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The Side Hustle Show
693: Renting Out Websites? How to Build Recurring Revenue with Simple, Local Sites
00:47:18
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- [00:01]
A
Getting paid to rent out websites. You know, I love a good rental side Hustle recurring revenue, strong roi. But in this example, there's no equipment to buy, there's no delivery logistics to deal with, there's no tenants trashing your place, which leads to some really strong margins. My guest is a longtime side Hustle show listener who recently started building and renting out simple local websites. Now it makes sense, right? Websites are digital real estate and if the location is right, namely if it shows up at the top of Google, that could be worth quite a bit to the right tenant. So from townrankseo.com, john Michael, welcome to the side Hustle Show.
- [00:40]
B
Thanks for having me, Nick. I absolutely love your show. I think it's fantastic.
- [00:44]
A
Yeah, I'm always excited to see your name pop across the inbox and you've been in the game for quite a while. But stick around in this one, we're going to soup to nuts on how to come up with profitable niches here, how to build and rank those sites, and how to find those well qualified tenants, along with the surprising new side Hustle that this project has unlocked. But John, my understanding is this started relatively recently, just this year in February. And I'm curious, how long does it take to start seeing your first revenue here?
- [01:14]
B
It took me about two and a half months before I saw anything coming in. And you know, that was a real exciting, you know, we got a lead and we got paid on it. Somebody actually, you know, writing a check.
- [01:25]
A
What was the lead for? If you're comfortable sharing?
- [01:27]
B
Yeah, no, it was for a gravel driveways in a city in California. We did a lot of research on it, came up with a plan, created a website and we were able to get some money coming in.
- [01:38]
A
How fascinating. So you build up this website in the gravel driveway niche for, I'm assuming a local city in California. And then customers or potential customers start coming to the website and say, I need this job done. And then are you answering the phone? Are you taking intake over an email form and then trying to find a contractor or a qualified service provider to go out and do that work?
- [02:00]
B
Yeah, so that's a big part of it. I want to say on the front of this, I told you I've been listening to your show for a long time. I heard Luke Vandiver, website rental coach. Coaching, I think is what it is. He did an episode with you, it's probably about four years ago or so, and I heard that one. And then I also heard you talking to one of his students. At one point, her name is Meow. And you know, I love both of those episod. And that's what kind of attracted me, prompted my action, if you will, to go ahead and create these sites. And so, but your question is, you know, what do you do? So here's the. In fact, I just got a lead from that one yesterday and it was a 700 foot gravel driveway and I have to kind of call some contractors in the area. And a big piece of this is trying to figure out who do you want to work with? You know, what's the relationship like? Do you vibe with them? Right? And you have to have a conversation and a business relationship with them and make sure first of all that they're okay with accepting leads. And then you kind of start to test drive, if you will, that particular relationship. You see where it goes. And then hopefully you want to rent them out the site just kind of get out of the middle and direct all those calls to them. We use an app called CallRail and within CallRail you put a number on the site, they call it, you get the leads in. But what I've done with a couple of my sites is I just have those leads or those calls or those messages you can also use now the text messages go right to the business owner and I kind of get out of the middle now I can hear what's going on from the recording and kind of see if those people are qualified. And if they're, you know, I get a good idea that they're going to move forward with the business. But that's how it works, basically.
- [03:45]
A
Okay. And that's maybe that's a little bit down the road. That's like a great scenario where you're no longer there, you just have a tenant where, say for 500 bucks a month, a thousand bucks a month, whatever it is, you just, all of the leads from the site are going straight to you. Right. I don't even need to be in this picture anymore. It sounds like early on you may not, you may not have the critical mass of traction and stuff to, to justify somebody, you know, who's signing up for that recurring service. But it's like, hey, as these leads come in onesie twosies, would you, do you want to play ball? Like, would you be interested in, in buying these from me?
- [04:15]
B
That's right. And there's two different ways to do it. Either you can get the business owner beforehand. You can say, hey listen, I'm thinking about building out a plumbing in Rochester lead generation site. I noticed that you're doing very well with your reviews on Google and such. And it doesn't look like you really have much of a website presence. Would you want to partner with me on this? And so you go into it with the partnership and you can build out the lead generation site or you can actually build the site. You know, build it and they will come. So you build out the site, you wait till the leads start coming in, and then you reach out to people in the area, either through Facebook or Craigslist or Google or wherever you find them, and you say, hey, I've got these leads coming in. I'm looking for one person to work within the area. Would you be open to doing something like that? And then you just see where the conversation goes from there.
- [05:08]
A
This is maybe one of my question marks around this because it seems like in these blue collar type of service provider industries, anybody who's good at what they do, they have that reputation is like they're booked solid for sometimes months. And they're like, no, we don't need any more leads. We're drowning in the leads that we've got. And so it's like, try to find that person who has a good reputation, is good at what they do, and yet is still hungry to continue to grow the business. Can you speak to that at all?
