Blog, Web, Domain, and Business Online Articles

All the hype about the sale of Weblogs Inc. to America Online (AOL) has given rise to the now famous question – How much is your blog worth? In acquiring Weblogs Inc., AOL has provided some concrete metrics to future valuation of blogs. How much will traditional media be willing to pay for a blog? Conversely, how much would you sell your blog for?

AOL-Weblogs Inc. Deal – Benchmark for Future Blog Valuation

Weblogs Inc was established by Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey in 2003. It is a network of blogs which includes under its wings successful blogs such as Engadget and Autoblog. Jason Calacanis pointed out that Weblogs Inc. earns in excess of $1 million yearly in Google Adsense revenues alone.

AOL purchased Weblogs Inc. for a confidential sum assessed at somewhere between $25 – $40 million. After said purchase, Tristan Louis came up with a blog valuation scheme based on the deal. He created a chart of blog value using the value of each inbound link to Weblogs Inc. as the basis. It is common knowledge that blog readers follow links. Search engines also act as users and primarily determine blog quality rankings based on linkage data thus direct and indirect value links are a great proxy for value measurement. In the blogosphere, conversations that nurture connectivity represented by links and indexes like Technorati give a vantage view of the value of a blog.

Tristan Louis itemized the publicly available data (list of blogs indexed) at Weblogs Inc. network including the number of inbound links (Technorati blog numbers) per blog divided by the purchase price to determine the value of an inbound link to a blog. At the rumored price of $25 million, the estimated value is $ 564 per link. At $30 million, it is $677.57 per link and $903.42 at an acquisition price of $40 million. Interestingly, the consumer segment chalks up the biggest percentage of linkage. Engadget represents over a third of the overall network traffic.

Applying Tristan Louis’s Weblogs Inc, sale, Dave Winer has also sold http://Weblogs.com to Verisign for a rumored price of around $2 million. Blog entrepreneur Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media has signed a deal with VNU Media to publish Gizmodo (gadget blog) across Europe in six languages. VNU Media is a leading worldwide information and media company which owns ACNielsen, Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, among others. With this deal, blog publishing has hit big time.

However, the value of a blog is not calculated based solely on links using AOL’s purchase of Weblogs Inc. Jason Calacanis, the man behind Weblogs Inc., disputed using links alone as proxy for the value of the blog network. He reiterated that the acquisition price was based also on the ever reliable revenue, earnings, management and other metrics.

Tristan Louis based his valuation scheme on links to a blog but he also acknowledged the significance of technology, talented management team, financial performance and growth. There is direct correlation between links, traffic, revenue and earnings capacity of a blog or blog network but it takes sound management to maximize all these potentials.

Value of a Blog – Some Metrics to Consider

How much is your blog worth? There is no one standard gauge yet. But one way to measure the value is to look at certain factors to gain a better perspective on how to measure the future value of a blog.

Aside from number of links as mentioned earlier, traffic level is a key factor in determining blog value. Highly trafficked blogs definitely have a bigger potential for earning compared with those blogs with few readership. A blog’s success is highly dependent on visitors/readers. However, ascertaining the value of traffic is a thorny issue. Some bloggers value traffic anywhere from $3 to $10 per hit a day. From this data, a blog with 2000 unique visitors (page views) would be worth between $6000 to $20,000. The downside to this valuation approach is that some traffic is more valuable than others. A personal blog might have 1000 unique visitors but more difficult to convert to revenue than a blog with 1000 readers that blogs on the topic of digital cameras.

Aside from diverse traffic streams that come from bookmarks, direct links or RSS subscribers will make risk of losing traffic low. Social bookmarking sites are inching their way to becoming prime sources of traffic, with peer referral at times carrying more weight than search results. There are a number of well known bookmarking sites you should link to. Top bookmarking sites include Furl, http://del.icio.us, Diggs, to name a few. By leaving an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed, you can feed you readers’ desire for information. Visitors can get automatic updates whenever you provide new content. Having a fairly good base of bookmarkers and subscribers ensure a steady flow of fans and repeat readers – the all-important traffic.

