Newbie Here, Need Some Serious Advice on How to Sell My Blog

I looked at a few articles and I was confident in selling but at the last minute I though I should ask for advice since this is my first time.

My biggest concern is transferring the Wordpress blog to the buyer I basically need to know the steps to take in order to transfer the blog & domain to the buyer as smooth as possible.

The way I understand it, I just need to back up the database file and send it to the buyer then I transfer the domain to the buyer, I’m hosted on Godaddy by the way.

Can anyone please break down the steps for me and I would also like to know the best method of accepting payment because I was originally thinking of Paypal.

Thanks!

How much do you expect to sell the blog for? In general, it’s better to use an escrow service to transfer a website, but if it has little to no revenue or traffic, it might not be worth it.

The basic steps to sell a site are:

  1. Gather proof of your traffic and revenue stats.
  2. Create the listing.
  3. Answer questions from potential buyers during the listing.
  4. When the auction is over, contact the winner to determine how they would like to transfer the site. The easiest thing for you would be to provide access to your hosting control panel. Some buyers might ask you to move the site for them, or want you to make a site backup and send it to them.
  5. Transfer the payment and the site using the method you and the buyer have agreed upon.

You’d be surprised how many problems can come up during this simple process.

Transferring the blog can be tricky if you haven’t done it before.

A couple of links for you if they help: my own article on transfers http://www.experienced-people.co.uk/1022-transfer-site-new-hosting/ and a guide to transfer of Wordpress blogs [URL=“http://www.velvetblues.com/web-development-blog/how-to-move-a-wordpress-blog-or-website/”]http://www.velvetblues.com/web-development-blog/how-to-move-a-wordpress-blog-or-website/.

If you’re moving servers/hosts, you need to backup the database and then upload the database to the new server. That’s easier said than done because it’s not as simple as uploading files/folders. The sending and receiving hosts may have different platforms/different facilities. If they both have the same control panel, it may be as easy as backing up on one and uploading on the other. OTOH, you may have to learn about the SSH command prompt, wget or phpmyadmin.

Have you considered hiring somebody to assist you? There must be a lot of people in Sitepoint for whom this would be child’s play. (No, I don’t take this on myself, sorry)

Thanks guys, really appreciate the advice

I like the idea of giving the buyer access to my hosting control panel. I just checked through Godaddy and they have 4 levels of permission:

1 - Administrative
2 - Infrastructure
3 - Content
4 - Reporting

I’m not sure but should I grant the buyer Infrastructure or Content permission? and I also want to know more about the escrow service because I’m planning on selling my website for $300 it has a valuable domain name and the traffic is decent.

The details are going to depend on your host and registrar, but the article that Fruitmedley Post linked to above has almost all of the information you would need.

Another option to transfer the content is to just turn over the hosting account to the buyer. GoDaddy is a pain to transfer from because their control panel is lacking a lot of features available in other panels, and the buyer might want to take their time.

Regarding escrow, there are a number of options. GoDaddy offers an escrow service if you sell the domain there, and there is escrow.com, sedo.com, and others.

This article pretty much nailed it for me http://www.downloadsquad.com/2006/10/16/how-to-move-a-wordpress-blog-to-a-new-host-dls-recipe/.

I now understand that since it’s a WP blog I just have to hand over the theme, plugins and database. The buyer would then have to install WP on their own server and upload the theme, plugins and import the database file.

On Step 5 it talks about creating a new database or use an existing one but make sure the tablenames (table prefix) is exactly what it was on the old host.

This is where I’m confused, but since the buyer will install a new WP blog I would assume they would create a new database so all they have to do is import the database file that I give them, am I correct? If not can you please explain it further.

Thanks

You would be making it much harder than it has to be. Since you don’t know how to move the site, just make it clear that the seller is responsible for moving the site after you give them FTP access or allow them to take over the hosting.

I wouldn’t recommend that the buyer installs Wordpress from scratch and then trys to upload your database schema, theme, and plugins on top of it, because there could be database changes between versions that would cause the upload to fail.

