10 ms·

How to Sell a Blog for $36,200

108 points by askaaronlee 13y ago

pavs 13y ago
About 5 years ago I sold a site on flippa (was called something else back then) for 15k, later worked on the blog for the new owner for about ~$600/month for ~6 months. It was PR-5 and at its peak (when I sold it) it had about 600k pageviews and I was making about $1000 month. I knew I probably could make a lot more if I tried, but I didn't. I still remember my site being on digg 4-5 times a month and all the traffic I used to get and all the headache that came with trying to keep the site up using wordpress. Fun times really.
patio11 13y ago
It's at http://thecupcakeblog.com/ http://thecupcakeblog.com/ , if you're curious. Personally I don't think the site is worth that, given the demonstrated revenues and what the market is typically like for sites with this model [1], but then again the fair price for most things is where a buyer and seller agree it is. Here's the auction page on Flippa: https://flippa.com/2736282-over-1000-ad-rev-199k-visits-475k-pageviews-a-month-large-social-following https://flippa.com/2736282-over-1000-ad-rev-199k-visits-475k... [1] You'd probably be looking at about $10k for it usually: trailing year's proven revenue. Nothing about it is defensible at all. Incidentally, if you were bound and determined to be the source for cupcakes online rather than a content scraper in the middle, you'd end up producing a site like: http://www.christmas-cookies.com/ http://www.christmas-cookies.com/ My SEO buddies and I ballparked owning that site as being roughly as lucrative as a full-time job as a cookbook author/editor (though it may have suffered a bit since we spitballed those numbers, due to ranking changes and the like -- it no longer dominates results like I remember it doing in ~2008).
- stevesearer 13y ago
  Interesting analysis. My website, http://officesnapshots.com http://officesnapshots.com, is essentially the same idea ("information DJ") but in a much different vertical - company offices. Once you start collecting information in blog format, the difficult thing to do is to do anything interesting with it other than have it in date-based archives. The Christmas Cookies site is much more interesting in that way. For anyone looking to start a blog with this sort of model, I've found it important to actually go and sell your site to advertisers as opposed to sitting back and waiting for them to come to you and buy.
  - edwinnathaniel 13y ago
    Hi Steve! I'm a casual Office Snapshots viewer! :D It's always exciting to come to your site once in a while just to see those nice offices (especially those outside North America). Thanks for keeping the site up to date too!!
    - stevesearer 13y ago
      Awesome, always happy to meet readers! I've tried to be pretty diligent about categorizing offices by location, so if you're interested in a plain ol' list: http://officesnapshots.com/location/ http://officesnapshots.com/location/
  - pwelch 13y ago
    Another casual Office Snapshots visitor. Also, wanted to say thanks for keeping it updated. Always an interesting read.
  - benlarcey 13y ago
    Looks like you're selling banners on the right hand side and not nofollowing them, be careful as that's a Google crime and you may find yourself on the receiving end of a Google penalty.
    - stevesearer 13y ago
      I've gotten the impression (pun!) that nofollow isn't strictly necessary for banners. In this video[1], Matt Cutts says many banners have nofollow to prevent bots from messing with tracking numbers, but I didn't get the feeling he is saying it is not allowed. Anyone else have wisdom on this? [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SesBNVanGs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SesBNVanGs
      - Matt_Cutts 13y ago
        Hi Steve, that advice was for banners that used typical ad networks, and Google handles the vast majority of typical ad network banners correctly. It looks like your links are direct hyperlinks, so I would recommend using nofollow on the right-hand links or ads.
- abailin 13y ago
  Would the 12k Facebook likes and 31k Twitter followers play into the price at all?
  - silverbax88 13y ago
    Twitter followers are just about worthless from a business perspective unless it's a staggering number (in my experience). You get a LOT more direct response from a Linked In group of 4,000 active members than a Twitter account with 100,000 followers.
    - poopsintub 13y ago
      The more followers you have the worse your click-through rate becomes. Twitter is horrendous for trying to get people to actually go to your content or advertised tweets because no one is constantly signed into twitter unless you're doing it for business or you're a teen.
    - jonnathanson 13y ago
      A lot of that has to do with the way Twitter works. Following someone on Twitter is as simple as clicking "Follow" and forgetting about it. No social considerations to weigh, no social qualification (Do I actually know this person? Does he know me?), and no site qualification (Am I a real person? A bot? A highly connected person? A low-connected person?). Joining a LinkedIn group asks a lot more of a user. There are multiple stages of pre-qualification, both user-initiated (seeking out and joining the group) and group-initiated (a lot of groups screen new members, for instance, screening "Stanford Alumni" for a Stanford email address of some sort). Your typical LinkedIn group membership is a lot smaller than a Twitter followership, but it's more homogeneously centered around a specific dimension of mutual interest, and the leads are more higly qualified. Twitter can work, and quite well, but it's a painstaking process. Cultivating a qualified and influential Twitter following is tantamount to having a second full-time job. There are followerships of 100,000+ that have basically been hand-picked and nurtured. Those are the kind of followerships that actually work. If you have even 10,000 fans that hang onto your every word, and a decent portion of which have others who do the same for them, then your following is worth an order of magnitude more than a 100,000+ following of mostly bots and dead weight. Getting to 1M+ followers on Twitter, based purely on buying or attracting bots or mutual follow/follow arrangements, is a nontrivial challenge and a serious waate of time and money. Not many people do it. This is why the sort of people who have 1M+ followers usually have a decent chunk of qualified followers, as well. These people tend to be famous outside of Twitter. I would be floored by any small business that managed to get into the hundreds of thousands of followers, let alone millions, with a strong percentage of qualified, active followers. It's pretty easy to suss out the difference, too.
- poopsintub 13y ago
