Blogs are high-margin businesses, coupled with low-interest rates, its valuation has gone up. Additionally, unlike physical stores that you have to open and close at the end of the day, blogs can stay operational 24/7.
It offers a higher average return compared to traditional investment. Let’s say you bought a blog for $24,000 and it generates $1000 revenue per month. Even if it had zero income growth post-purchase, in just 24 months or two years, you gain back your initial investment.
Say you keep this as a static investment for five years, by then, you’ll be able to make $60,000. Imagine how big the average return you get! More than 20% per year. Compare that to traditional investments and their typical return rates According to BankRate:
There’s no clear cut range of how much you can make with blogging. But just to give you an idea of how lucrative it can be, if your blog posts get 10,000-100,000 page views per month, you can make $0.2-$0.10 per page view from ads. That’s $200-$10,000 per month.
Of course, there are other monetization means you can employ, Adam Enfroy, a travel blogger earns more than $44,000 just from affiliate marketing. Add online courses and products to the equation you can make as high as $10,000 more per month.
But why not just start blogging from scratch? Successful blogs don’t reach their full potential until after they’re around a year or two. For new sites, Google still has to crawl your site, add other websites to the queue making the wait longer.
Whereas if you buy a blog site, given that it already has tons of quality articles, the wait will be shorter, having more chances to expect explosive growth in just a few months. Blog owners sell their sites based on the previous six month’s performance, not the next. Doing so undervalues the growth potential of their blog making a good buying opportunity.
Of course, there’s more to learn about buying a blog and monetizing it for an additional income stream. Buying a blog is a serious business, but once you get the hang of it, you can make smart financial decisions and see this field as a lucrative space to grow your income stream.
So where do you start? With choosing a blog niche to focus on.
Choose A Blog Niche You Care About
When owning a blog, it’s best to buy one in a niche you’re passionate about. This way, you’ll be more inclined to explore the subject and create more quality content about it. You won’t be as dedicated to a blog you’re personally interested in as in a blog you know nothing about.
While you can always hire someone else to create the content for you, having a personal attraction to the niche will ensure higher quality content. You’ll easily be able to choose topics to write about and identify which parts of the blogs need more focus on and which information to update or change.
You’ll be more confident discussing the topic and with a personal interest involved, you’ll be able to resonate better with your audience.
Whether it’s about outdoor sports like hiking and cycling, lifestyles like travel and fitness, hobbies like photography or coin collection, and business like marketing or crypto, the important thing is, you’re passionate about the niche so you’ll be able to offer to generate value for your content.
If you’re selling merchandise like sports apparel, you can do a health blog like what Impossible did. Or if you’re promoting medical alert equipment, you can do adult health care blogs like what Medical Alert Buyers Guide did.
With the best value, readers will be satisfied with the content they consume, moving them to explore more content, share it with others, or take action to generate conversions.
In many cases, a niche might be too saturated with stronger competition. There will likely be a blog that discusses the topics you’d like to cover. This is why it’s recommended to narrow the content focus.
If you’re planning to create content in the photography niche, narrow it down by focusing on wedding photography, lifestyle photography, high fashion photography, product photography, sports photography, photojournalism, or some other specialized avenue in the photography niche.
Create Original Content
Duplicates can affect your chances of ranking high on the search results. Once search engines like Google finds out you published copied content, it’ll penalize your site by putting on the last on the search results, likely the last page where no searcher ever goes. Basically, you get zero traffic which translates to zero chances of conversions.
Creating original content involves looking at competing blogs. But does that mean you’ll be enticed to plagiarize? Of course not. The purpose is to gather their best practices and give you a good idea on a content outline to work on.
A good practice is to consider and check the search results on the first page. Check out recurring subheading, sections, and keywords. Work those out in your content as well. Those topics likely put them in the first page and so it’ll increase your content’s chances too.
Always keep in mind to include keyword targeting in the prewriting phase of the content. This will ensure that the content you’ll write will have enough interested audience to visit your site. The more targeted the keywords are, the better chances for acquired traffic to convert.
To draw more traffic, consider writing guest posts on related niche sites. You’ll be able to tap into another website’s network and thus increase your audience base once discovered.
Understand The Operations Of The Blog You Want To Buy
Of course, it’s assumed that a blog you’re looking to buy has good search result ranking performance. This involves learning about the blog platform or website management tool the blog is currently under and replicating the system the previous owner or writer put in place that helped them rank to where they are now. It keeps operations streamlined moving forward.
