How to Increase the Business Value Before You Sell It?
- 27 Oct 2024
- Sell Business
You put a lot of effort into making your website. It looks awesome, has unique content and images, and has good SEO. Now, you have no further plans for your website. What will you do? Keep it in the archive until it dies with all your efforts? Or will you let buyers bid for it and earn a handsome return on the sale?
If you choose to sell your online business or website, you need to make sure that your business offers unique opportunities for buyers. Why would anyone put their money on a website that is non-functional and nobody sees it?
Suppose you run a beauty blog and have lost interest in it. Will you dump the blog or let others have it so you can profit from it?
In this blog, we will cover all it takes to increase the value of your business before you sell it. The steps are straightforward; all you need to do is keep your website live until you sell it. But, before selling your website or even a blog, here are a few things you need to do:
1. Improve Cash Flow:
Make a requirement for how much you spend on the website. Whether it's your content writer payment or graphic designer salary, you need to have a proper requirement for how much you are paying and how much you are earning from your website.
Serious buyers are interested in purchasing a website or an online business that makes some money. They want to know what the business has for them and how they can expect to benefit from buying a particular website.
If your website is giving away a lot of content for free and is using free images that anyone can take, you need to revise your website strategy. For instance, make your website have exclusive content and images to attract the buyer.
Even if you are paying a content writer to create content for your website, the content has to be exclusive to attract the buyer.
2. Maintain Financial Records:
If you have ever watched 'Shark Tank,' a business reality show, you will know that investors want to know how your business or website is doing financially—how much it can earn in a month, year, and year.
Any prospective buyer will be interested in buying a venture or a website that has some profit in it, from which the new owner can plan the journey ahead. Have all the financial records of your website nicely documented so you can show them to the new owner?
Perfect financial records will speed up the buying process and improve your business value.
3. Improve SEO:
SEO is the oxygen and blood of a website. You have designed a beautiful website and hired a professional content writer to create the content, but you forgot about SEO. Your website will be dead in any minute.
How your website ranks on the search engines can help predict how much you can make from your website. If you have not worked on keywords or used meta tags, alt tags, meta descriptions, and more to help search engines find your website, you are working in the wrong direction.
You need to ensure that your website ranks well on the search engine. Before putting your website on sale, it is beneficial to improve its SEO. You can hire an SEO expert to help you with it. If the SEO of the website is perfect, it has a higher chance of getting on the page one ranking and also increases the net worth of your website. Buyers and investors are keen on putting their money into a business that is already doing well online.
4. Recurring Income:
Lets assume you run an e-store, in the first year of our business, you were able to book a revenue of $1000, next years the revenue was $1050, but were their new customers or returning customers? Any business that has returning customers has higher value in the market.
Recurring income can be defined as payment received from regular customers like subscribers, members, and returning customers. The higher the percentage of recurring income, the higher the chances of your business getting sold with great returns. Let us look at how you can improve the recurring income of your website:
- Service plans
- Maintenance fee or after-sale service fee
- Membership/subscription
5. Diversify Revenue
Your website might be earning handsome money from selling goods. But what else can you include to improve the revenue flow?
Can you add affiliate links to your website? Can you run brand ads on your website? Yes, of course, you can, and you can simply multiply your revenue sources.
Suppose you run a cosmetic e-store; you can add affiliate links and brand ads on your website or blog. When even a customer buys anything by clicking on the link from your website, you get paid.
Diversification of revenue increases your business value, and you can expect to get a greater return when you sell it.
6. Diversify Traffic Source:
How are you getting traffic to your website? Through Facebook or Instagram? Don't restrict traffic to just one source. If you are targeting audience of Facebook for your cosmetic e-store, you might be missing a good number of customers on other platforms.
Use Google ads, digital marketing, social media marketing, and more to ensure your website is getting traffic from all the sources. Market your website as a brand. Make your website reach as many prospective customers as it can. The more reach, the better business value you can expect.
Starting a business takes a lot of efforts in terms of money, emotions, time, and creativity. And anytime you feel you have lost interest or developed a new interest in some other business. Don't flush your efforts; find someone who can cherish your work and start a new chapter from where you have left. Improve the SEO, increase visibility, work on revenue and cash flow, and maintain proper financial records to pitch your business for sale.