  That's decent revenue. I'm not sure if it's sustainable for a site that basically has no unique content other than generic descriptions. When you have a site making 'real' revenue on flippa at 1k a month, it usually will go for at least 3x the yearly earnings, if not more. She found a niche and should have kept going with it, outsourced or even took a year off without doing anything. The revenue would have likely still been there. Who knows if it would have lasted 3 years and ended up making her the $30k+ though.
- beachstartup 13y ago
  > Personally I don't think the site is worth that i don't agree. the url and existing content is worth at least that much to a larger publisher that specializes in food blogs. it's less than the cost of one junior FT employee for a year. i know this because the sale actually happened, so by definition, you are incorrect in that it was overpriced. someone bought the business, it is therefore "worth that". not sure what you are trying to say here, you might as well say the sky is green and gravity pulls upward. profitable, large companies have a very different interpretation of value than broke individuals. furthermore, they are oftentimes purchasing assets through debt or equity, which is quite different than something like money saved from free cash flow.
  - mcguire 13y ago
    I would tend to disagree: it is difficult to know whether an investment is actually overpriced until after the buyer has filed for bankruptcy due to being unable to support its acquisitions. As the poster's original housing business demonstrates.
    - beachstartup 13y ago
      i would disagree with your disagreement. the price of the transaction is the value, period. what happens afterwards is neither here nor there and can be complicated by factors that are completely unrelated to the viability of the original business, purchase price, or anything else. what happens if the purchaser makes the purchase, and then are the victim of a class-action lawsuit brought against a sister brand in which they have to spend their entire savings and must declare bankruptcy, thereby bankrupting thecupcakeblog?
      - avalaunch 13y ago
        So you're basically asserting that by definition nobody can ever overpay for anything?
  - nialo 13y ago
    The "value" may well be the sale price by definition, but that's not really the important thing here. The important question is, was buying this particular site for this particular price a good decision, one that will tend to make money for the purchaser. I don't know what the answer is, but opinions can certainly vary.
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  Wow, there is money in this? Why am I wasting time working on legitimate and difficult products? I'm a fantastic frontend web developer, and this seems like something slapped together very easily. Definitely want to try my hand in this. I don't know anything about SEO and marketing though. Where could one learn?
  - stevesearer 13y ago
    The difficult thing isn't really putting a site like this together, but rather keeping up with it for a (sometimes long) while when it is making no money.
    - k-mcgrady 13y ago
      Sounds like a lot of tech startups.
      - wangarific 13y ago
        Sounds like any business really.
  - eurokc98 13y ago
    Google's SEO Starter Guide is a good place to start: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/... Another is their SEO Report Card from a different angle: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/googles-seo-report-card.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/googles-s... Moz (SEOmoz) provides another good source of info here: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
    - rfnslyr 13y ago
      Awesome thanks!
  - munger 13y ago
- Sodaware 13y ago
  What would be the best way to get the initial traffic for a blog like that? It's always been a major stumbling block for me.
  - fowkswe 13y ago
    Keep at it. She made 10 posts a day, religiously. These things have a way of snowballing if you give it love and effort. Shameless plug for my information jockey endeavor: http://heritagebros.com http://heritagebros.com.
    - molsongolden 13y ago
      Seriously how long should it take to grow a beard like that? I think the longest I've gone is a few months so maybe I just need to man up and let it go for a year.
  - gnaritas 13y ago
    If it has interesting content, people will find it in Google. Getting traffic isn't about SEO, it's about having good content.
    - ry0ohki 13y ago
      That's not true at all, as Google as no way of surfacing new content. Write the best, most authoritative article on a topic in the world, and if you simply put it out there without doing marketing (getting others to link to it), no one will ever find it on Google. If it's in the SERP it will be on page 9000. This is the biggest mistake I see startups doing, simply creating content and hoping it surfaces to the top of Google.
      - gnaritas 13y ago
        One article won't get any site ranked, but a site with many good articles will build traffic regardless of SEO. Saying otherwise is selling snake oil.
- hahla 13y ago
  Where are you getting your valuation multiple from? You seem extremely confident in stating "You'd probably be looking at about $10k for it usually: trailing year's proven revenue." I've been a successful website broker for many years now, and I have never seen anyone using trailing year's proven revenue in practice. In my opinion with a few simple changes she could have gotten quite a bit more than $36k from the site. Flippa is usually the last avenue you should consider if you own a site with traffic and revenue history.
  - programminggeek 13y ago
    On Flippa, 1 year trailing revenue is about average or maybe current/average month revenue x 12 months. Anyhow, some are more, some are less, but that's about where the market prices seem to be.
  - vasco 13y ago
    What would be the first few avenues you should consider?
  - lingben 13y ago
    > Flippa is usually the last avenue you should consider if you own a site with traffic and revenue history. So what would you recommend if not flippa?
  - gabemart 13y ago
    >In my opinion with a few simple changes she could have gotten quite a bit more than $36k from the site. Could you very briefly explain what kind of changes you're talking about? I have a site I haven't updated in years that gets ~120k page views per month with about $2.30 EPM and I have no idea what to do with it.
- unhappyhippie 13y ago
  I disabled ABP on the thecupcakeblog but I still don't see any ads.
iambateman 13y ago
The purchase price reflects the fact that 479,000 page views is worth more than $1000 per month. That is $2.08/1k views (CPM). In a niche space like cupcakes, doubling that to $4.00 is extremely possible. If someone purchases the site looking at those 500k page views, and expects to be able to monetize at a CPM of $4, then $36,000 is a fine deal. It's a lot of risk, but not insane.
- silverbax88 13y ago
