Investing In Revenue Producing Websites For Passive Income With Ken Courtright

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap em in bacon for business owners, marketing execs and anyone trying to grow your business. Pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo. All right, welcome back to the show. This is your host, Brad Costanzo. Not that you would be expecting somebody else to host a show with my name on it, but that being said, I'm, I've got a fun episode today because it is directly relevant to something that I have a lot of curiosity in that I've explored quite a bit both in my personal and business life as well as some of the people who have been on the show before. Today, I'm going to be introducing you to a guy named Ken Courtright. Now let me give you the backstory here. I was just recently in Austin at Ryan Moran, former guest. You may have heard just, you know, a couple weeks ago, Ryan Moran's event called Freedom Fast Lane. And Ryan had some absolutely world class speakers, some amazing people up there. And then he introduces, he goes, hey guys, I'm going to bring somebody up. He's only got like 20 minutes to speak, but I think he said he was here last year and he's going to talk about buying income producing sites and having them run and passive investing, et cetera. So I don't think he really did him justice. But Ken got up and he spoke. And I know that I was kind of on the edge of my seat thinking, okay, I'd like to hear him talk a lot more about this because everything he was saying was, I don't want to say too good to be true, but it was like there's a lot of really good things that Ken was talking about with buying income producing websites and having them in your portfolio. And then afterwards in the hallway, I saw a whole bunch of people surrounding Ken asking him probably the exact same question a million times. And I kind of waited till the end where I just approached him and said, look, I'd love to have you on my show and explore this even further. So this is the topic we're going to talk about. So Ken is the founder of incomestore.com and today's growthconsultant.com and as I mentioned just a moment ago, the big topic we're going to be discussing is buying income producing websites and either for yourself and managing them or having Them do all the work for you. If you listen to a previous episode that I did with Ace Chapman, we talked a lot about buying websites and businesses instead of building them from the ground floor and realizing that we're in the business of, you know, in business, you're in the business of cash flow, making money. So sometimes it's crazy to think about building one from the ground floor because so many of them fail, as opposed to going out and buying your cash flow from somebody who's already done the hard work. That being said, I want to welcome you to the show, Ken. It's great to have you here.

Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. So I want to keep this a little different than maybe the traditional podcast where I say, so, Ken, tell me how you got started. Tell me your backstory. Tell me all this other stuff that isn't really pertinent to the really cool stuff you're doing right now. Also, I think I've set the frame for what we're going to talk about is kind of what you guys do and buying these sites. Your website, I guess your primary1 is incomestore.com, right?

Yeah, it's pretty much the only one left. The other one, we shifted away from that in about 2009. So income store is flagship.

Awesome. Now, you do an amazing job of explaining, like, you've got so many FAQ videos and what this is all about that I don't want to belabor the ultra basics too much for people. I kind of want to dive in if people go, crap, I get this, and I kind of want to treat this as, you know, my FAQ session. I've cornered you. This is my opportunity to get to kind of drill down to some of the questions. You may get a lot, but that I know are probably on a lot of people's mind who decide to kind of work with you and kind of pursue this path. But real briefly, you tell us in your words what you're doing, what the Income Store is all about, and kind of your expertise.

Sure. The easiest way to explain what we do is to use the metaphor of real estate. So let's say, like, I live near Chicago, but let's say I wanted to look into buying property, physical rental property, say, in Indianapolis. But I didn't have time to leave my job or leave my company. But I knew Indianapolis was the hot spot. I would end up calling a project manager in Indianapolis a scout, basically, and say, here's my budget. I've got, say, 1.5 million. I would like 10 units or five units, and they would find me property, they would help me basically, you know, fix it, get it ready for rental, and then they would find me tenants, and then they would manage those tenants in those properties. And in return, most property managers that work that way, they get a slice of the revenues instead of a fixed monthly fee. And so we do exactly that. People come to us and they say, hey, Ken, Cary, I just sold my house. I've got an extra, say hundred thousand. I heard you guys can either build me or buy me a revenue generating website and then you'll manage it for me and we'll share the revenue. So basically what we do, somebody will come to us and say, okay, I've got 100,000. What do I do? And then depending on what their needs are, if they want just pure passive cash flow or if they want to generate leads for their business, it all depends on what their needs are. We will typically though, we will do what's called a hybrid, and we will buy them a website that is already making money. And then in the next 90 days, we'll also build one from scratch that is built on the exact same keyword silo of the one that we bought. And so in short, within say 12 weeks, that person who threw us 100 grand now has an asset probably producing in the 20 to $50,000 a year range. Then we split that right down the middle, 50, 50. And then we take our 50% of the revenue in perpetuity and continue to buy content, continue to market that content, and continue to put some payroll and profit in our pocket so we can keep that site growing. So in short, in one sentence, people throw us money. We then buy them or build them a website that makes money. And then our 90 to 95 employees help manage that asset until they determine they want to sell it. And in exchange for that management, we share 50% in both the ongoing revenue and 50% in the price above which they bought it at, if it sells. So if they sell it for 200,000 and they gave us 100, they get their hundred back and then we split the overage of 100,000. 50. 50.

Nice. I love it. And that's very simple. And it's actually, it runs parallel to one of my closest friends, former clients, past interview guest Kent Clothier. He's the his family and himself big in the real estate market. And turnkey real estate is really their thing. They have a company called Memphis Invest and it's the exact same thing in real estate, like you said. So their clients just say, hey, I want to buy an Income producing house. So their company goes out and buys the house and they, you know, they buy the house for a good price, they renovate it, they put the tenants in place, they manage it and it's hands off. Their clients don't ever even see the actual property. They just get money deposited in their checking account and they love it. So it sounds like this is a very. It's a turnkey way for people to put their assets at work and not ever really have to worry about being technologically advanced or understand marketing. Right.

