I’m Retiring and Selling This Well-Established, 6-Year-Old Web Site and 30-Year-Old Business.
HumaneTrophies.com will continue to serve customers with all of the dedication that has made this business such a successful and fun enterprise for all.
Humane Trophies served me, my late husband, and our customers well for 30 years. Now I’m retiring, so I would like to transfer to your web site my traffic, incoming links, and Google PageRank for a price so low that I won’t have to spend much time haggling. For a price far lower than any other marketing channel, your business will get an immediate boost in relevant search engine traffic and sales.
Ideally, the buyer would also purchase the inventory (at 35% of retail selling price), the trademark, and the copyrighted patterns for $125,000, though they could be sold separately, subject to negotiations. The web site alone is valued at $16,783 and is offered for $5595. We started production of Humane Trophies in 1980. The moose head was my first design. Many more designs followed, including heads, rear ends, rugs, tuffets (stools), and apartment sized (smaller) trophies and rugs. We stopped production in 2005 and have been selling the inventory on line. The inventory is for sale which includes the items on the web site, hundreds of yards of luxury faux fur, eyes and thread.
For years now, web sites have been bought and sold with the benefit of objective measures of minimum value. Of course value above that minimum is a matter of opinion and circumstance, but the minimum is simple math: number of yearly visits and search engine referrals multiplied by the average pay-per-click (PPC) cost in the given industry. I don’t run PPC campaigns – all traffic to my site is free – but average PPC costs per click are established by many bidders in our industry throughout the US. The numbers below and thus the valuation of my website are provided by Google’s Analytics and other tools, which most of the world’s web sites use.
For six years, my web marketing has been managed by a top-flight search marketing firm, DISC Inc., which has specialized in search engine marketing for over 13 years. They have maintained the site and its search engine presence continuously.
According to Google, my site’s valuation (not including inventory, trademark, and copyrighted patterns) is:
20,220 visits from 3/1/09 to 2/28/10 (11,655 from search engines), multiplied by
$0.83 average cost per click for a well managed PPC campaign, equals
$16,783, based on a one year valuation (subsequent years are gravy)
Of course targeted PPC traffic would be worth more than some of the 11,655 organic clicks the site receives, and there are web hosting fees, and some webmaster time in incorporating the new site, so let’s cut the price to a third, from $16,783 to $5595.
That $5595 price includes several related domain names and all customer information from past sales. You could leave the site as is but direct people to click to your site for purchasing or more shopping, or you could 301 redirect all traffic to your site, or you could run the site as is, either adding your inventory to mine or replacing mine with yours if you don’t buy the inventory and copyrighted design. The 301 redirect option would gradually remove HumaneTrophies.com from the search engines, though you would continue to receive all of the Google PageRank, which is a function of the quantity and quality of incoming links to HumaneTrophies.com (and .net) established over six years. If you don’t buy the trademark, then you could not own the domain name, and would have to do the 301 redirect. Our web marketing firm can explain all of this to you.
The site has 27 incoming links, of which 5 have Google PageRank of 4, 7 of 3, 5 of 2, and the rest have PageRank under 2 or unknown. Hiring a link marketing firm to acquire such links would cost between $3000 and $5000.
I'm sure you have questions, so feel free to contact me. Or call me now at 802-254-4439. People expressing interest will get access to my Google Analytics data and other supporting data from my search marketing vendor.