- [05:38]
B
That's it exactly. I've talked to both multiple times. Some people are going, oh man, I just can't handle any more leads. And I'm like, well, great, I'm glad, you know, keep up the good work. But there are other people who, like you said, they do very good work, right? They're very talented. In fact, the guy who came by one day work on my garage, he was really talented. I started asking him some questions about what kind of site he has. He says, well, we don't have a site. And I said, what happened with your Google? My business profile? He well, it got denied. And so we had a whole conversation about, you know, what we could or couldn't do for him because he did great work. He had a little bit of broken English, but he did great work and we loved him, me and my wife. And so there are those kind of people out there all the time that do great work, but they just, just don't know how anything about SEO or how to set up a website or anything like that.
- [06:31]
A
If they don't have a great online presence, how are you finding them initially to connect and do that initial outreach? Hey, I got leads to sell.
- [06:39]
B
I find a lot of my people that I'm going to work with in Facebook groups. I'll go to Facebook groups in that particular city and I'll just start looking at people that are kind of advertising their services and I'll look at their website, see what it's like and then I'll look at their Google my business profile and I can see that they're doing a lot of work. But I'll have a conversation with them and say, I see you're doing a lot of work. Would you be interested in actually setting up a website? Would you be interested in working with me on these leads? And you can also post inside of a Craigslist or something like that and try to find some people. You say, hey, I'm working in this industry, I'm looking for one person to work with. Would you be that individual?
- [07:18]
A
Okay. Okay. I like this Facebook group angle because this is how we found several different contractors. It's like, and a lot of these threads, they might be a couple years old, but it's like I'm looking for a painter, I'm looking for a plumber, I'm looking for the garage repair person. And sure enough there's some recommendations in there.
- [07:34]
B
That's right. And people respond to that. The business owners respond to that and they say, hey, I can do that work. Sometimes they'll put up pictures of what they do. And that's the kind of people you go, okay, they're responding to it, they want work. And that's the other conversation you have with them when you talk to them. How are you getting leads now? Right. Are you paying for leads? Are you doing Google Ads or are they on thumbtack? Are they on Angie's list? And what we can do, we see that they're actually paying for leads already and we can replace that as opposed to being an additional cost.
- [08:05]
A
Got it, got it. In these early stages when you're just selling them one off before you have, you know, that ideal long term tenant quote unquote in place for the site, is there a rule of thumb for like, what's a lead worth to you? Or what's a qualified prospect worth to you? Imagine this gravel driveway is pretty sizable project, right?
- [08:24]
B
So for example, what did I say it was like 700ft was going to be? The gravel driveway? Right. It was going to be about, it's going to be about a twenty thousand dollar deal. And so when you're doing that you kind of think, okay, well number one, you got to think about how much profit are they actually making on this. Right? Yeah. How much is Built into it. And every industry is a little bit different. And you got to think about the percentages, how much they're paying, what the profit is, what is acceptable in the industry. And you do a little research online, you get to figure out, you know, okay, this is what an average price is, this is what the average profit is. And then you go in, I don't know, 5%, 10%, and you just have a conversation with them. I like to at 10% and then maybe back it up to 5%. But I don't want it to be so overwhelming to them that they don't want to work with me anymore. Right. So there's a real sweet spot. And when you're renting out a site, it's the same thing. Right. You want them to see that they are getting a fair shake because you want to be partners with them for a very long time once it gets started.
- [09:26]
A
Yeah. And if. And if this is a company that's been used to paying for leads on Thumbtack or Angie's List, they kind of have a sense of what their customer acquisition cost already is. And so if you can come in and kind of match that number or beat it, then that's okay. Your margins are going to be roughly the same as what they were or maybe even a little bit better. So I think that makes sense. You mentioned the episode with Luke. That was episode 448 in the Archives website rentalcoaching.com shn was the referral link that he gave me for his program. I think there's kind of a little intro video there. And then meow. That episode was 5 97. One of the most popular episodes, I think, was last year or the year before where we aired that one. But really cool episode where she was focusing on some international markets. Like she was from New Zealand, and so it was like Auckland, New Zealand driveway, maybe some very specific types of keywords. So does it make sense to start there on the city level and then go into the industry or in their particular industries that you like? Kind of a lot of moving chess pieces here to kind of align up and put all together.
- [10:29]
B
Yeah. So it just takes some research. On the front end. There are about 14 or 15 sort of criteria that you want to look at when you're searching. Number one, you want to select the niche, and then you're looking at the population. Right. When Luke said. What Luke says is he recommends anywhere from 40,000 people to 400,000 people. Right. You don't want to get too big, and you don't want to get too small. You want to make sure that there are businesses in the area that you can work with if you start to get some leads. And I'll not going to go through all 15 points. But basically what I am looking for at a real high level before I get down into the granular level is how many reviews do the top three businesses in the maps have? In fact, if people don't have a Google my business profile set up, that's something they want to look at. And so if I look at the top three businesses in the maps and the first one has 130 reviews and they're all 5.0 or 4.9, and then the second one has 49 reviews and then the third one has 68 reviews and they're all really high. Well, that's a pretty competitive niche that you're looking at right there. Right. For like travel driveways in Boston or something like that would probably be really highly ranked. And then the other thing that I'm looking for, are there businesses in those top three there that don't have a website. And if they don't have a website, that means there's not a lot of competition. Right. There's people there that are in the maps, but they don't know how to set up up a website or they don't want to set up a website and you can take over those positions. And you also want to look for things like are there small businesses in the area that you can work with? Are you seeing things there that would allow you to have a partnership with another business? And you always want to look at the websites that they have, but also you want to look for the organic searches, like how many companies are coming up in the organic searches for gravel driveways in Boston? And are they good? Are they something that is not a directory like Yelp or any of the other citation blogs? Right. Are they not a directory? And so you could just see, you could tell at a real quick glance from doing a search whether a niche is competitive or not.
