IMMSold

You wish.

With the recent Google PageRank update, many sites are now taking advantage of their increase in perceived values and selling them. One sale which grabbed my attention (and no doubt, many others’) has been that of BloggingFingers.com. Matt got a decent price of $6,000 for a 4-month old blog, and conducted a promotion and sale campaign which was very well done on hindsight. I hesitated on writing about this as my personal opinion is that site flipping is actually quite commonplace. In my short time online, 3 blogs that I read regularly had already been flipped - SiteFever.com, ShaunLow.com and now BloggingFingers.com, not to mention the others that take place on SitePoint.

However, after reading some of the comments on the sale, and reinforcing the idea of building multiple sites for an online income (thanks to Mark of 45n5.com), I would like to think further ahead.

If you noticed BloggingFingers’ monthly revenue figures since it was monetized (in September), they averaged around $400. I can safely say that’s more than what most new blogs can achieve, and no doubt part of it can be attributed to Matt’s previous experience with his first site which he sold for $1,000. According to him, the standards for a site’s value is 8-12 months of its potential monthly earnings, and blogs command the lower end due to much personal branding tied to their authors. If that’s the case, Matt got a reasonable price.

The thing is, if you noticed, BloggingFingers as a blog has not been around that long. (In fact, all 3 above-mentioned blogs had been around for less than 6 months each) And that gauge of calculating a site’s value is not a strict standard from what I have read.

Now, forget this and consider what 45n5 recommended. (Take note that of course you need time to do these things) Build 5 niche sites that you can work up to $50-100 a month in revenue. A lot of it rests on the niches you choose but that’s not part of the consideration here, assuming you have done your homework. While things like PageRank and other related rankings serve as extras to prop up your sites’ values, the bottomline rests on their current earning potential and the traffic they already attract. Flip them. You know where I am heading with this.

Of course there are other considerations, such as the time you put into building the sites and generating traffic. Many might not regard the value in then flipping them and averaging $1,000 per site, due in part to the amount of effort having to nurture these sites and $1,000 over a few months’ work might seem like beggar’s pickings.

My opinion is that in the beginning, that might be the case. But if you manage to go the distance and create 5 sites, I doubt you need more than a fraction of the effort for each subsequent addition, unless you wish to add further unique slants. You learn from each experience, and it’s your job to improve on every aspect possible. The economies of scale should in fact, increase. At least that is what I have noticed from the savvier online marketers who have created multiple sites as their business model, and a little from my own experience, no matter how limited it is.

While Matt has sold a blog, I am not sure this will work as well for blogs per se. There is a thin line between a website and a blog. Technically they are one and the same. My opinion is that a proper blog is something like a journal whatever the content. It is personalized and takes longer to establish. It is very hard to buy that and maintain or even improve the brand, without having to rebuild the readership. A website can simply be a content site that caters to a niche market. I struggle myself to point out the differences but visitors could care less about the author than finding something they need in terms of content or product. What you could do is to leverage on the CMS that blogs are built on to create these websites.

A better long term strategy would be to try improving and optimizing each site’s earning potential and to continue growing them, without ever having to drop them off to a willing party. However, if a particular niche site is not exactly your cuppa due to the subject matter, as long as it is making any money, you can leverage on that to auction it off. You may not wish to maintain it any further, or you have found a better, more rewarding niche. However, there’ll always be takers. In return you get a nice ‘golden handshake’.

I wanted to put all these down in a post to share with anyone as the idea bounced around in my head. I am by no means an expert in this, but since I have started working on niche sites, it never hurts to explore every possible option. If any of you have thoughts on this, or if any personal experience in this area, I’d be glad for you to share them with everyone here.

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