How To Sell Your Blog Interview
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I like to follow the sales of blogs, I find it interesting. We blogged about Blogging Fingers getting sold a while back. The blog on the block this time was Bloggin-Ads. Mike has become a friend and contact over instant messaging since his blog has emerged. Lately he has fallen on some hard times.
I hate seeing a blogger down, so I did my best to help his sale along. I thought now that his blog has sold it would be a great thing to interview him.
If you missed the sale, he recently sold his blog for $5,000, expecting a lot more (as did I). He cited other blogs being sold.
http://onemansgoal.com sold for $10,000
http://cashquests.com sold for $15,000
http://johncow.com sold for $25,000
http://bloggingexperiment.com/ sold for $15,000
http://bloggingfingers.com sold for $6,000
http://www.blogohblog.com/ sold for $10,000
According to this list, his blog was definitely valued at about 15-20k in my opinion. Whoever got it, definitely got a steal in my opinion.
I interviewed Mike Huang to see what went wrong.
Was selling your blog harder or easier than you thought?
Yeah, it was actually a lot harder to find bidders and potential buyers than I thought. I really thought I would receive bids up to $10,000, but that was out of the picture. Not to mention, the sale was hard on my wife and I especially after all the hard work put into it.
Why don’t you think you got the price you wanted? The long term advertising promises? Or something else?
From what I’ve been told, it is because of the long term advertising. What I should’ve done was not mention that, just receive bids, and if it goes high enough, I would just refund all the advertisers. I believe I could’ve gotten a least $7,000 or $8,000.
Another problem is the domain, which has a dash in it, which could cause problems with SEO, but not too much.
You mentioned the sale at Mybloglog, Blogcatalog, and Twitter. I also saw it on a lot of forums, which ones? What do you think drove the most bidders?
I mentioned it EVERYWHERE (mybloglog, blogcatalog, twitter, etc). Digital Point, Bloggeries, and NamePros. The most bidders most likely came from twitter or from other bloggers that mentioned it (hopefully BAYB!)
What did you learn from the sale?
What I learned is that you should never expect too much from selling ANYTHING because it may come out different than expected. A sale is much harder than what it seems and actually requires a lot of work.
Anything else we should know? Is the sale for $5,000 finalized?
It’s pretty much finalized and it’s in progress on escrow.com right now. Another thing to mention is that Escrow.com is the safest way to sell a site. Depending on the amount, if it goes over a few thousand, a seller should use escrow.
My Insight
The advertising slots that were already promised seemed to be the downfall, there were also other negative comments in sale thread.
A few pointers by observation when selling a blog:
- Tie up future advertising. I generally don’t like to sell a year in advance lately, but I have as of late.
- Along with advertising tie up any lose ends to make you look bad. Mike still had an open contest that wasn’t finalized which caused problems.
- Don’t change the blog around, keep the theme and posts going regular so the bidders can see how the blog functions and won’t take over with nothing left.
- Offer to stay on as a paid blogger to keep the “face” of the blog there, if possible.
- Lastly, this goes for Mike, don’t redirect the URL to another site in the closing hours of your auction!
Any other questions you have for Mike that I missed I’m sure he’d be happy to answer!
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13 Comments on this post
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Aaron said:
As an fyi, the Daily Blog Tips sale was an April Fool’s joke. You aren’t the first blogger who has mistakenly listed it though. I’ve seen a few other posts about blog sales, and they’ve also listed Daily Blog Tips.
Interesting read overall, though.
Aarons last blog post..Weekly Fix #4: PageRank, flea markets, and good design
July 29th, 2008 at 12:53 pm -
Matthew Henrickson said:
Ty for clearing that one up. I just took the list that Mike had on his sitepoint auction.
🙂
July 29th, 2008 at 1:28 pm -
The Affiliate Post said:
Thats a great shame to hear about Mikes hard times. He had a great blog going there. Kudous to you for helping the brother and nice little interview Matthew.
Good post!
The Affiliate Posts last blog post..71 Pages Of Everything You Need To Know
July 29th, 2008 at 3:47 pm -
KushMoney said:
I can’t ever think about selling my blog. Those are some big numbers to sell a blog tho. Recently Shannon put up his blog infectedbybugs for sale. He trying to get $3k. No bidders so far. From reading this post, I see he has some work ahead of him on selling it.