Well, you also said something key. This is their asset, it's not ours. We don't own any websites. We manage other people's assets. They get on the phone, they have monthly update calls with us, they tell us what they want done with the site next month, next quarter, if they want us to push the marketing harder. So they're involved. But at the same time it's their asset that is absolutely managed and built by us. So that's a good word. It's a turnkey position for them. Very similar to buying a franchise except they don't have to work behind the counter.

Right. Have you used, have you been using turnkey in your marketing and your.

Never.

I would use that. I would use that. It's a very popular word because I've got a big background in real estate and it's a word always used in real estate. Like turnkey means really hands off.

Yeah. So it's funny, I've heard it a million times and just never, never correlated. But you might start to see that coming soon.

I love it. So, so let me ask you a few more questions. So the kind of sites that you guys either buy or build, are they typically content based sites that generate money with advertising and basic like affiliate link revenue like Amazon or other stuff, or because you're not necessarily buying complex sites that are like E commerce, et cetera, or are you?

Well, we pretty much have a little bit of everything. So I do have E Commerce, I do have Amazon, I have some very large Facebook platforms. But I would say we're modeled after WebMD or which is the largest medical authority site on the planet. I think last year MarketWatch said it made $570 million from a single website. Yeah, 90% of that half a billion in revenue from one website is just passive, like Google AdSense, just banner ads, not necessarily to be clicked on, but in general for branding purposes for these large pharmaceutical companies. So what the biggest companies in the world, quite frankly, and what even the small businesses are looking for is called Toma Top of the mind awareness and the question is how in today's digital age do you get on the top of the mind of your potential customer? And one of the ways you do it is old fashioned guerrilla marketing techniques. And the biggest companies have figured out small mom and pops and entrepreneurs have figured out if you can find potential customer and then you can get in front of them on Facebook, get in front of them with a retargeted campaign with an information based website and you just stay in front of them, eventually they're gonna make a decision about your product or your competitor's product. And if you have Thoma top of the mind awareness from these branded ads, you're hitting home run. So we built a platform knowing our goal was to get to a thousand websites under management, over a billion annual eyeballs which we're going to hit this coming May. And yeah, if we can, if we get to a billion eyeballs across our portfolio and you know, somebody comes to us and says listen, you know, I really need to get in front of a 46 year old female, then we're just going to look into our portfolio and say okay, here's 35 sites that match. Let's do some branded ads and it'll be another additional revenue stream for our website.

Yeah, you basically got your own native ad network there.

Pretty much, yeah.

Nice. I love that. Okay. So that and keeping them though like that is very probably keeps it easy to manage when it's somewhat a lot of similar sites. On a side note, it was kind of funny you mentioned something I was talking about this to like probably the day after the meeting, I was talking to a couple of good friends of mine who are not in the world of Internet marketing at all. And I kind of mentioned, I was like, yeah, this was kind of an interesting business model of what he's doing, et cetera. And they were like. And I mentioned content based sites that generate revenue with banner ads, et cetera. They go, man, nobody clicks banner ads, nobody clicks those. And they thought because they never click banner ads that nobody does. I was like, you realize that Google built its empire on people clicking ads, right?

Google does 4 billion a month with people clicking on it.

Exactly. And like you said too, it's not always necessarily because of people pay, you know, cost per impression as well as cost per click. It's not necessarily just making money when people click. Sometimes it's just having it up there. People will pay just to show you and branding ad. Right? Cool.

Yeah, you can get one to ten bucks per thousand Page views, whether somebody clicks on your ad or not.

Right now your, your filters, when you go to purchase, when you go to purchase a website or business, because you're not buying a website, you're buying a business. Truly it's an income producing asset. What are some of your filters? Like what has to be in place for you to go out and acquire a site?

Sure, yeah, it ends up being about a 20 page document. But some of the highlights are we start with what's called a digital footprint, which happens to be the name of our annual conference. And a digital footprint is like, let's look at WebMD again. WebMD has been around exactly 20 years. They've made more money every year than the year before. They've never once gone backwards. And what they do, their digital footprint is every year we're gonna ask more and more doctors to write something every month. So they started with three doctors, then 15, then 50, now they're up to 505. So as the world changes, and I don't know if I had time to talk about this on Ryan's stage, but one fourth of every search in the Google search bar is first time. They've never seen it before. They have no idea.

So you gotta, I just saw that.

Somewhere, that statistic, that's amazing. So the fact is today, one out of every four things typed into Google, Google's never seen it before, they have no idea where to send it. So they use something called Rank Brain to determine where it goes. So what we want to do is we want to basically reverse engineer the website that's already built. And what we want to do is we're going to look at a site, let's say it's making $3,000 a month. The digital footprint will show us the last one to three years of its life cycle. Who built it, how is it built? How many pieces of content? How many pieces of content per week, per month? Was it done by one author, three authors, five authors? Where has the link equity come from that's holding up this website? Does it have what's called social signals? Does it have what's called author equity, where the author of the content some, you know, had some meat on the bone for their personal name? So we go through about, I don't know, 100, 120 different data points. And if we believe that our team of writers can absorb this site into our portfolio, see how it's built, see what it currently ranks on, and continue writing on the similar topics in a similar way, but do more of it, that's the determining factor. So basically, to boil it down, can we continue writing what it's been writing on in a. In a good or better way? And quite frankly, can we write more? So if you can double the content, which, if you just take WebMD and its simplicity, they just keep doubling the content every three years. So if you double the pace of the content, which is actually called content pace, if you double the pace at which you put content in monthly, Google has no choice. Their algorithm is physically built to honor the websites that write quality content, where their content gets picked up and shared socially, which can't be faked. And the ones that continue to increase their pace, Google increases the rankings.

