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Learning how to sell a blog takes little time at all, but you’ll need to do some prep work before you list your blog for sale. Taking the time now to make your blog the best that it can be before you sell it will help ensure maximum profits for your blog.
How to Sell a Blog
Reasons to Sell Your Blog
You’ve likely spent years pouring your blood, sweat, and tears into your blog. So why sell it? There are lots of reasons why you probably want to know how to sell a blog, and they probably fit into one or more of these below:
- You don’t have the time to dedicate to your blog
- The blog isn’t growing/making a profit
- You no longer have the passion for it and it feels like a chore
- Or, maybe you started the blog for the sole purpose of selling it {click here if you want to know how to start a blog}
No matter your reason for wanting to sell your blog, know that the more lead time you give yourself to prepping the blog for sale, the better. In fact, I recommend planning the sale of your blog about 12 months ahead of time.
Prep Your Blog for Sale
You can’t have a blog on a free site like Wix and expect anyone to take you seriously. Similarly, the content you post must be of high quality to attract buyers. Follow these additional tips to position your blog for sale:
- Have a self-hosted WordPress blog: Again, you can’t use Wix or Squarespace if you want to sell your blog. You must use a blog host like Bluehost or Dreamhost—this way, you own your content and have maximum flexibility.
- Remove your personal brand: Think a major media corporation like NBCUniversal will purchase a blog full of articles about your kids? It’s not likely. Begin removing anything you don’t want the future owner to have full control over once you hand it over—pics and articles of your kids included.
- Install Google Analytics properly: A blog buyer wants to know the analytics behind your blog, so make sure you have Google Analytics installed properly. They will want documentation or access to view your analytics before buying.
- Check the health of your blog and its posts: Remove any broken links, double-check your facts to make sure they’re still relevant, and check image permissions. If you’ve purchased images, the rights might transfer to your new buyer. If not, replace these images.
- Master search engine optimization (SEO): Buyers want to see that your blog traffic comes from more than just social media (even if you’re also selling your social media channels with it). Spend the time now optimizing each post for SEO.
- Generate backlinks: You want other blogs to link to your articles, provided the blog is high-quality. This is because search engines think that you’re an authority on the subject when others link to it. You can earn backlinks by guest blogging on similar blogs.
- Grow your email list: I made the mistake of waiting six years to begin collecting emails after blogging. If you don’t yet, do it now. This will up the value of your blog because you can include the email list in the sale.
Assemble Your Blog Data & Analytics
You must do prep work on your blog before pulling analytics and data for your blog. This is so that your analytics matches your “ask”—the buyer doesn’t necessarily care if you have 2,000 high-quality blog posts if it isn’t making money or getting traffic (usually—more on this later).
Gather the following into a PDF document for your potential buyer:
- Profit & loss statements over the last 12 months: An upward trend is ideal, but don’t worry if you’ve recently seen a loss in profit. You can still attract buyers.
- Google Analytics data: Typically, a buyer wants to see pageviews, sessions, traffic sources, and demographics. If you sell your blog on Flippa, it will automatically pull this data for you.
- Assets involved in the sale: Do you plan on providing social media channels you’ve established for the blog? How about an email list? What is your following like on these channels, and how many subscribers do you have? These assets increase the price of the blog.
- Ways you monetize your blog: Do you get sponsors or place ads on your blog? Even better—is your blog approved for Mediavine or AdThrive? The new buyer has to re-apply for these ad networks, but the fact your blog was approved for it anyway is an advantage.
Remember—presentation counts, and the more information you provide up-front, the faster a buyer can make a decision.
Price Your Blog for Profit
If you price your blog too high, you’ll scare buyers away. On the other hand, you definitely don’t want to undervalue your blog and list it for lower than you should. In fact, that can also scare away potential buyers—it’s too good to be true.
The price of your blog depends on these three factors:
- How much someone is willing to buy your blog for
- How much you’re willing to let your blog go for
- How much does your blog make now
I like to price my blog above what I’ll let it go for so that way there’s room for negotiation. Also, remember how I mentioned most people won’t buy a blog with 2,000 articles that don’t get traffic or any money? Well, that’s true most of the time.
If you sell your blog on social media in a group of bloggers, they’ll recognize the value of 2,000 articles. Many bloggers know how to monetize a blog, so getting a headstart by having 2,000 done-for-you articles is worth the price alone. For example, I’ve purchased single articles with images for over $500 before.
