When it's so easy to do better
Paul Metcalfe surprised even himself when he sold a directory site.
- Bought a decent domain (CreatorTools.co) for $95
- Swallowed his pride and fired up WordPress (haha!)
- Populated posts or pages with 100+ creator tools and descriptions
- Set up the rest of the site
- Set a price of $1000 and shopped it around to his contacts
Paul woke up and the $1000 was on the way. This all happened over a few days.
What a clean, quick, tidy, and profitable exit for a week's work!
Let's contrast this with my exits
Over ten years ago, I had a directory of money forums that were popular at the time.
At the time, the directory didn't look too bad.
But here's the lifecycle of that site:
- Registered a decent domain
- Bought a script to manage the directory
- Populated the directory
- Put some ads on it
- Let it languish, go out of date, and accumulate security holes for literally years
- Uninstalled the script but keep paying for the domain
- Just let the domain expire
At some point, I just let it go. The whole thing.
I've done this with other sites and domains, unfortunately. My exit strategy, if you can call it that, was simply to stop and throw it all away.
I don't think I even considered selling the domains or sites.
Why this was exactly the wrong thing to do
When I commented about my experience and not selling my site, this was Paul's response:
There are buyers for everything these days. Even if not yet any traction or making money – people will pay for the work done. And there's plenty of marketplaces to buy and sell projects.
Paul Metcalfe
Great advice, but the thing is I already knew this.
I knew there were marketplaces like Flippa for buying and selling digital properties.
What made it difficult for me to sell was that it was acknowledgment that the plan I had had for the sites or domains didn't come to fruition. And that I had only myself to blame for that.
My thinking was this: If I just dropped the domain name, I wouldn't be judged by anyone.
That was an emotional response, and it was completely the wrong answer.
Most emotional financial decisions are bad. My bruised ego cost me whatever money I would have gotten for the properties.
Lessons Learned time!
1. Think about the exit strategy at the start.
As I mentioned earlier, selling sites never occurred to me.
My strategy had been to keep sites forever and monetize them with ads or affiliates.
That's only a couple out of many, many, many ways to profit from a site — not the least of which is selling it. Prominent websites can go for millions of dollars to the right buyer.
So a good exit strategy would involve analyzing the work needed for the expected upside. Would another 20 posts or some images or some redesign work make the site worth more? Or just sell it as a handyman's special to clear the books?
2. Follow through.
Most of my sites — even some of my current ones — got that way because of lack of follow-through.
Most websites are not like fine wine. They don't get better with age.
If the goal of a site is ongoing income or appreciation of the value of the site, then maintenance is needed.
If maintaining a site is becoming an issue, that's a good indicator that it's time to sell and move on to concentrate on fewer projects.
Or, the goal may never have been income, but instead a quick flip like Paul managed with CreatorTools.co. If that's the case, follow through and git ‘er done!
3. Something is better than nothing.
At some level, it's painful to sell something at a loss. It makes the loss permanent.
Nonetheless, a partial loss is better than a total loss. That's what selling at a loss gives you.
So it's worth it to get something for the asset, no matter how little.
Thanks for reading!
Hi, I'm John and I encourage entrepreneurship in people, including myself.
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Header photo by Ankush Minda on Unsplash