Q uick question: What if Warren Buffett offered you $500,000 for your blog tomorrow? Would you sell it?
Do you even know how much your blog is worth? You spent a lot of time starting a blog, writing, optimizing, and growing it. Are you willing to hand it over to someone else?
That’s a tough question. Knowing how much your blog is worth can help you decide.
In this article, we’ll go over whether you should sell your blog, how to find out what it’s worth, give you some tips to increase the sale price, and finally, how to sell your blog. Let’s get started.
In This Guide:
Should You Sell Your Blog?
People sell for a lot of reasons. Sometimes for just one reason, other times it’s a combination of reasons that led to the decision. Take a look at these pros and cons and then decide for yourself.
Pros
- You want to start a new business – If you’ve been itching to start a new blog or business, it’s time to sell.
- You’ve run out of ideas – You might feel your blog has reached its max potential, at least with you leading it. You can’t see where to take the blog, or if you can, you don’t want to put in the effort needed to take it there. It’s time to move on and sell it to someone else.
- You’re bored with the blog – Getting frustrated or bored with your blog is a sign it might be time to sell it. It’s better to move on from it when you’re not passionate or interested in it anymore.
- Your return on investment may be high – Depending on your original costs for the blog, you may get a lot more for it if you sell now. If you’re happy with the sale price, consider taking it now.
Cons
- Blogging’s not as easy as it used to be – Selling your current blog to start a new one is a bit of a gamble. It’s a lot harder to start a successful blog today, so you may not want to do it again.
- It takes time to build back up – Building a blog takes time. So, if you sell your current blog, you’ll need to know how long the money you make from it will last. Plan for this before you sell.
- You can’t write in the same niche – Often when you sell a blog, you sign a contract that forbids you from starting a new blog in the same niche. It’s called an anti-competition clause and essentially means that you better be good at something else because you might not be able to keep doing the same thing.
- You lose control of the brand – This is an obvious thing, but if you haven’t thought it through, you might not realize what you lose when you sell. You give up control of the site and the brand, which means the buyer can do whatever they want with it. Unless you put conditions in the sale contract, the buyer can change the site design and layout, bring in a new logo, and make a whole host of other changes you don’t like.
Now that you’ve taken a hard look at whether you should sell or not, it’s time to figure out how much your blog is worth.
How Much Is My Blog Worth?
The first thing to remember is that it’s how much your website is worth to buyers, not you. That’s an important distinction to keep in mind.
As a general rule, to find out your blog’s worth, use this simple mathematical formula:
Monthly revenue x 12 months = sale price
Now, many factors influence your blog’s value, including your monthly revenues and profit, annual net profit, long-term profit, revenue streams, organic search traffic, and more. But this formula will give you a good idea of your website’s worth.
How search influences your website’s worth
Before we move on to the other aspects of finding out your blog’s worth, let’s take a closer look at why search traffic is one of the most vital factors in determining a good sale price.
Organic search traffic is always going to interest a potential buyer more than robust paid ad traffic.
Why is that?
Because they want something that won’t require a lot of extra work.
They understand they’ll need to invest some time and effort to make the changes they want to make, but not work on the basics like search optimization for keywords.
Paid ads are a lot of work
They require a lot more management, monitoring, and tweaking every day. Buyers don’t want to do that.
Selling Tip: Use analytics to demonstrate your search traffic numbers
To help your proof to your buyers that you’ve got awesome organic search numbers, install an analytics tool like Google Analytics or Fathom Analytics.
And do it as soon as you can on the site. The more history you can show a buyer, the more likely you are to attract a real buyer with a solid offer.
Maybe you’ve looked at your traffic numbers and see they’re not so great. Or you used that mathematical formula from earlier to calculate the value of your blog and you’re not impressed with the number. Not to worry, there’s still time to improve the value.
How to Increase the Value of Your Blog
Here are a few ways you can increase the value of your blog so you can sell it for more when the time comes. Some of them are easy to implement right away, while others might take a while. Just look for the Easy, Intermediate, or Hard tag.
Continue publishing content (Easy)
Make sure you’re still producing enough content to maintain your search engine rankings, website traffic, and audience engagement. Most sellers dial back their production, which is wrong. You want to maintain it at the same level as before to keep your audience around. Show buyers that it’s still a vibrant site with an engaged audience.
