All Entries in the "Blog Tools" Category

How To Value A Blog For Sale

Business have traditionally used various methods for determining resell value. Online businesses are no different. There is no one way to determine value. But there are some ways that are better than others.

If you want to sell your blog, do you know how to determine its value? First, you must ask yourself if anyone else would want your domain name. If the domain name is a branded name that carries your companies brand then it might not be of value to anyone else even if you gave it away. But what if you have a domain name that isn’t branded specifically for your company? Can you sell it?

Valuation is a tricky art. You can value a domain solely on traffic if you get enough traffic to the blog. Daily traffic in the single or double digits won’t be worth much, of course, but what if your daily traffic count is in the thousands or tens of thousands? Then that traffic may be of value to someone.

Another method of determining value is the amount of money that your blog has made in the past few months. Some people go back as far as two years. Others stick with the past three months and multiply the average by six, twelve, or twenty-four. Whatever you settle on for a value, you have to be able to justify it for any potential buyer.

I rarely recommend blog valuation tools because most of them really are not very accurate or fair. But I did recently stumble upon one that I thought was fairly accurate and decently fair in the way it calculate blog value. You can find it at websitebroker.com.

When you’re ready to sell your blog, be sure to check around. Don’t just list your blog with the first website broker you find. Sometimes you can sell a blog property through word of mouth long before a broker finds you a buyer. Start with who you know.

Google Friend Connect Or Facebook Connect? Which Is Right For You?

Everyone seems to be comparing two new social networking applications – Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect. I haven’t tried the latter, but I have tried the former. But this post isn’t about which is better. It’s about which is better for you.

How do you decide whether you should use Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect for your blog? Or neither? First, ask yourself this question, “Would having your very own social network aid your target audience?”

If the answer to that question is yes then you’ve taken the first step.

Now you just have to decide whether Facebook Connect or Google Friend Connect is a better choice. Either way, it’s a big step and you should know what you are getting into. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• Are you a member of Facebook and are you active there?
• Do you see a need for Facebook and would it improve your networking any?
• How are your technical skills?
• Do you have it in your budget to hire a developer to help you set up a social network?
• Is your target audience using Facebook?

If your answer to any of these questions is negative then you shouldn’t bother with Facebook Connect. You should use Google Friend Connect instead. Here’s why:

• Google Friend Connect is easier to install for the average user.
• Facebook Connect is proprietary and if neither you nor your target audience can benefit from networking through Facebook it just doesn’t make sense to use their service because you can’t use it with any service other than Facebook; Google Friend Connect, by contrast, is open source and therefore provides the ability to network across multiple websites.
• Even if your technical skills are not that great, if your audience is on Facebook and you have the budget to pay a developer to install Facebook Connect for you then it could pay off in the long run (you need to be where your audience is).

Social networking is here to stay. Thanks to both Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect, niche websites can get in on the niche social networking action now. To find sites that use Google Friend Connect, visit Friend Connectified.

Are Blog Carnivals Effective?

As a provider of commercial blog content we’ve never had an interest in blog carnivals. We didn’t need to. Our focus was on SEO and lead generation. But we’ve noticed that Caroline Melberg at Small Business Mavericks is hosting a blog carnival on her blog.

We hope Caroline’s effort goes well. While we’ve never taken an interest in blog carnivals ourselves, perhaps this will open up doors for some of our clients who want to participate in a business blog. The title of Caroline’s blog carnival is Gonzo Business Carnival. You can read the rules on Caroline’s blog, but in a nutshell, if you written any blog posts about business then you quality to enter.

Our thoughts on this is you can’t lose. Even if nothing comes of the blog carnival and you enter, you still get a link back to your website and the possibility of increased traffic. While this is what we’d call untargeted marketing, that doesn’t mean it’s ineffective marketing. We’re open to it until we see the results. Meanwhile, we encourage you to think about participating.

How To Promote Your Blog Posts Through Twitter

There are ever increasing ways to promote your blog posts today. Twitter is another tool that you can use to promote your blog. Here are a few ways to use Twitter to promote your blog posts:

• Open your Twitter account in your blog’s name
• Link to your blog from your Twitter profile
• Install Twitter Tools and set your settings to post a tweet for your blog posts
• Send your tweets from your blog using Twitter Tools
• Set your Twitter Tools settings to post a blog post every time you tweet
• Use the daily tweet rollup feature in Twitter Tools
• Send a tweet with a link to your latest blog post
• DM your Twitter friends and ask them to retweet your blog promotion tweet
• Ask your social networking friends to tweet your newest blog entry
• When you comment on other blogs, include a link to your Twitter profile

Twitter is becoming a powerful force in online marketing. I highly recommend it for every blogger.

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