Making money online opens up a world of opportunities. For many people like me, there really might not be anything better than sitting at home for a few hours a day and writing interesting articles in your blog, especially if you make a good full time income from it.
There are several resources at the end of this post that will help you do everything I discuss here.
Ever since the advent of internet advertising, anyone who owns a website and knows how to use it may sit anywhere and make as much money as they want.
Flipping a blog is much like flipping a house.
Buy a house, clean it up, make repairs, renovate and update it, then sell it for a profit. This whole process sounds easy, and you can make a lot of money, but there are plenty of things that can go wrong.
Flipping a blog is actually a little easier because you don’t have as much physical labor and legal issues to deal with. There are a few different options for blog flipping, either you can be the flipper, or the person who buys a blog, improves it and then sells it, or you can build a blog from scratch until it is making an income, and then sell it.
Build A Blog For Profit
In my mind, I would rather build one from scratch make it turn a profit, and then hold onto it. The reason most people sell a blog is due to the fact that, just like a house they require maintenance.
This is where hiring out comes into play
You can hire someone to manage the blog for you, including posts, advertising, and new ideas, then you don’t have to worry about doing any of this your self. This kind of job usually won’t pay to well for someone else so expect them to want to work remotely and on their own schedule. You can work up a contract that determines how many posts they must make to the blog monthly as well as what topics you want them to cover. You can look at their portfolio and get a good idea of their past work.
One good way to pay someone like this is by following an “employeecentric” method. With this method, you pay the employee and treat them so well that they happily write really good compelling content for you.
Lets say I have a blog about are that brings in around $2,500 per month. $2,000 of the profits are generated from Adsense, Kontera, Affiliate Sales, etc. The other $500 may come in from advertisers who currently pay for space on your blog. Simply pay the new blogger whatever over the $2,000 per month the blog is yielding. This way you will have a very dedicated blogger who is also motivated to write as much high quality content as he/she can.
Replicate The Process
After you have one blog running like this, buy another blog and offer your writer the added bonus of either writing for this blog as well for more money, or training another blogger to write in the style I want for an extra income. It takes a lot to get someone to operate creatively along the same lines as you do, and when you have someone who can, get them to manage all of the other writers and you will have an automated and fast growing popular publication.
I actually got this idea while going way off topic in my head while watching The Devil Wears Prada. Meryl Streep is editor in chief for an extremely popular fashion magazine called Runway. She has all these people working under her that know exactly what she wants. You don’t have to be as cold and mean as her at all, instead when you find someone who knows what you like and is happy to provide it, do not let go of them. Treat them like gold and they will help you automate your blogging income.
Selling A Blog
Building a blog and selling it allows you to take a little bit of money and build a good blog, then sell it for a huge profit later on down the road. This method is too “retirement minded” for me as I would much rather a passive income that occurs no matter what I do.
When building a blog that will be sold, minimum amount of money and time invested is the key. For this reason a great deal of brainstorming should preempt whatever site you decide to build. Look at what Twitter has done. They took a unique idea for a social and viral marketing platform, manifested it into creation, and now they could sell the entire thing for a huge sum of money. Everyone who works with Twitter could possibly retire comfortably if the company was sold.
What Should You Do?
The best part about all of this is you can do all of it. Every one of these methods will allow you to make money blogging, and work together to secure an income. If you build a blog from scratch, make it turn a profit, buy another blog with that profit, take that monthly income to pay someone else to manage the blog, then buy a few more sites and duplicate the process. Eventually, if you get tired of the continual work required to keep the sites up and running, you could sell the entire thing and live off of the profits. Hmm, I think I might do this.
Resources
SitePoint - This site is like eBay but for websites. You can buy high dollar sites, start up sites, or sell your own.
DigitalPoint - Much like SitePoint, this site hosts a really good forum where people can exchange info on site purchases and negotiations.
oDesk - This site is a virtual assistant for any technical help you need.
Elance - Much like oDesk, you can hire writers, marketers, sales reps, programmers, coders, etc.
December 20th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
Good post! I had a question about this though, would you recommend buying a new blog or building one?
December 20th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
@Michael - I would like to know the same thing. I have wanted to build a blog and make a profit from it, but what if I don’t want to wait?
December 20th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
[...] or Buy a Blog? Written by Jeremiah Smith on December 20th, 2007 at 3:12 pm I recently posted an article about flipping blogs for profit and I discussed some of the different methods on how to make money from blogging in the long term. [...]
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:48 am
Michael & Lorain: Thank you both for commenting here. I personally recommend building a blog before buying one. My recommendation is that you build a blog and work on it for about 6 months to a year. Determine a niche category that you’re interested in, post to it daily or every other day. Depending on the type of traffic and target audience you have, I recommend paying for some traffic to begin with. PPC, or even stumbleupon is a great source of traffic. You will be able to determine what to do in the long run after a few tests with this short term traffic. Don’t spend a small amount on it either, because it is better to spend a thousand today than a hundred every month. After you get used to this blogging system and traffic generation, then I recommend purchasing a blog. Income blogging is a very tough thing to do, so expect a lot of work and a long time before you actually make money. You will someday make a passive income.