179: The Art of Buying Websites with Jeff Hunt

In this episode I talk about optimizing for repins and then Bjork interviews Jeff Hunt about buying and selling websites. Hey hey, wonderful listener. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. I'm Alexa and we are just totally thrilled that you decided to tune in today. This episode of the podcast is sponsored by our sister site, our friends, wptasty. Wptasty is a food blogger's go to resource for plugin needs. A recipe plugin called Tasty Recipes, a Pinterest plugin called Tasty Pins. More on that in a bit, and an affiliate auto linking plugin called Tasty Links. You can head over to wptasty.com for more info. And for today's tasty tip, that is the helpful little knowledge nugget we nestle into a podcast episode for you is all about Pinterest Repins Pinterest is a huge traffic driver for food bloggers, and in fact it's actually the number two source of traffic on Pinch of Yum. And that's right behind Google. So when someone is on Pinterest and finds one of your recipes, they can save it by repinning it to one of their boards. Pinterest takes pin popularity these repins into account when determining what pins to show in search results. So if repins are so important on Pinterest, is there a way to actually optimize for repins? You betcha there is. And actually there are a few different ways. And the one we're going to talk about today is by setting the data PIN id. So when you open up a PIN on Pinterest, I'd actually recommend doing this on your computer rather than on a mobile device. You can check out the URL. Do you see those numbers at the end? That is the data PIN id. So let's say that you have a spaghetti recipe on your your blog and there's a pin on Pinterest. One pin one image that's performing really, really well. I'm talking a lot of repins. It's a bowl of spaghetti with a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese and a big old loaf of crusty garlic bread. We'll call this delicious image Pin A. You can take Pin A's data pin ID those numbers at the end of the URL and add it as an attribute to the other images in that recipe. So maybe you have a few process shots making the sauce, adding pasta to a pot of boiling water. If you add the popular pins data PIN ID to the process shot images, it'll force pin pin A Whenever someone tries to pin those process shots, you can add the data pin ID to your images with tasty pins or manually. This whole process is a great way to make sure that your best images are circling on Pinterest and that you're adding a bit more pin juice to the pins that are already performing well. You can learn a lot more about data PIN IDs as well as the other ways you can optimize for repins@wptasty.com repin. And now the episode. This episode is really interesting because it's something I never really considered when starting my blog. Buying another blog, think about it kind of like the whole repinning thing we just talked about. An existing website might already have a following, social channels, backlinks, and more that help establish its place on the Internet. Jeff Hunt is here today to talk about why he decides to buy websites rather than actually start them from scratch. So if you're looking for ways to diversify your income or perhaps just a way to start a new site, I think you're really going to learn a lot from this interview. Bjork, take it away.

Jeff, welcome to the podcast.

Oh, I'm really delighted to be with you.

Yeah, it's fun. Actually, we were talking a little bit about podcasting before. You have a podcast, which we can make sure that people talk about that you just launched. And actually I have a close friend here, Mark Doust, who has a podcast for his company, Quiet Light Brokerage. You were recently on that podcast. So you've kind of been on a podcast circuit lately. You've been, you've been making a lot of appearances on podcasts. So is that something that you've intentionally done or is it just kind of bubbled up as more podcasts have launched for you?

You know, it kind of comes in spurts, but it's great fun to talk about this because I enjoy what I do and I think it's particularly what we do in terms of buying websites isn't something that gets talked about a whole lot. So it's kind of fun to be a little bit unique. Yeah.

And it's actually an angle that one of the things that we try and do for this podcast is think really strategically about what is the norm. What is the window that most people see things through in terms of how they view success? And then what does it look like to present another window, like to give people the opportunity to say, like, oh, like, I always have looked out the north facing window, but I didn't know there's a south facing Window and there's, you know, a beautiful lake back there or whatever it is. And I feel like this podcast will be kind of that south facing window where it gives people the opportunity to look at a new. At what success might look like at a new angle. And we're going to be talking about specifically buying websites. But before we do that, I always like to hear a little bit of an origin story for the people that we interview on the podcast. And Jeff, I want to know for you, what did, what does your story look like? Like you've. You've come to be an expert on, on investing in websites and buying websites. But how did you get into that? Where did it start?

Yeah, well, yeah, it's probably different for everyone. In my case, I had a corporate job. I love my job. I'm not one of those. Just was hating what they did and wanting to get out, but I love my job. But then there was this opportunity to move overseas in kind of a ministry vocation. And so me and my family, four kids, we moved to a crazy country overseas and we were there seven years.

