The Blogging Institute
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The Blogging Institute This eBook Is Brought To You By Alexis Kenne Dot Com This eBook Comes With Free Giveaways or Resale Rights, However You May Not Change The Contents In Any Way
“How
To Build & Sell A Website Worth $50,000� LEGAL NOTICE
The Publisher has strived to be as accurate and complete as possible in the creation of this report, notwithstanding the fact that he does not warrant or represent at any time that the contents within are accurate due to the rapidly changing nature of the Internet. While all attempts have been made to verify information provided in this publication, the Publisher assumes no responsibility for errors, omissions, or contrary interpretation of the subject matter herein. Any perceived slights of specific persons, peoples, or organizations are unintentional. In practical advice books, like anything else in life, there are no guarantees of income made. Readers are cautioned to reply on their own judgment about their individual circumstances to act accordingly. This book is not intended for use as a source of legal, business, accounting or financial advice. All readers are advised to seek services of competent professionals in legal, business, accounting, and finance field. You are encouraged to print this book for easy reading.
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The Blogging Institute My name is Alexis Kenne and I’m the owner of TheBloggingInstitute.com . Over the last few months I’ve gone from being a LOSER affiliate to finally starting on the path of becoming a SUPER AFFILIATE and Expert Blogger! I shared some of my experiences on my blog I quickly realized how important was a mailing list in an online business. I then did everything to learn in the shortest time possible to send a ton of free targeted traffic to my main site at HomeBusinessFirePower.com and to my blog plus by making some small split tweaks to my conversions (opt-in rates) I’ve also managed to capitalize on the amount of traffic I do get. More Traffic = More Opt-ins = More Sales If you are struggling to get traffic to your site and /or struggling to make money online then I can help. Check out my site for access to my free affiliate marketing success kit, or visit my blog for some of the hottest affiliate marketing and traffic driving tips.
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One last thing before you begin reading the rest of the guide, I actually offer a FREE 7 day ecourse on how to make money blogging. You can get access to it at theblogginginstitute.com
Additional Useful Links
My Facebook Fan Page My Twitter Page My Youtube Channel My Articles at ezinearticles My LinkedIn Account My Google+ Account
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Before the Sale
6
Chapter 2: SEO and PageRank
8
Chapter 3: Building Natural Backlinks
11
Chapter 4: So Why Have a Sales Funnel?
15
Chapter 5: Building the Sales Funnel
18
Chapter 6: Selling the Site
21
Chapter 7: Escrow Process – Safe and Secure
27
Chapter 8: After the Sale
29
Recommended Resources
30
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Chapter 1: Before the Sale Providing you with a step by step guide on how to sell a site worth $50,000 wouldn’t be very helpful if you didn’t already possess one. Therefore, I am going to focus on writing both how to build a site worth $50,000 as well as what to do once you’re ready to sell it. If you have any questions while reading or afterwards, feel free to contact me via my email address: alexiskenne@gmail.com So what makes a site worth anything? Selling a website is a lot like selling a home. You need to have a great location (Search Engine Optimization), good neighbors (community of sites linking to you), curb appeal (Web Design) and fantastic living areas (content). Since you’re selling a business, you also need to possess incoming revenue streams. Throughout the first half of this report, we’ll be taking a look at how you can build up SEO, backlinks, web design, content and revenue streams to the point where your site is worth $50,000 or (gasp!) even more. Why Did I Choose to Blog about That?! When I finally sat down and forced myself to start blogging, I chose to call home a niche which already had dozens of high ranked websites on google with years of established backlinks blocking my path. It took me over a year to rank #1 for my keywords and another six months to bring in 11,000+ subscribers. In the end, however, it was well worth the effort to the tune of $50,000. I worked so hard every single day, sometimes as much as 10 hours per day, building backlinks through rich, high quality content. Usually I wrote more off my site than actually on it. Why did I work so hard? What was my fuel that kept me going even when I was making one cent a month from google adsense? Actually, it was two things: an adventurous love for learning and a true passion about the niche in general. If you do not possess these two things then you will not survive. Choose your niche wisely, because it takes a lot of money to make up for not possessing a love for learning and a true passion for your niche.
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The Blogging Institute Knowing what I know now, I could produce a website of equal or greater caliber within six months. However, that knowledge came at a real price and investment of time in exchange for saving me money. With this report you can take my advice and hopefully save a decent amount of both time and money. I had a true passion for my niche that enabled me to really shine in ways that most people simply weren’t expecting. I would embrace new ideas, question old dogmas, and be a fascinating and interesting figure all at once. This passion for what I was doing truly drew people to my site because they were interested to find out where all this enthusiasm and excitement would lead them. The idea that you can market products invisibly behind the scenes and collect your check every week is a falsehood in the internet marketing business. If you want to be successful then you need to put forth the honest labor. You need to work smart with direction and motivation behind your efforts. Take from this ebook a clear direction for your efforts and be motivated by the assurance that you will be successful if you follow my lead. Stay positive and stay motivated, don’t ever give up!
