What’s my blog worth?

Blog owned by single blogger sells for $15 million

This week ProBlogger got the scoop on a blogger, John Wu, who sold his blog for $15 million. Everyone has been buzzing about it in the ’sphere since. You are probably wondering “what’s MY blog worth?”

People have been commenting on the value of the blog sale above and the value of authority blogs in general. Many wishing they could someday sell at even a fraction of that once their blogs hit critical mass.

So what is the value of authority?

The value of a high traffic blog is immense. When you have a blog that commands the attention of the search engines for top keywords in your market, tons of traffic, a list of regular readers who hang on your every word in a market where advertisers are desperate to get in front of them, you have something of real value.

You should know. If you own such a blog, you are raking in big advertising dollars already. Advertisers seek out even small to mid-level blogs with moderate traffic (500+ visitors per day) to throw their ads in front of targeted demographics across a wide-swath of niches.

They want what you’ve built

Blogs attract some of the most die-hard fans and followers you can find on the net. Advertisers know that with a word, you can send fans who trust and respect you anywhere, to do anything you want them to do. That’s far more powerful than driving traffic with Adwords or other paid advertising.

It is hard work building a blog fan base and link popularity.  It usually takes average bloggers (who don’t know the tricks) 1 or more years to build a blog that has serious value.  It took the blogger in ProBlogger’s story over 2 years.  That’s a big part of the value buyers must consider when making offers on blogs.

Many times blogs will be bought out and the writer is asked to remain to keep the trust and respect flowing and to keep the fan base the of person who made the blog explode in the first place. That was the case in the ProBlogger announcement.

Your ability to demonstrate your blog’s value is key

Brag. Put your rss feed subscriber count from FeedBurner in an obvious place for all to see. If you are starting out, leave this off until you have something to brag about. Having 200 subscribers is something you want to keep quiet about until you have 2000 or more.

Let people know in subtle ways how well your blog is doing in advertising revenue. (optional) Some people aren’t into this, so take it as a “do it if it makes sense to you” tip.

Advertisers and investors will see anyway

If you’re a big deal, people are already checking out your rankings, pagerank, compete.com score, Alexa and your content and comment activity. It is easy to tell how well a site is doing at a glance with the proper tools and investors and advertisers know how to use those tools.

Selling your blog

Why would anyone want to sell their “baby?” If it is really making them so much monthly income in ads, lead generation, sales, or clients, why would they want to sell?

Many reasons

1. The market you are in is slowing, advertisers are harder to find, and you want to get out and start something else before the value of your blog goes down.
2. You are burnt out and want to be free again.
3. Someone offers you $15 million for it. (Take it, dummy!)

Building your blog

Authority blogs have the following ingredients you must build into your blog to go big and profit:

1. Respect:  You content is among the best in your niche, according to the number of links (votes) you have built up over time from other bloggers and site owners (who point because they respect and love your content).
2. Regularity:  Your blog can be counted on for new, quality content on a regular basis.  Note that many blogs that rise to the top of their market niche post multiple times per day within their topic range.
3. RSS Subscribers:  You have to build a huge following.  (”hugeness” depends on the niche) Go to the biggest blog in your niche and see how many RSS subscribers they have.  That’s your goal.  You don’t have to be the biggest, but you should be shooting for it even if you never overtake the biggest players in your niche.
4. Links:  Because your content is so good and in-demand, you should be building tons of links from other bloggers.  This will affect your search rankings and increase the value and traffic of your blog immensely.
5. Peer Acceptance:  The top blogs in any market niche have links from their peers, even competitors, which are some of the most valuable links to get.  Start networking to get on their radars and do whatever it takes to impress them enough to get reviewed or simply linked from one of their “speed linking” posts.
6. Offline Press:  Work on getting interviewed on radio.  Many radio stations look for experts to interview.  This can be a source of instant traffic from listeners and also links from the radio stations’ web sites.  Get on CNN or another news network and you can explode!
7. Learn the Trade:  Blogging is big business and is finally respected among most people as more serious than a diary.  Advertisers have seen the value, obviously.  Even the mass media uses blogs to figure out the “pulse” of online communities on politics, technology, weird and wild information, and many other topics that are news worthy.  So knowing blogging inside and out, learning how to accelerate the process of becoming popular and profitable, and skipping over the mistakes made by all newbie bloggers is important.

Protect yourself

Being independent of the whims of the economy is a dream of more people than ever since the beginning of the web.   Recent market crashes and economic downturns have made more people acutely aware that a “job” is not the definition of security.

Especially the 179,000 additional people in the U.S. who lost their jobs in September.  Having a profitable blog, whether you sell it or not, is security and freedom like nothing else.  One, because it is the easiest business to get started with online.  It’s not overly technical and you can start almost instantly.  Two, because advertisers, even in down markets, have to buy ad space to keep their “doors” open.

Blogging is hard work.  But anything that pays off like it did for John Wu takes hard work.

Is it worth it?

Ask any of the thousands of high traffic blog owners on the web who make anywhere from $5000-$100,000+ per month if what they’ve doen to get where they are today that question.  Ask yourself if such freedom is worth some work to achieve it.

To learn more about authority blogging, and to skip the multi-year learning curve and work most people have to put in to build an authority blog, check out this resource.

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Tagged as: authority blogs, blog valuation, problogger, selling my blog, whats my blog worth