Why? Because building more blogs doesn’t interest me as much as it did two years ago. Yes, it is possible to have a full-time blogging career, but I also want to explore alternatives. So what’s the alternative? Sites or mini-sites, web services, directories, toolkits, etc.

If you surf around the blogosphere, you’ll see that bloggers fall into a lot of categories. Some are great writers, some are good at link building, others at building dialogue with readers, and others at marketing and promoting their blog. That doesn’t mean that they’re all earning reasonable revenue for their efforts. When that happens, building a blog becomes a chore, not a pleasure. And that will come out in the writing – eventually. Lack of passion in the writing, of course, spells the beginning of the end of a blog.

Alternative

Fortunately, there are several alternatives to building and maintaining blogs, and some of them can be more lucrative. One is to build and flip limited edition sites. A bit of research at a couple of domain/ site marketplaces (namely Sitepoint Marketplace and Digital Point Marketplace) shows a small group of people building and selling mini-sites around hobby and other niche topics.

I’ve purchased a few of these sites at US$100-200 each. While they show promise with the content, they lack something. So I’ve been changing static templates, adding a few visual elements, mini-directories, etc. In some cases, I’m rewriting a bit of the content or at least rearranging text to be a bit more readable, such as putting items in to bullet-point lists. And of course, I’ll be promoting the sites where possible. When the sites are done, they’ll be more than just a bunch of pages centered around a theme.

For monetization, some of these sites have Amazon or more exclusive affiliate ads. A few have Google AdSense ads as well, if the content talks about specific products. But AdSense is not the focus in most of them. And the real monetization will be when I sell them. I haven’t put a great deal of extra effort into any of the sites, so even if I only make $100-200 over what I paid, I’ll be making a profit. The sites will be affordable to other buyers, so they’re more likely to sell quickly. If they have any Google PageRank, they may sell at a premium.

Process

If you are thinking of trying something similar, here is a suggested process:

1. Pick a topic. Hobby or home improvement topics are often worthwhile for affiliate program-based mini-sites. See my tutorial at Tubetorial about choosing topics for blog posts (which also works for mini-sites).
2. Register or buy an inexpensive domain name.
3. Set up hosting. If you’re going to be doing this a lot, get a hosting reseller account that makes it easy to set up multiple sites at no or little extra cost. This way, if you have a site buyer that’s slow to move the site, you can offer them a bit of affordable hosting and still have room to build new sites.
4. Write 10-20 “evergreen” pages of content. By evergreen, I mean articles that’ll hold up a year, two years or longer from now. If you don’t feel like writing, hire someone. Edit their content if it’s not exactly the way you want it. Or you can buy a ready-made mini-site and tweak that.
5. Get a free static template from a site like OSWD or Free CSS Templates.
6. Add visual content such as images or videos. Often, you can reuse pictures from Flickr (check the copyright) and video from numerous sites such as Google Video or YouTube. There are loads more, and once I set up citizenCast, I’ll write there about audio, video, podcasting, and webcasting options.
7. If you want, you might add something such as a mini-directory, if its links do not draw traffic away from your affiliate links.
8. When you’re ready, build your HTML pages, which will require a suitable navigation bar.
9. Post your pages and start promoting with links, in forums, etc.
10. Sell the site. You can sell before the site gains Google PageRank, if you want a quick sale at an affordable price. Or you can hold onto the site, build PR, build some revenue, then sell at a premium.

The idea is to create quality, limited content on a topic: i.e, just once. If you revist a broad topic, try to pick a different sub-niche. For example, if you have site on dog breeding that you build and sell, next time try dog training. Doing this gives your buyers a bit of an advantage: you are not creating competition for them. That doesn’t mean there won’t be other sites on similar topics, but you can at least honestly claim limited edition sites – which makes them more salable.

If you build, say, two sites per week and make $200 profit on each, then you could make an extra $1600/m for a few hours of work per site. Of course, if you did this every day, you could make more, though I believe there’s a saturation point in the market. I may be wrong – test the waters and see. You don’t have to give up blogging, but if you want to supplement your revenue, and you have a sense for what might work in terms of mini-sites/ affiliate sites, flipping limited edition websites might be the way to go.

A while back, I persuaded him to take up an interest in blogging about health. Except that I  haven’t had time to develop his blog for him, and he hasn’t had time to learn about promotion, etc. I’ve started and scrapped his blog a few times now. And maybe it’s my own poor health, but i seem to have an aversion to working on his blog. (Yes, I have loads of guilt about this.)

The net result, after almost two years of him waiting for me is that he went to a local seminar a few days ago, run by some snakeoil hucksters. They must have taken down his phone number, because the next day, my father emailed me and said they gave him “an offer he couldn’t refuse.” Instead of asking for US$4200, they offered him their online business package for $3500. He bought it.

Except that their online business package consists of some articles and a dozen or so screencast videos. No website, no content nothing. No assistance. Just how to build your site (use “meta tags”!!!), how to find drop shippers, and how to get traffic to your site. They left out the most important aspect: how hard it can be to have a successful commerce site.

Needless to say, I was peeved when I heard this (I’m on the verge of being a website/ domain broker for various people, and he knew this but didn’t consult me because he thought I was busy). Actually, I was more peeved at myself for not helping my father with his blog and blame myself for his spending that money. Half of the information in that info pack is probably wrong (meta tags? – give me a break), and all of it is free online, somewhere. Okay, if you don’t have the time to spend (took me two years) to learn everything, you may think it’s worth it. My father even told me in late 2005 to create my own info pack to sell to newbies. I considered it, but not for a $4,200 price tag.

