Flip This Old Blog: Bob Vila Approved

You won’t find Blogs for sale on eBay but hundreds are being sold monthly through a little-known two-year-old auction service based in Vancouver, Canada called SitePoint:

Matt Mickiewicz, co-founder of SitePoint Pty. Ltd. said his recent offering of BlogCatalog.com drew a winning bid of $40,000 in less than 24 hours. “There were seven backup offers and two higher than that, trying to break the deal,” he said in an interview. Other sales have included the Blog Watch Network, Biziki and College-Startup.com.

Each month, about 400 blogs are offered for sale through SitePoint Marketplace at a flat fee of $20 per listing. “Most sell in a couple of weeks,” Mickiewicz said. Custom designed software handles the sale process providing for private messages and forums for questions and answers.

“The sellers are entrepreneurs, sometimes flipping Web sites for profit like real estate,” Mickiewicz said. In some cases, buyers will “renovate” a site by using search optimization strategies to build traffic and include advertising links to increase revenue, and then offer the site for sale. “Blogs are easy to start, but what is hard is growing them to a decent size with traffic and revenue, and getting pages indexed by Google, Yahoo and MSN.”

The price for blogs is increasing. A year ago, a blog might sell for 10-20 times monthly sales. A blog in a hot category — like directories, mobile telephones, celebrity gossip or video sharing — will sell for more than a 100 times that. Vshare.com, which Mickiewicz called sort of a YouTube-clone was started a year ago and sold within seven months for $30,000.

Buying an existing blog is easy, but probably not for everyone. Web domains may need to be moved, files and archives transferred, and tweaks made to the site’s layout and content. “You do need a little bit of tech savvy, but that’s where some of our books can help people out. We publish a line of books on web development and web design,” Mickiewicz said. Original story via TECHBloke.

Filed under: blog bloke, instabloke, blog, blog news, blogging, blog resources, internet, computers and internet