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How to Prepare to Sell a Web Site from Day One
By Dewald Pretorius | October 5, 2007
When you create a new revenue generating web site, it’s very important to create it as a “stand-alone” site that you can easily package and sell at some point in the future.
You could, of course, hang on to the site indefinitely, but if you have a successful site there’s probably going to be someone who’ll be interested in buying it. The price offer just might be too good to refuse.
To do that, there are a few things you must do right from the start. It will save you a ton of work and a lot of headaches later on.
Here is a list of the minimum actions and strategies to take and follow.
- Register a domain with the primary keyword(s) in the domain name. It costs less than $10 a year to register a domain. Do not put your site on a subdomain of one of your existing sites (site.example.com). When you sell a subdomain site it’ll lose all its inbound links that you worked so hard to acquire, and it’ll seriously devalue the site. You’ll have to do a bunch of 301 redirects to ensure that the new owner does not end up with a dud.
- Create a separate MySQL database for the site, especially if you’re initially locating it as an add-on domain in one of your existing hosting accounts. It’s all too easy and tempting to install the site’s database in an existing MySQL database. Once again, if you want to sell the site, it’s going to cause you serious pain.
- Use only email addresses that you register on your domain name. It’s a five second job to create a new email address in CPanel on your domain. Use those email addresses for absolutely everything, from creating the site (for example, when you install WordPress on the domain), to creating social accounts, to submitting to directories, etc. That way you can easily transfer all the external accounts that accompany your site to the new owner.
- Don’t use your real name on the site. Create an alias or pseudonym and operate the site using that name. If you create a “persona,” it too can be transferred to the new owner and the site can seamlessly continue to function.
- Use some kind of affiliate link cloaking solution, even if it’s as simple as creating a subfolder for every link and doing a PHP 301 redirect to the actual affiliate link. If you hard-code your affiliate links in the content of the site, the new owner will have to edit every single link to change it over to his affiliate link. If you’re running a WordPress blog, using WordPress Affiliate Pro and a Google AdSense plugin will accomplish this goal.
- Create a Google Analytics account specifically for the site. You can then transfer a history of the site’s traffic patterns to the new owner. To do this, also create a separate Google account and name it something like “yourdomain@gmail.com”.
- Create a separate FeedBurner account for the site. You will have to give a deep price discount if your RSS subscribers can’t be transferred to the new owner.
- If you’re planning on building a serious mailing list, create a separate mailing list account for the site. A large list that can be easily transferred to the new owner will skyrocket the value of the site.
I hope this advice helps you make a ton of money from your web site one day!
Feel free to add more guidelines and ideas in the comments.
Tags: Building Websites
Topics: Building Websites |
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