Thing that really bugs me, though, is that my father is a busy man, despite being retired. He may think he saved $700 by spending $3500. But I could have taken that $3500 and bought my father income earning websites, or a few nice domain names on speculation, and he would have made money far sooner than he ever will with that bullcrap package of info.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you have $3600. You could buy a website income with a site earning $300/m that is selling at a 12-month multiple. Hold it for 6 months and you’ve earned $1800. Sell it for $4000, and you’ve earned an extra $400, for a total of $2200. That’s a pretty good return, provided that that income comes with very little effort on your part. If it takes time away from other income-earning activities, then you have to rethink your strategy. Maybe you’re better off being a domain mogul, which requires trend smarts and great analytical and speculative skills, but takes far less effort than trying to make a living with a new website.

So to those of you planning to make a full or partial income online, please don’t spend ~$4K on an info pack. Drop me a comment, tell me what you would really like to do, what topics you really know a lot about or enjoy enough to learn. Then I’ll give you some suggestions on what you might try. And it won’t cost you anything.

Given the amount of work I put into each, the starting bid prices are pretty cheap. Throw in my free advice and I’ll be bold enough to say you’ll get a bargain. Even though a couple dropped in the last Google PR rollout, a minimal of effort will raise the PR back up, and more effort could produce a nice blog income. One domain in particular has incredible potential for an affiliate product site. So go have a look. You might be surprised at what you find. And feel free to drop any questions on this post’s comments section, or over at the Performancing listing.

Andy, on the other hand, has taken every thing he’s learned and poured it into this very large, very detailed article. He explains:

• Why some sites sell for low multiples, some for high.
• How to build a high multiple site.
• Getting up to $12,000/m in profit, not revenue.
• The irony: a site that can be sold for a million might be worth keeping. Why? Because of tax reasons, site income can be more valuable than putting your money into real estate or stocks.

The point is that without a mortgage to worry about, you are earning real income. Now, when you sell the house, you’re likely going to sell for at least what you bought it for. So you get back your original investment plus some rental income. I don’t want to get too deep into a real estate discussion, but if you see where I’m getting at, let’s continue.

Stock market investors do it too. Property is a big commitment. Stocks are not. If you put that same $100,000 into a stable blue chip stock or mutual funds that pays regular dividends, you’ve bought an income. If you lose a bit on the value when you sell your holding, it’s a tax write off. If you gain, add that to the dividend earnings. You come out ahead, and get back most or all of your investment.

So how does this analogy apply to blogs and websites? Well, building up a new blog is a lot of work, and maybe you don’t want to be a domainer. So why not buy an established blog [Performancing]. There are lots of zombie blogs of good value. The owner hasn’t posted in a while, but the site seems to enjoy some traffic, has a reasonable PR (Google PageRank), backlinks, is indexed regularly by the engines (including Technorati), and most especially, enjoys a monthly income from ad revenue.

As with real estate properties that you buy up, fix and resell for a higher value, the ideal candidate sites (websites and weblogs) are those that have been improperly monetized. You may find it easier to increase the monthly revenue of an existing blog than to get your new blog earning any money at all. Consider these points:

1. Buy a site earning steady revenue over at least the last three months if not longer. Typical cost of a site is 12-18 months of revenue, plus premiums for the PR, if it’s high, and/or the domain name or any software.

2. Keep the site for X months and build up its ad revenue using any or all of the following:
1. More adsense earnings.
2. More affiliate revenue.
3. Text links or banner ads.
4. Amazon
5. Chitika
3. After X months, when the monthly revenue is up, even if you sell the site for what you paid, you’ve made a bit of monthly income. Domain registration and hosting costs are fairly negligible these days.

Don’t forget to keep existing regular readers in mind. Don’t over-monetize, and roll changes out slowly. Each site and niche will have its own ideal advertising methods. That’s something I’ll try to talk about in the future; I don’t think I know enough yet.

[For thoughts on choosing a site, see my Performancing article 5 tips for buying websites, also linked above.]

Example:

• Buy a site for $6,000 (12-18 months earnings) that has earned $500/m for at least 3-4 mnths (i.e., income is steady so far).

• Keep for six months, earning at least $500/m, that’s $3,000+ in income.
• Sell for $6,000 (if you didn’t increase rev), gaining $3,000.
• Sell for $12,000 (if you doubled rev), gaining $6K + $3K plus whatever extra ad revenue above $500/m that you earn.
• Subtract the cost of maintaining it. If you write your own posts, there’s only hosting and domain costs, and maybe be escrow fees during the purchase.
• If the site had momentum from, say, one post per day, you could probably get away with three per week, or hire someone to help write.

Now, that’s not to say you have to spend $6,000 to be successful at buying a blog income. However, if you’re just starting out, don’t buy a site with no income else you’re back in the same boat, and in danger of having too many sites.

If you buy a site earning just $25/m, to start, do you think you can boost that to $50/m and sell it for a profit? You’ll have to decide whether you want to hold a site or whether you’re buying to flip. Holding means paying maintenance fees. But either way, this method of earning a living with a website may be much less effort than starting/ continuing your own blog.