Wow.

And while we're there, we actually started a little real estate business. And so I kind of got my feet wet in the web because this business really needed a website and I knew nothing about websites whatsoever, so that kind of forced me to get into it. But then the business changed over time and, you know, we were supported by donations and I actually started buying websites while I was still overseas. And the donations, as they do kind of dwindle down over time if you're not actively promoting. And so the business kind of helped me to backfill what we lost in donations so that we didn't have to go out and continue to get sponsors.

What country was it that you lived? Where did you live?

It was Azerbaijan. Me and all my kids and my wife speak Azerbaijani.

Nice. That is so awesome. So I was, I was involved with model United nations when, when I was in school. And that was always one of the countries, like, who is, who is the country? Who is representing Azerbaijan? Like it was the. Everybody was always a little bit jealous of whoever got that country. So.

Azerbai. What?

Yes, exactly. Most people never heard of it. Yeah. So you're overseas, you're kind of essentially having this side hustle where, you know, hey, we have some people who are supporting us in this ministry and that we're doing. But also over time, there's kind of this shift that happens where maybe there's not as many people that are able to, you know, continue with recurring Donations or maybe some people that initially supported that, you know, year five, six, seven, they don't. And so you start to backfill it with some of this website stuff. And it sounds like it started by, hey, we need a website for this specific real estate thing. As a side kind of question, I know this isn't the main point, but I'm just curious, were you investing in real estate in Azerbaijan?

Well, I owned a house there, which was somewhat significant to put that kind of money at risk. In fact, I also, we made a loan to a school and we also had to put money in the bank just to remain in the country. It was just sort of a condition for being there. But no, I didn't buy as an investment in real estate.

Got it. Okay. So I was going to say we lived in the Philippines for a year and the idea of like just getting a. Finding a place that was a good fit and then leasing it was enough of a challenge. And then the idea of actually purchasing real estate, I can't imagine how complicated that would be. So that kind of kicks things off. You start to become interested in websites just due to the fact that you, you had to build one for this business. At what point did it shift and into like, hey, this. I need essentially a portfolio website or like a website to communicate information into. This website thing can actually be a business itself. When did you have that realization and what did that transition look like?

Yeah, I was listening to a webinar and it was teaching about Google News and how you could build a website, get it approved into Google News, publish news articles and make money from it. And they were selling a course and I had this idea of, well, you know, it feels a little bit risky to go through this process, you know, spend money on the course, build the site, what if it doesn't get approved? And I don't really know how to run it. So I thought, well, maybe I could actually buy one that's already approved. I found one on Flippa, actually, and I bought it and for just several thousand dollars. It was not a big site. But the great thing was the guy who sold it to me, the seller was just super helpful and he had a process. He trained me in the process, told me where to find writers, what articles to write, how to make money from those. And really within about three months, it had completely paid for itself. And then it grew from there. And so that was really my first clue that I could actually make money from those things. Actually, the next big step in the story was about seven years ago, we Returned home from Azerbaijan and kids are going to college. We needed to have an income. I didn't want to go back to the corporate world. So I thought, well, I got to take what I've been doing online and really ramp it up for as, you know, like having lived in the Philippines. The cost of living is quite different in the good old US of A. Especially when you got lots of kids going to college and all that. So I really had. That was the big transition was, you know, going from kind of. It was money and it was helpful money, but it certainly wasn't enough for our lifestyle back here.

Sure. And for those that aren't familiar, you had mentioned a website called Flippa. Can you talk about what that is and kind of how that works as a, as a website or a marketplace?

Yeah, Flippa is the marketplace. Sort of like ebay where there's an auction style system thing, online businesses. And Flippa is probably the largest one of those that exists right now. So if you're looking at, for websites, it's sort of the lower end of things. There's Flippa. At the higher end of things are dedicated brokers who specialize in selling online businesses. Just like a business broker, but for specifically a wide variety of kind of online business models.

Got it. Yeah. And kind of like you would use Zillow, not that they are the broker, but they list real estate. You can look through and say, okay, this house is located here and it costs this much. There are online business brokers specifically where they are selling websites. And so you can go and see, okay, these different websites are listed for this much and have this much income and you can buy them for this amount. So one of the things that, you know, as we talk about shifting perspective, looking through a different window, one of the norms that a lot of people would assume or one of the mindsets that people would have is like, if I'm going to build a business, I need to start that business and then from the ground up from zero, create something and then make it into this profitable, sustainable thing. But the, the, the great thing about where you come from is it sounds like from the very beginning you always had the mindset of, hey, if I'm going to build a business, I'm going to do it after, like the train is moving a little bit. I'm not going to try and get the train from, you know, 0 to 10 miles an hour. I might take it at 10, 20, 30 miles an hour and then try and go 60 miles an hour. So have you ever started a site from scratch or have you always taken on the approach of buying a business and then building it?

