I recently received an email from someone who wants to purchase my domain. He asked me to tell him what I want for it. I asked him to make an offer and he replied. "I will be very open and I would expect that your domain cost will take me 1 year or more to make a return or break even on the cost. If you decided to sell I would want a number that you were happy with and one that I could work into my plans." I was considering pay SEDO.com to professionally appraise the site but I don't know if it's a reliable source. Should I hire them to broker the sale? I make roughly $2000 dollars a year from the site and could make more if I dedicated more time to it. I have the #1 spot for the search term "bar tricks" on Google. I use the domain as my primary email address. The domain is Bartendermagic.com. The guy who wants to buy it sells bar trick videos online and has good Google rankings too.

Any guidance or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Taking the emotion out of the equation sites sell for 10-24 times monthly earnings as a general rule. Or 1-2 years of earnings said another way.

Sedo and the others are going to look at the domain name only, not the earnings. IMO they are waste.

Since you are looking a decent amount of money, I would use some form of escrow service.

I agree with colbyt. Given that you have your email there, you could charge him plus because of that.
I would say 5-7k is a decent offer. Try to test the market at 7.5k and see what is he saying.

Alex

Thanks for both of your replies. I think 6-7 would be fair but I dropped the 30 bucks for a sedo domain appraisal anyway. I figured it couldn't hurt. Should I also let the company I make most of my affiliate sales through know that I'm interested in selling the site. I make them roughly 6000 to 10000 a year. Perhaps they'd be interested in buying the site from me.

I would ask for $20,000 in this case, fixed price.

If I were you, I will sell all my site not the domain only because as you said it generates more than $2000/year so you sell it for $10,000 or more & you will ofcaurse find alot of buyers "only in that case" but as some user said above, don't use Sedo, DP,...etc because they value the domain only.
Good luck.

Now is it $2000 dollars gross or profit. The name is good and if profit I would suggest in my humble opinion at least $10k

Originally Posted by webeteran

Now is it $2000 dollars gross or profit. The name is good and if profit I would suggest in my humble opinion at least $10k

That's $2000 profit after hosting charges. Even if you factor in the time I put into it. (which is almost zero) it's almost all profit.

Originally Posted by felixtito

I recently received an email from someone who wants to purchase my domain. He asked me to tell him what I want for it. I asked him to make an offer and he replied. "I will be very open and I would expect that your domain cost will take me 1 year or more to make a return or break even on the cost. If you decided to sell I would want a number that you were happy with and one that I could work into my plans."

Any guidance or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Be Very careful when dealing with someone like this. Alot of them try to get you have them or someone they know appraise the domain. They will talk a good show for you getting you to think that they are going to pay you a ton for a domain if the appraisal is good. Once you pay them or their friend for the appraisal you never hear from them again.

I am not saying that this one is a scam but when you get unsolicited email offering big money for a domain watch out.

If you do proceed with the sale, make sure you use an appraisal service that you choose and if the price is more than a few hundred dollars use an escrow service to handle the transaction.

If it is a scam after a few emails back and forth of you not allowing him handle the sale and not getting the appraisal from an appraiser that he reccomends the emails will stop.

Good luck and I hope it works out for you.

Mark

That's seems like sound advice. I've learned that when something seems too good to be true, it usually is. In this case however, this individual and I have emailed each other back and forth over the years about bar tricks. I did sign up for a domain appraisal through Sedo.com two Fridays ago but that was my own idea. He didn't mention getting the site appraised at all. He just wants me to give him a number. I still haven't heard from Sedo.com but they said it would take up to seven business days. After reading some of the responses though I'm not too sure that it was money well spent.

I spoke with a friend of mine about this and he suggested placing the domain and site on Ebay for auction. I have to look into that more but if I did it that way would I be able to avoid hiring an escrow company. If not does anyone have any recommendations for a good escrow company?

Thanks all of you for your help so far. It's been extremely useful.

I would ask 10k for this domain.