Nice. Nice. Okay, cool. So yeah, there's a formula to that. So you're looking for the quality ones there. What about like, longevity of the site? Are you. Would you consider buying a site that's just been up for 12 months, for instance?

Oh, for sure. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I've bought sites that have been up for, quite frankly, five weeks. It depends on what we're seeing. If I already have a site that is in a vein of, let's just take wine. We own wine.net with a partner and if a site comes up and it's only say two months old, but I can tell it exactly matches what we already own, and I know my writers have already dominated in one site with it, they can then definitely jump on that second one if it's in a similar vein. I don't need a lot of backstory or a big digital footprint with that.

Nice. Okay, great. So let's talk about what kind of multiples are you buying these sites for? Do you have any kind of rules there in place?

We used to. We used to only buy at 2 times earnings. Because we have bought hundreds of sites from the five largest website brokers in the world, we've somewhat influence the market. So the cost of a good site has gone up from an average of about 1.7 times earnings when we started to about 2.6 times earnings now. So it's just pure supply and demand. So what we've done is we've actually kind of rebuilt our relationships with these brokers and we'll now get sites before they even list so we can prove to these sellers that they should work with us closer to a 2 times earnings. And the reason is we'll end up keeping the seller on as a co owner with our half of the revenue for the life of the site. And so they end up still getting 2.6 times earnings. Roughly.

Okay, so in essence you'll basically what, buy like half of the company?

No, no, we'll buy the whole thing out, but we'll then cut them in on revenues for say up to five to 10 years, you know, with it, with a tiny piece of the revenue, quite frankly, just because we want to consult with them, you know, they built it, it's their baby and we just, we want to keep that ingenuity and that vision and it's, it's worked really well for us.

Nice. So then are you typically in a case like that, like let's say I've got a site you're going to buy for $100,000. Will you, will it be a part cash and kind of a part.

No, no, I'm going to, I'm going to wire you 100 grand, I'm going to wire you 100 grand the next.

Day and then you're going to potentially keep a portion where I can still get returns from this as well.

Yes, correct. If you were selling a site for. And I bought it for you for 100.

Nice.

Let's say you were listing it for 115. Nobody's going to give you 115, but they're going to be 100. And I'd give you 100 if it's a quality site. But I'd also probably give you maybe a couple hundred bucks a month for the next five, ten years.

Nice. Yeah. So that sweetens the pot. And a lot of other people are probably not going to do that because they would probably come in and say, well, I'll give you, I'll give you 80, you know, and then I'll pay, I'll pay you out the rest over time, right?

Yeah, well, that's exactly how it's going to go. The typical site sells with a half down and the other half on a six month earn out. If the numbers hold, and the numbers seldom hold, there's a reason they're selling it.

Yeah, yeah. When I sold my first business, like I had to fight tooth and nail. I luckily got all the cash up front. But they started off wanting to do part cash, part owner finance. I wanted out. So it was a battle. But that was great. And I would have loved to have gotten that deal where I got all my cash plus some. Cool. So what about, okay, let's talk about income expectations. I'll get to the, like you mentioned the, the word and guarantee on stage. We'll get to that in a second. But typically I give you $100,000. I know, number one you said it typically takes about 12 weeks or so to start for me earning income. But what kind of income can I expect? Especially if you are depending on where you're buying this. Is there a range?

Yeah, I mean, yes and no. I mean the reality is revenue generating websites are revenue generating websites very similar to a rental property. I mean unless you take a rental property in Manhattan versus a rental property in Cleveland, Ohio, obviously for the same square foot, the rents are going to be higher in Manhattan. So same with, same with, with websites. Certain sites in certain industries take wine. Obviously if the site has more traffic, it's gonna have probably more revenue. So it's kind of like the higher traffic sites are like buying Manhattan. The lower traffic sites are buying, you know, Cleveland. But the cost is completely dictated hardline by the revenue at roughly say 2 times earnings. So just for a rule of thumb, if somebody gives us 100, I'm gonna buy an asset for them at two times earnings, or to say it differently, I'm gonna buy them an asset producing a 50% return. Does that make sense so far?

Absolutely.

Okay, we're gonna split it down the middle so the person that funded it has an asset that's receiving about 25% a year on their money. And then my company gets 25% a year on their money on their asset. But I have to take my 25% and chop it into thirds. One third, at least one third is gonna buy a tremendous amount of content. One third's gonna then market that content and get the world to see it. And the other third hopefully goes to payroll and profit. If they use that formula in almost 90 some percent of all industries, that is enough money to grow the site on a fairly steady basis. Now you mentioned the guarantee piece. I'm going to jump right to that.

Yeah, please do.

What we did is we realized a couple few years ago that wow, some of these sites are seasonal. And we actually didn't put the guarantee in to necessarily benefit the website partner per se. We did it for ourselves because the guarantee allowed us to say, okay, if we're going to guarantee like if on a hundred thousand dollar deal, we're probably going to do a consulting performance agreement like a property management agreement that will guarantee say 12 to maybe 15 or even 18% on that hundred grand. However, I'm going to chop that up into monthlies. So I'm only passing out say 1000 to 1500amonth. That way if the site is seasonal, I don't get pinched where in the old days seasonal sites would kind of Crimp us during the slow spots, which are typically Black Friday to January 23, the January, February payouts. For some reason we just were, we were getting hit in the gut there. And so what we ended up doing is we instituted this guarantee which says quite frankly, it's called the act of God clause. It says if something happens to this website for any reason, including an act of God, and this revenue drops four months in a row below the minimum, we have 31 days to build you or buy you a new one to get that minimum met. And we have to do that out of our own personal operating capital. Now we've only had to do that four times out of 800 plus sites. However, we've had to think about it 11 times. So seven, seven of those sites, we looked at it, we analyzed it, it got close to four months in a row and we were either able to bring it back quickly or it just never hit that four month in a row. But in four occasions it did. And we actually in two occasions went out and bought completely new sites. In the other two occasions we just built a couple small ones because it was only missing by a couple hundred bucks a month.

