I was browsing Yaro’s blog, today, when I noticed this post titled: Small Business Branding Has A New Owner. If you’ve not heard about it, Small Business Branding is a website about marketing and branding advice and how-to guides for small business owners.
Small Business Branding is become a success story thanks to the work of Vera Raposo that has taken over and will continued to improve it from where Yaro left off.
A Brief Summary
In December 2005 Yaro purchased Small Business Branding from Michael Pollock. Small Business Branding it was a famous blog with good search engine rankings for some popular small business terms that got about 400 daily RSS readers. Michael hadn’t aims on monetization so the site was only making about $100 to $200 a month, mostly from AdSense.
Just over two years later, when he sold the site to Vera, SBB had increase their readers to 2500 daily and earned around $1500 a month. The most important factor that helped Small Business Branding to improve it profits with the change of ownership was the addition of new sponsorships.
When Yaro purchased Small Business Branding from Michael Pollock, he immediately realized that he had a lot of difficulty work with two blogs. So, Yaro started a unique experiment into outsourcing blog content creation.
The Yaro Strategy
Yaro he found a great way to remunerate the authors with the ability to monetize their content published to Small Business Branding in whatever way they chose.
Each author was given a homepage inside the site that lists a history of their articles and other data about what they do and how they can be contacted. Also on this page are designated advertising areas where the writers can decide to promote anything they want to.
Result Of The Investment
As I say first the income growth came mainly by increasing the monetization techniques applied, with a big percentage coming from adding banners and text links and selling the ad inventory directly to sponsors for a monthly fee. This was obviously helped along by the steady traffic growth thanks to the team of content producers.
And Yaro?
He’s not said how much he sold the site for, but it was a great deal, and with the return he did very well. As an acquisition, this deal was very good and his return was well over ten fold. Yaro says:
“Blogs can be great cash cows and capital investments, if you look after them.”
Whether you need to start your own business, than you must know that Yaro he selling his own collections of sites. His collection includes two forums and a video site focused on the niche of mini of mini bikes for sale, which generate about $1200 a month. Yaro is looking for around 20 times revenue for these sites (as agroup).
