Rank and Rent: $1000 a Month From Simple Local Websites

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27:16That's Quo, Q-U-O.com slash side hustle. Quo. No missed calls, no missed customers. Let's move on to finding a tenant for this place. So we've got the, you know, it's rank and rent. So we've got the rank part taken care of and you can do a deep dive on local SEO. Let's talk about the rent part. So you got to find a qualified local contractor who is good at what they do, but is hopefully hungry for a little more business. Right. Right. Yeah. First thing is when calls start coming in, I have the call tracking phone number forward to me. And I'm essentially just going to pretend to be the secretary.

27:56Somebody's going to call up for whatever it is. We'll stick with our carpet cleaning example. And they just call up and they're like, hey, this is Irving, Texas carpet cleaning. And I'm like, yep, this is Luke. How can I help you? And I just take down all their info. Then they're going to tell me all their problems with their carpets, all the stuff they need. I have their phone number from the system. And I'll get an idea of where they are, if they're actually in Irving or if they're somewhere else. I'm going to take that number down and I'm basically going to say something along the lines of, all of our guys are actually out doing estimates right now.

28:27Let me do this. I'll put you in touch with one of them. I'll have them call you directly in a couple hours. And they're like, okay, great. Thanks. We hang up the phone and now I'm going to take that lead and I'm going to go find a contractor to fulfill it. How do you know who's any good? So you can do a little bit of research with Google. I'm looking through to see if they have some decent ratings. You can check Yelp. I'd say look at the Better Business Bureau, but I know those can be manipulated, so that one's hit or miss. You can pay for better ratings. But I like Google and Yelp. Look at the stars.

29:00If they're anything lower than four and a half, I'm probably not even going to talk to them. I want those businesses that actually care about their customers and are going to do a good job because if they don't, it's going to get me some bad reviews on my website and then it's going to hurt my potential income from this. One of the ways to find people though is you go to Home Advisor or Thumbtack and I just fill out the form as if I'm the customer with this issue. And then at the end, when they want contact info, I just put mine. And then when that salesperson calls up from this carpet cleaning website or this carpet cleaning contractor, I'm just going to pitch them on using me instead of HomeAdvisor or Thumbtack for the leads and also give them this referral.

29:47Okay. So you can lead with value. Hey, I know you just paid on Thumbtack anyways. I know you just paid for this lead, so let me make it worth your while. But while I have you, here's the proposal that I'd like to make. Okay. Right. Yeah. Basically just you want some more these. That's all it is. It's something simple. I'm not going to try to tie them down with contracts and everything. Free leads value in advance for a few days so they can get an idea of what it's going to be like. Yeah. And they'll see the, they'll see the light. Have you ever run into the problem of like, well, you know, the companies you're finding are already well-reviewed on Google, on Yelp.

30:20They're like, well, do I need a duplicate listing? Do I need more exposure here? Like what's the, what's the appeal? Right. Yeah. It occasionally happens where we come across the business that, you know, they say we have too much or, you know, we can't handle it. And my response used to be like, that doesn't make any sense. Why wouldn't you just expand and hire more people? But some companies or some people that are running them just don't have the drive to expand. Maybe they're happy where they are. In which case, I'm just going to change tactics. I'm now going to search one of the keywords like carpet cleaning Irving.

30:52I'm going to go back, you know, 10 pages and go through all the companies there. Because I know for sure that they're not getting any calls. Okay. Yeah. If they still have, I don't know, it's like, do you need the, and that's a good question on, on your front. Like, do you need reviews for a non-existent service before you could start to rank? It seems like a weird chicken versus the egg thing. Yeah. I mean, so you'll, you'll have your, your new Google listing up, right? You're ranked now you're sitting number one in the maps, number one in the organic search and people see your business and it says no reviews.

31:25And they're like, eh, I don't know if I want to call that one. So that's going to hurt your call volume a little bit. Some people are still going to call, so it'd be okay. But what I'm usually telling the contractor is, listen, if you want to boost this even more and you want to really ramp up the calls that I'm sending you, I need you to take the next person you serve through this website and have them write a review on this Google My Business. I'll pay 50 bucks if you can get somebody to review it. And I don't care whether they do it themselves or if they want to have a friend review it or whether the person actually does some work and reviews it.