Yeah.

And then now that person just happens to have two sites and they're well above their minimum. So the bottom line is the guarantee is saying that our company is going to stand by our management of that website. And if you know something tragic, including a Google algorithm Update like in 2013, we almost got just smoked. I mean, every time we turn, every six weeks it was this, that, the other. But it took us 18 months and just grinding it out, we've got almost every one of them just really, really humming again. And some of the ones we thought we were going to lose turned out to be some of our best sites ever. So beautiful.

So back to that minimum. So you said that. Okay, so if it falls, if it falls below the minimum for four months in a row, that's when you have to say, okay, we gotta make this good. But so that minimum is typically. What, like is it, is that. That's the minimum income for.

I've done, I've done minimums based on the contract because it's based on again, what their goals are. So if their goals are just. Okay, I just, I just would like some revenue, some, some passive, passive revenue. Or their goals could be. No, I need leads for my business. I need this. I need reputation prevention, reputation manager. I need, I need all these different things I've done guarantees in a contract which goes in perpetuity from as low as 11%. I've even done one as high as, I think 23, 24%. It's all different because every. Like you said earlier, every website is a business. So when we look at something, I'll give you just a couple great examples. The one gentleman I'm referring to was in the audience at Ryan's event. His name is Dinesh. Dinesh called us about a year ago, him and his brother, his brother's out of Dubai. I think they sold a piece of property or something and they threw us, I think 180, 180,000. We ended up buying a site that was making, I think, I think his guarantee is something like 22 to 3200amonth or something like that. And it involved two different websites. And that was exactly one year ago November, so 13 months ago. And that site went from three grand to five grand to nine grand to 15 to 18 to 20 to 22. I just heard it came in at 23, eight last month. Wow. He's now getting 12 grand a month. We're getting 12 grand a month. Now his minimum is only two or three grand. So he's getting 400% above his minimum. And quite frankly, that contract, I think if I do the math, it's paying him like 70, 80% a year on the contract. And if he sells it, you know, he put in 180, he could easily get something because you can sell these, believe it or not, for 3 to 10 times earnings because they're now an authority site, not a regular generating site, which I can get to that later. But so conceptually, that was one. But we have a much better story. A gallon. Costa Rica, they sold their business, they wired us, I think, a couple hundred thousand, and we ended up buying a site that did surveys for some very specific niche business or something, I can't remember. But again, it was about a year ago, and we put both our Google team and our Facebook team on this site immediately because it was a substantial site. The guarantee is 5,800, and it went from six grand to 10 to 15 to 20 to 30 to 40. It did 57,000 last month.

What do you think was the. Was there any specific reason?

Oh, I know exactly the reason. So what we learned, we did what's called a Focus six on February. We took six sites and we put both our Google team and our Facebook team. And I say that because growing a site to appeal to the Google search bar is completely different than growing a website where you're using social and the mindset has to be different. The budgets are different, the timing is different. Everything is long term on the Google side, short term on the Facebook side. And so what we did, unbeknownst to us, is we took six sites, we wrote marketing plans that just happened to involve both the Google team and the Facebook team. And those six websites, if you combine them a year ago, February, roughly, they combined net earnings were 12,200amonth. And as of last month, they did 126,000. So what we found is when you attack a website on the search engine optimization angle, say one month, and then you look at what grew, then you go right to the low hanging fruit, the stuff that's at the top of page 2 in search, and you attack it from every social angle you can. You literally just annihilate that site with traffic from all these sources. We noticed Google has something called fomo. Fear of missing out.

Yeah.

And then Google says, now wait a minute, what's all this traffic going to? What's now on page two? Most people don't go to page two of Google. And then they go, we must have missed something here. And they move those phrases from page two in search to bottom of or middle of page one. Does that make sense?

Yeah, because you had so many signals coming from social that they're like, all right, yeah, this must be something important.

They go, we must have missed it. Let's move it to page one to get in alignment with what the world's looking for. And then they just changed the digital footprint of our site. So now we scan it again. Now there's new stuff completely on the top of page two. So then we hit it from SEO again for a month. We run the scan again, and then we just attack with social. And so we've been with those six sites, we did a hit them from the north side with search, hit them from the right side with social, and just go nuts.

That's amazing. I love that. Cool. So you guys have the ability to really supercharge sites as as soon, especially when things are doing well. So obviously it's easy to talk about all the best case scenarios. Have there been any horror stories like you said?

Yes. I wrote my whole first book. Online Income. Navigating the Internet Minefield is the story of our first 200 sites. It's comical. And I have some better stories since that book. We had one site, it was in the industry, you would look things up for verification. And we bought it. And in a marketing meeting, one of the guys on our marketing team misunderstood my directions. He thought I said, use our corporate debit card for pay per click in a direct proportion to growth. That's what he thought. I said, it's not what I said. So as the site was making five grand a month when we bought it, he did a pay per click campaign and got the net earnings to 8,000. Well, that grew 3,000. Three is 60% of five. So he increased the pay per click budget 60%. Well, the site then went to 18,000amonth. He then doubled the budget again. It ended up going to 40,000amonth in net earnings. And one of the competitors of that site saw the growth was so rapid, so quick, they purchased 400 pornographic links from Japan and Russia. And in 72 hours they nuked us. And they basically annihilated the link pattern with crap links, you know, black cat links. And Google shut us down. They took us out of search. We got ahold of Google because we have a relationship with them. And they're like, you know what, we are so sorry. We see that, that this is not real and we even know who did it. However, our algorithm is mechanical. You're gonna have to go in one by one and detox every single link annually. And there's no way to do that. So, you know, we've had a couple, few of those. That was the one where we had to just, we just threw it away. I mean, just start over. So, you know, but in the world we live in, I mean, there's so much crazy stuff. But luckily our motto is Thomas the Train. We want to grow slow and steady every quarter. We do not want hyper aggressive growth. We'll take it.

But that's not what you're searching for.

Yeah, it's not the plan. Because when you're doing what's called a digital footprint again, we have an annual event, it's an Inc. And Forbes recognized, can't miss must attend event annually. And we go and we teach how do we build and how do we buy revenue generating sites. And we do it for the sole intent purpose. If we can teach the world how to do this, they'll end up making more money. And when they get a sizable amount of money, they'll get tired of doing the work. They'll just write us a check and let us do it. Absolutely. You know, that's our M.O. it works really well and you know, but we definitely share some, some very comical stories like the one I just shared, you know, when we're in person.

Right. And then, but the downside protection, like if something like that were to happen today, A partner gives you money and a site gets nuked for one reason or another that falls in line. That's your act of God clause, right?

Yep, totally.

So the worst that can happen to them really is will you, Will they just. While you're building them a new site or buying a new one, I'm assuming you'll do that with your money. Will they continue to get their minimum paid?

Oh, of course they don't. The guy, the gentleman that this happened to didn't even know this happened.

Nice.

Yeah. So he, his, his 3800 or whatever, his minimum kept coming in and we told him six months later.

That's great. Yeah. So, I mean, because that's the part when I think, I think when you said it on stage, that, that, that guarantee is probably like the, you know, one of the most convincing things I would imagine that a lot allow a lot of people to work with you, but it's probably also one of the biggest red flags. Like, wait a minute, that sounds too good to be true. But, but as I'm understanding it, your insurance policy is the fact that you've got so many sites, you're so good at this, you don't try to step on the gas too much. You've done this a lot. So that if one side or a handful of sites start to lose traction, you're profiting from enough of the others, you use your company bankroll to kind of bring that up and make things right.

And it's a. Yeah. And understand this. These stories I'm doing were a couple few years ago, prior to the Panda 4.0. We don't really. We have no juicy stories in the last couple few years. So the world of the web has calmed down tremendously. So, not that this is never going to happen again. Of course, anything could happen. But the reality is we're not too big to fail. You know, we're not an Enron situation. But if there was a challenge, we do have the ability to make some quick ads, put them on a bunch of our other sites, expose that website in front of a very large mass of people and probably lift that up if we had to. We have never had to do that.

Right.

But it is definitely a comfort. And just to show you how sensitive we are to the too good to be true piece, which is our number one, you know, most common thing. Yeah, we are. Our spokesperson nationally is still on our website today is Professor Hans Von Puppet. It's awesome. The very first thing out of his mouth, both on the national TV and a radio commercial and the video is, do you want to hear something that's absolutely too good to be true? And then he goes through it for a minute and at the end he says, and it sounds too good to be true, but it's true. So it's, it. But you know, we, we definitely don't take light that, you know, people are giving up, you know, their hard earned money to, to put an asset in our hands to manage.

Especially where something that, like with real estate, people understand real estate. Most people, well, everybody's either like lived in a, in a house or an apartment or bought one in their lives, so they kind of get it. But with digital properties like this, there's a lot of folks who are not as astute and they're like, well, I don't really understand this. So I imagine sometimes dealing with that, just the not, you know, getting people up to speed on what this is, especially if they're not digitally savvy, I guess you can say.

Yeah. And we kind of now, in the last year and a half, two years kind of played with that. Meaning the last year especially was our slowest year in new site starts. However, it was our biggest year. You know, we're an eight figure company. We grew substantially this year. We're a three time Inc 5000 company, which for a mature company, you know, those all came in the last four years. Usually a company that hits the Inc 5000 list uses their first year tax return exactly where we used our 17th year.

Oh, wow.

So, you know, we were pretty much referral driven. We don't do much of anything actually outside of our annual events. You know, getting people together and people asking questions. We don't even do a commercial at our events for what we do. It's, it's kind of crazy. But yeah, so we're, because of the, you know, people know real estate, but they don't really know what we do. Since we're at 860 sites with a goal of a thousand, we've really slowed down the new site partner acquisition because 71% of our site partners do another one in under a year.

Yeah. So you don't have to go out.

And we don't have to generate a.

Lot of new business.

Yeah.

What about, okay, this might be in the contract, right? Can I, can a, can a site owner partner? Can they fire you?

They can't fire us, but they can sell their site at any time and cancel the contract. But we have first right of refusal. So they can't sell it to your brother for 10 bucks.

Gotcha. Nice. Okay, cool. I like that you have on your website on Income store, how it works or on your product line. You talk about three different types of products. There's the totally hands off. There's kind of the combo hands off, hands on. And then there's the that what you call the hybrid triple which you mentioned in the video. This is what you're like really the most excited about or whatever you care to kind of either talk about a. The really the differences in the products, the popularity of them, like is there, you know what's appropriate for the right people?