So, Bjork, that's actually an excellent question because I've done it both ways, really. I've started things from scratch. But in the news business case, for example, I bought first, I learned the ropes, understood the process, how to hire writers to produce all of those kind of things. And then I was able to actually create a number of news websites from scratch after that. Although I did continue to buy them as well because there's good reasons for buying. And I've done that across several different business models where I've learned it by buying and either built from what I bought or actually replicated it by starting other ones from scratch.

Got it. So one of the things that I would be so curious to hear you talk about is, so you acquired the site. Let's say you learn it, you're able to build it a little bit. What's the decision making process for you when you say, hey, I could continue to build this thing and maybe to use the train analogy, take it from 60 miles an hour to 70 miles an hour, or now that I understand this, go and start something brand new. So how do you make the decision between investing and continuing to build the thing that you currently have, versus creating a new thing from the ground up, knowing kind of the formula that you need, but then shifting your focus a little bit from the thing that's working and creating a new thing? What does that decision making process look like?

Yeah, well, this is one of those parenting things like do as I say, not as I do.

Yeah.

Because I actually, like, I was way too splintered and I would start things when I really should have stuck to a single thing or more, at least more narrow focus. But let me just tell you a story as an example and it'll. And this one will make sense about why I started more. I bought this website, it was a mugshot website where they had photos of people have been arrested for this and that. And it was really funny. I told my wife I bought this thing. She said, well, what if they don't want their photos? You know? Well, this was from Utah. It's called bustedutah.com I thought, well, and then in the back of my mind I was, I wasn't as confident anymore after she said that, I thought about it. But I thought, well, Utah's a long way away.

Yeah. You don't want to be the person that is like outing convicts is like in a sentence.

Exactly, exactly. And extorting them. You Know, like, pay us to take your picture down kind of thing.

So.

But, you know, we did, too. Like, we would send letters. People would pay us to send letters to their, you know, to inmate friends, and we'd put perfume on them and smiley stickers and.

Sure.

So it wasn't all.

Yeah, yeah.

But anyway, so we did it, and it started going really well. Like, at the time, you know, we had these automated processes, and every arrest was a new web page, you know, and it was automatically generated. And so it was just doing fantastic. And it was summer, and so my kids were at home. They had some free time and so said, okay, kids. So we all sat in the family room and with laptops and everything, and I taught them, okay, this is how you research what a good state would be. And so each of the kids picked two or three states, like busted Mississippi, Busted Florida. And so they all created their websites, and we just followed that same pattern that was working for Utah, and sure enough, started picking up traffic. And so it was. And there was this little competition going on between my wife and my three oldest kids. And these websites are going to do the best. Arizona was a big winner. So it was kind of fun. But then we started getting the flame mail. Sure. And people, you know, people really didn't like that business. And I started to understand it, that that was not, you know, ethically. Didn't. It didn't. It was legal. Everything was legal. But it just didn't feel right. So we ended up selling it.

Yep.

Well, actually, we sold the whole portfolio. We had grown it to, like, 13 different sites over a period of five months. And so we did really well with it. But, yeah, that was one reason to go broad instead of go deep.

Yeah. This was not your ministry phase of life. This was the business building.

It's funny because you rationalize all these things, like, maybe this will give people incentive not to do what they did. At the end of the day, I decided it's not.

But I think it's interesting to point out and. And worth having a conversation around. I think when you think of website investing, there. There is the potential to get into something kind of with the numbers mindset and to think, okay, like, what does it look like to take something and to build it? Whereas the content of the thing is maybe not like front and center, but it's like the business building of the thing. The numbers is kind of what becomes the game. And you think of famous investors, and it's maybe a little bit more towards the middle, but like a Warren Buffett is going to invest in, let's say, Coca Cola. And granted, I think he really likes Coke a lot, but point being, that's not necessarily his passion in life, Coca Cola, but it is businesses and he's thinking about business building. And for a lot of people that listen to this podcast, there may be kind of, it's kind of, or in some ways maybe what it is is, you know, they really have this passion and interest in a certain thing. For most of them, it's food, it's recipes. There's other people that listen that aren't in this niche. But for a lot of people that listen to this, they're passionate about a thing and want to find an outlet to make that thing happen. To be able to, you know, make recipes every day and have that be something that is is their job or to be in front of the camera and to be kind of a, a mini version of a Food Network star. And for website investing, there, I think there still is that avenue. There is that potential to build and acquire something, but it's maybe a little bit harder if you're looking for something that has the right numbers as well as the right passion or, you know, niche that you're interested in. So would you be able to speak to those people that are interested or, you know, as we have these conversations, they're kind of fascinated by, hey, what would it look like to potentially buy a business that's already has some success, but with the qualifier that it is within a specific topic? Maybe it's not food and recipes, but, you know, it's fashion or like, what does it look like to search out something in a niche and then pursue it? Is that something that's possible to do?

