“Some listings are vanishing from a strategic decision of waiting for an even a higher price later. Some are due to few newly built homes available to trade-up to, hence some current existing home owners are unwilling to list. Some could be related to fear of being unable to buy after selling,” says Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors.

Supplies are down across the nation, not just in the former crash markets, like Phoenix and Las Vegas, where investors decimated inventories of distressed homes in bulk purchases. Listings are down 31 percent in Seattle from a year ago, down 32 percent in Denver, down 20 percent in Houston, down 37 percent in Boston, according to local Realtor associations.

(Click Here: Recover Watch Map, Complete Coverage)

“At the moment it’s a seller’s market again,” said David Fogg, a real estate agent in Burbank, CA. “Very low inventory, very low interest rates, almost no bank inventory of homes, it’s crazy out there. Every good property I’ve listed this year has brought 10-50 offers and sales prices 10-20 percent over comps. Cash is King.”

Nearly one third of all existing home sales in January were paid for in cash, and not just by investors, who are making up a shrinking share of the market. Fierce competition is forcing buyers to use every advantage, given that so many are going after so little.

In California’s San Fernando Valley there are usually over 9,000 homes for sale this time of year, according to real estate agent Billy Wynn. Today there are just over 1,400.

“Realtors are getting so many offers they are taking the homes off the market and not accepting additional offers before any offer is even accepted,” said Wynn. “This is real estate bubble 2.0 on steroids.”

It is a puzzling situation, given all the warnings of a tsunami of so-called “shadow inventory” that was supposed to be flooding the market right now. As it stands, fewer distressed properties are coming to the market.

“The ticking time bomb of shadow supply has been diffused by a combination of foreclosure processing delays in judicial states, legislation slowing down the foreclosure process in non-judicial states, foreclosure prevention programs and initiatives encouraging short sales,” said Daren Blomquist of RealtyTrac. “Notably, in 2012, was the National Mortgage Settlement, which both encouraged foreclosure prevention and short sales as an alternative to foreclosure, and the loosening of short sale guidelines by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in November.”

As a result, short sales, where the home is sold for less than the value of the mortgage, are rising as a share of total distressed sales, while bank-owned home sales are falling. Investors are now competing for such little supply that they are ironically pricing themselves out of the market.

(Read More: Distressed Homes Still Drive Sales)

“We are hearing also, that new home buyers are not really looking at the foreclosure market—the houses are either not in good neighborhoods or the house is in bad condition and needs a lot of updates,” noted Paul Miller, an analyst at FBR. “So home buyers are either going to new-builds or being very picky with the type and shape of the house. We are hearing from plenty of mortgage brokers that they are working with many couples, and they just can’t find the perfect house.”

This week we’ve heard from blog sellers, and blog buyers. Whether or not you’ve been inspired by what they’ve had to say, I’ll bet that the conversation has raised one key question in your mind:

What is my blog worth?

Image courtesy stock.xchng user ba1969

These days, we’re seeing blogs being recognised as valuable business tools, both for business-to-business as well as business-to-consumer connections. So if you own and run a blog, it makes sense to understand its value.

Today’s challenge is to do just that.

The basics

If you’ve been following along this week, you’ll already have a few of the key metrics for a blog valuation in mind:

• the age of your blog
• uniqueness and quality of blog design
• traffic levels, sources, and quality
• visitor stats: bounce rates, time on site, conversions, and so on
• current monetization approaches and levels
• associated social media footprint.

Andrew Knibbe of Flippa recommended that we use the marketplace as a yardstick by which to value a blog, but what other factors should we take into account before we start doing research there? Let’s step through the process of getting a rough idea of your blog’s value.

Vital stats

First, make note of these vital stats for your blog. You could do this on paper, but I recommend a spreadsheet, because that’ll make it a bit easier when it comes to comparing your site to others down the track.

• Blog age: Andrew from Flippa mentioned earlier in the week that older blogs tend to be given higher valuations.
• Domain: If you’re selling the domain with your blog, a shorter or more memorable domain is probably likely to be looked on more favourably than a longer domain, or one that contains hyphens, for example.
• Platform: The platform on which your blog is hosted might not in itself raise or lower your blog’s value, but it might impact the types of buyers who’d be interested in it.
• Theme: If you’re on a WordPress blog, paid or unique themes are more likely to attract more serious buyers.
• Alexa rank: We saw earlier in the week that Alexa rank also contributes to a blog’s value, so if you don’t know where yours sits at the moment, find out.

