Another way to make money from your blog is to sell it like Michael Pollock from Small Business Branding has just done. He sold it to Yaro from Entrepreneurs Journey for an undisclosed figure.
About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Soon to be a disclosed sum by the way. I’m going to record a little case study on the process of buying a blog and I intend to release how much I paid for it, however I’d prefer to do that when I have some content to go along with it.
Once the transfer is complete I should be able to start work on the case study.
Thanks for the mention yet again too Darren – have a good holiday by the way, and I’ll see you in January. You coming to the Aussie Open?
good to hear Yaro – looking forward to your case study.
Yep I’ll be going to the Open on at least one day. Let me know when you’ll be there and I’ll meet you in there.
I hate to sound like a party pooper and I really don’t want to offend either Michael or Yaro, but what a strange story.
Firstly, I can’t imagine ever buying a blog – after all, a really good blog is the sum of it’s author or authors, so when you take that away, what do you have left? It’s like buying a famous artist’s paints and canvases and hoping it’ll help you paint a masterpiece.
Secondly, and no offence to either buyer or seller, but looking at the traffic figures, I couldn’t believe that a site with such low traffic could be valued at anything. Is a blog with an average of only160 visitors a day and about 250 archived posts a valuable asset? With only $600 a year adsense income, it’d be several years before it paid out bigger than investing in a mutual fund, unless it sold for just a few hundred bucks.
Maybe my sense of value is all screwy here, so I’d love a yardstick. What does everyone else think?
Hi Stephen – you are quite right in all of your comments. This is the first time I’ve purchased a blog (as compared to a standard website) and as you mentioned the blogger personality factor is something worth considering. That’s one reason I’m documenting the process too – blog buying and selling is new ground and I’m sure people are eager for case studies on it.
It seems like a strange concept but fundamentally the same metrics are important. I bought Small Business Branding (SBB) because it’s established in a niche I’m targeting. The traffic figures aren’t great, but the search engine placement is fantastic (number 1 for “Small Business Branding” among many others key terms). I’m fairly convinced that because Michael has had divergent interests with his other blogs that the traffic figures at SBB didn’t get much further than they did. He just wasn’t writing often enough. I hope, even expect, if I get the content flowing regularly that the site traffic will start to grow quite well.
When you have a site as well positioned in the search engines as SBB the hard part is done for you. It takes about a year to get there and Michael has been blogging at SBB for a year. In a way I just paid him for his time over the past 12 months building this asset. His traffic comes almost 100% from search engines which is appealing to me as well. The more content I write the more search traffic will come.
If I wasn’t confident in my own writing abilities to keep Michael’s audience interested then I certainly wouldn’t have bought the blog. Of course I can’t replicate Michael’s style and I expect I will lose a few hardcore Michael Pollock fans, however I suspect quite a few Yaro Starak fans will also become regular Small Business Branding fans now too.
Ultimately though it’s impossible to know what will happen. In this case there were enough “ticked boxes” in my mind that made this a good purchase for me, and mainly because it’s so well focused on my existing niche – small business – I run one myself so am well positioned to write about. The fee I paid for the blog is more a reflection of the potential it has in my hands. That potential is unique to me in this case but certainly I’m sure many others would see the value in this purchase in their hands as well.
Thanks Yaro – i hope you didn’t take anything I wrote as disparaging. Good luck with your endeavour – I look forward to the case study.
Interesting move by Yaro – and boy was that a fast sale :-) Last night I read at SBBranding of the intention to sell, this afternoon it’s a done deal.
My real interest in the case study is to see how/if one can transform a blog that’s been build around a person (Michael) as most blogs are and change the personality behind it.
But then if anyone can do it and blog about it in depth for all to learn – that’ll be my man, Yaro. I’ve been a great admirer of Yaro ever since I came upon his blog early on this year – he really does take one on an entrepreneurial journey.
All the best, Yaro.
Yaro, I look forward to hearing more of your case study. Your comments above are interesting and worthy of further discussuion. I think it will be a topic on my blog in a day or so.
Congratulations Yaro. Nice purchase!
Andrew
A case study about buying a blog is interesting. I think we can wait something similar from Darren Rowse about b5media and blog networks. Because this is something new and as i can see this site (problogger) has changed in some ways. Before b5media and after……..
Yaro,
I’m very interested in seeing the case study.
I’m working on a graduate thesis at MIT that covers (among other things) contemporary business models for Internet-centric businesses. So, this would be a great reference for my work.
There’s not much material out there on how money gets made, deals get done and valuations get applied in the Internet “small business” market.
Thanks for your willingness to share the results and insights.
It’s funny that I mentioned selling blogs in the first comment on this post here.
No one seemed to give a hoot until Darren mentions something about it ;-)
thanks for the mention darren. and i’m looking forward to yaro’s case study. then i’ll know if i gave him too good a deal or not :-)
to robert: i feel your pain, and it’s the law of the jungle, so to speak. darren has authority (well-earned) on the subject. and no offense intended, but you don’t have that same level of authority (yet). it’s all about branding. oh wait, i can’t really talk about that any more …
to stephen: ditto what yaro said. plus i disagree that “a really good blog is the sum of it’s author or authors.” that’s only partly true in some cases, and completely wrong in other cases. go look at lifehacker.com and see if it’s about the authors. most of the time you don’t even know who’s writing each post. pretty much anybody could step into a site like lifehacker, and if they continued with a similar writing style and the same level of content production, that blog would be just as popular as it is currently with gina trapani and keith robinson creating content.
Thanks for stopping by (figuratively) Michael.
I know, I’m just the little guy here.
I was more or less poking fun at the situation, rather than being upset or mad about it. Sometimes I forget it’s hard to catch my sarcasm considering we’re all reading a computer screen…