I’m not familiar with GoDaddy’s hosting control panel, but if your hosting has cPanels and you’ve got Wordpress installed, then check out how to transferring Wordpress to a new host.

The potential problem is the prefix. If for example you’re using the default prefix, the export file would use

.....
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `wp_comments`;
.....
CREATE TABLE `wp_comments` (
.....
INSERT INTO `wp_comments` VALUES (
.....

So if for security reasons they gave the database a different prefix, there would be 2 sets of tables, the wp_ one being inaccessible to them.
And vice-versus if they used the default prefix and you didn’t.

The only way I can think of to get around it is to start with the same prefix, either you changing to theirs first, or changing theirs after.

Of course if you’re both using the same the problem is moot.

  1. As I eluded to in one of my earlier posts in this thread, GoDaddy uses their own control panel that lacks a lot of features included in cPanel and Plesk, and is not very user friendly in my opinion.

  2. I assume you posted in this thread mainly to drop your link to Flippa’s guide to moving a Wordpress site on cPanel, so I took a look at it. Is there any reason that you decided to go through all the extra work of manually backing up the files and exporting the database (and essentially doing all the same steps in reverse on the new server) when someone could just go a full site backup and then restore that backup on the new server? It’s basically 2 steps (full backup to remote FTP server, restore on new server) and there is almost no way to make a mistake.

It was a resource that I thought might help others, not just for this particular case. Do you berate FruitMedley when he links to Experienced People? I think not.

Luke, I didn’t intend to berate you.

I suppose I was a little harsh, but that’s because your post is not really relevant to the OP’s question, since GoDaddy uses their own control panel, and I mentioned that above. If Fruitmedley or anyone else posted a link to his or her own site that provided little information that is on topic, I would have said something similar.

Also, I was asking a legitmate question about your tutorial. I generally do full backups because they are easier to move and I have never had a problem, but there could be limitations that I don’t know about.

Fair enough benitez. I was merely providing it as a resource for others who may have cPanels accounts. It’s a resource I looked high and low for and not finding it, created the tutorial for the 100’s of Flippa Wordpress buyers/sellers.

To be honest, I haven’t tried the backup method, so I’ll give it a go and compare the two - seems like it sure would make life easier.

Luke, let me know how it goes. I have never used shared hosting, so maybe there are some people who can’t do full backups, or some other catch that I have never encountered when moving my sites around or moving sites that I bought from others.

I had no problem finding several guides explaining how to move a cPanel website when I looked for some to see if there were any issues with using the method I recommended. Maybe your difficulties were a quirk related to the difference in our locations?

That was the only potential issue I could think of - multiple domains on the one cPanels account. Never used that type of hosting either so can’t be too sure.

I had no problem finding several guides explaining how to move a cPanel website …

Hmmm, perhaps I wasn’t looking hard enough. It was a while back now so and I might have been searching for “move/transfer a wordpress blog”.

Luke,

Any update? I did a little research, and it doesn’t look like cPanel supports hosting multiple websites under a single account. You can put multiple domains in an account, but I haven’t found a way to host more than one website on those domains.

Benitez,

I’m pretty sure multiple sites can be hosted and administered in cPanels - I’ve seen Hostgator do this with their basic unlimited domain accounts. See Hostgator support.

So it begs the question: Can you backup a single domain from one of these cPanel account? I’ve asked Hostgator for an answer on this so we’ll see what they come back with.

If you use reseller accounts, they each have their own login under the master account and can be accessed and backed up individually (at least when I have set them up).

It looks like there is a way to host multiple domains under a shared account, so I’ll have to play around with cPanel some more.

This is the response from Hostgator in regards to backing up non-reseller unlimited hosting accounts:

The only options in cPanel are to generate a full web site backup which will back up everything for the account, a home directory backup which gets all of the files in your home directory including all of your web files for primary and addon domains, or database backups.

As benitez suggested - easy to backup and transfer if you have a reseller account but not so easy with a unlimited domain cPanels account.

Thanks for finding the answer to my question. Doing a backup in segments like that isn’t too bad, but it does require the account to be set up on the new host.