10 Questions You Must Answer to Sell Your Blog
Most websites have blogs. Blogs are great for regularly adding content to a website and creating a strong connection with readers. In addition, this new content is regularly indexed by search engine spiders that crawl the website. This brings in valuable traffic from search engines.
For the purpose of this article, we’ll define blogs as websites in which the blog is the main source of traffic and income. In other words, the majority of the website’s revenues are generated by blog posts.
People own business blogs and personal blogs. We’ll focus on blogs that generate income regardless of whether they are personal or business blogs. In order to sell a blog, it must produce income. We occasionally receive requests from prospective clients to sell blogs that make no money. These are usually personal hobby blogs that the owner has lost interest in and wants to sell. Without revenues, blogs like these never sell. So, let’s look at how to sell income-producing blogs.
The personal connection between the blogger and his readers
Everyone writes in a specific style. So each blogger has his own unique voice that his blog readers become accustomed to.
Business blogs generally hire different writers to contribute diverse articles to their blogs. As such, there are usually multiple styles and voices on a business blog.
But the vast majority of blogs are personal blogs written by the blog owner. This enables the blog owner to form a strong personal connection with his readers. Readers are engaged. They feel like they’re part of the conversation and post comments below the blog posts.
If you’re this type of blogger, when you’re looking to sell your blog, this could actually present a challenge because the identity of the blog is tied to you. A blog buyer has a different style and tone that the readers may not respond to. A change of blogger could negatively affect traffic and revenues.
This is not to say that business blogs don’t have specific writers that readers are emotionally connected to. But, in that case, a business blog buyer can acquire the blog and retain its writers. It’s business as usual when a new owner takes over. It’s the same writers, same article quality, and same tone. This is the ideal scenario for any investor looking to buy a blog.
So how do you sell your blog if your readers have a strong personal connection to you?
You could continue to write articles for the new blog owner for a fee. If the buyer agrees to this, you get to sell your blog for profit and earn additional money as a writer.
Otherwise, you can formally introduce the new owner to the readers in a post and encourage them to read his future posts. It’s then up to the buyer to produce quality, interesting content for the readers.
How do you present your blog for sale to buyers?
You can present your blog’s operational and financial information in a Prospectus or in a marketplace listing in any form you desire. But the information must answer the following 10 questions:
1. How many total blog posts are on the blog?
The number of posts on a blog are generally proportional to the amount of traffic it receives. Blogs with tons of articles tend to have more traffic and income than smaller blogs.
This is because search engines like larger websites with lots of useful content. More posts means that there are more web pages indexed by search engines which deliver traffic to the blog.
A bigger blog also means that website visitors have more web pages in which to enter the website. Traffic accounts like Google Analytics usually show more Entrances to different pages on bigger blogs.
2. Who are the blog writers?
This is an important question that every buyer will ask a blog seller. As explained above, if the writer is the blog seller, then the buyer has to decide how he will replace the seller.
He may decide to take over the blogging himself. Or he may choose to hire writers, which adds to his operating costs after he acquires the blog.
The ideal scenario for any buyer is that the writers continue to write for the blog at the same rates included in the financial statements.
3. How much is each writer paid?
The most important assets to a blog are its writers. Their rates must be clearly outlined in the Prospectus or in the financials. Writers charge fees as a price-per-word fee, monthly fee, or a fixed fee per article.
Some guest bloggers post articles for free in exchange for exposure to the website’s traffic and for backlinks to their websites.
Every buyer wants to know what it will cost to create new content.
4. How frequently is new content added to the blog?
Search engines love blogs that are regularly updated. These blogs get higher ranking. It’s therefore important for a buyer to maintain the level of frequency of posts in order to, at the very least, maintain search engine traffic.
Post frequency is also important to website visitors who bookmark and visit the website regularly. It’s important that they continue to view new content at the same (or better) level of post frequency that they’re accustomed to. This keeps them coming back to the blog regularly.
5. What is the length of the average post?
Internet users are said to dislike blog posts of over 500 words. As such, most blogs post articles of less than 500 words. (We don’t follow that rule in this blog.)
It’s important for a buyer to know how long the average post is in order to publish content of the same length as the previous owner.
If he publishes longer articles, he may lose visitors who expect shorter articles and don’t want to read long ones. If he publishes shorter articles, long-time visitors might feel shortchanged and stop visiting the website.
6. What are all the blog’s sources of revenues?
When a buyer acquires a website, the primary asset he’s buying is cash-flow. So he has to know where that cash-flow is coming from and how much cash-flow is coming in each month.
7. How many email subscribers does the blog have?
Email subscribers are a very important source of traffic and income for most websites. Email subscriptions are very important in website marketing. They enable blog owners to talk regularly to their readership. By sending out regular emails to subscribers, they can bring in steady traffic to the blog. This traffic is not dependent on a gatekeeper such as a search engine or referrer to send traffic to the blog.
Every buyer wants to know how many people are subscribed to the blog. He can offer additional products and services to this prospective customer base and increase the blog’s revenues.
8. What are the blog’s conversion rates?
A blog’s conversion rate refers to the rate at which visitors are converted to any measurable result defined by the blog owner. It is stated as a percentage.
For example, it could be the percentage of visitors that are converted to email subscribers. Or the percentage of visitors that are converted to customers who purchase a product on the blog.
So if 2 visitors out of 100 website visitors are converted to email subscribers, the conversion rate is 2%.
Most experienced website buyers look to improve conversion rates because it doesn’t require the new owner to bring in additional traffic. It involves getting more operational and financial performance out of the traffic that the website already receives.
9. What’s the average amount of time spent by visitors on the blog?
The amount of time spent on a blog is a key indicator to determine the quality of articles on a blog.
Articles drive traffic to the blog and keep them there. If visitors find the content useful and interesting, they stay longer on the website. This is what most buyers want to see.
10. Are all the blog articles unique content?
When a buyer acquires a blog, he’s acquiring a database of articles built up over the life of the blog. He must understand whether the seller owns the articles that he’s selling to the buyer. And he wants to find out if the same articles are published on other websites.
Some blogs contain articles that are copied from other websites. In this case, the buyer is not purchasing unique content. This reduces the value of the blog.
In other cases, blog articles may have been distributed by the blog owner to other websites. These other websites create competition to the buyer’s blog.
A little research using Copyscape will quickly tell a buyer if the content is unique to the blog that he’s acquiring.
These are the 10 most important questions that you must answer in order to sell your blog.
Author: Kris Tabetando
Kris Tabetando provides mergers & acquisitions (M&A) advisory and brokerage services to Internet companies. He also partners with investors to acquire & manage Internet businesses.
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