6 Lessons From a $6000 Blog Sale

There have been a fair few articles about blog sales flying around recently but here I have outlined what I personally learned from the $6000 sale of Blogging Fingers.

1. Call in favours from friends. The sale of a flagship blog is an important event. There are few times when you will have better reason to ask a blogging contact to give you some publicity. It sounds cold, but if your aim is to make lots of money from your blog there is little point spending hours making friends on instant messenger if you daren’t ask them for a favour or two. This is your hour of need. For this to be fair of course you have to have helped them out a few times first. In a word leveraging friendships is known as networking.

2. Patience is they key to a successful sale. When something as important as your number 1 blog is for sale it is tough to wait for replies to emails you have sent. It is temping to reply back to the first person who contacted you with an BIN offer for them; when the smart thing to do would be to wait (no longer than a day or two) and then you can make a more attainable offer to them based on what other feedback you have received. When the site is up for sale on a straight auction this need for patience is lessened but waiting to put it up for auction while you build ‘pre-sale hype’ is another challenge in itself.

3. Tweak your sales copy to perfection. This utilizes the understanding of psychology. One important lesson here is that the first earnings figure you say is they one that will stick in peoples minds. This is why I was very careful to say the Semptember earnings where nearly $400. I had the $400 in bold and before the $380 that followed in brackets. I put the slightly lower October earnings after that and I didn’t add up the sum of October earnings. No lies or deceit should take place, simply think carefully about the order you write things.

4. Don’t keep serious buyers waiting too long. Patience is needed when replying to people who want to know how much you want; but when a potential buyer has made you an actual offer you are seriously thinking of taking, swift decisive action is needed. This is just like deciding when to strike in a hunt; are you going to shoot that last arrow at the first animal that appears and make a kill, or wait for something bigger to take down. Dithering around is not an option. Believing you have made the right choice is important to your wellbeing and future choices.

5. Only put up a BIN (buy it now price) if you have done extensive research. By extensive I do not mean reading a few blog posts about how blogs are generally valued, but by looking at what your blog has that is of value. This is more a lesson I learned from my previous blog sale where I knew nothing about valuing blogs. I had started an auction at $400 only to be over whelmed by bids. I realised I had greatly undervalued the site and was so grateful I didn’t add those three little letters (BIN) next to that price of $400. Thankfully the site sold for $1000 but if I had added BIN (which I very nearly did) I would have some serious regrets.

6. Selling a blog is about marketing the sale. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that blog flipping is 90% marketing and 10% about the value of the blog, but like everything else the price is ultimately determined by supply and demand. You can increase the demand for your blog once it is up for sale by letting as many potential buyers know about it as possible. With blogs it is not too hard to do this for free because bloggers tend to follow big news just because it makes something good for them to write about. A few well aimed emails can start a snowballing of sales coverage, which is what happened with Blogging Fingers.

Bonus

Never sell a blog if it has not had at least 1 month of proper monetization. When you say your site “has potential” for more earnings that should be because traffic could easily grow not because you didn’t monetize it. The monthly earnings is the single most important factor a buyer looks at and earning more is by far the easiest way to increase a sites selling price. If I were looking to buy a site (which is a possibility for me now) I would look for one with high traffic and that has not been monetized properly, because it is bound to sell below its value.

How I Increased Earnings Dollar By Dollar, But Increased Overall Value By Steps of $100+

I had always planned to sell Blogging Fingers somewhere down the line. This is why in September and October I pushed every sale but in July/August I focused on growing traffic.

1 month is the minimum period for monetization to be used as the main price determiner of a blog. Therefore if you want to start a blog and sell it after 3 months, the best thing to do is focus on growing traffic for 2 months then heavily monetize for 1 month, then flip. I had 1 extra month of monetization but I am sure Blogging Fingers would have sold for the same amount 1 month ago if I had sold it then.

If you are thinking of selling your blog the question to ask is:

In 1 month will my earnings have increased enough to justify a whole month of blogging?

Remember when flipping a blog a rule of thumb is to multiply the monthly earnings by 10, so if you increase earnings by $100 you will be be able to sell for $1000 more .

My Theory Of Blog Flipping

A blog that earned $20 in month 1, $20 in month 2 and $40 in month 3 (total of $80) would sell for less than a blog that earned $0 in month 1, $0 in month 2 and $60 in month 3 despite the total earnings being lower. Keep that in mind when planning monetization.

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