Similarly, let’s say that your blog has a custom theme you’ve purchased from a web designer and developer. That probably set you back a few grand, so it isn’t worthless even though you aren’t making money from it.
Many blog brokers and marketplaces will help you valuate your blog for free. Some charge a fee for this, although I don’t recommend it. Unless of course, you’ve got an enormous media empire with many subdomains and entities. At that point, it’s worth calling in the big guys for help (and, you’re probably not reading this blog post if that’s you anyway!).
How to Price Your Blog for Profit
Follow this general formula when pricing your blog:
monthly revenue x 12 = blog’s sale price
The sale price of your blog may need adjusting up or down depending on your blog’s profit. For example, if your revenue is $500,000 per year but you only net $18,000 per year, you may need to lower your price. Or, if you have very little overhead, you can increase that price.
Let’s say that your blog falls under our earlier example where you don’t make anything but have a ton of high-quality blog posts. In this case, it could potentially be worth much more than a blog with way fewer blog posts that actually makes some money. In fact, you can potentially get up to 30 times the net profit you make now (remember, you aren’t making as much, but you have high-quality content so you can charge more).
Follow this formula if you have a lot of high-quality content but aren’t yet monetizing it well:
monthly revenue x 30 = blog’s sale price
For example, let’s say that you only make $100 per month with your blog, but it has 1,000 great articles that rank well in search engines. You could ask for up to $3,000 for your blog ($100 x 30 = sale price).
Let’s say that you don’t necessarily have a ton of high-quality blog posts, but you get a ton of blog traffic. You can still follow this second formula. This is because as a seasoned blogger, I know that as soon as I hit 50,000 sessions per month on my blog, I can qualify for Mediavine. Or, if I hit 100,000 pageviews per month, I can apply for AdThrive, which pays even better. That’s the first thing I’d do when buying a blog that gets great traffic.
List Your Blog for Sale
Bloggers typically use one of a few different avenues when listing their blog for sale, although some people use several at the same time. These include using a blog broker, a blog marketplace, or posting it for sale on social media—whether through private Facebook groups or through in-feed posts.
Sell Your Blog Through a Blog Broker
Think of selling your blog through a broker as though you’re playing in the big leagues. Brokers carefully vet potential clients to make sure it’s worth their time to take them on—such as requiring blogs to have a minimum monthly profit of $500 to $1,000 per month. After all, a broker will promote this blog sale to their list of potential buyers, and they usually run ads to the listing.
Brokers typically charge more than 15% of the sales price for commission. The benefit of using a broker is that they do all the work to market your blog for you, and will walk you through the process of how to sell a blog step-by-step.
List Your Blog Through a Blog Marketplace
Using a blog marketplace is by far one of the most popular options for listing a blog for sale. Typically, people use a digital property marketplace like Flippa to offer up their site. You’ll pay 5-15% of the sale when using Flippa, depending on the sale price. There’s also a listing fee of $10 to $49 per listing.
You can pay for additional marketing services like newsletter placement and social media promotion. These additional services start at $29. Most blog marketplaces also teach you how to sell a blog.
Post Your Blog for Sale on Social Media
If you’re not keen on paying a commission to list your blog for sale, consider listing it yourself on social media. You can promote the sale to your own social media following, or you can post it in blogging-related Facebook groups. Before posting your blog for sale within a Facebook group, make sure the group rules allow you to advertise.
An example of a Facebook group that allows this is Flipping Websites. To help protect both the buyer and seller, use Escrow.com to complete the transaction. This way, funds don’t release until all of the assets are transferred over successfully.
Transfer the Assets to the Buyer
Before a buyer sends payment to you, they’ll likely want to hop on a video chat just to make sure you’re legit. The buyer has a right to perform due diligence and verify the information you provided. They will also negotiate the final price with you.
We recommend using Escrow.com to complete the handover of the payment and assets after you’ve accepted an offer. You upload all of the assets to the Escrow website. This includes your ad network accounts, email provider accounts, website files, domain information, and social media account details.
It can take 7 to 10 business days to fully transfer over assets and receive payment. If you’re using a blog broker, they’ll handle this entire process for you.
Bottom Line—How to Sell a Blog
Creating and selling a blog has the potential to earn you a generous profit. In fact, a lot of people create blogs for the sole purpose of “flipping” them. No matter your reason for selling your blog, give yourself plenty of lead time so that you can sell it for maximum profits.
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