- [12:47]
A
Yeah. Is there a rule for like, imagine if, if the town is too small. Well, there may only be one or two players there. It's like, is that kind of a red flag? Like, well, there's this. I need a broader pool to try and do business with.
- [13:03]
B
It is, yeah, because you may be able to rank number one there, but if you don't have any business owner to partner with, it's really not going to matter. Or if there is not really a demand in that area, you're not going to it's not going to be fruitful.
- [13:17]
A
Okay, are you looking at the search volume around certain keywords as well?
- [13:22]
B
Yeah. So usually what we're looking for with the search volume is not so much like a local search. What you want to look for is like gravel driveways, Right. You go into Semrush or you go into any of the tools that are out there and you think, okay, gravel driveways. How many people are actually searching gravel driveways within the nation? And if you can see that they're searching, that there's a lot of search there where you're going to know is something that people are searching. Now, you can't tell exactly what people are searching in that particular city, especially if it's a real small city, but you just kind of extract the information from that and figure, okay, a lot of people are searching this particular term.
- [14:02]
A
Okay, are we talking like a hundred thousand searches a month? What's good here?
- [14:05]
B
Well, here's what you have to do. You have to use a combination of what you see in Semrush, which doesn't know everything, and then you have to use your brain at the same time. Right. Usually what I'm looking for is at least 1000 or so searches per month. But in that particular area, that particular niche, whatever it is, building gravel driveways, building concrete driveways, doing concrete work, whatever it is, even though it may not show up in the big search, you can kind of think to yourself, okay, you know, you just do a little research and think about what the population is there. And you think to yourself, well, wait a sec. This is a city of 150,000. Right. They must be having some concrete work done here. They must be having some sort of plumbers are needed here. And. And so you have to use kind of a combination of common sense and what you see in the search results.
- [14:59]
A
Yeah. Do you like those industries where it's a $20,000 gravel driveway versus like a mobile car detailing service, or Maybe it's a $300 job.
- [15:10]
B
That's the ones that everybody wants because it's much easier to make your money back and you get paid more for the leads. However, if you find something like, I mean, sometimes painting is a real good. Both interior painting and exterior painting. Sometimes it' the highest profit type of jobs. But you can get a lot of those leads, so you have to kind of balance that with how many leads per week am I going to get with the price of the job?
- [15:37]
A
To give you a starting point for your niche research, I put together a free list of 50 potential rank and rent niches for you. All you have to do is hit up the show notes for this episode, enter your email and I'll send it right over. I've got more with John coming up in just a moment, including the size of his portfolio so far and how he gets these sites ranking and earning so quickly. Coming up right after this. Here's a little bit of side Hustle trivia for you. Did you know that our Partner Shopify powers 10% of all E commerce in the US everything from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to dozens of side Hustle show guests you've heard from right on this show. And there's strength in those numbers. Ever notice that purple shop pay button when you're shopping online? That's a telltale sign that a store is powered by Shopify and just one of the reasons Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. Shopify makes it easy to sell online with hundreds of beautiful ready to go templates, inventory management tools, payment processing, analytics, and powerful marketing and email tools built right in so you can find and keep more customers. If you want to see less carts being abandoned, it's time to head over to Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com go to shopify.com sidehustle one more time. It's shopify.com sidehustlE Summer is the season of backyard barbecues, hanging out at the lake, epic family road trips. But when the temperature rises, you don't want to be sweating over your wireless bill. That's why I made the switch to our partner mint mobile in 2019 and haven't looked back. Here's what's great about simple, affordable premium wireless service without surprises and unexpected overages. All Mint plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text on the nation's largest 5G network. The switch was easy. I was able to bring my own phone and keep my old phone number and all my existing contacts. So join me in ditching overpriced wireless and get three months of unlimited service for just 15 bucks a month this year. Skip breaking a sweat and breaking the bank. Get this new customer offer in your 3 month unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.comsidehustle that's mintmobile.comsidehustleen upfront payment of $45 required equivalent to $15 per month limited time new customer offer for first 3 months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. How many of these sites have you built out at this point?
- [18:11]
B
Yeah, we've got 10 of them built out.
- [18:14]
A
Okay. In all, all over the place. Or you find like one industry and then lather, rinse, repeat across a bunch of different cities. Or do you like, say, oh, I'm gonna focus on this one city and build relationships with the business owners there?