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Chapter 2: SEO and PageRank
Setting your site up for SEO is easy, once you know what you want to go for. That’s the real trick, understanding your niche and placing your site among the search terms that potential buyers are looking for. You don’t necessarily need to hunt for keyword phrases like “Where to Buy Product X,” but instead, you should search for people who are looking for solutions to problems. You can then turn those people into buyers. I’ve read hundreds of reports about how you should be targeting already dedicated buyers, you know the ones searching for “Buy Product X.” However, depending on your resources and skills, this could be impossible thanks to all the other smart people doing the same thing. These are the most crowded and fought over search terms in the niche you are looking to build a site in. What’s worse, these buyers typically only click on the first hit on google, so you have to be #1 or you might as well be last. To find out what people are searching for on google, use the keyword tool that google provides for free. You should also sign up for google analytics for SEO and visitor tracking purposes. Google analytics is critical for reselling your site, so make sure that it is up and running from as early on as possible in your site’s existence. Buyers will want to be able to look through Google Analytics (you can upload it to your auction when selling the site) and it is a huge selling point for most. For the niche that I created my website in, I focused on keyword phrases that someone would search for when looking for assistance, but not necessarily products. Since my website sold advice on how to earn virtual currency in a video game, I wrote about and optimized content for searches such as “Where to find item X in the game.” This would bring me players who were looking for “Item X” but who could potentially also be looking for game guides. My job was then to turn these curious google searchers into interested buyers with either my own product or the products of others that I could sell. When you create content, try to produce useful information that answers Download Your $97 Gift >>>> Here
The Blogging Institute questions from people who may eventually want to buy products from you. In terms of optimizing my pages, I did the following for maximizing my SEO impact. Please remember that this is only half of the equation for getting good google page rank, the other half is backlinks, and I’ll be addressing that half next. Added my main keyword search to the title as part of the html. In blogger, and on any site for that matter, you can edit the html to have your search phrase appear after the title of the post. This way every single post you write already has your search phrase in the title. This is helpful because it makes it so you don’t have to write “Keyword Phrase: ” + “Blog Post Title” on every post. Cross linked my posts together. I went back through my posts (yes all 1,000+ of them) and linked each one to at least three others. I also created a site guide, a location where the best content was all linked together and organized in one area. Make sure that when you create a site guide page that it is within one click from the home page. This site guide contained all my best content and information (like a table of contents), and it acted as a mini-sitemap for google bots. The more intertwined your links are between posts the easier it is to create a maze that traps both google bots and readers alike. Getting lost amongst all the great posts on your site is exactly what you want these two parties to do. Submitted my site to DMOZ.org. This is the premier location to submit your website to. Obviously you also want to submit to google, but you might want to explore similar but smaller versions of DMOZ.org. I found about ten blog directories and submitted to those as well when I first began my blog. Wrote articles for Ezinearticles.com. Recently this marketing giant has seen a lot of hits from google, but I still use them with moderate success. If you write long titles (long tail keywords) that people could search you will get a few bites with each article. I rewrote every single blog post on at least three article sites, but Ezinearticles.com was the most successful by far. One article had 25,000 hits in a month.
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The Blogging Institute For each post on my site, I had a particular google search in mind. Some call these more specific searches which are related to your main search to be “long tail keywords.” These keywords are not searched often, but when they are, they are people just as interested in your site as if they were using your main keyword search phrase. The more long tail keyword posts you create, the more google traffic you will get. To give you an idea of how crazy these searches can be, by the time I sold my site 45+% of the traffic came from google but that was spread out amongst almost four hundred pages each day. That’s four hundred posts all getting one or more hits, and most getting less than three. What’s more, the pages weren’t the same from day to day, as all were getting hits randomly throughout the month. Yes, there were still pages that received far more hits individually, but all the pages getting one or two totaled up to more than what the bigger ones received throughout the week. If you haven’t read “The Long Tail”, I highly recommend it for understanding this concept better. Reworked the best posts. I said earlier that I went through all my posts and cross linked them to each other in order to create a maze of links throughout my site. I also edited the most popular pages to make them more in depth, have stronger SEO for their search terms, added tagged images, reworked post tags, etc. You should definitely figure out which pages get the most posts consistently from month to month and refine those areas of your site. Definitely keep your site guide updated as well. That’s all I did in terms of on page SEO. People make it sound like it’s a super complicated process that requires lots of money and time, but it’s really not. All it requires is an understanding of what people are searching for in your niche. But what if you screw up? What if you aren’t getting the google traffic you want for the searches you want? Well, you can do what I did when I realized the same thing: 1. Change your title of your site to the new search phrase. 2. Create new content that targets this new phrase. 3. Add the new posts to your site guide and cross link old ones to the new posts.
