Continuing Adventures

Are blogs like houses?

November 14th, 2007 | by lissie |

I have seen a couple of times the idea of “flipping a blog”, now I know about flipping a house but a blog? In real estate terms flipping is when you buy a property with a long settlement date with the intention of on-selling it before you have to make the original settlement. It can be profitable at certain time in the market but of course if you haven’t actually got the money to settle its a pretty risky strategy. So as Kirsty asked: why would you flip a blog?

I guess it would come down to if you think you can buy the blog for a good price and then on-sell it for a better price. Usually price is determined by revenue - so if you saw a blog which you could think of ways to make more money from by promoting it to get more readers or by changing the advertising to get more $$ I guess you might flip it. The trick with blogs is that normally they are dependent on the author for content: so maybe you would pay the author to keep contributing -though I suspect most people would only sell because they had found something new to do and didn’t have time to write frequently anymore. Maybe the blog is in an area you think you can write about so you can add your own content, therefore you are buying a step up out of obscurity which all blogs go through in the first few months: though technically that’s not flipping - to flip you have to sell again.

I think the problem with buying and selling, or flipping a blog is to find the seller. Ideally you want someone who is not too Internet Marketing savvy - meaning that you can easily add value. However most of those people would just let the blog lapse - it costs very little, or nothing to have a blog, its not like leaving houses lying around unused!

It would need to be the right type of blog too - this blog for example is unsaleable: its a confused blog, doesn’t know what its niche is: its covered everything from my frustration in traditional IT work to a pure travel blog to my attempts at learning more about making money online - it has been rambling a lot which really means the only person who could write for it is me!

So to answer the question: no, I don’t think blogs are like houses, but there is a market for buying and selling blogs, and websites its like buying and selling anything though - you need to know what you are doing and how to value your product!

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