The new blog is EcoFuss.com, a Green Eco Friendly News, environmental issues blog. Green everything is already booming and will continue to do so, so getting in the niche now seems to be a smart move long term for the next three years or so. But for the important part, the numbers:

• PageRank4
• 9 months old
• 10,000 visitors/month
• Adsense revenues of $50-60/month
• Private ad was $50/month
• Price: $700

The blog had a little rough history after changing owners not too long ago, and it has definitely been very under monetized, with a lot of that due to lack of effort and asking too much for prices.

My plan

I immediately implemented a new design with a professional logo while transferring all the accounts over to myself. For content, I’m having a hard time deciding which direction to take the blog – a more offbeat satirical/entertaining commentary or a more newsy type informative. I may try a mix of the two since I’ll be writing the content initially for a couple months and then take it from there. As for green niches, I’ll stay general and cover everything environmental – energy, travel, business, tech, and policy with a little conservation, living tips, and animal stuff.

Monetization Plan

• I’m relying on Adsense as the backbone now. It’s doing fine, but I hate having all my eggs in one basket
• Text Links – I hate text links as well since I don’t want Google to hate me. However, I may sell them to recoup my investment sooner.
• Affiliate ads – I’m really struggling finding good affiliates within the eco friendly / green niche, but I’m still looking. I’m hoping to find an affiliate that could come up with at least $25/month in revenues.
• Private Ads – The barrier between me doing okay and really well hinges on private ads. The site used to have a private button ad for $50/month, but I didn’t bank on that revenue when I purchased it since it smelled a bit fishy. But if I can land a couple small private advertisements and reviews, I’ll be doing great.

Conclusion

I have a lot of work yet, but hopefully July concludes well so I’ll be a little less anxious about my investment. I’m getting a little weary of the potential of the site after seeing that all the industry leaders right now are nonprofit blogs. I expected the green niche not to be as profit driven and commercial as the travel niche, but not to the extent that I’m finding it to be when searching for advertisers… it’s kind of scary.

But I’m looking forward to developing this site in a new niche for me and give you the opportunity to follow this new venture of mine if you feel like it. Questions or comments appreciated, and you can always contact me through the site if you want to work together at all.

I was pretty surprised at what I saw:

One, a huge webmaster community (V7N.com) for sale for 6 months revenue, and 1 year’s profits. Has multiple income streams from advertising and from being a contextual link company. Why so cheap??? Because of its scale. With a price tag of $220,000, it’s sticker price seemed to drop only based on it’s large scale and unique niche amongst “real businesses.” But is it not unreal that a hugely profitable business can go for only 1 year’s profits!?

Another niche sports news site with a price tag of $7,000 – has big visitors, 2 years of age, PR4, good domain, nice design, and comes in at less than 8 times monthly revenue! The revenue is diversified between CPM and CPC, while text links and affiliates have not yet been utilized yet.

While it would take some time to set up a better business system, and a portion of revenue to find very very good writers, I think I’m still correct in my claim that these larger scale sites are not getting the fair, historical valuation makes them a good value.

So not to trying to make my quest of acquiring sites more difficult, but I think that buyers with some money to spend can find favorable valuations in content, ad driven websites. Buying established businesses at 6 to 8 times the monthly revenue is cheap, no matter what niche your [legitimate] business operates in. Period.

The New Site

I purchased Cancun Blog .org for $200 over at Sitepoint. The site had a shabby design, the theme was broken, no revenue, and the content hadn’t been updated for a year. So I guess I just liked the domain, PageRank of 4, and its micro travel niche.

When I saw the blog was for sale, I made a thread over at Digital Point looking for writers. Two of the three applicants were really good, and the writer I ended up with has a condo in Cancun and has been there several times. He agreed to write for $.01/word and advertising space for his condo. So it is a beneficial deal for both of us.
Marketing

I’ll just be trying to optimize the site for search engines as best as I can. Here are my plans.

• Link my three travel blogs to Cancun Blog
• Participate in several link exchanges with other Mexico blogs
• Participate in Blog Carnivals. The Carnival of Cities is golden, and will be a perfect fit.

Monetization

The usual Text links, Adsense, and sponsored posts will be my main advertising right away. Eventually I will want to utilize the blog’s micro niche and get some direct advertisers from Cancun businesses, since I see they are advertising on a lot other Cancun travel sites already. Once I get some of these direct advertisers and partnerships to maximize the micro niche aspect, I’ll be in the money and consider the blog successful.

So wish me luck. You will be sure to hear more from me regarding my successes and failures with the site.

• PageRank: 5
• Unique Visitors: 55,000/month
• Page Views/month: 85,000
• Born on: March 2005
• Revenue – Almost exactly $860/month for three straight months
  • Adsense: $460
  • TLA: $220
  • Chitika: $170

The site also came with an additional PR4 Zune blog, a PR3 home gadget blog, and some other branded domains which were not near as popular as the main tech blog. So they had a lot of potential for future success, but not at the same level as the main blog.

Expenses

So to make it a true business instead of a job a few bloggers would’ve been necessary. With one post a day on the main gadget blog, and two a week for the other two blogs with PR that would be 9 posts a week. If I were to pay $10/blog post that comes out to $400/month. I’m not sure how much hosting would cost for a site like this, but a figure $30/month would probably suffice.

