You have made the decision to sell your blog and already have an acceptable offer for your content site from a potential buyer? Then it is time for you to start thinking about the preparation of the sale. Especially if you want to complete the sale quickly, you should have made some preparations before signing a sales contract.
Save time with solid preparation
At TreasureHunter we regularly make the experience in the purchase of various content portals that the preparation of the respective founder decides significantly on the time of the sales process. While well-prepared sellers typically complete transactions in less than 14 days, the buying and selling process can take up to 6 weeks or longer for founders with little or no preparation!
Noch viel wichtiger: Rund die Hälfte aller initiierten aber nicht zum Abschluss gebrachten Ankaufsprozess im globalen Handel digitaler Assets sind nach unserer Schätzung auf mangelhafte Bereitstellung von Unterlagen und Dokumentationen auf Verkäuferseite zurückzuführen. Wenn Du also nicht nur Abwicklungsgeschwindigkeit erhöhen sondern auch die Deal-Wahrscheinlichkeit nicht gefährden möchtest, solltest Du die Vorbereitung sowie unsere nachfolgenden Tipps ernst nehmen.
Tip 1: Identify asset-specific key figures
A P&L (profit and loss statement), i.e. a monthly statement of all income and expenses over the last 24 months, is requested by every serious buyer. In the best case, you already have an overview at hand or you can organize it through your tax advisor. If you have several websites and revenue streams are mixed (e.g. an affiliate account is used for several websites), the effort for asset-specific revenue allocation may be more extensive. We would be happy to provide you with a P&L template. Please send us an email with the subject ‘P&L template’ to [email protected].
By the way: Ideally, you group the different cost and revenue items into areas. For sales, these can be, among others:
- Display advertising
- Affiliate revenues
- Direct advertising
And in terms of costs, you can break it down into these areas by way of example:
- Content creation
- SEO and online marketing
- Sales activities
Do not hesitate too long with the transmission of this information. If in doubt, ask the interested party for a signed NDA and then send him the P&L statement. Only on the basis of this data will he be in a position to make a sound offer.
Tip 2: Proactively take your own time into account when considering costs
As a founder, you will have distributed the profit of your blog over the years as your ‘salary’. The buyer will ask you in any case, how high your real effort over the last years averaged per week / month was. In any case, give a realistic estimate and document it briefly, explaining on which activities you have allocated your time.
If you don’t provide any or untrustworthy values, any serious buyer will estimate your time expenditures based on averaged experience values incl. markup as a ‘safety buffer’, which regularly has a detrimental effect on the EBIT(DA) and thus the central calculation basis for your sales price.
Tip 3: Clarify the rights to your content
Blog buyers, such as us at TreasureHunter, buy not only the domain, but also the tech, IP and content of the respective assets. In any case, you should clarify in advance and be able to prove via contracts that the rights to texts, images, videos and technical developments are yours.
If this is partially not the case, you should proactively inform the prospective buyer and obtain or acquire the corresponding rights from the rights holder in parallel. Statistically, unresolved rights to content are one of the most common reasons why website sales fail. The sooner you seek clarity on this, the lower the risk that you will invest time in a doomed sales process.
Tip 4: List accesses and contacts
Ideally, you list all contacts and contact persons of all business partners on Excel spreadsheets. Such a list is required by the buyer anyway and gives you a good overview of who you might want to inform in advance about the upcoming deal. Concrete contacts can be:
- Contact persons of affiliate networks and other advertising networks
- Contact persons of direct advertising customers
- Permanent and freelance employees or freelancers, e.g. editors
- Consulting agencies and service providers such as SEO agencies
Tip 5: Create and update process documentation
With your blog, you are selling a company and thus operational and strategic processes that have contributed significantly to the creation of value through your asset and should continue to do so in the future under the management of the buyer. Accordingly, process documentation is essential for serious buyers and will be requested at a later stage of due diligence. If these are missing, this can not only reduce the valuation of your asset but in the worst case even lead to a (temporary) termination of the negotiation talks by the interested party!
It is best to go through the existing process documentation before the in-depth negotiation with a prospective buyer, supplement and update it where necessary and prepare it uniformly in the form of Excel spreadsheets or Google Sheets. This not only strengthens your profile as a seller in the external perception, but also significantly increases the speed with which you can sell your blog.
If you have any questions about these tips, please feel free to contact our team. Just send us an email at [email protected]. We look forward to reading from you and wish you a smooth sale of your blog!