I know, I’m just the little guy here.

I was more or less poking fun at the situation, rather than being upset or mad about it. Sometimes I forget it’s hard to catch my sarcasm considering we’re all reading a computer screen…

to robert: i feel your pain, and it’s the law of the jungle, so to speak. darren has authority (well-earned) on the subject. and no offense intended, but you don’t have that same level of authority (yet). it’s all about branding. oh wait, i can’t really talk about that any more …

to stephen: ditto what yaro said. plus i disagree that “a really good blog is the sum of it’s author or authors.” that’s only partly true in some cases, and completely wrong in other cases. go look at lifehacker.com and see if it’s about the authors. most of the time you don’t even know who’s writing each post. pretty much anybody could step into a site like lifehacker, and if they continued with a similar writing style and the same level of content production, that blog would be just as popular as it is currently with gina trapani and keith robinson creating content.

No one seemed to give a hoot until Darren mentions something about it ;-)

I’m very interested in seeing the case study.

I’m working on a graduate thesis at MIT that covers (among other things) contemporary business models for Internet-centric businesses. So, this would be a great reference for my work.

There’s not much material out there on how money gets made, deals get done and valuations get applied in the Internet “small business” market.

Thanks for your willingness to share the results and insights.

Andrew

My real interest in the case study is to see how/if one can transform a blog that’s been build around a person (Michael) as most blogs are and change the personality behind it.

But then if anyone can do it and blog about it in depth for all to learn – that’ll be my man, Yaro. I’ve been a great admirer of Yaro ever since I came upon his blog early on this year – he really does take one on an entrepreneurial journey.

All the best, Yaro.

It seems like a strange concept but fundamentally the same metrics are important. I bought Small Business Branding (SBB) because it’s established in a niche I’m targeting. The traffic figures aren’t great, but the search engine placement is fantastic (number 1 for “Small Business Branding” among many others key terms). I’m fairly convinced that because Michael has had divergent interests with his other blogs that the traffic figures at SBB didn’t get much further than they did. He just wasn’t writing often enough. I hope, even expect, if I get the content flowing regularly that the site traffic will start to grow quite well.

When you have a site as well positioned in the search engines as SBB the hard part is done for you. It takes about a year to get there and Michael has been blogging at SBB for a year. In a way I just paid him for his time over the past 12 months building this asset. His traffic comes almost 100% from search engines which is appealing to me as well. The more content I write the more search traffic will come.

If I wasn’t confident in my own writing abilities to keep Michael’s audience interested then I certainly wouldn’t have bought the blog. Of course I can’t replicate Michael’s style and I expect I will lose a few hardcore Michael Pollock fans, however I suspect quite a few Yaro Starak fans will also become regular Small Business Branding fans now too.

Ultimately though it’s impossible to know what will happen. In this case there were enough “ticked boxes” in my mind that made this a good purchase for me, and mainly because it’s so well focused on my existing niche – small business – I run one myself so am well positioned to write about. The fee I paid for the blog is more a reflection of the potential it has in my hands. That potential is unique to me in this case but certainly I’m sure many others would see the value in this purchase in their hands as well.

Firstly, I can’t imagine ever buying a blog – after all, a really good blog is the sum of it’s author or authors, so when you take that away, what do you have left? It’s like buying a famous artist’s paints and canvases and hoping it’ll help you paint a masterpiece.

Secondly, and no offence to either buyer or seller, but looking at the traffic figures, I couldn’t believe that a site with such low traffic could be valued at anything. Is a blog with an average of only160 visitors a day and about 250 archived posts a valuable asset? With only $600 a year adsense income, it’d be several years before it paid out bigger than investing in a mutual fund, unless it sold for just a few hundred bucks.

Maybe my sense of value is all screwy here, so I’d love a yardstick. What does everyone else think?

Yep I’ll be going to the Open on at least one day. Let me know when you’ll be there and I’ll meet you in there.

Once the transfer is complete I should be able to start work on the case study.

Thanks for the mention yet again too Darren – have a good holiday by the way, and I’ll see you in January. You coming to the Aussie Open?