Halfway between house hunting and being at the wrong end of a car accident, I wrote a long follow-up piece to my earlier post on site flipping. Trying to edit it after a long day and looking at 45n5’s fun evaluation of the Top 100 Make Money Online blogs’ worth, I decided to cut it short and more to the point. It ended with more questions than answers.

Remember how at the beginning of your blogging journey, you would probably have received advice to build a blog as personally branded as possible? Best place to start would be to build it on a domain etched in memory of your name.

If an A-lister sold his personally branded blog that was pulling in the dough, would you buy it? How much would it be worth to you, given that the original force behind the brand ceased to be involved?

Given the brand and revenue generating capability, it probably wouldn’t be a bad decision to grab it. It could generate many-fold returns on your investment if you have done your research.

But how can you do that? And how long would it last?

A personally branded blog grew from its original fan base and any revenue generated would be based on the pulling power of the face attached to it. Once this is gone, most people would have lingering doubts on the new team’s capabilities and authority. Many might leave, and those who stay probably compare constantly with the past. Advertisers invest on you, not your blog. Without that, your blog would never be the same to most people, no matter how far you brought it, and how well-monetized it is.

It will always be a tough act to follow someone successful. More so for a blog tied to a personal brand. But at the end of the day, it boils down to the team taking over. Do they have the talent to continue in the blog’s original direction, or take it to a higher level? Therein lies one of the main problems with taking over a blog with a personal domain tied to it.

You could rely on building a new audience who would not care too much about the past, and judge entirely on the new content. Or if you negotiated well, there could be opportunities for the original owner to make guest appearances, be a flagship spokesman or whatnot.

As this would represent a greater challenge for personal domains, it might be a better idea to brand your blog based on a niche-related domain name. It would probably be more marketable in every area. However, in some cases, such a blog could also lose its lustre to advertisers. I dropped my advertising with SiteFever once it was originally sold. It was not quite the same dealing with the new owner, and certainly I could not be assured of his ability to continue the site’s quality.

On hindsight (and a very big one), this blog would probably do better if put on sale with its present domain name. I cannot imagine myself buying a blog called YCTan.com no matter how well it did. Because I wouldn’t be that person and the effort spent to rebuild a brand might not be worth the outlay. A personally branded blog after it has been flipped, in most cases, might possibly be worth much less than before it was sold.

Now forget about selling your own blog. If you had the resources, would you buy one that is personally branded? Assuming it is well monetized but most of this leveraged on the original owner’s brand. As the aim of investing should always be to bring the potential to the next level, how would you do that?

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