How I Successfully Make Money Building and Selling Blogs

I’ve been creating content online since 2006. I started out building a camping website with my husband, which we would work on in the evenings after the kids went to bed. We came up with the topic through keyword research and looking at the stats. It was purely about the stats, because let me tell you, I hate camping. A true vacation to me includes a hotel room, a pool and maid service.

Needless to say, we weren’t successful and we ended up losing money. But I had been bitten by the online bug and knew this was where I belonged.

Start with a Topic You Know and Love

Fast forward a few months, when we decided to create another website. It was on a topic I could sink my teeth into, write hundreds of articles off the top of my head and just enjoy. My husband did the keyword research and I wrote the articles. We started making money within a few months and I knew we had something legitimate on our hands.

After working on the site for about 8 months and increasing the income to just under $1,000 a month on average, we decided to sell. I was bored. I felt like I really had nothing left to give to the site and I was ready to move on to something else. We listed the site on a popular online website marketplace and within a few days sold the site for a high four-figure sum.

Show Me the Money

This site had around 25 pages of content, so let’s do the math here: sold for $7,500, which was making $900 a month and we created around 3 pages per month. The first three months we made just about nothing. Then it went from $200, to $400 to $600 and stayed at $900 up until we sold. Let’s figure we made around $11,000 total from both the sale and the combined monthly income. That means we were paid around $440 per page we wrote. Not bad. The buyer was purchasing a website which was ranking really well for highly searched keywords in the search engines, plus a steady income we had built. It was a win-win.

I think this site sold for what it did for several reasons:

• I was writing about something I was passionate about and had first-hand knowledge of and experience with
• We did the research up front to make sure we had a reasonable shot at making the site quite profitable if we did the work required
• We wrote the content with our readers in mind first of all, but using words that the search engines would like and would reward us for

And Then Blogging Entered My Life…

After building websites, I discovered the world of blogging. I have not looked back since. Not only have I built and run several successful blogs, but I have also sold several. Some I built with the intention of selling, while others I decided to sell after simply losing the desire to continue pouring myself into it. Chalk it up to a short attention span.

Let’s play with the numbers for a minute, shall we?

I sold one blog for $4,000 after building it for 6 months. How did I come up with the idea for the blog? I focused on both keyword research and knowledge about the topic. Do you see a pattern here?

The blog was making just over $500 a month and I was working on it for about an hour a day. It’s not an extreme amount of money by any means, but $500 a month can make or break the bank for some people.

The Moral of the Story

What’s the moral of the story here? There are several actually.

Each post you write has value. Whether you are writing the posts on your blog for your readers, for the search engines, or to appeal to a potential future buyer, each post you write has value. So treat it that way.

It is possible to make a decent income with your blogging efforts. I have people ask me all the time “Can I really make money from this?” Yes. But, it takes knowledge about your topic, passion and a willingness to consistently do the work required.

You don’t have to be an A-lister to make money. I am by no means an A-list blogger. Most people in the online world don’t even know I exist. I kind of like it that way. But I can tell you this; I make a full-time income from my blogs and am thankful every day for this opportunity that I have been given.

Do you have any secrets to your blogging success? Have you bought or sold a blog? Share a little of your blogging story in the comment section below.