What Price To Pay For A Site?

Recently, I was contacted by a business associate asking for my help to price his website. There are so many factors that must be factored in when establishing a price with the buyer carefully examining potential income, administrative costs, and return on investment when tendering her offer.

Monthly Income Is A Significant Pricing Factor

I have found sites listed for as much as 12-20 times the monthly net income average, with 6-12 months also common. This means that if a site is making $400 per month after expenses it could sell for anywhere between $2400 and $8000 based on this formula.

There are some other considerations to keep in mind, intangibles that can determine the price:

• Age of Site — Search engines tend to respect older, more established web addresses.

• Page Rank — Although Google has wreaked havoc with this tool of late, it is still a fairly good measuring tool for any site.

• SERPs — If you dominate the search engine results pages (SERPs) for certain key words or key word phrases, this will add value to your site. Some buyers will only consider Google SERPs, while I like to look at Yahoo! and maybe MSN.

• Is it an Authority Site? — If your website is recognized as an authority for your particular topic, you should be able to command the upper end of the price range.

• Net Income after expenses — Domain and hosting costs should be subtracted plus any advertising or writing expenses required to maintain the site.

• Time I must spend on site — This can be the most difficult thing to gauge: will you be required to spend “X” amount of time on the site every week or can it pretty much run on automatic pilot? High maintenance sites should be discounted heavily.

Use Sitepoint To Market Your Site

Making a decision to purchase a site should not be taken lightly especially when you are talking about paying thousands of dollars for the blog, website or forum. Personally, if I were to sell a site, I would turn to Sitepoint, a webmaster site which I successfully used in 2006 when I sold the Aviation Employment Board and this year when I sold several other websites and blogs.

Happy marketing!