How to become the "King (or Queen) of Digital Real Estate" with Nick Wood

0:02Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network with great shows like Content is Profit. Today, we'll be breaking down how to become the king or queen of digital real estate. To draw these value bombs, I brought Nick Wood into EO Fire Studios. Nick is the king of digital real estate. He is the founder and CEO of Digital Landlords, a thriving online course community that teaches hundreds of students worldwide how to create an online side hustle that is resulting in life-changing passive income for many of his members, with many of his students earning from$10K up to$45K per month through his curriculum.

0:45In today's foundation, we'll talk about what digital real estate is, how you can turn it into passive income, the three key points for a successful lead generation within this, the difference between a good salesperson and a bad salesperson, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Nick and our sponsors. Business Made Simple, hosted by Donald Miller, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Business Made Simple takes the mystery out of growing your business with episodes like how to get out of your day-to-day operations without crashing your business.

1:19Listen to Business Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts. Is this your year? Visit thrivetimeshow.com to see testimonials of how Clay Clark's business coaching has helped over 2 ,000 entrepreneurs to dramatically increase profitability. It's month to month and less money than an average minimum wage employee. Schedule your free consultation today at Thrivetimeshow.com. Nick, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What is going on, Fire Nation? I am excited to be here. Something that I would mention as something that I believe you need to do to be successful is always leave meat on the bone.

2:09Don't always be looking for the best deal necessarily. Look at it from a long-term perspective because if you're going to be in business, you're going to be coming back again and again and again. So Fire Nation, as I mentioned during the introduction, we're talking about how to become the king, or if you're a female, the queen of digital real estate. And I want to start, Nick, by just breaking it down. What the heck is digital real estate? And how could a person turn that into passive income? So digital real estate is just like physical real estate in that we build properties, we build assets, or we buy them or we create them.

2:51We then rent them out to tenants. The only difference is it's online and our tenants are our business owners. So we build very simple websites that generate phone calls. And then we take those phone calls and rent them out to local business owners, making passive income for our assets. Simple. Very simple, Fire Nation. And we're going to keep diving into this whole topic because there's so much to uncover within this opportunity. So what is rank and rent digital real estate? And why is it the best business model on the internet? The term digital real estate recently has been kind of used loosely in a lot of different industries, and a lot of different things with the metaverse with Bitcoin with all kinds of different things.

3:37When we say rank and rent digital real estate, we are literally building websites, ranking them, and then renting them out. That's the rank and rent. And it's the best business model, not because I say it, but find me another business model that checks all the boxes that's scalable the way this is, that has assets. That's the big one. It has hard assets that you own, you control. You could do it from anywhere. It's recurring. It's recession resistant. It just checks all the boxes that many of these other business models are missing one or two of these key pieces. And that is why I truly believe it's the best business model on the internet.

4:13And you were able to move to a pretty interesting location. I won't personally out you, but I mean, I will say Fire Nation, it's very unique. I actually don't know a single other person living there because you're able to run your life, run your business and have your family along with you anywhere in the world, which is something that I love. I'm actually about to take a one month river cruise throughout the entire continent of Europe and as I'm sitting on my balcony watching the coolest and most awesome cities of Europe pass me by, I'll have my laptop on my lap and I'll be doing this and doing that when it comes to business, when it comes to work, making deals, chatting with people and it's just so amazing that we can do this from anywhere in the world.

4:59It's really exciting but let's kind of dive deeper into this because I am kind of really curious about this being the best business model on the internet. That's a bold statement, Nick. I need you to back that up with a little more fire. Amazing. Well, first of all, you can out me. I live in West Africa. I live in three towns, Sierra. Come find me, man. It's going to be a long ways. You got to get a lot of shots. You got to fly a long ways. So come find me. And I agree with you, John. It's 2023. I can't imagine being tied to one location. I spend at least a third of my time traveling before we made this move.

5:36I can't imagine being stuck to one place. I'm right there with you. And if you're listening to this and you don't have location freedom, it is far, it is the greatest freedom, even past the money part of the freedom equation. But yeah, let me back this up a little bit. Any business model out there, let's talk about some popular ones. We have drop shipping. Drop shipping is great. A lot of people do it. You do not own assets, right? You do not have a hard asset. When all is said and done, you are left with, what are you left with? Right. And I'm not, I'm not just going at dropshipping any of the models out there, affiliate, right.

