If you are into Internet entrepreneurship, then selling your website requires a lot of ground work. It is an important to find out the market value of the site you are planning to sell. You have to turn into a wise negotiator so that you get the best price for your efforts.

Internet entrepreneurs have various reasons for developing and selling websites and domain names. You might have developed a website as part of your hobby. Gradually, it turned into a revenue generating source, but now you want to sell your website with the purpose of making a one-time profit. Or, you may be into the business of creating new websites, developing it over time and then selling it at a good price when you get a good offer. Such websites are carefully nurtured websites that have good quality content and keywords that have been optimized on major search engines and thus have a good volume of traffic. Another reason for selling a site is that you may be venturing into a completely new area or product, and so want to cut ties with a different sector before moving on. Whatever may be the reason, selling websites is often a profitable venture.

Important Steps To Consider Before You Sell A Website

The first thing that comes to your mind is, “What price do I quote if I plan to sell my website? What is the market value of my website?”

There is no established method or mathematical formula into which you can put numerical values and arrive at a sales figure for your website. It is a trial and error method. You can compare your website with other similar ones and arrive at a comparable cost based on the ongoing rates. Moreover, it also depends on the mutual agreement between the two parties – the buyer and the seller. Who out of the two is a better negotiator?

There are two commonly used methods to assess the value of a website. You can combining them with other factors which you feel are relevant while determining the price of your website.

Average Monthly Income– Most people use this straightforward mathematical formula for assessing a website’s value. Most website acquirers pay about one years profit for the site (or about 12 times the average monthly income).

What Is The Cost Involved In Creating A Similar Website? In this, we try to value the price of the site by taking into account its assets and inventory - that is the quality of its content, search engine optimization, quantity of images, the volume of traffic, links on the site, etc. With a higher volume of traffic, you will get better offers when selling your website. The more well known the site is, the higher will be its price.

Factors which lower the value of your website include lack of links or relationship with others, poor revenue generation through advertisements, poor publicity, etc. At the end of the day, you will be able to sell your website only at that price which a buyer is ready to offer.

Aside from loading slowly over dial-up connections, there are a number of problems that can develop for webmasters that use flash and other scripts on their websites. If you choose to work with a professional web designer, he or she should be able to setup these scripts in a manageable way – and should offer to fix any problems that arise from their use. On the other hand, if you’re designing a site on your own, you’ll need to be able to manage these scripts properly on your own if you plan to use them on your site.

CHMOD and PHP scripting

Most of the web hosts on the market today offer web space that is hosted on a Linux or Unix server. Aside from offering you unparalleled stability, they are also much cheaper than Windows based servers. In addition, if you need special scripts, you can get most of them for free without even having to look beyond the offerings provided by the web host. If this is a service you plan to use, make sure your web host offers Fantastico – this is the industry leader in providing free scripts.

That said, if you decide to purchase or run a custom script, you’ll need to be familiar with several things, including creating MySQL databases and editing CHMOD permissions. While these steps are not overly complicated, they can be intimidating for a new web designer. See if you can find a book at your local library on PHP scripting, or search for free tutorials on the web. When you feel you’re ready to begin using custom scripts on your site, make sure you purchase them from a retailer that offers good customer support – there’s nothing more frustrating than following the instructions given and having your script not work! Good customer support will help you sort out these problems.

Exceeding bandwidth

Aside from causing your site to run much slower, Flash, Java Applets and other scripts eat up bandwidth. Once you’ve exceeded the amount allotted to your web hosting account, your site will simply stop functioning. You may or may not receive an email from your web host letting you know that users cannot access your site. Unfortunately – if you aren’t careful – it may take you days, or even months to find out that your site is unavailable. This will cost you in search engine ranking, as well as leave a negative impression on visitors and potential customers.

Therefore, you’ll want to find out how much bandwidth is used by these applications before you purchase and install them. Ask the retailer for an idea of the estimated bandwidth use before you purchase the script. If you aren’t able to find out, you can try installing it and testing the application yourself while keeping track of how much bandwidth is used. Don’t be afraid of scripts that eat up a lot of bandwidth – in today’s hosting market, bandwidth is extremely cheap and you can always increase the amount dedicated to your hosting account to run the scripts you need.

Once you purchase web hosting and begin to build your website, you may find that you want to increase its functionality with specialty scripts. However, use caution. Some third party scripts can be a security risk – so search online for other user’s experiences to make sure it’s legitimate. In addition, because various scripts use up a lot of bandwidth, you’ll need to make sure that you don’t exceed your monthly or yearly limits. By keeping a close eye on your site – and making adjustments to your scripts as needed – you’ll keep your site going, keeping visitors and search engines happy.

