Are you making this mistake with your new blog?

We talk a lot about success in blogging – success in making money, in building communities, etc.

But where there’s the possibility for success, there’s also a possibility for failure.

And when you’ve invested your own hard-earned money into a particular project, it can be very painful to watch it go south.

Today I want to about how, if you are not careful, you can completely ruin a blog that you have just bought and instead of turning it into a profit-machine, you end up making it a liability.

If you want some advice on buying websites, please read Raj’s tips on buying websites for profit and SEO and my post on buying old websites.

Let’s say you buy a website that has a thriving community, good search engine rankings, under-monetized and a great brand to work with. You find out that the owner wants to sell, you get to him first, negotiate, bada bing bada bang, you own the site by next week.

And then your troubles start.

Did you plan for:

• Maintaining the community by following the same style as that of the previous blogger(s)?
• Changing as few things as possible (design, monetization, seo) in the beginning and to introduce them ‘slowly’?
• Spending plenty of time blogging on the new site to help your audience learn about you and trust you?
• Bring in new bloggers and ensure regular posting if you couldn’t manage it yourself?
• The fact that you might need to ‘bail out’ (and thus would need buyers to offload the website) if things don’t work out for you?

Giving lots of time, introducing changes (very) gradually), having a contingency plan – these three items should be on top of your to-do list for any blog that you plan on buying.

A new blog is like a new website – you need to put in the time to make it successful, whether it is monetization, or design or SEO or more content.

Hand in hand with this is the assumption that you need to know where to spend that extra time too – just blogging all the time or promoting the site all the time can’t cut it.

Are you giving your new blog plenty of time? For that matter, what about the one you just bought, or the one you’ve had for ages but hasn’t gone anywhere?

If things don’t work out, you should always have a backup plan.