Monthly Profit

So a monthly profit would come out to a conservative $400/month. It has unlimited potential, and could realistically be ~$600 with a little work, but let’s just stick with $400.

Selling Price

The blog(s) ended up going for $9,000, which is just 10X revenue, but more importantly ~23X profit.

So what I’m looking for is feedback on this deal. Would you have done it? Sure, there are a many externalities that are involved depending when purchasing the site, but from the numbers alone, consider the following questions:

• Is this a good investment at $9,000?
• What is the most you would pay for it?
• Would a partnership have been worthwhile, since I couldn’t afford the site outright by myself?

Think about these questions, and please share your thoughts in the comments. I’d love to hear what others think about this potentially lucrative online investment.

In my view, this is the single most important factor in determining the value of a site. Even in a low paying niche, if you’ve got the traffic, you can make a killing. Take this site for example: http://dogbreedinfo.com/ – with over 2.5 million unique visits per month, they generate mucho money (something like $600/day in AdSense revenue alone).

At a very deep level, daily unique visitors gives you a sense of the value of your site in the eyes of your potential customers. Contrast this with various factors such as Google PageRank which give very little indication of the value of your site in the eyes of potential customers, but rather reflects (poorly in my view) the value of your site in the eyes of other websites.

2. Average Daily Profit

Forget gross revenue. Who wants a website that generate $2000 in revenue but spends $2100 in advertising and maintenance expense. Revenue is very seductive, and it is normally what gets listed on sites like SitePoint. But before you buy a site, make sure you know both the expenses and the revenue…and their difference.

The reason I don’t put Daily Profit above unique visitors is that daily profit is a variable that almost always relies heavily on unique visitors. Plus, Daily Profit is a variable that depends to a large degree on the manager of a site. If a website is currently being undermonetized, but has great unique visitor stats, then you’ve got a great opportunity to jump in and maximize profits.

3. Quality of Content

If the website is informational, then ask yourself how original the information is. Is the information considered authoritive or does it at least have the potential of becoming authoritive? So much of the content on the web is junk, so when you find that rare gem of a site with genuinely useful and unique content, it might be worth paying a premium, even if various other factors are lacking.

One thing to consider, however, is whether the content ages quickly or not. If a site produces qualityvideo tutorials on topics in fast moving niches like SEO, the critical question to ask is whether the content is timeless, or whether it will be irrelevant in 2-3 years. Not all content needs to be timeless. If you’re up for the challenge of producing a steady stream of relevant content, go for it, but just make sure you know what you’re getting into.

4. Backlinks from other sites

In my view, backlinks and their associated metrics (i.e. PageRank) tend to be way overvalued on the web. Now, you can take advantage of this fact and try to sell sites on these metrics alone. But in the end, PageRank should not be the only reason you buy a site. I’ve seen shoddy five page sites with PR6 sell on SitePoint for $2000. The fact of the matter is that most of these sites have been artificially pumped up and then sold off. Beware of this strategy.

One way to identify whether you’re being conned or not is to go to www.live.com and do a “link:www.domain.com” search. The reason I prefer Live.com at the moment is that it lists backlinks by domain, so you can get a good picture of the total number of domains (as opposed to pages) linking to a site. Why does this matter? Because diversity in backlinks means you probably won’t lose your PageRank if one or two sites pull their links.

In the end, backlinks matter, but in my view they only matter at a domain level. The best tools on the web for checking a site’s backlink value are Live.com, Yahoo SiteExplorer and SEOMoz PageStrength.

5. Visual aesthetics / Site Layout & Design

Content is king, or so they say. But what most people on the web ignore is a great site design. As we all know from the sale of cars, humans often judge a product by how it looks and how easy it is to use. Find a beautiful but functional site, and you’re half-way there. Personally, I think paying for a nice site design these days is way undervalued. The reason? Well, site design is quantitative and it doesn’t result in profits all on its own. But a good design will help you keep your customers, and that, as they say, is priceless.

6. What the Niche, dude?!

The topic of your site has consequences. Are you passionate about the topic? Will the topic keep you focused and consistently dedicated to the site? Does the niche have an audience? Has the niche been proven to be profitable in the past? Is the niche oversaturated or undersaturated? How easy will it be to develop product or content for the niche? How easy will it be to acquire customers and/or readers in the niche? These are all questions that determine the value of a site not only from a objective standpoint, but also the value relative to you as the owner. Which brings up a key point – value is in the eye of the beholder – if you like losing money, then hey, there’s lots of sites out there with lots of value! Of course no one likes losing money! So if you want to make money, make sure you have a sense of how you want to make it, and how you want to spend your time doing so.

7. The Intangibles

Things that are priceless these days include:

Age of domain – The older the better.

Quality of domain – Memorable and/or short but keyword rich domains are best. In general, stick with .com

Age of content – Again, the older the better in cases of timeless content

Strong Search Phrases – how much of the traffic is coming through targeted search phrase? You’re not taking advantage of the global market place, if the global marketplace can’t find you.