Selling Websites for a Living

As already discussed, you can make a living selling websites that you built on the day you sold them but to make some real money and to get the serious buyers interested in what you have to offer you need to sell sites that are already profitable.

The best and most popular are sites monetised with Google Adsense. There are several reasons for this but the main one is that everyone trusts Google. If the site makes $300 a month the site owner knows the money is as good as in the bank.

The reason I prefer to sell sites with Adsense earnings is that it is very easy to prove your sales pitch claims. Google gives you tracking tools that show how many impressions the ad has received, how many clicks its received and how much the ad has made.

Customers love this in depth proof of earnings even though Adsense TOS doesn’t allow you to show all the stats – you can show total impressions and total earnings. They also like the fact its residual income and they don’t have to worry about PPC campaigns, drop shippers, affiliate costs etc.

People will tell you that you can no longer make a living with Adsense but being able to sell a website for $10K when its earning just $30 a day means I beg to differ. Most people with a modicum of experience will feel $30 a day is very achievable.

If you go this route you need a system in place. Depending on your experience and resources it could take anywhere from 5 months to a year to reach the traffic levels required to make $30 a day.

If you build one site each month then you will have anywhere from 5 to 12 sites on the go at once. Even 12 is highly manageable and of course, with each site built your experience increases and time involved decreases. Once a site reaches its goal and you sell it on, you build a new one and start the process again.

The idea being that after a given amount of time you will have a site for sale each and every month that will fetch you around $10,000 plus you will be earning substantial Adsense earnings.

Not all will reach their target and I tend to sell when I feel they’ve peaked and leveled off. You need at least 30 days of earnings history anyway to show clients and you will soon know when a site stagnates by monitoring your Adsense earnings.

If you have the traffic but its not converting into decent Adsense earnings you can supplement it by selling ad space, adding an affiliate program, creating an e-book to sell, build a mail list etc. all of which add to the sites value when it comes to selling it.

Sites that really take off offer a bigger dilemma than the sites that under achieve. Do you keep the goldmines or sell them as well? The reason I started selling websites in the first place was because I quickly realised once you hit number 1 in Google for your main keyword, the only way is down! For that reason I tend to let them go.

These aren’t cheap and nasty splogs I’m building. They are high quality, unique blogs with real readers and real content. If I decide to keep one I need to be able to commit the time required to keep it growing as well as carry on building other sites to sell.