Advance Preparation for a Sale: Keep Separate Accounts

As I’ve pointed out often, income is great, but it barely holds a candle to what you can make when you sell a site.  If you follow a wise plan, you’re looking at at least a 5X buyout and quite likely 10X or more.  10 years’ worth of income would be more than enough for many people to sell and move on to the next thing.

So while it’s important to lay the foundation for a maximum sale price, you also want to take steps now to make sure that the transition goes as smoothly as possible.  Believe me, you don’t want to be stuck running a site any longer than you have to after it’s sold.  You want to be able to hand over the keys and just walk away.

One thing that will help you do that is making sure that each of your sites has a separate account at each service you use.  If you don’t, separating them at sale time can be very painful, if not impossible.

For example, I’ve sold two sites to buyers who are still linked to my Google Analytics account because they needed access to historical stats.  Because I couldn’t transfer just one site’s stats to them, I had to just keep them linked indefinitely — and Analytics was the easiest situation.  For most services, there’s no way at all to give custom access to different individuals.  Thus you’re faced with either turning over the account in whole and moving your other sites out of it, or the buyer having to create a brand new account and start from scratch.

Obviously the easier you can make it for the buyer, the better deal you’re going to get and the more willing buyers you’re have.  So, if you have multiple sites all running under the same accounts at Analytics, AdSense, Commission Junction, etc., split those out into their own accounts as soon as you can.  It will be a little more work initially, but it will save you big time later.