693: Renting Out Websites? How to Build Recurring Revenue with Simple, Local Sites

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1:14You 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 countrankseo.com, John Michael, welcome to the Side Hustle Show.

1:51Thanks for having me, Nick. I absolutely love your show. I think it's fantastic. Yeah, I'm always excited to see your name pop across the inbox. You've been in the game for quite a while. But stick around in this one. We're going 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?

2:24It 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. What was the lead for, if you're comfortable sharing? Yeah, no, it was for 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. How fascinating. So you build up this website in the gravel and 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.

3:01And 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? 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 Vanderveer, 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 episodes.

3:33And 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.

4:08and 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.

4:55Okay. And that's, maybe that's a little bit down the road. That's like a great scenario where you're no longer, if I'm there, you just have a tenant where say for 500 bucks a month, a thousand bucks a month, whatever it is, you just, all 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 have the critical mass of traction and stuff to justify somebody, you know, signing up for that recurring service. But it's like, hey, as these leads come in, onesies, twosies, do you want to play ball? Like, would you be interested in buying these from me?

5:26That'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.

6:10I'm looking for one person to work with in the area. Would you be open to doing something like that? And then you just see where the conversation goes from there. This is maybe one of my question marks around this because it seems like in these blue collar type of service provider industries, right? 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 trying to find that person who has a good reputation is good at what they do.

6:44And yet is still hungry to continue to grow the business. Can you speak to that at all? 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. 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?

7:17Hey, well, it got denied. And so we had a whole conversation about 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 don't know anything about SEO or how to set up a website or anything like that. 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. I find a lot of my people that I'm going to work with in Facebook groups.

7:54I'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, I'm working in this industry.

8:25I'm looking for one person to work with. Would you be that individual? Okay. I like this Facebook group angle because this is how we found several different contractors. It's like in a lot of these threads, they might be a couple of 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. 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.

8:55They 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? Yeah. 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. Got it, got it. in these early stages when you're just selling them one-off before you have 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?

9:31Imagine this gravel driveway is a pretty sizable project. Right. So for example, what did I say? It was like 700 feet was going to be the gravel driveway, right? It was going to be about a$20 ,000 deal. And so 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.

10:05This 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 start 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. Yeah. 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 costs already is.

10:46And 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, 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 slash SHN was the referral link that he gave me for his program. I think it's kind of a little intro video there. And then now that episode was 597. One of the most popular episodes, I think it was last year, the year before we aired that one. But really cool. So she was focusing on some international markets like she was from New Zealand.

11:22And so it's like Auckland, New Zealand, driveway. way, you know, some, you know, very specific types of keywords. So does it make sense to start there on the city level and then go into the industry or their particular industries that you like kind of a lot of moving chess pieces here to kind of align up and put all together? 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's what Luke says is he recommends anywhere from 40 ,000 people to 400 ,000 people, right?

11:58You 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'm 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 and 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.

12:43Well, 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 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?

13:23Are 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. Yeah. Is there a rule for, like, imagine if the town is too small, well, there may only be one or two players there.

14:05Is that kind of a red flag? Like, well, there's a broader pool to try and do business with. 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, it's not going to be fruitful. Okay. Are you looking at the search volume around certain keywords as well? 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 Simrush or you go into any of the tools that are out there and you think, okay, gravel driveways.

14:49How many people are actually searching gravel driveways within the nation? And if you could see that they're searching, that there's a lot of search there where you're going to know it's 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. Okay. Are we talking like 100 ,000 searches a month? What's good here? Well, here's what you have to do. You have to use a combination of what you see in SEM rush, which doesn't know everything.

15:22And then you have to use your brain at the same time, right? Usually what I'm looking for is at least a thousand 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.

16:00They must be having some sort of but plumbers are needed here. And so you have to use kind of a combination of common sense and what you see in the search results. 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? 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's not the highest profit type of jobs, but you can get a lot of those leads.

16:40So you have to kind of balance that with how many leads per week am I going to get with the price of the job. 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. Are you still overpaying for wireless? It's time to say yes to saying no.

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19:10Just go to indeed.com slash side hustle show right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash side hustle show. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. How many of these sites have you built out at this point? Yeah, we've got 10 of them built out. 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 going to focus on this one city and build relationships with the business owners there? No, they're all over the place. I have retaining walls.

19:48I 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 niches, right? Oh, like a rehab center type of deal? Exactly. So when people are getting out of rehab, they need a place to go live. And we're able to Bill website. And, you know, the rent can run anywhere from, I don't know,$800 a month up to $2 ,000 or$3 ,000 a month, depending on how much luxury, so to speak, you want. This is for the person, not the sober living place paying you for the website, but for the tenant checking into the sober living place. Just wanted to clarify.

20:25Yes, correct. That's 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. Got it. Got it. Okay. So we've got 10 of these built out. How many of them are rented out or making money at this point? Three and four if I close one tomorrow. So, yeah. Yeah. So it takes a little while, you know, to kind of get going. We've been at this five, six months, but it's nice to have them rented out. And then also, you know, I have others in the pipe that you just never know when they're going to take off, right?

21:01And that's why I like to kind of diversify, like do different niches in different cities, and then work with different kind of business owners. 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.

21:36The 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.

22:19Can 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. Well, there's upside and downside of 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 suburb, 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.

23:05Or they're going to be searching for gravel driveways in Salina versus 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 that 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, we got to build out a page that has landmarks in Dallas and just got to be real intentional about what that page looks like and then link it back to the homepage.

23:52And then you will start to come up in the rankings. Okay. Sending all sorts of signals and probably it makes sense to target the broader population area. That would be my hunch. And then kind of have little sub pages for the suburbs or, you know, these other surrounding areas. That's it, exactly. All right. So let's go to this Boston gravel driveways example. We got this killer exact match domain. What comes next? 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?

24:27Is it technically sound? Does it adjust well on mobile and desktop and all those things? Then the second thing that you'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 and the FAQs on that particular site? Right. 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?