I have just closed a thread trying to sell my website here at dp. My website has $50/month comission income via hostgator. The website is http://www.ncahost.net I added a starting bid of $100 and bin $450 and did not even reach my starting bid. I proved all traffic and income proof in my first post. I assumed 10X revenue was about right, so with 9X revenue BIN, i would have thought i would get some decent interest. So whats my website worth and what did i do wrong?
where do you get your visitors from? eg. is it ranking highly for any search terms? I don't see anything special about the site that can't just be made from scratch for $20
I get about 15%-20% traffic now from google. The website itself is a simple wordpress however i have around 15 articles i think it is of unique content and the website has an income of $50 per month.
Here is the problem.. Its a wordpress blog, with 15 articles. for $15 dollars I can get someone to write all them articles, so the amount of content has no value really. The PR, and Traffic rank/$money is not really up to anything to throw down, and the domain name is a dot net with 3 letter combo with the word host.. Only thing rocking is the template, and I prob could pick it up for cheap or free In about a week and $50 dollars later I could reproduce your entire site and ranking, and that is prob what everyone else is thinking when they look at buying it. You really have to have a great domain name, technology, or marketing edge to sell something higher than the amount of work its worth when 1 million other bloggers can make it in the same day. Best of luck!
Thanks l3vi. The reason i assumed it was worth at least $300 is because i have seen websites with no unique content sell for this amount making less than i am earning in a month. Maybe i shouldnt have put all my eggs in one basket, now im stuck with a website that i cant sell when the money could be really usefull.
Ok thanks again for the advice. I think i may dump wordpress and use a custom blog system, do you think that would increase the price someone is willing to pay if the blog system was custom with admin CMS? obviously not as many features and plugins etc.
wordpress isn't your problem. I decided to write about this is a new thread: How I make money with websites Hope that helps
If you want a good sale and to be paid properly and big money go to sitepoint. I sold freefilmfactory there for $4500 all went well paid straight away.
Im sure sitepoint costs around $20 for a listing? The problem i have now is that i have all my eggs in one basket and have $10 left. I also have exams at the moment and dont want to work much on the website, however if i leave it the value might be lost completely. Im stuck at the moment, i cant sell it but i cant keep it!
Why not wait another month then you'll have $70, if you're making $50 a month? You can add more articles on it by then. If you had like 100+ pages it would be worth it. Being on Wordpress doesn't matter, there's nothing wrong with that, though I prefer Joomla myself as a content site creator. It's the lack of pages that's more worrying really, and the domain name doesn't mean much. I've bought some real crappy websites on DP because I like the domain name and can see potential for it in a different area, so that might explain why you've seen other sites that look like trash sell for the same money as you're asking. Looking at it, without knowing you, if I'd seen your ad I would have assumed that the $50 a month was an outrageous exaggeration, seen the PR1, noticed pages like this http://www.ncahost.net/2007/11/25/finding-the-right-host-for-you/ that don't look right, and noted that it's only half a year old (the domain name I mean) and that I don't really like the domain that much, and, most important to me, it only has a handful of pages - then just write you off as being out of your mind trying to sell a $50 site for $300... Now of course I might be wrong about you and your site, totally up my own arse and way off the mark, but these are the thoughts that would go through my mind after a quick look at it in an auction before I move on to the look at the next site. If it was $50 and I had my own hosting related site I would consider buying it for the articles and just use them on my own site and redirect the domain I bought from you to my site until it expired. If I were you I'd think up a better name for it, register a nice .com to go with it and build it up for a few months at least... then either sell it or sit back and collect the profits from it. Personally I'd do the latter because I hate selling stuff, it's too disheartening as you seem to have discovered. I've only ever tried to sell one site before, in a moment of madness, that I was hoping to get $300 for but it never happened. I'm glad it didn't though because I'm getting $10 a day from it now.
Thats a very fair point Astroman and thankyou for your input. To be prefectly honest i would probably think the same as well. One problem i am having is that hostgator is showing my earnings however has not credited my paypal account yet. If hostgator were to credit my $100 into my paypal account now then i would have no problem with running the website more and trying to improve it because i now have the security that with $100 in the bank, if it fails or money needs puting into the website, i would be able to afford it. I think my next course of action is to try and get a template created custom within wordpress. I will then update the website some more and build up a good amount of articles for users to read. Just one further question to all of you experienced lot out there, do you think that people will want to read articles like the ones on the website or do you feel providing just reviews, just coupons or any combination of the three would be the best way forward? Thanks for your input!
For articles I would do both, the ones you have on there now may not be news to us lot on DP, but new people get into this internet lark every day so those explanations of different hosting types etc will be useful to some people and will come up in some searches eventually. Hosting's always relevant to everyone though, no matter how long they've been designing websites etc - so if you can come up with honest reviews based on facts I'm sure they would be useful to a lot of people.
Thanks again Astroman. As for the reviews, i would really like it if users of the website wrote reviews on their hosts like happens on alot of host rating sites but none of the users have yet submitted anything. How would i go about that considering it is not really a community related website but an informative one.
Maybe it's better for you to just concentrate on the information side of things then, and leave out the review idea. It's next to impossible sometimes to get members who'll post stuff for you when your site is brand new, for all kinds of reasons, but mostly because it's new and I guess because they wont know for sure how long the site will be around so wonder what the point of posting would be. Unless you have lots of friends who will post things for you, or you want to pretend to be lots of people yourself, or you want to pay people to post it's probably better to leave that side of things until you get more visitors per day. You could just make your site an information source about hosting in general, there's a whole load of ideas you could write about - stuff that you could research in techie magazines on the subject. I know the following has all been done before: comparing Dedicated Hosting, VPS Hosting, Reseller Hosting, Cheap and Free hosting etc - but you can write about them in your own way and, as you research it, you will find out a whole bunch of new stuff you hadn't even thought of to write about for your site. For instance you might discover all sorts of stuff about video hosting, cluster hosting, setting up and running your own server, being a hosting company et cetera... you could go on and on. Now, I'm not remotely interested in writing about any of the above, which is why I don't mind telling you my ideas - if I was I would have kept quiet. That should go for you too though, if it all sounds too boring then just don't bother, pick a subject you like and write about that instead. @ientrepreneur I have a couple of clients that use Adwords very successfully but they're all selling stuff directly of their sites. My own sites are pretty much all content related with no products and I don't use Adwords at all for them, just nice text, SEO and a lot of time. I do have a fair few sites though, so when I make a new one I link it in to some of them (I have them grouped into categories) so they're picked up by Google et al pretty quickly. When I say SEO though, there's no tricks, just good text, good meta tags and good use of image descriptions and proper headings et cetera - nothing special really. P.S. I'm supposed to be working on something complicated for a client right now, which is why I'm writing all these long posts today - because I'm trying to put off getting started
Again good advice Astroman! I will continue with ncahost.net unless i get any offers for it and will start a few other websites and try and build a network like one i used to own. Very hard with $10 but im sure a cheap domain name and some cheap hosting for a month may do me till i start getting pay for my hostgator affiliate. Does anyone know how long it takes hostgator to pay?