Yeah, and it's a good point because a lot of people, you know, that does, you know, when you're talking about investing or buying a business, it certainly narrows the possible pool if you're focused on a particular niche or industry. Now, the good news is, you know, for food people, food is enormous. And mom sites or lots of mom sites, so health and fitness, lots of those. So actually the pool isn't as small as if you're like really narrowly focused.

Sure.

But yeah, what it means is it may take a little bit longer to find exactly what you want, the right size, the right subcategory about that, those kinds of things. But, you know, I found that people, what people think they like to do maybe is different. You know, I'm sure that lots of food bloggers have found that it isn't all about food. Like Putting, yes, putting a blog together is about so many more things than unfortunately for many, I'm sure, but just about the actual topic. For example, I now have sites in fitness, in health, in parenting, in footwear, in some luxury items. So I'm kind of spread out across the board. And if I did limit it to what I wanted to do, it would be chess, I don't know, swimming. How does it make no money specifically.

Doing both of those things at the same time, which is a very small niche. But so let's say that somebody's interested in it. They, they've heard us kind of talk about it. What does that, what does that. Well, before we get to that, why. What would your, what, what would your reasoning be for somebody who's like, well, no, I just want to build my thing. What are the considerations people need to have as they weigh buy versus build? And maybe some of the advantages that come along with buying a pre existing website and then building it from there.

Yeah. Okay. So first of all, building is fantastic and you learn a lot, you develop yourself and you make a business the way exactly the way you want it to be. So there's never anything wrong with that, but there's some really distinct advantages in buying. And you know, one of the first ones is that it's super fast. If you want to have an income, if you want to have an audience and traffic and a process and a product, whatever it might be, when you buy, you own that thing the very next day. Right? And so it's a lot faster. Now granted, it takes some time to find what you want and to go through that, but once you've got it, it's a lot faster than building something from scratch. And along those lines, it's kind of sad, but the truth is that literally millions of blogs get started every year that never make a single dime, that may not ever have 10 visitors. And there are ways to not do that, but it's buying something. A site that already has 1,000 visitors or 10,000 or 100,000 or whatever is in many ways a lot more certain than starting something from scratch. Of course, there's ways to limit your risk and both approaches, but so speed, certainty. And the other thing is actually it's easier. As you know, when you start from scratch, you wear a ton of hats. Like you have to be a designer and sometimes a product creator and sometimes, you know, audio visual specialist and a marketer and all of these. And in today's world you can't. I mean, you can get by, but with some things but people have pretty high expectations for quality. And so, you know, there's more pressure to do all those things pretty well. So when you buy something that already exists, a lot of that groundwork is done. A lot of the technical work has been done, the setup, the initial marketing, sometimes product creation, if you're doing an ebook or whatever that might be. So then the difference is you get to focus on either what's broken or what needs improving, or areas that you can grow. And so you can narrow your focus to a much smaller slice of the universe than when you're starting from scratch. And you really have to take care of all of that. So those are some of the really big benefits of buying. And of course, one of the questions that comes to people's mind when I talk about this, I think really quickly is just, yeah, but you have to spend money if you buy, right. And so you're putting capital risk in your savings at risk. That's absolutely true. But I think what people don't think about is starting from scratch is also a sacrifice and a risk because so many people spend lots and lots of time and even spend money on tools and advertising, all kinds of things. So I think there's a bigger cost than people realize to start as well.

