I had started my online journey back in 2004 as a freelance programmer. Since then I have done coding, designing, consultancy on web frameworks, SEO, SEM, handling lead generation campaigns for various clients, being a Mod of one of the biggest forum on web, wasting countless number of hours on digg and 4chan and building and selling websites.

Building websites and selling them can be a good business if you know the business model and where (and who) has the money. The business model is not that simple to build a website, get it traffic and sell it. It is like saying build a plane, find a client and sell it.

Let me tell you what i used to do (I have stopped doing this since I don’t feel its worth enough my time to do it anymore). I had a fairly decent knowledge of CMS and web frameworks and I knew it how to build good looking sites, themeing them to make them stand out and how to get traffic to them. I think it took me more then a year to understand the whole business model of what people are looking for.

Here are few rules of building websites and selling them -

1. Just because you think a site is great doesn’t mean others also think like this
2. Just because you think
3. What can be done in future with the site will almost all the time have no effect on its current valuation
4. If you are over optimistic about the pricing and not looking to compromise, most likely you won’t be able to make a sale.
5. Very rarely you will get best evaluation of your site as its never easy to find and convince a buyer who gets everything of what you are saying.

Here are few tips on how to make your site stand out and make a best sale -

1. Try to find a USP and push it in your sales pitch.
2. Find all the current revenues
3. Sales pitch is the most important part to get the best and highest evaluation. Make sure you get it right. Simply putting all the stats and images may not get you best buyer.
4. Try to offer additional service like transferring the website for some additional money or setting the site on the buyers server and explaining him everything on msn/aim of how the site works.

In the end, be practical. The person who is looking to buy your site is a businessman just like you and he won’t be paying you a single dime more than what he feels like it is worth of. if you have problem with it, you can always say No. Sometimes its worth enough to wait rather then selling the website in first go.

Some of the marketplaces where you can sell your website is sitepoint.com, digitalpoint.com and v7n forums.

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