- [18:27]
B
Nope, they're all over the place. I have retaining walls, I have kitchen remodeling. Believe it or not, we have hit on a niche here that we think is doing very well. It's a sober living.
- [18:40]
A
Oh, like a rehab center type of deal.
- [18:42]
B
Exactly. So when people are getting out of rehab, they need a place to go live. And we're able to build website and, you know, the rent can run anywhere from, I don't know, $800 a month up to two or $3,000 a month, depending on how much luxury, so to speak, you want.
- [19:01]
A
This is for the person, not the sober living place paying you for the website, but for the.
- [19:05]
B
The.
- [19:06]
A
The tenant checking into the sober living place. Just wanted to clarify.
- [19:09]
B
Yes, correct. That is how much the tenant would pay. And so we do SEO on those sites and we're able to feed those leads to sober living facilities, and they're very grateful for that.
- [19:19]
A
Got it, got it. Okay, so we've got 10 of these built out, but how many of them are rented out or making money at this point?
- [19:25]
B
3 and 4 if I close one tomorrow.
- [19:30]
A
So yeah, yeah.
- [19:32]
B
So it takes a little while, you know, to kind of get going. We've been at this five, six months. But it's n to have them rent it out. And then also I have others in the pipe that you just never know when they're going to take off. Right. And that's why I like to kind of diversify, do different niches in different cities and then work with different kind of business owners.
- [19:53]
A
All right, well, fingers crossed for you. Yeah, well, the beauty of it is they cost you next to nothing to build. It's like this upfront research phase and business development phase of trying to find the right tenant, so to speak, the right client for it. But then once it's up, it's like relatively hands off. Doesn't cost a ton of money to build a website. Let's get into that process here. Talk me through kind of the domain selection all the way through building out the content and then we'll get into the marketing stuff.
- [20:20]
B
The domain selection is usually, it depends. Right. Some of these we cover Large areas. Right? Large areas of a state. And so we'll pick something that coincides with that large area in that state. But most of the time you're selecting a. Whatever the city name is and then whatever the niche is, let's just say it's BostonGraveldriveways.com right? So you want to select something that's very specific or that's what works for us, at least selecting something that's very specific. That way when people are looking for that particular term, it'll come up in the search engine. So that's the domain selection.
- [21:02]
A
Can I pause and say, like, if there are fewer service providers or a more sparse population, is that when you have to go a little bit broader? Like the example would be, well, you could do Seattle gravel driveways, or you do like pnw, like Pacific Northwest, you know, something that would encompass the whole region versus just like Seattle metro.
- [21:21]
B
Well, there's upside and downside to that, right? If you have something that is very, very small niche and you want to hit Seattle, whatever the niche is.com that'll work. However, most of these niches, right. If you're going into a subur, for example, where I live in the Dallas area, like if you go a little bit north, people are going to be searching for gravel driveways in Prosper as opposed to gravel driveways in Dallas, or they're going to be searching for gravel Driveways in Salina vs. Gravel Driveways in Dallas. And so that's where it helps to be a little bit more specific. Now here's what you can do, right? Let's just say you go to gravel driveways in Prosper, a small suburb. Well, then you can build out pages, though, that are associated with that. They say we serve these areas, but it's not like you can just put service areas and write down the name of the city. What you got to do is you got to be really intentional about that page that you're building out for, let's just say Dallas. If you say we serve these areas well, you got to build out a page that has landmarks in Dallas and you just got to be real intentional about what that page looks like and then link it back to the homepage and then you will start to come up in the ranking.
- [22:39]
A
Okay. Sending all sorts of signals and probably it makes sense to target the broader population area. I don't. That would be my hunch. And then, and then kind of, you know, have little sub pages for the suburbs or, you know, these other surrounding areas.
- [22:51]
B
That's it exactly.
- [22:52]
A
All right, so let's go to this Boston gravel driveways example. What we got this, we got this killer exact match domain. What comes next?
- [23:00]
B
So now you're going to build out the site and basically Google's looking for four things when they're ranking you, Right? Number one is the design of the site. When I say the design of the site, does it load fast? Is it technically sound? Does it adjust well on mobile and desktop and all those things? Then the second thing that they're going to look for is the content. And when I say content, what they're looking for is something that stacks up against the competition. It can't just be one AI page or anything like that. It's got to answer questions like how much does it cost? How long does it take? What comes next after this? Where can I find just all the who, what, where, why sort of questions in the FAQs on that particular site? Right.
- [23:42]
A
Okay. And at this stage, do you have a partner in mind where you can kind of almost interview the founder and ask those types of questions for how much does it cost or how long does it take? Because it's like, if I'm coming in, I don't know the first thing about gravel driveways. Like, I don't know how to answer these questions.
- [24:01]
B
Well, sometimes we do, sometimes we don't. But it just takes research. Right? You can find out all that stuff by just getting on either ChatGPT or just doing a search on Google. You could figure out what all the FAQs are. Then the other thing that we like to do is go to a competitor that's in that area and see what's on their site and see what those questions are like and see how they are answering those sorts of questions.
