6 Mistakes Sellers Make When Selling Websites: #2 Stop Running Website before Sale
Many website owners develop and actively manage their websites for a certain period of time. Then, they become bored or lazy or run out of funding to continue to run the website and decide to sell it.
Many of these website owners stop managing the website altogether once they decide to sell it. This is a huge mistake.
As soon as a website owner stops managing a website actively, the lack of proper management usually shows up in the traffic and financial results. Inevitably, these numbers decline.
Website buyers fear declining Traffic and Revenue numbers
As a website seller, you must remember that buyers give more importance to the most recent financial numbers than they do to historical financial numbers. This is because the search engine ranking, and therefore, value, of a website can change from year to year.
Website buyers do not want to acquire a website that is in decline. Buyers don’t want to feel like they are catching a falling knife. The fear that they will lose their entire investment.
Now, the website’s decline may be simply because the website owner has stopped actively managing the website. But, the website seller will have to prove that this is the sole reason for the declining numbers. In some cases, this may be difficult because buyers may not believe the explanation.
This is how the simple decision to stop actively managing a website can seriously hurt the sale of an otherwise valuable website.
Website Asking Price and Value Drops
As a website seller, when you neglect your website operations and the traffic and financial numbers decline, the most recent numbers are smaller than the historical numbers. When your website business is appraised, and the most recent numbers are given more weight, this significantly reduces the asking price and value of your website.
Your website will be appraised at a much lower value.
Again, you see how your decision to to stop actively operating the website can cause you to leave a huge amount of money on the table when you sell the website.
Operate you website optimally until you close the website sale
You must continue to run your website actively up until the moment that you transfer all the website assets to the website buyer. Do everything you can to maintain or grow your website numbers before and during the process of selling the website.
In this way, you get maximum value from the sale of your website.
Author: Kris Tabetando
Kris Tabetando provides mergers & acquisitions (M&A) advisory and brokerage services to Internet companies. He also partners with investors to acquire & manage Internet businesses.
- Connect with Kris:
