There are several factors that are key to coming up with a blog’s value, I’m going to briefly review how I go over them with a real world example.
In a nutshell I’m looking for the following: Age of site, Google Page Rank (PR), accurate traffic information (visits and pageviews per month), audience demographic, current members/users, newsletter subscribers, RSS feeds, and top organic producing keywords.
I’ll start by providing some screenshots of a blog I was evaluating recently and quickly work through them:
Target Blog
Site Point Auction
A quick visit to the Wayback Machine will show me what the site has historically looked like. In this case it’s not old enough to have a record (that’s not good). You can also get some old thumbnails of previous versions over at Domain Tools.
Google Page Rank can be checked via the Google toolbar or by using a 3rd party website. I like to use Website Outlook because this provides me with PR, Alexa Rank (with historical graph), and other sites hosted on same IP. [side note: visit any similar looking sites and make sure there are not multiple copies of this same content lined up for sale] In this case we have a PR of 3 and Alexa rank around 125K which is absolutely fantastic but it has only been this way for 3 months so I’m skeptical.
website outlook
Finally demographic and user information can only be obtained from the owners of the site so talk with them. I received some information on the community and visits which turned out to be a pretty savvy creative crowd that loved all the “grunge” artwork. I verified the traffic was all organic and referral from many different sources via Google Analytics. This was key due to the short life of this blog. I estimated this blog had a current adsense income of about $40 per month on approximately 60K visits / 150K pageviews per month.
Domain name: 100
Page Rank 3: $200
Traffic 1 year: $720
60,000 x .005 CTR (half percent) = 300 Clicks per month * .20 each = $60 per month = $720 for 1 year.
Therefore as the site sits it is worth about a thousand dollars to me. Now I was still nervous about the short life of the site but I accounted for that in my pricing of the traffic by only using a 12 month multiplier, in reality this content will be good for as long as three years. I could also use another PR3 site in my collection to bump up some of my other sites. 10 minutes after I received the valid Google Analytics traffic verification I decided to pull the trigger. The buy it now was set to $800 … and someone beet me to it.
It happens.
This was a very brief overview, before actually making a purchase there are other things that must be verified about the site and the seller. Do your homework on both but do not get paralyzed, listen to your gut.
Tags: Blog Pricing, Page Rank, website traffic