5 things I learned when I sold my website for $180,000

Let me take you back in time for a moment,

To the start of lockdown in 2020.

I had a 9-month-old travel blog,

It had recently been accepted to Mediavine,

But then with the news, the traffic dropped by 95%.

Eek!

I had a five-year-old and a two-year-old,

School and nursery both closed,

And my job at a travel agency gave me a 20% paycut.

This was not okay.

Baking banana bread and bingeing Netflix wasn't going to help me get out of this one...

Immediately, I did a pivot away from travel.

Since we couldn't even travel to the next town,

I started a new site in a lifestyle niche.

I had no idea what would happen,

And I certainly didn't expect to be selling the site for $180,000 in 2022.

But, here we are.

I worked my ass off.

And my life got a lot better.

This is the first website I've ever sold,

And as most people reading this will also sell a site in the future,

I thought it would be helpful to share the 5 most important things I learned...

1. Niche websites sell for a lot!

I had no idea that websites sold for so much, but they do.

And when you think about it, it makes sense.

Investors need somewhere to put their money.

The income from a niche website can be much better than real estate or the stock market.

So there are a lot of very wealthy people wanting to buy up these assets.

When I did the maths,

I figured that I'd been making $250/hour from working on the site.

Even though I'd only made $130 in total after the first 12 months.

2. The multiples you hear on YouTube are exaggerated

If, like me, you watch niche website YouTube channels, you'll have probably heard income reports where people work out the value of their website based on a multiple of monthly earnings.

They might say, 'this website earned $1,000 last month, we can multiply that by 40, so it's worth $40,000'.

It's not though.

For two reasons.

1. Websites are priced on profit, not on income. So you need to subtract your expenses before multiplying.

2. Buyers like to go off the last 12 months, not the last 6, or 3. This will bring down the average a lot.

I sold my site for 37.5x the average profit from the last 12 months.

During that period, the income increased from under $1k to over $10k.

But we used the average.

 
3. You have to account for fees and taxes

The fees I paid to the broker (Empire Flippers) were 15%.

So I paid them $27k to handle the sale.

Then I'll have to pay taxes on top of that.

Although the fees are high, I feel that the broker did a lot of work and they certainly earned it.

I wouldn't hesitate to use them again.

4. Selling a website is complicated

Some website sales are much more complicated than others. 

When I bought a small site recently,
It was done and dusted in a couple of hours and a few emails.

But this site, with lots of different affiliate programs, an email list and social media accounts, was a different beast altogether!

If you're organised from the start, this transfer will be easier.

5. It can take a long time

I first listed my site for sale in February. 

So it took over 6 months from start to finish.

I think that took a while to find a suitable buyer, because the site had a UK focus.

That immediately narrowed the pool of buyers.

Most people that I spoke to were overseas with large media companies.

They weren't an ideal match for testing products that only ship in the UK.

A site monetised with ads and a US audience will have a much larger pool of buyers.

I'm bearing that in mind for my next ones.

I hope that this has given you some insight into what it was like for me to sell my first website.

I'm pretty thrilled that I managed it,

And I can't wait to spend the money on a house,

Once I can eventually get approved for a mortgage

(Or I've saved enough to pay cash, which might just be faster!)

Until next time

NSL

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