Selling a website is a great way to generate cash, free up your time for other projects and reward yourself for your hard work. It can also be a difficult, stressful process in frustration that can result in you selling a website for less than you think it’s worth. I’ve sold several sites on Flippa, ranging from entertainment blogs to unique service websites with massive amounts of press coverage. The last website I sold on Flippa became the most active website auction in Flippa’s history. Over the course of my successful Flippa sales, and from observing other successful auctions, I’ve discovered that the elements that make an auction successful aren’t the same as what many people expect. From the length of your auction to press coverage of your website, a huge range of factors can affect your Flippa sale price. Below are the eight factors that I think are most influential for maximizing your website’s sale price on Flippa.

Press coverage on a high-traffic, mainstream blog is often all it takes to catapult your website into the public eye. The power of the tech press has grown so massive that a lot of startup founders think that getting into TechCrunch is all it takes to make it. Over the last couple of years I’ve launched several websites, ranging from humorous and amusing online games to glitter shipping services, and managed to attract press attention from publications like Fast Company, The Guardian, Time and hundreds of other high-traffic websites. The strategy I used wasn’t the traditional mass sending of press releases or stalking journalists on Twitter, but understanding how and where tech journalists find their stories, then using this information to put my content in front of them. If you have an interesting product, a unique service or a website that stands out, it’s surprisingly easy to achieve the same results. Here’s how:

Coverage in the mainstream media is one of the most effective ways to put your app, startup or website in front of millions of potential customers. The only problem is that getting press coverage, at least for a small company, is very difficult. Cold emailing journalists is a slow, time-consuming and boring process that rarely produces results, while hiring a PR firm is usually prohibitively expensive. The solution is to forget about the traditional rules of interacting with the press and instead use cheap and effective techniques to set your startup, app or website apart from the crowd and make it something journalists want to talk about. From old-fashioned publicity stunts to deliberately offending people that you know will talk about your product, here are five cheap and unconventional ways to make the press pay attention to your startup, app or website.