How much shall I sell BroadbandGuide.co.uk for?
It’s time to consolidate again as I’m finding myself spread too thin, with loads of projects getting neglected. So I’ve decided to sell one of my broadband domains/sites, namely BroadbandGuide.co.uk.
First thing I need to say is that the site has been negelected - hence the sale - and hasn’t been updated in over a year. Nor has there been any linkbuilding done. As a consequence traffic is pretty low, but there is some. Here are the stats for this year.
Month Page Loads Unique Visitors
May 2008 171 90
Apr 2008 986 530
Mar 2008 1,058 506
Feb 2008 1,223 534
Jan 2008 1,201 514
Here are some reasons why I think this domain will be attractive to the right buyer:
Generic: It’s a great geneic term and does exactly what it says on the tin. All other generic terms relating to the broadband sector have long gone. This name is also really brandable, easy to remember and contains no hyphens.
Age: The site has been live for around 2 years now, maturing nicely so already has an edge over any newly registered domains.
Sector: The broadband sector is very competitive and as such pay per click is really expensive. Therefore a site that does well in the natural serps will be able to compete in a market otherwise dominated by merchants and super affiliates with deep pockets. Some article writing and link building, and I think this site could fly.
Commissions: This is a really rich sector. CPA’s start at around £30 and go up to £100. If you do well you can command much higher than published commission rates as well as tenancy and placement deals. Lots of cash kicking about in this sector.
Google Ready: I used this site in my article “How to build a landing page site for Google that won’t get banned“. So it ticks all the boxes that Google require when it comes to quality score etc.
So that begs the question, how much shall I sell it for? I know of other affiliates sites in this same sector that earn £5k to £10k a month in commissions purely via organic rankings. As I mentioned above, CPA’s are so high in this sector that this is easily achievable.
So what does everyone think? Leave your thoughts in the comments below on what you think I should sell the site for. Then probably next week I will start marketing the sale of the site through the usual channels.
What I’m listening to right now: Mary J Blige – “Lady”
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
May 6th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
A quick assumption first .. 500 uv pm, generating maybe 5% orders at an average of £50 equates to £15,000 income pa. I’d start with that as a minimum.
May 6th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Based on the assumption that it makes about £250 a month, I would say it’s worth about 2.5K.
How much does it make Kieron?
May 6th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Hi Dave - being totally honest I have no idea how much it makes. I use the same affiliate links on broadbandguide.co.uk as I do on my other sites so I can’t split them out.
Therefore I think the only fair way to market this domain is with zero revenue guarantees. As I said above I think its value is in the generic domain name, not the actual monthly revenue - as it has been neglected for so long now.
May 6th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
Nice domain, If it was mine, i’d probably let it go at around £10k
but i’d probably sell it to a nice young chap for about £50
ha
May 6th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Before the sale goes up i would try to use the tracking codes affiliate networks provide you with and see exactly how much money the site makes (even clickthroughs), you may be surprised or dissapointed but at least then you can get an accurate figure. From the current market if you market a site with no revenue minimum traffic, PR1 and the age does count for a few factors…. but you wont get more than £1k for it unless you can publicize the revenue stats…. I would be interested in it but i would not pay over the odds for it based on revenue projections.
May 6th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
Kieron, why not offer the site as a competition prize for readers of your blog? Would certainly get you a massive boost in traffic….
Just a thought! (or you could just donate it to me
)
Rich
May 6th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
I give you £100:)
Doug
May 6th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Do those visitor counts also include bot traffic?
If so, the amount of actual visitors could be one third of the numbers shown.
May 6th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Why not have a huge competition and give it away as a prize to the person who created the most unique method of promoting the here.org.uk site. Think of all that linkbait and traffic for minimum outlay
May 6th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Mary - you need to view this as the sale of a domain and not a website. Unfortunately I don’t have the time to swap all of the links so I can gauge revenue which is why I stated that there is no revenue guarantee.
Richard/Lee - not a bad idea, I will probably use another of my domains though as broadbandguide.co.uk is too valuable.
Jon - no they don’t. But again, don’t get hung up on visitors/revenue. Instead treat this as a domain name sale.
Doug - you’re a funny man.
May 6th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
A grand for the name
May 7th, 2008 at 12:02 am
The benefits here are a good domain name term and its age - Jan 4th 2002. However just to rank for the brand term “Broadband Guide” puts you up against ThinkBroadband and Broadband.co.uk on Pagerank’s of 6 and 5 respectively in Google.
With only a Pagerank of 1 and little in the way of confirmed returns and content anyone paying over £1k would be a little foolish IMHO.
However putting your name against this in the sale/auction will no doubt pump up the price and interest - it would certainly be an interesting/exciting auction!
Check out AcornDomains, they have a good and active community for domain sales and of course Sedo, but their commissions can be quite high from memory but they have a good history of domain sales.
May 7th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Yup thinking below the 2k mark personally. Just get some monkey to work on it for you mate!
May 7th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Probably less than £1k. The domain is really generic, but that’s not necessarily a good thing - particularly in such a competitive market. The easiest backlinks to get would be for the term “Broadband Guide”, and traffic resulting from that may not be too great, compared with say “broadband providers” for instance.
Personally, in such a market, I would be looking for domains that fit into a tighter niche to increase the chances of penetrating it, and getting some reasonable rankings. Like a sharper needle.
Then again, someone with deep pockets looking for a “brand” to front a big long-term battle may snap it up for several thousand. You never really know until you put it out there.
May 8th, 2008 at 11:54 am
Those suggesting that the value is 10k are insane! 500 visitors a month will likely make 5 or less sales, so that’s around 100 quid a month.. *if* it makes any sales at all..
The majority of the links to the domain are from Kierons own sites, so if these are dropped then the site will lose all it’s (already meagre) natural traffic..
It’s a bit of a lame duck site I’m afraid, with the backlinks it’s worth maybe £500, without them, it’s worth £50.
May 8th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Matt - domain names do not have to have a site attached to them and traffic to be of value. There is a huge market for good generic domain names only.
May 8th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Hi Kieron,
You have to admit that the backlink issue will devalue the site if the deal does not include you keeping the backlinks ad-infinitum.
It’s an ok domain name, but i think that the premium on it is not in the thousands, i’ll up my valuation to a few hundred wihout the backlinks.
May 8th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
If we valued every site by backlinks and PR then there would be no market for super premium domains and we would not get 500k co.uk domain sales.
Kieron could easily have taken the site and run a campaign, visited a site like SP and sold it as a “business” with keyword lists and conversion data for a lot more which might be a little unethical if the buyer is inexperienced but happens daily at online marketplaces.
I think whoever buys the site can be sure that they are buying a quality domain with solid foundations and with minimal effort will see a healthy return.
May 8th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
Would be a very interesting name to develop, and clearly possible to add significant value. Valuing the domain name alone I would say around the 1 to 2k mark based on similar names I have sold.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
Hi Kieron,
You should sell it with my broadband-guide.co.uk domain and maximise both’s value! Would be nice for the new owner to have both variations I’m sure :o)
Cheeeers,
Chris
May 15th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
I’ve got an old broadband price comp site that gets around 150 uniques a month from Google. It hasn’t made a sale in 6 months.
Broadband conversions must be quite low, as buying decisions aren’t instant and when people make do make a decision, the brand group stands a good chance of getting the commission.
July 15th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Turn it into a forum similar to whirpool and digitalspy
July 24th, 2008 at 12:51 am
keep it, ill seo it for a small rev share ; )