You may have heard the recent news about AOL purchasing Huffington Post for the sum of $315 million dollars. Will AOL buy your blog? Will AOL pay you a million dollars for your blog or website? Will AOL give you hundreds of millions of dollars to buy your blog? Are you crazy?
The short answer is maybe, but the longer answer is maybe-but-a-we-just-a-gotta-wait-and-see, but maybe not for $315 million cold, hard smackeroos. It could be more, though it could be much, much less… and you’d still be happy about it.
They may have terrible AOL customer service, where you can never reach a live person, but they have a pretty solid dating system and far more money than they reasonably know what to do with. And you might just be able to get in on that.
How to Get AOL to Buy Your Blog:
1 – Have a blog: If you don’t already, start one. Do it now, we’ll wait for you to come back.
2 – Make your blog not suck: Got your blog? Great. Now make it good. Original content is a great start, but clever pictures, often of smart cats, silly celebrities, or politicians in compromised situations really help.
3 – Have a reader: How many readers do you have? A couple million a month would be ideal, but any number greater than “just you” is also good. Do you have five? That’s worth something, maybe we should talk.
4 – Think about how you’ll spend your vast fortune: Now that you have a blog and someone is reading it, invest a few solid days or weeks contemplating how you’ll enjoy your newfound wealth. Go ahead and be a bit crazy about it. Chartered flights to the moon and lavish parties of debauchery are good, but you might want to think bigger.
5 – Make one more post: Write one more blog post, just so it really looks like it’s important.
6 – Success!never consider selling it, no matter how huge the offer. AOL keeps an eye out for this sort of thing, and you’ll almost surely get a call.
Unfortunately, there’s no direct way to contact AOL to sell your blog, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. If you have a direct contact at AOL, you can certainly try to float it that way, but they really like it when you play coy.
If you don’t get the call you’re waiting for, then make a few more posts each week. Keep them uncommonly brilliant and insightful, and keep growing your reader base. As long as you keep doing that consistently, year-in, year-out, and keep pretending like you don’t want to trade it all for a mere pallet of cash, then success will surely be yours… at some point.
Yeah, and you have to be careful of careful ruses to get your site:
“Would you sell me your site for a million dollars?”
“Sure!”
“Would you sell me your site for a dollar?”
“No! What do you think I am?”
“We already figured out what you are…we’re just dickering on a price…”