 Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for joining us. Today's topic is how to sell your website for profit and our speaker is Chelsea Clark. Hey everybody. Thanks so much for coming to check out my session. Today we're going to dive sort of right into some practical things that you can do to position your site to sell to get it ready to get it monetized in a way that's going to be attractive for when buyers come looking and even if selling your website isn't a goal, you're still going to be able to walk away hopefully with some practical tips just to bring more traffic and revenue to your WordPress sites. So I also want to cover what your website would actually need to have in order some sort of best practices if you want it to have a hundred thousand dollar exit or more so I'm using that as a good example kind of baseline and I'm Chelsea Clark. I am a business intermediary. I'm a content creator and an investor. I have two companies. One is her paper route. That's where I buy, scale and sell content sites and teach other people how to do it too. We have a podcast as well called her paper route podcast and I founded the niche investor marketplace. This is where we connect buyers and sellers to sell content sites on the platform in a safe way to do it. Hey guys come on in. We're just getting started. You haven't missed anything yet. Yeah and I was born in Vancouver, born and raised. I live in Vancouver Island now. You're going to hear me talk about website investing and blog flipping and they are one in the same. They really are the same thing. You've probably seen those HGTV shows where someone buys a house, renovates it, flips it for profit and website investing is really the same except you don't need a team of contractors or a huge mortgage to get into it. Some of the time it's actually you can make a very small micro investment to get started or you already have a blog, an online business that you're already working on now and then you can just generate more traffic and revenue to it and make it worth more at resale. Okay so let's dive into this and I do want to say too if you have concerns about is it going to be risky to sell my business, how do I know what it's going to be worth, what if I get taken advantage of by a buyer, things like that. We will cover that in this session and I have a free thing to give to you at the end too that well you can walk away with and it'll help you with those very valid concerns too. Also to give you an idea of what content sites or blogs typically can sell for, it's really all over the map. There's no, because everywhere press site is different, there's no way to say your site will definitely sell for this but these are some creators that have sold on our platform. Emily sold her food blog for $150,000, Kellen sold his gaming niche site for $20,000, Brandon sold his yoga blog for $38,000, Kyle sold a course reviews blog for $325,000, this is all in US dollars too I should mention. Then we have some creators that actually start starter sites and flip a couple of those a year. So really it's all across the board but I'll show you sort of some different stages you can go through to reach the number whatever your goal number is. So what are some things that make a website more valuable than others? The first thing we'll get it right out of the way is profit. If your site's making more profit it's gonna sell for more but there's definitely some other things that come into play which can actually increase the value or decrease it in some cases. So different types of revenue can actually be more valuable than others when it comes to selling a content site. So affiliate marketing revenue that's a golden one we like that one. Digital products is great and of course ad revenue from display ads like AdSense, Mediavine, Monumetric those are kind of like the trifecta when you're selling an online business. Now of course there's physical products there's different things like that but we talk about those three because your buyer pool is gonna be bigger it doesn't take special skills they're more passive those types of revenue types so you're gonna be able to have more people to take interest in your site. The content quality that's the biggest one too we want to see content sites that have human written content above all so no PLR that's like private label resale sort of rights we want all the content to be original and of course you can use AI it's just again your buyer pool gets bigger when you have a human written content site. And the traffic sources of course organic Google search traffic is gonna be the hottest any search engine really but diversified. If your site right now only has traffic coming from Google I mean that's nice but it's actually gonna make it harder to sell so you should look at things like Pinterest different social platforms anything that you could do to diversify your traffic it's gonna be more attractive to buyers. And then nice to have is if you have an email list active social media accounts that's always good to kind of package it into your site that you're gonna be selling. Backlinks and a higher domain authority also adds to the value of your site. So you can use things is that my mic that's making like yeah sorry I'll try to move around so much I'm like a handsy talker as you can see so it's hard for me just to like stay still. And then also so it's talking about getting increasing your domain authority and getting more backlinks you can use things like Harrow which is help a reporter out and quoted which is a newer one it's a paid service but that's really good too because you get connected with journalists who are writing for things like Forbes Business Insider things like that so you can get backlinks back to your