere, seem to think thats the only reason people come to the site.
Never mind
You now have the knowledge gained from your efforts and could probably replicate the work for a new site in a fraction of the time and make it considerably better now that you have incentive to do the work that you may have not done before. It's worked for me a few times. This gives you cash in hand and incentive to push yourself into new endeavors. Good luck!
The google sandbox makes old sites more valuable. If the PR is good you might earn more by sharing out the pr to other of your pages/sites. Selling assets can cost you.
And the Google sandbox effect also makes the buying and selling of links more lucrative. You might want to see these people are interested in purchasing space or advertising on your domain.
