How to sell large public site without letting the users know the site is up for sale?

[Adverted]

I own a large community website which has a lots of registered members and daily activity, plus millions of page views. I wanted to know how to handle a possible sale of the site without letting the members know its for sale, but still attract the key buyers within the market.

The domain itself is valuable, being 4 characters long, but the value is in the community and the revenue potential off its members, I don't want to monetize the site, but have been approached by 2 different people to buy the site, but if I sell i want to allow more people the chance to bid.

Is there some type of public but yet preapporeved bidder auction or other ways to make the sale known but only to those within the domain/web development community?

Any help or can offer will be great,

Stephen

 

[Albert Tai]

You could make a sale thread as in PM me for the site url. This could keep the site from being in google index in a sales thread and also won't be seen if any potential member of your community was browsing around the forum that you posted in your sales thread in.

 

[Adverted]

Thanks for some of the advice, it looks like its going to be hard to try and do a publicish sale, will just dig around using linkedin and whois info and contract certain people that I knew would be interested,

 

[Steen]

List it for sale on Site Point and use tinyURL for all URLs and spell the name "E X A M P L E . C O M" so it does not show up in search engines.

 

[nameadvertising.com]

Contact a well known broker. Attend a domain show where many private deals are consummated.