Make Sure You Highlight These 3 Features When Selling a Website

By | June 29, 2011

It’s just common sense: when you want to sell something, you make sure that what you’re selling looks as enticing as possible. If you’re selling a house, you make sure that the house is clean when you show it to other people, and that the landscaping looks neat and fresh. It’s not so different in the online world where you need to highlight your website’s features if you want to fetch the price of your heart’s desire. You can see people doing just that at WebsiteBroker.com.

But how do you do it for yourself? You know how to make a house look good, but what kind of features and highlights will make a website look better to potential buyers? In order to answer these questions, you need to get inside the head of a potential buyer and understand what they’re looking for. Luckily for you, we’ve done a little bit of that work already and can present you the following three features to focus on as you try to sell your website.

Feature #1: Your domain relevance.

Okay, we realize that “relevance” can be a broad term on the Internet, so let’s focus on some specifics. What makes your site relevant? You’ll want to choose some of the variables where your website scores highly and then advertise these variables in your website sales listing.

For one thing, a domain’s relevance can come from the age of the domain. If your domain has been registered for 15 years, it will often perform better than younger domains in the search engine listings. Why? Because search engines use this variable as one of the ways to measure relevance.  If your domain has been around a while, then the search engines can be more sure that you’re not looking to spam anyone. This is a great feature to highlight if you have it.

Feature #2: Your website’s audience.

There’s more to an audience than just pure, mass numbers. For example, let’s say that your site doesn’t attract a lot of visitors, but of the visitors it does attract, many of them stick around and participate on your site. That’s valuable to someone looking to buy a website, which means it’s something you’ll want to highlight.

If, on the other hand, your website does get a lot of visitors, there’s no reason you shouldn’t highlight that fact as well. But there’s more to the story of an audience. Do you have a lot of subscribers on your website but not a lot of visitors? Do people participate in a lot of your polls? What about your site might make its audience unique? These kinds of questions are exactly what you’ll want to ask yourself.

Feature #3: Niche placement.

It’s one thing if you’re the number one web site in a small niche like home-made oven mitts with specific designs on them. But what if you’re the number two website in a larger, more powerful niche like digital camera reviews? Suddenly your domain name is vastly more attractive to potential buyers simply because of the market in which it’s placed. Make sure that you understand how important the context of your site can be to potential buyers.