Putting an accurate price tag on your blog isn’t always easy but it is easy to get it wrong unless you know the basic principles on which to value a blog.

Different bloggers put different weight of worth of different factors which can determine what a blog is worth.

In general, we tend to over value our own blogs due to the fact that they’re our own. But just because we as the authors place so much value in what we believe is so amazing, doesn’t mean everyone else will or that it’s worth what we think it is.

Here I’ve written up what I believe to be the most logical, reasonable and easiest ways to come to a realistic financial value of your blog.

RSS Subscribers

To me, RSS subscribers of a blog is probably the single biggest factor in determining potential value. Even above revenue. How many RSS subscribers a blog has on a daily average indicates how many people like the content of the blog so much as to want to keep coming back.

There are, as many people know, ways to manipulate or deceive people into thinking the RSS number is higher. You can buy subscribers, you can grab an image of an RSS chicklet of a blog with 2,000 subscribers and place it on your own and at a glance the majority of people wouldn’t question it.

These techniques can help improve actual subscribers as people never like to be first, so if they think lots of other people have subscribed before them, they assume the content must be good on a regular basis and good enough for them to come back. So will usually subscribe as well. I however, would prefer to be completely genuine and honest with myself and actually see how people naturally subscribe without display of false statistics.

I don’t think enough bloggers put enough value on RSS subscribers when they go to value or sell their blog. As a blogger, your readers are your biggest asset and without them, even with traffic but no continuous readers. You don’t have a blog. You have a static resource. Which is fine, but the real value in a blog to me is the return factor. If people don’t even want to come back and get free content on a regular basis, assuming you give it, how much can your blog realistically be worth.

Monthly Revenue

A basic rule of thumb evaluation factor for basically all sites, not just blogs. Personally I don’t think the monthly revenue is AS important as the subscriber amount of a blog because monetization can be improved if the traffic is there, but if people aren’t even coming back… there’s a lot more work to be done.

Some people selling their blogs like to take the highest revenue figure they’ve achieved in revenue and put that as the monthly revenue. I think this is a little bit misleading as it gives the impression that’s regular. For monthly revenue you should be giving what the blog makes on average, every month. As in, it will make at least X amount. The easiest way to get an average is to take the highest and lowest earnings you’ve ever made in a month, then find the middle-ground.

If you do go to sell your blog, make sure you don’t lie about revenue as the buyer will eventually find out. Which won’t comeback to serve you well. Just be honest and give proof. People love screenshots, stats or any further form of proof that you can provide to absolutely clarify everything you are claiming. Makes the sale easier on both sides.

Quality Content

I think the amount of regular, unique, quality content is sometimes overlooked as a genuinely important evaluation factor. A blog’s content is a blog’s foundation. If your blog doesn’t consist of great content, why would anybody want to come back.

There are a lot of marketers who pay for content. Some simply buy a load of domains, build a huge network of sites or blogs, slap a few AdSense units up, a basic design and then pay other people to write heap loads of articles which they spread out. Then, overtime the sites build age, rank and small monthly incomes from AdSense.

Now this blog for example has 213 posts, this being the 213th. And I would say about… 190 of those are PURE content. I mean, you can count anything as content, any text on a page, anything on a page. Is content. But I use the word content in a more defined meaning to mean hard-written. And the vast majority of the posts on this blog are hard-written, took me quite a while to conjure up and usually cover, I think, some valid points.

That being said, how much do you think it would cost to pay somebody to write 190 + hard-written, quality articles? Quite a lot I’d bet, even at Indian prices.

I definitely think the amount of quality content on a blog should come into play when placing a value on it.

Site and Blog Evaluators

There are a lot of evaluation tools out there that will give you a rough market value of your; domain, site or blog. And there is a difference. There are some evaluators that are purely meant to evaluate your blog. Some which are meant to purely evaluate the domain itself.

But, all of these evaluation tools pretty much work using the same principles. They all check; age of site, incoming links, general mention, search engine rankings / inclusions. Then you have other things which some check and some don’t, such as your site’s Alexa rank. Which to be honest I don’t value at all. I find Alexa’s rank to be about as useful as… Alexa’s rank.

I’m not going to do a big comparison between each evaluator as I think that’s a bit pointless. Instead I’ve just pointed out one at each end of the stick. One which I would recommend you completely ignore and one which I recommend you pay good attention to:

Useless = Business Opportunities

Right, now, I assume this wasn’t built to be a competitor in the evaluation field but more of a general in-site tool people can quite handily link to for fun. But this may as well not exist lol.


My blog is worth $69,438.42.
How much is your blog worth?

According to that tool, this blog is worth $69k. Well, I don’t even need to express any sort of logic to expand on why that is completely ludicrous. $69k! LOL!

Useful = DNScoop

This is about the best generic evaluation tool I’ve found yet. DNScoop pretty much gets it as close as you can get. It checks your site’s age, all your incoming links, your PR, your Alexa rank, general mention and then combines everything to come up with a sensible market value.

According to DNScoop: Internetbabel.com is worth $2k. Sounds more like it.

Things That Really Don’t Mean THAT Much

I’m just going to briefly cover what I consider to be overrated indicators to a site’s worth. Notice I put the second ‘that’ in capital letters as these things do obviously help but I think too many people buying and selling put all their trust in these things.

1. Google PR - I used to care about PR, until I realized that it really doesn’t matter. Why is a high PR important or valuable in any way shape or form? Ok, so Google respects your site more, they list you more, they place you higher in the SERPs. So what, I get so little traffic to ANY of my sites from Google that it really doesn’t matter to me.

Google, not so long ago shafted this blog from PR 2 to PR 0 for, I assume - a PayPerPost post I made. I can understand why Google do what they do and I love Google and their business ethic. I just really do not care about PageRank. There’s so many fun ways to get traffic, so many viral ways that will get you huge traffic if you just apply yourself in comparison to scraps of Google’s traffic from months of trying to improve your PR. Let Google view your site how they want but don’t let them influence you.

This is why I think, when you sell or buy a site, you should really only take notice of PR peripherally. If I was buying a blog and saw the PR was 0 after 10 months. I wouldn’t suddenly think “WHAT, NO PR! WHOAH, NO GO!” Because that blog could of just been bitch slapped by Google too, doesn’t mean it’s not quality. You have to look at the whole picture.

2. Alexa Rank - The reason I don’t think a blog’s Alexa rank is very important in terms of value is because of Alexa’s infamously bad inaccuracy. It’s hard to be accurate with anything on the web and trying to be a dominant ranker of every site alive is beyond comprehension so you have to admire their valiant effort. But still, I’ve just lost more and more faith in Alexa as time has gone on.

With the recent update things appear to have gotten worse not better.

Anyway, I think Alexa is useful in that it gives a VERY generic and VERY loose view of what sites are where on the web. You can place some small faith in an Alexa rank when buying a blog no doubt but don’t rely on it. I view Alexa as another peripheral statistic. You don’t really need it but it sort of helps when trying to get your head around what to pay or what to sell for.

In Closing

To finish, here’s a quick checklist of things I would recommend doing to find the real value of your blog:

  • Ask other Internet marketers and bloggers what they ‘would’ pay for your blog, without even giving them any idea of what price you have in mind.
  • Get all the primary statistics of your blog and compare them to others who are selling.
  • Research the marketplace, see what other blogs similar to yours are selling for and compare everything.
  • Use DNScoop!

The best way and easiest way of course is to simply try and sell your blog. Whack it up on SitePoint or a popular forum and see what people would pay for it up front. That’s the real value :)


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