31:59I do need some kind of review on there just so people see that it's legit and that, you know, the service actually helps people. Gotcha. Because, you know, once it's in this other company's hands, once it's in the contractor's hands, their process may be to collect reviews for their own profile or their own Facebook page or something? Okay. I have to find a way to incentivize them to do it. And it's usually something I found a few different ways to do this. One would be, I will give them a discount on the rental fee for the first month if they get some reviews on there. Another one would be just to give them a business card.

32:39And on that business card, I would put a direct link to the Google My business profile and a, you know, a free contest run, run something like, you know, we'll give away a$200 gift card to somebody out of anybody who leaves a review. So then you have them give that out to everybody. Okay. And then, you know, you just pick somebody and give, you know, the prize away for one of the people who left a review and we've had a good success with that. Okay. So, you know, after you get somebody, Hey, here's, here's the pitch, you know, we're expecting, you know, based on this search volume, and maybe you ran it for the first month where the calls came to you, like, hey, if this month was typical, we expect five to 10 calls every month.

33:19And then just name a price. Like, what do you think those leads might be worth to somebody? Yeah. So I do a little bit of research on that ahead of time too. So generally when I enter a market and a certain niche, I'm going to look at what the average job is worth in that area. So, So I was just looking at this one. So plumbing in Albany, New York, average job is$365. And that's data provided directly from HomeAdvisor. So that's a multimillion dollar company. I know they've done their research and that number is legit. So now if this website is getting 30, 40 calls, I could just multiply the number of calls by the average job.

33:56I have the potential value that I'm sending. And then I just have to factor in how many this contractor is going to close. so in my conversation with them i'm asking them you know how many people are you going to close if i send you say 10 calls and 90 of the time they're going to tell me oh 80 90 yeah and then i'm going to push back on them and say give me the real number of people you're going to close because this is i need that information and then they'll be like oh okay fine like 40 50 okay and And that'll kind of let me come up with a general pricing guideline. Okay, fair enough. Across your portfolio, is there an average monthly rent for these sites?

34:39Yeah, it's around$1 ,000 a month. Somewhere between$900 and$1 ,000. A lot of the, if it's really, really low-hanging fruit, like super easy ones, and kind of a low-ticket item, they're usually going for like$500,$600. bucks. If it's a little bit higher ticket than 1 ,000, 1 ,500. And I have one guy that pays three grand. It just depends on how valuable that service is. It's really interesting. You can see how it wouldn't take too many of these to really make it, make it a full-time run at it, make a full-time income out of it. It's just fascinating why somebody would rent the site from you versus like building it on their own because you make it sound like, well, it's not that complicated to to do it or maybe it makes sense where it's like okay we can double dip our exposure versus i don't know it's just a weird it's a weird one where it's like i just run run google ads yourself or something like if you're really concerned with getting more leads it's weird like no we're gonna write this guy a check for a thousand bucks a month and we're just gonna get these leads book the business and we're not gonna worry about it yeah it's because you know like the ads and stuff or organic is always preferable because ads, people are being bothered, right?

35:50Somebody might need it maybe. So they'll call it right away, but ads are usually a bother and it's harder to close those people. The leads generally are lower quality, but if it's coming organic, it's kind of a different mindset for the customer because they're seeing you and they're looking at where you're ranked and they're like, wow, these guys are number one in this entire city. It must be for a reason. They just see where you're sitting and they're like, wow, they must be the best. So they call you. Sometimes they don't even question the price. So you can generally cherry pick the leads you want and price however you'd like, as long as it's within reason, if you're able to secure that top spot.

