Blogosphere

One of the hottest trends online these days is to develop and sell blogs. I had my own experience selling my blog and I have to say that this has been a profitable make money online scheme and an easy way to raise finance for your other projects.

After selling BloggingMix (now redirected to WhyDoWork.com/blog), I received a couple of inquiries about how I managed to sell it and how did I reach my potential buyers.

In the coming days, I will be blogging about my experience in selling my blog. And in my final post on selling your blog, I will tell you how much did I sell BloggingMix to Matt of Whydowork.com. There have been alot of queries from curious bloggers about the selling price so I decided to finally reveal it. Watch out for my future posts for the details.

For today, I wish to share you some useful resources for bloggers who want to sell their blogs. These websites help facilitate the sale of your blog. These are also great places to find blogs, in case you want to buy one.

1. SitePoint Marketplace

SitePoint Marketplace is the meeting place for buyers and sellers of new or established blogs, templates, advertising services, hosting services, content, domain names among others. SitePoint is visited by thousands of potential buyers and sellers so it presents a good opportunity for you to promote your classified ads.

To place your classified ads, you need to register an account for free and buy the needed credits. The prices of their services vary depending on the level of exposure you wish to achieve with your advertisement. The fee is minimal and the result is fast depending on your marketing skills. Buying and link exchanging services are free.

2. Sedo

In it’s 7th year of operation, Sedo is one of the largest marketplace for premium domain names with over 11 million domain names to choose from. Other than that, Sedo lets you sell new and established blogs and promote you domain names. Their services are free but a 10% commission is charged once you have found a buyer for your product.

3. Ebay

With a huge user base, Ebay is an ideal place to sell your blog or any product you wish to auction. For the same reason however, you might come across scammers and fake bidders. Your clasified ads are indexed by search engines so you make sure you optimize it using appropriate keywords. This will drive more traffic to your auction and may increase the potential numbers of bidders.

Listing your blog for auction is free but Ebay charges a commission fee for every successful sale.

4. DigitalPoint

Digital Point Forum is another website with a huge user base that allows you to trade, buy or sell your blog, templates, services, domain, content among others. Their services are absolutely free and their iTrader helps you identify reliable and questionable buyers and sellers.

5. NamePros

NamePros primarily operates as a marketplace for premium domain names but it could also be used to promote your blog for sale. Since NamePros is a forum with a huge user base, you can expect alot of bids from their users. They even have live chatrooms where you can exchange words with potential buyers and sellers.

Like any other forums, you have to be a registered user before you can start using their free services.

6. Bloggeries

One of the fastest growing community of bloggers, Bloggeries forum lets you sell your blog, content, templates, services and other products for free. All it takes is for you to register an account before you can start using their free services.

Before you even think about selling your blog, looking for a place to sell them isn’t the first step to do. You first need to make sure that you’re really willing to sell and let go of your blog. My experience selling my first blog wasn’t a good experience, so make sure you’re really up to it. Also, you need to learn how to appraise you blog to avoid being taken advantaged. One of my succeeding post will provide you with more useful tips when selling your blog so make sure you come back for my updates or subscribe to my feed.

Like always, your comments are always welcome. Do share other places where you can sell blogs if you know some. Thank you for your time.

Today (June 3, 2008), Entrecard finally launched the long awaited option to buy Entrecard credit. This has been prompted by the huge number of requests from Entrecard users and the increasing number of scammers selling Entrecard credits online.

Everyday, Entrecard will buy 20,000 to 40,000 credits from their trusted users, which will then be made available for sale.  This means, available credits for sale in a day is limited, and is subject to a first come first serve basis.

You can buy Entrecard credits using your Entrecard account through the link provided in your dashboard. Currently, 1000 and 5000 Entrecard credits are sold at US$9.50 and US$47.50 respectively.

Other Ways To Earn Credits

Entrecard now lets you earn more credits by simply publishing new articles. However, this incentive is limited to once every three days and is handled automatically via your RSS feed, which their system picks up automatically.

