Buy My Blog For Fame Or Money
How many times have you heard that if you’re serious about blogging, you should treat your blog like a business? More than a couple of times, perhaps.
Sometimes, a business can start by buying an already existent business and make it grow further. If you have the money, why not skip those first years when you have to struggle for each client, for each contract, for making your way to the top? That’s the same with blogs.
That’s nothing wrong with buying an already established blog, which already has an audience and which already makes some money. But how do you evaluate a blog before buying it?
RSS feed subscribers number is one of the assets. Or is it?
I think it rather shows how popular the writer is, but you have no certitude that those subscribers are going to like your style, so you cannot be sure that they will choose to stay with you or rather dump the blog.
And even if they stayed, how do you translate that in money? How much money do you think you can make monthly from one subscriber? You probably are a subscriber for several blogs out there. Only think of how many things have you bought lately from the blogs you’re subscribed to, and you’ll understand what kind of earnings you can expect from your subscribers.
The monthly income is another certitude. Or is it?
It depends where this income comes from. I’ve seen in the SitePoint Marketplace blogs listed for sale, claiming they make X amount of money every month. If the income comes from AdSense, this is a certitude and a value you can count on when you calculate how much it would take until you get your investment back.
But if the income comes from paid reviews, it doesn’t have any value at all, because you’ll have to write paid reviews in order to keep that money coming every month. If this is your aim, you’d better buy some pre-owned domains with PR for some $5 - $50 and use them for writing paid reviews until they get slapped by Google. You’d get your investment back much faster than if you paid several thousands for a blog, based on the idea that a normal price evaluation is the monthly income times 10.
The Alexa rank speaks volumes about the blog’s traffic. Or is it?
In order to count in Alexa, a visitor needs to have the Alexa toolbar installed in his browser. By all probabilities, somebody who has Alexa toolbar installed knows what internet marketing is, knows what ads are, and he might already have bought all things that you’d like to sell him via your affiliate links. Why is this guy valuable for you? Not for the money you’d earn from having him read your blog, that’s for sure. A good Alexa rank only shows that there are a lot of internet marketing people who read that blog. A not so good Alexa rank shows nothing: that blog could have really high organic traffic levels, from people who don’t have the Alexa toolbar, so it could make a great acquisition in case you want to make money online from it.
The Google PR is worth the money. Or is it?
PR can be faked, so you should never pay a high price only based on a high PR. There are sites like domainpagerank.com, where you can check if the PR is valid or not. However, PR alone doesn’t help you with anything. It doesn’t bring you traffic, it doesn’t help you rank high for any keywords in SERPs.
What matters when evaluating how much a blog is worth?
I got the idea for this post after finding out that One Man’s Goal sold for $10,500, which Marc, the new owner thinks is a good deal, and after noticing that John Cow is for sale, too. The Cow published some statistics of his blog, and one of them got my attention: he says that 20%-30% of his traffic is organic. In my view, this is the real traffic, one of the most important metrics of a blog’s value, because:
- Organic traffic is fresh: they are most probably new to the programs I’m promoting as an affiliate, and they are most prone to subscribe via my links rather than people who found my blog from social networks or other blogs.
- Organic traffic are people who have a need and search the net for a solution. They either find it on my blog and subscribe to my feed, or buy the products I endorse, or both, or they don’t find the solution on my blog, so they leave it by clicking an ad (which also translates into money for me).
- Organic traffic is not influenced by the blog sale: they will find the blog in Google for the same keywords, regardless who’s the actual owner of the blog. While the subscribers number is expected to decrease over the first few months after a blog being sold, this has nothing to do with the organic traffic. They will keep on coming, as usual, so they are a certitude.
So, here are a few things to check when buying a blog:
- Traffic split: organic, direct, referrals. Beware at the organic traffic, as it may come from PPC campaigns, and many counters don’t make the difference. Ask to see Google Analytics stats, because in there you’ll see the Google (cpc) traffic apart from Google (organic) one.
- Income split: AdSense, paid reviews, ads selling, donations. If there is no AdSense on the blog, but you think of it as a future option, check the organic traffic, take the best keywords the blog ranks well for, and put them in the Google AdWords Keywords Tool, which will give you an estimate of the CPC and of daily number of clicks. By taking that figure and dividing it by 2 or by 3, you’ll get the maximum potential earnings you can expect if you rank first for that keyword. Why divide the figure? Because that’s AdWords, that’s what advertisers pay to Google per click. Publishers’ revenue is smaller, because Google keeps a commission on every click. This commission is not disclosed, but from some tests I’ve done, I’d say that Google keeps at least half of the amount paid by advertisers.
- Backlinks pointing to the blog: you can check them in yahoo.com, by typing link:www.sitename.com in the search box. You’ll see a list of all sites pointing back to that blog. If there are very few links, it means the blog is not so popular, so either its PR is fake, or it is coming from only a few high PR backlinks
- Reputation: look through those backlinks, to see what other bloggers say about the blog you wish to buy. I’m not saying that you should believe all that’s been said, but you can at least be aware and try to judge things with your own head before spending your money to buy an established blog.
What do you think? How would you tell a scam from an opportunity? What else would you check if you wanted to buy a blog?
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Simonne,
That was well put and as sensible as you could be when it comes to evaluating a blog’s worth. There are plenty of intangibles like most transaction online and off but the only stable measuring stick online is search traffic. You made a great point about being wary of PPC traffic - hadn’t mentioned that myself. You are on your toes.
Thanks and well done.
Grizzly’s last blog post..What is a Blog Really Worth?
Hey Griz,
I’m really sorry to see how people jump into buying sites worth less than what they pay, only to be sorry later on. I liked your article and I thought it’s worth spreading the word some more, so people stay away from unfair deals as much as possible.
Great post! Quantifying the value of a blog is tough… and it’s totally different than a pure website. I typically estimate that 50% of the traffic and profit/revenue goes away instantly. Then my bid would be approximately 12 months of that estimated profit or 6 months of the estimated revenue.
For example, let’s say your current blogs make $2 profit per thousand unique visits per month and the potential purchase has 20k uniques per month. Then I would expect to make $20 per month ($2 x 20 x 50%). My bid would be in the range of $200-250 (or $20 x 12).
bobangus’s last blog post..Launching a New Theme for BobAngus.com
Yes, there are a lot of factors to be considered. For example, if I take the case you mentioned and I notice that your AdSense is not well optimized, I might be able to maintain the monthly revenue even if part of the readers go away. But if I were new to all this stuff, by the time I’d figure out what to do, my blog would be almost dead.