36:29What happens when the service provider that you've partnered with has a change in management, has a change in processes, all of a sudden they're not delivering the quality of work that you would like and maybe you get a bad review or just something like it's just not working out anymore. Like what's, I'm just curious about any horror stories, worst case scenario type of stuff. It depends on, you know, if the person is one, if it's something that can be fixed and you can keep them around, or if it's something where you're just like, okay, this person's got to go. You know, I had one of these recently.

37:03I have a restaurant cleaning service in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We were sending it to this guy for a few days just to basically trial it out. We probably would end up charging him around 500 bucks a month. On day three of free leads, customer called up. They're like, hey, we need you to clean it. And he's like, great, I'll be there tomorrow, 10 a.m. 10 a.m. rolls around, person never comes. Guy calls back the next day. And of course, I have all the recordings just listening to all this. and the guy's like, hey, you know, it's 1030, nobody's here. And the contractor that I was sending the leads to was just like, yeah, I'm not really interested in that and just hung up.

37:44And I listened to the call. I have a partner on some of these sites. I listened to the call. He calls me up and he's like, dude, you got to hear this one. And I was just playing it and I was like, why would you ever tell a customer that? That's your income. That's your livelihood. It doesn't make sense. So that was an instant like, dude, you're done. I just, I called them up. I'm like, I heard the last call with the customer. That's it. We're done. And then we just had to find somebody else. Yeah. It happens occasionally. There's nothing you could really do about that. You try to do your due diligence upfront, but people present a great front.

38:23You just got to test it out, see how it goes for a little bit. Yeah. Are most of these month to month? Or do you say like, I want a six month commitment, 12 month commitment? I do monthly. I know a lot of other people in the industry do six months, 12 months. But what I've found is that if you're doing a good job of providing leads, which if your site's at the top, it's just going to keep bringing them in. People generally don't leave as long as you're priced decently. I'm aiming for my contractor that I'm sending leads to to get a minimum 10x return. So if I'm charging them 500 bucks, I'm bringing them at least five grand in business, usually way more.

39:01So that way it's a no brainer to keep me around. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Make it easy for them. Make it money that they're happy to spend and keep spending. Right. Yeah. Cause then it's less stuff for me to do too. I don't have to keep looking for new contractors. I can just leave that one and move on. I just want to rinse and repeat the process and get another 20 sites out there instead of trying to get that extra 200 bucks for this site. Yeah. How long does somebody typically stay with you? Or I mean, you've been doing it since 2016-ish. Like if you had clients from the very beginning, or is there some turnover here, just like, you know, a regular apartment or rental house is going to have turnover?

39:39Since the beginning, when I first started, I have not, I've lost one contractor, a single one. He ruined my stats. I had a hundred percent rate until that guy ruined it. He basically like, It was a liquidation company he partnered with. Well, he essentially got acquired by a larger company. And that company just had no interest in continuing with lead generation. They were going a different direction. So we lost that person. I had to find somebody else. But it wasn't a big deal because it took us a week to replace it. And then I still have that income. Okay. So I've lost one person. It's just you got to choose people up front.

40:17Finding the right person is, you might go through a few just trialing out leads and trying to see who's going to work out. But once they start paying you, it's pretty much game over from there. That's really interesting. They're in it for the long haul. They're saying, hey, keep them coming. What kind of time does it take to manage after this initial content creation and local citations and this initial contractor outreach? It sounds like as long as the rankings hold, it's pretty hands off from there. But like you do anything to, you know, maintenance wise SEO, or if somehow you drop off the first page, like, oh, the call volume dropped, you know, how are you dealing with that to try and bump it back up?

40:56Yeah, I mean, I know how it's going to sound, but really not, not much time, maybe a couple hours a week on like maintenance type stuff. I might go in and make an edit to a site based on something a contractor wants to do. Or, you know, maybe I update a theme because the, you know, the plugins expiring or something. That's about it. In terms of ranking the site, once it gets there, it generally stays if you do the work correctly the first time. On the occasional time where there's an issue, you might have to do some more links to try to push your site up a little higher. Or worst case scenario, maybe your Google My Business page goes down.

