Examine other websites such as Sitepoint or WebMasterWorld or some of the other trading forums. It is quite possible that you will find the exact same listing. Familiarize yourself with it. If it didn’t sell on another forum, there is surely a reason why.

Check the seller’s history. What is their reputation? How do their last 20 posts look like?

Examine the site statistics. Go to Alexa, and check what is the site’s ranking. Check whether the site is indexed in Google and if its pages are cached. The same applies for MSN indexation. See if there are any backlinks. Finally, check what the site’s PR is.

Carefully examine whether any of the site’s content is copyrighted, or stolen. Pick some random phrases from the articles or content, then Google it with quotation marks. Does it show up on other websites?

It is very important to ask the right questions. You might want to use the following questions to get some valuable information:

• Ask about the site’s age
• Ask whether the seller is the original owner
• Ask if the seller bought this site
• Ask for the reason for selling
• Ask about the amount of traffic
• Ask about the amount of traffic from US
• Ask about the scripts running at the site
• Ask if a license is needed for these scripts
• Ask if you will have full copyright to the scripts and content if I buy it
• Ask about the content uniqueness
• Ask about hosting costs
• Ask about resources usage
• Ask about the site’s income
• Ask about the income for the past 4 months
• Ask about the ad networks used at the site
• And many more…

The buyer should be able to ask as many questions, stupid or not. If the seller is unable to answer them honestly, or without hesitation you should be alarmed.

I have decided to divide my tips into two categories – transaction tips and valuation tips. These are the very basic hints on how buying a website should proceed, therefore all those inexperienced in the matter should find something for themselves here.

Transaction Tips

1. It is important to hire an attorney.  In order to protect your interest you simply must have a purchase contract that is signed and written accordingly. Such contract should be signed by all owners on the sellers side (and that includes all officers if buying from a company)
2. Get a chain of clear title on the domain.  If the domain has been owned by more than one person or company you must make yourself sure that it was cleanly sold each and every time.  Popular virtual property does change its owners from time to time.  Your attorney should be able to help you document this. After you have built the domain into a PR8 you don’t want it yanked back to some previous owner.
3. Get a clean title on the content.  Your attorney should write this into the sales contract.  The seller will guarantee you consistent copyrights to all of the website content.
4. Employ an escrow agent.  The escrow agent will make the seller comfortable and hold your money until all of your conditions have been met.
5. Do not close the deal before the domain is in your name, at your registar (you can check it in the whois query)  and you have been given the passwords to the hosting, control panel and ftp.

Valuation Tips:

1. How sexy is the domain?
2. What is the content quality?  Is it linkable?  Will you own it completely?
3. How many backlinks are present?  What about their thematic relevance?
4. Will the backlinks stay unchanged when the deal is closed?
5. What is the site’s actual income? What is the conversion rate? Is it possible to increase it even further?

These pieces of advice on selling websites involve essential suggestions that the reader should bear in mind and apply practically when involved in website trading. The sale of your websites is likely to take some time, typically as long as several months if you want to get the desired or the best price for your website.

Below you can find the most important tips on selling a website.

• Decide on the actual price of the website you want to sell. The price should not be very high and must remain stable.
• You should sign a Non-Compete Clause (NCC). This will give others the impression that you are a serious seller.
• Keep running your website with high efficiency.
• Do not hesitate to share large amounts of private and confidential information. Buyers are likely to become reluctant to sellers who offer limited amounts of information. On the other hand if you give more information, you should receive more interesting offers.
• It is important to keep your tax filings, financial reports, budgets and business plans up to date.
• You are advised to devote as much time as possible to provide accurate details because every serious offer will demand a high level of accuracy, primarily concerning cash statements of all kinds.
• If your revenues are mixed from several websites you should separate them unless you are going to sell all of them together.
• Get rid of all possible complications present in your website before any attempt to sell it.
• You must keep audited financial statements because it indicates the future performance of your business. It also helps the buyers to get financing facility from banks.
• Before selling your website, make yourself certain that you provide all crucial information about your website such as search engine ranking reports, profit and loss statements, traffic reports, and summary of the website business model.

Additionally, you can make use of the services of web site selling brokers and web site marketing companies for selling your web sites. They will sell your website on a specified rate of commission. You can also follow the above tips on selling websites. For achieving a reasonable profit, it is good to familiarize yourself with all available tips on selling websites.

• Provide a short summary of what your website actually does. You don’t have to write a long essay. Most people won’t read long elaborates anyway.
• Provide an auction end date. If you don’t do this it will be clear that your aim is to get as much money as possible. Of course this is nothing wrong per se, but it doesn’t look well form the buyer’s point of view.
• Provide all necessary income statistics. Create a screen shot (Blurring out things that are against TOS of course) and of course provide long term income. It should cover at least 4 months. If your website is newer than that, provide as much information as you can (i.e. the day that you added monetization)
• Provide traffic statistics information. Give a link to your stats generation page, or at least a screen shot. Once more, giving as much information as possible is advised.
• Do not become irritated with people who start questioning things such as your content origins or its copyrights. Do you have full copyrights? If you are unable to answer such questions, just hope that your buyer is really stupid.
• Don’t spam the forums to get the required number of posts. Most people do check your history before buying.

Websites are sold in a number of different places. You can find offers on webmaster forums, on eBay and other auction sites, or on special trading sites dedicated to the buying and selling of businesses.
Webmaster forums are probably the best place to look for a website purchase. The sites offered there are usually worth buying and they are hardly ever lemons (and if they are it quite possible that forum members will point it out). The only drawback is a particular forum won’t provide you with a very wide selection of sites.
Another good place is Ebay because the websites there are usually not overpriced, though 99% of all eBay website listings are lemons. They are either using stolen content and/or designs, or they are just cookie cutter sites that some company churns out. eBay is where you will have to frequently resort to Alexa and The Google Toolbar.
Special trading sites are in my opinion the worst source of website offers. Although fraud does not occur very often neither does realistic process. People tend to ask for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for sites with almost no traffic and revenue. To put it simply, they hope to find at least one sucker who will eagerly pay these extremely high prices and then they will be set financially for awhile.

Troubles a buyer may run into: You are given the Admin data to log into the affiliate program which also violates the TOS. You log in and make changes in the Payee/Ownership of the account to make it your own. You think that’s it? Not so fast! Unfortunately, it isn’t. The affiliate program puts the account on hold and income drops to zero or you are required to reapply. If you decide to reapply then the next bunch of questions are: Does the site still comply? Is the affiliate program still interested in the type of site you just purchased?

Troubles a seller may run into: You have forgotten to notify your Affiliate program about the sale, therefore you may be deprived of all your income. The deal should include terms and a condition that the seller is obliged to notify all Affiliate programs of the sale and that the buyer will reapply.
Why purchase a site which is cheating? Forums are filled these kind of deals. The buyer must thoroughly examine the website in question and make himself certain that each and every Affiliate Program established on the site or which has ever produced revenue is in compliance with the letter and intent of the Affiliate programs regulations.

When you first see a sale, start with running a Whois search and carefully examine the owner. If the seller is not the same owner as showed in the Whois database leave and do not buy that site. If there is a change in ownership in Whois during the sale, this should be alarming. Audit the sale by sending an email to the address showed in the Whois database and ask for a response from the same email account. If it bounces or you do not receive a response, leave and do not buy this site. You would be amazed by the enormous number of fraudsters attempting to sell websites which they do not own.