597: Website Rentals: The simple local websites that earn $1000/mo each

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1:16What's up? What's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show, part of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network because your nine to five may make you a living, but your five to nine makes you alive. In 2021, we aired an episode called Rank and Rent. And it was one of the most popular episodes of the year. And a 15-second summary of that side hustle is you create a website for a local service business like Dallas Carpet Cleaning. That's, I think, the example we talked about. You get it ranking well in Google, and then you rent it out to a qualified local service provider that is hungry for more needs.

1:51Now, today's guest is a side hustle show listener who heard that episode and took action on it in a big way. Since then, she's built out 45 of these local sites that once they have a tenant in place, so to speak, earn an average of$1 ,000 to$1 ,500 per site per month. From blackbirdseo.com, Meow Rios. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show. Thanks, Nick, for having me here. I am excited for this one. Stick around. We're talking niche and location selection for this rank and rent business. We're talking Meow's local SEO process and how to find reliable suppliers, because after all, those are the businesses that are paying the rent here.

2:31Now your listener only bonus for this week is a list of 25 niches that could be ripe for rank and rent. You can download that for free at the show notes for this episode at sidehustlenation.com slash meow. It's M-I-A-O. or just follow. Yes. Is that right? Yeah. Yes. Okay. M-I-A-O or just follow the link in the episode description and you'll get right over there. So where I want to start is, so you hear this episode with Luke Vanderveer, I think it's 448 rank and rent. And you say, okay, I'm gonna give this a shot. So three months in, this is crazy. Your site, first or second local site starts to gain some visibility and this local government reaches out and say, Hey, we need you a bit on this project.

3:15Can you talk about what happens now? Yeah, well, that was kind of a surreal experience. And there was a three month in one after I built a site. And yeah, like one day, I've just got a quote request saying that, hey, you're invited to this government tender project is demolish a building of a school. Yeah, that was at the Ministry of Education. So when I got this request. I was like, I have no idea how to even start the tender process. I don't know what to prepare. It just seems too big to do it. Yeah. You don't have a demolition company. I don't. I don't have anything. On your laptop halfway around the world.

3:52I know. I just built this site. So I reach out to Luke and I said, hey, look, I've got this lead. What should I do? Should I just leave it? I don't know what to do. Luke said, wow, you should go for it. I just got some sort of a confirmation, the confidence, maybe I should give it a go. So what I did is I reached out to a local contractor that of course is fully qualified. We actually probably spoken on the phone before. So, and he's all in on this project. And he did mention that maybe the chance of success is not that high, but we will give it a go. So I just actually, my English is actually not my first language.

4:28So my writing sucks. Imagine me submitting the government tender. So I have to hire someone, ask my VA to help me out to sort of tidy up all the document, lots of like safety or the thing. Like a kind of a formal process. Formal, yeah. It's very tedious. Having said that, I got it done and we sent me the application. And three months later, one day just out of the blue and boom, I received the email saying that, well congratulations you are the successful bidder for the school project for the ministry of education wow yeah and of course we did finish that project i think for that particular lead i got paid for over five thousand dollars just for that yeah that's really a cool story like creating something out of nothing and really a win-win for everybody because this company now got this big job that was big enough that they were able to pay you a$5 ,000 commission for sending them that lead.

5:30Now, is it typical to structure it as kind of like on a commission basis, you know, we'll pay you a percentage of the total billing or a flat fee based on whatever work we book? Or I think what Luke was describing was more like, look, 500, 1 ,000, 1 ,500 bucks a month. Like we'll just send you all the leads that we get through the site just to make it like easier, more consistent and like not have to track on a performance basis, all this stuff. So I do both. I prefer the flat fee. So actually majority of my website that I do a flat fee deal. It's just so much easier. There's no tracking. There's only a few sites I do commission.

6:04One is the demolition. Only because it's high ticket because each job could be over 100K per lead. And sometimes the sales cycle is super long because imagine if you have to demolish a building and that involves like a console consent, this connection or the service. It's just very, sometimes we can complete a job that the leads actually came in last year. So, and that's how long the sales cycle can be. So usually it's a lower volume, a higher ticket. So for that particular niche, I do the commission base, but the rest, absolutely. I do flat fee. It's just so much easier. Okay. Yeah. This is similar to, we did an episode with Link Moser, who was doing high-end lead generation for real estate agents.

