How Much Profit

[paulus]

Hi

This is my first post so hello and welcome to me 

I noticed the (vey quick) sale of a blog on Sitepoint yesterday/today and I think it was owned by one of you guys. I looked around on the blog but couldn't find a suitable place to put this so forgive me if I'm in the wrong place!

It looked like a lot of work had been put into this site: 30+ good quality posts, the traffic had been built to nearly 7,000 UVs / month, revenue etc. The speed at which an interested buyer snapped up the site is testament to its quality. I would imagine the author must have taken maybe a couple of hours to write each post, given the quality. With the site selling at $1,500, just considering the writing time alone, that equates to the owner working in effect for a mere $25 / hour. Obviously this excludes all the time invested in getting the blog to a sellable state. I think this is quite low.

I was just wondering whether the seller could give some feedback about their thoughts on this sale, whether the work put in was worth the sale price, whether it was simply an experiment to gauge the viability of future flips etc. Maybe my estimates are wrong about how much time went into the project, but personally I would be disappointed if I was working for $25 / hour.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very new to this game and am just interested in getting the perspectives of other people.

Any input?

[Bclark]

I'm the guilty party in that flip.   

That site was a pretty high quality flip.  However, most of the posts were taken from another blog that I purchased.  Basically what happened was, I bought a site with some quality content, but the domain was awful.  I got the domain, deleted it, and then uploaded the database to a different domain with the posts.  The original domain just wouldn't have cut it.

So basically I wrote about the last 5 posts or so for it, and the rest were written by someone else.  It really didn't take as much time as you might have imagined.  I think I totaled about 20 hours of work on that one.

That's a good lesson though.  You don't have to buy a blog to use as is... a lot of times I buy blogs just for the content, and set the content up on a better domain, with a better looking site.

[paulus]

Hey, thanks for owning up! Excellent idea, that makes more sense.

Presumably though $1,500 - (cost of time + cost of buying the original site) would still leave you a tidy margin?

[Bclark]

I bought the original site for $15.  It was basically $15 for a cluttered mess of a wordpress blog that had been abandoned months ago, but it had about 20 high quality articles.  That told me that this person was a skilled writer, but just didn't have the knowledge to make money blogging.  The domain was something that had absolutely nothing to do with the organization and productivity tone that the blog was obviously aimed at.  The theme?  A free theme that looked like it was straight out of the build your own website days on GeoCitites.  Bonus points if any of you actually created a site there back in 1995.

There was obvious value there.  Less than $1 for 20 articles that were of extremely high quality, and most were over 500 words.  Great writing.

So, I basically bought it for the content alone.

Now as to the tidy margin you speak of.  Let's do some math.

$15 for the original site
$10 for a new domain
$30 listing fee (included highlighted and bold features)
====
$55 total cost

So after paypal fees I totaled about $1,440 on the sale.  That's $1,385 in profit after you take out the $55 in costs.  At an hourly rate (assuming appx. 20 hours), that left me with a tidy profit of about $70 an hour.  I'll take that all day, every day!

[paulus]

I bought the original site for $15.  It was basically $15 for a cluttered mess of a wordpress blog that had been abandoned months ago, but it had about 20 high quality articles.

Now that's what I call a bargain. I'd like to know where you do your shopping! Did you discover the site and then proposition the owner...?

I've contacted owners of a variety of sites I liked the look of, but with no success. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places.

[Bclark]

Try this video to start.  It's almost exactly what I did to obtain the site.

https://siteflipu.com/blog-flipping-prospecting-for-gold/

[paulus]

Thanks for the link, very informative. I trawled through blogcatalog this morning for around an hour but didn't find anything decent. I'll have maybe have another look later.