How To: Sell a blog for far more than it is worth
I read a lot of blogs, a lot. One of the blogs I used to consider a daily read was recently sold... for $20,000! That's a lot of money for a blog that has not been around for very long.
The blog in question is careerramblings.com. According to the Whois database the site was first registered/created on 2007-01-23 18:45:55.0. That means the site was not even six months old when it was sold.
The question you are probably asking yourself is, "How do you flip a website in under six months for $20K?" The answer is deceptively simple.
Page Rank
One thing you want to improve prior to selling your site is the domains Page Rank. The higher the Page Rank, the more faith Google has in your site and the more money you can get for the site. Gaining Page Rank can be very easy if you know how to get back links.
Like the great John Chow, Career Ramblings took a tip from the man and instituted a "review for a link back" policy. Doing this cost Career Ramblings next to nothing (an occasional post) and appeared to grant a PR6 back link to the writer of the review.
I have done this myself in the past (wrote the review for a link) but I stopped doing it after I fell out of the zero Page Rank crowd. I still get a laugh when someone offers me this "great deal" where I write about them and I get a link from their site. It's BS people. Unless you are just starting out, don't do it! All the benefit goes to the site you are reviewing.
With all of these sites linking back to you your Page Rank will begin to rise. Add in some links from some Social News sites and it will rise even higher and faster.
Technorati
Another benefit of all those blogs linking back to you is that your Technorati score will fall like a rock. On Technorati, a low score is better than a high score.
As of writing this Career Ramblings has 1,244 back links on Technorati which puts them in the Top 10K with a rank of 8,605. That is a very nice number. A lot of things open up for you when your blog enters the Technorati Top 10K.
Social News
Not all social news sites are equal. Digg will send you tons of traffic (when you make the home page) but it is traffic that acts like a swarm of locusts. They suck up a bunch of bandwidth, stress out your server, and leave nothing in their wake but a low CTR for your advertising. This can be good if you sell CPM advs, not so good if you run CPA or CPC advs.
Netscape, on the other hand, will send you far less traffic when your story makes it to their homepage but, Netscapers are an older bunch who like to click on advertising and follow through on CPA advertising. While diggers are like locusts Netscapers are like a bus full of senior citizens spending their child's inheritance on trinkets and doodads to bring home from a sight seeing tour.
Yes, I prefer the Netscape traffic.
Getting content on these social news sites also benefits you in the Page Rank department. When I last checked both of these sites were PR8+. You can do a lot with a collection of PR8+ back links!
What about StumbleUpon? StumbleUpon is a different beast...
Increasing your Page Views
Having a high Page Rank and a low Technorati score is great but you still need Page Views to show how popular your site really is. People might be bookmarking your site as a favor and not actually going there.
Getting on StumbleUpon can greatly impact your Page Views but only if your content is good. If you are printing junk than Stumblers will just give you the thumbs down.
When Career Ramblings was sold they boasted of over 60K Page Views a month. That works out to about 2K Page Views per day. They also claimed to be averaging $2K in earnings between all of their revenue streams.
It is clear they were getting a lot of traffic that liked clicking on advs but were they getting repeat visitors? I did not see any information on RSS numbers.
With only 60K Page Views a month how could they possibly be making this amount of money? It defies all web logic. Unless you discover how they managed to constantly stay on Netscape's home page.
Gaming The System
It's not that hard to game the social news sites. It has gotten harder to game Digg but it is very easy to game Netscape. Let's look at who has been submitting the Career Ramblings content to Netscape:
- Submitters
- Jane May - founder of Career Ramblings. It is interesting how she stopped submitting AFTER she sold the site.
- JoshCR - New PR man for the site? Notice he has only submitted two stories thus far and they are both for Career Ramblings?
Netscape is coming down on sploggers and it looks like Career Ramblings has morphed into a splog over the last few months. I even tried to submit a story from Career Ramblings a few weeks ago and was beaten to it by Jane May! One of the first rules of social media is not to submit your own content. You can break that rule every now and then but to submit everything you write? Bah!
Conclusion
It is very easy to game the system and sell a site for far more money than it is worth. Selling a site for ten months "projected" revenue tells me that the gravy train was coming to an end.
To go from $0 to $2K (in under six months) in monthly revenue shows extreme growth. You do not sell a site with a growth rate that high unless you feel it has run its course. Further you don't sell it for a mere ten times current revenue.
Image used under Creative Commons License from flickr user zacksphoto
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Spot on with this post Steve,
I read it was earning 3k PM, so that would be just 6 times its monthly worth… not sure if thats what it peaked at though…
Link-back for a review is a con… run by con artists taking advantage of inexperienced bloggers…
They say you get a PR 6 link, you dont… you get a PR6 link divided by the number of other links on the page / sidebar etc… but only for a few days… after which the post drops off the front page and you are left with a PR0 link divided by the number of links on the page…. a total scam… unless its a brand new site not yet spidered by SE’s…
After it drops off the front page of the site you still get a link from that post which will likely be a PR 4 or 5 depending on a few different factors. It’s not a con at all as you’re giving them the same thing - a link on your site for a link on theirs.
