Blog flipping, a great way to make money online
CashQuests.com has just been sold for $15,000 on SitePoint.
The blog has been around since December 2006 and in October 2007 generated $1390 in revenue, so based on that figure they achieved a selling price of around 11 x monthly revenue. So not a bad multiple.
What interests me is that in a relatively short amount of time the blog has managed to build up a user base of over 900 subscribers and quite decent traffic levels for a new blog (16,000 uniques per month).
So how did they do it?
Well they started by being slightly controversial, some of the earlier posts certainly didn’t pull any punches. The blog owner always picks linkbait-worthy topics to write about and often took deliberately controversial stances on topical debates. They also networked like crazy and managed to get mentioned/links in a lot of other popular blogs.
Whats the point of this post Kieron?
Well I wanted to highlight the fact that a reasonably new blog sold for $15,000. Now while that’s not an insubstantial amount of money its not enough to retire on. But, what if you could sell 10 blogs a year at $15,000? That’s $150,000 for a years work, about £72,500 in real money. Not a bad salary.
So is it possible to create and maintain 10 new blogs from scratch a year? Yes I think so. You could pick topics that you are knowledgeable about and can write about with ease. You could also sub contract articles out to third parties, for quite reasonable prices. As your blogs grow you can also invite guest bloggers to post for free. And lets not forget that during your first year you will also be making money from affiliate sales/adsense/text link ads and private ad sales on your network of blogs.
I guess what I’m saying is that it doesn’t take a lot of effort to get a blog up and running on a Wordpress template. And even keeping 10 updated with regular fresh content isn’t that hard to do. And at the end of the day there is a huge after-sales market of bigger players looking to buy smaller blogs and absorb them into their networks.
Don’t believe me? Then take a look at these recent blog sales:
BloggingFingers - $6,000
OneMansGoal - $8,500
BlogOhBlog - $10,000
It seems to be that the average market value of recently sold blogs is around 12 x monthly profits. In my experience I think its perfectly achievable to generate £1000 per month in ad sales/affiliate sales etc. So allowing for a couple of lean months is £10,000 per blog sale achievable? I think so. And the beauty of letting blogs mature for at least a year is that they have a reasonable amount of time to get indexed in Google, build PageRank, gather new subscribers and generally get good placements in the search engines.
And don’t forget that the beauty of using Wordpress as your blogging platform is that its so easy to use, no technical skill is required. So all you need to do is write good content and be a bit clever when its comes to monetising and promoting your blog.
So is this a strategy for making money online in the future? Most definitely.
What I’m listening to right now: Akon - “Wanna Be Starting Something”
Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Blogging, Making Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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[...] of here.org.uk wrote a post today about the sale of the Blog site CashQuests.com for $15,000 on the Sitepoint website. This [...]
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
I can attest to this. For example, a few weeks back i bashed together a tech blog, spent one week writing articles and getting a few links, I then sold it for $800 in under 7 days.
The worst part is I don’t have the “get up and go” to pull my finger out and actually do it every week.
I don’t think its that easy, if it were sites like that would not sell for 15k…
That said, I think Darren Rowse followed a methodology similar to the one you describe… so it can work.
Regards selling sites, blogs are dependent on their author, and many fall to pieces shortly after sale.
CC have not posted since the news broke, perhaps that is the prospective buyer trying to establish the value of site minus its authors.
As for doing 10 at a time, CC was actually a multi authored site…
Interesting concept so long as the area you blog about is fairly wide. Blogging about widgets may not warrant the $15,000 price tag. Having said that, a blog is worth what someone will pay for it I suppose.
Thats good going… I am surprised people will pay that much for these sites, there again I suppose it depends on how many hours you spent on it, or how many hour it would take them to produce the blog themselves…
I estimate 30 mins to set up, 1 hour of link building, 1 hour of content writing, 1 hour of selling it (answering questions etc). Cost was 1 domain name at $7. So for less than 5 hours work and $7 I made quite a nice profit.
I just wish I could build these sites for other people as that gives me motivation, I don’t have the kick up the rear to do it for myself / own projects
A nice figure $15,000 for a year old blog.
This is what I like about Entrepreneurs that they hae the ability to think about more possibilities, like Kieron did…
10 Blogs/Yr x $15,000 = $150,000/yr.
Personally I don’t believe I’d ever sell a blog or website in this manner. Every site I create, nurture and work is in worth more to me in terms of revenue and link power than a single sale could generate.
Of course if someone were to offer me stupid sums of money for one of my sites I may backtrack on that very quickly
Right now though I believe in the collective power of the content network of websites I’m building. United they stand and all that…
But if you don’t have an exit strategy what is the point?
Unless they are just a hobby or a bit of fun and not work?
Don’t get me wrong David, there’s a point alright. A Content Network like the one I’m referring to exists for the purposes of making money. Selling off arms of that network defeats the purpose, and weakens the network as a whole.
Yeah I could sell a website, but it’s removal from the ‘web’ of websites would affect the listings for other sites, this affect their earning potential.
So while I understand that someone could be aiming for the quick win ‘flip’ like you’ve described, longer term results can be far more lucrative.
Oh I totally agree. Based on what I read first time I thought you were doing websites for personal value, if they are making you money then certainly don’t sell off the supporting arms of that structure.
It can’t be done at the rate of 10 a year. Having been there, you can’t do a half dozen blogs. Even two is difficult. The content brainstorming takes time as does the production. Ask any quality writer and they’ll tell you most of their stuff takes at least an hour.
But in addition to that, you need to comment on other blogs to network with those bloggers. You need to submit their material to the relevant social networking sites and invite them to go vote/bookmark/etc it so they recognize (implicitly) that you did them a favour. All of this takes time.
Another point is that people will tire of a relentless self-promoter. Another reason why it can’t be scaled well.
All that being said, if you can get together a group of friends who will all be contributing a fair share, you’ve got a better chance. a,b,c, do the writing, d,e,f do networking, g,h,i do monetization. Also, having some custom blog templates you can rely on would be essential.
Finally, reinvesting the money from the first sales into the next sites would probably get you going much better. The trick is to leverage the money to create more value in a new site than your current one is worth. Much easier said than done.
This is a great article and has been one of those ‘lightbulb’ moments that you get occassionaly. I’m not sure if the blog bubble though will burst much like the dotcom boom of the mid nineties, interesting views and ideas though.
You are right, developing is worth all the money. I wouldn’t pay too much on a high PR domain, but I would do it for a domain
which ranks well for my desired terms.