The blogging world seems to run on themes. When one blogger does something, it catches on and soon several people do it. We’ve seen this in every area from ways to monetize a site, things we write about, redesigning your blog, and now we’re seeing it with selling blogs. NorthxEast was the first one I noticed selling for more than $8k. Then Blogging Fingers (yet another blog I read) went up for sale and apparently went for $6k. This morning Darren Rowse wrote a post about the sale of several sites and even tossed out a couple I hadn’t heard about.
With results like this, and the type of coverage these sales have been getting, you can bet we’ll be seeing several more before too long. The amount of money to be made is too high not to at least consider it. For example, Blogging Fingers sold for $6,000. The subscriber count is right around 200 and Matt apparently made $380 the last full month prior to the sale. Naturally the first thing that goes through my mind when I see those numbers is what is Blogging Experiment worth? I have right around 400 subscribers, and made right around $600 last month (plus I’m on pace to top that this month). When you consider those numbers, a price of 10 to 12 thousand dollars seems fairly realistic. Now I don’t know about you but that’s not chump change for me, at least not yet 
.
Ok, I won’t let those thoughts run through your head any longer. No, I’m not selling Blogging Experiment. Unless someone came in and blew me away with an offer I couldn’t refuse, I don’t ever plan on selling it. Besides, if my goal is to make $6k a month with it, selling for $12k would seem fairly short sighted don’t you think?
However, the point remains there is substantial money to be made from launching and then selling a blog. Often the launch is the toughest part and if you get good at doing that over and over, you could make a substantial amount of money. I mean shoot, this blog so far is pretty much a road map to do just that. Set up a blog, start writing some quality content, promote it for a couple of months, then monetize it. Just like that you’ve got something that’s worth several thousand dollars. If you can manage to work on a couple of blogs at the same time and each time sell them for a good price, you could make a fairly decent living! Granted it’s not the traditional method to make money blogging, but a lot of times it’s these outside-of-the-box type ideas that turn out to be the most profitable.
A good website which is generating lot of revenue will have good worth in the market. For this, companies fully depend upon search advertising capabilities. One way is to make a website based on search engine optimization (seo) techniques. This technique will help in improving the site seo rankings by showing a site earlier in the search results and more searchers will go to that site. Another way is email marketing software that makes it simple to build specialized html email campaigns with no high-tech expertise. A link exchange manager is also used to increase website traffic. Other techniques include adsense marketing, adword, banners etc. It’s best to choose the technique which best suites your business, your pocket and generate good amount of revenue.
Author: Ben
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It’s amazing what blogs are selling for over the last couple days. Deciding if you want to sell your blog now is hard, but you need to focus on what you set out to do. Was it to build a blog and sell it or hold onto it and generate monthly revenue?
Matt from BloggingFingers also sold his first blog for $1000. Its also developed for around 3 months.
Selling your site after a short period of time can’t be good for your future ventures. Your readers at the next blog can’t trust you anymore.
That aside, Why don’t you sell one of your abandoned blogs in this booming “property market”?
Well, I don’t really believe in making money by selling blogs. Unless you have a tremendously influential profile in the social media world or have some contacts in the A List, launching a blog from the ground is difficult ALWAYS. What I like about blogging is the fact that it’s almost passive income after a year or two. I mean look at John Chow, he doesn’t do much marketing of his blog. His blog income is pretty much on auto-pilot these days. The only thing you’ve to do once you have an established blog is to write content. I would rather wait for the big money at the end rather than stressing myself out every 3 months trying to make a blog successful, selling it and making $3000-$6000…
I started writing a reply to this but it’s long I’m going to keep it to post on Blogging Fingers.
Be sure to check Blogging Fingers tomorrow for my response to this.
Matt, I’ll be interested to hear your input since you’ve been down that road already.
@ Ruchir, I don’t see how you “don’t believe in making money selling blogs.” I mean it’s not really debatable that it’s an option. Now, I’d agree with you that the launch CAN be the most difficult part but I don’t think it always is and you certainly don’t have to have A-list contacts. Just look at this blog! Also, I don’t think blogging is ever passive income until you hire writers to create the content for you. So, if you got good at starting up blogs but had trouble monetizing them (something many people struggle with) this would be a brilliant way to go.
It might not be “passive” in the true sense of the word. But at least it’s kind of passive. Just consider John Chow’s example. John hasn’t posted an informative, insightful article since ages. The whole month last month he posted sponsored stuff. Yet, he made about $23,000. Now sponsored posts don’t require that much research (plus, Michael Kwan does most of the reviews), so it’s somewhat passive.
And consider it from another perspective: if a blog sells for about $3000 after the blogger posted for 3 months, it comes at about $1000 a month. Now, it’s really not that difficult to achieve $1000 a month without selling your blog.
