Selling a membership website....

[Jeremie]

Hello All,

I would like to pose a question to all of you,

Do any of you have any experience with selling membership websites anywhere (Flippa, website brokjers, etc) that didn't have any customers, but was professionally done, custom everything but not marketed, only left collecting cyber dust?

I ask because that is exactly what I have sitting on my computer and I am left paralyzed with my marketing efforts to drive any traffic to the site. I am more of a designer/creator/put-together-er rather than a marketer and my site is just worthless sitting there with no traffic coming to it...

So I thought about selling it in the hopes that I could get a little bit of a return and move on to something different... or if you had some other suggestions (constructive) to a person who lacks skills for promotion (namely me) but who has a site ready to go....??

Thank you,

Jeremie

[JockP]

Whats the site ?

Likely not to get a return

[benitez17]

If it's really well designed, has some unique features that you coded, or has a quality domain, you might be able to get a decent amount of money for it, though it's hard to say how much without looking at it.

If it's nothing special, expect a couple hundred dollars at most.

[grynge]

Websites aren't like houses where if you pay to have them revamped you might get more money for them. A websites intrinsic value is based around any income and/or memberships that it can produce. Having a great idea and paying a coder $xx,xxx to develop the idea into a website for you, does not in turn give the website a value of $xx,xxx, people will still base it on members and/or any income it has produced. Though as benitez mentioned sometimes a well coded idea can produce a small bidding war.

[TheodoreK]

Have you read this wonderful thread on valuing websites and blogs here in EP?
My suggestion is to drive traffic and monetise your website before selling. (and yeah, I know it's harder than it sounds!)

[Clinton]

Jeremie, people wanting to sell a site often say that their site needs just a bit of promotion/marketing.

I believe that 99% of the skill in making a success of a website lies outside of the design and coding. It's in what you, mistakenly I believe, call "promotion".

Apart from the design, what makes a site a success? Some suggestions:
1. The right idea (everyone thinks his idea is brilliant. Most aren't)
2. The right content/product/service - the REASON why people should come to the site
3. Being in the right place at the right time
4. Having the budget to promote and the skills to spend the budget wisely
5. Being able to analyse the competition and learn from their mistakes
6. Link building skills to get others to send traffic to you
7. SEO skills to get traffic from SEs, affiliate mangement skills if you want traffic from affiliates
8. Ideas for viral stuff (and the placing of those ideas so they "explode")
9. Managing finances
10. Managing members, encouraging user participation and discussion, attracting new users
11. Creating a newsletter and providing regular high quality content for subscribers
12. Developing partnerships with other companies and individuals
13. Building enough traffic to get admitted into the right paying programs
14. Collecting, analysing and using the traffic stats to make the site more useful to visitors
15. Technical skills to ensure security, manage the traffic flow, create automatic back ups, spread load across servers etc
16. Building a brand

and

...hard graft with a million other things.

Let's dispel the common misconception: A new site, however well coded, doesn't become a success just by adding a bit of promotion and water and stirring!

Don't get me wrong, the right look and feel and functionality can make all the difference between success and failure, but it's the part of the business that can most easily be outsourced.

That's not to say you cannot sell your site. But before you find a buyer you need to understand what type of person would be attracted to your site. Can you provide a profile of the buyer? Who should come to you rather than go to freelancer.com and get someone to create it from scratch to his exact specification?

[Denny]

So I thought about selling it in the hopes that I could get a little bit of a return and move on to something different... Jeremie

Jeremie: Focusing on what you said; "move on to something different" and your comment about being a "designer/creator/put-together-er" leads me to this comment;
It sounds like you'll be in the same boat when you move on to something different. If you plan to stay a designer/creator only, then my suggestion would be to sell the site as is. Because won't you be faced with the same dilema when you move on to something different? Or by "something different" did you mean not creating websites?

[tke71709]

It sounds like you'll be in the same boat when you move on to something different. If you plan to stay a designer/creator only, then my suggestion would be to sell the site as is. Because won't you be faced with the same dilema when you move on to something different? Or by "something different" did you mean not creating websites?

As an addition to the comment above, I'd recommend partnering with someone who has the skill sets that you are missing and working together.

I've dealt with a great developer in the past who can't drive traffic for the life of him. His problem is that he wants to hit a home run and won't work on "boring" projects that can make decent money whereby I prefer boring projects with more real world potential. Maybe we'll hit it big someday, I always agree to work with him when he comes calling.

[Makeit]

Clinton,you might consider sticky-ing these great points.

[Jeremie]

Thank you all for your answers to my humble question above...

I have nothing to lose by showing you the website(s).... I am not married to them anymore, so I will not be easily offended by your honest comments on strategy and such.
Also, if any of you think the site(s) could be developed into something worth spending time on and are willing to help out (JV) I would be pleased to work with you.

After reading through your responses, and more especially Clifton's I was forced to look at my creations in hind sight and I see a lot of mistakes...

Either way, that is water under the bridge now, I am interested in seeing what can be done now, or if anything at all can be done... Here are the sites:

The niche I am focusing on is the "Option Trading" market - BullTradingPro.com (this is the sales letter to the membership side)
The membership side is located at: BullTradingProSystem.com (it is a WordPress theme using the Digital Access Pass membership platform)

It is a drip feed program for the Silver membership while the gold membership gets everything.

In any case, I appreciate your comments, and look forward to more..

Jeremie