If you are interested in selling your web property (online business), there are quite a few considerations. The top ones are: Is my business ready for a sale? How do I find a buyer? What about scammers or competitors stealing my ideas? Should I use a broker, and who? How do I price it? What documents do I need? What is proof of income? How do I prove my traffic sources?

We get questions about what the actual process is to purchase a website (and many sellers are confused since this dates back to the origins of mergers and acquisitions). It’s a business like any other; the typical process applies for purchasing. For this example, we are going to use a broker scenario where they are the middle-man to the transaction. Summary of the process: Broker emails out the listing(s), or you find a business through networking and outreach.

When purchasing a website, you want to have free traffic from search engines (organic traffic). To see what kind of traffic that is, we want to determine what keywords the site ranks for. There are buying keywords and just research keywords. Having a nice mix of both is great, but the money is when people are looking to make a purchase (end of the purchase lifecycle). A long time ago, Google Analytics gave us the keywords people used to find a website.

Backlinks are one of the highest ranking factors in Google and many other search engines. These are links to your site (or the website you are going to purchase) from an outside site. They often have anchor text, which is the part of the URL that explains what the link is. The better the site linking to you (in the eyes of the search engine), the better the boost/juice you get from them.

What are the tools that we can use to check domain name information and its history? This is important so we can see where the domain has been, how many times it’s moved around (hosting companies) and how long it’s actually been in service. We can also research who owns it, and how many other sites they own that might be a conflict of interest. The first tool we are going to use is “whois”.

There is a great blog from a VC at Redpoint by Tomasz Tunguz. In it he discusses every kind of SaaS business you can think of. He has a great article that analyses pricing over the last six years (read more). The large trend in SaaS is about a 3-4 times multiple of net. Online businesses are typically calculated from their net profit (income minus expenses), so a business that generates $100,000 a year in free cash flow/profit would sell between $300k to $400k.

Most websites have their domain name DNS connected with whoever they bought the domain from. So for instance if you use GoDaddy for your domain name, they also host the DNS. Just to clarify, DNS is what maps your domain name (approbo.com) to an IP address that your computer/web browser uses to find the server your connecting to. There are DNS servers that your local computer connects with to resolve the websites you go to.

GA or Google Analytics is a great resource for any business owner. The amount of useful reporting and analysis that can come out of the platform is staggering. Many businesses are not using even a small percentage of the power of GA, so let’s discuss a couple things you can do right now to get better data out of it. A. To start with, do you have GA enabled on every web page?

Preparing for a sale before-hand makes this process much quicker. The best option is to open a new domain register account for just the business/domain you want to sell. This means a new GoDaddy/NameCheap Account, or a new Google ID/Google Domains Account. What we typically recommend to sellers is to get a new google email address, then create a new domain holding account just for the business they are selling, and transfer the domain to that account.

To start with, if your a seller, then the business is going to be worth a great deal more to you than it is to a buyer. This is one of the due diligence points that we look through when purchasing a business (real site age). Finding out the true age of a site can be tricky. Domain names that are only a year old doesn’t necessarily mean the business is only a year old.