How to list in forums

Tips for listing a site in forums

Listing your site in forums - some tips.

There are several forums where you can list your site for sale. A lot of the people who frequent these forums are experienced webmasters and are capable of doing a lot more research into your site than many appreciate (some of the due diligence they can do and tools they can use). Dress up your stats, exaggerate your earnings, polish a turd and they'll rip you to shreds.

When listing in forums:

1. Read the terms and conditions of the site, read their posting guidelines and particularly the posting guidelines for the site-for-sale section. See if your site fits the bill. To list in some of the forums you may need to temporarily take off pop-ups, disable ActiveX ads, and even disable your online ordering for the duration of the listing. Some consider it unfair to have to make these changes but the other side of the coin is that if these restrictions weren't in place the forum would quickly become a SPAM fest with people posting fake site-for-sale threads purely to drive traffic to their sites.

2. Disclose the URL if you feel comfortable but be prepared for a sudden influx of rubberneckers to your site (officially described here as those curious souls who have neither the money nor inclination to make a bid but consider themselves authorities enough to comment on the quality of your site or that your oldpage.htm is not working). What seems to be gaining in popularity is the use of tinyurl type redirection services.

3. Encourage interested parties to contact you by Private Message rather than posting in the thread. That way you can keep awkward questions out of the public domain and prevent the thread getting sidetracked or hijacked. You could always reply to a question in public IF you think it would help others.

4. Stating that offers are acceptable in the thread gives the impression you're not shill bidding. Accepting offers by PM as well will ensure that those who don't want to bid publicly can still make an offer.

5. Disclose the major negatives. Disclose it if you've been banned from Adsense / recently lost 80% of your traffic in a search engine algo change / lost a major link buying customer... you get the picture. Should that information be discovered and posted by someone else you lose much of your credibility and it'll be a long time before enough people have forgotten your URL for you to start a new site-for-sale thread. Bear in mind that many of the webmasters in these forums frequent other forums too.

6. Always stay polite, answer every relevant question as diplomatically as you can, reply to every PM within at least 24 hours. People are watching your reactions carefully. They are judging you as much as they are judging your site. If you come across as cranky, impatient, rude, arrogant or insulting it will affect how much people accept your claims; it'll affect how they perceive you as someone worth doing business with.

7. In addition to Terms and Conditions each of the for-sale forums has a "sticky" advising you  on what information you need to disclose in your post. Read that carefully.

8. Take control of your thread. Manage it. If the forum allows you to delete posts be ruthless in deleting those posts from awkward elements looking to cause trouble.

9 Use a Non-Disclosure Agreement. We've got a free sample here for you. But do note that it is very little protection against someone in a lawless foreign state. Always work on the basis that the confidential information disclosed could become public knowledge.