How to put a price on a Blog?
With the rapid growth of Blogging comes the increasing popular market of buying and selling Blogs. However although Blogging is a growing Business there is still no model in place for putting a price on your Blog. In this article I am going to be explaining the best techniques for trying to price up how much your Blog is worth, whether you are selling your Blog or merely interested in the value of your Blog. I am going to try and create a general yet simple model for pricing up any Blog. As well as this I will be talking about what information you should include on your Blog’s sales page when you come to sell your Blog, this will help to maximise your chances of selling your Blog and receiving the price you ought to receive.
Website Pricing Tools are useless
I want to start by making clear that website pricing tools are not accurate, do not use these tools to put a starting price or buy it now (bin) on your Blog. These tools generally only take in to consideration the statistics that they can find on your Blog and these are usually statistics such as Pagerank, Number of Incoming links, Compete for traffic details, Alexa rank and several other statistics. Generally speaking the price you are calculated after using one of these tools is either too high or too low they are generally not accurate and should never be used to create a realistic value for a Blog. The statistics they use to put a price on your Blog are also sometimes very inaccurate such as compete.com who predict that I receive 429 visitors per day, which I can honestly say is very inaccurate. They also take in to consideration Pagerank which shouldn’t factor much at all in to evaluating a price for a Blog.
To conclude the use of these pricing tools, do not use them to find a realistic value for a Blog. They can be highly inaccurate and use inaccurate and unimportant statistics to make the pricing evaluation.
A Blog is only worth what someone is willing to pay
I realise this may come across as a very obvious statement to make however its importance is far superior to much of this article. At the end of the day after you have factored in every type of technique you can use to price up a Blog, when it comes to selling a Blog it can only be sold if someone is willing to pay the price that you feel its worth. I know if I was to try and sell this Blog, I wouldn’t be able to sell it, because the price I would accept for this Blog would never be reached. The reason for this is because I price my Blog when it has reached its full potential however potential buyers would only price the Blog at its current level of income and growth.
I don’t mean that the techniques I am going to explain in the next part of the article are not worth doing but instead that its worth taking with a pinch of salt. Although you could probably reach quite a realistic figure by using the techniques I will speak about in this article it is best to be realistic. As the price your Blog is valued at is affected by more than the internal factors, external facots such as the current state of the market affect a Blogs value too.
Anyways, lets move on now to the techniques you can use to find a realistic price for your Blog.
How to find a realistic price for your Blog?
Firstly I have to say that you can’t just put a price on your Blog using only one of these techniques instead you need to use each factor together to find a realistic price for your Blog.
Blogging Income
This is probably the most important factor to consider when selling your Blog, especially from the potential buyers perspective. It is important when you are considering selling your Blog that you have at least 1 months previous income records print screened and saved, providing proof of income helps potential buyers to trust you which is very important because in many cases you will be handling more than just a couple of hundred dollars.
If you have used any sort of advertising program such as Google Adsense it is important to print screen your Blogging chanel for the Blog you are selling also ensure you block out some of the information on your print screen such as your CTR. Google has very strong legislations in place when you are showing proof of income to other people and there are guidelines in place which you have to abide by if you are planning to keep your Google account.
It is very important to list down every type of income you have received from your Blog as well as going in to detail. If you have received income through several different sources such as affiliate commission from Clickbank and Commission Junction, Google Adsense, and private advert sales it is important that you provide proof of each, if your private advert sales have been paid through a service such as Paypal take a print screen of each payment.
The last thing to do when providing your blogging income is to total up each income path and add a total income as well. If your Blogging income is quite large then this is a great selling point so don’t be afraid to boast about it, add the amount to your advert title to catch the eyes of potential buyers.
When it comes to using your Blogging income to calculate an overall value for your Blog dependant on the Niche your Blog has been established in I would recommend you valueing your Blog at a 3 months up to 12 months income.
This is a very general formula that people use for Blogs, if its a well established Blog with over 6 months of stable income and proof of income I would definitely recommend you estimating your Blog value at anywhere between 10-12 months of Blogging income.