However, it’s not as effective as everyone seems to think.
Ok it will end up with some PR, but it is still not PR6 or whatever they promise, and it is still not balanced.
These guys normally put 10 links in a post with non poor anchor text.
In return they get a contextual link with multiple links…. I think it is a bum deal… completely in-effective.
IMO you are better off visitng a few decent “do follow blogs”….
This is a dofollow blog.
I don’t agree, my pagerank has a lot to do with commenting on others’ blogs and a few reviews I’ve done, for the pagerank value….never considered selling my site though…it has my name in it. Wonder if you can sell a site easily that has your name in it?
Yeah, those earnings seem way out of whack for 60K views. We had 135K page views last month and pulled in around $900. Either we’re really bad at advertising (which is totally possible) or they’re stuffing the ballot box.
Good for Jane May. Bad for the buyer.
60K PV and $2K revenue is about 3-4 cents per page view. If they were making $3K monthly as Jez says then it becomes a nickel per page view!
Your numbers are under a penny a page view, which is probably about average. I am glad to see you are getting tons of pageviews!
I think John Chow makes about $10K (one of his best months) and he gets far more than 200K-300K page views (what the math works out to). PLUS he gets a lot of money from reviews and other monetization schemes. I think the AdSense revenue Jane blogged about on her personal blog showed CR making $1K from AdSense alone. That’s about what John Chow makes on AdSense and he has 10 times the traffic and a huge number of RSS subscriptions.
I agree, kudos to Jane May on pulling this off!
Glad to hear our numbers are about average (above would be great, but it’s better than below!). We had a big rush with all the season finales last month, so I think we’re going to trail way down this month.
We even managed to break $500 on Adsense last month, which was surprising and exciting. We don’t do any directly sponsored posts though, so I think we’re probably missing out there. But that’s okay.
JC is certainly a master at maximizing his traffic to revenue conversions.
That 3k was for one month, I am not sure what the average was:
http://www.janemayblogs.com/may-earnings-update/
So you’re judging another site’s revenue off of your ability or lack there of to generate revenue? That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve heard all week. I have no idea what kind of money Career was actually pulling in but the point is, neither do you.
Jez commented above that they pulled in $3K+ one month.
http://www.janemayblogs.com/may-earnings-update/
I think the krux of what Steve is saying is why would you sell a rapidly expanding business for just 6 or 10 times the current monthly revenue?
The first part of the article tells you how it was done. The second part asks why you would sell a profitable blog in a strong growth mode that makes enough money for many to become a “full time” blogger for such a small amount of money.
Steve, are you selling your blog now?? ;)
How much are you offering? If I sell my blog I want to never have to work again. ;)
I’m tellin’ you, man. Sell hmtk.com. Buy hmtksteve.com. :)
Ha ha, very funny!
I’ve had this domain for 5 years now. I think I have it registered for another 3 or 4 before I have to renew it.
If only I had purchased hmtk.net when I bought the dot com name…
Ill give you $50 :-)
Is that for one text link ad?
Not now I know its a do follow haha,
Haha. I liked that one.
I can’t believe how Netscape allows the gaming to continue. Whenever I submit my own blog to Netscape I make sure that
a. I’ve submitted other stories as well
b. the story is actually of interest to the Netscape community
c. The story is newsworthy
d. I only do it 2-3 times a month
Jane May on the other hand completely disregarded all of the above and still got away with it.
It’s amazing how bloggers are taking over Netscape. You go to the home page and next to credible news items you’ll find stories such as “How To Be Motivated In Office?”.
I’ve seen DoshDosh on Netscape a lot lately. As far as I know DoshDosh is not splogging and I genuinely like their content (as I used to with CR).
Digg went through the “blogger” phase as well before they clamped down on things (a little bit too hard of a clamp down for my tastes). I think Netscape needs to look into accounts that only submit from a small pool of URLs.
I do not use Netscape everyday, mostly because I have no idea how to effectively search for stuff on Netscape. I know there is some sort of search on there because several of my Wii Sports articles (that are on Netscape) generate 10-50 views a day from people who find them on Netscape.
You’ve recommended that I use Netscape to gain more readers - still haven’t done it. I’ve also looked at sk*rt. I can’t see submitting my own stuff to any of those social news sites. I’ve never been much for self-promotion (unless I have to do it for a job) and I would definitely wonder about a blogger if I saw them submitting their own stuff repeatedly. I can see submitting the occasional post but all your posts or the majority of your posts? Ngugh.
Then again, I don’t really use the social news sites - it’s enough for me to keep on top of the blogs I do read much less find new ones!
There is nothing wrong with getting your foot in the door and submitting some of your own stuff to get noticed. There is something wrong when you submit all of your stuff over and over again.