site that you're trying to build up the DA. And now some things that actually make it harder to sell your business so kind of on the opposite side the flip side of those great revenue streams we were talking about ones that can be harder to sell not impossible but definitely makes your buyer pool smaller is if you are selling a service if that's your main revenue stream because of course a new owner would have to have that skill or manage a team of people that could do it physical products physical product businesses do sell but if we're just talking about content sites stick with digital products would be my advice and this one might surprise you but sponsorship income that actually doesn't add any value to the resale of your business because that is just usually a one-time deal between you and a brand and it's not a recurring income stream that the new owner can expect to take on so they're not going to value sponsorship income in the valuation or in their offer so it's nice it's nice way to make money but when you're thinking about reselling kind of keep that in mind but if we're going to break this down how to actually sell your website for $100,000 and have that exit some things to consider is the standard market valuation typically in the industry is sites sell between 24 and 36 times a site's monthly profit but what I've been seeing more recently is that sites are actually selling between 30 and 40 so we're seeing a higher multiple and that's been since the start of COVID so it seems like there's more buyers out there trying to get these online businesses which is great for you if you're thinking of selling but if we're gonna do this to get to a hundred thousand dollar valuation now math is not my strong skill but if we break that down we're trying to get that 40x your WordPress site should be making about $2,500 a month generally now we can kind of make this kind of fun so if you were to create one digital product like an online course price it for $500 you'd only have to make five sales a month to have a business worth a hundred thousand dollar exit so hopefully that can kind of make you see that it can be a lot less scary to sell your business and get those higher valuations when you break it down I want to quickly just go over that again so important things to do if you're gonna be priming your where priming your WordPress site to sell it's kind of a mouthful connect your Google Analytics and your search console which you probably already doing anyway just to run your business but that's gonna be really important when a buyer comes looking because they need to verify the traffic you can say you have so many page views but they're actually gonna want to get view access to verify that before they make an offer you're gonna be publishing high quality content I also recommend avoiding putting your real persona on your site if you're thinking of selling it so you can create an avatar you can you know like under a pen name I'd say don't put pictures of your kids up on your site especially if you're thinking of selling because then that new owner they could do anything they want with your site and then focusing on those three revenue streams which were affiliate marketing digital products and ad revenue and some advertised networks they actually pay more than others so we find that things like Mediavine tend to pay better than Monumetric or AdSense not always and not in all niches but from my experience and what I've seen working with publishers it seems like Mediavine is pretty good and I'll give you an example of that this is a site that I had on Monumetric now I really like Monumetric they have a low barrier to entry I think it's 10,000 page views a month and you can get your site into it whereas Mediavine you have to have 50,000 page views in the last 30 days in order to be eligible for 50,000 sessions in the last 30 days so you can kind of get onto Monumetric first and this is what I did with this site you can see it dropped off on September 12th because that's when it became eligible for Mediavine and I moved it but when I was on this network I wasn't getting very good RPMs so like $2.84 was an average which is very low and it's saying that the highest I ever had with them was $4.32 so I was like oh I don't think that's very good comparing it to my other sites it just wasn't really performing on Monumetric at all so I moved it over to Mediavine and on the day that it onboarded which is September 13th the RPM started at $12 so already that's much better than two and then each day it went up as it sort of balanced out it was up to $22 on September 16th which brought in $63 so by comparison I was making like $9 on a good day on Monumetric and then I'm making over 60 on Mediavine. Same traffic levels hadn't even added a new blog post yet this is just in the same week so just something to consider if you're going to be selling your site making it a goal to get onto something like Mediavine because not only is that attractive to the buyers because then they know you're on a premium network and they can you know benefit from that but while you're working on the site you're getting paid to work on it basically so you're not losing money by making this a project site that you're planning on growing and selling but of course focusing on SEO growing the traffic and revenue at the same time and just making sure that you're tracking your profit and loss I like to do it every single month because buyers like to see that monthly breakdown it's a lot easier for them to see exactly where the affiliate income comes from what programs are performing on a month-to-month basis then if you just have everything at like a year end that doesn't give the buyers that you know it's much information as they can