Replicating the system and strategies the previous owner had in place includes fully understanding the process the blogs go through. Does the owner craft the content themselves, do they have a team to handle aspects of the content creation, or did the owner hire a blog content writing service to do the job?
So you have to decide if you should handle this on your own (given that you have content writing experience and expertise), if you need to hire a full-time staff and request transitioning phase assistance from the previous owner, or if you should tap contractors to do the job for you.
Quality blog content only comes with an efficient system in place. To get the same quality results, ask the current owner to a meeting (physical or through conference management software) to ask about how the existing blogs were crafted to be in a good place to take over.
Taking advantage of Flippa, you’ll get access to chat forums in the blog listings you’re interested in. Read through the discussion board to find answers to your questions, or if there is no existing question yet, you can pose it yourself.
Also, ask about the additional blogging costs you might need to spend to get a more accurate picture of the investment amount needed to acquire and run the website. Pinpoint all the pieces from topic ideation to content creation up to the blog support needed to sustain the current rankings and traffic flow.
To take some weight off your shoulders, you can also work with blog content writing services. You can provide them a detailed briefing about the content you want written and just wait for the content to be produced.
In many cases, more than just relying on organic traffic, traffic acquisition strategies involve promoting the content on social media sites. If social sites are a major source of traffic for your blog, discuss with the previous owner if the purchase will include access to all of the social media sites they run that’s linked to promoting the blog.
A helpful reminder though: It must at least have 50% of organic traffic. Traffic acquisition from social media and ads will likely get less interest compared to traffic generated from search engines. The latter gives a certain level of assurance of the people’s commitment to your website or the niche it focuses on making them more receptive to the action you want them to make when on the website.
While you’re discussing blog operations, don’t forget to inquire about other website maintenance needs. You can ask questions like:
- How long will the current domain name purchase last? How much does it cost? How much do you pay for the website management system?
- Do you have additional tools like a PIM or a plugin utilized in the blog, if so, is it an essential tool? How much does that cost?
- Do I need to tap web developers to help with website maintenance? Do they need to have specific expertise like a React JS developer, a React Native developer, or other types of developers?
Also, consider if email marketing strategies are already put in place, and if not, does the previous owner have an email list acquired from the blog you can start working on?
A good thing to consider when choosing a blog to go for is that it should at least have 500-1000 email subscribers. In many cases, you can’t make visitors convert on the first visit. You should have the chance to retarget them to finally close a deal or make any other kind of conversion. Reaching out through email marketing will make this possible which will only happen if you’ve captured their email information.
Blog Traffic
When considering a blog to buy, check out how its current traffic acquisition. You can’t monetize a website when no traffic is coming in, that’s why examining the existing traffic with tools like Google Analytics is an essential step to take. Check the blogs’ traffic volume and the traffic source to ensure the initial statistics the owner provided are true.
Third-party reports from tools like SEMrush might also help. Flippa partnered with this tool to give buyers an insight into a blog’s traffic volume and overall health.
Ahrefs can also provide valuable insight. For example, I checked out this skills gap analysis blog by Axonify and it showed the average traffic it gets and how many backlinks it currently has plus other pertinent SEO insight.
Consider the traffic growth chart. Is it growing, decreasing, or plateauing? Several elements can result in this. You can first ask the previous owner about the reasons for this and then you can do additional digging yourself.
It’s either the content publishing volume changed (maybe slowed down knowing it’s in the purchase process), new search algorithms are put in place, ad spending is decreased, or less promotion on social channels.
You can also use Ahrefs or SEMrush to check on the blog’s backlinks. While this is not a foolproof method, it’ll give you valuable insight into how the blog is faring in terms of rankings.
You can look for red flags such as a site ranking on the first page but only having 3 backlinks. If that’s the case, something fishy might be going on and the search results screenshot provided to you might be doctored.
Know the blockers so you’ll know how to address it. It’ll also give you a good gauge if the blog is still feasible to buy or not. Feasibility also concerns how revenue is generated, so let’s consider that next.
You’ll want to make sure you’ll get your initial investment back at an optimal rate hence analyzing the current revenue will help in doing that. Ask the owner for revenue spikes, the reasons for it, and the financial history of the blog.
Blog Revenue
Simply, understand how the blog generates its monthly income. You can ask the owner questions like:
- Does the blog run on sponsored ads? Affiliate link purchases? Banner ads?