Blog Income Formula
SEO Blog = $200 per month x 12 = $2400
The $2,400 would be the value and perhaps the starting bid or Buy it now price that you would put on your Blog when you come to selling it. However like I said before although Blogging income is probably the most important statistic when you come to sell your Blog it is much better to provide other statistics and calculating your overall value from other statistics too.
Blog Traffic
The second factor to consider is your Blog’s traffic, I would like to mention that this is in no certain order that I am explaining these although the first two are very important.
When ever you set up a Blog it is important to set up some sort of traffic statistics tool straight away this helps to keep track of your overall traffic as well as pin pointing exactly where the traffic has come from. I recommend a tool such as Google Analytics, its very easy to set up and it has an abundant amount of information for your Blog.
Just as I mentioned with your Blogging income its a good idea to include proof of your traffic its not good enough just mentioning how much traffic your Blog receives to your potential buyers. As well as this you need to provide proof of traffic through a print screen or print screens of each month’s traffic. I assure you that if you don’t provide these, potential buyers will ask for them and it will become annoying as well as stupid not to just add proof from the start.
To calculuate a value for your Blog from this statistic alone would be quite hard, although you can get some sort of estimate it is best to use this information as well as other information such as the Blog’s income to work out a value for your Blog.
It may be worth your while to look at putting a price on your Blog per visitor that arrives at your Blog each month. This is just a simple formula I have just thought of now and I am not sure if it would work however I shall share it with you.
Lets say your Blog receives 10,000 unique views per month you could work out an average price per visitor and multiply this by the number of visitors you receive each month. If your traffic has been increasing each month for a long period of time then you could also forecase the future of your Blog and add this to its overall value.
For example
Blog Traffic = 10,000 Unique Views per month.
Price per visitor = $0.25 x 10,000 = $2,500
With the $2,500 you could either multiply this for each month or you could leave it at one months predicted income.
Now obviously this formula would only work with a one or two types of website such as a forum or large directory. The problems with this formula are that you cannot successfully put a realistic price on each user that visits your website. However if for example the person selling the website found it hard to monetize the site then this may look quite interesting to someone who is skilled in monetizing websites. Just a thought, please don’t laugh at my formula 
RSS Subscribers
The amount of subscribers you have subscribed to your Blog can be an important statistic to measure your websites value as well as being a very important statistic to include when your selling your Blog. Since Blogging started to become popular the interest in the amount of subscribers a Blog receives has increased from both a boasting point of view as well as being a good indicator of the size of the Blog.
The size of your Blog’s readership cannot be accurately measured by looking at a Blogs subscriber count however you can predict that at least that number of people read your content each day that you publish new content. Although the number does fluctuate up and down it is a good indicator as to the gravity that your Blog can pull in.
Using your subscriber count as a way of valuing your Blog can be quite tricky however you could (like I mentioned earlier in the Blog traffic secton) put a price on each subscriber. It is extremely important to add this figure to your Blogs sales page when you choose to sell your Blog, especially if the figure is quite high.
Newsletter Members
Similiar to RSS subscribers we have Newsletter members the reason I have split these two apart although they are very similiar is because of the larger flexibility you have with your Newsletter members. If you are using software such as Aweber you are able to E-mail your members when ever you want, with what ever content you want.
The advantages of newsletter members is that you are able to market products/ services to them easily, as well as this that you have a targeted amount of members for a certain market awaiting your promotion. Opt in lists and E-mail addresses have always been worth a lot of money and if your list is in a market which has a high value such as Internet Marketing or Weight Loss then you could very easily use this list to increase the value of your Blog.
Using this list as well as your Blogging income and traffic statistics you could definitely make a solid realistic calculation as to how much your Blog is worth. However you do have to look at some external sources which we will come on to later.
Articles
The amount of articles that you have published on your Blog should be an important statistic to mention when you come to selling your Blog and it can be a great part of a calculation towards how much your Blog is worth. However the amount of articles your Blog has published is usually not regarded as being that important because people go for the more popular choice of checking the amount of readers a Blog has and how much income it receives.
When selling your Blog I would look at the amount of articles you have on your Blog and assuming that it is all unique content I believe you could put a very good value on your Blog using this as well as a couple of other statistics.
