Hi Everyone
I'm thinking of selling all of my sites, including my main site which is an online magazine. I'm not 100% sure yet, but if the price is right, I might be up for selling it. I don't really have enough time to work with it anymore, so it's not fair towards the writers (who are all writing pretty much for free), thus I think new owner might be a good idea. Here's the info -
1. Your name - Siim Einfeldt
2. URL of site -
thecheers.org
3. Age of site - 3,5 years
4. Approximate monthly page views and/or unique visitor - last month, 14 771 uniques and a 22 000 views. In best months the number have been 25-100k, but not lately due to lack of time.
5. How does site generate income? How much? - Around $200 from linkworth, around $100-200 from adsense, around $20 from kontera, and ca $50-$200 via direct link sales.
6. Who develops content and how much time does it require? - This magazine is volunteer based. This means that the content is written by writers for free. Lately I have offered the writers 30% of adsense revenue via their own adsense codes, but it's still rather close to 0. Writers write because they like it, they get exposure etc. And if the new owner is right, I would definitely suggest everyone to keep writing for the magazine in hopes that the new owner will be able to get the traffic levels a lot higher. Over the 3,5 years more than 200 people from more than 30 countries have written for the magazine. Currently there's ca 10-15 active writers and new articles are published pretty much daily (except for the past two weeks as I was away myself). Plus there's a list of 50 people who could be writing for the magazine as well, but possibly need some waking up.
So generally speaking, volunteer writers write, volunteer editors edit and you do the publishing (but this could be done by someone else as well). So partly, it works if you only spend 5 minutes per day working with it. BUT in order to get it running better, to get writers more active, to get more traffic, then you will need to spend a lot more time with it.
Every week we receive a number of requests to review cd's (since we're also featured in Indie Bible) and applications from new people who'd like to write for the magazine are coming in quite often as well.
The magazine has it's own custom CMS with even a blogging option and the cms itself can be reused for creating new magazines. This of course would take a bit of time from your programmer, but it's pretty reusable, I have used it myself on different sites as well.
7. Reason for selling - time issues
8. Will you help with the transition of the site to the new owner? - yes
9. Does the site have an e-zine or newsletter? Number of subscribers? - not really
10. The asking price for the site. - I'm not sure about selling the magazine yet, but in order to even consider it, the price will need to be $15000+. And I'd really like to be sure that the new owner will be doing everything in his power to get more publicity to the writers. And of course, more publicity to them means more traffic to you which again means more money.
Note that the potential is huge considering the amount of writers, 2000 past articles that could all be optimized better for search engines. Note that most of the articles do not get old because they are not news stories, but other genres.
Anyone interested, contact me for more information (specific questions please) or in case of no questions, make your offer in this forum. (leapfish.com appraisal for the site $33k -
http://leapfish.com/domain_name_appr....thecheers.org)