6:11Um, you are at the mercy of the people that you are promoting their products to every single one of them has a chink in the armor. And I dare you to find a chink in this one. That's, I mean, that's really what it comes down to. When I was transitioning, I used to be a door-to-door salesman and I knew that I needed to get into something that was online that I owned and that was recurring. And I started, I made a list. I said, well, I need this. I need this. I need this. I need this. Scalability, assets, recurring, low barrier to entry. That's a key. Not a ton of cost up front. And this was the only one after looking at all the different models, looking at the FBAs, looking at everything that checked every single box.

6:55And so the way to back it up is just find me another one and I'm open about it. You find me one that beats this, I'll jump ship tomorrow. I've searched, I've looked, and I'm open. Shoot me a message or an email and I will gladly take a look, but nothing compares. I've seen students of mine and people in the industry come, they go with the shiny object syndrome, and then they come right on back because they realize how good this is. Let's talk about successful lead generation because it's so gosh darn difficult. So what are the three key points for successful lead generation? Number one, picking the right niche.

7:34Number two, picking the right city. And number three, picking the right business owner. And if you mess any one of those up, you are going to have a lot of extra stress, a lot of extra work, and it really won't work long term. And so maybe I could offer really quick. So a couple of tips on picking the right niche is no matter what business you're in, but especially in the lead generation methods that I use, which is ranking websites and selling those leads, you have to go into niches where it's high ticket enough that you can make money and they can make money. You have to go into niches that is phone driven, things where people come to your house to get an estimate.

8:15Those are the two big things. And they also have to have enough volume. If there's not enough volume in specific cities, there's no leads to generate. So that's the tips I'd give you on picking the right niche. You also need to pick the right city. You go into a city that's too competitive, you're never going to rank your website. You go into a city that's not competitive, but doesn't have enough volume, you're not going to get any leads. And if you don't pick the right business owner, I don't care how many leads you send them. I don't care how good and how much you over deliver business owners and customers will cancel if they do not make money from what you are giving them.

8:48If you're working with business owners and that's it. So So niche, city, and business owners, those are the keys, period. Okay, I like those keys. Now let's give a specific example filling in those blanks, either maybe from you, something that you've done, one of your customers, one of your clients. What does that look like? Let me give you a good example. A good example is a property that I own, an asset that I own in Bentonville, Arkansas. It's not a huge city. It's with the headquarters of Walmart, so it's growing. It's less than 100 ,000 people, so the city is correct. There's not a ton of competition there, but there's enough volume.

9:21So the city's correct, right? The service, the niche is concrete. Concrete checks the boxes. It's semi-high ticket,$2 ,000 to$10 ,000 and above. And it's also phone driven. Concrete people don't have showrooms. You call them and say, come give me an estimate. So the niche checks the box, the city checks the box. And I found a great business owner many years ago, three, four years ago, that is hungry to grow. He knows how to close deals. And I have been collecting from him$250 per week. That's a thousand dollars plus per month, every single month since early 2020. So we're going on, I don't know how many years and there's been no break in it.

10:09I haven't talked to him personally in eight, nine months. So that's a good example. A bad example would be, I thought that there was a niche called basement waterproofing that would be a home run. It's competitive. It's a good niche. It's high ticket, but it's competitive. And I chose the wrong city. And I'll give you an example of the wrong city that I chose. I chose to go into Atlanta, Georgia, a really big city. Competitive niche. It's too high ticket because it attracts big companies with big budgets. Atlanta is too big of a city. So it also attracts more competition. and that website, it cost me an arm and a leg to try to rank it to which, at some point I decided it wasn't worth the squeeze and I pulled out of the project and it wasn't worth it.

10:52So you have to get those things right and it's the difference between success and failure in this business model. Fire Nation, two great examples from a success side and a failure side. We're gonna talk about good salespeople. We're gonna talk about bad salespeople. We're gonna talk about being a digital landlord when we get back from thanking our sponsors. I remember back in 2013 when Entrepreneurs on Fire was scaling fast. And in those early days of our business, we sometimes found ourselves struggling to keep up because we couldn't find software solutions that were easy to use and that would grow with us.