This is my Article formula for putting a price on your Blog
Number of Articles X estimated amount of words per article = Estimated amount of words on your Blog
Estimated amount of words on your Blog / 100 = Amount of words on your Blog / 100
Amount of words on your Blog / 100 X $0.50 = Valuation or added value.
I realise that could of been very confusing, so I shall use an example as well.
100 Articles x 500 words per article = 50,000 words on your Blog
50,000 / 100 = $250
I wouldn’t necessarily say this could be an overall value of a Blog but perhaps you could add this on to your overall predicted value.
Sites Age
Another statistic to take in to account when your selling your Blog or buying a Blog even is the age of the website. Although I can’t think of a good enough formula for the age of a Blog I think its a very good statistics to add when your selling your Blog.
SERP Statistics
Lastly, one that links in quite well with the previous is your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) positions. I think this is a very important peice of information to add when you are selling a Blog and I do think it should be considered when calculating a value for your Blog.
It would be a good idea to add a detailed table of your current rankings for your website including each keyword you are ranked for. What I would add is that it probably would not be a good idea unless you were 100% set on selling your Blog, just in case someone else wanted to try and damage your rankings. Also don’t add the amount of traffic you receive per keyword because people may then try and compete with you.
External Factors
I am going to briefly talk about the external factors that you will have to take into consideration when calculating a value for your Blog. Although many external factors don’t directly impact your website they can indirectly, take the worlds current economic crisis for example. Although you personally may not have felt the crunch on your Blog, your traffic may have dipped earnings may have decreased and your overall Blog value may of decreased to due to lack of demand and lack of money, its a recession these things happen.
Other external factors include Google changing their algorithm and this having an affect on your Blog’s traffic. Competiting advertising programs coming in to place which take away all of Google’s customers, highly unlikely but it could happen.
The increased amount of Internet users who are becoming immune to advertising on the Internet. Each year the amount of click through conversions halves due to people becoming more oblivious or perhaps clever when surfing the Internet. This leads me on to a future article which I will be writing about Advertising and its future on the Internet.
The point of this section is to get you thinking about everything surrounding your Blog that may not affect your Blog directly but things that could have a massive affect on your Blog. These external factors are often uncontrollable and many you cannot predict. If your planning on selling your Blog now, during the economic crisis expect to have less interest in your Blog and to be forced to accept a lower value tag.
Overall I believe these are all good factors to consider when you are selling your Blog. They are good statistics and information to analyse when calculating a price for your Blog and on top of that they are also good for including in your sales page when you finally go to sell your Blog. I would recommend adding all this information to your sales page along with proof when needed to maximise your chances of selling your Blog and receiving the amount that you ought to receive.
Blog Pricing System
At the start of this article I wanted to create a Blog valuation system that could work with most Blogs on the market, however I believe there are too many factors to consider to make any sort of universal valuation system for Blogs.
Instead I feel that it is better to have seperate formulas for each statistic which you have for your Blog and in the end to total them all up and to see what your final valuation is. If your still not happy with the valuation then stick with your Blog, put in some more hours and sell it in the future.
Places to sell your Blog
Digital Point Market Place (Beware of the rules before you can post here)
I really hope you enjoyed this article although it was quite long. I have tried to create a structure as to where you can skim read it quite effectively however I am not sure if I was successfull in doing so. I would love to hear your views on putting a price on your Blog and how you would go about doing it? Any formulas that you have created or effective formulas you have come across for putting a price on a Blog?
How to put a price on a Blog?…
In this article I am going to be explaining the best techniques for trying to price up how much your Blog is worth, whether you are selling your Blog or merely interested in the value of your Blog….
Good post. This is quite possibly one of the hardest things to do when evaluating your own blog.
These tips will serve to be a great base point.
Those all seem like good metrics to me. Just like when valuing a stock you need to look at a lot of different numbers to find what the “right price’ is.
Thanks Pliggs and Johnny for your comments and input.
This is a very interesting article. You have just cited important points on setting a price tag for a blog. Very helpful. Thanks.
I believe that my blog worth something after reading your post, very useful information. at least now I can calculate how much it worth!
nice article. read very fast and agree most of the issues.
Will, I think your valuation model for blogs is an excellent resource. It’s obvious you took quality time to examine and build a formula that makes sense. Kudos!