How a Public Site Sale Can Harm Your Reputation

April 30, 2010 in Business by Olgi Zenullari

I’ve seen different big sites or communities that announce it in public when their site is for sale. They even add some big texts on the header of their website to attract as many visitors as possible to their auction page or to their announcement
In this article I will speak briefly how a public sale could most probably harm your reputation and make your loyal members feel disappointed

How a Public Site Sale Can Come Back As a Boomerang?

This happens especially in communities where the role of an admin (or site owner) is crucial. If you are going to sell any site you better do it as privately as possible (learn from the bigs, most of the Fortune 500 companies hire brokers to acquire other companies / businesses secretly). In a huge forum (let’s say a get paid forum) your members would feel really anxious for the future of the community, not because they love you but because they might not feel safe anymore (payments missing, site disappears etc)

Its a simple logic, in a money making site where the owner of the forum pays every member for each post, to sell the site publicly is a suicide, tons of emails , private messages and other ways of contacting until they get their hard earned cash. If you are the owner and you are actually selling a money making community, means you are either not making money or tired of that job, in both the cases you will harm your reputation and if you will ever want to re-open a similar forum you won’t have the same success

The Advantages of Public Sales

Public sales have a lot of advantages as well and one of the most important ones is without doubt, traffic! If you list your website on the top webmaster forums (at the proper buy / sell section) you are going to get a lot of traffic because people in nature are curious to see what you are selling (so they can see how you are generating profit but thats another case). Some times people post fake sale announcements just to get traffic and at the end they keep the site themselves (this is most probably the “fake it till you make it”

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