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Potential can be damaging. If you think that pointing out how your site can make money will help, you may be doing more harm than good.

There is a pizza shop nearby to our offices. It has always been a pizza shop. It has always had (some) customers. However, it has changed owners and opened and closed at least 10 times. It just happens to be located on the worst traffic corner in the history of man. But still it survives in some form because of the illusion of potential.

When setting the value of a site, you of course have to look at how much a site is making and how it is doing so. And there are plenty of sites out there that make money. But there are also sites out there that put "potential" in a buyer's face instead of cash. Not really a good thing to do.

The most common words that show up in our evaluation sheets are "a webmaster can make money this way" and "this site has potential because". After that a lot of people list specifically how money can be made and then slap a 60 thousand dollar estimate onto the evaulation request.

It's true. A well constructed site with traffic has huge potential, and there is a monetary value assigned to that potential. But potential and profit are two different things and they need to be treated as such.

When a buyer sees "this is how this site can earn money" the first thing he/she will ask themself is, if it is so easy to make money with this site then why isn't it already making money? If it is so easy to sell advertising on this site then why isn't any being sold? Obviously there is a chicken and egg thing going on here.

As a rule of thumb it is ok to state how a site may make money to sell it. But don't use it as the primary marketing tool to sell a site. A site's value should be based on factors that have already happened, not what may happen. Leave it up to the buyer to know how to market and make money from a site. Just inch them in the right direction. The educated buyer already knows how to make money, and will ask you for suggestions. At that point be ready to help them out.

So, in short, a for sale listing should list hard facts. Leave the speculation to when a buyer contacts you. Then you can get a dialogue going and you can determine whether the buyer is interested in your money making ideas. You don't want to alienate any set of buyers.

-- Interested in learning more secrets about how to sell your site, and what your site may be worth. Try our site evaluation service and get our staff's opinion on how much gold you may be sitting on. An opinion is a terrible thing to waste. --