Are you sure you would rather sell than lease?

For a small business on a tight budget, a $300 a month pill may be easier to swallow than a $5- or $10-grand elephant.

There are a couple strategies you could employ once you have the website up and running and ranked in Google.

You could turn it into a local plumber directory and then rent it out to plumbers by having them pay to be prominently displayed on the top.

You could also turn it into a lead generation site and sell the individual leads to plumbing companies. It should be noted that this strategy is very hands on and with the nature of plumbers being an immediate need, it might be more work than it is worth.

You could also look to sell the site to a plumbing business and let them take over the site and have the top ranking.

You could also sell it on Flippa.com to another person who wants to do lead generation. You could also offer it on WF to sell it to somebody too.

Since you stated you would rather sell the site, I would just get it up, rank it and then see what you could sell it for at auction on Flippa.

One thing to note with the price you get-- it is totally dependent on traffic. You may be able to get it ranked highly for a Google keyword, but if nobody is searching for that keyword and you aren't driving traffic to the site, it will essentially be worthless.

When doing your keyword research in Google, make sure that you are looking at the search numbers for an EXACT match, not a BROAD search, otherwise you will inflate your numbers by quite a bit and be disappointed with the actual results.

-Ben

It really depends on your area too. My husband and I just did a workshop last night for tradespeople (electricians, plumbers etc) in our area and we had the same comments we always do, "I don't need a website, I'm busy enough already." So frustrating!

Having said that, NO ONE here has any clue about SEO so it would be so easy to plunk up a site and get top ranking. So tempting... wouldn't hurt to try I guess.

Thanks everyone for the great advice! I like the leasing idea.

I do this, only instead of selling the sites, I sell leads I generate from the site and always keep actual ownership of the site. It becomes an asset to my company, and it generates cashflow consistently.

The only thing I'd say is watch out what industries you try and get involved in.. some of them have regulatory bodies that prevent them buying leads, etc.

If you're absolutely looking to flip them because you don't want to deal with the management, it's going to depend on the performance of the site.

If the site looks pretty, but does nothing in the way of producing leads, it's not very valuable... if it has traffic and you can prove its value, you shouldn't have too much trouble finding a plumber (or insert industry) to buy it. Just make the numbers make sense to them.

I would suggest you did some research, found out how much traffic the keywords get and then do some generic analysis based on traffic and conversions. If lets say you get 1000 hits a month, and you manage to convert 50-100 through the contact form, multiply that by the average plumber call cost ($200) in your area and get a number. So, lets say the site could potentially generate 10 to 20 k in revenue/month. Adjust your price accordingly whether you want to sell the site, the lead or lease it. It all depends on how much traffic your site gets, how well it converts etc. But if it is a plumber then it would convert best if there is a phone number on it