Make Money from Selling your Own Websites

You can make money from selling your own websites.  Making money from selling your own websites is not going to earn you that much money if you don't put in the effort to learn how to go about it properly, and put in the effort to make your websites worth the higher prices you can ask for them.

It should be your own websites that you're creating and wanting to sell, not the type hosted on somebody else's website where it does not have it's own unique website address.  In other words you're going to need to register a domain and get hosting for your site or sites.

Now if you don't know how to design a website or understand too much about html and CSS coding, there are some options available to you:

• You can take the time to learn how to design your own websites; for free from information on the Internet is fine; you don't have to pay to learn how to design a website (Tony and I didn't; are self-taught, and even have a bit of a web design portfolio now from having designed websites for other people.)
• You can hire somebody to design your website for you, giving them all your written content to upload to your site, for you.
• You can learn how to use a WordPress blogsite, where you can get by without having to know much html, or any at all.  Now I don't mean the WordPress sites that are totally free, hosting and all, that have addresses that end in .wordpress.com and that you get at wordpress.com - I'm talking about the free WordPress themes you get at WordPress.org that you get hosting for, and you register a unique domain name.  You can learn how to get it all sorted and ready to use by yourself, or pay somebody to do it for you, where all you have to do is log in and start fiddling and adding content - like through us, our cheapest starting package is just R420, including hosting, domain registration, initial set up and more.

Now that you've decided on which kind of site you want to use, why are other people going to want to buy your site when you try sell it?

Well, they're not going to want to buy your site unless you put in some effort making your site attractive to potential buyers.

How do you make a website attractive to potential buyers, when you're trying to sell that website at a profit?

And when can you charge more than the average website seller out there?

If you have a really good domain name for your website (the website address), I guess you could try just slapping a bit of content on, and hoping that people would want to buy the site on the strength of the good domain name alone.

How do you determine what a good domain name is that others are likely to want to buy?

Well, that's another whole story, but, briefly, you need to buy and register a domain name that has words in it that many people are searching for every month.  You can find out how many people are searching for certain words on the Internet every month by making free use of the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.  Then of course, that domain name must be available to register.

What can you do if you want to charge a higher price for your website?

You can add a few pages of content that have words that many people are searching for every month.  If you do your research well, using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and any other free tools you know of or find, you may be able to have the title, description and link to your site appearing on page one of Google search results when people use those words to look for information on Google (or Bing, Yahoo, etc) - if your chosen words have a lot of competitors this is more difficult to achieve, so don't ignore the words that do not have too high a monthly search volume, as they often have less competitors.  Too few though (competitors) and too low a monthly search volume could also mean that hardly anyone is looking for information about those words each month, so it can be tricky getting the balance right.

You can also start getting some links from other sites that have related information on them, to increase the page rank of your site.  One of the easiest and cheapest, although time-consuming, ways to do this is to comment (decent comments; not spammy ones!) on other blogs that have similar content to your site.  It helps if these blogs that you comment on have a good page rank already, have been around for a while, and get lots of traffic - you can usually tell by how frequently they post new content and the amount and frequency of comments they get, or you can do a check using a pagerank checker or using Woo Rank.  They may also be using PPC advertising like Google Adwords, to help themselves get more traffic - you can check it they are on KeyWordSpy.

The content on your site should be well researched and well written, and also related to the domain name of your site.  If using a html website always include meta title, meta description, and meta keywords in the coding, and a doc type declaration in the very first line of coding.  If using a WordPress blog, always fill in the description area, usually found below where you write your new post, and always fill in quite a few tags in the tag section.  Write titles for your articles that are related to the domain name too.

Do not put the articles on other sites too, and when you sell your website or WordPress blogsite, you can add extra charges on for the content on the site, since you have saved people the trouble of getting some content added to their new site, content that is already drawing traffic from search engines because you so nicely did the correct research to try ensure that it did!  If you don't put the articles on other sites too, your buyer gets fullrights to the content, and you can charge more.

You can also give the new buyer a list of sites where you have left a comment or link back to the site.

In other words you've done a lot of work at helping the site get found easily already, and have saved the new owner of it the trouble from doing all that work himself - he gets a site, probably related to his business, that is already getting the right type of traffic he wants it to get.

Sometimes a person may not want to buy any of your websites you're selling with the aim of giving their business more exposure, but they may be wanting to buy the website because they want to put ads on the site that can earn them a passive income, like from affiliate programs or from Google Adsense, or they may want to rent out ad space on their site.  They may even want to add some more articles to it, and then resell it to somebody else!  It's up to them what they do with the site; once they've bought it from you, it's theirs.

You may want to let the site age for a bit before trying to sell it, so that awareness about its existence is given a chance to grow, so that traffic to it increases, so that its page rank increases.  Perhaps 6 months.  Longer if you want.

The more you can offer a potential buyer of your website, the more you can charge for it.

Speaking of putting Google Adsense ads on a website, you may want to do that yourself too, before you sell the site, and then just take the ads off when you sell the site as the ads would have your Adsense publisher id in them, and the new owner might want to add his own ads to the site.

What might happen, though, if you use ads on your site prior to selling it, is that you may be happy with the earnings you are making from the ads, and you may decide not to sell the site afterall.  You've, in effect, created the perfect site for yourself!

© copyright Teresa Schultz 2011