41:35I had that happen for one of the first sites I started. I have a vehicle wraps website in Phoenix. Population's 1.6 million people. I was number one, number one. Now I'm still number one in organic, but my map listing disappeared because Google didn't like how I set it up, which occasionally it happens, but it's not a big deal because I can just go find another virtual office, send another postcard, and I'll be up and running again in a week. Okay. It looks like this carpet cleaning site is built on Weebly. Is that your go-to tech stack just for the site structure? For beginner, I would say definitely for ease of use, you know, Wix or Weebly.

42:18I personally like Weebly. It's super easy. Drag and drop everything. You know, you want to add a title to the page, you click on title, drag it over to the page. You want to add paragraph, you click on the little paragraph icon, drag it to the page. It couldn't be easier for a person who knows, you know, almost zero code like me. So, you know, the first bunch of sites were that. I built one, built it out how I wanted it. and then it has a cool feature where you can duplicate the entire structure of the website. So if you want to build, you know, nine more, the next nine are going to be really fast.

42:50You just duplicate the site and paste in new content. Gotcha. That's a, that is a handy feature. And I imagine there's WordPress plugins or something that will do the same thing like across different builders, but yeah, it saves you some, saves you some copying and pasting. Yeah, that's the, that's the easy route. So if you're a newbie, Weebly is a great one. If you're a little bit more advanced. You want to go the WordPress route. So that's the way to go if you really want to scale. So if you get to the point where maybe you've killed your job now, you've got enough of these, whatever you want to go, 20, 50, 100 sites, that's when you go to WordPress.

43:22You build out... I paid somebody to do it. I took a virtual assistant from the Philippines. I gave them my website and I said, I want you to recreate this with a free theme and then export it as a file so that every time I want to open a new site, I could just import it load the whole thing paste in content and go And I just trained va how to do it all for me. Luke. This is uh, fascinating stuff You know people are starting to do the math saying well, you got a portfolio of uh, a hundred of these things Averaging a thousand bucks a month in rent What motivates you to keep building keep growing?

43:54I imagine it's like a pretty nice. Uh, I mean Even beyond just a lifestyle business is a pretty substantial operation here. What's what's going on for the rest of this year? What does the future hold? So I will say, just for clarity purposes,$100 ,000 a month is a lot of money. It's not that high. 30 % of the sites are rented out. 70 % are in the ranking process. Somewhere page one, like bottom toward, or like page two, working my way up. So all of those aren't rented out, because of course, some of them I built this year. So it's taking me time. A few of them went up last week. But yeah, no, it's absolutely crushing it.

44:31So you don't need a job when you get a bunch of these going. Going forward, I actually, I used to do client SEO. I used to work, I learned the skill set, and then I started working on other people's sites. And I just did not like being in contact with a client all the time because they were always complaining, like asking me to make changes, sending reports. And it was just taking up a lot of my time, which is why I switched to this model where I essentially own this digital real estate and I just rented out to a tenant. But a lot of those clients also at the time were always asking me, how do I do this?

45:04Essentially, teach me how to do what you're doing so I don't have to pay you. And at the time, it irritated me. But thinking about it now, I don't have them anymore. I kept in touch with all of them. They're asking the same thing. So I put up a Facebook group specifically for contractors and people who wanted to kill their job by building these rank and rent websites. And I started adding them all to it. So, I'm coming out with a course in a couple weeks, and it's going to be exactly how to do it. So, they don't have to pay a marketing company$1 ,000 a month retainer. Or, you know, if it's a normal person with a 9 to 5, just exactly how I did this.

45:41How I built the sites up and just rented it out to help those same contractors. Appreciate you dropping by, sharing your stuff. Again, really interesting, unique business here where it's like, yeah, I'm going to own this digital real estate and find people who would want to rent that out from me. I think it's genius. I'd heard about it first years ago, but, you know, never really met anybody like, you know, in the trenches doing it. So I appreciate you coming by. Luke, let's wrap this thing up with a number one tip for Side Hustle Nation. You really just got to take whatever that business is and go for it.

