How I Sold a Blog for $20,000 in 8 Months | Hacker News Reader

How I Sold a Blog for $20,000 in 8 Months

blogtyrant.com

38 pointsndimopoulos27 comments

What an appalling and offensive use of one's time.

Make not-so-much money by providing generic content on a subject until X level of popularity is reached, at which point you transition the audience into a not-astounding paycheck and the web property into a commodity valued solely in visits.

And the world moves on, nothing bettered, and very little changed, beyond a tiny shifting of money ownership.

This is the greatness of Google.

Information Dilution. Instead of a site with dense, focused, relevant content, we can create hundreds of sites with watered-down information.

The more sites we have to sift through, the more money everybody makes.

Google has incentivized the web to dilute content.

Come on.

Everybody starts somewhere.

It's crass, but an extra $20k in the bank as a safety net can make the difference between someone becoming an entrepreneur or stay working full-time.

$20,000 for 8 months work isn't very much. It's not very clear how much time he spent per week but it sounds quite significant.

I always qualify "isn't very much"... for the U.S.

I could definitely use U$ 20.000, it's more than a year and a half of my (post-taxes) salary here in Uruguay.

(And yes, I should look into consulting, etc. HN is a great way to nag me to move forward and it's good advice).

Don't most blogs tend to be read by people in that country though? Perhaps there are subtle cultural differences in topics, language, style that make blogs more appealing to people who are culturally similar... for example, I know that Dell concentrates sales forces by geography to some extent, so that when you call from the South you get another person from the South and might be able to chit-chat about whatever Southerners like to talk about (mint juleps?)

Right, I guess my comment might even be insulting to some - if so, I apologize. I am in Denmark but I think wages here are pretty comparable to the US for many industries.

But, if what you say is true then surely you should consider writing a blog as described in the article?

It wasn't insulting, don't worry :)

I always observe how living in the first world changes the perspective of people... (latest example: " travel doesn't take a lot of money." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1601857 ).

And yes, I should :)

he used 10 hours/week as an example, and that would put it in the neighborhood of $60/hr

US$20,000 for eight months would put it roughly on par with what I'm earning in Edinburgh, UK right now.

He's made a point about monetizing it from the beginning, so one can assume that he's earned more than just the $20k: he's trying to show buyers that it earns money, and the best way to do that is to have it earn money.

Many times the experience and knowledge learned are invaluable in future projects as well as at prospective places of employment.

> "Write a blog you believe in"

This sounds like the "How to Get Rich Quick" book that instructs its readers to write and promote a "How to Get Rich Quick" book.

Where exactly is the common ground between writing something you believe in and writing and developing a blog with the explicit goal of an optimal quick cash exit?

I was a bit turned off as well. After all your going to spend EIGHT WHOLE MONTHS on this. EIGHT! Think of it...two entire seasons will pass!

Maybe putting some more time into it will yield rewards that don't appear to be sub-minimum wage?

Or I could keep my blog and make the same amount in ads in the same amount of time. :)

A couple things I was curious about after reading this: wouldn't a blog that's just been handed to a new owner end up losing followers once the readership realizes the old author's bailed? Also I'd love to hear any tidbits you'd care to share on monetization strategies for bloggers.

depends. a lot of niche blogs don't make their money on regular readers, but on the adsense revenue on organic searches and people looking around for info they want. a lot of the techniques he talks about is similar to the process people use to make that type of adsense/referral.

> but on the adsense revenue on organic searches and people looking around for info they want

"Detailed revenue breakdown of a gadget blog ($61k in dec 2007)"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216960

http://selfmademinds.com/200801/income-breakdown-for-decembe...

i get a 404.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1Zw50qP...

People will come for the old content and consume the new content, possibly to a decreasing level, but still. Also if you're simply buying the blog to point some links to another site for garnering Google linkjuice or to own the first SERP or whatever then you probably don't care it's the current link structure (on- and off-site) that's working for you.

> Also if you're simply buying the blog to point some links to another site for garnering Google linkjuice

That sounds like paying for a link to me. Does it count as paid links to them? I always wondered about this kind of thing - I would never keep visiting an authored website if something like this happened to it, and I don't know anyone who would, so I've never understood what the buyer gets in this situation.

Google, et al., may look like a clan of prescient mystics, but they're not. If you don't change the whois info they don't know the domain changed hands - indeed paid for links are really hard to spot algorithmically if done right. The regularity of updates will affect rank (increasingly it seems) but this can be maintained and content can be purchased at very low rates. Unless your site gets flagged for review by a human I think you're unlikely to be caught.

>I would never keep visiting an authored website if something like this happened to it

My blog, for example, gets most hits for a couple of posts on the Safari browser. Despite being entirely unrelated I can drive traffic to other sites from this blog, not high value traffic for sure, but if I were looking to bolster my pageviews for some reason (1st round?) or give another site an injection of PageRank short term then it works well enough.

Would you really notice one addtional href in the footer?

Footer links are pretty much discounted, at least by Google, if the SE can sniff the context, FWIW.

no, but I'd notice the content change (assuming they changed authors.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com