find useful. So I want to do a little project here what I would do if I had a content site and I was getting it ready to to flip let's say in six months so whether you have a site right now that you're working on or you're thinking about buying one that you're going to work on and then flip for more either way where I would start is I would start by doing a content audit and I would go into google search console on the left hand side there's a bar it says search results I'm sure you guys a lot of you here will know this but go right to the queries and we'll find which ones are performing like not necessarily too low maybe on the front page but definitely not at the top of search results we're going to find the ones that are getting a little bit of traffic lower down on the first page because those are going to be our ones that we can work on to improve and we're going to look for a top 10 and start there so I'm going to find the top 10 blog posts that could be a bit better with a little bit of love and here's what we would do so over here this is your blog post what I would do is for those top 10 blog posts is I would do content audit being improving the content adding more affiliate links or better higher paying affiliate program links I would check for spelling errors I would just make it more meatier make it better make it interesting maybe I would find a partner that would pay better than something on like share sale maybe I could go directly to the brand and get a private deal for a higher commission uh so in that blog post I would have a lead magnet opt-in so I want you to create two products just two products one which would be a free lead magnet and then one would be your paid digital product so in the example of the online course that's what would be the paid one so we would have the lead magnet uh opt-in form embedded in the blog post when someone clicks they enter their email to get the free thing they click the opt-in button we want that to redirect to a tripwire page and let's say that your course on your main for sale page would be 997 but when they land on the tripwire page they get an offer for five hundred dollars to get in for a bit of a deal so remember our goal is to only get five sales a month to have a hundred thousand dollar exit that's how I would set it up so if people said yes let's do it they'll purchase they go on to the thank you page whether or not they purchase it they're still getting the the free lead magnet it's working in the back end here and they're receiving that through your email service provider and now sending traffic to those blog posts because remember it's your top 10 that you're just going to focus on all your content is great but if we're just going to focus on 10 posts to get that valuation up then you can see I've made Pinterest the biggest icon all these other icons are great other different ways to send traffic but Pinterest is going to be like your savior because it is a huge search engine if you're ranking on Pinterest you can be getting traffic from those clicks for years so crinkly sorry if that's annoying guys try not to move too much so using Pinterest I would just go and add pins like images to all of the blog posts maybe five pins get those ranking on Pinterest I'd create boards on my Pinterest account that have keywords specifically to those blog posts so if you're blogging about how to grow tomatoes you would have a Pinterest board called how to grow tomatoes this is just going to send signals to Pinterest so they know what your content is about and you'll start ranking in their search another reason why I like Mediavine is sometimes they'll actually pay more for Pinterest traffic than Google traffic not always but this is the example of the site that I've just onboarded with them and I compared it to another two sites that I have with them and right now it seems like they're really liking Pinterest traffic so I'm getting a higher rpm for traffic coming from Pinterest and my sessions are pretty low but it's still doing pretty good so I like to mention the Pinterest topic because not everybody is using it to its advantage and it's it's free it's a great tool for any content creator so to sort of pull those topics together we would either work on a site that we already have or acquire a site and work on it and grow it I do a content audit to improve the monetization I would create one free lead magnet and one paid digital product set up a tripwire page focus on driving traffic utilizing Pinterest specifically make it a goal to partner with a premium ad network utilize your email list and of course track your profit and loss every month and I would do this for six months and then get a website valuation and see what you can get see see what suggestions you might be you never know you might be surprised it might be worth more than you think it is and I'll give you a free website valuation so if you go to my site at nicheinvestor.com slash val like valuation we will there's no obligation or anything we just will look at your site we'll look at your traffic we'll look at your numbers and we'll give you some suggestions on what it could potentially sell for but if it's not quite ready to sell yet our team will just give you some ideas of how you could improve it or just generate a bit more traffic to get it ready and again that there's no obligation there and the the free offer that I wanted to give you too this is my niche site intro kit which I do sell but I want to give it to everybody here for free to say thank you for coming to see my presentation this includes interviews that I've done with creators who have had five and six figure exits there is a step-by-step training in what you can do again sort of more into detail than what I talked