Want To Sell Your Blogspot Blog?

I used to help people buy and sell blogs, and as I result I get at least a couple of emails weekly from bloggers asking if I can help them to sell their blogs. If I believe the sale is feasible (i.e., the blog is quality one and already makes good money) I do help. Most of the times, however, selling the blogs would be too hard to be worth anyone’s time.

The most clear example of this are people who email me asking if I can help to sell their Blogspot blogs (i.e., a blog they created on Google’s Blogger service). Selling such a blog is almost impossible. Why? First of all because the person is not the real owner of the blog. He owns the content, but the blog is property of Google. In fact if you read Blogger’s Terms of Service you’ll find this sentence in the very first paragraph:

Google also reserves the right to modify, suspend or discontinue the Service with or without notice at any time and without any liability to you.

This means that your blog could be shut down any day, and it would be hard to find a buyer willing to bear this risk.

Second, you would also be violating another clause of the ToS:

7. No Resale of the Service. Unless expressly authorized in writing by Google, you agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, trade, resell or exploit for any commercial purposes (a) any portion of the Service, (b) use of the Service, or (c) access to the Service.

You could try to sell it secretly, but if Google finds out they would probably shut down the account/blog, which again scares most buyers off.

Want some empirical evidence? Check the last 1,000 sites/blogs that were sold on Flippa. I just did. None of them was using Blogger’s platform. All of them had their own domain names.

Truth be told I have seen a couple of Blogspot blogs being sold in the past, but they were generating a lot of revenue with AdSense (e.g., close to $1,000 monthly), so the buyers were willing to take the risk. Other than these exceptions I have never seen a Blogspot blog sell for a decent price.

Does this mean you are screwed if you have a Blogspot blog? Not at all. You’ll just need to solve the situation before you try to sell it.

Remember, while Google owns the platform itself, you own all the content you write there. Here is the quote from the ToS:

Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services. You or a third party licensor, as appropriate, retain all patent, trademark and copyright to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Google services and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate.

So you’ll just need to get your content out of Blogger and hosted on your own website before you can sell it. Here is a quick step-by-step guide for doing that:

Buy a domain name

Get a company to host it

Install WordPress on your domain

Use the “Import” feature on WordPress and import all the posts from your Blogspot blog

Redirect your blogspot blog to your new domain (here is a guide for that)

A second alternative is to point your Blogger account to a custom domain. This is not ideal, however, because your content would still be hosted on Blogger. If you want to try this just go to Dashboard > Settings> Publishing, click on “Switch to: Custom Domain”.