- [24:26]
A
Got it. Okay, so design, content, what's next?
- [24:29]
B
Citations. Right? You got to have citations. Citations are things like Yelp, White pages, Yellow Pages, Angie's List, thumbtack, et cetera. Right. You have to be listed out, and you have to list out the. What they call the. The nap. I know, I've heard you talk about that before. The name, address and phone number and all that stuff has to match exactly with your Google. My business profile. And so you want to have those now, I use a service called Babe. Citations. Babe is what it's called.
- [24:59]
A
B, A, B, E. Yeah, B, A.
- [25:01]
B
B E. Citations, Babe. And the reason I use them is because they will write, and this is what's important. You have to have a unique description of each of these citations. You just can't copy paste the Same thing into every description because that'll hurt your rankings. So I use citations, babe. Gosh.
- [25:19]
A
I mean, that's the easy button. It's like, hey, the description is the description. Our businesses, you know, we were founded in 1997 by, you know, the third generation. I remember Luke saying this. He's like, don't just copy and paste. Like it's going to hurt you in the long run. Yeah.
- [25:32]
B
And they will make you over 200 different citations. A lot of people say, okay, I can do citations. And then they do four or five. And there's nothing wrong with that. Four or five is better than nothing. But the more citations that you have, the better. And then the last part is the backlinks.
- [25:47]
A
Okay.
- [25:48]
B
There's so many different ways to do backlinks, right. You can buy them, you can do blog comments. I like to do what is called A. And Luke taught me this. It's a competitive link acquisition. Basically you go out to all the competitors, you see who they are getting for links and then backlinks. And then you go out and you reach out to all those organizations to get it. So backlinks is a challenging task. Everyone deals with it. We all want the good backlinks, but it just takes, takes a little bit of side hustle. It takes some elbow greases is what it comes down to.
- [26:21]
A
Are you able to create your own Google? My business listing for gravel driveways. Boston, when you're not in Boston. I've had heard that it's like we're going to send you a physical postcard and you got to, you know, do a video walkthrough of your facility. Like it's become more and more challenging to get verified.
- [26:39]
B
It is challenging, but there are ways around it. Just got to kind of know how to work the system, so to speak. Sometimes we've gotten denied on the first try, but then we'll get accepted and then we'll appeal it and get accepted on the third try. And sometimes they actually want video verification and that's where you do have to work with a partner in the area, say, hey listen, you know, can you go out to the facility? You know they're going to want to film you or you know, they're going to want you on a video so they can confirm this is a real business in the area.
- [27:10]
A
Okay. So the four elements that Google's looking for were design, content, citation, and backlinks.
- [27:16]
B
That's correct.
- [27:17]
A
Anything specific on the backlinks? I like this competitor trying to snipe competitors links and get them pointing Back to you. Anything else that you found effective on that front?
- [27:26]
B
Yeah, so I have actually. So I'm looking at some of our spreadsheets right now, and when we're doing backlinking, it's not as straightforward as you would think it is. In other words, when you're backlinking, you don't, you don't want to just go have everything go to the homepage every time. Right. And you want to use a. Sometimes it goes to the service pages, sometimes it goes to the homepage. And you want to spread it out to make it look as natural as you possibly can. Right. When you're working with these different companies. And so that's what you do on the backlight. And you want to make sure that the anchors are varied. Okay. In other words, what I mean by that is you want to make sure that sometimes you're using the URL to the. To your page to where It's a naked URL. And what I mean by that is there's no www.on the front of it. Sometimes you're using the HTTPs in there and you leave the S in or you take it out. Sometimes you want to just use a keyword or an anchor word. And so there's different ways to do it, but that's really what you want to do. You want to have a combination of blog comments, forms, you want to have a guest post. If you can sometimes work with haro, people do that. I've not had a lot of luck with it.
- [28:47]
A
Okay.
- [28:48]
B
And then there's different ways to work it in terms of getting trust circles with people that you know. So that's a little bit about backlinks.
- [28:56]
A
Okay. And speaking to anchor text really quick. This is like the underlined text on the other website that is linking back to you. And it looks. Starts to look real suspicious if 100% of your backlinks all say Boston gravel driveways. And, and it's like, wait a minute, this, this looks like you're trying to manipulate the, the search rankings. And Google says, no, no, no, no, not allowed.
- [29:14]
B
That's right. Yeah. So you want to vary it up.