Selling blogs can mean quick cash and can be especially useful if you need some money for a more important project or some capital for a new one. Of course, selling is the only option you’re left with if you know you’re not going to make any money off your blog or if you’ve lost interest. But, making a living through blog selling is just too tedious and mundane…That’s what I meant.
Gotta post about the whole blog selling matter on my blog. Thanks for the inspiration. You just rock Ben
I think if you are creating an “asset”, no matter if it is a blog, ecommerce site, or whatever you should always keep in mind what its “value” may be. We only have so much time in our lives to do what we want to do and some day that “asset” you created may require to much time.
If that time comes it would be nice to know what that market value might be and what the options are for selling it, if that is the option you take.
In an earlier post you said, treat your blog like a business. Well if it is a business it should have some kind of “value”, right?
Great post, Scott
It depends on the blog, if the blog is about you than you can’t ever sell it. The key to selling a blog is creating it from the start with a goal of selling it, otherwise the blog becomes dependant on you and can not survive without you writing it.
I remember about 6 months ago when carearramblings sold for $20K. right after the sale the blog fell off badly and the sellers next blog never took off.
I looked at his posted traffic numbers and I can not believe he was able to sell the site for such a large amount of money! Will the new buyer be able to keep the readership?
It also got me to thinking, when you have a high RSS readership how does it affect your overall page views metric? If most of your readers are reading your feed than they never see your ads on site. If anything a high RSS subscriber base should bring down your ad rates for onsite ads.
Ben you hit on something at the end there – the hardest part is launching a blog. So person A spends months launching a brand new blog (we’ll assume its an easily sellable niche blog and not a personal blog), doing all the grunt work and slowly builds up the readership to a decent number and starts bringing in some revenue.
Now he sells it to person B. For the next few months person B does the same amount of work as person A but he makes way more money than person A because the hard work was already done. Now he sells it to person C for BIG bucks.
The person *starting* the blog is doing all the hard work and then selling up just when it starts to get profitable! If you ask me that’s just crazy! A much better business model imo would be to go around buying all those blogs, revamping them and then selling them after the initial hard work is done. Don’t start from scratch.
I’ve got some blogs I’m will ing to sell
Caroline, there are people doing just that. Those people would have to know how to monetize a blog that currently is getting traffic but not making a whole lot. I definitely think it’s doable though.
@ Steve, the reason RSS readers help your numbers is that a lot of people will click through to comment etc.
Now you have me thinking….haha. I went to a website yesterday that calculates your blog worth and it came back and said my was worth 16K. I don’t know if I put much credibility in that seeing how my RSS subscriber base is still less than 50 and the blog is only 8 months old. Anyway…it did get me thinking along the lines of what you have written. If one had the talent and time they could start a new blog each month and after a year start selling the oldest one and starting a new one. If your blog sold for 10K then that would be 120K a year just building and selling blogs. I know there are those out there who don’t have the time or inclination to start and maintain one till it is profitable but will pay someone to do that.
As nice as it would be to get $6K i think it’s not a great deal considering the work that would have gone into building the site up. Still it depends on how much $6K is to the individual i guess.
@matt: really looking forward to your response. Btw, haven’t you handed over to the new owners, or are you staying on as a guest writer?
After reading the comments about the hardship of starting a profitable blog (I almost forgot how hard it is), I think its good to treat your blog as a asset. So that when the right offer comes, you can decide objectively.
Not to answer for Matt but according to his post about the sale he’s staying on full time for a week and then part time for at least a month.
I’ve written my response here:
http://bloggingfingers.com/creative-blogging/the-great-selling-blogs-debate-my-response/
This may just be me playing devils advocate here, but doesn’t this sound a lot like the first dotcom bubble. People/Companies are dumping all this money into these website/web companies that only revenue model is advertising, what happens when these advertising dollars dry up? The only difference I see this time is companies are not trying to do an IPO, which is really what made the dot com bubble bad. Hey maybe i am wrong but I started my blog because I wanted to do it no matter if I may money or not.
Derek, I think what we’re seeing here is the valuation of traffic and readership. If the entire business model is based on advertising I would definitely say you need to diversify, however, blogs often make money from several different sources whether it be affiliate sales, advertising, or selling their own product. If the advertising dollars drop off, that will certainly hurt but it wouldn’t bring everything crashing down around us. At least that’s my take on it.
@Ben – It boils all down to eyeballs, how many eyeballs can these people get to look. I do not think it will all come crashing down like it did in the past because this time you do not have all the IPOs being over inflated, but I do feel advertiser eventually are going to need to wise up and I think google will play a part in the fact that advertisers need to better focus their marketing dollars to the people that need to seem them. To me at least it is all about how much time in the day can I devote to content (be it blogs, email, websites, tv, podcasts/vidcasts). It is almost getting to the point were I am getting content overload and I need to reset my content intake amount.
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