NorthxEast is Up For Sale! … and About Getting Ready to Sell

Ever felt like buying a nice, established blog? Well as of this morning NorthxEast is up for sale! Read on for details of the sale, as well as some thoughts on selling blogs.

On Auction

So first of all, if you’d like to see details of the auction, you can head over to Sitepoint’s Marketplace and if you’re interested in buying, place a bid. The minimum bid is pretty low and the reserve isn’t that much higher. I haven’t the faintest clue what the blog will go for, and am quite curious to see how it sells. If all proceeds to plan, I’ll post up about the process at the end before I hand over.

How to Sell a Personal Blog

For those of you who have been visiting this blog since it began back in February, you may recall that NorthxEast used to be a personal blog where I wrote about business, blogging and other random things. In fact the site was almost called CollisTaeed.com. Just before launching the blog however I had a change of heart and decided not to use my name as the domain. I’m glad I did this because it was the first step to making sure the blog was saleable. After all how can you run a blog called CollisTaeed.com if you aren’t… Collis?Anyhow some months ago after we launched FreelanceSwitch and it began to be super successful I realised that some time in the future there was a very real possibility we might want to sell NorthxEast, since it didn’t really fit in with the rest of what my company does (we mostly do sites for creatives like designers, flash animators and so on). We weren’t really 100% sure about selling however until yesterday when having a weekly meeting and deciding to refocus some of our efforts.In any case to get a blog that was just my own personal ramblings into something that could be taken and sold if need be, I took the following three steps, starting back in May:

1. Focusing the Topic of the BlogAs any marketer will tell you it’s much easier to sell something which you can sum up in a few words. When NxE was my own blog, the posts were semi-random and covered a variety of topics. In May I cleaned out most of the posts, kept the ones relating to blogging, gave the site a fresh makeover and it became a Blog about Blogging. Not the most original idea in the world, but a popular one!
2. Getting a Second Writer InvolvedOne of the issues with selling a blog is that inevitably the writers change. Since people read a blog largely because of the tone of voice, style and personality of a writer, it didn’t seem like a very good idea to continue on as the only writer if I had any plans to sell. So I asked Leo who you all know by now from his blog ZenHabits (which incidentally has recently crossed into the top 100, congratulations Leo!) to come on board and write a weekly post. This meant readers started getting used to different writer voices.
3. Opening up to Guest WritersWhile having Leo on board meant two voices, that’s still pretty specific. So to make things even more diversified, a month or so back I began asking for guest posters. Since then we’ve had five, the fabulous Ali from EverybodyGoto, the extraordinary Ankesh from BlogClout, the ever productive Mike of TheDailySaint, Finnish super blogger Jarkko of JarkkoLaine and most recently my fabulously talented countrywoman Skellie of Skelliewag!Thanks to guest posters, the site not only has more voices and personalities, it also has great content and now when we finally did make the decision to sell, that diversity means it will be much easier for a new blogger to take the site on and grow and develop it.

So anyhow the blog is up for sale. I’m a bit sad to see it go, but I hope that it will mean freeing up some time to start a new blog which is a little closer in content focus to our other sites, and for NorthxEast I hope that the right person with lots of passion for blogging takes over what we’ve started here!The auction will be running for two weeks and when it’s all done I’ll write one final post up about selling blogs (this is my first time) and anything one needs to watch out for or do. In the meantime it’ll be (bloggin) business as usual here!