There's no wonder product again, the products were built because people today have completely different needs. You take someone that's comfortable in life, they might even want to do something for their wife or their daughter. You know, they may just want to go to the first one which is just, hey, let's buy a revenue generating site and grow it steadily. But people today, it's just, it's funny, it's different than even a couple years ago. They want more from us, they want leads. They're very in tune to reputation management, reputation prevention, credibility in the marketplace. So the hybrid triple is simply in English. We build a site based on their passion. So if somebody's really passionate about sports or skin care, whatever, it does not matter the industry we go in. So we're gonna build something that's called an authority site modeled exactly after WebMD. Our team of writers is gonna write every piece of content. They're gonna kind of give us some input monthly on a regular basis and steer the ship a little bit. But we're going to do the physical writing, right? And then in the first 12 weeks we're going to get a quick assessment to what we built from Google and Social. And then we're going to go out to a company and we're going to say, okay, build us a revenue generating website on the exact same keywords this site stands on. But we want you to do it through the eyes of say one, two or three affiliate products. We want the site making money physically in a couple weeks. We want it moving multiple products or generating leads or this or that. And then we then do it exactly the same thing again eight to ten weeks later. And now we have three different websites all in the same keyword vein, trying to dominate the same space, but all built by different companies. And we end up buying those other two from those other companies. And then we cross market the three of them together. And the only way to best explain it if somebody wants deeper info is study the NASDAQ company Interactive Corp. Iaci. And you'll find that Barry Diller from Paramount Pictures raised a billion dollars, went out and bought Match.com, expedia, CollegeHumor, and four other household name websites. And then he ran out of money. So the only thing he could do was cross market those seven sites together. He began that five years ago. And if you look at the stock on Nasdaq, it's one of the fastest growing stocks in the last five years. And he had no money to do it. So we are doing that with the hybrid triple. We're taking three sites in the same exact vein, same demographic audience. They're built by three different companies.

But why do you do the three different companies? Is that because I vary it up so that it's not like templates?

Yeah, no, it has nothing to do with the look. It's. I want, I want different vision down, down the throat of each site. Yeah. And you know, like, like what's his name? Einstein. Says the brain that got you into the jam cannot get you out of the jam. So when you take three different companies but you give them the keyword, you want to dominate. These companies are incredibly, you know, filled with high creative people. So we have never given a company a keyword silo and seen them come back with anything similar to something else. So what you want to do is you want to then cross market that group of sites and mention the one site with another site and then mention. But you don't do it linking them together. You do that with very specifically written content, you know, like review content or this or that. And you just, you know, you just keep people on their toes. And then all of a sudden you just have this mass audience down three different sites and everybody's happy.

Nice. So that's. So in that case, you're not going out and buying one like the hybrid triple. You're not buying one that already exists necessarily. You're building them from scratch, but then you're buying them from the people.

Exactly. Yes. So we're basically funding them up front. A little bit of seed money, saying build something, and in 12 weeks I'm physically buying it.

I love it. And you're probably getting a great deal because it's not like, you know, you're.

Buying something to a degree. Yes and no. But I'm cutting in that guy that's built it at a very high level on a portion of our half of the revenue for five years. So it's actually still more than two times earnings.

Okay, great.

Yeah. I don't want to short them because I want to do it with them for years to come. So they win, we win.

Okay. And then so that's your, that's your hybrid triple. Then the other ones, like you said, one of them is just listen, we'll go out and buy a site that's doing decent. What are the. I think I saw this. But what is really the minimum somebody needs to have to invest with you?

Yeah, we do property deal jackets between 50 grand and 5 million each. So if people put in more than 150 will always entertain, you know, a multi unit portfolio. So they'll get maybe two sites or three. If they do 300 or more, it's always three sites, sometimes even up to five.

Okay. But if somebody puts in 50 to 100,000, they typically get one site.

Yeah, probably. Again, it's going to depend on their goals, depend on how fast they need revenue or leads or reputation fix. But with only one domain, with 100 grand or less, you get more muscle down that domain.

Yeah, I gotcha. Excellent. Now, do you tell me what your average. What do you call them? Partners? What do you call your site partners?

They're website partners. But the fact is, because they're their assets and we're not like a mutual fund company or anything like that, I can't actually talk averages or anything about another person's asset.

Well, I actually don't want to talk about that. I was more going for the demographics, but I was saying first you call them like site partners. I guess. But so what's the average demographic or psychographic of your site partner? I mean.

Oh, there you go. Yeah, we've got everything from single females in their late twenties, believe it or not, all the way to people in their early 80s. But if I had to say the avatar, the avatar is. And it sounds so loose and so general, but it's anybody that has just come to the realization they either have to make up lost time quickly or they want to just have a fricking boatload of fun generating revenue in the coolest way possible. And I mean that sincerely. So many people do this because it's cool, right?

Yeah, it's true. How many of the. How many of your site partners have a. An advanced knowledge of digital marketing?

Less than 1%.

I would think so. Yeah. Yeah. And I could also see. So like somebody like myself, I do have an advanced knowledge of digital marketing and I do a lot of this stuff, but I also see the value and the stuff that you guys do because number one, my advanced knowledge is not in the SEO and all of this other stuff that you're doing.

Right.

Like the content based sites. Mine is much more direct response sales and you know, paid traffic to an offer. Right. Those are my, those are my expertise. But I see the value in saying, yeah, listen, there is a, there is a time and a place for having much more passive, dependable assets that can grow with time, that you don't need a whole lot of hands on, etc.

Yeah, sorry.

No, go ahead.

