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Knowing your history. Website statistics and billing slips can be the difference between disaster and profit.

Think about this scenario. Someone works their entire life to build a small business. They put their heart and sole into it. The busines makes money. Then they go to sell it and no one wants to buy. What is wrong with this picture? The seller didn't keep accurate figures and couldn't prove a thing.

The above scenario is more than an empty example. A person on our staff was recently interested in buying a small hotel. Some 10-12 units, nice place near the water. Rooms recently done over and even a new roof. The price was also outstanding. However, when he went to sit down with the owner, the owner handed him figures for the last two years of operation that looked like chicken scratches. Nothing was solid. There were virtually no sales slips. There was even an employee being paid under the counter. And thus, in the end, even though it was a good deal, the whole thing fell through. The decision not to pull the trigger on that deal was a good decision.

No one won from that case. The seller wasn't able to retire and probably ended up getting even less than the already low offer. And the buyer wasted his time and energy chasing a pipe dream. If there had only been better books and stats everyone would have been set.

Websites are unique in that you can pretty much track every single bit of data that goes by. Every visitor can be tagged. You can know where they went and what they bought. You can know what sections of your site are failing, etc. Unfortunately, many sellers list their sites without much time spent on stat pages.

Any good website host should provide you with site statistics. Stat programs are usually free. For instance, our host (webcs.com) offers three stat programs free: Awstats, Webalizer and Analog. One is fine of course. More graphical programs like Awstats create graphs automatically and track more data. If your host does not have stats, switch hosts before listing your site with us and gather at least a few months of data.

The more data you can accumulate the less likely someone is to try to haggle you down in price. Because in the end you can say, look here. Hard facts win the day every time. We always suggest a sampling of 18 months. If you have more great. If you have less, you can still show buyers stats, they will just be less reliable.

Similiarly, you must keep records of sales, costs and profits. You of course do not want to put this in any for sale listing because it is priviledged information, but have it on hand when a buyer comes calling. And make sure to put in your listing that you have hard proof of profit claims.

What if you don't have stats? Well, it will be hard to prove anything to a buyer. So you will have to list your site lower than the actual market value.

-- 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. --