  I think that could be done by adding video content, and monetizing that. The CPM rates for video are much higher.
- poopsintub 13y ago
  You could easily bring in more revenue. Adsense and BSA are just the beginning to monetizing a site. She has no idea how much a site like this could make with that amount of traffic and probably didn't even look further. $1000 a month is nothing.
  - grecy 13y ago
    Can you elaborate a little please?
    - stevesearer 13y ago
      I've found that many site owners are lulled into passively accepting advertising on their website through Google and BSA (which is exactly what they want). If you have a website that is awesome with content that people like, go sell the hell out of it to advertisers. Find companies that sell things your readers should know about. Then go and actively contact them and sell them advertising space. Some easy ways to find potential advertisers: -see who advertises on other sites in the same field -if there are trade magazines, look to see who advertises in those -look for trade shows and see who buys booths and advertisements at them
      - wangarific 13y ago
marincounty 13y ago
Be very careful selling your Website. Tell the truth, and don't manipulate sales, or statistics. I see a lot of fraud claims popping up in Municipal Court.
- fourstar 13y ago
  Post a link to a source.
phamilton 13y ago
Essentially, it seems picking one section of pinterest and putting it on a blog changes it from being a time sink to a business.
manuelflara 13y ago
I did a similar thing years ago, here's the Flippa auction (sold for $20k): https://flippa.com/127164-no-1-blog-about-casual-games-in-spanish-18k-a-year-revenue-easy-to-run https://flippa.com/127164-no-1-blog-about-casual-games-in-sp... I'm open to questions, although here are the main aspects of it: - Started a blog in Spanish about indie/casual games, mostly for fun - It was part of a (very small) network (NexoBlogs.com) run by a friend of mine on his spare time - After a year or so I ran out of things I wanted to write about, but then I noticed some terms driving most of the traffic, and focused on them. At this point I was making probably $40 a month - A year later, after focusing on those terms, traffic grew a lot (even though for most "big" keywords I wasn't number one) and revenue was maybe a couple hundred bucks a month - At this point I started looking at affiliate programs. Ended up with BigFishGames' which pays 25% of each sale and keeps the cookie on the user's computer for a year - Another year went by and I was making around $1K or a bit more a month, quite comfortably - I spent almost a year basically not writing (I'd write a generic summary once a week). Traffic still went up - After that, traffic started declining, so I hired someone from oDesk to write for 5€ / post 20 times a month to write new content - As you can read in the auction, at one point income from BigFishGames dropped a lot and I decided to sell it since someone else could do better with it, and it sold for the amount I wanted - It ended up netting me (sale price aside) maybe $20K in total, and it was my only source of income for a year while I traveled around South East Asia
- poopsintub 13y ago
  Google has changed alot. I had sites sitting there and gaining strength before panda and penguin came along. You could almost write about nonsense and be ranking in google over time without any seo 'help'. Someone asked in another comment how you gain traffic to a blog like this. Is there any keys to getting the word out there fast? Pinterest might be a quality start for this niche?
  - manuelflara 13y ago
    I literally did zero marketing or anything else in order to get traffic, other than checking which posts brought more traffic and write about that more. So I don't have much advice in that regard.
tobyjsullivan 13y ago
30 hrs/mo * 24 months = 720 hours 24 months * (1000 / 2) avg $/mo = $12,000 [1] $12,000 earned + $36,200 sale = $48,200 total income $48,200 / 720 hrs = $66.94/hr Given the exceptionally high risk, I'd have to declare that a ROTI fail but different people value their time differently. [1] My revenue calculation assumes a relatively steady growth.
- halcyondaze 13y ago
  There are a lot of intangibles earned as well...time to get a similar blog to same levels of income will generally be reduced on next project. Piggybacking off of built asset authority -> fast launching new sites, building credibility for yourself as skilled in that area opens up consulting avenues...etc
badman_ting 13y ago
People who exhibit the behavior described in the first couple grafs of this blog post drive me nuts.
avalaunch 13y ago
It sounds like she's basically just a cupcake aggregator but has chosen to do all the work manually. I think it would be a fun project to automate everything. You could: setup a cron job to scrape the top 100 or so sources for cupcake articles every day. use mechanical turk as quality assurance to make sure the articles are indeed about cupcakes. You could also have them help tag each article. write a script to automatically tweet each new article. write another to automatically post each picture to pinterest with a link back to your site (might get banned for spam?).
- DanBC 13y ago
  Depressingly that site would be better than a bunch of [cupcake] aggregation sites.
calbear81 13y ago
How do these blogs build a user base given the proliferation of content curation channels like Pinterest (just save a "cupcake" search), Tumblr, and others? I recently went on cuteoverload which was huge at one point and there's barely any comment activity anymore.
joelrunyon 13y ago
Surprisingly light on actual details. I was hoping for something more of a step-by-step guide.
pothibo 13y ago
I've started blogging for fun in May this year. When I started, I used Wordpress to start a blog ASAP. With all that is being said about blogs and revenues, I'm surprised blog engine still tries to focus their engine on the editorial part of the blog. I couldn't find a blog engine that focused on A/B Testing and analytics. Is it because I missed something?
- ankitoberoi 13y ago
  There are plugins for almost anything you want to do with wordpress. I'm a co-founder @ AdPushup, our tool allows bloggers to use A/B Testing on AdSense and other ad networks to improve ad revenues.
dhrona 13y ago
Unless you already have a large social following, the amount of time it takes to build a successful blog is too much on average. There are many other activities which can pay off much better with the same amount of time invested.
jt884 13y ago
This woman is another Amy Hoy. A whole bunch of delusional talk about money, but very little evidence or indication that it's anything besides a "look at me, I deserve your attention" ploy. People who are humoring her in the comments here are naive beyond any hope.
jacobbudin 13y ago
She copied other people's work and made money. Shocker.