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The Blogging Institute That’s it. That’s how easy this particular system is. Now for the other half… backlinks.
Chapter 3: Building Natural Backlinks As you grow, readers will naturally link to your content on forums, websites and social media. However, you need to do some serious back linking yourself in order to raise the value of your website to $50,000 and beyond. Building a backlink is surprisingly easy, all it requires is an html link to your site and presto, you have a backlink. Quality goes a long way however on search engines, so you’ll want to put more effort into it than just pasting your html in a comment or forum post. Here are the ways I developed natural, high quality back links to my site. If you want additional assistance beyond this report, I’ve written two books for online entrepreneurs that could help: The Why People Course and Black Sheep. Backlinks are so misunderstood in today’s marketing world. People believe that a backlink is simply a way to improve SEO and get more traffic. That’s actually what a poorly constructed backlink does; sending you unfocused traffic that isn’t worth all that much money to you. A truly great backlink is a vote of confidence and the beginning of a conversation which ends on your site. Here’s a quick example to illustrate my point: A great backlink would be one placed in the middle of a forum discussion regarding how to solve a problem. If this backlink offers a solution to the problem in question then the backlink would most likely attract highly targeted traffic interested in finding an answer. If a reader took their time to read the whole forum conversation and click on your link, then they are highly interested in your solution to their problem. If that person found the forum post through Google, then when the reader clicks on your link they will improve your search ranking one click at a time. Having a web of links within your site (remember cross linking from Chapter 2?) will share the Google juice among many pages and help those parts of your site rank better as well. That’s a great backlink that you can create by engaging others in a conversation at the location that they are most comfortable in, before sending them to your own site. Download Your $97 Gift >>>> Here
The Blogging Institute A combination of the following was how I managed to get 72,000+ backlinks to my site by the time I was ready to sell it. Nothing was automated, just natural links from myself and people who I met spreading the content of my site. This is the other half of the equation that you don’t see when people write great content; the promotion of it!
Being helpful and attentive in emails Guest posts Forum comments with signatures Blogger comments Social media links Youtube videos Blogging carnivals Guest podcasting Running a podcast Entering contests Hosting contests Twitter Conversations Facebook Conversations
There are two types of backlinks, the ones you create directly and the ones people who interact with/hear about you create. I think that most marketers underestimate or ignore the backlinks they don’t initially create; the ones inspired by helping others. By engaging in so many different communities (that was the key here, I wasn’t just dumping crappy backlinks), I was able to influence other people to leave links to my site. Even something simple like being helpful and attentive in emails created an untold number of links to my site. Why? Because all the people I helped would eventually talk about and link to my blog on everything from social media sites to forums. Sometimes even those buyers who refunded my products ended up selling my guides to their friends and recommending my site. It is amazing what being kind, attentive, and gracious can do for you popularity. So with that being said, when you are creating backlinks for your site or blog, be sure to keep the human element of backlinks in mind. When you talk on twitter or facebook, work to engage people, not to sell your products or simply build links. Work to build solutions and answers Download Your $97 Gift >>>> Here
The Blogging Institute instead. Eventually the people you help will ask who you are or if you have products you can recommend to them. That’s how you can become a seller who advises friends instead of just a spammer who seeks out buyers. Keeping in mind the types of people you are bringing to your blog from Google (people with problems who could potentially buy your products). This mentality of help first and ask for money later works really well. Be the solution to their problems and they’ll never stop buying from you. Part of building backlinks is having content for not just you, but for other people to link to as well. Having really helpful posts aimed at answering the questions that people are googling will provide them with ideal places to link to (and you when solving their problems!). In addition to writing concise, helpful content, you can follow my lead and establish a forum on your site. There are hundreds of ways to do this; I simply installed a phpbb3 forum on my domain (If you are looking for hosting services, I recommend Host Gator for their customer service and tutorials). This forum ended up becoming one of the best places for discussions within my niche and it grew almost exclusively through word of mouth. Why did it grow so well? Because the members linked to it on other sites and created their own content that other websites linked to. When I ended up selling my website, the forum was one of the highest valued commodities because it was a sign of true community centered on the site. The site you build will end up becoming a community instead of just a destination for Google traffic. As more people find your site useful and link to it, Google will continue to reward you. As you develop your network and build social media accounts around your site, you’ll also begin running into people who can help you in far more ways than just spreading your content. You’ll meet product developers, web designers, artists, pitch page writers, etc. In your rush to build a site that is worth $50,000, don’t forget the true value of a site is determined by those who you help and connect with. The connections I made enabled me to outsource my site design, build better products, connect with other marketers in my niche and even find the right buyer. I call this ‘building a web’ which catches new visitors at the various social hangouts they enjoy and brings them back to the center of the Download Your $97 Gift >>>> Here
The Blogging Institute web (your site). You end up with this central home base surrounded by social communities, be them social media or blogs/websites. Your site becomes the glue that holds them all together. So why is this important, besides the fact that you’ll be getting more traffic than you know what to do with? Being present at these locations and creating valuable content everywhere you go will provide visitors with social proof of your expertise. When a visitor finally becomes a buyer, they will have been exposed to you on so many levels that they are confident in your capability to solve their problem(s), whatever they may be. So what did I do with the social media accounts that I grew over time? I didn’t use them to grow my site, although they were a small part of my ‘web.’ Instead, I used social media to meet new contacts which I could hire for their services or website owners that I could collaborate with. This is how I found contacts to outsource and allowed me to improve the look of my site as well as find numerous opportunities for growth. I’ve never used Twitter or Facebook to grow a fanbase, only to build up contacts for future opportunities.
