The time to sell has come for my beloved blog. Let me try and answer the first question that comes to mind, why?

Because I am entering an extremely busy period in my personal life. Moving from Europe to Australia soon, having to find a new place to stay for a couple of months first, before the big move, I am going to be spending most of my time moving house, filling out tons of paperwork, then shipping everything over to Aus and trying to get a new house there. With all this going on, I won’t have much time to attend to my online business, so I’m probably going to take a break from the Internet for a few months.

So my loss is your gain.

JohnCow.com is a widely known and popular MMO blog. Ever since the blog launched on the first of July 2007, it has hit the ground running and within just a few months its build up a very recognizable name within the make money online niche. It would be very easy for the new owner to continue the site, as its obviously being authored under a pseudonym. I’m not really a cow 😉

The stats:

• PageRank 3
• Alexa 22,100
• Compete 41,020
• Technorati 1696, Authority 1457
• 382 Posts
• 13,417 Comments
• 47,412 Backlinks (Yahoo!)
• 2,830 indexed pages (Google)
• Average of 30K uniques per month (without social media)

I’m sure there’s more stats potential buyers would be interested in, and you can just shoot me a PM for further questions.

Now, besides the stats, there’s a lot of extras that will be added to the sale.

Looking at SEO, in a highly competitive niche like MMO, the blog currently ranks 5th place for “making money online” and 1st place for “John Chow” in Google’s SERPs.

For branding purposes, besides the .COM I’ve secured .BIZ .INFO .ORG and .US so the brand can be expanded to different business models. Think about blog consultancy via .BIZ, or a MMO forum on .ORG for example. .INFO right now has a facebook games app on it, which we will include. The .US is currently used to promote a unique wordpress theme I’m selling and has a Pagerank 5.

I’ve also got several unique creatives (header, mascot, banners and wallpapers) that were designed especially for the site. All files are available in PSD format so you can modify them as you see fit, and I will introduce the new owner to my designers to continue the relationship I have with them.

Speaking of relationships, because of the popularity and the nature of the blog, I’ve made a lot of influential friends in the business, obviously John Chow himself being one of them. I will introduce the new owner to my contacts. I get emails every day from people who are willing to setup a JV of some sort because of the blog’s status, I receive Beta invites and the occasional free stuff that companies sent me, looing to get promoted by John Cow. The new owner can obviously build on this.

We’ve currently got a massive quadcore dedicated server (details here) worth about $300 per month ($3,600 p/y), fully sponsored by our web hoster. Besides the free server, they also sponsor huge contests (XBOX Elite and a copy of GTA4 this month), and let us give away massive discounts to our readers and let us use our affiliate links for it too. This will all be included in the sale, the web hoster has agreed to leave the current agreement in tact for the new owner.

Besides all this, we are also including relevant site memberships like MyBlogLog (community of nearly 1,250 members) Feedburner account, twitter account. The non-free plugins we use like the advertising engine, WP affiliate pro and WP Auctions (with tailored design). Heck, I’ll even throw in the 30GB iPod video that’s currently listed in our WP auctions plugin 🙂

The blog is not banned anywhere (think Digg, Reddit, SU whatever) because we never really tried to play that field. So the new owner could focus on this market if they’d want increase traffic via social media.

I’m sure I’ve missed some stuff, so feel free to ask me whatever you’d like to know if you’re a serious buyer.

Revenue Details:

Private ad sales, some sponsored reviews, affiliate promotions etc. The site is currently not using adsense because I’ve been experimenting with different income streams. The new owner can obviously put up adsense or whatever. The site is not banned by Adsense.

The blog has a fully automated advertising script, so clients can buy a spot in seconds. Saves me a lot of time because I don’t have to chase up for sales.

Free sponsored dedicated server worth $300 per month. (I didn’t include this in the income).

Traffic Details:

The blog receives highly targeted traffic from other people in the MMO niche. This is one of the best niches to be in because people really do spend money on promoted items on the blog, like ebooks etc. 

Organic: 20-30%

Referring sites: 50% 

Direct traffic: 20%