108 points by askaaronlee 13y ago

pavs 13y ago

About 5 years ago I sold a site on flippa (was called something else back then) for 15k, later worked on the blog for the new owner for about ~$600/month for ~6 months. It was PR-5 and at its peak (when I sold it) it had about 600k pageviews and I was making about $1000 month. I knew I probably could make a lot more if I tried, but I didn't. I still remember my site being on digg 4-5 times a month and all the traffic I used to get and all the headache that came with trying to keep the site up using wordpress. Fun times really.

patio11 13y ago

It's at http://thecupcakeblog.com/ http://thecupcakeblog.com/ , if you're curious. Personally I don't think the site is worth that, given the demonstrated revenues and what the market is typically like for sites with this model [1], but then again the fair price for most things is where a buyer and seller agree it is. Here's the auction page on Flippa: https://flippa.com/2736282-over-1000-ad-rev-199k-visits-475k-pageviews-a-month-large-social-following https://flippa.com/2736282-over-1000-ad-rev-199k-visits-475k... [1] You'd probably be looking at about $10k for it usually: trailing year's proven revenue. Nothing about it is defensible at all. Incidentally, if you were bound and determined to be the source for cupcakes online rather than a content scraper in the middle, you'd end up producing a site like: http://www.christmas-cookies.com/ http://www.christmas-cookies.com/ My SEO buddies and I ballparked owning that site as being roughly as lucrative as a full-time job as a cookbook author/editor (though it may have suffered a bit since we spitballed those numbers, due to ranking changes and the like -- it no longer dominates results like I remember it doing in ~2008).