By this point, you should be off to a good start.

Traffic stats

Next, it’s time to open up your Analytics tool and take a critical look at your blog stats not just for the last month, but over the last few months.

• Monthly traffic: Note down the total traffic levels first.
• Traffic sources: Next, allocate portions of traffic to the relevant sources of those visits.
• Landing pages: Look at your key landing pages. Shahzad mentioned yesterday that some of the most popular landing pages on the blog he was buying were off-topic posts. How relevant are your main landing pages to your blog’s brand and niche?
• Bounce rates: It’s important to look at this data over time, and to work out which traffic sources have lower or higher bounce rates. This can help you get an idea of the overall value of your blog’s traffic.
• Time on site: This is a good measure of engagement and, again, it’s worth looking at the average time on site for each different traffic source, to see which visitors are more engaged.

This information should help you get a feel for the value of the traffic your blog attracts, and the content you’ve developed. It might also help you identify places where there’s room for improvement, but for now, let’s keep going with our valuation.

Monetization

If you’ve monetized your blog somehow, you can be sure that potential buyers will be interested to know how you’ve done it, and how successful you’ve been. Let’s pull together the data—if you don’t already have it at your fingertips.

• Monthly revenue: Add up your revenues for the last three months and divide by three to get a monthly average.
• Monetization sources: Make a note of the ways you monetize your blog. Have you created unique products from scratch? Do you use certain advertising or affiliate networks?
• Conversion rates: Look at your conversion figures for the last three months, and compare them with your last three months’ traffic to calculate your average conversion rate.
• Value per visitor: Take your average revenue figure for the last three months and divide it by your average traffic figure for that time period. This will give you an average visitor value, which will be really helpful in assessing your site against others for sale in your niche.
• Profit: You might not be able to calculate this figure until you complete the next section, but do be sure to subtract your costs from your revenue figure to get a profit figure. Again, this will make for easy comparison between your blog and others. If it’s good, it could also go a long way to tempt potential buyers.

Note that at this point, you can calculate a valuation based on a multiple of your revenue—either 12 or 24 months, say. This will give you a good reference point for the research we’ll do on Flippa in a moment.

Costs

Whether or not you’ve monetized your blog, potential buyers will want to know how much it costs to run, so they can compare it with other blogs they might be considering buying. Make note of the costs you pay for:

• Hosting: Note monthly or annual figures.
• Design and development: Unless you have regular maintenance charges, you might want to add up what you spent on your blog’s design and development in the last year as a more objective figure than your expenditure for the last three months.
• Content: Do you pay writers? Buy content? Add up those costs—along with your own time cost for writing and editing your blog’s content.
• Marketing and customer acquisition: If you spend money on advertising—or time on guest-posting and content marketing—again, add up those costs for the last three months.
• Time: Don’t forget to tally your time for other blogging tasks, like social media, affiliate and ad management, and so on. Try to get a clear and honest picture of how much time it takes you to run your blog on a monthly basis.

Comparing blogs in your niche

This basic information shouldn’t take you too long to collate. And once you have, the real challenge begins! Try to find at least two other blogs for sale in your niche to compare yours with.

1. Go to Flippa.com. You can, of course, search for sites for sale in your niche on Google too. That can be a good way to find out what’s for sale, but as those sites may not give you an indication of how much they’re hoping to sell for, a visit to Flippa for research is a good idea.
2. Find sites for sale and auction in your niche or a similar niche. I’d recommend you look at finished sales, since that’ll give you the figure the sites sold for, rather than just their current bid price, or Buy It Now price. Recent sales will give you the best indication of what the market is actually willing to pay for a blog like yours.
3. Assess the sites. Go through the checklist above again for each of the sites you’re looking at. Make a note of the prices they sold for. See if you can spot any trends that can indicate what the market values in blogs within your niche, and think about how your blog stacks up on these points.
4. Settle on a price range in which you think your blog might sit. Rather than picking a single figure that you think you’d accept for your blog, I think it’s probably a better idea to use your research to work out a range in which that price might reasonably fall. You’ll have a figure you wouldn’t sell below, and a range in which you can set your expectations.
5. Compare the range with your multiple-of-revenue price. If you calculated a multiple-of-revenue price above, compare it with the price range you’ve arrived at to see if the figures are in the same ball park.

