Sales advice for a high turnover (over £8000) website

Hi guys!!

This sales thread is a bit different. Basically I have a website that I want to sell and am looking for help on selling it (would be a great help if you want to buy it!!) but really I am looking to put a bit of a pitch together in order to sell it.

Below is my sales/info on the site and I am looking for people to ask me questions about the site/sale so I can work out exactly what info people are looking for.

I don't have a particular price in mind so would really appreciate it if people WHO ARE NOT interested in buying the site would PM with valuations on the site. Though this thread is not just an appraisal, its more of an appraisal on my sales pitch and people are free to make offers too.

Thanks in advance for taking the time to read the following. Accounts are available for people seriously interested in making an offer.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Business for Sale

Business Description

"Welcome to NottinghamStudent.co.uk This website is the information portal where you can learn about the real Nottingham. It provides listings of essential service providers, the trendiest places to shop in Nottingham and the best places to eat for students. Whether you're looking for a night out in town or fancy a quiet night in, this site will guide you in the right direction. Maybe you're looking to branch out and make new contacts? Join our forum and talk to other students in Nottingham."

The website started as a simple information website for Nottingham student one year ago. I spent weeks gathering information and data about Nottingham and assimilating all the information that a Nottingham student would need. At this point the revenue was to be generated by local advertisers in the area. Most of the original advertisers are still with the site and still providing revenue. There is massive potential to sell much more advertising space to more local businesses in Nottingham - you could even setup a sales team to increase to advertising revenue. The best thing about revenue from advertising is that it is ongoing so you only need to get the sale once to get a valuable customer.

November 2005 was a massive jump for Nottinghamstudent.co.uk. I teamed up with promoters for Nottingham's largest student night. The nightclub Isis has a massive capacity of a couple of thousand and it is full most weeks. In November I set up a system to start selling tickets for Isis online. It was slow to take off at first, but I did a lot of promotion and gradually the website became the popular way of getting tickets for the Nightclub. The last couple of weeks I have been turning over in excess of £1000 a week selling tickets online.

Last month I received a call for a promoter in Nottingham who runs nights at four other nightclubs and havelined up four more nightclubs for next September. This will dramatically increase the revenue for the next year.

The online store where people purchase the tickets for nightclubs has been coded so that any products can be sold from it. The back end panel allows you to set up your own entries for products.If you are interested in purchasing this business and you are an entreprenuer I am sure that you will already be thinking of the possiblities of what to sell from the website with an already massive student following.

I have a massive amount of data which has been collected via the website. I have 368 customers who regularly purchase tickets online and over 800 student email addresses. There is potential for mass marketing and upselling to existing customers.

There is massive potential in this site for growth. Please call me (Jamie) on 0777190**** (not in this thread!) for more information on my ideas for the future of the site

When I first started building the website I concentrated a lot of my efforts on building the rankings of the sight in google search placements. After months of optimising the site it now performs well for most key phrases that students are likely to type into the search engines. I also built a number of links from other websites to Nottinghamstudent.co.uk. It even has a link from the official Nottingham University website which wasn't easy to get but provides amazing coverage for the website. I usually get at least one email a week from another webmaster who wants to exchange links with the site. The site is the authority site for Nottingham students.

Location: This site is about Nottingham but there is absolutely no reason why you should need to be in Nottingham to run this site.All transactions are web based so location is not of importance. All other work can be conducted over the phone.

Contacts: Through this website I have built up a number of very useful contacts in the local business community and in the nightclub industry in Nottingham. I will personally introduce you to these contacts if you wish.

Recently I hosted a night at a nightclub in Nottingham with a capacity of 700 people. The deal was that I would get all of the ticket revenue on the door (£4 a ticket) and the nightclub would get the revenue from the drinks. I was only able to get that deal because I own the student website for Nottingham students. If you are interested in running student nights I have all of the contacts that you would need to do it successfully and could. You can easily earn £2000 a week promoting nightclubs in Nottingham. If you are interested in doing business in the nightclub industry in Nottingham this website will give you a massive edge to do that

Methods of promotion.

When I first started the site my budget was not that high so it was primarily natural search engine traffic. However as the website got more successful and I started to get revenue from advertisers I promoted via other methods such as flyers in the student areas. I had 10,000 flyers of my own printed at one point.

However when I became associated with Isis nightclub selling their tickets online I have never had to promote again. Every week the nightclub has 10,000 flyers going out all saying "get you tickets online at www.nottinghamstudent.co.uk". 10,000 flyers a week is a lot of advertising which is paid for by Isis.

As well as taking revenue from advertisers in the local area and from selling nightclub tickets the site also takes revenue from google adsense. Google adsense - "Earn more revenue from your website, while providing visitors with a more rewarding online experience. Google AdSense™ automatically delivers text and image ads that are precisely targeted to your site and your site content—ads so well-matched, in fact, that your readers will actually find them useful. And when you add Google WebSearch to your site, AdSense delivers targeted ads to your search results pages too. With AdSense you earn more ad revenue with minimal effort;and no additional cost.

This site is not from a template but hand coded. Easily editable in frontpage, dreamweaver or any other editor

I am selling this site because I a going into my final year of university and I cannot afford the time to make the website a real success.

If you have little experience with websites this is not a problem. I will spend as long as it takes to go through every aspect of the website and how it works. The way that it has been coded makes it very easy to use anyway. I will change all aspects of the sites so that payments are made into you account

Nottinghamstudent.co.uk is the most powerful domain name for the website but also comes with www.nottinghamstudent.com

This auction includes content, domain name, many existing customers and many contacts. Hosting is paid up for about another year.

Business age: 1 year

Turnover last 10 months: £8237

Net Profit Last 10 months: £2034

(Great British pounds not Dollars)

-----------------------------------------------------------------

*ANY* Comments, questions, queries etc are appreciated and actively encouraged!!

Once again - Thanks