A post at Poker Affiliate Listings from Haynesey inspired this post about how to sell a poker site. As Haynesey points out, most people sell poker sites incorrectly. I have some thoughts on how to best sell a poker website too, and here they are:

The first step to selling a poker site is to have a poker site worth buying. Lots of people ask my opinion of what various websites are worth. I always look at the different aspects of a site when thinking about value. Some of the aspects of a poker site that can have a value attached to them include:

1. The domain name. Some domain names have obvious intrinsic value, like poker.com or pokerstrategy.com. Others, like onlythebestonlinepokergames.info have significantly less value. If the domain is short, memorable and easily-spelled, then it’s worth a lot more than a domain that’s long, easily-forgotten, or hard-to-spell. And tld matters too; a .com is worth more than a .net or .org, and .nets and .orgs are worth more than .bizs or .infos.
2. The brand name. Some domain names might not have obvious search engine benefits, but if everyone recognizes the name of the domain, then it’s got a brand value. Two Plus Two wouldn’t be the name I’d choose for a poker forum, but it’s worth a fortune now just for the brand recognition that it brings with it.
3. The design. Most website designs aren’t worth very much. Let’s face it; talented designers are easily found and hired. I can put together a design for one of my websites that I’m thrilled with in a matter of minutes. And I can hire someone for less than $1000 to create a beautiful design. But if you really love the unique design of a site, then attach a higher value to the design.
4. The content. This is one of the main sources of value for a website. If a decent 1000 word poker article is worth $50, and you’re buying or selling a site with 100 of those articles, then you can attach a value of $5000 to that aspect of the site.
5. The backlinks. It’s harder to pin down the value of various backlinks, but the way I always look at it is how much would it cost me to recreate that backlink profile? I include the cost of the time I’d spend getting those links, as well as any associated costs.
6. The search engine placement. Being the #1 or #2 ranked site in Google for a phrase like “poker strategy” has a value attached to it. The more rankings a site has, the more the site is worth. Attaching a value to this is tough too, but you can get some idea of what various phrases are worth by looking at 7search.com to see how much people are bidding for the terms there. (I mention 7search because they still accept gambling-related advertisements, and they make their CPC information easy to find.)
7. The traffic. You can evaluate a site’s value by looking at how many visitors the site receives daily or monthly. Just attach a value to each visitor.
8. The revenue stream. If you know how much a site is generating in revenue each month, then determining a value gets a lot easier. You just have to decide how much you’re willing to spend today to have that stream of revenue in the future.
9. The value of links from the site. If it’s a site where you would buy links from, then the value of those links become part of the site’s overall value. Once you buy it, you can get all the links you want from pages on the site, without having to pay for them, because you own the site.
10. Mailing lists and forum members? If a site includes a subscriber list to its newsletter, then that has value. If a site has an active forum with participating menus, then that has value too. Even a blog with regular commentators and lots of subscribers to the RSS feed has more value than a blog which doesn’t.

But this article isn’t about how to buy a poker site; it’s about how to sell a poker site. Why write all of the above information about evaluating poker sites’ values?

Because most people selling poker sites don’t understand that unless they have something worth selling, the price shouldn’t and couldn’t be very high at all.

Forum posts where people are offering to sell 10 page websites on lame domains with poorly written content abound on any poker or gambling affiliate forum with a marketplace. Why waste your time and others building something to sell that’s worthless or that’s only worth a minimal amount?

Instead, why not create a valuable poker site?

If you’re going to create a website or a network of websites to sell, why not create something you can sell for a lifechanging amount of money?

Why waste your time creating sites to sell for $500 or $1000 when with effort and time you could build a site or a network of sites you could eventually sell for $1 million or $2 million?

How to sell a poker site?

Create a poker site worth selling for a lot of money. That’s step 1.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 11:50 am and is filed under Mistakes, Monetization . 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.