A little while I go I was selling FacebookProfile, a site which I started in May 2006 as a small little side project. Traffic quickly rose on it as the popular social networking site Facebook got ever more popular.
Despite my lack of attention to it, I had managed to get the site to make about $100/month with just Google Adsense, but I was just letting the site sit there. It had tons of traffic, and therefore lots of potential for someone to take the reigns.
So I posted it for sale on the SitePoint forums and started getting lots of serious bids through private message. However I started the bidding way too low. Even before I posted the site for sale I had serious buyers trying to pay $3,000 for the site. Therefore all the normal bids on the auction I ignored, and only spoke with buyers who sent in much higher private bids.
The highest bid I got was $6,500 but I was wary because the buyer was dragging their feet and didn’t know much about the transfer of the website or how to operate it. I wanted a quick sale and quick transfer, so I sold the site to someone who knew what they were doing and could transfer everything without a hitch.
Within three days of posting the auction I had my $5,500 via Google Checkout, and less than a week later the full website and database were transferred over to the new owner without me doing much work (this is why I chose to sell to someone who knew what they were doing).
This profit tally doesn’t include the Adsense revenue the site brought in…probably somewhere in the hundreds of dollars range.
For me the transaction is over, but it’s nice to see the new owner is actually drastically improving upon the website. He added a whole slew of new features, posts, articles, re-structured the advertising and even added a Facebook Forum for developers and users.
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So from a random idea last year, I got some good experience, several hundred dollars in adverting revenue and a nice $5,500 payout this year!