6:55And the drawback was you had to have a real estate license to be able to legally earn a commission on those referrals. But it was similar. Like, hey, I don't need to do a ton of these because one multimillion dollar property could be worth $40 ,000,$50 ,000 in commission. But this is a way to kind of broaden that idea and no real estate license required. So it sounds like you like the demolition niche, something I never would have considered. What makes a good niche for the rank and rent model? I like something that's service-based that you don't have a storefront. Basically like a plumber, the concrete guy or roofer, you go to the client side to work.

7:34So it's not that people come into your office. So service-based business. The second one is I really like those high ticket type of work, like concrete, driveways, patios, earthwork, demolition, roofing. Nothing sexy, nothing sexy. But those niche work, they work. And that's because the value of these jobs is worth quite a bit to the service provider. And so they're just like, if we can get more leads in, if we can book up our calendar, then yeah, it's worthwhile. We'll just add this to our monthly marketing budget. Yeah, exactly. I've done the smaller niche, like handyman. I probably would not do handyman again.

8:15Having said that, I have a handyman site that's producing lots of, lots of leads and business has been with me since the beginning when I started business. So, and sometimes like a smaller niche, like a gather cleaning can be good because it's high volume so you get like a 60 to 90 leads per month but the thing with gutter cleaning is sometimes you start a job with gutter cleaning and you find out the gutter needs to repair the roof needs to repair the roof needs repaint so a small job can turn into a bigger job you just never know so but my personal favorite is still a bigger ticket niche do you like to go deep in one location or deep in one niche or like it's really a matter like trying to find the sweet spot of i'm going to do carpet cleaning in dallas and then i'm going to build out all these other niches for dallas or i'm going to go do carpet cleaning in 100 different cities there's two ways to tackle this so if it's a big city like with a population of a million and above, I like to go either niche down.

9:24So for example, if it's concrete, I don't do all concrete. I just specialize at certain type of concrete, either as a stem concrete or concrete resurfacing or concrete driveway. So you have to be the specialist in the service that you provide. I found you get a lot more success than just do something in general in the big city. Okay, the bigger the city, the more niche down. Yeah, so niche down for a big city. And if it's a big city, also you can, let's say for New York City, it's just too big. So you have to niche down to a different borough, like Manhattan or Brooklyn or Queens, Long Island.

10:03So yeah, either niche down to the specialized area or niche down to the local area. So that's a general rule. I found anything above 50K should work, the population-wise. I'm talking about 400K population-wise seems to be a very sweet spot. So it's not too big city. Your local competition is not that strong and you have enough volume. The population produce enough leads, enough search volume that is going to help you to rent the site out. Okay, cool. And I swear I was on Wikipedia at one point. Like, here's a list of cities with population, you know, 100 ,000 to 250 ,000. Or you could probably just ask ChatGPT at this point.

10:44come up with this list for me and there's a potential starting point. Anything else that goes on? I'm trying to cross-reference these cities. Am I looking at the local competition yet or am I? Yes. One thing I'm doing, I'll just actually give you an example that just shows you the initial research. Sometimes it's not about what you provide, it has to be good enough, is about your competition. So I'll give you an example of two sites I've built. One is a, that's in Wellington, the capital city in New Zealand. And the data shows that the landscaping business has a huge demand, very high volume. The keyword difficulty is medium.

11:26So you have the local competition. So I thought, given that how much demand, I'm going to build a site for landscaping. A few months down the track, the site is ranking, However, the quality of leads and the number of leads are not great. So we're still producing the leads, but it's just not ideal. So what I did is I built a specialized. So I work at this landscaping company and they do all the paving, concrete, artificial grass, retaining wood, everything. And then what we did is we found the concrete driveway in the local area. There's no company just do concrete driveway. There's a lot of landscaping company.

12:08There's a lot of concrete company just does a very general contractor, but no company does concrete driveway. So I built a site for concrete driveway in Wellington and that site blew up. It's completely blew up. So what happens is this contractor, if a client wants a concrete driveway down in front of the house, sometimes they've got to do the backyard. They need a retaining wall again. They need paving work again. So it's finding the right market to get into, therefore dominate. So you're still providing the same service. However, it is extremely important to actually pick the niche that with very little competition.

