Tips for Selling Your Website? Make Sure its Up To Scratch First

Kieron Donoghue, of www.here.org.uk, has written a great post about what information you should disclose to buyers when trying to sell your site. Within his post he has compiled a list of 10 things you should tell potential clients, but these also seem like good metrics to measure how good your site is and therefore are the areas you should concentrate on if you’re trying to improve your site. After all, if you’re telling the client about these things then they have to be good.

The URL
Kieron reminds us that it is a necessity to tell the client the URL. Obvious advice but some sellers won’t just so they can get direct contact from the buyer before disclosing it. Remember, the URL is possibly the single most important aspect of your site. It has to reflect what your site is or does, it has to be easy to remember and type, and it has to appear professional. Avoid hyphens, trademarks (other than your own), long names and quirky spellings if you can.
Take a look at “18 Tips For Choosing A Good Domain Name” for further advice
Traffic
Obviously, a successful website needs traffic because more traffic means more opportunites to monetise the site (see below). Building traffic by writing good content is the best way of retaining a site’s credibility while amassing a following and building up search engine rankings.
Paul Stamatiou has some excellent pointers in his article “How To Boost Your Blog Traffic“.
Earnings
At the end of the day, the seller wants to buy something that is going to make them money. If you don’t have any monetisation on your site then its going to be very hard to provide any evidence that your site can make money. You can try Adsense to start with, or one of the many other advertising networks that are around. Note though that early attempts to monetise your site could end up harming any efforts to build traffic as web users become more savvy to advertisements on websites.
Not sure where to start? Try this list: “101 Ways To Monetise Your Website or Blog“
Niche
If you can find a topic that doesn’t already have a blog dedicated to it, well done! There are so many blogs around now that it is difficult to find one that is unique in its field. If you are the only site covering a niche, then you are better placed to capture 100% of the traffic that your chosen area generates. The easiest way to do this is to specialise: instead of cars, cover 1970s cars, or even better, 1970s American cars. Sure, the audience may be smaller, but the more targeted your niche, the more accurate your monetisation can be. Once you have your niche sorted out, every now and again use Google to search for similar blogs popping up - always keep an eye on your competition.
Dosh Dosh has a brilliant guide: How To Choose The Right Blog Niche
Users
Slightly different to traffic, are your users or userbase. A loyal following that keeps coming back is great for affiliate sales and as long as you listen to your audience and provide good, relevant content, it is easy to keep them. This is easy to track if you use Feedburner, as it gives you your subscriber numbers (a combination of email and RSS subscriptions). The added bonus of an email user base is the ability to provide content for members or subscribers that is not available on the site.
Check out “20 Tips To Increase Blog Readership” from Swift Media UK.
Pagerank/Alexa/Technorati
Although these metrics are not so important nowadays, no-one is ever going to knock you for having a good Pagerank. In fact, some advertising networks base their prices on these rankings, and therefore a buyer will appreciate good rankings. Others don’t use any of these so even if these scores are low it’s not the end of the world. Linking out to “good” sites is a good way to increase these rankings. If you hadn’t noticed by now, all of these are related.
How To Live Online has a good primer: “Alexa Pagerank, Technorati Rank and Google Pagerank for Newbies“
Hosting
Good hosting is essential. Maybe not so much in the early days when you’re just trying to keep costs down, but in the long run when you start to get popular and you need to scale up your hosting plan, make sure your hosts can cope with it. Independant reviews of big hosting services are fairly easy to find on the web, so make sure you read a couple before you commit. If you do decide to change hosts, back up everything and plan thoroughly how you’re going to move to ensure the least amount of downtime. A new host worth anything should be able to help you with this.
Have a look here for “What Makes For A Good Host?“
Backlinks
The number of backlinks you have to your site is an indication of popularity/reach and also potential traffic. The quality of the backlinks is important too - having 2,000 backlinks from spam blogs means nothing. The best way to do this is to create good content again, promoting your articles and networking with other bloggers.
Read Garry Conn’s “How To Increase Backlinks” for further ideas.
Workloads
The holy grail of passive income is zero-input, but this is unrealistic. On the flip-side, you don’t want to be working 60+ hours a week on a site that is earning nothing. To get the most out of blogging you have to put in the hours, but be smart enough to realise when the the time invested is not providing a return and you need to move on. Plan ahead, schedule posts in advance, invite guest writers, share the editing, anything to make your workload lighter and your return greater. This will be attractive to buyers.
Darren Rowse (ProBlogger) shares some of his blogging techniques: How Do You Manage Your Blog?
Unique Selling Point
Linked in some ways to the blog’s niche, the Unique Selling Point (or “USP” as it is often referred to) is basically the way in which your site is different to all other sites out there. There are usually three ways to achieve a USP - be the first, be the cheapest or be the best. By hunting down an untapped niche you can be the first - no competition makes it easier to make a name for yourself early on. With blogging, its hard to be the cheapest, because most blogs are free anyway! But by being the best (or certainly one of the best) you stand head and shoulders over the competition. Think of a unique way to present your content, or to interact with readers. Make it different - it also stirs up interest in other bloggers and can help with backlinks.
Another slant on the topic: Why Your Blog Design Needs To Be Unique

So there you have it. I completely agree with Kieron’s list, but its worth evaluating your blog against the list to make sure you’re pointing it in the right direction.