I’ve always thought of selling blogs and niche sites as something you could only do once the site is established and bringing in $1k/month or more. Now it seems that it’s more and more common for people to sell a small blog, sometimes even pre-revenue.
In the last year alone a ton of people have jumped into the whole making money online trend, and blogging is a common way to do that with almost no upfront costs. Unless that is you want to buy a starter site to get you to profitability a little quicker.
The site I sold
About 2 years ago, when I had only been blogging for about a year, I bought a rather high-ticket item on Amazon. I noticed that the product was also quite popular with thousands of reviews and many competitors. At the time that was all it took to spin up a affiliate niche site, so I did.
I spent about a weekend building the site and adding 8 posts. These were pretty short posts and I wrote them all. It wasn’t the best content on the internet, but I was targeting some low competition keywords and high ticket items.
Earnings
I built the site with those 8 posts and then waited, for 2 years. I had almost immediately lost interest in the niche because it was super boring. However I kept the site, and it actually earned about $100 in 2020 and almost $200 in the first half of 2021.
Traffic
Because of the nature of the content and the niche, the sites gets very little traffic. However just a few conversions a month can bring in a decent amount of money. As you can see from the analytics screenshot, the site continues to gain more traffic even though it’s received no content in literally years.
The spike at the end is from where I listed the site on Motion Invest and I’m assuming it got a bunch of people looking at it before it sold in about an hour. I’m not going to mention the url of the site I sold, but like I said it was on Motion Invest and probably wouldn’t be that hard to figure out.
You can see the traffic going to those 8 articles slowly climbed and then plateaued once it got to a certain point. The site will no longer be mine by then, but I think even with the current thin content that it will probably get some nice conversions during the 2021 holidays.
The site’s content
Like I mentioned above, the site had just 8 posts. The site was just barely seeded with minimal content and left to sit on the internet. The posts themselves were pretty short, and not all of them were affiliate posts. The ones that were targeting species commercial intent keywords and did have clear call-to-actions linking to Amazon.
As you can see from the screenshot above there were just 11k words for the published posts, which is really nothing. After looking at the types of content I have on the site, it breaks down like this:
- Guides – 3
- Q&A posts – 1
- Affiliate (best) – 3
- Listicle – 1
What I got for it
I put just enough work into this site that I didn’t want to let it expire, so I hoped to sell it to someone even if it wasn’t for much money. The calculations ended up coming to this site making around $27/month over the last 6-8 months.
They listed it in a dutch style auction where it starts at a certain prices and then is decreased by a certain amount every few days until someone buys it. It ended up selling for $1200 which was a 44x multiple, more than I ever expected to get from such a small site that I maybe put 20 hours of work into total.
After Motion Invest’s 20% success fee, I’ll end up with $960. So pretty much $1k for a really small blog. That’s around a 36x multiple for me after they take their cut, which is still really good.
A 20% cut sounds really high, and it is. That rate only applies to site’s under $20k though. If I ever decided to sell one of my larger sites with them, that would easily fetch 6 figures, then I hope they’d negotiate that rate since many of their competitors are much lower.
Regardless, I’m happy with my Motion Invest experience thus far. The site hasn’t changed hands yet and I haven’t received my money yet, but the contracts are signed and it should be just a matter of time until everything is wrapped up.
Is it worth it to sell small blogs like this
I’d say there’s a sweet spot, and it’s higher than this range. I have another site that I’m prepping for sale in the coming months that should be in the $20k to $40k range. That’s the range I’d probably like to sell sites in, though I do plan to make a 6 figure exit at some point.
Having said that, if you have a small blog that you are no longer interested in that makes a little money it might be worth selling.