In the blogosphere as in any other field, revenue or earnings is a major focus. a logical approach to blog valuation would be to base its worth upon current and projected earnings, assuming that your blog is earning something to start with. Again, there are varying views on how to use current earnings to measure a blog’s value.

Some bloggers opine you should expect six to eight months earnings as your blog value. A blog with a daily income of $150 would be worth between $27,000 – $36,000. Still, others determine a blog’s value as being two years of current earnings. A blog earning $150 a day would be worth $108,000. Again, there is a huge disparity between these methods of assessing value. Having diverse streams in the form of multiple affiliate programs also increases blog revenue. An affiliate program is an advertising model in which a blog owner markets via his blog a given product, on behalf of another company. The blog owner is reimbursed a percentage of all sales sold thru his affiliate link. Reimbursement rates can vary from 1% and upwards. Google Adsense is a prime example.

Visitors access blogs throughout the Internet primarily through search engines. If your blog does not have a post appearing in the top ten search engine rankings, the chances of visitors reaching your blog is low. A blog’s presence on relevant search engines is a significant medium for maintaining a blog’s success. Search engine ranking and pages indexed in search engines is critical for generating traffic to a blog. Having your blog among the top results of a search or receiving a high Google PageRank (a system for ranking blog posts) would increase your blog’s overall value.

High quality content will always be a key factor for determining a blog’s value. As has been said time and time again – Content is King. Moreover, search engines can only “read” a blog. What attracts a search engine are the words, the content of a blog that explains, informs, shares and educates readers. Good content increases blog value.

All these aforementioned objective metrics can be considered in assessing the value of a blog. Added to all these, a talented management team behind a blog, its underlying tools and blog technology in use can further help to estimate the future value of a blog.

Website is the heart and soul of an online business. It shows the appearance of your products, services and unique selling on the web. Therefore, it must web development a high priority, if you want to grow your profits through online business opportunities. Web development is a process of comprehensive and more integrated processes such as web design, content generation, client / server-side scripting and includes Ecommerce development. To all web development and successfully completed, competent technical skills, creative approach and accuracy required are immense. Web development services in India epitome of all the above parameters for a successful web development.

has outsourced a complete web development services from India many advantages in his basket for your business. With its help you can make your products and services online 24X7 to visible from every corner of the world. With complete web development solution, your company can increase product knowledge Garner. The communication between you and your potential customers will be more streamlined. You can easily visit the promotional and development activities convey to your customers through your website. Short, with the Web development outsourcing from India to increase the visibility, popularity and credibility of your company at a lower cost.

Professionals working in Web development work in India in a strategic way to make your site more attractive to the target group. They use real images, graphics, unique and informative search engine friendly content for the increased visibility of your website. Proper titles and meta tags will also be created to your friendly website optimization. Proper attention will be paid by the web development professional to your website easy to navigate and make fast to load.

There are numerous companies, web development in India. You can quite simply a web development company to maximize your online business growth potential within your budget. Before an election, make sure the company is concerned with the latest knowledge and technologies related to web development.

A great myth propagated by website design individuals and web development companies is; the next website they develop will be something different than the last ten or fifty or two hundred. If what a web developer says doesn’t match what you see, you can trust the old axiom, ‘What you see is what you get.’ While template developers would have you believe otherwise, the Internet is a visual world.

For lack of any marketing creativity, website developers call web site based examples of their work the ‘Portfolio’ page. Yep, almost as sure as you will find their About page and their Home page, their Services page and their Site Map page you will find their ‘Portfolio’ page. Websites are practically living, breathing marketing platforms when done right. Profitable websites go knocking on doors all by themselves, ushering customers in, completing the sale while promoting the business to the next customer. Your website developer is a big piece of your marketing. When it doesn’t occur to a prospective web designer to market themselves any differently than their competition, they already show an inability to deliver a web marketing solution capable of helping your business grow by increasing the reach of your marketing and the size of your market.

