Today morning I woke up to a very interesting email… one from a web development company that showed an interest in purchasing this blog. I will not go into much detail of who they were, as that would not be right, but anyways… they showed a strong interest and wanted to purchase at $5,500 and go up to $6,000 if I stayed on for a month after that as a writer.

$6,000 USD is quite a lot of money - I did need to think about it for a while, however I eventually decided to say no and stay on blogging for the rest of my readers. Do you think that was the right decision, or was the decision the dumbest one I’ve ever made so far?

I personally feel it was justified - here’s why:

1) I don’t want to see this blog divebomb.

After you’ve put in time and effort into something, you don’t want to see it fail… even if you don’t own it anymore. While I’m sure the new owners would have good intentions for the blog, I’m not sure whether it would be to put the readers first, and their pockets second, or vice versa like what happened to Cashquests. You can take a look at the Alexa graph of Cashquests after it was sold - it’s not a pretty sight.

2) My readers would be throughly pissed off

You guys are what makes this the blog that it is - I’m not sure how happy you’d be if I sold it and it was taken over by someone else, but I don’t think you guys would be too happy :) . This blog is run on a large part by my personality - sometimes good, sometimes bad but someone coming in with a different personality could wreak this website - and see a similar fall in traffic (and readers unsubscribing).

3) This blog is only going to grow

Say that the new owners had good intentions, and say this blog continued in its vein of growing steadily month after month - that would be something that would be painful to see, especially with the knowledge that it could have been me running it, me earning the extended revenue and me seeing the increase in RSS subscribers. At the moment, this blog has a bit above 200 RSS subscribers, something that is only going to increase along with revenue, and I’d like to use the best of my ability to see it happen.

What is your opinion - good to keep or should have sold it?

Will I ever sell TheUniversityKid.com ?

I’m not going to lie to you - there are two instances when I would sell TheUniversityKid.com. Before I do so, I’d really like to get tshirts and stuff made, because I’ve always wanted tshirts for my own website, but nonetheless, I would part with this in two cases.

The first case is if an offer of upwards of $10,000 USD was received - a figure that is well away from (hopefully!) what anyone is willing to pay at the moment. With that sum, I could put half in the bank and use the other half to start up another blog, with a handy little chunk for promotion and whatnot. Hopefully no one that reads this website has $10k to drop though, as it would still be hard to let go :)

The second case is well… when I finish or leave university. Should I do so, the domain name kind of doesn’t really make sense, and it would be better to take the money and start again - by then I might be able to nick myname.com off its current owner :)

Designers and coders

Thanks to all of you that volunteered yesterday - I will go in the order that people posted, so will send off emails shortly. As for the niche website theme, someone pointed me via MSN to this amazing Wordpress theme for niche sites - I love Wordpress, being too thick to do much in anything else, and the theme shown is pretty sweet - it could go for any type of website I reckon. Here’s a screenshot.

What do you think?

Adtoll - free advertising worth $20

Adtoll are looking at promoting their… system and to do so all new bloggers get $20 worth of advertising free. That’ll net you a week on Shoemoney or a few months on other blogs; anyways, you don’t lose much other than a bit of time signing up so check it out - their marketplace is an interesting one to view if just for the wide diversify apparent. Check it out.

The RSS contest is really heating up now, with just a few subscribers difference between myself and Internet Babel - I’m still up for guest posts, and submitted one today to Bloggin-Ads which will go up shortly - if you have a blog with more than 300 subscribers, and need a guest post, just send me a message. :)

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