How To Buy a Blog – 7 Reasons Buying a Blog is an Amazing Investment
Blogs typically sell for 30 to 40 times their average monthly revenue over the past 6 months. If your blog earns $1,000 per month, then in theory, you can sell it for upwards of $40,000. There are blog marketplaces (like Motion Invest) where you’ll regularly see blogs sell for this amount.
On its face, that seems like a lot of money. But, I’m going to make the case that blogs are undervalued, and you actually want to be on the buyer’s side of that transaction.
1) Average Returns on Traditional Investments are Much Smaller
Pretend you bought a blog for $30,000 that pays out $1,000 per month. Pretend your new blog had zero growth post-purchase; it stayed as a static investment for 5 years (60 months).
You just made $60,000. Your initial investment was paid off after 2.5 years. You made a 100% return on your money over the next 2.5 years (20% per year). And the blog can now be sold for $30,000 or you can hold it and keep making $1,000 per month.
That’s amazing, particularly when you consider what normal investments typically pay out.
| Investment Type | Typical Return |
|---|---|
| Real Estate Rentals | 10% |
| Stocks – S&P 500 | 10% |
| Bonds | 5% |
| 5-Year-CD | 0.33% |
| Savings Account | 0.05% |
2) Blogs Are an Underlying Asset
Blogs are an underlying asset that pays a large dividend; they’re probably best compared to real-estate rentals.
Imagine if you bought a house and the renters paid off the entire mortgage in only 30 months. Every month after that was pure profit. Holy cow! People would be bending over backward for that type of investment opportunity if it were a house. But, because a blog is a very niche investment idea without much competition, you can easily find this opportunity out there right now.
3) Your Blog Can Depreciate and Appreciate in Value Very Quickly
Blogs are a speculative investment. If Google cuts your site off tomorrow, the site becomes worthless overnight. And it’s difficult to predict whether a blog will still be viable in 3 years let alone 10. This is why blogs can be had for only 30x revenue vs. a much longer term. There’s significant risk involved if you don’t know what you’re doing.
But, it also works in the other direction. Double your site’s traffic, and the blog is worth twice what you bought it for. Double your site’s revenue, and the blog is worth twice what you bought it for. Both of which can be done quite easily in the right circumstances.
Think of this as being the world’s most profitable house flipper. You do a tiny bit of work on how the site is monetized or how fast the theme is (getting you more traffic), and suddenly you’re selling the blog for double what you bought it for 6 months later.
4) Your Blog Can Increase in Traffic Very Quickly
Blog articles don’t reach their full potential in Google until they’re somewhere between 6 and 36 months old. Meaning if you buy a site with a ton of new articles, there’s a chance for explosive growth. All you have to do is wait a year or two.
People are selling their sites based on what happened in the previous six months. Not what will happen in the next 6. By doing this, they’re tremendously undervaluing the growth potential of their websites. It’s a great buying opportunity.
5) A Pro Can Monetize More Effectively Than The Previous Owner
The least effective form of monetization is ads. Particularly ads being served from Adsense and not a more premium ad network like Ezoic. And yet, this is how most bloggers are monetizing their websites simply because it’s the easiest way to start making money from your content.
If you see a website that’s monetized with Adsense ads. For the love of God, buy the site! All you need to do is switch from Adsense to Mediavine, and you’re likely to double the website’s revenue. If you can figure out how to loop in high paying affiliate deals or create your own product sales, you might 10x what the website was making prior or more.
If you can do something like this, you’ll be able to pay off your investment in a matter of a couple months.
6) A Blog Doesn’t Require Active Maintenance
If you own a house and rent it to tenants, you’re going to be responsible for maintaining that property. And maintaining a house can be an expensive endeavor. Expect to spend 1% of the home’s value every year just keeping it standing.
When you buy a blog, you’ll need to find hosting that you trust. Then you’re done forever. You don’t have to do anything else until the end of time if you don’t want to. Just pay the small fee to your hosting provider, and your website will send you money month after month until Google stops sending you traffic.
7) Taxes Favor The Buyer
You’re going to be paying some serious taxes if you sell your blog for $100,000 (think 40% or more, depending on your country).
You’d much rather be the buyer making $3,000 per month in that scenario. Yes, you’ll pay taxes too. But at smaller increments, there’s more opportunity for you to shelter that money (donate to your retirement accounts) and not see anywhere near as high of a tax bill.
What To Look For When Buying a Blog
1) Original, Quality Content
The primary thing you’re looking for when buying a blog is original, quality content. Quality work will stand the test of time. If the content sucks, or half the work is plagiarized, it’s only a matter of time before Google catches up to you and the blog you bought loses all value. You don’t want to buy a blog where that’s a severe risk.
2) Site Age & Domain History
The second thing you’re looking for when buying a blog is the age of the posts and the domain’s history. You don’t want to buy a domain that has any type of negative history with Google. Newer is better because you’re likely to experience a jump in traffic as the posts and the domain gets older. Blogs with a lot of new content will likely see a boost in traffic as those posts age.
3) Bad Theme & PageSpeed
You actually looking for sites with a terrible theme. Why? Because you can easily improve it and increase the cash flow.
Take load times, for example. If a site takes more than 5 seconds to load, you can get a 27% traffic jump just by getting it down to 2 seconds. Google may notice this speed increase and begin sending you even more traffic on top of that.
4) Poorly Monetized Sites
You’re looking for sites that just slapped Google Adsense & Amazon Affiliate links on their website and walked away. You can buy the site, upgrade to a premium ad network, or sell your own product and dramatically increase your revenue overnight.
A small increase in the revenue you make per thousand visitors can significantly impact overall profit.
How To Find a Blog to Buy
If you were buying or selling your blog, websites like Motion Invest, Flippa or EmpireFlippers exist to help facilitate transactions. I recommend using them as a starting point if you want to find a blog to purchase. However, there are a couple of problems with these websites.
- Be on the lookout for scammers. These sites don’t adequately vet who you’re dealing with sometimes.
- The people selling their websites on these services typically do so regularly and will ask for top dollar. Plus, it’s in the site’s best interest to sell the blogs for as much as they can.
If you really want to get a deal, look for sites in your niche with a lot of good content. Blogs that don’t appear to be under active development (check their homepage / sitemap.xml to see if new posts are being created). Reach out to their site owners and see if they’d be interested in selling.
If so, they might be happy to offload the site to you for a very reasonable price.
And that’s it. Now go out and buy a blog! Or at least consider holding onto the one you already have.