I Tried Selling My Blog Website— Here’s What Happened
A few months back, I wanted to sell my 2 years old blog site because I lost interest in the niche and wanted to invest in new business — copywriting & web designing.
But the website flipping platforms charge lots of money in commissions and listing fees.
Like any frugal person, I posted about my blog site on some blogging-related Facebook groups.
The process looks like this:
You make a post that you wanna sell your site. Interested people will ask you all kinds of questions like your website’s link, niche, monthly earnings, monthly traffic, etc… and of course — the price you wanna sell it for.
It’s up to you which information you wanna make public and which do you wanna make available only for truly serious people.
Anyways, I told them,
Hey, my blog website is making an average of $4,000 per year for 2 years now. And the site has 15 blog posts and gets around 1500–2000 monthly visitors.
Tell me, if it were you as the interested buyer, what would be your next step?
Any normal peasant would want to know HOW?… along with some proofs.
Yes, I did get some serious inquiries, but their budget was too low — not a fault of either of us.
But then enters the BRAINWASHED herd!
Their brain just melted and started to hear LOUD sirens of red flags. They couldn’t digest that it’s even possible.
After all, the affiliate/blogging gurus were telling them that they can on average expect to make around $2-$10 per 1,000 pageviews/impressions. And here was my blog… making ENORMOUS monthly RPM (revenue per 1000 pageviews) of $222.
Could you really blame them for being doubtful?
So, they immediately declared it a possible scam. They thought… no, actually they believed that I’m there to rob them.
The FUNNY part: Their belief didn’t change even after showing all the proofs.
This is what happens if you pigeonhole
Those gurus were not wrong. As a beginner blogger, you can expect to make around $2 to $20 RPM if your blog is earning through the Amazon affiliate program or Display ads.
But I was using neither of them.
Without disclosing my niche, I wanna tell you, I was promoting SaaS products (Software as a service) that too in a business category.
SaaS products are mostly subscription-based and are hosted on the cloud instead of on your system. Netflix is a good example of this. Although you’ve to install the app, but all the content is still hosted on their own servers and you’re paying a subscription fee to access that content.
In the business category, SaaS tools can be quite expensive and the commission rates are super high unlike that 1–10% of Amazon. And let’s be honest, most items that you’ll actually promote through the Amazon affiliate program won’t yield you more than 4%.
On Amazon, you can sell a $2,000 laptop, and may only earn $80. On the contrary, if you promote a Saas product of $2000, you could even earn up to $1,000 commission.
So now, you can see why my blog site didn’t need too many blog posts or too much traffic to generate good revenue.
But nobody bought my blog site as a result. Lol
Look,
Without proper research and planning, you’ll face fierce competition on both sides.
Amazon can earn you a lot due to its trust factor and you’ll be earning through a model of low commission, but high sales. On the other hand with non-Amazon products, you’ll earn through fewer sales but high commissions (and hence, lower minimum bar for website traffic numbers), which may take a bit more convincing than a low-cost product on Amazon.
Which path you want to take is up to you based on your interests and life experiences.
The main takeaway of this blog post is —
NEVER PIGEONHOLE Yourself!
Stay vigilant towards possible scams, but still always keep your eyes, ears, and mind open for new ideas though.
