There's Money in Them Thar Blogs!

Blogs are virtual real estate and you know about real estate: there's always money to be made!

I was recently browsing through the net when suddenly my eyes popped out! I popped them back in again and reread:

“ … but while their dreams are fueled by high-profile Internet deals — Condé Nast’s $25 million purchase of Wired News, People.com’s acquisition of Celebrity Baby Blog and, most recently, a deal this….”


A quick check in my mental filing cabinet and I quickly shot a note off to my friend
David in New York:

"...Hey David! Wasn't that your friend that started the Celebrity Babies Blog?..."

"Yes" he replied. "She sold it to People Inc in 2007 or 2008 for an undisclosed amount."

"Undisclosed Amount" is always good. Read it any way you want but I can tell you it usually means that your bank balance has just been fattened.

I remember our conversation several years ago. David was telling me about a friend of theirs who started a blog on celebrity babies and how she was having so much fun and that the dollars were beginning to roll in. We chuckled and continued our conversation on something else.

As I started to learn more about Internet Marketing and the importance of blogging, I often thought of the Celebrity Baby Blog. I even visited it several times to get some tips on putting up a blog ... I had thought of maybe celebrity dogs or something along those lines. Never did it. I mean, I did start a dog site, but never a celebrity dogs. I'm not one for celebrities so it would not resonate strongly with me.

But that's not the point! The point is that blogs and websites get bought. Earlier this month I posted on your blog being Google Real Estate. ABSOLUTELY! Now there is a motivator. Blogs and websites are virtual real estate and you can buy and sell blogs and sites just like you do houses and land. It is a growing business on the internet and a very lucrative one.

Still in its infancy, you can buy existing sites for under $10K, do a little bit of work, add value,increase traffic volume and sales, and sell it to a bigger buyer.

Typically blogs and sites sell 2 to 8 times the annual net income derived from that blog or site. Now don't go bananananananas! 8 times is not likely unless you happen to be a You Tube or Twitter or some other online phenomena. But say you bought a blog for $10K and it was already producing that much in annual sales(sometimes owners of blogs just want to get rid of them without much thought as to their real value). With a little effort on your part you add value in the way of higher page ranking, increased daily unique visitors and the annual sales goes up to $40K ...you sell it for $80K. That's $70K in your jeans. Rinse and repeat. Can you say Blogger Mogul?

Its a neat way to make money. But you do need to know something about how to make a poorly performing blog into a star ... and that's what we are trying to do here!

Happy Blogging!

PS...Now that's the kinda cheese I like!

Quick Links:
Celebrity Baby Blog
Google Real Estate

Blogging - step one

Even though I have several blogs, most were thrown up in a higgledy piggledy way --- the purposes varied; as support to an existing website that I have, others are a commentary and still others are on personal development. I want to do this one differently. This one has to be an example on how to blog for money. With this as the prime reason for starting a new blog, I have to give more thought about the way I go about it.

Immediately questions need to be answered:-
- what is the topic going to be?
- who is my target audience?
- should I use blogger or wordpress?
- should this be a standalone blog or should it promote one of my online businesses?
- how do I best monetize it?

The first question that I am going to tackle is topic. There is no shortage of topics to write about. If I want to make money on this blog then I have to be able to rank high in the search engines, choose my keywords carefully, even the domain name makes a difference.

If the topic is too broad then I have a lot of competition out there. An example would be both my Buy Me a Mercedes Benz site and the corresponding Mercedes Benzblog. I threw both of these sites because I like the car and just wanted to write about it. Even though I am making some money on the site (the blog is not monetized for a reason)I don't expect that it will be up on page one of any of the search engines any time soon. This will be a labor of love and who knows, years hence it just might show up on page one!

The way to success is to "niche" your topic. The saying in the internet world is "inch wide and mile deep". An example of that, still staying on the topic of Mercedes, might have been on the McLaren.

Between now and the next time I post here, I will do some research on my topic and will post here on how I arrived at it. Till then .... happy blogging to you!