 Buying a Blog
With the economy dropping a fair bit, it can mean a prime opportunity for entrepreneurial people to pick up amazing websites for much less than they could a few months ago. One blog I know went from a potential sale price of $13,500 USD to being willing to take a sale price around $8000. These two prices were six months apart, and the site in question had gone up in value, with strong traffic, back links, and advertisements.
With the drop in advertising rates online, people are getting much more nervous with their money, and it is driving prices down quickly, but while this might seem like the perfect time to buy, I'd hope that you'll all err on the side of caution.
When buying a blog especially, you can expect traffic stats to drop by around thirty percent. Nearly one third of the unique visitors and page views will vanish overnight. That percentage is variable based on how publicly the sale is processed, and how much the traffic is tied to the owner and author.
If someone like John Chow sold his blog, JohnChow.com, and was public about the sale, the traffic would tumble downwards very quickly. Even if he sold it to the biggest, most experienced internet marketing company in the world, it still would no longer be John Chow, the person that the readership had come to envy and sometimes respect.
In selling a few sites of my own, and participating in the sales of others over the last three years, I have witnessed this effect time and time again.
I would suggest never buying a blog if:
- the owner has mentioned on the blog that it is for sale publicly
- the owner is unwilling to stay on for a minimum of 3 months as a transitionary period
- the blog sells text links through Text Link Ads or a similar service
- the blog doesn't rank on Google for its own name
- the blog will loose more than 5 inbound links from "partners" or other sites immediately after purchase
- the blog has been around for a year and doesn't have a Google PageRank 3 or higher.
Most of these things will directly effect traffic or search engine rankings over the long term or are a sign of currently bad search engine rankings.
Be careful when buying a blog, as things don't always go smoothly. As the buyer or seller, you need to trust the person you are buying from, but don't trust anyone blindly. Get every detail possible, do research on Google and other services, and only buy if everything looks right, and in your gut, you are confident. Sometimes a gut feeling can save you from huge mistakes, so don't ignore it out of hand.
It is better to pass up on a good opportunity, than burden yourself with a bad one.
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