Selling a website in forums tips

Top ten tips to sell your site via Site For Sale forums

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5. Plan your post out carefully providing as much information as you can without overloading potential buyers. Many fora have a format for the kind of information you need to provide. It's best to stick to that format as regular users of the forum are used to the layout and style. To work around time out issues etc you could compose the post in an HTML editor, save it, then copy and paste into the new-thread form.

You've gone through a lot of trouble to attract potential buyers to your thread and you can't afford to lose them now. Have a brief introduction that summarises your offering. Then describe the site/business, how it works, how much it makes and other pertinent information. You do not need to post a 10,000 word memorandum of sale. If you've exceeded 2,000 words you're probably saying too much for a thread. Use the usual presentation tools like titles, sub titles, bold, italics, paragraphs, images, graphs, colour etc to make your post easy to read. Spell check and spell check again. Shoddy presentation puts buyers off.

How much do you disclose? That's up to you. Some sellers do not even provide the URL of the site for sale on the pretext that a DMOZ editor may see the thread and delete the site's DMOZ entry... or that it would not be fair to the eventual buyer if the sale thread keeps coming up way into the future for any search involving that domain name. In any event you'll need to be prepared for free-loaders pumping you for information on how you attract traffic, how you make your profit, who your secret drop-ship merchants are etc. They'll invariably pretend to be interested in buying your site and you'll have no way of knowing for certain whether they are genuine buyers or tarts. Again, it's up to you how much you disclose in the open thread, how much more you provide freely via PM (Private Message), and how much you disclose only on completion of a Non Disclosure Agreement.

6. Be prepared for brickbats. Interested buyers have incentive to rubbish your offering because it depresses the price and saves them money. They may find genuine faults/issues/problems and blow them out of proportion, they may invent problems or plant seeds of doubt by hinting that your site seems to violate someone else's intellectual property. If there's some secret you're hiding it may come out here and ruin your thread. So, if it used to host adult content till about three weeks ago, or it was banned by Adsense, or you have been taken to court because the domain name violates someone else's trademark... for goodness sake disclose it yourself before someone else does.

7. Start your thread when you know you're going to have time to answer questions, reply to PMs promptly etc., and be warned that this could take up a lot of your time. Some buyers want information from your traffic stats that you may have to extract manually, others may want you to compile a breakdown of earnings info etc. Even answering questions in the thread itself can sometimes be quite time consuming.

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