about here but really just giving you that guideline to get your site ready to hit a marketplace I've also included 100 ways to monetize your site just as a bonus it's kind of like an idea bank you can pull from it anytime if you're ever thinking like oh how can I make some money today you can just dip into there and get it and a profit and loss a digital tracker so that can help you just keep on track of what's coming into your site how much you're spending and when buyers are going to be making an offer they want to see your profit and loss they want to take a look at it to really understand it so it's good to start tracking it now even if your site's making what doesn't matter a dollar or $20,000 a month just track each dollar and then if your site if you do want to list with us we'll waive the listing fee if your site is approved to sell in a marketplace too but I'd love to answer some questions if anyone I know I'm a talk a fast talker yes I just really want to say thank you for promoting Pinterest oh yeah I remember hearing 70% of people go on Pinterest intending to buy something yes 5% or less of people who go on Instagram want to buy anything yes so and Pinterest for whatever reason is really neglected in just the you know online space so thank you for I can't say enough good things about why I shouldn't be doing more with Pinterest myself well that's a good reminder I think I mean for me too when I talk about it then I feel like oh I need to actually work on my Pinterest more you know because it is it really is a valuable tool and the cool thing about Pinterest too is you can have affiliate links on Pinterest you can add shoppable links like to different stores idea pins can be a really great way to to get your content out because Pinterest wants to promote idea pins it seems right now so those are doing really well but yeah thank you just say one other thing that from back when I was a big time blogger back in the 2000s post your blog post like you don't link to Facebook from your blog paste a URL into Pinterest into Facebook so that people get traffic back to your site inbound links or inbound links yes you put your link on somebody else's social media then you're getting the link juice as opposed to you know having the Instagram feed where it's Zuckerberg does not need more SEO point yes for inbound links but if somebody comes from there to you that's an inbound link to your website and that's money in the bank I didn't know you can sell sites but this is really that's a great point too because you also for affiliate marketing is why send a Pinterest pin directly to a product when you could send it to your website where you have more information about the product and then they can go and buy so you're just keeping all the traffic coming to your site wherever that's coming from our Facebook as you mentioned so yeah that's great Hi curious to see what your I guess experience and like perspective is on like which affiliate sort of websites to use like from my experience and websites that I have I use Amazon some private deals and then some marketplaces like impact yeah I always find that Amazon just like the quantity of like purchases that are actually followed through it there's just so much higher than you know like the private deals are going directly to a specific brand but I want to know your take on that and if like one is valued more than others when it comes to definitely and I remember I'm supposed to repeat questions into the mic sorry so the question was about different affiliate programs versus Amazon associates or Amazon influencer program versus doing private deals with brands personally I like to have Amazon links on any of my content sites even though unfortunately as we all know Amazon doesn't pay the best when it comes to affiliate marketing but they have everything and everyone feels a lot of people feel comfortable shopping there so the conversion can still be really good so in addition to doing private deals and using things like impact share sale awin is another good one too there's lots of bigger brands cj.com I like to have a mix and if I find I've joined a program on cj first and then it's getting a lot of conversions then I'll reach out to that affiliate manager and be like hey look I can show you that people buy your stuff from me can we do something a special promotion campaign something like that and then kind of that blends into more like influencer marketing which can be can be good but like I said at the beginning if you're doing influencer deals that's a one-time deal so if you can just get a higher commission rate that's always the best that's what I'd recommend yeah any other questions hey if we want to do living website yeah where would we start yeah well I mean if you already have a site you've already started basically everything that you're doing right now oh sorry the question was where do I start if I want to start flipping websites and I was saying that if you already have a site everything that you were doing every bit of effort that you're putting in that is getting your site ready so increasing the revenue increasing the traffic and then there's lots of different marketplaces that you can sell it on so my one is niche investor.com but there's also empire flippers there's flippa motion invest there's a lot of different platforms so I can't speak to anyone else's company but for my one we're a small boutique brokerage that we kind of walk you through every single step so when you're ready to list we actually help with negotiations we manage the escrow the closing we ensure that you get paid which is a nice thing that can be kind of scary too if you're waiting for escrow to close you have someone backing you up but you can also sell privately