If you had a question about gravity, you’d ask Einstein.
If you had a question about cookery, you’d ask Gordon Ramsay.
And when it comes to the question of how to sell your website, you ask Andrej Ilisin.
Andrej earned over $50,000 selling a website he created about German Shepherds. In the short time since that first website sale, Andrej is now worth over 7 figures. Among the many successful ventures of Andrej, his greatest is the Investors.club — an international marketplace to buy and sell websites online.
Whether you’re a website buyer hunting for high quality vetted websites or someone with the drive to make money online right now and sell your websites, Andrej has created the place to make it happen.
If you were already asking yourself “How to sell your website?” then we’ve spoken to Andrej and pitched that question to the perfect person.
And here is his roadmap for how to sell your website:
- Find your niche
- Build up your website’s engagement
- Keep that engagement up
- Create a community
- And finally: How to sell your website
So let’s get started on our journey to discover your future as a website entrepreneur.
This is just a beginners guide, being a website selling entrepreneur, I must admit takes a long time to master — especially as the market becomes saturated. But by understanding the key principles, eventually you will actually know WHAT to learn.
How To Sell Your Website Step 1: Find Your Niche
Before we sell your website, we’re going to have to buy a website that we can actually sell.
As with all business ventures there are 2 main starting points:
- Buy a new website to fit a niche
- Buy an existing website with potential
Both approaches have their pros and cons, so before you start spending money, you’ll have to be sure which is best for you.
Buying a website: Starting With A New Website
If you have an original idea that no one else is tackling, then that’s an amazing start.
Your first goal is to buy your domain and hosting to get your idea off the ground. Buy a relevant domain that instantly lets viewers know what your website is about. This isn’t as important for searching (these days Google cares more about what’s on your website rather than what it’s called), but it will help you greatly in getting across the concept of your site to your audience.
Buying a website: Building on potential
Another method is finding a website that already exists, but isn’t hitting its potential.
There are thousands of people who start building sites and quickly lose focus to bring the idea to fruition. You won’t be one of those people.
So if you have a plan for how to latch onto the potential of a site, then get in touch with the website owner and see if you can purchase their domain and have a site that’s ready to go. Alternatively, you can head to investors.club to buy an already existing site that is being listed cheaper than the potential value you see for it.
Always Pick a Specific Niche
Whichever approach you go for, the golden rule is to always go for a niche. Domain names which are relevant to the content and activity on the site are stronger than ones that aren’t.
Instantly discovering a small audience that’s loyal is far more valuable than spending a long time going after a larger audience who have other options.
Your aim is to quickly establish yourself and then sell your website. If you’re planning to make the next YouTube, then your molehill is going to ascend into a mountain very quickly.
How To Sell Your Website Step 2: Building & Maintaining Your Engagement
Once you have your website in place, it’s now time to start procuring your most valuable asset: visitors.
The more popular your site is and the more returning visitors you have, the more you can sell your website for.
Building your website will be a mixture of technical skills, analytics and creativity.
The most important factors that will grow your site’s audience will be:
- SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
- Advertising – Paid google ads and social media ads
- PR – Having a great reputation with your audience
- Backlinks (Link building) – Having other websites link to your site
Building engagement by yourself
When it comes to growing your website by yourself, SEO, PR and paid advertising are three avenues you can undertake by yourself.
SEO may be a strange new concept to many, but in short it involves you building your website in a way that makes it easy for search engines like Google to know what your site is about and reliably bring it up in searches.
There are many free resources online to teach you the basics and you can quickly learn everything you need to know; from your keywords to your meta descriptions.
Making sure your site has great PR is another key focus. Make sure you are never half heartedly putting out content. You need to make sure that your site is high quality and respected by the audience you’re trying to engage.
Paid advertising is the most costly form of engaging members, but if you’re after a niche audience, for only a few pounds a day you can reach a large number of your audience, whether that’s on social media or Google.
Building engagement with others
Building a successful website might feel like a lonely venture, but it doesn’t have to be.
One of the best ways to help your site show up in online searches is by getting in touch with other site creators similar to yours and linking to each other’s content.
These are known as backlinks and from Google’s perspective they make your website look very valuable. It’s a seal of approval effectively. If other websites are sharing your content, then it must be good and it’s great PR for your site.
How to maintain your engagement
To keep people coming back to your website, you need to give them a reason to keep coming back.
And that means you need 3 things:
- Content
- Content
- Content
Once you’ve started to strike a reputation and a relationship with your visitors as a trusted source of information, then you simply need to keep that good spirit going.
How To Sell Your Website Step 3: Creating A Community
In the age of social media, your website’s reach is no longer limited to just your website itself.
If you have an engaged audience, then the more ways you give them to interact and gain value from your site, the better.
Selling a brand is infinitely more valuable than simply selling a website, so work on growing your community with the same importance as the website itself.
Learn how social media works and master it
Being great at social media has its own skills and nuances that have to be learned. But the best advice is to just start doing it.
Experiment, have fun with it and try to engage with your audience.
The nature of social media is that it is a social experience.
So be social!
The golden rule is to be authentic and be the centre for your community to congregate.
It might seem like busywork to start with, but when you come to sell your website, you’ll be thankful you put in the time.
How To Sell Your Website Step 4: Selling Your Website!
This is the fun bit, the part that all of your hard work has come to.
However, you probably have one question:
“When is the right time to sell my website?”
Deciding the right time to sell your website
Judging your website’s value is simple: the more engagement you have, the more valuable your website will be!
Thankfully, the Investor’s Club can give you an accurate and fair valuation before you sell your website. The Investor’s Club also ensures that you get to keep more of the profits for your hard work.
Before you sell your website, you can have use the Investors Club valuations service and accurately judge the right time to sell.
The Journey To Sell Your Website
Taking the first steps to build and sell your website are a learning experience.
However, the tools and means to do so are more convenient to access than ever.
And with marketplaces like Investor’s Club making it easier, safer and fairer than ever before, it’s a great way to make money online as additional income or as a full time job.
Andrej started with one sold website and is now one of the premier experts in the world.
It’s time for you to follow in those same footsteps. Good luck out there!
Remember: read read read. This post was just a short introduction to the topic of website flipping. For more detailed instructions and guides, check out the Investors club guides and follow your favourite digital marketers, such as Ryan Stewart and Craig Campbell.