stevesearer 13y ago
Interesting analysis. My website, http://officesnapshots.com http://officesnapshots.com, is essentially the same idea ("information DJ") but in a much different vertical - company offices. Once you start collecting information in blog format, the difficult thing to do is to do anything interesting with it other than have it in date-based archives. The Christmas Cookies site is much more interesting in that way. For anyone looking to start a blog with this sort of model, I've found it important to actually go and sell your site to advertisers as opposed to sitting back and waiting for them to come to you and buy.
- edwinnathaniel 13y ago
  Hi Steve! I'm a casual Office Snapshots viewer! :D It's always exciting to come to your site once in a while just to see those nice offices (especially those outside North America). Thanks for keeping the site up to date too!!
  - stevesearer 13y ago
    Awesome, always happy to meet readers! I've tried to be pretty diligent about categorizing offices by location, so if you're interested in a plain ol' list: http://officesnapshots.com/location/ http://officesnapshots.com/location/
- pwelch 13y ago
  Another casual Office Snapshots visitor. Also, wanted to say thanks for keeping it updated. Always an interesting read.
- benlarcey 13y ago
  Looks like you're selling banners on the right hand side and not nofollowing them, be careful as that's a Google crime and you may find yourself on the receiving end of a Google penalty.
  - stevesearer 13y ago
    I've gotten the impression (pun!) that nofollow isn't strictly necessary for banners. In this video[1], Matt Cutts says many banners have nofollow to prevent bots from messing with tracking numbers, but I didn't get the feeling he is saying it is not allowed. Anyone else have wisdom on this? [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SesBNVanGs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SesBNVanGs
    - Matt_Cutts 13y ago
      Hi Steve, that advice was for banners that used typical ad networks, and Google handles the vast majority of typical ad network banners correctly. It looks like your links are direct hyperlinks, so I would recommend using nofollow on the right-hand links or ads.
abailin 13y ago
Would the 12k Facebook likes and 31k Twitter followers play into the price at all?
- silverbax88 13y ago
  Twitter followers are just about worthless from a business perspective unless it's a staggering number (in my experience). You get a LOT more direct response from a Linked In group of 4,000 active members than a Twitter account with 100,000 followers.
  - poopsintub 13y ago
    The more followers you have the worse your click-through rate becomes. Twitter is horrendous for trying to get people to actually go to your content or advertised tweets because no one is constantly signed into twitter unless you're doing it for business or you're a teen.
  - jonnathanson 13y ago
    A lot of that has to do with the way Twitter works. Following someone on Twitter is as simple as clicking "Follow" and forgetting about it. No social considerations to weigh, no social qualification (Do I actually know this person? Does he know me?), and no site qualification (Am I a real person? A bot? A highly connected person? A low-connected person?). Joining a LinkedIn group asks a lot more of a user. There are multiple stages of pre-qualification, both user-initiated (seeking out and joining the group) and group-initiated (a lot of groups screen new members, for instance, screening "Stanford Alumni" for a Stanford email address of some sort). Your typical LinkedIn group membership is a lot smaller than a Twitter followership, but it's more homogeneously centered around a specific dimension of mutual interest, and the leads are more higly qualified. Twitter can work, and quite well, but it's a painstaking process. Cultivating a qualified and influential Twitter following is tantamount to having a second full-time job. There are followerships of 100,000+ that have basically been hand-picked and nurtured. Those are the kind of followerships that actually work. If you have even 10,000 fans that hang onto your every word, and a decent portion of which have others who do the same for them, then your following is worth an order of magnitude more than a 100,000+ following of mostly bots and dead weight. Getting to 1M+ followers on Twitter, based purely on buying or attracting bots or mutual follow/follow arrangements, is a nontrivial challenge and a serious waate of time and money. Not many people do it. This is why the sort of people who have 1M+ followers usually have a decent chunk of qualified followers, as well. These people tend to be famous outside of Twitter. I would be floored by any small business that managed to get into the hundreds of thousands of followers, let alone millions, with a strong percentage of qualified, active followers. It's pretty easy to suss out the difference, too.
poopsintub 13y ago
That's decent revenue. I'm not sure if it's sustainable for a site that basically has no unique content other than generic descriptions. When you have a site making 'real' revenue on flippa at 1k a month, it usually will go for at least 3x the yearly earnings, if not more. She found a niche and should have kept going with it, outsourced or even took a year off without doing anything. The revenue would have likely still been there. Who knows if it would have lasted 3 years and ended up making her the $30k+ though.
beachstartup 13y ago