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Chapter 4: So Why Have a Sales Funnel? You can have a website with no exterior advertising and still make thousands per month thanks to a well-designed sales funnel and an Aweber autoresponder. This incredibly useful tool will act as the funnel’s backbone. Even if you are starting from scratch, you should still have some sort of sales funnel implemented. This is because with limited to no income generated, you are running a hobby instead of a business. The beauty of Aweber’s system is that it will expand automatically with your userbase. Have 1000 new leads this week? No problem! Your autoresponder, blog broadcaster and standard broadcaster will be able to handle the influx and generate sales for you. That’s the real power of Aweber, but Aweber is just a tool and will only work as well as you implement it. What makes sales funnels successful are these three things: 1. Appeal for signing up a. Offer helpful email series b. Offer a free ebook c. Offer secret tips 2. Relationship generated by content a. Ask for feedback b. Offer additional free services c. Include reader comments and emails in your content d. Talk to the individual. Use “You” not “Fellow Readers” or “Hi Everyone.” e. Respond directly to reader responses to your emails. 3. Quality and Relevance of suggested products a. Try out the products before you sell them b. Offer enough interesting information to get a click; no more, no less
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The Blogging Institute c. Specify who the product is meant for and what main problem it solves d. Give your opinion, unbiased and honest
The Numbers Once you have a sales funnel running you can look at the number of sales you are actually making in comparison to new subscribers you are accruing. This enables you to determine to what degree (if at all) you can outsource. To hit our goal of $4,000+ per month (so that the site will be worth around $50,000 to most buyers), you will need to sell 4 products for $37 every day. Is this realistic? Depends on your sales funnel to be honest, but let’s say that you have a 5% conversion rate for turning new subscribers into buyers. At the 5% conversion rate, you would need 80 new leads per day to get 4 sales. Maybe that’s unrealistic because your site can currently only bring in 10 new subscribers per day. Even with a great incentive to get additional sign ups, this number will prove difficult to sustain for most businesses. Most people would think, “Ok, I just need to spend my time and money on attracting more subscribers and I’ll reach my goal.” Actually, your best option in this example is to spend your energy on improving your sales funnel in the three ways I mentioned above (appeal, relationship, relevance). Perhaps you work at this for a few weeks and greatly improve your sales funnel’s contents. Maybe you can bring that conversion rate up to 40%. Suddenly those 10 new subscribers per day are earning you 4 sales. Now, a 40% conversion rate is a very difficult number to reach. I would shoot for 10%-20% and then work on improving your traffic as well. Anything below 10% is considered a weak sales funnel. Charlie Sheen would consider you weak if this were your current conversion rate. Don’t be weak, focus on improving your sales funnel from day one and don’t overlook its importance.
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The Blogging Institute My experience with my own sales funnel was that I was able to make far more improving it than I was attempting to drive more traffic. Once I had an optimal sales funnel, I could spend money on outsourcing and advertising knowing approximately what my ROI’s would be. The sales funnel was the spine of my business. Until I had a sales funnel I was basically flopping around like a fish with no real direction or capability for educated risk taking. Once you have a sales funnel running you can look at the number of sales you are actually making in comparison to new subscribers you are accruing. This enables you to determine to what degree (if at all) you can outsource. To hit our goal of $4,000+ per month (so that the site will be worth around $50,000 to most buyers), you will need to sell 4 products for $37 every day. Is this realistic? Depends on your sales funnel to be honest, but let’s say that you have a 5% conversion rate for turning new subscribers into buyers. At the 5% conversion rate, you would need 80 new leads per day to get 4 sales. Maybe that’s unrealistic because your site can currently only bring in 10 new subscribers per day. Even with a great incentive to get additional sign ups, this number will prove difficult to sustain for most businesses. Most people would think, “Ok, I just need to spend my time and money on attracting more subscribers and I’ll reach my goal.” Actually, your best option in this example is to spend your energy on improving your sales funnel in the three ways I mentioned above (appeal, relationship, relevance). Perhaps you work at this for a few weeks and greatly improve your sales funnel’s contents. Maybe you can bring that conversion rate up to 40%. Suddenly those 10 new subscribers per day are earning you 4 sales. Now, a 40% conversion rate is a very difficult number to reach. I would shoot for 10%-20% and then work on improving your traffic as well. Anything below 10% is considered a weak sales funnel. Charlie Sheen would consider you weak if this were your current conversion rate. Don’t be weak, focus on improving your sales funnel from day one and don’t overlook its importance. My experience with my own sales funnel was that I was able to make far more improving it than I was attempting to drive more traffic. Once I had an optimal sales funnel, I could spend money on outsourcing Download Your $97 Gift >>>> Here
The Blogging Institute and advertising knowing approximately what my ROI’s would be. The sales funnel was the spine of my business. Until I had a sales funnel I was basically flopping around like a fish with no real direction or capability for educated risk taking.
