Making money online is tough. If you have been into blogging or creating websites for making money online, you know it pretty well. Unless you are a SEO wizard, there is no way you can get millions of visitors to hit the magical earning figures. After having worked hard for months building a website or blog, you realize that it’s not your cup of tea! Your site is still getting a few hundred page views a day and your earning is less than a few dollars a month. Maybe, you lose interest in that particular site or blog as you are no longer keen to work in that niche. What do you do? Just let the blog or site wither and see all your efforts and investment go down the drain.
If you have a website or blog that is getting some traffic but you are not able to take it further, it is time to handover the baton to someone who can take it to higher levels. Instead of letting it waste, you should salvage whatever you can by selling it. There are plenty of people looking for blogs or websites like yours. They know how to turnaround a site and make it a success. Let them buy your blog.
Is it time to sell your site or blog?
Your site or blog may not be growing due to several reasons, most importantly not knowing the tricks of the trade. If you don’t want to abandon your site or blog, learn search engine optimization and SEO copywriting. Be socially active and interact with other bloggers. If you are not keen to do so, it’s high time you sell your site/blog.
A few main reasons to sell your site:
- Want to quit blogging
- Lost interest in a particular blog
- No longer confident about a niche
- Don’t have time to maintain a blog
- Need money for other projects
I recently sold a technology blog on Flippa for $1,100. It was a Page Rank 4 blog with around 200 visitors a day. It wasn’t making any money. Why did I sell it rather than fix the issues? Actually, I had lost interest in that blog. I was also not sure about the domain name as well. I hadn’t published any articles on it for more than 9 months. Instead of letting it vapourize, I decided to sell the blog.
Monetize your blog by selling it on Flippa
If you really want to sell your blog, there is no better place than Flippa. It is the most popular marketplace for websites and blogs with thousands of users. Flippa ensures that all bidders are genuine by verifying their contact numbers. You can be sure of getting genuine bids for almost any blog (other than some crap sites).
Register with Flippa: The process is fairly simple. You get registered with Flippa and get your phone number verified. If you want to sell a site, you need to pay a small fee of $19 to get it listed on Flippa. All sites are auctioned on Flippa to make sure that you get the best offer. You need to decide the duration of the auction and a reserve price. The reserve price is the minimum amount at which you will sell your site. You also need to mention a starting point for the auction.
Verify ownership of site: You will have to verify the ownership of the site by adding a meta tag in blog template or uploading a file to the home (top-level) folder of your site. If you have a BlogSpot blog with custom domain name, you can add the meta tag in the template.
Approve bids: Once the auction begins, you will start getting bids. The maximum activity is seen in the beginning and the end of the auction. All bids have to be approved by you. It is a feature to make sure that you can weed out bidders who you don’t trust and would not like to deal with.
Buy It Now: When selling a site of Flippa, there is an option to have a “Buy It Now” price. If any bidder wants to buy your site outright, he/she can just click on the “Buy It Now” option and pay the price fixed by you. It brings the bidding at temporary halt. If you accept the “Buy It Now” offer, the auction ends and the site is sold to the person making the offer.
Ask for payment: Once the bidding ends, you will have to transfer the domain name and site content (or whatever you offered in the auction listing) to the winner. But make sure that you get the money first. When using PayPal, send an invoice with clear terms and conditions to the buyer. This will come handy in case of any dispute.
Use Escrow for safety: If the buyer is not comfortable giving you the money and needs some kind of guarantee, there is Escrow. An escrow service allows two parties to transact by acting as a buffer. The buyer pays to Escrow after which the seller sends the product (in your case domain name and website content). After the buyer confirms receipt and is satisfied with the transaction, the payment is released to the seller. Escrow comes for a fee depending on the amount of transaction. If you are not in the US, you may have to get the money wired to your bank account rather than getting it in your PayPal. International wire money transfers are a bit costly and can dent your earning by $50 or so. Unless the money is big enough to justify the extra cost, try to avoid Escrow.
Transfer domain and content: Getting the domain name ownership changed can be easily done at your end. After the ownership details have been changed to reflect the buyer’s ownership, send the buyer the authorization code required for getting domain name transferred to his/her registrar. Ask him/her to initiate the transfer process. You can send the content of the blog beforehand so that the buyer can ensure a smooth transfer of the website to his own hosting space. You can also sell a blog hosted on Blogger with a custom domain. In this case, mention it clearly that the buyer will get domain name and an XML file with content.
So don’t just sit on a pile of diamonds whining about your bad luck. Sell those diamonds and become richer.