46:16It doesn't matter what the business is. if you think it can work and you put in the time, you can get results. With all these different things I've done, I've had some success in each one. You can do it if you push for it. You just got to go for it. Take the leap. It's so true. Thanks for sharing and we'll catch up with you soon. Appreciate the time, Nick. Thanks.

46:41This one definitely got my gears turning as a really interesting and unique side hustle that's a win-win-win. It's businesses getting more jobs, customers are hopefully connecting with great service providers, and you're getting paid too. Now, if it were me, I'd probably start local or semi-local. I just feel like that might be easier to build relationships with service providers. You could use a keyword research tool to punch in all of the different service categories from Thumbtack or another site, and then in combination with the name of your city or town to see what the estimated search volume looks like, what the relative competitiveness looks like, and then also thinking about what the average job might cost in those service categories.

47:24It honestly sounds like kind of a fun puzzle or challenge, but let me know what you think. If you give this one a shot, I'd love to hear from you. Once again, notes and links from this episode along with the full text summary are at sidehustlenation.com slash rank and rent. You can learn more and also apply for a strategy call with Luke at website rentalcoaching.com slash SHN for Side Hustle Nation, website rentalcoaching.com slash SHN. Now let me get the time machine fired up and we'll be right back to check in here with Luke in 2026. So last month, it was time to replace the air filter in the car, which is about the level of vehicle maintenance I'm qualified to do.

48:06So I google up the part number, I find this random store that is selling it, and then to my absolute delight, I see that they're running on Shopify. How could I tell? That little purple shop pay button at checkout. It meant not having to create yet another new account. It meant not having to find my wallet. I am paid and checked out in just a couple clicks. You already know that our sponsor, Shopify, is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, including that car parts website and dozens of side hustle show guests and you probably already know about the built-in store templates and marketing tools that make it easy to get your store online and get found but what you might not know is that shopify can also help manage your inventory ship products internationally and even handle customer returns on top of that you've got access to their award-winning 24 7 customer support if you have any trouble so let's see less carts go abandoned and more sales going with shopify and their shop pay button sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash side hustle.

49:03That's shopify.com slash side hustle. One more time, it's shopify.com slash side hustle. Running a business is hard. If it were easy, everybody would be doing it right. You've got a to do list a mile long and you got a dozen different hats to wear. So here's a resource to help lighten your load. I'm excited to partner with Gusto for this episode because they've been one of the most recommended services by side hustle show guests gusto is the easy affordable online payroll hr and benefits tool for modern small businesses in fact they help over 400 000 businesses like yours take the pain out of tasks like payroll tax filing direct deposit health insurance administration 401k benefits onboarding tools and lots more of course i encourage you to do your own due diligence check out their reviews online and i think you'll find the common threads in the comments about how easy it is to use, their great customer support, and the great value.

49:55So here's the deal. To help you get started or to make the switch, Side Hustle Show listeners can try Gusto today at gusto.com slash side hustle, and you'll get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash side hustle. One more time, that's gusto, G-U-S-T-O dot com slash side hustle. Luke, welcome back to the Side Hustle Show. Catch us up. It's been five years. What's going on with the rank and rent portfolio these days? Oh, man. Things are great, Nick. Happy to be back on. The portfolio is much larger than it was before. And we've got AI in here and lots of very cool stuff going on.

50:37So excited to talk about it. How many sites are you running these days? 230 sites, 80 % rented, averages about 185 grand a month, depending on what happens with the commission and rev share deals. Rev share is new. So I started doing that and that's had quite a dramatic impact, which is nice. 180 grand a month. Yeah. It averages. It's all over. It's up and down 30 grand from that either way, depending on what happens. That is crazy. That's a pretty serious operation. Tell me about the rev share thing. So I think previously we talked about, look, it's just going to be a flat fee. It's going to be a thousand bucks a month to rent out the site.