Chapter 5: Building the Sales Funnel I’ll describe for you in this section of the report exactly how my sales funnel worked, as well as my reasoning behind each part of the setup. Remember, the whole point of this funnel is to convert skeptical, potential buyers seeking advice into grateful, product buying fans. If they aren’t converted into buyers, they will soak up the free content and pass it along to other potential buyers. That’s the goal, and it enabled me to make enough income to sell my site for $50,000. Let’s me show you exactly how I did it. There were many revenue streams I experimented with that made decent money, like adsense earnings of $300 to $600 per month, but none of them were the reason I could sell my site for $50,000. I’d like to focus instead on the one tool that made me the most money by far: Aweber. You can get Aweber for $1 your first month to try it and I recommend it highly due to their great tutorials and customer support. Aweber was the reason for my success and I will never build another site without it being the spine of my sales funnel! Here is where I placed my Aweber forms for people to sign up to my email list: Blog (Aweber list for blog) 1. Inline Sign Up Form o Always present on right side bar of site. o Also appears at bottom of individually viewed posts. 2. Popup Form Download Your $97 Gift >>>> Here
The Blogging Institute o Appears once per visitor on the first visit. o Made friendly and offer help to new visitors. Forum (Aweber list for blog) 1. Popup Form o Appears once per visitor on the first visit. o Made friendly and offer help to new visitors. Product Site (Different Aweber list for affiliates) 1. Inline Sign Up Form o Appeared high on the affiliate page on every visit. o Offered to give advice and instructions for new affiliates. o Promised advanced knowledge of sales and discount deals. For signing up to my email list, I offered seven tips in seven days. Why was this important? Because the tips were really good and it forced people to remain members for at least seven days if they wanted to see every tip. I found this worked a lot better than offering a download in exchange for membership. What’s more, I was able to simultaneously deliver my best sales pitches in addition to the seven initial emails using the autoresponder (if you set the value to 0 for how many days between two pitches, aweber will send them simultaneously on the same day). Of my 30 emails in my autoresponder, 12 were advertisements for my products or affiliate products. The other 18 emails focused on building trust, asking how the readers were doing and offering top notch tips. Aweber enabled me to create a robust sales funnel that used my intense web of sites to grab leads, then develop trust, and finally sell products. I actually got quite a number of ideas for posts and products thanks to all the feedback readers submitted to my autoresponder. Simple questions like “Hey, how’s the site working out for you?” would give me literally thousands of responses. Towards the end of my autoresponder sequence, I created a pitch for getting readers to become affiliates for my products. I would estimate that around half of my affiliates were born through this email. Many had never even sold products before. Of course I also had an affiliate newsletter through Aweber as well which provided a dozen emails containing advice for these affiliates selling my products. Download Your $97 Gift >>>> Here
The Blogging Institute Aweber also provided me with far more subscribers (blog broadcasts in Aweber track your subscribers and add them to your google feedreader count). Although not everyone knows how to subscribe to google feedreader, pretty much everyone knows how to sign up to an email list. My pop up and inline forms provided me with as many as 50 new subscribers per day (I was getting maybe 5 per day before that). Each new subscriber went through most of my sales funnel and I would venture to say that over a third of them eventually bought something. I used the broadcast (this is different from blog broadcast) to send almost instant communications out to my audience. These emails were timely and effective at either building trust with a great tip or generating revenue with a hyped up product. As long as the email contained a useful product or tip, the audience would react really well to it. If a broadcast for a product did particularly well then I would attach it to a point in the sequence of my autoresponder for new subscribers. Obviously not all products or tips were ‘evergreen’ in nature so the broadcast became an opportunity to deliver ideas instantly to my audience that would otherwise not be possible in my sales funnel. I spent a lot of time changing and updating my sales funnel to impress new readers and build trust. I also responded to every single email they sent me when they responded to my aweber broadcasts or autoresponder. This built an unshakable bond with my readers, so strong that I was able to provide them with great products to solve their problems and they would buy them immediately. So even though I had an automated sales funnel that was making great money, the human element of interacting with the subscribers went a long way. I am not going to touch on the subject of what products to sell with your sales funnel, as I truly believe that there are always high quality opportunities out there, but I would still recommend considering the creation of your own product. Most of my revenue came from my own clickbank product and all the social proof available in my ‘online web’ provided me with a steady stream of buyers. Nothing screams “Buy Me!” like the product of a website owner who has helped you tremendously over and over again. Definitely consider it if you want to Download Your $97 Gift >>>> Here
The Blogging Institute earn enough money to sell your site for $50,000. Without my own personal product, I would estimate that my site would have sold for around $25,000 instead. That’s the difference having your own product makes because you’re taking in 100% of the revenue, not just a percentage for affiliate sales and you’ll have your own affiliates selling the product as well.