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13:53See over 2 ,000 verified success stories and schedule your free 101 13-point assessment with Mr. Clay Clark himself today at Thrivetimeshow.com. Knowledge will not attract money unless it is organized and directed through practical plans of action. Become the next success story. Schedule your free 13-point assessment today at Thrivetimeshow.com. Nick, as I mentioned before the break, there are good salespeople. There are bad salespeople. What separates the two? Good salespeople eliminate objections. Bad salespeople wait for objections to come to them and try to overcome them. You can overcome an objection preemptively and I call it eliminating objection.

14:37I already know the customer is going to talk about price. I already know that there's, the objections are always the same, no matter what you're selling. If I know your objections are going to be price, trust, got to talk to my spouse, partner, et cetera, et cetera. I know the list, why don't I just overcome them before they get brought up? And for those of us that have kids or maybe have nieces or nephews or whatever, it's always easier when you sit down at dinner and say, hey, now you've got to eat your broccoli before I give you the dessert. But if you wait until that fight comes to you, you may or may not win it.

15:09So the thing that I've seen is when you look at it and say, I'm going to play offense, I'm going to attack and eliminate objections up front instead of waiting until they object and then try to overcome it. Night and day difference. Fire Nation, night and day. Be preemptive. I love that. Now, I want to get an example of both sides of this equation. Give us an example of a good salesperson. We get what you just said, but now again, let's kind of explain an actual situation where a good salesperson would do something, maybe a little role play. And then I want to do the exact same thing for a bad salesperson.

15:44Let's say that the objection, let's give it an objection of, I got to talk to my business partner, okay? Or my spouse, either one. So a good example, do you want to do an actual role player? Do you want me to - Sure, no, let's do it. You want to get the good or bad first? Let's do the good. Oh, actually, no, no, I take that back. Let's do the bad first because then that won't reveal the good yet. Okay. So the bad, I'll kind of have to explain it, but essentially if I were going to close a deal. I always use an assumption close. So I would say something like, okay, John, like I told you, I'm going to get you all these tree service leads in this city, Anaheim.

16:21You're going to get all of them exclusively. It's$2 ,000 per month. And all I got to do is grab a card from you. Are you an Amex or a Visa? Right. I go for the close. At which point you would come and you can go ahead and give me the objection. That sounds interesting, but I've got to talk to my wifey. Of course. Right. And so I can't even like at this point, this is a very difficult one to overcome because I let it come to me. In fact, there's strategies that you can use. I use a method called the feel felt found and I tie them down to make sure that that's the only objection. And we, I mean, that could, we could go an hour on just that alone, but it's, it's very difficult to overcome that objection because you've let it come to you.

17:01What are you going to say? No, you can't talk to your wife. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So here's how you do it correctly, right is let's say that we're on the phone what i like to do is before my call i do a zoom call or zoom close i would send you a video and i would show my screen i would explain a few things right kind of walking you through what our meeting is going to look like tell you that it's no big deal no pressure and i would say something like this in my video to you so john like i said four o 'clock tomorrow and just as a reminder as we talked about if you could make sure to have your wife since she is part of the business on the call.

17:36It'd be awesome because what I don't want to happen is for her to not be there. And then there's a situation where we're playing telephone and all she's going to hear is the price. And quite frankly, I'm looking for one business owner here in Anaheim and if it's you, great. If it's not, I'm going to move on. But time is of the essence. So if she could be on, that'd be amazing. If she can't, let's reschedule. Sound good? Okay. Thanks, John. I mean, that's all you got to do. And doing that lets you know, it completely eliminates that entire 20, 30 minutes or lost deal, period. And another thing you can go a step further and let them know, hey, I expect a decision at the end of the call.

18:15And you don't have to say it just like that, but in a very subtle way, you can let them know you're expecting a decision because you have other options. Fire Nation, I love that concept of what a good salesperson would do and what a bad salesperson would do. And of course, which side of the fence that you want to be on all about being preemptive. Now I want to end with a bang and really get deep and talk about what it means to be a digital landlord. Like let's make sure Fire Nation leaves our conversation today, having no doubt what this means, having no problem picturing themselves as the king or queen of the digital landlord space.

