Established forums are becoming very desirable properties. Just ask Lee – he’s recently sold several larger sites very quickly for very good prices. Across the Internet landscape, large and small companies are being snatched up left and right. For example, did you read about Sony’s acquisition of Grouper? Grouper holds less than 1% of the online video market (where YouTube is king at 43%), and doesn’t have a dime of revenue. But that’s okay with Sony – they just paid $65,000,000 in cash for them. (Go ahead, count the zeros.) It’s funny, because they get as much traffic as we do every month…
Okay, so how does this apply to forum owners? While Internet forums are not nearly as hot as video sharing websites, we should still take away a few lessons from those who have been bought before us. Now, before you decide to stop reading because your beloved forum isn’t for sale, understand that I know you are attached to your site (we all have some level of attachment), but if some big company came along and offered you a whole heap of money for your site, I think you might reconsider that stance. But the key is that if you aren’t ready for that offer, it won’t happen. With a little bit of foresight, you could avoid a whole lot of heartache later.
We all need to run our forums like they are for sale on the open market. Why? Because everything is for sale and there are plenty of shoppers out there with money to spend. How you run your site before the sale will determine what caliber of buyer (and what price tag) you can expect. And I am not only talking about traffic stats and Adsense screen shots.
Treat Your Records – Traffic and Otherwise – Like GOLD. What is it, exactly, that you own? Your online real estate is totally virtual. It could go -poof- into thin air in the blink of an eye. So, too, could your traffic stats, financial records, and other virtual data. Do you back up your website? You should be backing up everything, all the time.
In that same vein, make SURE you have a long trail of traffic stats. I don’t care about just the last three months of a two year-old site! I care about the last two years. And don’t use the, “I changed servers, so I lost my stats” crap. You can still keep that data. To me that says poor planning, and if you are that bad at something so simple, it leaves me to wonder what else you may have missed in running your business.
Does Your Bookkeeping Hold Up? How many forum owners treat their forum like a business? Whether that means hiring a virtual assistant to do your books, or simply using a program like QuickBooks to do it yourself – it needs to be done. We are very fortunate that keeping financial records for a website is generally very, very simple. But simply having that record is HUGE. Take the time NOW to make sure that you get what you deserve in the event of a potential future sale. This isn’t something to try and backtrack on later. A business with good books will sell far more easily than one with shoddy record keeping. (Oh, and you should keep good books anyway, but that’s another post. 
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Get Everything in Writing. Do you have special arrangements in place with other sites or vendors? Do you swap banner space with any other sites? Do you get a discount on advertising on any other sites? Anything that you have arranged with any other website or business should be in writing. If it isn’t now, write something up and make it official. As a buyer, would you think twice about the future of these relationships as the new owner? You sure would.
Make sure that you are not currently harboring any of these buyer red flags. If you are, deal with them NOW and not later:
- Poor traffic stats history
- Poor advertising management
- Poor bookkeeping (incomplete, improperly kept, etc.)
- Undocumented business relationships
- Undocumented systems and procedures (Could someone run your business if you died tomorrow? If not, it’s time to start writing down what you do.)
For anyone that is reading this thinking it might not apply to them since Google, Microsoft, or some other massive entity won’t be buying a basket weaving hobby forum anytime soon, this kind of preparation can have just as large of an impact on businesses with much smaller price tags. I saw a site for sale recently in the gaming niche that had a ton of potential. Great idea, good programming, good name. Unfortunately, the owner had a server crash and had lost some members and all traffic stats. The site was up for sale with no actual traffic or financial information. I doubt it sold for the $1,000 starting bid, but if he had proof of the stats he claimed he had prior to the crash, he would have gotten at least 5 times more than what he was asking. It’s a good lesson to learn. Your site is only as good as what you can present at the time of sale.
So starting today, keep your records squeaky clean and run your site like it was actively for sale. You never know when that offer will come along that you can’t refuse, and with proper planning, the deal may actually come to fruition.
