Guest post by Althaf

If you visit sites like Sitepoint.com or Digitalpoint.com, you will notice websites being bought or sold for a lot of money. Sometimes, sites are sold for a few hundred dollars and other times they are sold for a few thousands. The business of selling websites/blogs have known to be very lucrative for a long time.

What makes certain websites to be sold for a lower amount and others for a higher amount. This is what I want to focus on today's article. I hope this brief writing will serve as a reference guide, if ever you plan to get into this business.

There are certain factors that buyers look for when buying a website. Some of them are:

Domain name - If the domain name contains an important keyword or two, then it is more valuable in the eyes of the investor, as it can be easily remembered by the visitors and attract more returned visitors.

Content - I have seen sites that have had duplicate content that have been sold for couple of hundred dollars. These sites basically had a 1000 plus articles in them and were attracting some visitors from Google and other search engines. At the same time, I have seen sites with just 50-100 original articles that were driving tons of targeted keyword traffic from the same search engines. One such site got sold for about $9,000. The differences were the original content and the level of respect the latter site had achieved in Google database.

Traffic - These days you can start a site and get traffic from day 1 through media sites like Digg and Stumbleupon. Stumbleupon especially can get you 50-100 visitors per day easily. The point to note is, that social medial traffic has next to zero conversion. If you are looking for good opt-ins, trying to sell an affiliate product, or expecting few clicks on your AdSense ad, then social medial traffic isn't for you. They are simply blind to these elements. On the other hand, if your website get a steady stream of traffic from search engines, then the conversion percentage is higher. This add tremendous value to your site. There are many sites on the Internet that thrive on search engine traffic, they make over $20,000 in passive (almost) income every month.

There sure are other factors when evaluating a website for investment, such as RSS subscribers if any, bounce rate, average time of engagement, etc. Not everyone looks at these factors as much as they do the above 3 points I mentioned.

The next time you plan to develop a website for flipping (selling), pay attention to the 3 factors I explained above. They could make or break the deal.