- Did it generate monthly revenue from Google Adsense?
- How much of the traffic rate is from organic searches?
- Are their seasonal highs and lows on traffic and revenue?
- Do they sell in-demand products like kids masks, vitamins, handwash, or alcohol? (pandemic times)
By considering these questions you’ll have a better understanding of the blog’s profit margin to assess if it’s a good blog to buy or not.
Using Flippa, you’ll be able to use built-in integrations like WooCommerce and Stripe to verify its revenue. Check out the revenue history for the last 2 years at least. It’ll tell you if the blog can deliver sustainable revenue for you.
Like what was mentioned at the outset, with blogs, you can make as much as a 20% average return per year. Compared to real-estate rentals, blogs arguably pay larger dividends making it a good underlying asset. (see first image above)
You can look at blogs as a digital real estate investing opportunity. As with the analogy we’ve used at the outset, blogs can be considered as a real estate investment, only that it’s in the virtual space.
The difference is, with a physical rental property, you’re likely to pay 10-15 times the monthly revenue. So if the property you own produces $50,000 in rental revenue, you’ll likely pay $500,000 to $750,000 to buy it.
Buying a blog website, you’ll likely pay more, 18-24 times the monthly income. But significant ROI will be made in the very first year. Plan to monetize it in more ways than it currently does, you’ll still make more money to cover the initial cost you shed out for it.
In comparison to physical real estate property, your initial investment may not be paid back until 3-4 years have gone by. With blogs, you can get a return of investment, if not in the first year, the second, faster than physical real estate.
With physical real estate, you’ll only be making money from rent alone but with blogs, as mentioned, you can employ several ways to make the virtual space income-generating. How can you increase your blog income?
Blog Growth
When considering a blog to buy, more than just looking at the monthly revenue, take a look at the monetization strategies already in place. If the blog already has an ad space, utilizing affiliate marketing, or promoting a product but the monthly income it makes can’t cover a 100% ROI in 1-2 years, you might want to check out other options to buy.
Here’s why it’s good to go for under-monetized blogs. It’ll give you more confidence that you can still employ more ways to generate more income from the blog. If the blog is mainly promoting products like High Desert Pure, you can also place ads, add affiliate links, have backlink clients, and sponsored posts, as an additional income stream.
The ideal is that you can still add 2-3 income sources. It can be different types of ads (CPC ads, banner ads, text link ads), sponsored posts, or own products like eBooks or services allowing you to recover from your initial investment in a year or two.
You also have to consider if you have the expertise to open up other revenue sources for the blog. If you have to hire someone else to help you out like a media buyer or an affiliate marketer, will the pay for the external help needed not hinder you from generating back your return of investment within the ideal timeframe?
Blog Acquisition Process
After completing learning about the blog operations, checking if it has sustainable traffic and revenue, and if it still has opportunities for income growth, you can now start the blog purchasing process.
First off, make sure you know who owns it. Nothing worse than handing over your money to someone who isn’t in authority to turn over a blog you are interested in. There have been stories where hackers take control of a blog, sell it to someone and the new owner realizes they have little to no control thus losing the money they paid.
Use WhoIs’s Domain History tool to check out the ownership history of the blog you’re looking to buy. These tools archive alterations made on the domain so anything odd will stick out. It’ll also give you details on who owns the blog so you’ll know the right person to reach out to, especially if you’re negotiating a website purchase privately.
Here is a sample of the details you get with WhoIs. I researched Close’s predictive dialer blog and it gave me the needed details including phone and email to contact the owner.
Next, check the website’s history. More than just the domain name, check out the blog’s history. We’ve been in a situation where we thought we got a high-potential domain only to find out later when the traffic growth stunted that it was previously an adult site. It was an awful lot of work figuring out and deeply researching for a new domain name to adopt and then migrating all the content to this new site.
To prevent this from happening to you, you can use a tool like Wayback Machine that provides snapshots of the website’s past. This way you’ll gain confidence that your blog has no sketchy past that will cause a decrease in your growth.
When website and ownership credibility is established, it is time to do due diligence. You can refer to these basic requirements to consider if a blog is worth purchasing:
- It must at least have 50% of organic traffic.
- It should at least have 500-1000 email subscribers.