51:16I hadn't really thought about this. And then I was on Bradley Headman Dropping Bombs and we were talking about it afterwards. He's like, yeah, we do a lot of rev share. So I came back and I started going to the clients that were paying like larger flat fees. And I talked to them about doing rev share. And I've started pitching it to all new people. Anytime it was like a bigger niche. So something like demolition or like a high ticket emergency plumbing, things that were just more expensive. and I was basically pitching it as I would like access to the CRM to be able to see like read only to be able to see what you're bringing in.

51:48And, you know, this will be on me, right? I have skin in the game now if I'm taking a percentage. So I have all incentive to push this as much as possible and make you a lot more money. So that pitch has kind of been going better because they're like, OK, they don't have that much risk because it's on me to generate. Instead of a flat fee, it's now performance-based. So you can see that being more amenable. But of course, you come out ahead if it works, because now if they book a couple hundred grand worth of jobs. It still works out. I have one person that was getting pissed off at the rev share because they're like, dude, you're making so much money.

52:26And I'm like, yeah, but you're making the most. I'm like, you wouldn't have any of this if I wasn't doing this. So it's created some interesting conversations with clients. I switched one person to just a higher flat fee. Like flip them to RevShare, then flip them back. But it's still working out in my favor and students' favors. So the RevShare thing was huge. Really cool. Definitely. What's the typical like percentage wise? 10, 15 percent, depending on what it is. OK, it's higher than I would have expected. I don't know how much margin is in some of these higher ticket services, but that's a good chunk.

52:58But it's one of those things I'm negotiating. I'm always pitching a little bit higher. And then I'm just like, I don't. Part of the thing that's helping is I don't need it. And so if they don't want it, I'm like, all right, that's fine. I can just do it with somebody else. So just pitch somebody else. Yeah, this is affiliate marketing just on a really high touch, localized scale with an affiliate program. You're going to have to go cut the deal yourself. You're not going to find it off the shelf at Impact or Commission Junction or anything like that. You're going to have to make these deals and think of it from the buyer's perspective here, the contractor's perspective of like, well, what's my cost of acquisition?

53:35would I be willing to pay 10 % to Alouk to not have to worry about my marketing, to have somebody else take care of lead gen and still hopefully make a good income after completing the jobs? Right. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. I think it's the rapport building and some of the stuff with, you know, talking to people and trying to establish that up front, that's still the same. People still just want to know that you can connect. Has anything changed on the niches that you like? You mentioned some of these higher ticket services like demolition and emergency plumbing. Anything else been kind of cropping up lately for either you or your students?

54:10Not necessarily changing a ton with the niches, just a little bit more selective in what I pick and trying to find higher level uses of the skill set. Like in 2023, I bought an ice cream catering company and I was like, oh, I could apply lead gen to this. So now I'm like looking for things that I can apply lead gen to so that I could just make more money on other things that interest me. I'm in the middle of underwriting for a paving company that I'm going to buy. That's another one. I can just spin up some SEO for it. I can get some map listings going and that'll crush. So I'm just trying to combine multiple things I like and be a little bit more choosy.

54:45You're out scooping ice cream on the weekends now? Ice cream. So yeah, I bought a company, 52 trucks, three states. Gave my brother half the company to run it. So I'm not involved. I'm just doing lead gen for it. I just paid for it. the lead gen skill set, the same skill set applies. So I can use that to grow it, brings in more stuff. And yeah, just trucks driving around selling like, you know, overpriced ice cream to kids, crushing it for me. Come summer, you're like, cha-ching, okay. Dude, yeah, buy those screwballs, you know? Yeah, this is an interesting one because it's like, to you, the asset may be undervalued.

55:24If I'm bringing in kind of this complementary skill set, maybe they're not really taking advantage of digital marketing or online real estate in the way that you know you could. And you could say, well, I can pay this multiple, but I know if I apply steps one, two, and three within six to 12 months, it's going to be worth X. So cashflow in the meantime, plus, you know, this equity multiple as you can expand the value there. Yeah, it's huge. And I didn't really realize that I was just having a conversation with my CPA and I was like, how do I not pay taxes? And she laughed and she's like, legally?

