Should You Buy a Blog or Start One?

You may have heard this question before: “Build it or Buy it?” That’s goes around a lot in business schools. In essence, you want to figure out if you are better off making something (a business usually) from scratch as opposed to buying an existing solution. The same concept applies to blogs as well. You can start your own blog and hope to get ranked on Google in 6 months, or you can pay a premium to own a blog that has been around for a year or two, and has already passed the Google Sandbox issues. So how do you know which option is better for you? After all, you just wouldn’t jump into buying a business out of the blue without doing much research, would you?

Buying a blog is often as complicated if not more than starting one. You can buy a blog that has been around for a few months but has been stagnant for that month. While blog turnaround could be a very lucrative business, it is often complicated and not worth the efforst. In essence, when evaluating this decision, you want to pay attention to the following factors:

• Blog Age: blog age is one of the most important factors that you need to consider before buying one. If a blog is less than a couple of months old, you are always better off creating one than picking up the 2 months old blog. Things are very different if the domain that the blog is hosted on is more than a couple of years old. You want to avoid Google’s Sandbox at any cost possible, so the blog age can be very valuable to you and your business.
• Blog Traffic: depending on the premium that you will have to pay for a blog, you want to make sure there is a steady amount of traffic coming to that blog. If the blog gets 0 traffic every month, then you want to make sure you can justify the premium.
• SEO Links: when you think about starting a business, it is always good to have the option to take a few shortcuts on the way. SEO is something that you need to do for any blog. But you will have to do more of it for a brand new blog than an already optimized blog. If you find a blog that already has a lot of incoming links with optimized anchor texts, then it is definitely worth it to consider buying that blog. But again it all comes down to the premium that you are asked to pay for that blog. Buying blogs is anything but cheap, so you want to make sure you are making the most out of your money.
• Blog Structure: when you buy a blog, you want to make sure that you won’t have to make drastic changes that could turn the current readership off. So you want to make sure the blog your are considering buying has the right platform, design, and can be turnaround without making significant changes (knowing that changing platforms could be a big headache).

“Build or Buy” decision is anything but easy, but it should all come down to maximizing your time and money. The option that allows you to do both is often the right one.