
How to Sell a Blog for $36,200 - askaaronlee
http://amandatinney.com/how-to-sell-a-blog-for-36200/
======
patio11
It's at [http://thecupcakeblog.com/](http://thecupcakeblog.com/) , if you're
curious. Personally I don't think the site is worth that, given the
demonstrated revenues and what the market is typically like for sites with
this model [1], but then again the fair price for most things is where a buyer
and seller agree it is.

Here's the auction page on Flippa:

[https://flippa.com/2736282-over-1000-ad-
rev-199k-visits-475k...](https://flippa.com/2736282-over-1000-ad-
rev-199k-visits-475k-pageviews-a-month-large-social-following)

[1] You'd probably be looking at about $10k for it usually: trailing year's
proven revenue. Nothing about it is defensible at all.

Incidentally, if you were bound and determined to be _the_ source for cupcakes
online rather than a content scraper in the middle, you'd end up producing a
site like:

[http://www.christmas-cookies.com/](http://www.christmas-cookies.com/)

My SEO buddies and I ballparked owning that site as being roughly as lucrative
as a full-time job as a cookbook author/editor (though it may have suffered a
bit since we spitballed those numbers, due to ranking changes and the like --
it no longer dominates results like I remember it doing in ~2008).

~~~
rfnslyr
Wow, there is money in this? Why am I wasting time working on legitimate and
difficult products? I'm a fantastic frontend web developer, and this seems
like something slapped together very easily.

Definitely want to try my hand in this. I don't know anything about SEO and
marketing though. Where could one learn?

~~~
Matt_Cutts
Looking at the site in question, it has been affected by Google's Panda, so
our algorithms don't think it's a very high-quality site and that has affected
the site's rankings in Google's index, at least. Personally, I would look to
add more value than the article described.

And of course if you're looking to buy a site, whether on Flippa or elsewhere,
you'll want to ask about any recent webspam action notifications from Google,
as well as ask about any traffic trends in case the traffic to the site has
gone down recently.

~~~
rhizome
The first thing I noticed is that it's just reposted posts from other blogs,
even using the other blogs' picture. I'm glad that sort of thing is
downranked.

------
manuelflara
I did a similar thing years ago, here's the Flippa auction (sold for $20k):
[https://flippa.com/127164-no-1-blog-about-casual-games-in-
sp...](https://flippa.com/127164-no-1-blog-about-casual-games-in-
spanish-18k-a-year-revenue-easy-to-run)

I'm open to questions, although here are the main aspects of it:

\- Started a blog in Spanish about indie/casual games, mostly for fun

\- It was part of a (very small) network (NexoBlogs.com) run by a friend of
mine on his spare time

\- After a year or so I ran out of things I wanted to write about, but then I
noticed some terms driving most of the traffic, and focused on them. At this
point I was making probably $40 a month

\- A year later, after focusing on those terms, traffic grew a lot (even
though for most "big" keywords I wasn't number one) and revenue was maybe a
couple hundred bucks a month

\- At this point I started looking at affiliate programs. Ended up with
BigFishGames' which pays 25% of each sale and keeps the cookie on the user's
computer for a year

\- Another year went by and I was making around $1K or a bit more a month,
quite comfortably

\- I spent almost a year basically not writing (I'd write a generic summary
once a week). Traffic still went up

\- After that, traffic started declining, so I hired someone from oDesk to
write for 5€ / post 20 times a month to write new content

\- As you can read in the auction, at one point income from BigFishGames
dropped a lot and I decided to sell it since someone else could do better with
it, and it sold for the amount I wanted

\- It ended up netting me (sale price aside) maybe $20K in total, and it was
my only source of income for a year while I traveled around South East Asia

~~~
poopsintub
Google has changed alot. I had sites sitting there and gaining strength before
panda and penguin came along. You could almost write about nonsense and be
ranking in google over time without any seo 'help'.

Someone asked in another comment how you gain traffic to a blog like this. Is
there any keys to getting the word out there fast? Pinterest might be a
quality start for this niche?

~~~
manuelflara
I literally did zero marketing or anything else in order to get traffic, other
than checking which posts brought more traffic and write about that more. So I
don't have much advice in that regard.

------
iambateman
The purchase price reflects the fact that 479,000 page views is worth more
than $1000 per month.

That is $2.08/1k views (CPM). In a niche space like cupcakes, doubling that to
$4.00 is extremely possible.

If someone purchases the site looking at those 500k page views, and expects to
be able to monetize at a CPM of $4, then $36,000 is a fine deal. It's a lot of
risk, but not insane.