Other than publishing new articles on your blog, you can also earn more Entrecard credits by writing for them. Entrecard is giving away as much as 2000 credits for an article or even more depending on its quality and usefulness to the EC community.

To be able to write for Entrecard blog, here are the three simple steps you need to follow:

1. Get Your Idea Approved. - Before you start working on your article even when you’ve written for the Entrecard blog before, you need to email Graham (graham@entrecard.com) and tell him about it. Use “Post Idea” as your subject. Once you’re idea has been approved, Graham will  set up your account on the Entrecard blog so you can log in and start writing your post.
2. Submit Your Post For Review. - When you’re done with your post, click on the ”Submit For Review” button. Phirate or Graham will do the final review of your post before it gets published. At the same time, Graham or Phirate will decide how much Entrecard credits to pay you. Remember that the Entrecard credit you receive as a payment depends on the quality and usefulness of your post to the Entrecard community.
3. Get Paid For Your Post. - Sit back and relax. You receive your Entrecard credit once your article has been published.

Here’s a quote from the Entrecard Admin about what to write about:

“We are looking for posts that will help people improve their blogging and keep the community connected. Tips for blogging, tools, resources, are all great. Personal anecdotes and stories that make this place feel like a community are also great. Jokes, funny stories, industry news is all fair game. Just send your post ideas to graham@entrecard.com and we’ll go from there.”

If you are still looking for another way to earn Entrecard credits, why don’t you subscribe to their blog. Entrecard is offering a one-time bonus of 50 EC by subscribing to their blog via email. Click here to subscribe.

Thank you for your time.

Google Adsense has recently introduced a more improved version of Adsense For Search. With the improved version of Adsense for search, custom search is now integrated allowing publishers to take advantage of this new feature without having to leave their Adsense account.

Here’s a short video from Google Adsense to introduce you with the new features of Adsense for search.

Here is a summary of the features of Adsense For Search powered by Custom Search Engine.

• Site Search: You’ve worked hard to attract users to your site, so it’s understandable that you’d be concerned about those users leaving through web search. Now you can choose to provide just site search so users can find all the information they’re looking for on your site, and you can host the search results on your own pages so that they can find that information without leaving your site.
• Improved indexing of your pages: We’ve recently improved our indexing technology so that you can provide a more enhanced Site Search experience for your users. AdSense for search will now index even more pages of your site, as long as we’re able to crawl them, so that your users will see more results from your site in your AdSense for search results. Stay tuned for more updates on future crawl and indexing improvements!
• Vertical search: You can also allow your users to search across multiple sites - this could be a network of sites that you own or other related sites that you think your users might find useful. If you write book reviews on your blog, for example, you can use vertical search to specify a list of online bookstores for users to search through. Other examples of vertical searches include computer forums, travel blogs, political sites you endorse, etc.
• Tuning search results and ads with keywords: Search terms can have different meanings in different contexts, so you can now configure your search engine with relevant keywords. Let’s say you manage a site about yoga - you can enter keywords such as ‘yoga,’ ‘exercise,’ and ‘meditation’ so that when a user searches for ‘mat,’ the search results and ads will be more related to yoga mats and less to commercial floor mats. (You can see an example of this in the video below). In experiments, we’ve found that this tuning has led to an increase in earnings for publishers.
• Selecting ad location: Do you want ads to appear at the top and bottom of your search results? Or along the right sidebar as well, just like on Google.com? Now you can make the call on where ads are placed. (Here’s a tip: we’ve found that placing ads at the top and right monetizes the best for publishers.)
• Quick and easy updates: Just as you use our ad management feature to quickly change the settings for your ad and referral units, you’ll be able to do the same for your search engine within your AdSense account. Your settings will be saved in your account, so you won’t need to generate new search code for each change.

What do you think of the changes? Do you think this will help improve monetization of blogs and sites? Share your thoughts through the comment.

Thank you for your time.