- [29:16]
A
Okay, very good. Okay. So we've got the website built out. The, you know, it's starting to climb in the ranks. And now the, the calls are coming in. If we don't have a tenant in place now we gotta go find that provider. What does that conversation look like? Because I have to imagine and they get calls promoting local marketing service all the time, but you're coming at it with kind of a Unique angle of we have this asset, we have this digital real estate. Would you like to rent it out from us? And maybe that helps cut through the clutter. It was a different pitch. John's response, plus how much he's charging companies to rent out these sites. And the unexpected new side Hustle conversations with prospects led to coming up right after this foreign nick at side Hustle Nation. Sorry I'm unable to take your call right now, but if you leave a message, if that's what your customers are hearing, you're leaving money on the table. You fought hard for those leads. You need a phone system that keeps up and helps you stay connected 24 7. That's why I'm excited to partner with OpenPhone for this episode. OpenPhone is the number one business phone system that streamlines and scales your customer communications. It works through an app on your phone or computer, so no need for a second phone or a landline. And here's what's really cool. With OpenPhone, your team can share one number and collaborate on customer calls and texts, just like a shared inbox. That way any teammate can pick up right where the last person left off, keeping response times faster than ever. See for yourself why over 60,000 businesses trust OpenPhone. And right now, OpenPhone is offering Side Hustle show listeners 20% off for your first six months at openphone.com Sidehustle that's O P E N N P H O-N-E.com Sidehustle and if you have existing numbers with another service, OpenPhone will port them over at no extra charge. OpenPhone. No missed calls, no missed customers.
- [31:13]
B
Yeah, and you know, there's no way to really script, if you will, the conversation. But what I will do is I'll say, hey, listen, I'm, you know, my name's John. Let me be real upfront with you. I've got this lead here, right? Somebody just called me. They want a 700 foot gravel driveway and I'm looking for a person to work with in the area. First of all, have you ever gotten leads from other companies before? And they'll say, yeah, you know, I work with a lead gen site and you know, you have to have a little bit of finesse. You know, fortunately, I've got a background in sales, but it's just about exploring that conversation. Ask them questions. You know, you ask things like I talked about it earlier, are you advertising right now? How do you get your leads? Are you satisfied with that? Are you getting enough work? And then you say things like, if I should have Given you these leads, could you even handle the influx of leads that are going to come in? I mean, are you prepared to scale or should I go work with somebody else? You know, you, you just have that conversation, you see where it goes and it really is, it's a trust and you got to build that relationship with them.
- [32:20]
A
What's a typical price per month or how do you structure the, the, the rent, so to speak, for the websites?
- [32:27]
B
Yeah. So what you're going to do is you, I mean you basically kind of figure out how much they're making per lead on there. Right. And it's going to be different for a gravel than it is for an interior painting site because most of the interior paintings they're not going to have as much margin and it's going to cost less for them to actually sign up a lead. Okay, so, or I mean what they're going to make off of it is less than you would for a gravel driveway. So you have to go in, you got to do a little bit of math, kind of figure it out. You have to talk to them, you have to ask them what's your margin on this? How much are you making? And just use your gut on whether they're telling you the truth. And you can always go to Google and just say how much is a gravel driveway usually worth and what's the margin there that you know, companies make on it? How much does an interpending job usually cost? And then you kind of go backwards from that and figure out what is a lead gonna be worth to them. You don't wanna gouge them. You want them to have this forever. And I want them to have like a, you know, a 10 times return on exact on what they're earning from paying me. So they'll keep paying me throughout the years.
- [33:30]
A
Yeah. Are you comfortable sharing like, oh, the first one was 500 bucks. So the first one was a thousand bucks, something like that.
- [33:36]
B
The first one, believe it or not, was actually 300. I just wanted to get something on the books. Then we went from 500 and then we went to a thousand.
- [33:44]
A
Nice. That's great. That's like really exciting. And so far, I mean it's early, but so far no churn in terms of sorry we're booked up or sorry it's not working or you know, whatever, now we got to go find somebody else.
- [33:54]
B
That's correct.
- [33:55]
A
Okay, very cool. I imagine if it's working, the customer lifetime value here has got to be really high where it's like as long as we keep doing the business, business. As long as this sticks at the top of Google and the leads keep flowing in, yeah, absolutely. We'll keep paying this. And it just becomes part of their marketing budget where it's like we have outsourced our marketing to John. Right. And said this is not something we have to worry about. But all of a sudden we have a local SEO expert in our camp who's doing this for us. Right.
- [34:23]
B
My job on the back end is to continue to add some backlinks and continue to make sure that the content is fresh, maybe add some additional content, just kind of keep up the website if you will. But after it's all built out though, it's a pretty easy upkeep.
- [34:41]
A
Yeah. Do you have a rule for like, well, every month I need to have a new article or new website or something like just to keep it. I kind of tend to agree. Where Google tends to award recency, where it's like it just shows a signal, hey, this is still active, it's being actively managed. They're still running the business. And so we want to keep at the top overall.
- [34:59]
B
We want to add two to three articles on it per month just to kind of keep it at the top of Google's radar.
- [35:04]
A
All right. Are you sick about writing about gravel driveways at this point? Like, how much is there to say about this?
- [35:10]
B
Well, okay, so I got a little secret for you here. Okay. So me and my wife work together, right. And basically she is the one that's doing all of this work in the background. I have a full time job that I do in the, in the daytime and I do some of this nighttime and weekend. But yeah, we've learned about all sorts of industries that we never thought we would learn about.
- [35:32]
A
Okay, to what extent are you relying on AI to rewrite these citation descriptions to write these blog posts or these articles? Like, what's, what's the role of AI in this business?
