Evaluate Your Mom Blog's Assets

By Wendy Piersall from Mom Blogging For Dummies

There are some obvious aspects of a blog that would make it valuable to a buyer. Lots of traffic, regular advertisers, and quality content are pretty much the three biggies. But because lots of traffic can be a very relative term, you can do a lot of other things to build value for a future buyer:

Good search engine rankings: If your site is on the first page for a very competitive term, you may get offers to purchase your blog based on that alone. It definitely pays to have solid search engine traffic. But you don’t want traffic from search engines to be a very high percentage of your overall traffic. That is a risk that most buyers would avoid.
Solid social media presence: This doesn’t refer to your personal profiles on social networking sites, but to your business profiles, such as a Facebook fan page or a Twitter account just for your business. These are things that prove your readers are engaged with your brand, and will be an asset to any owner.
Established mailing list or RSS readers: A large RSS subscriber base is a guaranteed source of traffic and repeat visitors. Mailing lists are even more valuable, and can generally be transferred to new owners. Subscribers are a group of individuals who are invested in your content and have already stated they’re open to your marketing initiatives.
Great domain name: If your domain name has value by being short, memorable, or having good keywords, this adds value to your web business.

If you also bought common misspellings of your domain, this is a bonus, but not likely to affect your sale price.
Special applications or technical functionality: If you’ve invested in having a custom function developed for your site, this is also valuable to a new owner. Examples would be custom plugins, integrated Facebook applications, a job board, or a shopping cart.
An established membership community or forum: Active online communities are hard to start and hard to grow. Forums are also very sticky features on a site; they draw visitors back regularly, especially those who view many pages.

When you reach the decision you want to sell your blog someday, you should do everything you can to build up these assets along with your traffic and revenue. That way, when the day comes that you do have an offer, you’ll have plenty of advantages working in your favor.