I Sold my Blog for 5-Figures

The time was December 2021. I had just left my high-paying remote SEO job. I wanted to be an entrepreneur and build stuff.

So I started a blog in Dec 2021, right after a few days of quitting my job. Btw, I wrote a full tweet here when I quit. Some nostalgic memories in this thread. Mind you, a lot has changed since then.

Since 2018, I have known about how bloggers earn through ad revenue, but somehow, I never practically did anything about it.

So I started this niche blog in Dec 2021. Now, the best part about this blog?

I didn’t write a single word. Back then, GPT was the talk of the town.

I wanted to do an experiment, where I could put minimal effort with less time and still not regret it. I knew SEO, I knew the tricks of the trade.

I subscribed to an AI tool and started pushing SEO-driven content on that blog.

The Road to Monetization

This was a lonely road, that put my patience to test. I knew SEO takes a lot of time. I used to publish articles every day for 6 months.

Came June 2022. I started getting good organic traffic from Google.

This is where I decided, I wanted to monetize. So I joined Ezoic, as there were no traffic threshold requirements.

That sweet $1 generated on a random day in June, was one of the most rewarding moments one can have.

I cherished it. That $1 motivated me to push more articles. Slowly, and steadily the blog grew.

  • June 2022:- $10
  • July 2022: $25
  • Aug 2022: $35
  • Sep 2022: $100
  • Oct 2022: $150

Now, something crazy happened in the last 3 months. It’s Q4 time. Generally in Q4, the advertising rates shoot up.

The main reason is, all the advertisers start pushing more ads as they want to complete their budget for the year and start afresh next year. Hence the RPM rates go up and thereby, the ad income to bloggers go up.

I didn’t know it would blow up so much.

November got me $500, December got me $1100+

That was it! This was the sign, that I would scale this blog crazily thereafter.

Scaling my blog to $3000/month+

2023 was a defining moment for this blog. The site started earning quite good consistently.

It started making $1500 – $2000 per month on average till Aug.

September 2023 was the peak. It generated almost ~$3000 in a single month.

I also used to accept sponsored posts and accept around $100-$120 for 1 post. So September 2023 was the peak of this blog.

Then something happened, that changed the course of this blog and my life as well.

The infamous Helpful Content Update from Google hammered every niche blogger of this industry. And I mean, every niche blogger, even famous websites was not spared.

Just a few months later, the site was down 50-70%. That was not just me, but for every niche blogger, the traffic and income was subsequently down almost 50-70%.

As if Google just obliterated the entire blogging industry in a single shot with their new algorithm update.

And to break you the bad news, even today, as I write this post in Jan 2025, there seems to be no recovery from this update for any blogger out there.

But what exactly happened?

Even the Google-Gods don’t know what happened, how would I know?

People say that AI content was targeted. But from what I see, even human-written blogs were targeted too with the hammer. So it was not just AI.

The hammer was so powerful, that many bloggers decided to just quit.

The Future

Naturally, my blog was also down from 100,000 visitors a month to nearly 25,000 visitors a month, a whopping 75% decline from the top.

At its peak it made over $3000/month, in 2024, it was making $500-$600 on average.

But after some months, my traffic got stable and so were the revenue, but it was still down!

I decided to pull out. The reasons were simple. I can’t let a single company or algorithm dictate my revenue.

The dependency on Google was absolutely scary. One day you are living the best life and the other day, your entire business is gone in a whip.

But fortunately, my blog was stable later but still down. Couldn’t recover to the top.

I decided, that I can’t take this uncertainty any longer, and while the blog is stable, I have to exit this.

Btw, on the side, I was also running a couple of SaaS projects, which I was already interested in. So it all kinda made sense.

I could get some upfront cash from the blog exit and can utilize or re-invest in my SaaS projects or diversify my investments further.

I listed my blog on Microns.io, Acquire, and Flippa. I got some serious inquiries from each site, but none of them succeeded. Finally, I was talking to a person in Nov 2024, regarding the acquisition.

We reached an agreement for a decided price of 5 figures.

The exit value was totally worth it for the investment I made on this site (both time & money).

This blog made more than $30,000 in 2 years, with almost negligible time & money investment from my side.

Why negligible time investment? Because for every article I used to publish, I invested roughly 20 minutes a day. That’s a drop in the ocean given the time I invested in other projects.

On top of that, if you add the exit value to the revenue generated from the blog, it absolutely tops the chart.

Blogging is one of the best business models out there. Not sure what the future will look like for bloggers.

Certainly, I am out of niche SEO-driven blogs for now. I will just publish my insights, and learnings in this personal blog.

What I am doing now

After this massive success I had with my niche blog, I started many things.

tejas_rane
tejas_rane
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