Dive deeper into your blog’s niche (Easy)
Take a look at your blog and ask yourself this question, “Could someone recreate your blog in an afternoon?” If your answer’s yes, that’s a problem if you want to sell it.
To prevent it from being the same as others online, niche down as much as you can and own the market. It’s easier to become an authority if you’ve chosen a narrow niche because you’re the best or only one writing about it.
For example, if you’ve got a fitness blog, consider niching down into writing one for people who work from home or one for people with back problems.
Going deeper into your niche will also give you higher quality traffic and a potentially more engaged audience. You’ll be speaking to an audience that’s tuned into the topic and want to hear more. Buyers will appreciate that.
Diversify your traffic sources (Intermediate)
Future-proof your blog with a variety of traffic sources so you won’t get slammed if you lose one of them altogether (like you might in a future Google algorithm update.) Add email, social media, and referral traffic to your blog if you don’t have it right now. Improve your rates if you have them already.
Improve (or start) your social media following (Intermediate)
A robust social media following is a clear sign you’ve built an actual brand for your blog. Buyers may think of it as a “soft” email list, too, as it’s another marketing channel you can tap into and monetize appropriately and generate another revenue stream. A bonus point for them as they can monetize it quickly.
Demonstrate (or increase) email list conversions (Intermediate + Hard)
Buyers will want to know how your email list adds value to the blog. You need to prove that it adds lifetime value to your business. An active email list with a high conversion rate will bump up your sale price easily.
To improve your email list before selling:
- Create a welcome email sequence for new list subscribers.
- Add automation sequences to your campaigns to upsell subscribers as needed.
- Routinely send emails with content, offers, and deals that add value to your audience’s lives.
- Segment your list in ways that add value to your blog and make it easy for buyers to use as well.
- Optimize your email optin forms everywhere on the blog.
- Track signups based on optin form location, such as sidebars, landing pages, inline on blog posts, through exit-intent, and more.
How to Sell Your Blog
The selling part is relatively easy, all things considered.
Step 1: Get your valuation
Use a website value calculator to get an idea of what your website is worth. There are many dedicated tools for this, and they all use different factors to arrive at their valuations, so you should try a few to get an idea of the value of your blog.
Perhaps take an average of the values you find in these calculators:
Step 2: List your blog with a website broker
Next, it’s time to list your blog with a website broker. Just like a realtor who sells your house, a website broker will advertise and handle the sale of your site. Most of them offer a value calculator, so you can start there and then move directly to the signup and listing process.
Step 3: Your blog is listed for sale
By this stage, your site has been vetted and is listed for sale on the broker’s marketplace. Brokers like Flippa and Empire Flippers state that hundreds of thousands of buyers browse their listings every day, but it’s hard to know precisely how many people are looking. Good sites will sell in several months, so expect to wait a bit before cashing in.
Step 4: Your blog is sold
Hooray! Your blog sold, now all that’s left is to wait for your money, right? Not quite.
Most website marketplaces place money in escrow for a time to ensure that the buyer and money is legitimate. They do this for everyone’s protection, just like in real estate.
Walk away from any marketplace that doesn’t have any safeguards in place for payments like this.
Step 5: Migrating your site to the new owner
Now it’s time to send over all the background technical information for your site, like the web hosting login information, all WordPress plugin subscription information, analytics account information, and more.
Make a checklist of what you need to send so you don’t miss anything and be available for any questions for a period of time after the sale, say, 4-6 weeks. That way, the new owners can hit you up if they have any questions or you forgot something.
Step 6: Receive your money
Once your blog is migrated over to the new owners, it’s time to receive your money. The broker will take a percentage of the sale amount (usually 10-15% of the final amount) and send the rest on to you.
And that’s it! Your blog sale is now complete and you’re fully free to move on to your next project, whatever that may be.
Finding out how much your blog is worth can be fun. But if you’re serious about selling, you’ll want to dig a little deeper. Find out the real value of your blog, maybe work on it a little to improve the valuation, then list it with a website broker. You may be surprised at just how much you get for it!
Do you have any other pieces of advice on how to sell your blog? Leave a comment and let us know.
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