Especially when its cheap copy you bought off a freelancing site…
Wow, reading this, I’m not sure I want to start a blog now! Seems like there’s WAY too much stuff going on, and I’m just now becoming aware of it. And I apologize for sounding like a complete newb here, but what is a splog? That’s a new one on me. I apologize for taking up space with my uninformed questions, but I suppose if one never asks, one never learns. And I am still giving serious thought to starting a blog, but I apparently am still not entirely aware of everything I’d be getting myself into! Thank you for any insight you can give.
A Splog refers to a blog that is full of spam or otherwise designed solely to make money with poor content. It is a derisive term.
Not all blogs are designed to make money (and some that are never make money!) As long as my blog covers the cost of running it I’m happy.
I gotcha, thank you! The main reason I want to start a blog is simply for a creative outlet, and mainly for fun. Of course, if I can make money off of it, than that’d be alright too! But, it looks like that’s actually a sizable amount of time and work to get it to the point where it makes money. Something for me to keep in mind for the future, I think…
Sorry but you’re WAY wrong on a few different areas.
First of all, there is no rule on what or how much of your own content you can or should submit to the social sites like digg and netscape. The community controls what becomes popular and what doesn’t and if they think you’re submitting crap, they’ll let you know it.
Also, there are plenty of reasons to sell for “only” 10 months revenue. First of all, blogs as you know require work. Sure you’d make more if you kept the blog for the next 10 months but that’s another 10 months you’d have to work at it. Who knows what else Jane has in the works. I do know she’s got other sites so selling this one to focus on others (or to do it all again for 20k) is a distinct possibility.
You’re not the one buying the site so it doesn’t matter what you think it’s worth. To be honest, this post makes you sound more than a little jealous of someone else’s success and most of the commentators thus far sound like they’re suffering from the same affliction.
That is true for Digg but not for Netscape. Burying a story on digg will bury it, sinking on Netscape will not.
That is very possible, she could have a bunch of sites that make far more money than this one but, in reading her personal blog, I get the impression that she does not.
I can only comment on things that I see. Looking at her Netscape profile I see what looks like a splogger account.
I actually admire Jane for pulling this off! Taking a blog from PR 0 to PR 6 in less than six months and then selling ot for $20K is a huge achievement. I’m just perplexed as to why someone would sell such a cash cow while it is still in growth mode. Not only selling it in growth mode but, as Jez pointed out above, she recently claimed it brought in $3K a month in revenue. That makes the sale price equal to 6 months revenue, possibly less if the rate of growth continues at its present rate.
Time will tell if it continues its trend on Netscape or if it falls off once Jane May stops promoting it.
PS: If you read her description on the sitepoint auction you would have gotten the impression she was selling a splog. that listing is already gone otherwise I would have quoted it. To sum up her description it was, “Buy cheap content. Get it on Netscape. Watch the money come in.”
Fair enough. I guess I can see the confusion although the 3k was only “mostly” from Careerramblings.com and I think included most of her websites.
Also a quick influx of cash like that can allow you to do a lot of other things as well. Whether it’s startup capital or just quitting your job and having a cushion or even a down payment on a house etc.
Jane did very well for herself and I think we all respect what she achieved in that respect.
I think the reason for this post is that CR was presented as a genuine blog… it attracted a lot of genuine readers… Steve was one of them… so was I…. JM always spoke of the need to write “great quality content” and building a “loyal reader base” got the loyal readers to link to it etc etc etc…
Then stuffed it full of cheap copy, became an SE spammer and dumped it…. you cannot realistically expect to do that without someone writing a post like this on it….
I think another factor that can increase your blog selling price is the the top rankings achieved in Google.
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I don’t want to turn into one of those “people” but I’m going to say this anyway…
great post! :P
I have to say that the sale confused me a little. If revenue was on an upward trend, why would you be so keen to sell up now? Is the site going to get ‘de-listed’ (or whatever the correct term is) from google or something??
After reading some of Jane May’s later posts I’m begining to think this was a case of her listing the blog at an overly-high price just to see what would happen. When someone actually offered to buy it I think it was a case of, “If they want it THAT bad they can have it!”
[...] long time readers remember when I posted several months ago on how you can sell a blog for far more than it is worth. Well, it looks like someone was reading my article and decided to get out [...]
So you’re judging another site’s revenue off of your ability or lack there of to generate revenue? That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve heard all week. I have no idea what kind of money Career was actually pulling in but the point is, neither do you.
Digg is a no follow site and the people don’t click I would have to say useless site. Technorati is good if you get in the 10k and below. stumble is just pure traffic and another no follow, but better traffic than Digg I would say. I have never tried netscape, but according to you it seems to be worth a shot, thanks! One that you didn’t mention was Mixx, I believe it is a great site you can post and the people are cool and usually get up pretty high, and it is do follow!