Happy New Year: I Zapped Your Link!

You can tell who greeted the New Year in last night and who did not. Some blogs are silent today as bloggers recover from a night of revelry. Others had the presence of mind to “drip” their article by writing it while their sobriety was still with them.

As for me, I hit the pillow around 10:30 on New Year’s Eve and woke up as the firework’s were being set off in my neighborhood. I’ve been online since 7:30 a.m. updating the main HTML pages for this site, checking to make sure that all nine blogs I manage have flipped over for 2008, and updating links.

Not bad for a guy who will reach the Big 5-Oh in 2008, eh?

Speaking of links, I may have zapped your link today. Back in December 2006, I worked feverishly to exchange links with lots of folks with the arrangement that some would be permanent while others would expire at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 2007. Not to waste a moment, I logged on this morning and tossed a bunch of links and then checked the remaining links to this blog to see if “reciprocity” was still in effect.

What I learned today was ugly.

Most of my writing friends are still blogging away and our linking agreements are in place. I understand that Georganna Hancock will be moving links to a special page in the near future (I may do the same here) while two other writing blogs have since gone dark.

The ugly part was all of the links I made with Digital Point (DP) members — only two of what was probably two dozen links still remained. So, if you think your link is still good here you better check your site as I could not find any sign that The Article Writer is still receiving link juice from you.

Regardless, my linking strategies have changed since my DP link-a-thon. Effective immediately, I will only allow other writers to have a link on this site under Reciprocity, but I am grandfathering in a few other links as the benefit to both parties outweighs everything else.

If you are a writer with a blog and are interested in exchanging links with me, then please drop me a note and we’ll take it from there. For everyone else, I have five other blogs where linking is allowed, therefore we might be able to work something out elsewhere. Again, feel free to contact me.

That’s enough work for today. I’m taking advantage of the legal holiday and my advanced age to get some rest.

Have a Happy and Productive 2008!

What Price To Pay For A Site?

Recently, I was contacted by a business associate asking for my help to price his website. There are so many factors that must be factored in when establishing a price with the buyer carefully examining potential income, administrative costs, and return on investment when tendering her offer.

Monthly Income Is A Significant Pricing Factor

I have found sites listed for as much as 12-20 times the monthly net income average, with 6-12 months also common. This means that if a site is making $400 per month after expenses it could sell for anywhere between $2400 and $8000 based on this formula.

There are some other considerations to keep in mind, intangibles that can determine the price:

• Age of Site — Search engines tend to respect older, more established web addresses.

• Page Rank — Although Google has wreaked havoc with this tool of late, it is still a fairly good measuring tool for any site.

• SERPs — If you dominate the search engine results pages (SERPs) for certain key words or key word phrases, this will add value to your site. Some buyers will only consider Google SERPs, while I like to look at Yahoo! and maybe MSN.

• Is it an Authority Site? — If your website is recognized as an authority for your particular topic, you should be able to command the upper end of the price range.

• Net Income after expenses — Domain and hosting costs should be subtracted plus any advertising or writing expenses required to maintain the site.

• Time I must spend on site — This can be the most difficult thing to gauge: will you be required to spend “X” amount of time on the site every week or can it pretty much run on automatic pilot? High maintenance sites should be discounted heavily.

Use Sitepoint To Market Your Site

Making a decision to purchase a site should not be taken lightly especially when you are talking about paying thousands of dollars for the blog, website or forum. Personally, if I were to sell a site, I would turn to Sitepoint, a webmaster site which I successfully used in 2006 when I sold the Aviation Employment Board and this year when I sold several other websites and blogs.

Happy marketing!