Where And How Can I Sell My Blog?

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.

KT. B. asks:

My boyfriend and I started a blog this summer and had a blast. Even though we are newbies, we managed to get a PR of 3, some back links and even hold the top spots in Google for a handful of keywords.

School will be starting for both of us next year and I don’t think we will have time for it anymore. It seems like a waste to have all of that original content, links and PR just go to waste. So, where does one go to sell a blog? Are there any tips or suggestions you have?

First of all I want to clear a misconception that many newbie bloggers and webmasters have: selling a blog or a website for a meaningful amount of money is not easy as it sounds.

Perhaps we have to blame the “overnight riches” stories that circulate around the web, with people who started and sold websites for tens of thousands of dollars in a matter of months. Trust me, it is very rare to see a case like this.

Another misconception is the fact that backlinks, unique content or Google PageRank will make your site appealing to potential buyers. They help, but these factors alone won’t fetch the money. What matters for website buyers are two things: traffic and revenues (with a heavy emphasis on revenues).

In other words, if you want to sell your blog or website for a good amount of money first you need to take it to a point where it receives decent traffic and, most importantly, generate stable revenues.

Here is a practical example to illustrate the point. Consider that we have two blogs. Both are one year old and have unique content. Blog One has a PR4, some backlinks, gets 10,000 visitors per month, but it makes no money at all. Blog Two has a PR2, also gets 10,000 visitors per month, but it makes $200 monthly from Google AdSense.

Blog Two has a small PageRank, but it makes a decent amount of money, so its selling price would be much higher. I would guess that Blog Two could sell for as much as $4,000 if the traffic is mostly organic (i.e. from search engines), while Blog One would probably sell for $500, if that.

If I was the owner of Blog One I would probably not sell at all, because the money I would get would be inferior to the real value of the blog. Instead I would try to monetize the traffic first, and perhaps even grow the site, and only then try to sell it.

Now back to the central question: where can one sell a blog or website. By far the best resource for that on the web is a marketplace called Flippa.com. If you remember well that used to be the marketplace for websites inside Sitepoint, and now they spun it off as a separate website.

You’ll need to pay a fee to list your site there (around $50), but it is guaranteed that your listing will be exposed to many site buyers. They have an auction system too, so if you are not sure how much your site is worth you can leave it to the bidders.

Another option would be the “Buy & Sell Websites” section of the Digital Point forums. You won’t need to pay anything to list your site there, but the bidding system is pretty much manual (i.e., forum posts), and there is a smaller number of serious buyers shopping around there.

There are other marketplaces and forums on the web where you could list your site, but I don’t think that any of them get nearly the exposure that the two I mentioned do.

What about you, what is your experience with selling blogs and websites? What marketplaces did you use? Was it easy to sell?