Around a year or so ago there was a huge influx on Flippa with people trying to sell custom blogs.

People would just install one of the Revolution themes, add some content and then try and sell them for $197. With so many people doing it, it soon started to die off and only the blogs getting traffic or ones that were customized even further would sell.

But hanging around on Flippa as often as I do, I’ve noticed that there is still a good supply of these types of blogs still selling even today.

Here’s an example:

http://www.greatwaystoloseweight.com/ – This site has just sold on Flippa today for $297. It was created on the 5th March 09 and getting around 150 visitors per month. Rather than being an auto blog, it has 20 unique articles and a reasonable looking free WordPress theme. Here’s the auction.

So why would it sell for such a high price?

Well, the first thing would be the niche. Weight loss/fat loss/diet blogs will usually sell for a higher price than other niches. That’s because it’s an evergreen niche that is easy to monetize with Adsense, Clickbank products and CPA ads.

The other reason could be the age of the blog. Being 12 months old would give it more power in the search engines when adding new content or linking to other sites that the buyer owns. It would be considered more of an “authority” than a brand new blog.

Not Just A Fluke…

Even brand new blogs can fetch the same price.

Take a look at:

http://topflyfishingsite.com/ – Another blog sold today on Flippa for $297 and it’s brand new. It’s been loaded with 30 articles but doesn’t even state they are unique. It does however have quite a nice looking WordPress theme. Here’s the auction.

So What To Take From This Post…

- Put in a little extra work into your blogs and it makes all the difference.
- Use a nice looking theme and try and make them look unique.
- Never be afraid to set a high Buy It Now (BIN) price

Blog flipping is not dead. Otherwise I wouldn’t have created BlogFlipz.com

Enjoy Your Blogging!

Tony

There are so many ways to make money with WordPress and I like to use more than a dozen each year.

This particular one I did a few years ago but there’s no reason at all why it wouldn’t work just as well today, so I thought I would share exactly what I did

In August 2006 I created and launched the site – www.AdsenseBlogThemes.com. The site gave away free WordPress and Blogger themes and has a one time offer for 100 themes.

I had a basic theme created for me, for I think it was $60. I then adapted it and created all the images for the blogs and put the package together. In total with all the images it stood me at $160.

On initial launch I had a few good JV partners, so I had a good supply of immediate sales. I also prepared 8 follow up messages promoting the latest products at that time. These messages brought in sales almost everyday for the first few months. No joke.

I shot straight into the top 11,000 sites online as shown in Alexa:

Also, on every theme was a link at the bottom, which says “Theme By Adsense Blog Themes” with a live link to my site. So I got free traffic from visitors to other people’s blogs.

The site grew to over 200 unique visitors daily and I never once paid for any advertising.

So I was earning money as well as building a list. Over 3500 gave me their name and email to download the themes. This enabled me to build a very targeted list. I had some good results promoting other people’s products too. Here are the results of Rob Benwell’s Baby Blogging Bonanza product:

I finished #8 winning $100 and of course all the commissions from the sales I made. (I even beat Phil Wiley! LOL!)

I then promoted 3-4 times to that list every month. These are almost always resell products to do with blogging or making money online.

Here is the result of a promotion I sent out on the 2nd October 07. It was for a video on an alternative to Adsense and each sale was for $10 straight into my Paypal account. At last count I sold 38 of these:

I eventually sold the site for $2000, so it’s not mine any longer.

So Why Am I Telling You This?

The reason why I’m sharing these results with you is that you can easily achieve it yourself. Just create hundreds of themes using Artisteer and give them away. Build a list and promote related products to the list and earn hundreds (possibly thousands) of dollars in commissions.

Just add your links to the bottom of the themes and give them away to as many people as you can. In exchange for their email address, they get great looking themes and you get the ability to send out promotions to them for years to come.

What are you waiting for?

Tony Newton

In a post on his blog, Darren Rowse from the excellent blog Problogger.net revealed how he has turned down several offers for one of his blogs.

The blog in question is called Digital Photography School – and is just three years old (or so).

I found it interesting that he has considered the first 2 years as a “launch phase”, when most of us would consider that running a blog for 2 years of hard work as nothing more than just that, hard work!

Here are his exact reasons and goals of what he wanted to achieve in those 2 years:

That might seem like a long time to get a blog up and running but for me the ‘launch phase’ meant more than simply getting the blog designed and announcing it – for me the ‘launch’ is all about these sorts of things:

• building a foundation of solid content (the blog now has 713 posts, most of which are ‘how to’ or ‘tutorial’ style content)

• getting an initial design up (I launched with a free design and quickly upgraded to a purpose built one. It’s now dated and we’ve outgrown it – but it has served us well).

• building a loyal readership and subscribers (the blog is now read by around a million readers a month and subscribed to by over 100,000. The forum has around 200,000 visitors a month.)

• building community (this takes time. Initially I did it with a Flickr group and then leveraged that to start a forum – now with 23,000 members).

• building a ‘list‘ (at the heart of DPS is a newsletter which drives traffic and builds community. It is sent to around 48,000 subscribers per week).

• establishing a publishing routine (I started off posting 3 times a week and have built it up to posting 7 times a week)

• building a content creation team (originally I wrote every post – now the blog is written by a team of 5 paid writers (each doing one post per week) and a number of regular guest contributers)

• building a team of community leaders (the forum is moderated by a wonderful team of voluntary members)

• building relationships with other bloggers and partners (something I was slow doing, mainly due to being time poor – more recently however I’ve been more intentional building relationships with others in the industry)

• experimenting with monetization – (making money from the site hasn’t been high on my priority list to this point – rather in this launch phase it has been more about working out what types of monetization works and what the community responds to. The site does make money, but more importantly I’ve been learning about monetization)

So as you can see, the launch phase has been very well executed indeed.

Traffic And Earnings Don’t Matter

Another thing which is surprising is that the offers he has received (3 of them in high six figures) is that none of them were interested in how much the site was making or even how much traffic it was getting.

Yes, that is worth reading again!

All they were interested in was the fact that it was a “solid” business. They were just interested in the fact that the blog had a brand, loyal readers, busy community and a high amount of user participation.

So What Can We Learn From This?

The first is that you should treat your blogging like a business. There are only very few cases where you can make millions online in a short space of time. The whole “get rich quick” phenomenon that people associate with the internet just isn’t there.

But there have been several recent cases (including Bankaholic.com selling for $15 Million after just 2 years) where blogs are being sold after just a couple of years for high six figures or into the millions.

So the second thing to realise is to build a solid foundation to begin with. Don’t try and get thousands of links and hammer popup boxes all over your blogs just to get an email address. Concentrate on creating good, appealing content that your readership loves and will come back for more. Encourage comments and reader participation, which is a huge mistake that most bloggers make. People love sharing their opinions and doing so on your blog not only gives you extra free content but can start dialogues. When this happens people will link to your blogs and discussions will continue.

Also make sure you add content as often as you can. There’s nothing worse than finding a nice looking site with great content, only to find you visit a week later and nothing has changed! The whole point of blogging is the ease of which content can be added on a regular basis. Try to post everyday but don’t leave gaps of 4 days or longer because readers may look elsewhere.

Hopefully you have found this as interesting as I have, that in just a couple of years you could possibly be offered a Million dollars for your blog. If that doesn’t give you inspiration you need, nothing will!

Enjoy Your Blogging!

Tony