If you spend time commenting on other people’s blogs, there will be occasions when you run across abandoned blogger blogs. These are blogs that a person had used, but for whatever reason decided to delete the blog leaving the domain name opened to be claimed. If you happen to find an abandoned blog where the url is available, it’s like finding money in the street that keeps coming month after month.

I think that most people don’t claim these blogs because they feel that they will need to find the time and effort to write on this new blog, but the truth is that there is no need to do so. Once the blog has been established (that’s always the hard part) by getting into search engines and with some pr, it’s possible to make money off of it.

Take for example The Bored Investor. This was one of those abandoned blogs that I came across one day and I decided to claim it. As you can see, I have not updated it in ages, but it still brings me in $200 a month from advertising.

This is how you find them in three easy steps:

Broken Link: The first sign that an abandoned blog may be available is that you follow a link to a post and you get the blogger page that says that the page no longer exists. This is a possible sign that the blog has been deleted by the original owner.

Check The Main URL: If you get the “page no longer exists” page, type in the main url into your address bar to confirm that the blog no longer exists. Sometimes it was just that single page that was deleted, but the blog is still there. If the url for the main page also shows that the blog doesn’t exist, then there is a better chance that the blog has been deleted by its owner.

Try Claiming The URL: Use your blogger account and see if you can claim the abandoned blog. If the blogger deleted their account, you will be able to do so. If, however, the blog was deleted by the blogger system as a “spam blog,” then you will get a notice that the blog is already claimed by someone when you try and enter the url.

It takes about 5 minutes to find out and at the end of the process you will either have a new blog in your blogger account or you wasted 5 minutes of your time. But that five minutes can end up being relatively profitable when you find a blog that you can claim.

I currently have 4 of these blogs that I have been able to claim over the years (and I have actually given back three others to owners that accidentally deleted their blog) which bring in about $500 a month from adsense and other advertising. While I have never actively searched for these, they are a nice bonus when I come across one as I know that they can easily be monetized with little effort on my part. I’m sure that there could be a profitable business in doing so (and there are quite a few spammers that use this strategy).

I never actively pursued this money making route because, quite frankly, it isn’t how I enjoyed spending time on the Internet. I enjoy building content and letting people know about my sites, not searching for sites that have been abandoned by others. That being said, if the opportunity offered itself while I was doing my daily rounds and was only going to take a few minutes to check out, it was worth the time.

So as you do your commenting rounds, if you happen to follow a link to a blog that no longer exists, you may have found the equivalent of money lying in the street that will appear again and again each month…

Image courtesy of a trying youth