18:53So if I asked you, John, what does it mean? What is a landlord, right? If I asked you that, what would you say? I'd say somebody that owns a property that has tenants. So it's the same thing. You're a digital landlord. You are somebody that is online creating assets that you own and you have tenants that pay you passively. The name of the game is passive income, right? And it's this elusive, sexy thing that we always talk about, but how do we get it. And everyone, we've all read the Rich Dad, Poor Dads. We've all done this. We all know that real estate is a great vehicle, but there's that catch of, well, I need cash to buy real estate.

19:30And then I know there's the conversation of, well, you can get creative and you can do this and that and wholesaling. And I get that. But what if I could show you a way where you could go and do the exact same thing, make even higher returns, but without having to bring 20 ,000, 50 ,000, a hundred thousand dollars down or to the table. And you could have cash on cash returns that were literally infinite because you're using other people's money to scale. You tell me I was crazy and I would probably not disagree with you. And that's how I felt too until I got into this, but that's it. You are doing what you would do in the real world on the digital world.

20:04You're building assets. You're building these online properties that produce leads that you own, you control, and you are a landlord over them. And your tenants, AKA the business owners that pay you every month to rent them out and you collect passive income. And of course, nothing is 100 % passive. I will call it semi-passive. There is some upkeep, there is some maintenance. If it weren't, it would probably be a scam. But it is a fantastic business model that allows you to do exactly what you do with real estate online. Nick, what is the one key takeaway from everything we talked about here today?

20:38Digital landlord, successful lead generation, good salespeople, bad salespeople. Talk to us about the one thing you want to make sure that we get during our entire chat today. I think going back, this is maybe an extension of something we talked about, but when you mentioned being able to go on a month-long river trip, river cruise, and I'm sitting here in West Africa, and I guess what I would say is the biggest thing that you need to do is sit down and figure out what, be very clear and very transparent with yourself about what you actually want and what you want your life to look like in five to 10 years, because there's a lot of ways to make a million dollars.

21:24There's a lot of ways to make a million dollars a month, but if you're not careful about how you want that to look, what do you want your lifestyle to be? Do you want to be location, uh, freedom from location? Do you want to be able to work a certain amount of hours? Do you want to be able to make, like, you have to be clear on that. And most people, what I find is they say, Hey, I want to make X amount of money. Well, that's pretty broad. And what you're going to find is that if you're not very, very clear on it, then you're going to end up and wish that you had these different things. So all I would say is, thank goodness.

21:53I didn't have the foresight to, to, to even think that far ahead, but I got into something that allowed me to have all these things like location freedom. And so just do that and, And then match up whatever business model. Maybe it's this one. Maybe it's something else. But match up the business model that fits and allows you to achieve that vision you have of your life five to 10 years down the road. Rather than just saying, hey, I want to make X amount of money and leaving it open to chance. The more specific, the better. Nick, how can Fire Nation connect with you? Give us the best ways to do that.

22:24Give us a call to action of any kind. And then we'll say goodbye. Amazing. If you would like to just get a taste of, hey, this sounds really interesting. I'm wondering if this is something that I can actually see myself doing. I have a, well, first of all, I have a YouTube channel. Type in my name, Nick Wood and Digital Real Estate on YouTube. You'll find me. But I have a free training in which that will also lead there. The domain and the website is rent, R-E-N-T, simple, S-I-M-P-L-E, sites, S-I-T-E-S. rentsimplesites.com. It's a free training. It'll walk you through if you want to get started today, what are the steps?

23:05And that'll give you enough of a taste to say, hey, this is something that's interesting. And then you can start going down the rabbit hole. And it is quite an exciting one, I must tell you. But be careful if you click on that link because you may end. No, I'm just kidding. You know where it goes. Fire Nation, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with Ndubs and JLD today, so keep up that heat. For links to everything that we talked about, visit eofire.com. Type Nick in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. And Nick, one more time, what is that URL?

23:43rentsimplesites.com. rentsimplesites.com. Nick, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we will catch you on the flip side. Thank you. Appreciate it. Hey, Fire Nation. A huge thank you to Nick and our sponsors for sponsoring today's episode. And what about accomplishing your number one goal in 100 days? It's called the Freedom Journal. The Freedom Journal will help you accomplish whatever goal that you have within 100 days. And we're talking step by step. So just visit thefreedomjournal.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side.

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24:54Schedule your free consultation today at ThriveTimeShow.com.