12:48Interesting. So it was the landscaping company that was doing the driveways? Yes. So that's the same. It's the same company. The local landscaping company, there are a few big ones that have a good name. So they dominate the market. So it's very hard for someone small to medium business to just get into the market. Because when people think about landscaping, there's a big name out there. But if you change your arena to the concrete driveway, well, no company is doing that, like specializing that. So it's just really easy to get into. And you ended up getting all the landscaping work, but through the right channel.

13:22That's really interesting. Trying to find that back door, that side door into the place. Maybe it's number six on our menu of service offerings. But if I try to rank for general landscaping, it's really tough. But if I try and rank for concrete driveways, okay. Yeah, a different, just specializing it. Yeah. More with Meow in just a moment, including the tools she's using to evaluate the search competitiveness of a market and her local SEO ranking process right after this. Did you know there's a disease running rampant alongside hustlers and new entrepreneurs? It's called superhero syndrome. Symptoms include a feeling like you got to do everything yourself, thinking you're the only one who can do it right, and struggling to let go of certain tasks.

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15:52Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash side hustle. Go to shopify.com slash side hustle. Shopify.com slash side hustle. Are there any tools or metrics that you're using to kind of quantify that level of local competition? I use two tools. I use SEMrush. So I was looking at the keyword difficulty. even though on the data saying anything above 20, it is still rankable and it's still doable. It's super like a moderate, but I don't like to go to those niche because if I'm going to spend the same amount of time and money, I want to go for the easy target. So under 20 on the metric?

16:39Yeah, under 20. Is there a minimum search volume that you're looking at? Yep. I would look at the combined search volume to be 150 and above, at least 100 above. So let's say if it's bigger ticket niche, like a demolition, then I think 100 is enough. But for a small ticket niche, and I would looking at higher volume, probably 200, but maybe 150 combined keyword volume is a criteria. That's surprisingly low to me. Like, oh, only 100 people are searching for this every month. But if the jobs are$100 ,000, they're searching for it, a pretty well-qualified lead if it does come through. So that does make sense.

17:17Yeah, you don't actually need that much of search volume for a bigger ticket. Yeah, and maybe companies are ignoring it because it is low volume. And I'm telling you, the concrete driveway company, Wellington, sometimes the search volume is not really reliable, especially in a smaller country. Maybe in the US it's more accurate. that Wellington concrete driveway there's only 30 search volume as extremely low but sometimes you just have to use your intuition like looking at the city's population yeah it's impossible to have that low volume and something's wrong so just do it anyway so yeah there's value of ranking at the top of google in whatever small niche it is whatever small city it is like if you can get to the top good things can happen and so that's kind of the next phase of this conversation is like okay I find the niche and city and competitiveness combination that looks attractive.

18:10And then what happens next in terms of securing a domain and like building out that site? So we were talking about the keyword research and knowing your local competition. I believe that's the most important step. So I don't actually give this job to VA. I actually do this research part myself. The rest is pretty streamlined. So the next is you find a domain that is the most. I prefer to use the domain name that contains the keyword. So whatever the niche you're doing, if it's roofing, you would have the roofer or roofing, those keyword in your domain. So it's more of like a partial match of the niche you're doing.

18:47So you find your domain. And the city name too, or just the service? Yeah, absolutely. I make sure all the domain name contains the city name and the niche name. And I got to imagine for a lot of smaller towns, those domains may be more readily available or maybe they're cheaper on the secondhand market versus New York roofing or something like that. I got to imagine that's like super premium already claimed, but it's like wellingtonnzconcretedriveways.com, like probably available for 10 bucks or whatever. Yep. I'm surprised because every time I'm using that domain, trying to search for domain and it's always available and I was shocked.

19:24Why not? Yeah, that like never happens. Like all the domains I want are already taken. So that's a cool element of this niche or of this site hustle. Yeah, but the original country level domain is easier to get. Okay, so what happens next? Next, you get domain and I use WordPress. I felt WordPress is easy. I started with a Weebly, but when I decided to scale and I switched to the WordPress, I use a template and then you just upload a template, swap all the content, find the photos. Don't get any photos from Google because those photos are not, maybe have a copyright. So I make sure all the photos are either purchased from a photo stock website or they are copyright free.

20:08And then you build a site. I contract all the building part to my VA and she's really, really good. So she actually taking care of the building process. So you build a site and after that you create all the social media like Facebook, building the citation and just start a ranking process and i do have the people that help me with the link building making the blog comments building the backlinks that's all the technical part all right well let's unpack each of those steps because there's a lot there on the content side so your va is building out the content side like these are the services we provide like this is about the company what do you put on this page when realistically there's no company behind it yet.