Chapter 6: Selling the Site Before you even consider selling your site, you had better have a damned good reason. If you don’t, then people will make up (often bad) reasons for why you’re selling. Maybe you’re just not good at managing the site anymore or maybe you’re out of content. Maybe you’re just selling out when the going is good. That’s the kind of talk that will occur if you don’t give a valid reason. Not only do you need a valid reason to sell, but you need to have a good plan of action in place well before you’re ready to sell the site. This plan needs to include ways to automate the site, whether you outsource the content creation or minimize it while maximizing profits. Keep this in mind and start planning months before you decide to sell. Now that you’ve spent months or maybe even years developing your ‘web,’ it’s time to actually sell the site. I used Flippa.com and recommend them for their services and cheap auction posting cost ($20 for 30 days). When you do decide to sell, don’t waste money paying anyone to advertise your site, even Flippa. Instead, use your influence in your niche to create a real storm of interest around you selling your site. You don’t need to publicly come out on your own website (a turn off for most buyers), but use your list of contacts gathered from meeting other site owners and contacts on social media to spread the word to those that matter. The vast public won’t know about the sale (and there’s really no reason to tell them because it may disrupt future business for the next owner) but the people who could potentially buy it will find out. Make your auction on Flippa public so that people do not need to sign up with an account to see what your pitch contains. Download Your $97 Gift >>>> Here
The Blogging Institute For prices strategies, I stuck to starting off with way more than I could ever get for the site, namely $100,000 starting bid, $250,000 buyout. I did this to gauge interest and to attract a larger crowd. People then came to me and said that it was too risky of a buy but they were still interested if the price was lowered. This is exactly what I wanted to happen. About half way through the auction’s shelf life, I then cut the price down to $50,000 bid and $100,000 buyout. I received a bid for $50,000 and decided to end the auction because I knew the bidder and felt that he would do an amazing job with my site. I probably could have waited for more money, but I was happy to sell to the right person rather than make a little extra through a bidding war. Some places you can advertise for free: http://www.warriorforum.com/ http://www.Craigslist.com http://www.Reference.com http://www.Superpages.com http://www.myfreeadboard.com http://the-traffic-secret.com http://www.deepseahits.com http://www.useads.com/ http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/forum.php I wouldn’t advise paying for any advertisements since you want targeted leads that understand your current niche. Some odd suggestions that worked for me included writing a guest post for http://www.problogger.com and similar blogging sites in which I mentioned that I was attempting to sell my website. Sites like problogger allow backlinks as long as they are related to the article. Once you have a Flippa account and have posted your url for sale, it won’t go live until you’ve finished with all the little details regarding your website. Here are the areas I addressed within my pitch and in the other areas of the site. For reference purposes, take a look at my actual sales page on flippa. Mentioning the fact that you’re selling on social media, podcasts, forums, or anywhere else that you are already engaged in the Download Your $97 Gift >>>> Here
The Blogging Institute community is a great idea. Cause a stir in your own community and word will spread randomly to others. Be sure to link to your flippa.com listing when you mention the fact that you’re selling. Title The title of your auction posting should be something catchy and appealing to a wide audience. Try your best to be broad in the characteristics of your site but exact in the revenue. Let me use an example. Perhaps you sell antique chairs on your website and make $3000-$6000 per month. You should use something like “High Quality Furniture Site - upwards of $6000 per month.” See how the left side of the hyphen catches your eye regardless of what kind of furniture you sell? That will increase the number of people looking at your site from just antique chair sellers to the wider range of all furniture. Also, your revenue is extremely appealing with upwards of $6000 per month. If I were in the furniture business and read “high quality furniture” followed by “$6000 per month” I would at least look at your sales pitch to learn what you were doing. Maybe I’ll then tell a friend who could potentially buy it… you never know. When you pick your domain url to sell, don’t make the mistake I did of using the most recent name for your domain. If you were on blogspot like me and bought your domain through google, then your most recent name change is the date that will be found by Flippa, not your true site age. In my case I had an Org site that was one year old when the Blogspot version it replaced was actually three years old. A lot of people criticized and questioned how old my site was. Once you pick your domain you’re screwed if it isn’t the oldest one. I lost a lot of potential buyers who saw that I was claiming to be 3 years old when Flippa said I was barely a year. You can’t go back and adjust your auction’s domain name, so be careful if this situation applies to you! Description Write this more than once. Why? Because you won’t get it right the first few times and you’ll most likely come up with things to add throughout the sales process. Especially when you are interacting Download Your $97 Gift >>>> Here
