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I'm sorry to be picky here, but "hits" is not a good term to use when discussing traffic. For example, if you put 50 pictures on a single page and that page was viewed one time the web tracking program would record 51 hits - one for the page and 50 for the graphics.

What I'm sure you meant was 50 unique visitors a day. "Uniques" are a better barometer of site traffic, and good stat packages like Google Analytics automatically filter out search engine and most bot visits from people visits.

Another metric you should include in your valuation calculation is estimated search traffic. What you want to do is pick the top 2 or 3 KW's for that site and see how much traffic those KW's generate on a daily basis, then compare that to the total unique visits per day.

Why is that an important metric to ad? If the daily estimated search traffic for those KW's is 15,000 a day then 50 unique visitors is not that much. To me, that makes the site far less valuable. But if the daily estimated KW searches is 150 per day that makes the site more valuable.

The last metric - and the most important - is conversions. A conversion might be completing a sale, filling out a form and requesting more info, signing up for a newsletter, clicking on banner ads, or other "take action" points on a web site. After all, a site that generates traffic but doesn't convert is essentially worthless.

In the end, even if you have a site with decent traffic and conversions I think it would be hard to sell, especially in this economy. You need to be willing to carry the site for a long time and look at many distribution channels other than eBay (and factor out visits from those other channels from your daily unique visitor stats!).

If you do this you should find a way to monetize the site for yourself while you're trying to sell it, even if that was is by putting a few Google ads on the site. I don't think your idea is a bad one at all, I just think that you need to further that idea and come up with a good business plan before you enact it. You might find that the price you want to sell a site for does not even come close to the time, effort, and money you put into it.

Would seem to me that if you are smart enough to find a niche, build a site, write the content and grab relevant traffic, then you should be monetizng that site for yourself and making a nice tidy long term proft for yourself.

As a further response to Nobby's post, it would be good to get a list together of things to do when looking for a niche in which you could create a website. An obvious start would be:

Are sites on page 1 of google optimising it in their page title?
Do the most highly searched for keywords in that niche searched for enough?

I'd first start looking at building up content. Maybe add a blog and start posting valuable and relevant information. You'll need to give visitors a reason to visit the site and come back. At the moment the site just looks like a single holding page.

Monitising the site I'd say an affiliate scheme might be a good idea. I haven't had any experience of using adsense on a site so I'm not sure what the returns would be.

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Adsense results vary wildely, i guess it all depends on what you call a good return. In the mortgage niche ads can pay pretty well, on the down side your specific niche is very localized, im not sure how much traffic you could get.

I have owned many adsense sites over the years, some have earned pretty well, other barely cover their own domain and hosting. I guess the beauty with adsense is, its very simple to add and likewise if its not working for you, quick to remove and try something else.

Yeah I've thought about it but not tried. They do get indexed quite quickly and I do get adsense clicks on hubpages. Could also use them for affiliate schemes too, like you say.

I got a click on my mortgage adsense and I got 54p for it whilst Adwords says it costs between £6 to £8 per click. Any reason why my Adsense revenue was so low? Was the ad clicked on just a low paying advert?

That's right from past experience I would of thought that my percentage would of been higher but I don't have a huge amount of Adsense experience either.