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Blog Engage $500 USD Guest Blogging Qualifying Article

I have seen some discussions recently around selling blogs and how much should one accept for them on the Blog Engage Facebook group which I highly recommend all Blog Engage members join and be a part of the discussions there.

Of course I participated in the discussion but wanted to approach this topic from an article perspective and weigh in on the feedback from other bloggers, readers and general public.

Why Start a Blog?

There are primarily two reasons why people start a blog, one would be to share information with family, friends and the public without any thought to trying to earn a primary or second income.

The second reason is that in some way you want to try and make extra money or replace your 9-5 job with an entrepreneurial venture online.  Most people who start in this category (including myself) do it at first as a part time gig and if they are truly lucky can earn enough to do it full time.

Attachment To Your Blog

Now after you start working on a blog for a while, the vast majority will feel some sort of attachment or vestment in your blog.  This after all is months and years of your hard work, labor, and frustrations.  You will have faced everything from technical issues, theme / appearance changes, writer’s block and sometimes the opposite, traffic issues (no traffic, too little, sudden peaks), commenting issues (anyone listening?) and so much more.  It is hard in my opinion for someone to create/start anything themselves and not invest some of their emotions and personality into what they are creating.  All of the best and most successful make their enterprise an extension of themselves and are 100% committed to them.

So Why Sell Your Blog?

I have seen many bloggers over the years just vanish, shut down everything and expire domain names without even selling.  They did this for a variety of reasons that included family pressure, job pressure, boredom, frustration at not achieving goals…etc.  Blogging is a long term commitment honestly, unless you plan to hire someone or pay to have others create your articles you had better be prepared to be in it for the long haul.  You don’t have to write every day, but if you expect to earn from your blog then you need to make sure you are constantly creating new and exciting original material to keep the search engine gods happy and the readers amused.

If however you were thinking about abandoning your blog, getting tired, bored, frustrated you may consider selling it.  Some do so on auction sites like Flippa, others list on forums, craigslist and just announce on social media until they find someone who is interested (or not).  Price and valuation are tricky and depend on many factors.

Blogs with a high pagerank can value higher even with much less traffic (a PR5 or PR6 blog can sell the domain for much higher premium than a PR0 blog with 2000 visits per day).  But ultimately anybody who invests in a blog will be looking at the revenue stream, how much does it currently earn and what is it’s earning potential.

Selling personal blogs is just about impossible if they are tied to your name, I for example could never and would never sell “justingermino.com” that is my frigging name, it isn’t for sale.  If I didn’t want to blog I would just never update it or shut the site down, but I would always own the DNS name, it isn’t transferrable.  This is why if you ever have even an inkling that you may sell your blog one day, don’t ever use your name as the DNS name of your blog.

Now, if your site does already make money a general framework is that your site could sell for 3 and maybe 4x your current annual revenue.  If your site makes $10k per year, you may be able to get $30-40k for it in sales if you can show concrete earnings. This would entice an investor that it already generates income and if they develop they can greatly increase.  If your site makes no income you can try your best to estimate based on PageRank, Alexa, Incoming Links, Social Media followers (provided your accounts are tied to site and not you personally) and Analytics/Web Master tools research.

Honestly, selling a blog isn’t easy if you have social media with your YouTube Video’s, Facebook followers/fans…etc who are tied to your personality.  These are more difficult to transfer if your personality is tied to your site, but if you have a really good domain name and a wealth of information on your site you may be able to attract someone.

What Would it Take to Sell?

Personally even if you didn’t want to blog anymore, I would just leave your blog up and let it age, so what if you don’t update it for 6 months or 1 year, websites age like wine, they get more authority the older they are.  You could change your mind and come back without having to start from scratch.

However if you weren’t thinking about selling and you were approached from someone out of the blue who wanted to purchase your site would you consider it?  How much would you sell for?

In this case I probably would even consider my mini DragonBlogger empire for the right price, if I felt that I could get more for it than I could earn in the next 5 years up front, I probably would sell and leverage that income to partially invest in a new blog or set of blogs, with money invested I could grow them 10x faster than the way I did my technology blog where I had to do all the promotion and learn everything the hard way and for free.

If someone were to approach you to purchase your blog, would you sell it for the right price?

What would that price be?

Have you ever thought about quitting or selling your blog?  What stopped you from selling it, or what finally convinced you to get rid of it?

Share your thoughts also as a reader, if a site you visited every day suddenly had a new owner, would you still visit?  Would you see what they had to say and how they alter the site?

I want to hear from you,

-Justin Germino

Image Credit: Flickr & AnthonyImages

About Justin Germino

Working in the IT Industry for over 11 years and specializing in web based technologies. Dragon Blogger has unique insights and opinions to how the internet and web technology works. I run a successful technology blog and try to help others with blogging and WordPress tips on my spare time. Follow @dragonblogger on Twitter.

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