The Blogging Institute with buyers and they are asking for certain information, you will be able to update the description or attachments areas of your auction. Start off with an outline like I did, here is the actual one I used: 1. What is the Demographic? Can you instantly appeal to a wide group of people? 2. How much potential does the site have, and how much is it making now on autopilot? 3. How much work have you put into automating the site? How much are you saving the buyer? 4. What’s the competition like? What’s your site’s status in the community? 5. Do you have hard numbers for Google rankings and backlinks? Note: backlinks will be listed automatically for you by flippa, so just copy this number here and you will need to manually search google for rankings. 6. How successful and tested is your sales funnel? 7. So with all these great things going for your site… why in the world are you selling? Note: This part needs to be very compelling on an emotional level so that buyers can sympathize with your issue(s). 8. Bulleted list of revenue sources and dollar amounts per month. 9. List what the buyer is starting with, in terms of actual reader and subscriber counts. Note: I also mentioned how many new subscribers I was getting per day approximately. 10. How can the buyer keep the site going without you at the helm? How much time will be required to keep the site going on autopilot? Note: In my case I hired writers who could be kept on and painlessly managed by the new owner. 11. Reiterate why the site is such a great buy. Explain who the market audience is and how the site is positioned to take advantage of that demographic. This particular outline that I just had you read was exactly what I wrote out for my own site. I feel that it covers a good chunk of what you will generally need on every website that you can sell. You may wish to go into additional details, but keep in mind that each section was no more than four sentences long. I did this on purpose with colored headlines above each paragraph to draw attention of skim readers. Be concise and interesting, with enough information to make Download Your $97 Gift >>>> Here
The Blogging Institute potential buyers keep reading and eventually contact you for additional information. Financial Details Your financial details should contain the past years’ worth of financial information with emphasis on months where you made the most money. Mention your consistent income as well as why you made big spikes of income on particular months if you did at all. Use these as selling points and compare your revenue to the amount of money you pay in monthly/yearly expenses to maintain the site. Traffic Details Show consistent statistics for your traffic and if necessary, mention periods of time where you spiked. In my auction I didn’t mention the fact that attached to the posting was my google analytics report for the past year. Don’t make the same mistake! If you link your google analytics account to the auction then be sure to mention it here. Attachments You should mention everywhere in your listing where it applies (note that I never did this and consider it a huge mistake) that you are including attachments for proof of earnings/traffic. Take screenshots of revenue reports as well as create excel spreadsheets wherever possible. I used google adsense reporting tools (part of the suite that comes with google adsense) as well as the export to CSV option in Clickbank to produce high quality attachments for my potential buyers. I also took screenshots of the data in processed form (totals for each month for instance) and used that in case buyers didn’t want to read through excel spreadsheets. You’ll find that you add to the attachment section the more you talk to buyers because they will constantly ask for this information to be presented. Tax Information
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The Blogging Institute You won’t find an actual place to enter tax information publicly on your Flippa auction, and you shouldn’t, but you may want to have the amount of taxes you paid the past and prior year for your website. Some buyers will want an idea of how much money you’re spending on taxes and whether you’ve kept the website legitimate and legal for as long as you’ve had it. Although you don’t need to provide them with physical or virtual proof, you should have the numbers ready in your head to share with them. Accepting the Bid People will ask for tons of information and give you chump offers. Don’t get upset; just say thanks but no thanks. Save the information you gather for showing the next client or upload it as an attachment to the auction. Be patient, the right seller will come along. Even when the bid for your auction is accepted, still remain patient. Don’t become a nervous wreck like me or you’ll lose a lot of sleep and get gray hair (my fiancé honestly found a gray hair on my head one week into the sales process). One guy offered me $15,000 for the site, which was a horribly insulting offer after I had spent a few days catering to his every request regarding revenue information for my domain. However, the information he requested turned out to be very helpful later on for the actual buyer to review. I just said “Thanks but no thanks,” accepted his reasoning for why he wouldn’t be able to go beyond $15,000 and ended the skype conversation as politely as possible. At any moment if you are happy with the current bid and buyer on your site, you can choose to end the auction and accept the highest bid. I would do this only if you are very happy with the current high bidder and think that he/she will do a great job with your site. Keep in mind that the future success of your site will look very good on your flippa account, in the mind of your past audience, and with anyone else associated with the sale. There’s no reason to sell your site to someone who is going to run it into the ground and ruin your chances of selling additional websites. It’s important that you’ve done the ground work of meeting new contacts through social media and site collaboration so that by the Download Your $97 Gift >>>> Here
The Blogging Institute time you are ready to sell, you already know the people that are going to buy the site. For transactions of this magnitude, there is no reason to go with buyers who could be flakes and bail during the purchase period. Instead, use your vast networks to reach out and find the right potential buyer(s). Because you know the person buying to some degree and they know you, there is incentive for both parties to be as courteous as possible. Who knows, one day you could work together again in the future.