Aside from using blogs and WYSIWYG editors, there are a number of tools available on social networks that can help you build simple websites. In some cases, these resources can help you create forums, photo albums and anything else you might need to make your website more appealing and productive. Whether you’re building a hobby page or a site for your business, social networking site tools offer an easy way to design websites and locate suitable audiences for them.

Ning Networking

Today, Ning is one of the hottest new social networking sites. When you sign up for their free services, you’ll be able to create a blog, homepage, photo album, and even a forum for your site. Perhaps best of all, if others are interested in the topic of your network, they’ll be able to join your group and create the same type of features. This can offer you a tremendous opportunity to create all sorts of online resources that can help you make money or advance a social cause.

For people who don’t know how to code in HTML, these sites can be ideal. Just like popular blogging sites like Blogger and Blogspot, Ning provides you with standardized templates that will help you build your first site in a matter of minutes. If you do have some HTML skills, you’ll be able to modify these templates to suit your own style and needs.

Bookmarking sites

Even though the Ning network does not allow you to create bookmarks, you can create free link pages using social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Stumble Upon. Aside from offering you an easy way to organize your favorite bookmarks, these sites are also invaluable when it comes to backlinking to your own webpages. When combined with resources on the Ning networks, you can create an enormous amount of traffic by combining your resources with those of others on the network.

Squidoo

Squidoo is a new type of social collaboration network in which users create “lenses” – simple websites designed to showcase a user’s knowledge on a specific topic. When you register with Squidoo, you can choose the topic you’re interested in writing about and then create a site about it using their simple drag and drop interface. Squidoo lenses can be a great introduction to basic site design – plus you have the advantages of being indexed quickly in the search engines and gaining traffic from the vast network of Squidoo users.

Depending on your needs and objectives, a variety of social networking tools can be used to help you build and promote your website. Aside from offering templates that make it easy for you to publish your materials efficiently, you can also use these tools to manage search engine optimization at the same time. Even if you are a seasoned web designer, you might find that social networking tools allow you to quickly gain a web presence in a certain niche and tap into tons of free traffic from users on these sites.

When you see fancy websites created by movie studios and large corporations online, you might feel overwhelmed, thinking your own site should look that way. While these sites may draw a great deal of traffic, it’s important to remember that people are drawn to them because of a brand name or specific product – not necessarily because of the content of the site. If you’re just getting started as a website owner, don’t underestimate the value of a simple website. Simple, easy to produce sites can easily pull in traffic – and possibly revenue – if you keep the following guidelines in mind:

HTML only sites are simple and SEO friendly

When it comes to simple and easy, there’s nothing quite like a simple HTML site that includes keyword-rich text and links other relevant pages. Aside from being the most basic kind of website that you can create, these pages are also the only ones that a search engine can navigate. Unfortunately, if you add frames, javascript, or other menu elements, the search engine will not be able to crawl each page on your site and index it properly. As a result, your page rank may be much lower than that of a simple HTML page.

Simple HTML sites can be created with many free tools

Today, almost every web hosting service includes some type of HTML editor. Because adding links and new pages are fundamental to building a website, they all include these functions. Therefore, even if you have never created a website before, you can easily build large sites using the most basic HTML tags to accomplish your goals. You can even practice on these services for free before you begin your own site by signing up for a Yahoo Geocities account and launching their site builder.

Adding increased functionality to simple websites

Of course, there will be times when you want to add more complicated items like shopping carts, photo albums, and guest books to your website. While each of these items requires complex scripts to create, they’re all designed to run on a simple HTML page. Therefore, you won’t need to worry about compatibility issues. You can find thousands of free scripts online that can be added to your site by copying and pasting the code into the appropriate pages – so you don’t even need to worry about writing the script.

There’s no question that we’d all like to have award-winning websites, complete with all the whistles and bells available today. However, it’s also very important to make sure that consumers and search engines can navigate your site easily and efficiently. Consequently, if you want to get the maximum benefit from a small- to medium-sized website, your best option is to use the simplest HTML tags that you can find.

As you learn more about website development, you’ll probably find that you want to experiment with different methods and more complex design techniques. When you do get to this point, it’s important to remember to keep an eye on the page rank and web traffic for your sites. Surprisingly enough, you may find that your simple HTML websites are more likely to outperform the complicated ones across the board.