> Personally I don't think the site is worth that i don't agree. the url and existing content is worth at least that much to a larger publisher that specializes in food blogs. it's less than the cost of one junior FT employee for a year. i know this because the sale actually happened, so by definition, you are incorrect in that it was overpriced. someone bought the business, it is therefore "worth that". not sure what you are trying to say here, you might as well say the sky is green and gravity pulls upward. profitable, large companies have a very different interpretation of value than broke individuals. furthermore, they are oftentimes purchasing assets through debt or equity, which is quite different than something like money saved from free cash flow.
- mcguire 13y ago
  I would tend to disagree: it is difficult to know whether an investment is actually overpriced until after the buyer has filed for bankruptcy due to being unable to support its acquisitions. As the poster's original housing business demonstrates.
  - beachstartup 13y ago
    i would disagree with your disagreement. the price of the transaction is the value, period. what happens afterwards is neither here nor there and can be complicated by factors that are completely unrelated to the viability of the original business, purchase price, or anything else. what happens if the purchaser makes the purchase, and then are the victim of a class-action lawsuit brought against a sister brand in which they have to spend their entire savings and must declare bankruptcy, thereby bankrupting thecupcakeblog?
    - avalaunch 13y ago
      So you're basically asserting that by definition nobody can ever overpay for anything?
- nialo 13y ago
  The "value" may well be the sale price by definition, but that's not really the important thing here. The important question is, was buying this particular site for this particular price a good decision, one that will tend to make money for the purchaser. I don't know what the answer is, but opinions can certainly vary.
rfnslyr 13y ago
Wow, there is money in this? Why am I wasting time working on legitimate and difficult products? I'm a fantastic frontend web developer, and this seems like something slapped together very easily. Definitely want to try my hand in this. I don't know anything about SEO and marketing though. Where could one learn?
- stevesearer 13y ago
  The difficult thing isn't really putting a site like this together, but rather keeping up with it for a (sometimes long) while when it is making no money.
  - k-mcgrady 13y ago
    Sounds like a lot of tech startups.
    - wangarific 13y ago
      Sounds like any business really.
- eurokc98 13y ago
  Google's SEO Starter Guide is a good place to start: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/... Another is their SEO Report Card from a different angle: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/googles-seo-report-card.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/googles-s... Moz (SEOmoz) provides another good source of info here: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
  - rfnslyr 13y ago
    Awesome thanks!
- munger 13y ago
Sodaware 13y ago
What would be the best way to get the initial traffic for a blog like that? It's always been a major stumbling block for me.
- fowkswe 13y ago
  Keep at it. She made 10 posts a day, religiously. These things have a way of snowballing if you give it love and effort. Shameless plug for my information jockey endeavor: http://heritagebros.com http://heritagebros.com.
  - molsongolden 13y ago
    Seriously how long should it take to grow a beard like that? I think the longest I've gone is a few months so maybe I just need to man up and let it go for a year.
- gnaritas 13y ago
  If it has interesting content, people will find it in Google. Getting traffic isn't about SEO, it's about having good content.
  - ry0ohki 13y ago
    That's not true at all, as Google as no way of surfacing new content. Write the best, most authoritative article on a topic in the world, and if you simply put it out there without doing marketing (getting others to link to it), no one will ever find it on Google. If it's in the SERP it will be on page 9000. This is the biggest mistake I see startups doing, simply creating content and hoping it surfaces to the top of Google.
    - gnaritas 13y ago
      One article won't get any site ranked, but a site with many good articles will build traffic regardless of SEO. Saying otherwise is selling snake oil.
hahla 13y ago
Where are you getting your valuation multiple from? You seem extremely confident in stating "You'd probably be looking at about $10k for it usually: trailing year's proven revenue." I've been a successful website broker for many years now, and I have never seen anyone using trailing year's proven revenue in practice. In my opinion with a few simple changes she could have gotten quite a bit more than $36k from the site. Flippa is usually the last avenue you should consider if you own a site with traffic and revenue history.
- programminggeek 13y ago
  On Flippa, 1 year trailing revenue is about average or maybe current/average month revenue x 12 months. Anyhow, some are more, some are less, but that's about where the market prices seem to be.
- vasco 13y ago
  What would be the first few avenues you should consider?
- lingben 13y ago
  > Flippa is usually the last avenue you should consider if you own a site with traffic and revenue history. So what would you recommend if not flippa?
- gabemart 13y ago
  >In my opinion with a few simple changes she could have gotten quite a bit more than $36k from the site. Could you very briefly explain what kind of changes you're talking about? I have a site I haven't updated in years that gets ~120k page views per month with about $2.30 EPM and I have no idea what to do with it.
unhappyhippie 13y ago
I disabled ABP on the thecupcakeblog but I still don't see any ads.