What we do with the people that want to be hands on, we get a lot of very similar questions. And about a year ago, well exactly a year ago, I decided instead of answering these questions or coming out with an faq, I launched a podcast called Today's Growth Growing business today. And 80% of what is in those 150 episodes are the answers to the questions I get from our site partners.

Nice. Yeah, that's fantastic. Do you get many people or have you really looked into this using self directed IRAs to fund these?

Yeah, 1.1/3 of what we do comes from self directed IRAs.

I would think so. Do you do much education to your partners about that? About. Because a lot of people don't even know that they have that option.

You know what? No, we, we do. Not a good job at that. No, I mean we, we don't mention it much. It's funny, we get approached just can I use it? And you know, So I think five of the seven largest self directed IRA companies, you know, are using us right now. SunTrust, SunWest Trust, Horizon Equity Trust. We've done deals with all of them. So we're approved by those guys. We probably, it's not even on our website. I mean we probably should, you know, put some kind of a blanket that says hey, you can use that, you.

Know, if you're, if you're interested in a. I think this is potentially a really cool introduction for you. I've got a friend named Greg Hurlein and the website is Greg G r E G H-E-R-L-E-A-N.com youm can check him out. So one of the things that he does like so self directed IRAs is really the, is really the place that he's kind of staked his flag as one of the leading experts out there. And one of the things he does is he works a lot in the real estate market but also beyond that because in for real estate investors using a self directed ira. And by the way for my audience, I kind of forget that they're Listening. If you're not familiar with what a self directed IRA is, it means that a traditional IRA is, you know, you can buy stocks and bonds and anything you could typically buy from a stock broker. However, if you want to put real estate, gold, business assets, partnerships, etc. Into your IRA, you can't go to Charles Schwab or Fidelity or Merrill lynch and do that. One of the main reasons is they can't make any money because it's not regulated by the sec. If they do that, however, there are companies that you can use. For instance, I use a company called KingdomTrust.com they're out of, I believe, Kentucky. And I use them, they hold my IRA assets, in which case I typically put that in private real estate loans to other rehabbers and people so I can make a good return on my money there. So a self directed IRA for my audience once more is just your ability to invest in alternative assets, including businesses, without going through the typical channels. So now that I'm kind of back because you understand what I'm talking about, Greg, one of the things that he does is he helps people really understand that. Look, you can use self directed IRAs for so many things, right? Like that's a telling the populace what else they, you know, just educating them on the potential. But he also works with business owners, showing them, listen, if you want to raise money out there, there's a lot of different ways to raise money, but there's so much money sitting idly in IRAs a lot of times in cash, and people just don't know. So he shows business owners how to go out and kind of tap into that huge amount of cash that's sitting idly on the sidelines looking for something. But they're scared to death of the stock market. So if you're interested, I'll make a personal introduction and you guys can kind of chat offline. But I think he'd probably be really intrigued by what you've got going on here as well. And he even may know some people with assets.

Yeah, I'd love the meet and greet on email. That'd be great.

Yeah, I love making connections that could potentially turn into something cool. What else do I have to ask you? Is there a particular nut that you're trying to crack in your business right now? And by that I mean is there a. Whether it's a strategy you're trying to figure out, a resource you're trying to find, a person you're trying to hire or fire, or a connection you're trying to make? Is There anything out there that nut that you're like, we're looking to solve this right now?

Well, I'll just do a blanket statement. We are always looking for great talent. We're up to 90 plus people. We're in multiple countries where our employees sit. So anybody that has a really good knowledge of Amazon, Facebook, e commerce, web design, anything to do with Internet marketing, I would definitely send us a resume. I think we hired 24 people this year full time. So we're definitely growing. We need another 10 to 12 key people, like yesterday. So that's probably the nut I'm trying to crack, is, you know, Jim Collins, good to great. You cannot get great people on your bus fast enough. And then just over time, you'll eventually put them in the right seat. So we hire talent first, position second.

Nice. And this talent can be virtual?

Correct. It's not a. Yeah, definitely. You work from anywhere.

Nice. So this has been really, really cool, and I'm glad that we got a chance to do this because as I said, I got it at a very high level of what you do. I mean, actually not at a high level, at a very detailed level. And like a lot of people, I kind of wanted to dig a little bit more and say, okay, is this something. It sounds extremely legit. Let's find out. I'm definitely convinced that it is. I think you've got a really cool business model. Well, and. Oh, another question. I written this down before because I was gonna wrap up here in a second, but have you ever even looked into equity crowdfunding as a model for your own business? Do you know much about that or have you looked at it?

Oh, yeah, yeah, We've looked at reg A, reg D Crowdsource. I mean, the reason we don't. It's really simple. I would much rather own 50% rev share of 1000 sites than 100% of 100. Because what we're going for is mass. We're going for a body of sites. I'm not going for revenue. So if I was just going for revenue and fun, I would do 100 sites myself. But I'm trying to, quite frankly, help hundreds of people solidify their personal finances, have something truly they can give to their kids. Making money today is a nightmare. I mean, it is. And keeping money, I think, is a much bigger challenge than making money. So I think our country does a crap job of. No, they do worse than a crap job of educating our kids on what the difference is between earning interest and spending interest.

True.

I mean, truly, we have A site called Wealth Maverick. And we built a tool inside it. So here's a good public service announcement. This is already with Sharon Lechter in the White House. There is a tool inside of Wealth Maverick. I think you click on life calculator. We've created this killer app which is the story of two twin brothers at 18 years old. We got with, I think it was US bank or Chase bank in 2012 and said, what does the average male adult spend money on between 18 and 72. And they gave us their books and they said, okay, he buys a car here, a used car here at this percent, a real new car here at this percent. Sometimes a boat, a house. I mean we have everything the average person buys.

