Selling a Website to Buy a House
Updated on March 16, 2020
If you have a profitable website or a blog, you might be one of the thousands of people working online that don’t realize what they have built is an asset that can be sold. Making money from your passion project or side hustle is already a huge achievement and we love the community of entrepreneurs who have built something from scratch based on who they are, the opportunities they saw, and their willingness to put in the work to lay the foundations of a business. So we take pride in being there when that same business owner eventually wants to do something else and would like to put their hard earned money into something new.
We’d like to introduce you to a pair of sellers who did exactly that. Charlie and Brittany Ives had been building travel and business blogs for around three years before they discovered Empire Flippers. They enjoyed working on these businesses, which had become a big part of their lifestyle, and they had no idea there was a marketplace where you could sell a website, especially a blog. Even more shocking was the idea that someone would pay six figures for something that Charlie and Brittany had built while exploring 20 different countries.
Every online business owner knows that your most precious assets are the specifics of your niche and business. This information is the edge you have against all your competitors. It’s your secret sauce, and you don’t want to share it lightly. After Charlie got over the shock of the opportunity, the next big leap of faith for him was handing over all his data to Empire Flippers for the vetting process.
“Empire flippers vets every site that comes through their marketplace. That meant I had to turn over access to my Amazon, my tracking… everything that a website entails. I was really leery to do that, with the thought in the back of my head ‘No one’s gonna buy this site in the first place!” Fortunately, Charlie was comforted by the fact we’ve vetted hundreds of businesses, he got through vetting without a hitch, and moved on to the next step.
As Charlie says so well, “Getting a website listed is only half the battle. Then you have to find the buyer.” Once Empire Flippers vets a business and verifies its earnings, the listing goes live and a whole new phase of selling starts. Empire Flippers has several tactics to get eyes on your listing. First, we share it with over 80,000 interested buyers. We also set up remarketing campaigns, syndicate the listings to several buyer networks, and funnel thousands of people to the Empire Flippers Marketplace to see your business.
Next, if your business is valued at over $45K (like Charlie and Brittany’s was), then we’ll do a Seller Interview that highlights the features and benefits of your business in your own words. Buyers especially like getting a sense of who the seller is from these interviews. We share these interviews with our social media followers on Facebook and Youtube. We also turn some of these interviews into episodes on our Real Money, Real Business podcast.
Charlie and Brittany took their location independence to the next level since they sold their site while travelling around the world. “We were bouncing around quite a bit. I first talked to Empire Flippers when we were in Munich, next had a potential buyer call when we were in Prague We were going over an offer in Budapest, finally signed a contract in Chiang Mai, and then finalized the deal in New Zealand.” Our team at Empire Flippers is also 100% location independent. This gives us lots of options, especially when it comes to time zones, to make deals work for both the buyer and the seller.
“Without Empire Flippers, I could have never pulled this off. There are so many logistics that go into selling a website this size. I remember receiving the money after I sold the website and I still couldn’t believe that I was paid this amount of money for a website I had built just a year and a half ago.” Stories like this are why we do what we do. We thrive on helping entrepreneurs and business owners realize that they own a sellable asset, and helping connect them to buyers looking to either get started or grow the business.
When it comes to sellers, we especially enjoy hearing about what they do with the money. “We earmarked this money, if the site sold, for the purchase of a house. I basically traded some online real estate for some physical real estate. We never wanted all of our eggs in one basket. That really hit home for us that we could actually see this house, walk into a door, and it wasn’t just logging into WordPress, into a website.” Every seller has a different story. Some sellers buy real estate, some sellers put the money back into digital assets, and some take time off to travel the world.
“Having been through the process as a Seller, I’d recommend Empire Flippers because I realize what goes into vetting a website. The process is genuine, fair for both parties, Buyer and Seller. Empire Flippers facilitates a speedy transaction and a very fair transaction,” Charlie shared. If you’d like to see what your online business is worth, check out our nifty tool. This tool will let you plug in the details of your online business and get a valuation range, so you can see the possible numbers behind your future exit. Because, hey, who doesn’t like dreaming of what they are going to do with all that money!
You might not be ready just yet to submit your business for sale. You may need a bit more customized planning to make that happen. That is exactly why we also offer free Exit Planning calls to help you get the maximum value when you do decide to sell your business. Feel free to schedule a call here.
If you’d like to keep up with Brittany and Charlie’s journey, check out their travel blog at thetradingtravelers.com.