~~~
poopsintub
You could easily bring in more revenue. Adsense and BSA are just the beginning
to monetizing a site. She has no idea how much a site like this could make
with that amount of traffic and probably didn't even look further. $1000 a
month is nothing.

~~~
grecy
Can you elaborate a little please?

~~~
stevesearer
I've found that many site owners are lulled into passively accepting
advertising on their website through Google and BSA (which is exactly what
they want).

If you have a website that is awesome with content that people like, go sell
the hell out of it to advertisers. Find companies that sell things your
readers should know about. Then go and actively contact them and sell them
advertising space.

Some easy ways to find potential advertisers:

-see who advertises on other sites in the same field

-if there are trade magazines, look to see who advertises in those

-look for trade shows and see who buys booths and advertisements at them

~~~
wangarific
This takes more work but often yields better benefits. Adsense and BSA are
easy, drop in some code and wait, with no fear of rejection. It's hard calling
up companies, pitching yourself, and getting rejected but that's what you have
to do to get more than $1k for half million impressions/mo in a niche like
this one.

------
avalaunch
It sounds like she's basically just a cupcake aggregator but has chosen to do
all the work manually. I think it would be a fun project to automate
everything. You could:

setup a cron job to scrape the top 100 or so sources for cupcake articles
every day.

use mechanical turk as quality assurance to make sure the articles are indeed
about cupcakes. You could also have them help tag each article.

write a script to automatically tweet each new article.

write another to automatically post each picture to pinterest with a link back
to your site (might get banned for spam?).

~~~
DanBC
Depressingly that site would be better than a bunch of [cupcake] aggregation
sites.

------
tobyjsullivan
30 hrs/mo * 24 months = 720 hours

24 months * (1000 / 2) avg $/mo = $12,000 [1]

$12,000 earned + $36,200 sale = $48,200 total income

$48,200 / 720 hrs = $66.94/hr

Given the exceptionally high risk, I'd have to declare that a ROTI fail but
different people value their time differently.

[1] My revenue calculation assumes a relatively steady growth.

~~~
halcyondaze
There are a lot of intangibles earned as well...time to get a similar blog to
same levels of income will generally be reduced on next project. Piggybacking
off of built asset authority -> fast launching new sites, building credibility
for yourself as skilled in that area opens up consulting avenues...etc

------
phamilton
Essentially, it seems picking one section of pinterest and putting it on a
blog changes it from being a time sink to a business.

------
badman_ting
People who exhibit the behavior described in the first couple grafs of this
blog post drive me nuts.

------
calbear81
How do these blogs build a user base given the proliferation of content
curation channels like Pinterest (just save a "cupcake" search), Tumblr, and
others? I recently went on cuteoverload which was huge at one point and
there's barely any comment activity anymore.

------
pavs
About 5 years ago I sold a site on flippa (was called something else back
then) for 15k, later worked on the blog for the new owner for about
~$600/month for ~6 months. It was PR-5 and at its peak (when I sold it) it had
about 600k pageviews and I was making about $1000 month. I knew I probably
could make a lot more if I tried, but I didn't.

I still remember my site being on digg 4-5 times a month and all the traffic I
used to get and all the headache that came with trying to keep the site up
using wordpress. Fun times really.

------
marincounty
Be very careful selling your Website. Tell the truth, and don't manipulate
sales, or statistics. I see a lot of fraud claims popping up in Municipal
Court.

~~~
fourstar
Post a link to a source.

------
jacobbudin
She copied other people's work and made money. Shocker.

------
pothibo
I've started blogging for fun in May this year. When I started, I used
Wordpress to start a blog ASAP. With all that is being said about blogs and
revenues, I'm surprised blog engine still tries to focus their engine on the
editorial part of the blog.

I couldn't find a blog engine that focused on A/B Testing and analytics. Is it
because I missed something?

~~~
ankitoberoi
There are plugins for almost anything you want to do with wordpress. I'm a co-
founder @ AdPushup, our tool allows bloggers to use A/B Testing on AdSense and
other ad networks to improve ad revenues.

------
joelrunyon
Surprisingly light on actual details. I was hoping for something more of a
step-by-step guide.

------
dhrona
Unless you already have a large social following, the amount of time it takes
to build a successful blog is too much on average.

There are many other activities which can pay off much better with the same
amount of time invested.

------
jt884
This woman is another Amy Hoy. A whole bunch of delusional talk about money,
but very little evidence or indication that it's anything besides a "look at
me, I deserve your attention" ploy. People who are humoring her in the
comments here are naive beyond any hope.