you don't need to work with a broker so you can just get your site to a point that you want to sell it get a valuation from any of the marketplaces and then just decide to sell it yourself you can sell in Facebook groups you know there's so many ways to do it I think just one foot in front of the other and jump into it check out like YouTube as well there's a lot of resources there on my blog to her paper route.com we have tons of free resources on blog flipping but really it's like more traffic more revenue that's going to get you more for a higher payday in the end yeah another question great first of all who buys who's on the other side of these transactions who if I start a blog on drones I have a client who's doing drone reviews who would buy that and then second question is how well do they do after they buy yes what are your obligations like if I sell a business often I'll have to be involved for a year to help in the transition what is the obligation and how successful are the average blog purchaser great question so that question was when you have a site who is buying it and what is the success rate what is expected of you as the seller to see that the the business that you're selling is successful moving forward we like to recommend a 30-day post sale transition period so this is for content sites if you're selling a brick-and-mortar business with tons of inventory then it's going to probably be longer than 30 days but if it's a content site an affiliate site something that earns from passive revenue streams we find that 30 days to offer to the buyers usually is more than enough time so that could be we like to also put that in the contract because we don't want you as the seller to then be locked into like training for eight hours a day or anything like that unpaid so we make sure that we set the guidelines in the sale agreement so everyone understands what that transition is like how they get in contact with you just emails or do you have like a once a week zoom call that gets worked out on a deal-by-deal basis a lot of sites that we have sold on our platform the buyers have run it for six months to a year and some of them come back and resell it for more so we're actually finding some sites are coming back and being sold a few times and then the people who are buying they didn't want to buy it the first time because they didn't want to put the work in but or the time in too that's a big thing so a lot of people they have the money but they don't want to spend the time on getting things up and running and you know all that startup work that it really takes to get a business going so those are the buyers for those kind of deals does that answer your question very well thank you okay good hey my question just around like the structure of the company so does it matter where you registered the business do you deal with certain territories or do you have trouble dealing with certain territories and kind of link to that is if there's payment gateways and they might be like reoccurring revenue doesn't matter which payment gateways you use always normally seems from your that's a great question so the question was does it matter like where you live geographically who you're selling to and then the types of payment processors that you use in your business and we've closed deals worldwide so with online businesses typically not always but typically you can live anywhere and you can buy a business in another country because it's an online business and it's not owned by a like a corporation or an LLC dependent in that geographic location sometimes we've had businesses sell and it is owned by an LLC so they dissolve that they close that down and then they're free to sell it as is as far as payment processors if you're using something like Thrive Cart which I love it's actually one of my favorite cart tools the PayPal that you have connected to it has to stay with that Thrive Cart account so that can be kind of tricky but you can just easily change the Stripe account to your own Stripe account when you sell so it does get a little tricky with PayPal you can take over PayPal account but then you have to kind of be back and forth PayPal to prove that you own the business it can be a little bit trickier so I would say add your own PayPal in if you're buying and then Stripe can be kind of used at a what platform are you using right now for selling products oh yeah yeah I think any way that you can make it as seamless as possible for a new owner that's going to help so that when they're looking at potentially buying it they're not going to feel overwhelmed and scared that they have to like a big learning curve to manage a bunch of different processors if you can kind of get it down to a couple that's going to help but it's not it's not necessary and like I say it's a deal by deal basis every business is going to be a little bit different so you can kind of make it work the way that it works for you yeah thank you hey do you have an idea of how long it might take to break such a website I think the question was how long would it take generally to work on a site before it's ready to sell nice well that's going to be different for everybody so the more effort you put in the more money it's earning is going to be more it could sell for so we have some sellers that like I was saying at the beginning sell starter sites and they sell those for anywhere from a thousand dollars to three thousand dollars and they sell a couple different sites a year so that's a smaller sort of micro business that they have and then we have people who have been working on their business for years and they want to retire and that's obviously a bigger one but our biggest market is people who have been running a site for just six