Chapter 7: Escrow Process – Safe and Secure 1. Buyer and Seller Agree to Terms 2. Buyer Sends Payment to Escrow.com 3. Seller Ships Merchandise to Buyer 4. Buyer Receives Merchandise a. Merchandise in transit from seller to buyer b. Buyer inspects merchandise c. IES reviews terms 5. Escrow.com Pays Seller Escrow fees can be paid by buyer + seller; this is known as “Split.” I recommend this option. Escrow is safe because the money is kept in a third party’s possession until both the buyer and seller are happy with the transaction. If the buyer tries to short the seller then Escrow will hold onto their money and if the seller tries to short the buyer then the seller pays for the fees in full and the buyer gets a refund after returning whatever merchandise was given by the seller. It’s a great system and much safer than anything else out there. I created multiple google docs for the buyer so that he could immediately start going through all of my accounts and taking them over. This was a mistake. For one, I forgot to change my passwords for my accounts since I use them for other crucial things such as my online banking and email. I ended up changing those crucial logins after the sale. If you are selling accounts as part of your transaction, you should definitely change your passwords before the buyer sees Download Your $97 Gift >>>> Here
The Blogging Institute your old ones. Instead of handing over your accounts in the beginning, the first thing you should do is provide your buyer with the EPP codes and unlock the registrars of your domain(s). Call your domain hosting service to get this information and provide the EPP code so that the buyer can transfer your domain(s) to wherever he wants to store them on his own hosting providers. I should have done the above first because technically the buyer does not own your site until he has the domains. He/she should not be granted all of your support accounts such as Aweber and Clickbank. Why was giving these out a mistake? The buyer was already sending out broadcasts to my list and making money with my Clickbank account before the domains were actually finished transferring. That was money that I should have been given, not the new owner. What’s worse, if the sale had fallen through then I would have lost that money with no way to get it back since it wasn’t part of the transaction being governed by Escrow. Maybe you could fight for it, but if you were getting your money from a foreign country like I was‌ well good luck with that. Once your domains are transferred to the buyer, then send over your supporting account information and have the buyer change your information on each account to their own. Ask that they do not change the passwords until after the sale is complete. If you have issues transferring the domains, which were also a huge problem for me, you can instead let the buyer take over your hosting accounts. Ask them to change your financial details to theirs as well as the contact information. Once that is done have them change the password and now they own the site. Suddenly the transfer process is up to them instead of you and both parties can move forward with accepting the other accounts and finally the Escrow acceptance instead of waiting for the transfer process (a 1 to 4 week ordeal) to finish. I would also recommend cancelling all hosting payments for the domain(s) so that you will not be charged for later installments. Same goes for the other accounts such as clickbank or aweber if you are selling those as well. You should never have to sell your google adsense account because there is simply no need to do so. Same goes for accounts like Download Your $97 Gift >>>> Here
The Blogging Institute Amazon. The new owner should be charged with changing the code to their own accounts instead.
Chapter 8: After the Sale
Don’t forget to fill out the short survey that Flippa gives you. This will make the buyer very happy because it increases their reputation on Flippa. Only give less than 10/10 and a positive review if the sale didn’t happen. In which case you’re probably rather pissed that you lost the Escrow down payment. Stay in touch with the buyer and help out from time to time. Don’t ever actually WORK for the buyer, but do make an effort to provide additional information that might be needed to keep the site going. Contact information for web designers, content writers, etc. are great things to include in the google doc that you create during the selling process, but odds are you will forget something. Be courteous and give the helpful information the moment you realize it’s missing simply by adding it to the google doc and notifying the buyer. Did I mention how much I love google docs? They make life so simple. Now is not the time to think of your next projects or what you will do with the money that you earned from selling. Instead, you should have planned this part out when you were deciding why you were selling the site in the first place. Don’t make the mistake of trying to figure out your next move after you’ve given up your bread winning domain that you worked so hard to create. Have a plan for short, medium and long term at all times. Recap: Selling a Website that’s worth $50,000 1. Build up a reputation and presence in your community and surrounding communities. 2. Obtain high rankings on google and numerous backlinks. Download Your $97 Gift >>>> Here
The Blogging Institute 3. Automate the acquisition of new leads and selling to them. 4. Develop a sales funnel that earns $4,000+ per month consistently and spikes for far more. 5. List on Flippa.com and use Escrow for payment safety. 6. Transfer domains and supporting sites, along with helpful documentation. 7. Allow Escrow to complete their inspection. 8. Follow up with the buyer in the months to come to ensure that they succeed. I hope that I have helped you to develop a plan for building up and selling your website. Good luck and if you have any questions feel free to email me at alexiskenne@gmail.com Good Luck!
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