How much can you sell a business for?

How much you sell for depends mostly on the history of the site and how long it has had its traffic/revenue for. A site that's been around over a year and has fairly consistent net profits of $15k/month can easily be sold for $300-500K or more if it's in a well established market and the product/site is good quality. If you have a one-of-a-kind type of service making good revenue then you can often find a buyer or company that is willing to pay a hell of a lot more, otherwise, for simple content sites they normally sell for 1-5 years worth of revenue if they have been around for a long time. Of course if you're selling a business that has only been around for a couple of months you would be lucky to get 6-12 months worth of revenue when you sell out.

Reality is you'll NOT sell for much to ONLINE business buyers... There seems to be some weird expectation that 3-6 month net revenue is a fair price. It's not.

Sell to offline buyers - they'll value a business more appropriately, especially one so "hands free" as an internet biz.

A business can sell for anything between $10 and $2.5 billion.

Thanks for the responses everyone. Do you know of any resources I could get my hands on to help me evaluate what my business could sell for?

One of the most important factors to consider when investing, selling, or buying a business is the price-earnings ratio. Don't let this term scare you, it's very simple. This ratio basically tells you how long it would take for you to recoup your entire investment in this business and start generating profits.

I'm not in the stock market, but I remember Apple having a price-earnings ratio of 40. This 40 means that you will recoup your investment in Apple's stock after 40 years! Obviously no one would wanna wait that long for their money. But people still bought the stock at this price point because of one important reason: Apple was expected to grow very quickly. That's also why hot start-ups with a bright prospect sell for a P/E ratio of 30+. If everything goes as planned, this 30 will quickly drop to 3, and investors will recoup their investment in 3 years and start making profits.

So, if you have a business that makes 15K/month. That would mean 180K/year. With these figures in mind, calculate a fair P/E ratio.

One way to do that is to look at the current P/E ratio of other companies in the industry; how much they sold for. Then adjust your own price earnings ratio depending on how better/worse your business generally is.

If similar companies sold for a P/E of 15, maybe yours could sell for 20. That would mean your business is worth 180K X 20 = 3,600K. Congrats, you can retire now.