Just because you create a membership site of your very own or even buy it from someone else, it doesn’t mean you have to be stuck with it for the rest of your life. I have sold membership sites and the favorite one I sold is one that I created with the intention of selling it before I even started with the content. If you plan ahead in this way, you can sell a membership site of yours for many, many times where you earn every month.
So to make sure your membership site sells for the highest amount possible, I have a few tips for your. Mostly, I’m going to tell you how to handle moving over the domain and how to move over the software.
So how you position your site so that it almost flies off the shelves?
Well I have a few tips for you. First of all, leave some potential money on the table. When I sold off this membership site, I did market it as much as I should. I didn’t set up an affiliate program. I didn’t pull out individual project for leading so there were a lot of good ideas to give to the person who bought the membership site.
Another important thing in having a membership site is have some subscribers. It’s one thing to have the site set up. I don’t think they have the content but if you have paying subscribers who pay you month after month, it’s a lot easier to justify a high price.
I only had about 50 subscribers paying $50 a month at the site I sold, but it was still good enough to get a $40,000 payday; and that brings you to my next point—appraise the site.
A normal site with usual paying members is worth about a year or two worth of the monthly revenue it brings in. So because the site made around $2,000 per month, it was worth close to $40,000. Now, to make the site worth that much, we added in a few extra bonuses including some resell rights, a couple of mailings, a few extra sales letters; but in general it was about two years’ worth of membership fees.
And next, show some future potential. Show that these things can be improved. You left money on the table; show that the (2:28 affiliate) program is easy to add. A big selling point for this is 12 months’ worth of content was already scheduled into the site. So the person buying it didn’t just buy a membership site but how will these expenses. If you let it sit for an entire year, it would still make a bunch of money. So that is the future potential. A big thing about this is not just to ask for a price but showing a lot of ideas about what their buyer can do.
So now you sold the site. Maybe you’re thinking about selling the site and trying to figure out what to do next.
Well after the site has been sold, usually you work out some kind of agreement and use a service such as Escrow.com to hold the money until the transfer is complete.
Now what’s up with this “to be transferred?”
The two most important things are the domain name and the payment account. So obviously if you have this site posted on a .com name, it’s going to be moved over. So you only need to get the buyer to request a domain and be moved over to his registrar; and you’re going to have to unlock the domain and maybe you can change to their details.
Your Escrow is needed to move the payment account over. Now if you have your own merchant account or PayPal, you might be screwed and might have to sell off the entire account to them. Now if you’re using service like ClickBank, which I was using because I have planned to sell off the site, you can simply change the login information and the payment information, meaning the owner’s name and mailing address, and now the account belongs to him. So ClickBank is very friendly about selling off sites but PayPal not so much. When somebody is paying you through PayPal, they’re stuck in that account.
And finally, you need to move over the software that you used to power the site. This means your membership site’s life. If you have purchased an unlimited site license to run your site, you’re going to have to buy a brand new single-site license and then transfer it over into that person’s name.
Another issue is things like the autoresponder or the list. So the important thing that you would mind as far as moving a site in someone else’s name is to set up the whole thing as a separate business; set up its own payment account, its own domain name, its own license, and its own autoresponder.
To position your own membership site for sale, leave money on the table, have some subscribers and appraise it. Then when someone buys it, transfer over the domain name, payment account, membership site license, and the e-mail autoresponder.
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