20:46Okay. Yeah. What I do, actually, that's what I learned from Luke. I did not create this process. I just follow someone that's already had the result and started doing it. Now, in terms of content, I would basically found out all the local, like I would put a keyword in for that business and the city's name and collect the top 10 competitors that's already ranking well. and I pull the data into SEMrush and then get all the keywords in. Then you analyze it. For example, let's say stamped concrete or roof repair has a very good search volume and I will put that in as one of the service provide. So we create the content.

21:33It's worked out better that way. So I found lots of business, they like to write about how good they are, what they provide, but without knowing the market. So what we do here is we research the market, find out the service that's really highly in demand. People need it. Therefore, pick the one and throw it to the website. And yeah, and your website literally become a Wikipedia of everything people need to know about that business. Okay, so if I'm understanding this, it's looking at plugging my top five or 10 competitors into an SEO tool to see what content of theirs is already ranking. And like, what have they created content around?

22:14And then just trying to match that, like doing the same or better to build out this site. Yeah, and it's about finding the service that people are interested and lots of people searching for and have a relatively low difficulty to rank and throw all the business onto your site. Because you can say, okay, this competitor has offered a few services, but not others. But the other competitor has a certain service that this one doesn't provide. So your site becomes the Wikipedia. Your website becomes the one-stop shop for everything that people are looking for. Therefore, whatever the search comes to your site.

22:53You have to skip the about page where we're a third-generation family-owned company. And here's the picture of me and my dad. And we run this thing. You have to kind of leave all that stuff blank for the time. Yeah, yeah. Personally, I don't like to provide light. You can say you're a family, local family. You can say you're a locally-owned business. But personally, I don't want to put any information that's false. So I like to keep the website pretty generic unless I found a local contractor to work with and we can tailor make the content to be more specific to that business. Writing a story because a story, a personal branding always works better than generic content.

23:30But just to start with, something very generic would work. Yeah. And is there a call to action on the site? Book a quote, contact us now, you know, call this toll free number. what happens when somebody lands on the site? So very big call to action. So that's the whole point, right? You want to convert the clients whoever click into your website. So big numbers. So numbers on the top and I want to make sure every page because they may search you from, they may found you from a service page, not your homepage. So every page would contain a quote request form. So it's easy for the potential clients to just send inquiry to us.

24:10So definitely quote form, call to action, numbers, make sure every page have that so people can contact you. What do you use for the phone numbers and or the phone answering? There's a lot of phone company provider service. So I use Twilio and lots of people use Corel. I think there are just so many company provider service. You can get a virtual phone number and then just using that. And I would program the phone number and with a bit of a sort of a welcome to the business and press one to connect or press one for roofer. Yeah, you can program and make it look at least present like a real business.

24:52Okay, so you have like a virtual answering service would say concrete driveways, Wellington, how may I help you or how may I address your call or something? Yeah, so I just programmed the welcome message. In the beginning, I answer the phone call. So I just pretend I'm the office lady. I'm the reception. Okay. But you can tell like what site, because it's going to be probably a different phone number for all these different sites. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. Now I've got it. Yes. There's a functionality that you can set up what we call a whisper message. So if I get a phone call, I would hear a little whisper message saying new leads from Wellington language.

25:27Okay. Okay. So you know how to answer the phone. Okay. Otherwise, with a 40 site, I have no idea where is this caller coming from. But yeah, you can identify where's the caller coming from. Everything's tracked, recorded. It's easy. Okay. And then you have to become a very good actor or actress in saying, my guy who does our bids is out right now. Let me get back to you. Or sorry, we're booked up on that date. But so you kind of have a critical mass. Then you got to go find a service provider or supplier to go out and fulfill the work. Yeah. Sometimes there's a general rush. So like people are calling, oh, I've got this urgent job.

26:00Like, for example, tree. I have a few trees that, yeah, they need someone doing the job urgently. So I immediately have to drop everything I was doing and look for trying to find a contract that can provide this work. It's fun. Gotcha. Yeah. Because you don't want to get a bad review. I know. This person blew me off or they weren't available. Yep. It's so easy. Actually, yeah. People write bad reviews these days. More with Meow in just a moment, including her surprising link building strategy and how she connects with reputable suppliers for these services, the would-be tenants for these rank and rent sites, right after this.

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