- [35:46]
B
Yeah, that's a good question. So that's come up a lot lately. I would say like even a year ago, before we started this, we were writing some blogs about other things. My wife's always been creating websites. AI was a, like a nutrition. No, no. Right. And Google's going to check it. They're going to find out if it's AI and all that sort of stuff. So what we do now is you have to use a particular prompt. Right. It's not as easy. You just can't say write a article about gravel driveways. You got to be real specific about what you want them to Write about. And then you take that and basically you finesse it, right? You make sure you humanize it. You take the AI out of it, you add to it, you subtract from it. You just got to kind of give it that once you over. But we do use AI. And as far as the citations though, like I said, I'm outsourcing all that.
- [36:36]
A
Okay, so we've got citations, babe, we've got CallRail for call tracking and phone numbers stuff. We've got ChatGPT, we've got Semrush or Ahrefs for your initial keyword research. Any other tools in tech that you swear by in this business?
- [36:52]
B
The other tool that I use on a consistent basis pretty much every day is magenta. That's for the backlinks and to see what the trust flow is of the sites. You want your site to rank higher and higher with backlinking and getting good content on the site. We're hoping that the trust flow goes up in Majestic.
- [37:11]
A
Okay, interesting. I haven't heard Majestic in a while. So cool to see that they're still around. Talk to me about the side hustles on side hustles here. The accidental local SEO work that has kind of spun out of these contractor conferences, right?
- [37:25]
B
So what we were really not expecting this entire time was to do any SEO work, right? I just wanted to build these out, run them out. But in the meantime, people kept coming to us as we were having these conversations with them and they were saying, hey, listen, we're not sure we want a lead generation site, but we would love for you to do some work on our website. So we started doing some local SEO and now we have like five or six paying customers on a monthly basis for local SEO work. What we end up doing is writing a lot of good content because we've learned. I say we. My wife, God bless her, she has learned how to do it very well. We work with people on their Google business profiles. Some people never even have a Google profile. Google Business profile. They don't know how to get it. And once they have it up, we optimize it for them. Right? We'll do some post on it. We teach them how to get reviews. We do what you call reputation management is the big word nowadays, but it's basically just helping people with their Google business profile. I mean, the key though is writing that good content to where Google is going to rank you and you have some very detailed content and they're looking to you for the answers. When people put in a particular search.
- [38:42]
A
Term If I look like for reputation management, Dallas or something, does town rank SEO show up? Or how is that how people are finding you?
- [38:48]
B
That may be one of the keywords we're ranking for. I should have my wife here explain to them.
- [38:53]
A
That's okay. Or is it, like, does it stem from. From those proactive, outbound.
- [38:58]
B
Yeah, it stems from all the conversations. It's all the cold calls. Right. It's all the cold calls. It's people that have a conversation with them and they say, no, we need some SEO work. Like, one of our first clients on the SEO side are movers. Right. Actually, as my daughter moved recently and I hired some movers and I started talking to them about how they were doing SEO. And they said, well, we really aren't. And I looked at their website and. And it was really bad. And they liked us and they trusted us, and they said, hey, would you be able to build us a website? Which is. Sure, you know, so we built them a website, we got them on a monthly subscription, and now we're working for them. In fact, my wife was just showing me right before I came down here, their website is, like, ranking really high for the keywords. Now, one of those sober houses that I told you we were writing for, we looked at that and, you know, it's magical if you know what you're doing. And once again, I did not create this method, and it's Luke. We're just kind of following his method. If you create the right content and you get the citations and you get the right backlinks, you can really do some incredible things.
- [40:09]
A
Yeah. We did an episode recently where we kind of talked about local SEO as one of the last frontiers where Google still wants to show you local companies instead of an AI answer, it's like, this is, you know, still really viable and still really valuable for local businesses to get discovered and get. And get business from. What are you charging for the, like, the moving company for, like, the subscription? Local recurring retainer.
- [40:34]
B
Yeah. So they were one of our first. So we charged $500 a month, and we're getting to where we can definitely charge a little bit more, and we may begin to charge a little bit more, depending on the demand. However, we want people limited for the long term. Right. And they know they're talking to somebody, you know, in the United States, and we're doing good work and we're showing them what we're doing, and we have quarterly meetings with them. And, you know, we're not a large organization, but we can definitely help people rank and so that's, that's what's going on with the, the movers.
- [41:08]
A
Do you see a path where this becomes a full time thing for you?
- [41:12]
B
Yeah, so we do. You know, it's definitely full time for my wife. I mean, it's what she's doing on a day to day basis. And we just, like I said, we really just started trying here, if you will, like back in February. And we can already see it picking up. And so the long story short is, yeah, I do see where this could be full time.
- [41:31]
A
Okay. All right. It's really interesting. And this has come up over and over again where opportunities become visible once you're in motion. It's like you're sure long term goal. We'd love to have this passive portfolio of rental sites just right, you know, raking in the kitchen cash. But in the meantime, if people want to hire us for this more active agency type of consulting, freelance type of work, hey, I'm not going to turn it down. Because it's like we almost got paid to build these skills.