55:58And I was I was like, yes, legally. And she goes, buy a business. And I was like, what do you mean? And she's like, just buy an existing business. So she like recommended me to go to the seminar. I like learned this. And a few months later, I own a business. And then I'm just like buying more and now using this to do that. So it's like just another thing I'm kind of adding because I really like that you could apply the SEO skill set to it. You just pick something where I don't have. How does that help you on your taxes, though? Well, yeah. So it'll help one year and then you got to buy another one to keep using depreciation.

56:27so like the the hard assets the trucks the furniture the equipment ff and e uh furniture fixtures and equipment you use that to depreciate against your active income and then you could do a cost segregation on the land to also help go against your income but then every year you would it's it we're essentially just delaying this because then the next year you'll just make more money two businesses now you got to do this again so i'm in the loop now but i'm cool that it's it's great everything's going good so far all right so far so good there was the ice cream one what was the second one you said uh paving company okay ice cream was one of a similar structure where the existing ownership is going to stay on or you find another operator yeah so the the ice cream i'm running out of brothers so the the ice cream was 50 i gave to my brother to run it so i can keep me passive the paving one i'm gonna have to hire somebody to to run it so i don't have to so i'll be in there for a couple weeks kind of learn what he's doing hand it off to somebody and then back out to do my lead gen.

57:26And then that person will do it. Just owner since the start, 40 years in business. He's got a whole team in place. So I shouldn't have to do much. That's the dream anyways. I don't know how often that works out. We'll see. We'll see. I've done a lot of due diligence trying to do it. There was a lot of stuff we missed on the first company because obviously I'd never bought a business before. So you always learn things trial by fire. Got it. So it sounds like parlaying some of the online cash flow into more of an offline asset, almost becoming the type of customer who would have hired you for these website buildouts.

58:00Yeah. Yeah. Combining it. And a tax strategy at some point. So anything that has changed in the world of rank and rent? We've had a couple of your proteges, a couple of your students on in between our episodes, but what's going on there in terms of either the SEO side of things or Google business profiles? Like what do you see? Yeah, I see a lot of stuff. I know there's a lot of hype about AI and taking away search and so forth. Google's still got 90 % of the market share, so that's good. But across lead gen sites and things, people still want to talk to a person. So that's not really having much of an impact on our blue collar stuff.

58:40And then if we want to take advantage of it, we're using a lot of structured data. So changing the way that we're doing headers and things to be more question-based, like who do we serve? And just changing everything into a question and then writing the paragraph under it. And we try to get like a direct answer right away and then go into the detail below the answer. Lots of schema. Okay. So schema is a fancy word for this structured data to tell Google that this is a frequently asked question rather than just straight text on the page. And so it can kind of index it somewhat differently and hopefully serve that up to somebody who's looking for that exact thing.

59:18Right. Yeah. So a lot of that, the frequently asked questions is super helpful in just making sure the structure is correct when you're setting it up. If you're using something like Elementor and WordPress, it's just a drag and drop. So you'll have the questions as like H2s and then a little paragraph below it. and just doing that has helped a lot more websites appear in those AI overviews. And you could also manipulate what appears in the AI overview with press releases like you used to do in the old days. What would be an example of a press release you're sending out? Just like who's the best ice cream company in state, and then you write a whole article about how your company is the best company in the state, and then it goes out and you'll notice that chat GPT starts picking up.

1:00:06You're the best ice cream company in the state because you've appeared in so many places. So it's like taking us back to like 2000s when we're like manipulating things to move things up in the search engine. Even if it's like a completely self-serving press release, it's not like you got an award for being the best ice cream. It's just like, we're going to raise our hand and say, we're the best ice cream. No, but I've seen it work. I've seen it work, which was really funny. And it just, yeah, it just gave me a laugh. Yeah, that is what a time to be alive. We've seen the interesting thing is if you can get your company to show up in the search results.

