Help me with selling my site (maybe) / valuation

[petera]

My website that I have worked on over the last few years is going pretty good, and is profitable.

• I have a few videos on youtube, what happens to my you tube account? It is registered in my personal name etc.
• Same as forum registrations etc, I have a few accounts with various forums, one of which I have been with for quite some time and would still like to keep that account as I have made other threads in it that I'd like to keep access to etc.

The issue is that youtube and the forums have my signature links etc, which all point to my main website. What do you do in this situation? Can you transfer a youtube account at all? or move the videos to another person or username etc. And not loose revenue or views or position on youtube etc?


I have one main site (authority) then about 6 other smaller sites that have from 1-5 pages etc I have adsense on them and amazon too.


Here are the adsense earnings for the last few years.


Date: Payment that went into bank account
May 2008
June 2008
July 2008
August 2008
September 2008
October 2008 $129.54 USD
November 2008
December 2008 $103.54 USD

January 2009
February 2009 $112.51 USD
March 2009
April 2009 $161.27 USD
Ma 2009
June 2009 $177.22 USD
Here google changed over to AUD as I'm In Australia
July 2009 $125.15 AUD
August 2009 $218.94 AUD
September 2009
October 2009 $292.86 AUD
November 2009 $200.10 AUD
December 2009 $301.78 AUD


January 2010 $282.02 AUD
February 2010 $426.93 AUD
March 2010 $380.93 AUD
April 2010 $392.15 AUD
May 2010 $394.35 AUD
June 2010 $469.17 AUD
July 2010 $392.56 AUD
August 2010 $407.31 AUD
September 2010 $568.32 AUD
October 2010 $773.38 AUD
November 2010 $684.87 AUD
December 2010 $852.52 AUD


January 2011 $831.44 AUD
February 2011 $781.64 AUD
March 2011 $673.50 AUD
April 2011 $781.86 AUD
May 2011 $644.19 AUD
June 2011 $537.36 AUD
July 2011 $583.56 AUD
August 2011 $513.73 AUD
September 2011 $550.76 AUD
October 2011 $667.97 AUD
November 2011 Not in bank yet but will be $771.95 AUD



So that is the adsense earnings history.


Amazon

January 1, 2008 to November 13, 2011 total earnings is $917.45

I cashed in a cheque for $575.36 back on 28th July 2011.
Unpaid balance is $271.74.


Now most of my adsesne earnings are from the one main site.


1. Is it best to sell the whole lot of them as one lot?

2. Or sell them off individually?

For me to work out each individual earning for each site will be a mega pain in the royal behind. That's why for me personally it would be easier to do the whole lot in one go, but what are peoples thoughts?


And the main site is a PR of 3, with some inner PR pages of 4 down to 0 I guess, I have not checked them all.

This month it has had 28,353 visits so far and 75,331 pageviews according to google analytics. And it says 88.26% from search engines which is 25,000.


This is a genuine site, not one of these crappy MFA sites. Built it with Site build It SBI originally, and then went over to Xsitepro.



Its a very low maintenance site, pretty much don't do anything to it. Has the potential to cover a lot more valuable content.


Anyway my main concern is the youtube account thing and the forum account thing, and I have one in yahoo answers as well.


Any ideas what would be an expected sale price?


Peter

[grynge]

Just a rough guess if those are the only earnings you are probably going to get somewhere between $4000 and $12000 at auction unless the site has something unique or a great domain name.

The money from adsense for that traffic seems to me a way too little, have you done some testing to see if you can get the results up? I get on avg about AUD about $1000 per 50k pageviews and 15k visitors.

I don't make money from youtube so does the youtube income act as adsense income? What does the forum have to do with revenue? or are you talking about a major source of traffic or just the name?

Each bidder is probably going to want something different from you, the smart ones will want total control of the accounts lesser ones might not know what you do with them. Most bidders will probably only want to bid on the main income site, unless the others drive a major source of traffic to the money site?

[Clinton]

I haven't been into YouTube's terms and conditions recently, but I do know you can transfer an account over to someone as simply as by giving them the login and letting them change the password.

Forum accounts: It's not unusual to reach a deal with the buyer where you agree to keep the forum signature links unchanged for a defined period of time. Be careful that it doesn't violate the forum owner's conditions. We don't allow paid signatures, for example, and while some forum owners may see your signature links as genuine others may consider them paid for links once you've sold the site. (The forum owner has no way of knowing if you're giving your links away free or for a price)

For me to work out each individual earning for each site will be a mega pain in the royal behind.

It's an even bigger pain in the backside for the buyer. I suggest you sell the sites together. There could be interconnections between the sites that make separating a bit problematic. But be aware that buyers would prefer, especially at this level of earnings, to buy a single site generating all the traffic and revenue rather than a network of sites.

Sale price could be affected by the domain names, the industry you're in, the quality of your content, the backlink profile you've got and several other factors.

[petera]

The money from adsense for that traffic seems to me a way too little, have you done some testing to see if you can get the results up? I get on avg about AUD about $1000 per 50k pageviews and 15k visitors.

Interesting, maybe because my site niche does not have many advertisers it is lower? Having said that doesn't google show you ads that you have been searching for from other pages etc. Say if you have been searching for weight loss, and you then visit my site which might be about gardening, doesn't adsense then still show you weight loss related ads?

[Clinton]

Those are called Interest Based ads, petera. On one of my larger Adsense accounts they come in at less than 5% of the earnings. The CTR and RPM for IB come in at much, much less than for Placement and Contextual ads.

Contextual on its own constitutes about 88% of the earnings for that account of mine.

[benitez17]

Since it sounds like all of the sites are related, it would make sense to sell them as a group.

If they are as maintenance free as they sound, you can probably get something nearer the top of grynge's range in my opinion, though it's hard to say without seeing the site.

If I were buying it, I'd want you to transfer the YouTube account. Can you tell how much traffic is being driven by your forum Yahoo Answers posts?

[petera]

The sites have nothing to do with each other at all, totally difference niches. And there is no interlinking between etc.

Yep they are pretty much low maintenance really all I do is if I can be bothered to add a new page then I will. Apart from that if someone post a yahoo question related to the website, I give my best answer and leave a link to that page.

How do I tell how many links are from yahoo? It is not really that much I do not think.
I don't think that all back link checkers really pick up all the links anyway so how can I give you an accurate answer?

[benitez17]

The sites have nothing to do with each other at all, totally difference niches. And there is no interlinking between etc.

Yep they are pretty much low maintenance really all I do is if I can be bothered to add a new page then I will. Apart from that if someone post a yahoo question related to the website, I give my best answer and leave a link to that page.

How do I tell how many links are from yahoo? It is not really that much I do not think.
I don't think that all back link checkers really pick up all the links anyway so how can I give you an accurate answer?

If the sites aren't related, it might make it a little harder to sell them as a group, but many people would still be interested. You could set up some Adsense channels to track the revenue independently going forward. The fact that they are low maintenance is a selling point.

There are numerous backlink checkers, none of them are comprehensive as you said. You could try Majestic SEO, Yahoo Site Explorer, Bing, Blekko, or some other tool and see which gives you the best result.

I was more interested in knowing how much traffic was being driven by those links, which you should be able to tell with Google Analytics or whatever other visitor tracking program you use.