iambateman 13y ago

The purchase price reflects the fact that 479,000 page views is worth more than $1000 per month. That is $2.08/1k views (CPM). In a niche space like cupcakes, doubling that to $4.00 is extremely possible. If someone purchases the site looking at those 500k page views, and expects to be able to monetize at a CPM of $4, then $36,000 is a fine deal. It's a lot of risk, but not insane.

silverbax88 13y ago
I think that could be done by adding video content, and monetizing that. The CPM rates for video are much higher.
poopsintub 13y ago
You could easily bring in more revenue. Adsense and BSA are just the beginning to monetizing a site. She has no idea how much a site like this could make with that amount of traffic and probably didn't even look further. $1000 a month is nothing.
- grecy 13y ago
  Can you elaborate a little please?
  - stevesearer 13y ago
    I've found that many site owners are lulled into passively accepting advertising on their website through Google and BSA (which is exactly what they want). If you have a website that is awesome with content that people like, go sell the hell out of it to advertisers. Find companies that sell things your readers should know about. Then go and actively contact them and sell them advertising space. Some easy ways to find potential advertisers: -see who advertises on other sites in the same field -if there are trade magazines, look to see who advertises in those -look for trade shows and see who buys booths and advertisements at them
    - wangarific 13y ago

marincounty 13y ago

Be very careful selling your Website. Tell the truth, and don't manipulate sales, or statistics. I see a lot of fraud claims popping up in Municipal Court.

fourstar 13y ago
Post a link to a source.

phamilton 13y ago

Essentially, it seems picking one section of pinterest and putting it on a blog changes it from being a time sink to a business.