I'm on that right now, by the way. Keep going.

Yeah. And the interest rate. Now watch this. We did a story of one brother. He spends interest according to the average U.S. american. But the other brother is a little weird. He lives like my family. We have the last name Courtright. There's never been a male Courtright have a W2 job in 150 years. Everybody owns their own business. We were drilled. You pay your house off in four years. You run privately hold companies debt free. And that's what we are. So we were freaks of nature growing up with parents that said credit cards are evil, no debt, but we're not normal. So the guy on the right is like a member of our family. And what he does is he finds out how much his brother is spending in interest spending and then he saves it. And then we give these kids, because this was built for kids, a dial. And they can change the interest they're going to earn in the same dollar amount as what their brother is spending on the left. And then they can earn 2% or 6 or 10. And then when you go to the bottom, you look at the results when you change it from say 2 to 6% and you go to the bottom of the page and you're going to quickly realize, holy cow, the difference of 2% compounded versus even 4 or 6 or 8. It is extraordinary.

By the way. This is awesome. So for anybody listening, I'll put a link to this in the show notes, but it's on wealthmaverick.com life calculation. This is cool. I like this. I like this a lot. I gotta show this to my. Yeah, so that's 22 year old cousin.

Yeah, that's a fun. That's a fun tool that we're trying to get Sharon Lecter. She's in the White House for She's pushing a bill right now to get financial literacy as a general ed, not optional subject.

So important. Like I grew up with every father who was a financial advisor and really taught me a lot of this stuff. So I take for granted what I know versus what a lot of the people you know, that I grew up with just had no clue with. And home economic. A little home economics class that mixes in budgeting and how to balance a checkbook with how to bake a cake is not enough education.

Yeah. So we are in the business of getting people legitimately free from the bondage of debt and finances. And you know, it sounds so cliche, but the reality is, you know, who out there is really helping. You know, there's a lot of great people out there and there's a lot of things you can do to make some part time income. But we took a look and took a step back. After 17 years of general growth consulting and 3,000 3,100 regular clients, there was no residual benefit. We were just making money. And then we stepped back and said what could we do that definitely a money maker, but forces people to build equity in something. And so, you know, this is, this is a, you know, what are we in our 24th year? So it's a pretty well thought out. Many times tried over. I don't know if that came out right. But you know, we get this from so many angles and you know, we got, we're still making a lot of mistakes, but it's finally starting to work.

I love it. Well, Ken, thank you so much for your time here on the show today and going over a lot of this stuff. I know it's, it's probably very enlightening to a lot of the people who are listening to this and you know, I encourage everybody if you want more information. Ken has got a ton of videos and information on incomestore.com you can tell he didn't just. This didn't just spring up. He's answered a lot of these questions before and he goes into explaining it. If he hasn't done a good enough job now and once more think about this. If this is the least bit interesting to you and you want to follow up with Ken and look at this. Take a look. Do you have an IRA right now? Do you have anything that is money that's potentially in the stock market or somewhere else, there are ways that you can get a self directed IRA. I personally use kingdomtrust.com I'm not compensated for mentioning them. And you can explore ways to diversify your Assets. I mentioned this early on when we were talking. One of the things I actually like about this is that I'm very pessimistic about the overall stock market and economy right now. I mean, it's been eight years since a massive recession. Things are highly overpriced in the stock market. I don't have any of my assets currently in the stock market. And I like that this is somewhat insulated or completely uncorrelated to what's going on in the general market, typically because people are still going to be googling websites and information and going there and seeing ads and clicking ads and whatnot. So this seems to be a really good alternative asset to insulate yourself against market risk. Would you agree?

Yeah. Well, put it this way, since 2012, Ford, Nissan, Sony and one other company have taken 25 to 35% of what used to be radio, TV and newspaper advertising budgets. And these are in the billions. And it's now only online.

Yep.

So what they're realizing is in the traditional television world, you cannot track the dollar from a TV commercial to a sale. And on the Internet they can track a funny commercial, I mean, a funny video, you know, that just literally drops a seed. But then they do a retargeting campaign. And there's companies today that are earning over a billion dollars of revenue a year just tracking pixels. For people that start on mobile and then buy on a desktop. It's amazing. So the reality is the world is craving information. And the highest, how do I say this? The most expensive product ever sold is information. The greatest industry we could tell our kids to go into is information. Everything revolves and goes up and down on information. It's either the movement of the information, the creation of the information, the storage of the information. Everything flies with information. So it's not going anywhere. It'll always be here. If Google craps out, somebody's gonna step up and be the next Google. So people need info to live and that's the world we're playing in.

Absolutely. Well, I love it, Ken. This has been fantastic. I look forward to staying in touch with you, finding more about it and encourage everybody to go. Check out incomestore.com check out your podcast. What's the name of the podcast again?

The two main tools we have is today's growth, growing business today. That's the podcast. That's the business related kind of growth nugget podcast. It's all centered around my next book, which I don't even have a title for, but it's basically 19 growth techniques. Nobody's ever heard of. But then the other asset we use big time to teach people is the Digital Footprint event, which can be found@digital footprint.net Cool.

Writing that down. Those will all be in the show Notes to everybody else, thank you so much for listening. I do my best to bring you the, as the title says, sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. It's my pleasure to interview people like Ken. If you have any questions for me for the show, if you have any recommendations, you can always send me an email to ask bradaconwrappedbusiness.com that is a personal email. I will reply and you'll get a lot of other goodies as well. That being said, Ken, thanks a lot for joining me on the show and for everybody else, I will see you on the next episode.