I’ve been following Career Ramblings since it started in November 2006 and was quite surprised to find out today that it has been sold for a whopping $20,000!!

Created in a partnership between Jane May and John Anthony, the site loosely focused on career advice and experiences in the corporate world and managed to achieve a brilliant PR6 in the last PageRank update.

The site was always designed to make money online and there are some quite interesting points to note from it’s success and sale:

• Adsense earnings were a big earner ($678 in May) for the site and this is no doubt due to the high-paying business ads that were displayed

• Affiliate earnings were another big money earner. I found this curious as I never noticed many affiliate links or banners on the site. With a bit of searching, I found the post Netflix vs Blockbuster which was a textbook case on how to get affiliate sales. Disguised as an “on-topic” business comparison, the links to Netflix and Blockbuster were affiliate links that earned around $20 per sign-up.

• Traffic was great during the weekdays but dropped to pretty much zero on the weekends. This is probably due to the nature of the site and career information being searched for by students and workers. The 38,000 unique visitors in May is a great number but perhaps not overly difficult to achieve.

• Hired ghost writers were used for recent posts on the site. A good strategy for a site of this nature and the owners were able to find writers that delivered around 30 posts with 3-4 days turn around time. However, this does mean that whenever I see another post written by Jane May anywhere I’ll be wondering whether it was ghost written or not! I’m also starting to wonder whether Jane May was just “the face” of CareerRamblings.

• The site had a loose focus. Despite being primarily about careers, posts on AGLOCO and remodelling a patio were way off-topic. This does question the “stay close to your niche” philosophy for success.

• Reputable backlinks were achieved due to the topics of the posts. Many high quality “education focused” sites linked to CareerRamblings. That isn’t possible for a lot of niche sites.

• The site earned $1800 a month and as it sold for $20k this figure is in line with the “rule of thumb” technique that your site is worth about 10x your monthly earnings. NetBusinessBlog earned $1200 per month and sold for $13k.

• It was bought by Impulse Communications which is a professional website operator and owns the popular Bored.com

It’s a great result for the CareerRamblings team and I want to wish them a big congratulations on their success!

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