manuelflara 13y ago

I did a similar thing years ago, here's the Flippa auction (sold for $20k): https://flippa.com/127164-no-1-blog-about-casual-games-in-spanish-18k-a-year-revenue-easy-to-run https://flippa.com/127164-no-1-blog-about-casual-games-in-sp... I'm open to questions, although here are the main aspects of it: - Started a blog in Spanish about indie/casual games, mostly for fun - It was part of a (very small) network (NexoBlogs.com) run by a friend of mine on his spare time - After a year or so I ran out of things I wanted to write about, but then I noticed some terms driving most of the traffic, and focused on them. At this point I was making probably $40 a month - A year later, after focusing on those terms, traffic grew a lot (even though for most "big" keywords I wasn't number one) and revenue was maybe a couple hundred bucks a month - At this point I started looking at affiliate programs. Ended up with BigFishGames' which pays 25% of each sale and keeps the cookie on the user's computer for a year - Another year went by and I was making around $1K or a bit more a month, quite comfortably - I spent almost a year basically not writing (I'd write a generic summary once a week). Traffic still went up - After that, traffic started declining, so I hired someone from oDesk to write for 5€ / post 20 times a month to write new content - As you can read in the auction, at one point income from BigFishGames dropped a lot and I decided to sell it since someone else could do better with it, and it sold for the amount I wanted - It ended up netting me (sale price aside) maybe $20K in total, and it was my only source of income for a year while I traveled around South East Asia

poopsintub 13y ago
Google has changed alot. I had sites sitting there and gaining strength before panda and penguin came along. You could almost write about nonsense and be ranking in google over time without any seo 'help'. Someone asked in another comment how you gain traffic to a blog like this. Is there any keys to getting the word out there fast? Pinterest might be a quality start for this niche?
- manuelflara 13y ago
  I literally did zero marketing or anything else in order to get traffic, other than checking which posts brought more traffic and write about that more. So I don't have much advice in that regard.

tobyjsullivan 13y ago

30 hrs/mo * 24 months = 720 hours 24 months * (1000 / 2) avg $/mo = $12,000 [1] $12,000 earned + $36,200 sale = $48,200 total income $48,200 / 720 hrs = $66.94/hr Given the exceptionally high risk, I'd have to declare that a ROTI fail but different people value their time differently. [1] My revenue calculation assumes a relatively steady growth.

halcyondaze 13y ago
There are a lot of intangibles earned as well...time to get a similar blog to same levels of income will generally be reduced on next project. Piggybacking off of built asset authority -> fast launching new sites, building credibility for yourself as skilled in that area opens up consulting avenues...etc

badman_ting 13y ago

People who exhibit the behavior described in the first couple grafs of this blog post drive me nuts.

avalaunch 13y ago

It sounds like she's basically just a cupcake aggregator but has chosen to do all the work manually. I think it would be a fun project to automate everything. You could: setup a cron job to scrape the top 100 or so sources for cupcake articles every day. use mechanical turk as quality assurance to make sure the articles are indeed about cupcakes. You could also have them help tag each article. write a script to automatically tweet each new article. write another to automatically post each picture to pinterest with a link back to your site (might get banned for spam?).

DanBC 13y ago
Depressingly that site would be better than a bunch of [cupcake] aggregation sites.

calbear81 13y ago

How do these blogs build a user base given the proliferation of content curation channels like Pinterest (just save a "cupcake" search), Tumblr, and others? I recently went on cuteoverload which was huge at one point and there's barely any comment activity anymore.

joelrunyon 13y ago

Surprisingly light on actual details. I was hoping for something more of a step-by-step guide.

pothibo 13y ago

I've started blogging for fun in May this year. When I started, I used Wordpress to start a blog ASAP. With all that is being said about blogs and revenues, I'm surprised blog engine still tries to focus their engine on the editorial part of the blog. I couldn't find a blog engine that focused on A/B Testing and analytics. Is it because I missed something?

ankitoberoi 13y ago
There are plugins for almost anything you want to do with wordpress. I'm a co-founder @ AdPushup, our tool allows bloggers to use A/B Testing on AdSense and other ad networks to improve ad revenues.

dhrona 13y ago

Unless you already have a large social following, the amount of time it takes to build a successful blog is too much on average. There are many other activities which can pay off much better with the same amount of time invested.

jt884 13y ago

This woman is another Amy Hoy. A whole bunch of delusional talk about money, but very little evidence or indication that it's anything besides a "look at me, I deserve your attention" ploy. People who are humoring her in the comments here are naive beyond any hope.

jacobbudin 13y ago

She copied other people's work and made money. Shocker.