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Today I dropped by ProBlogger by way of soaking up a little continuing education on the blogging biz, and what should I find but this interesting piece on how to put a valuation on your site. It’s part of an ongoing discussion that leads Darren to consider what a blog is worth. In addition to the obvious — consider the site’s financials (cash flow, balance sheets, & the like) — he suggests a number of more subtle and interesting ways to assess your blog’s worth.
It’s surprising how little most of the sites on the market earn, if those offered on Flippa are any measure. Darren observes that in addition to considering your site’s basic vitals (its age, its domain, etc.), its traffic statistics, and its monetization strategies, you should calculate its costs, both in terms of your time and in terms of cash-money costs.
Most of the services you need to start and run a profit-making blog are fairly nominal in cost. You have to find an unused domain name and rent or buy it, requiring you to pony up a little cash to operators such as GoDaddy. Since WordPress.com doesn’t allow small users to run advertising or plug their own enterprises on the sites it hosts, you’ll need to find another hosting service. Then you’ll need a graphic theme; WordPress.org offers free themes, but some of the nicest are “premium” themes that cost something.
Pulling all these elements together creates some hassle, and as we know, hassle consumes time. And time is the kicker here: time you spend creating and writing a website may represent opportunity cost, if you could be using that time improving your performance at your day job or pursuing a better-paying enterprise.
Fortunately, Web hosting from services like 123-reg can help by organizing these things for you. They provide not only the server space you need but will provide a domain name, too — and they throw in a choice of themes. I’ve also found that hiring a Web guru such as Jesse Michelsen of Splyced Ventures to ride herd on the back-end jobs frees up vast quantities of time. Jesse handles maintenance, tech support, and security for both Funny and The Copyeditor’s Desk.
Paying for resources that save you time, especially if you’re not very techie yourself, actually saves on the cost of running your blog, assuming you have some other money-making enterprise (which you probably do, since blogging is unlikely to make you rich). Code may be poetry, but this English major type ain’t no poet…and with each new “update” I grow more averse to the endless learning curve that characterizes computer technology. It would take me for-freaking-ever to figure out and then implement all the crucial behind-the-scenes tasks that keep Funny running. Every eight hours consumed by that stuff is eight hours taken away from paying clients, and eight hours of opportunity cost sunk into the blog. Seen in that light, having that highly skilled work done elsewhere at a reasonable fee in fact reduces the cost of operating your blog — and increases its potential value a salable commodity.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
I actually enjoy most of the aspects involved in running a blog, but you’re right, it is NOT a small time investment!
That’s an understatement! I’ve diddled away the entire day on blog-related futzing today.
Perfect timing on this topic! I’ve been futzing around with themes for weeks now because I’m just not happy with how it looks and it makes me wonder if I shouldn’t just pay someone to deal with it, except it’s not like AGSL really makes income to cover the cost so much.
Then again, maybe it’d be worth it so I would just Stop.
Food for thought …
I’ve liked most of the themes you’ve tested. The one you had up today, with the script heads, is quite attractive.
The Thesis theme that Jesse put in FaM is a premium WP theme, but the price is modest. It’s highly malleable — you can do all sorts of things with it. Assuming you know what you’re doing, that is.
Do you have any thoughts on working within the free version of Wordpress? This post is resonating with my thoughts on themes and setting up stuff right now.
I’m working on a project for one of my professors, and while I feel limited by wordpress.com at times, there’s nothing else I can use. (I’m helping set up a new site/blog to help advertise for Classics stuff.)
If WP.com will let the site stay up, it’s ideal for a project that you soon will have to hand over to the professor or to a future GA, because Wordpress is easy to use and WP.com provides plenty of easy-to-understand support.
If the site is actually advertising — i.e., soliciting people to sign up for courses they pay for — eventually WP may take it down, because advertising violates WP.com’s terms. However, they’ve never taken down the sites I built to get around BlackBoard, which have carried posts saying things like “sign up now for this course.” So you probably can get away with it.
They have a nice selection of themes. I tend to prefer the minimalist look, of which they have plenty. When you’re setting up something for a public institution, you have to consider accessibility, so think about the size of the fonts, avoid themes that reverse out the type against a dark background (white on black, for example), and don’t set type in red or green.
Does your school not have its own platform for departmental websites? You might want to check to be sure your professor is allowed to set up school-related sites outside of the college’s own platform…it would be frustrating to put in a lot of work only to have some dean tell you to take it down.
It’s not a site that’s advertising for university stuff, it’s for an academic organization which is trying to spread the word about Classical studies. Kind of ‘why take Latin’, announcements, and general bloggy type stuff.
As far as I know, it’s an association that’s a collaboration between different schools teaching the Classics in the state. My advisor has been in contact with ITS, and I think wordpress.com is what they recommended, but this is all really complex and not a lot of people know what’s going on because there’s a big lack of tech-savviness . A professor at another university was hosting it through their school, but they’re too busy now to keep up.
I’d rather we get a wordpress.org, but I don’t think that’s a good route to go before it gets stable and can be kept up easily. I’ll keep everything in mind though and present to my advisor tomorrow.
Thank you for the help!
It’s not difficult to move a blog from WP.com to a hosted site, although it’s wise to get help from a web guru to do it — there’s always SOME damfool stumbling block.
One nice thing about WP.com, if nontechie faculty are likely to continue working with it after you finish the degree and move on, is that tech support is very good. A future Web-shy user might find it easier to keep the site going if it were on WP.com.