I want to flip blogs but I am not sure what niche to build on.
July 29th, 2008 at 4:16 pm -
Organic Search Traffic said:
Thanks for bringing this to our attention about the blog sales. Very interesting statistics.
Organic Search Traffics last blog post..5000 Website Resources
July 29th, 2008 at 7:32 pm -
Link Building Bible said:
Yah, well, Shannon just got back from being hacked ….. and lost his pagerank…. and has childish blog posts….and doesnt convert his 10000+ monthly search engine visitors well since he only has 200 subscribers (it was only at like 240ish when the site was hacked) and he has little to no comments…. … I don’t see him getting too much for it.
There will be a time to sell Link Building Bible…. dunno how much I’ll get for it…
Link Building Bibles last blog post..Why I Promote Link Building Not PageRank
July 29th, 2008 at 9:44 pm -
Matthew Henrickson said:
Well well now now. I dont know about the website in question lol.
Glad you guys are interested in the post, blog sales seem to fascinate me.
July 29th, 2008 at 11:00 pm -
Rhys said:
I think there has been overinflated values in blogs for a while now.
Look at sites like Cashquests, Blogging Fingers and One Man’s Goal. All of them sold for large sums of money, all haven’t really achieved anything since being sold – Cashquests has effectively died. I remember when One Man’s Goal was sold and the chap who bought it was completely torn to pieces by a number of people. Do you really think anybody – especially a newbie to the blogging world – would want to go through that? Especially in times now where people are feeling the pinch? People would be more inclined to buy a passive income site, rather than one which a) requires work and b) may not sell that well. Chances are the audience who reads Mike’s blog also reads Problogger/John Chow etc, and anything promoted on Mike’s blog would probably lead to a low conversion rate as they’d have already signed up through Problogger or John Chow (I admit, I don’t actually read Mike’s blog, so if that statement’s untrue, I apologise).
There is one exception to the rule in the list above and that is John Cow. John Cow sold because it was a fairly popular blog and money maker, the chaps who bought are experienced moneymakers, and I wouldn’t be surprised that John Cow would eventually overturn John Chow in income.
Rhyss last blog post..Too Cuil for Scuil
July 30th, 2008 at 1:57 am -
Codrut Turcanu - AdSenseProfitTips.com said:
You did a great research for this blog post.
I am surprise to see the statics, however, blog sales is something very interesting to know about.
I’m fascinated by the process of selling a blog interview.
July 30th, 2008 at 12:47 pm -
Blog Tips for Beginners said:
Thanks for sharing this interview. There are a lot of useful tips that ones can learn from Mike after the sale and I did.
Yan
Blog Tips for Beginnerss last blog post..It’s Christmas in August
August 1st, 2008 at 7:51 am -
Mike Huang said:
Thanks for the interview Matt.
As for the blog sale, I really wanted a lot more for it, but at the same time, my wife and I needed the money. This is why it had to be sold. When I worked on Bloggin-Ads, I tried to make everything different from what other bloggers do. This includes different unique topics for posts and the style I portray things.
-Mike
Mike Huangs last blog post..Boxhead – Halloween Special
August 1st, 2008 at 11:31 am -
AnotherMMOblog said:
People also have to remember that buying a blog also means buying the domain and believe it or not, there are TONS of people willing to pay that amount for certain domains.
Also, people usually don’t buy for GREAT stats, they buy blogs that are monetized well, gets lots of search engine traffic and of course, have potential. I’m sure whoever takes over bloggin-ads will fix up the site, monetize it and site flip it for five-figures.
– AnotherMMOblog
AnotherMMOblogs last blog post..Win up to $50 Paypal Simply by Commenting
August 5th, 2008 at 3:52 pm -
Codrut @ Blog Post Ideas said:
Yes, blog flipping is an area worth pursuing; it’s a back-end profit generator in my business.
By the way, this post idea is worth a sequel for 2010, what do you say?
December 19th, 2009 at 2:47 pm