By the end of this challenge, you should have a rough valuation on your blog. If you’re game, share it with us in the comments below. Or, if you’d rather, you can just let me know if you were surprised—or disappointed, or inspired!—by the price range you arrived at.

Twitter is underwhelming at 140 characters. Any sane person would say “What do you do with that?”

Why limit yourself to so few words when there is a dictionary and an encyclopedia available and limitless communication at your disposal.

Its brevity is both an enigma and its charm. It has been its weakness and strength due to that simplicity.

Keeping it simple is not without success precedent.

One of the most successful children’s books of all time was written with only 50 words. It was a challenge thrown down to Dr Seuss by his editor when he was about to write his  next book “Green Eggs with Ham“. To put this in perspective the previous book by Dr Seuss “The Cat in the Hat”  was written with 236 words.

Simple is good.

The history of short and simple

Just over twenty years ago on December 3, 1992 the message “Merry Christmas” was sent by software engineer Neil Papworth to the Vodafone director Richard Jarvis.

That was the world’s first text message. It was short and it was simple.

Who would think that 20 years later  that:

• 6  billion messages would be sent every day in the USA
• 2.2 trillion texts would be sent every year in the USA
• 8.6 trillion SMS messages would be created every year around the planet
• Text messaging would be a $150 billion a year industry

It is the messaging of choice for most teenagers. The adults have also realized its time saving capabilities.

People have also understood that having a conversation is maybe not something you always want to do.

Twitter wants to transform video messaging

Twitter has just announced a smart phone app called “Vine” that allows you to take a video that is limited to 6 seconds and continues to loop.

It is not alone with the idea.

There are competing apps called Viddy and Tout that do much the same.

So what can you do with a 6 second video and it raises this question again.

Why bother?

Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to put the boot in. Twitter took texting to a new level and put it on steroids. Maybe a short and simple video is enough to get a powerful message out that is memorable.

Is less more?

How could you use Vine for marketing?

Viddy thinks that 15 seconds is the right length for a video short message while Vine has chosen 6 seconds. Maybe there is some science behind both but let’s look at some possible ideas for marketing with a short video.

Here are 6 ideas:

1. The brand elevator pitch

Want people to understand what your brand is all about. The elevator pitch is where you wrap it up in one sentence or two. 6 seconds is maybe enough.

How could you make it visual and viral.

2. Product demonstration

One to two minute video reviews of products in your online store are now maybe too long. Why not experiment with six seconds?

3. Launching a new product or service

Explain your new product in six seconds if you can. (If you don’t then use YouTube). Maybe your messaging will  get better as you learn to communicate the key features and not the unnecessary.

4. Give your brand a personality

Social media allows and wants you to give your brand a personality. Use Vine to make it real and authentic. Make it quirky or innovative.

Many brands want an image that goes beyond bland.

5. Marketing a promotion

Use a 6 second Vine video to market a new promotion. This could  be a new book, song or  a movie or even an event. How long do you need to communicate something new. Remember the power of simple.

6. Announcing a special offer or discount

50% off. How long does it take to announce that special offer for your clothing store?  Make it visual, aural and shareable.

If you want to look at how 15 businesses are using the Vine video app for their brand. Check out this post over at Hubspot.

What about you?

How do you think you could use a six second video on Vine to market your business and brand? Do you even want to?

Do you think this idea will stick or do you think it is a fad?

Look forward to your comments below. Tell us your thoughts and ideas.

Want to learn how to create great content for your social media marketing?

My book – “Blogging the Smart Way – How to Create and Market a Killer Blog with Social Media” – will show you how.

It is now available to download. I show you how to create and build a blog that rocks and grow tribes, fans and followers on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. It also includes dozens of tips to create contagious content that begs to be shared and tempts people to link to your website and blog.

I also reveal the tactics I used to grow my Twitter followers to over 135,000.

Download and read it now.

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