1:00:40And it's when we did a whole episode on ranking in AI and the guest mentioned press releases there as well. But the conversion rate from that, she said, was like 10 to 15 times higher than Google. Like the inherent trust that people are putting into some of these AI answers, notwithstanding how easily manipulated they are or may be at the moment. It was kind of crazy. It was really eye-opening to see how much maintenance is required for this portfolio of 200 plus sites as things go stale and links break and content needs updating. It sounds like a full-time job. To compensate for the slightly increased maintenance level, I have moved one of the VAs to full-time going in and kind of fine-tuning things for our new AI future here.

1:01:26So using our new stuff, like using Manus and Claude to write better content and insert more topical relevance and put in landmarks and other things to make content better. They're going back through old sites and making those more robust so that it kind of further secures my spot, generates more leads, kind of protects the future, safeguards a little bit. Right. Because if you're the competition isn't standing still, right? You can't just have a completely static resource that you never touch and expect the paycheck to keep coming in. Right. Well, what's next for you? What's got you excited these days?

1:02:03I'm pumped to do a few things. I mean, one, with my students, I've changed a lot of things and I'm bringing out, I have a friend who's an AI engineer by trade. He's worked at some really big companies like Coinbase, Amazon, Google, all these things. And we've been developing tools that can automate portions of the process so he just created a tool that does all the niche research for me that we'll be releasing to our members soon which is cool so it'll go and it'll take me all of the biggest piece of the pie or one of the first building block yeah for for all the profitability and figuring it out so it's like taking all of my example sites that are doing well funneling in all the stuff that didn't work all the stuff that is work all the mistakes i've ever made.

1:02:49All that's in there. And then it's looking at all these different data sources to pull in just intelligence on like, why is this market good? Why is this one we should do? Why or why not? And it'll give you all the reasons, like, here's your level of risk. Here's all the reasons it would make sense. And like how much money it would cost and the average price of the job. And this market's a good one because it has X number of companies that you could reach out to. and here's how fragmented the market is. These people are paying for ads. These people aren't. Like it'll give you everything. So I know going in that my chance of success is this number on a scale, which is awesome.

1:03:30And then once we get in, he's also developing another tool. This one's taking a little bit longer, but we're in the middle of it to just take it from you punch in the niche you want and it spits out the completed site following my exact process end to end. Yeah, that'd be really cool. That's sick. It's still cool. I wish it was already done so I could just show you this live. But we're just in the middle of it now. Well, coming soon. Coming soon. We'll be sure to link that up. Or if you check out website, rentalcoaching.com slash SHN, you'll be able to see what Luke is up to over there. Again, appreciate you stopping by.

1:04:08Any other parting words of guidance here for this time travel catch-up segment? Where AI is going. Blue-collar work appears to be the thing that will be the last to be disrupted, right? White-collar stuff where we're sitting in front of a computer, typing things in, that's something that can be erased with AI. But if you can create some kind of income on the side to protect yourself, there's one way to prepare. And the other one is to learn some of these AI tools. If you think of, like, distribution in math, math class, if anybody remembers this, or stats, there's, like, that bell curve. And I'm thinking about it from like an adoption perspective.

1:04:46There's the people who are like, I'm never going to use AI. There's people who are like, I want to know everything that's coming out. And then there's everybody in the middle. If you could shift yourself closer to the, all right, AI is coming, whether we like it or not, let's try to figure it out. You're going to be in a better position to at least know how to use some of these things so that you're not the person that gets removed when AI is replacing a job. Well, this is such an interesting place to play. I'm going to use these AI tools to support these blue collar, un-AI-able businesses, the driveways, the demolitions, the pavers, the roofers and stuff.

1:05:19It's like, OK, that's unlikely to get outsourced, but maybe some of their marketing may be. And if I could position myself to use some of the AI tools to improve their marketing, maybe I can keep myself safe from that. So it's a fascinating, fascinating world to live in. um listener bonus for this one uh 50 potential rank and rent niches to kickstart your research process you can download that for free at the show notes for this episode just hit the link in the episode description it'll get you right over there big thanks to luke for sharing his insight thanks again to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone side hustle nation.com slash deals is where to go to find all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place that is it for me.

1:06:01Thank you so much for tuning in. 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.