- [41:57]
B
That's it exactly. Like I told my wife when we started this, there's very little downside in terms of capital. I mean, you know, if you're starting a brick and mortar building and you got to hire employees and do all that stuff, you know, you're really rolling the dice and it may work out, it may not work out. And really all we did was take some training, figure out these skills. We're already in the black. We're made more money than what we spent to start this with. And so now it's all kind of profit from here. We just got to figure out how to be more efficient about things and serve our customers better.
- [42:30]
A
And it's one where you can keep stacking on sites. The incremental time to manage each one is relatively low. I think that's pretty exciting.
- [42:40]
B
That's it exactly.
- [42:41]
A
Anything you would do differently, I mean, it's only been, you know, since February, but anything you would do differently. Starting over.
- [42:46]
B
When I first started here, the biggest challenge and what was both my wife and I felt overwhelmed with what had to be done to get up to speed. Right. We could see it in the distance, but we got sometimes caught up in the weeds. If I were to kind of go back and teach myself at that time is like, hey, just take this one day at a time, do the next right thing, learn this piece by piece by piece and the results will take care of themselves.
- [43:18]
A
Yeah, I'm with you there. It was like break you down. Into the next logical step. And it can be really hard because you're like, I know there's a hundred steps. And I only. Right now, I am only knowing with reasonable degree of confidence. The first, first three was helping my friends. They were, like, adding a garage to their house. And I'm up there helping them. And we're at the stage of, like, there are tools strewn about their entire property. I'm, like, tying rebar. There's, like, half of a stem wall built, and the path to turn this into a completed garage is so far in the distance that I'm, like, stressed out for them. But to their credit, they're just like, okay, the next thing we're gonna do is frame this little section and, like, okay, we're going to keep chipping away at it one step at a time. It's like, that's something that always stood out to me. Yeah, it's true. We've got Town Rank SEO. You've got this portfolio of different local sites that are building and slowly ranking, and a handful of them are already monetized. What's next for you? Where do you want to go with this thing?
- [44:16]
B
I want to have 10 to 20 of these sites rent it out, keep it on autopilot, if you will, and then be able to invest in other things like real estate and possibly other businesses. And so that's really where I would like to take this eventually. And I want to have something to pass on to my kids at some point. Right. Just to be able to say, hey, look, if you build this from the ground up and take care of it, this is an asset. And you can do the same thing.
- [44:44]
A
Yeah, absolutely. It can become an asset once you get the cash flowing in and kind of the systems in place. Absolutely.
- [44:50]
B
Yes, sir.
- [44:50]
A
Well, John, this has been awesome. Again, townrankseo.com, you can find them over there. Let's wrap this up with your number one tip for side Hustle Nation.
- [44:58]
B
Be consistent. Consistent. And don't be afraid to fail. Right. Like, what I did in the beginning is I wasn't consistent enough, and I just had to not be afraid to fail. And you just had to be consistently putting in the work. And the other thing is that I would say if you're trying to rank locally, you want to write unique and engaging content to help Google find you very good.
- [45:23]
A
That consistency comes up over and over again, and there's something to that. I find I am very, like, streak mode motivated, where if I do my meditation or journaling habit, and this is the whole James Clear thing. You're okay to skip once, don't skip twice. That's your new habit now. But I'm very motivated by streaks. And you mentioned the sobriety thing. It's like, okay, it was dry January, then it was dry February. If you keep that streak going, it becomes kind of motivating. Or I'm trying to do a bunch of pull ups every day. It's like, okay, did I do my 42 pull ups today? It's motivating to keep that streak going and even if, if it's something really small. But you know, Jerry Seinfeld talks about don't break the chain. You know, do that little thing every single day and really, really can pay off and start to compound in a side hustle like this. So the biggest kind of note that I took was having these honest conversations with business owners and saying, how are you getting leads today? You know, do you have the capacity to handle more what's struggle with your business right now? It's like, here's the skill set that we can bring to the the table. How do we make this a win for you? Right? And just having those open, honest conversations and trying to build that trust to be their outsourced local marketing department in a way. Again, really cool stuff. Townrank SEO.com we did mention Luke Vanderveer. That was episode 448 and website rental coaching.com SHN was the referral link that he gave me. I also put together a free listener bonus for you. It's 50 rank and rent niches to kickstart your research. We about talk talked about painting and gravel driveways and all sorts of other potential ones. So we got a whole list for you there. You can find that in the show notes for this episode. Just follow the link. Good.
- [47:02]
B
I may have to download that myself.
- [47:04]
A
There you go. Get some more going. Head on over there. That'll be a free download for anybody listening. And the other episode that we mentioned was Meow rios. That was 597. So if you like this business model, get a couple other perspectives and go tune into those in your arm archives. Big thanks to John for sharing his insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. Side hustlenation.com deals is where to go to take advantage of all the offers that our sponsors have put together for you. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. So fire off that text message. Fire off that Instagram dm. Hey, I think you got to check this out. I think this will be right your alley. Until next time. Let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the side Hustle show. Hustle on the.