months to a year and then selling it hey so I have two questions so one is what tool would you suggest for the lead magnet you suggested and other is kind of like conclusion for me which is you said about Pinterest right so as a developer when I had a social media account below the social share so Pinterest is the last thing I had and I didn't have any idea how because this was popular so where does this traffic come into Pinterest and who has this traffic because for example in our day-to-day life we use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram but I never have personally used Pinterest search for anything so who are these traffic is it applicable for like any type of blog that can share traffic from Pinterest or yeah so the question was your second question I'll go back to your other one about Pinterest who are the people that are on Pinterest who who is using Pinterest does it work for all niches I think Pinterest releases something like 400 million monthly users something like that recently so it's a lot of people it's not necessarily great for every niche but ones that kind of across the board really do well are things like food blogs so food content a little bit of tech as well like how to do x how to learn how to x where to buy the best camera stuff like that travel is huge on Pinterest so people who use Pinterest they're I thought personally I find that they're more in a shopping mode sort of as you were saying yeah yes so so you know and we tend to put them last well if you think about it when you're looking at Pinterest it's like a bunch of billboards it's like a bunch of pretty things and if you're on something like TikTok I find when I'm on TikTok I'm just in chill mode I want my brain to just go numb and I'm not trying to work I'm not trying to think I'm just wanting to laugh and get entertained but if I'm on Pinterest I'm like oh that looks cool or how to do this oh I want to learn learn that skill and I'll kind of click and go check out that person's website so from personal experience that's that's how I use it but I'm sure it's going to be different in in different markets and different niches that you're in your other question though about the lead magnet did you mean what I used for the slide or what I recommend for making lead magnets I mean what would you recommend the best to canva canva's free canva's amazing you can create everything in canva just design something download it you could sell it you can make it free I just put it in a funnel using convert kit as my email service provider convert kit can be a little bit pricier if you're not having 20 sales yet so mailer light is a nice one that is free up to I think a thousand subscribers and then as you grow you can always move to something more robust but that's what I use for my email funnel and for creating digital products and I have canva pro now and I find that's really helpful for images and you know stuff but definitely read the terms of service of canva because you can't just sell everything canva offers it's going to be different the graphics images so you'll just want to make sure that you're not you know taking my word for it and then going and getting in trouble so you know read canvas terms of service yeah so you mentioned mailing lists what is a good healthy number back in the day again the size of your mailing list was way more important than how many how many monthly viewers you've got to your website yeah what is your position on an ideal number of people in your mailing list I think an ideal number amount of people on your email list to start sending a newsletter is one once you have one person on it start sending newsletters send them out with affiliate links as if you have a thousand people on your list oh yeah for selling your business the email list adds sort of like an extra nice to have so it doesn't add an extra like a dollar amount specific but if you have let's say 500,000 email subscribers buyers are gonna be like oh okay and they're gonna like bring the money out but it doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna sell for a specific amount every time so we've sold businesses that have a list of 10,000 people and it's actually been a starter site doesn't have much traffic yet but they've been growing it through things like social media that just with a lead magnet so that's one way to but usually you're gonna want to have traffic revenue first and then email will be the next thing it's all important just you can't like you can go buy 10,000 newsletter subscribers but you should not do that you need to have like conversion you need to have the same athletics for your yes yes please no one go and buy email lists that's not going to get you very far for running a business so yeah I'm sure people do do that but you would want to make sure that they're opting into your list they're choosing to be there you don't want to get any fines or anything like that for FTC or things like that good point though thank you any other questions hey I might have missed this at the beginning but what is your background is it an SEO? yeah so I've been a content creator for 20 years I've been a business intermediary for the last 10 so I'm a broker a business intermediary is a person that helps connect buyers with sellers for selling businesses and I've kind of had my toes in both the world of content creation running a portfolio of my own sites and then also helping people sell businesses in the last two and a half years we've done over four million dollars worth of sales on the platform and those are small sites right so those are like that the average selling price for those kind of sites have been under a hundred thousand dollars so for each one cool everybody happy awesome thanks guys