A quick view through the ‘Portfolio’ page will typically show a few websites that for whatever reason the company thought were representative of their work or they are proud of. After reviewing many portfolio pages, it is safe for me to say many in the web design and development industry intend their portfolio page to simply prove they have done another website or two in the past. ‘Portfolio’ seems to be intended to tell their website viewer, “Been there done that… SEE?” and nothing more. Capabilities or function or, MOST IMPORTANTLY, the ability to create profitable websites are not even considered. The portfolio page is a necessary evil, a web industry standard having nothing to do with the pride an artist or photographer would attribute their portfolio. When a website portfolio doesn’t indicate anything about the web developers ‘customer’ profitability, the principal reason every business has a website, the portfolio page tells exactly how out of touch the website developer is with client needs.

So, you made it to my recommended starting point of a website developer’s own marketing piece, their ‘portfolio’ page. Now what? As you move into choosing a web marketing partner, you are making a decision that will impact your bottom line for the foreseeable future, maybe even the long term success or failure of your business… You have to dig in; the end result of an hour or two of thoughtful research will be greater profitability ongoing, forever. Does a quick look at the representative images on the website developer’s portfolio page make all of the websites look about the same or do they have individual flare and unique creativity? Go to one of the websites; can you unplug the logo of whatever company owns the website, plug in another logo and suddenly it is about another kind of business OR do you know the instant the page opens, what the business you are looking at does with the logo removed altogether? Now scroll to the bottom of the page; is the site copyright two or five or ten years old OR is the site copyright from this year? Is there a link to the developer’s own website… THERE SHOULD NOT BE! Does the navigation lead you to dig deeper? Does the visual ‘look and feel’ of the site inspire confidence in the individual business’s ability to do a great job, or are you left indifferent, even questioning? Most importantly, when you do a search for what the company does or sells, do you see them listed? What is the point of making a beautiful website that no one will ever see? What does the site tell you about the website design company who conceived and developed it?

Next go back to the developer’s portfolio page and look at another and another and another. As painful as it can be, the time you take investigating up front may be the difference between business growth and attrition, profitability or bankruptcy. Yes, website development has that kind of impact on business all of the time. Do all of the websites have the same structure or feel? Is the only appreciable difference in sites the logo and color scheme? The final graphic test, what does the website developer’s own site look like? Is their home page representative of the web design and development industry? Is web marketing one of a dozen things they do? If you stumbled into the site looking for something unrelated, how long do you need to read to find out what they are about? The single most obvious indicator of a website development firm’s abilities is their own site. A great website developer will have a great site. A second tier developer will have a site that for all intents and purposes, could be for any other kind of business if you swap out a logo and some text.

The ultimate test of a website developer’s abilities is to call twenty of their customers. Let them know you are considering hiring the developer for your own company. What was/is their experience? Ask them in confidence, “Knowing everything you know after developing a site with the developer, would you do it all again with the same company at the same price.” Why twenty? Most web developers will have a few customers that they like and who like them and receive special treatment. Once you get beyond ten you start to get a feel for what the average development customer can expect. Ask for customer references in similar industries to yours. By defining who your references will be, you will likely get a more representative sample. You will be surprised by the value of information you get from business people just like you, who count on the developer to make a representative image, backed by functionality that makes them profitable.

The bottom line in website development is the cost to return on investment… A well done website’s profitability to cost ratio will be staggering. To be truly profitable, a website needs to be seen at the top of native search engine queries AND seen as a graphically unique, customer endearing representation of the individual entity the site represents. Great websites are found at the top of free search engine queries where their custom, creative, perfectly definitive graphics coupled with functionality and ease of use add profitable new business to companies’ bottom lines, ongoing forever.