Buying and Selling Sites, Part 3: Find New Ways to Monetize Your Site

In my last post, I wrote about the importance of keeping your website up to date and making sure everything works correctly on your site. This month, we’ll look at ways to monetize your site and maximize its value – something that’s beneficial whether you plan to sell your site or keep maintaining it yourself.

If you’ve got a free site like a tube, selling ads is probably the best and most obvious way to monetize your site. Another way to drive revenue on a free site is to sell premium memberships. Offer free users one level of content and access, and then for premium users you can do things like give them higher video quality or longer videos, or both. You can also make the site ad-free for premium members, a common approach on non-adult streaming platforms like Hulu.

If you’re running a pay site or offering any sort of product for sale through your site, start an affiliate program. Particularly if you operate a paysite, launching an affiliate program is a great way to increase your traffic and generate more sales.

Regardless of the kind of sites you operate, don’t get caught in the trap of thinking there’s only one way to generate revenue. With any kind of site, you can always figure out other upgrades, upsells and products you can promote to your users.

Subscription based paysites can also sell content on a pay-per-view basis, giving people the option of paying by the scene for content they can’t get on the site through their subscription. This is also another way to charge users as opposed to a monthly fee. Some users just don’t like the subscription model – so give them other alternatives and different ways to buy what you’re selling.

You can also sell discounted memberships for other sites you work with. In many cases, you can hammer out a deal with another paysite to cross-promote each other’s sites to each member base – a great source of well-qualified and highly targeted traffic.

You can also promote ‘hard’ products, like toys and novelties, to your members. Upsells and cross-promotion isn’t limited to physical products, of course – you can also promote live cam sites, clip stores and anything else that’s complementary to what your own site has to offer.

Market Your Business

While they may not be the center of the universe for surfers they once were, search engines remain an important source of high-quality traffic. Do things to improve your search engine results like hiring a strong SEO consultant or company. There are some great SEO consultants out there who can help you get higher search rankings in Google. If you want some recommendations, you can contact us on our site.

List all the benefits of your site in your marketing and how they affect the user. Make sure you’re specific with your marketing and show them the features and benefits of doing business with you.

Eliminate Unneeded Expenses

Improving your bottom line isn’t just about bringing in more revenue; you also need to operate efficiently and eliminate unnecessary expenses. You should be reviewing your cash flow constantly to make sure you’re not spending money that you don’t need to. Make sure there isn’t duplication or unnecessary redundancy in your staffing.

From time-to-time, check services you pay for like hosting for instance and see if there are better and less expensive options. Take it from me, I’ve done this and saved a bunch – plus got higher quality hosting in the process.

Always look for ways to do things more cost effectively. You should endeavor to make your profit and loss statement show more profit. Increasing sales and reducing expenses obviously does just that.

Make sure your P&L statement accurately reflects your company’s actual costs, not a bunch of personal expenses you’ve put in. Mixing in expenses that don’t belong there will cost you money when you sell. It may help you with the tax man to put that stuff on your tax return, but it hurts you if you show that stuff on your profit and loss statement. Remember, every dollar in profit increases the value of your website as much as 3x to 4x!

Finally, when you do make the decision to sell, you need a good, experienced broker to help lead you through the process. We’ve gotten people tens of thousands of dollars more on their sale just by adjusting the P&L statement to reflect actual business expenses as opposed to a bunch of BS they show the tax man.

Again, if you’re in need of assistance ask us for recommendations. That’s what our company is all about: Helping buyers and sellers get good, fair deals.

Next month, we’ll look at other ways to get more when you sell your website.