- It should under-monetized blogs
- It has to be at least one year old. It takes a few months to a year to be crawled, be recognized by Google, and have valid traffic data to assess. People debate over a longer domain being better over its maturity having no considerable significance. At the bare minimum, still, the blog has to be at least a year old.
- Blog/domain history. Research on the blog or the domain names history to find out if it has some type of history with Google. If it does, skip considering this blog, your website traffic will suffer in the long run no matter how good the content you’ll be making will be. We’ve been there, and we had to change domain names because of it.
- If you’re looking to have a good visitor base to start with, aim for a website that already generates 10,000 monthly visits. Starting from scratch, you can easily build a blog that gets 3,000 visits. Aiming for more visits than that will make what you spend more valuable.
- Must have established brand awareness. Having this, it’s easier to generate more traffic and gain confidence from your readers. When you buy a blog that already has an authority on the niche, people will be more likely to trust it and the products it promotes which in turn will generate more revenue for you.
- Good theme and page speed. No one wants to visit a site that takes forever to load. If your site takes more than five seconds to load you’ll lose 27% of the potential traffic volume you’d get if it had just loaded three seconds faster. Good page speed signals Google to rank you higher thus getting more blog reader volume.
If it passes the basic requirements, you can now make an offer or make a bid if it’s on a website auction platform. If the blog you chose fell short of some of the basic requirements, you can use these as points to haggle in a negotiation for a cheaper price. When the price is settled, you can now move forward with the payment arrangement, it’s best to take advantage of an escrow feature.
Flippa comes with this feature where the sum of money is held including other digital assets until the transaction is given a go signal to move forward. An escrow feature ensures the transaction goes smoothly and each party gets what they agreed on.
Should anything go wrong, an escrow will help you get your money back. However, you can also research ahead how a purchasing arrangement goes in both your countries (given that you’re from different places) to find out what works best.
You can also opt to purchase in stages. For example, you might both agree to have the database or PIM tool, email list sent, and hosting access delivered first. Once the payment clears, you can move forward to sending over the domain and website details.
When that’s settled, ask the current owner for the supporting assets which include website username and password, social media account details, and email subscription lists.
Remember to know exactly what you are purchasing. Is it the domain name and its content? The server? Database? Images? Mailing list? Being very specific with these details will ensure you’ll get the best value for your money and isn’t going to end up upset in case what you assumed is not included in the package.
Other details you’d want to get are the owner’s complete name, phone number, business number, tax number. You can run these details on a government database to ensure that the person owns the website, its domain, content, and has the authority to sell it.
It’s best of you to have an expert blog broker to assist you so you’ll be more confident about your decision on buying the chosen blog. Additionally, they’ll be able to point out blind spots and guide you in the valuation stage including handling any legalities involved.
Creating a contract will be a wise move. Not only does it reinforce the agreement made, but it also helps solve any issue that may arise quicker. For this, you may need assistance from an IP lawyer.
In the contract, including a non-compete clause. This ensures that the current owner will not go off creating the same niche blog like the one they sold you. Doing so helps you maintain the traffic and prevent the previous owner from using their niche expertise and connections against your newly-owned blog.
If necessary, you can also include a period of support as an additional clause in the contract. This will ensure a smooth transition from the previous owner to you. This will also ensure that you’ll be oriented on the blog creation process that helped them generate the traffic and income it currently is generating.
Conclusion
Taking the effort to research a blog before buying it will be worth your time and money. Unless you do the needed due diligence, you can end up buying a site that’s a huge waste of your money.
Some sites might be tempting to buy just by looking at the initial details. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You have to do additional research and go through each step of the process to ensure a good virtual investment.
Check for sustainable traffic. Half the monthly audience should come from an organic source. Then check the monthly revenue if it can cover the ROI in 1-2 years. Additionally, check if all monetizations are already exhausted, if it is, revenue growth might be a challenge which is a factor for you to consider other options.
Also don’t forget to check ownership and website history. Without doing the latter, you might put effort and money towards making new quality content but end up in futile results with organic ranking not improving.
Again, if you’re not familiar with some of the technicalities, it’s best to hire experts like an IP lawyer, blog broker, and a content writer if writing is not your cup of tea. And remember to choose a blog in a niche you like, this way you’ll be more invested in growing your blog.
Consider each step in the process and keep in mind important requirements and tips, in no time you’ll be able to find the right blog that will help you reach your financial goals online.
Ready to buy a blog? Find the perfect blog for you on flippa.com.
