Selling Websites For Profit – Does It Work?

Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 11:42 am

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Wow! A long time between posts, eh? I’ve not been exploring many income generating opportunities of late, because I’ve been kept busy writing. As you well know, there are only so many hours in a day and the children take up a lot of them. I’ve picked up a few regular writing clients and I write articles for their websites. It brings in a few hundred dollars a month, and it’s not too time consuming.

One thing I’ve always wanted to try was building and selling a website. It’s supposed to be very profitable! I did some reading and research, and created my first blog to sell. I chose the pet niche because I know it well, and it’s always popular.

The costs were (in US$) firstly $8.81 for the domain (I register my domains with Namecheap and they always have a discount coupon). I don’t count much for the hosting because I have unlimited domain hosting and I just tacked it on to my existing hosting package. I had a nice custom header done for it, cost $20, but in future I’ll be having a go at using photoshop to create my own. And, my listing on Sitepoint marketplace was $10. So, total was around $40. I used a really nice Wordpress theme that’s easy to customise, and I have the rights to sell sites created with it. I also researched keywords and wrote 10 blog posts, each one original. Not sure how I’d value the time spent on research and writing. It had Google adsense on it, as well as an Amazon shop, a clickbank product and another affiliate product – so it was well monetised.

It didn’t sell. I listed it at $97 which I thought was fair for a new blog with unique content written by a professional. So, I still have it, and I’ve been building traffic to it. It’s getting around 200 visitors a month now, not much in the way of income, but it’s growing. It’s in the number 1 position on Google for its keywords in quotes. I now have someone interested in it for $150, but we’ll see.

I think the thing to remember about selling websites is you can’t just toss one up and hope to make a profit. It needs to be a quality site to start with, it needs to have some traffic to it, and ideally it needs to be earning a little income. Otherwise, it’s not worth a whole lot. I’ll let you know if this sale follows through, but frankly if it doesn’t, I’m happy to hang onto it as a niche blog.

I’ve just finished reading an ebook on selling sites on eBay. That’s my next experiment. I bought a domain name with high search numbers and low competition, I have about 20 private label rights articles ( to save the time of writing them myself) and I have a list of high search keywords. I’ll make my own header, and the costs will be very low indeed. I think I can get this site set up in an evening, I can get traffic to it fairly easily, and we’ll give it a go. I’ll keep you informed.

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