Yeah, there's definitely, I think it's important to think about even if you're in the beginning stages, that idea of opportunity cost and, and time that you spend building something that isn't getting a return is time that you're literally spending. Like there's, there's some correlation to a dollar amount for that. And that, that might not be how you view it. Maybe you view it as like, okay, I'm not able to spend time with my kids as much if I'm building this thing from the ground up. But there inevitably is a cost on either side. You're buying a pre existing business or you're building one from the ground up. And like you said, one of the advantages with buying something is that there is a little bit of a track record there that you can look at and say, okay, I know there's some success here. So in regards to seeing that, how do people actually know, like you, let's say you, you, you look at a site and you're like, hey, this would be one that I would like to buy. What does it look like to actually know if a website is successful and to kind of crunch the numbers to see if it's a smart decision? How do you be smart about buying a website?

Yeah, and it's really about Kind of limiting the risk. Because if every website we bought, we could just be assured that the income it has yesterday continues tomorrow, then it wouldn't be a big deal. So you kind of have to look at it from a risk perspective. And, and there's some real fundamentals. I mean, just like human bodies have these indicators like blood pressure and temperature and all of that, they're vital signs for websites as well. And so some of the fundamentals are things like the age and the consistency over time, so that, you know, older websites have. They've seen devices come and go, and they've seen Google algorithm changes come and go, and they're still there. And so there's momentum that goes along with that age. And apparently, if they've survived some of those things, they're probably doing some things correctly. And so there's some basic SEO. You've probably touched on SEO, I'm sure, in your courses and in your podcast. But the health of the backlink profile can be important where people have or have not built spammy links, for example, things that Google might not like.

And really quickly, can you touch on that, what that looks like and what a spammy link would be?

Yeah, I mean, at the simplest level, if you use a tool like Ahrefs or another tool that just shows you what links are coming into a website and you run your eyes down the list, a lot of times you see these websites that just make no sense to be linking to the one that you're looking at. And so they may have, like, really spammy names that you can't even pronounce. Or they may. They may be from very questionable sites. Like morally questionable or bustedUtah.com. exactly. Or like the owner of busteduta.com, like really wild characters like that. And that's not the only guide. But that's just kind of. That gives you an idea. Totally unrelated. A site from a truck website, LinkedIn to a baby website or whatever, you know, so that's. That's one way to think about it. It's just things that don't make sense that are artificial.

Got it. And yeah, those tools that you so Ahrefs or Ahrefs or however you say that Semrush, these, these SEO tools will be able to say, hey, we can show you, for any. For any website, all of the links or most of the links, I don't know how accurate they are, that are pointing to a certain website. And so if you are looking at a website and saying, hey, I kind of am interested in buying this that's one of the important things to do. Use one of those tools and do kind of a review of what, what do the links look like? And even for your own website, you know, if you're not doing kind of an audit or due diligence on purchasing one, it's probably a good thing to do to have an idea of what your backlink profile looks like, as you talked about. So that makes sense. Kind of, kind of looking at the age of the website, kind of those stats that you mentioned for a website, the age of it has been. Has it been around a long time or is it brand new? Is it on the up and up in terms of how the links are created, which is so important for SEO? Is there good content behind it? One of the things that you talked about that I thought was interesting is this idea of buying a process. And I think this is something even for people who aren't interested in buying a business can think about, because it's a really valuable thing for businesses. But what does that look like to buy a process? And what should we as business owners, bloggers, content creators, be thinking about when it comes to introducing processes into our own businesses?

Yeah, really good point. These businesses have a motor and that's like the key thing that drives the business. Where do you get your customers? And that's the engine in the business is like, what is the secret sauce that enables this website to get new visitors? And so if you can put your wrap your mind around that and assess what that is, then that's super important. So for example, it could be something like, well, this business has learned that if they post on Facebook four times a week in a particular way, it's going to generate X amount of traffic which historically has returned this amount of revenue. Or the engine might be something like, well, we publish this many articles in a month of this link of this length, and we choose the topics in this way and so on. And that might be the engine. But in E commerce, same thing, we research new products in this way and then we launch them in this way. And that's kind of their process. So that is the core thing that we look for when we're buying a website is what is the process that the seller has taken this far to get the site to where it is. And if you can, you know, you get the idea, you see some websites that are for sale and you think the seller has no clue why he has traffic. And the problem with that is that if the traffic dies off, then neither he nor you will be able to figure out how to resurrect it. Because there wasn't really a reliable process to begin with. So it's really key. On the other hand, if you sort of, you read a little bit about the business, you understand what that traffic motor is, the lead generation model is, and you think then you begin to imagine things like, oh, yeah, I think I could do that same thing, only I could do it twice as frequently, or I could do it a little bit better, or I could apply it to more websites or whatever. Then that's how you begin to visualize how you can grow the business and how you can operate it. And also like, is it the business for you? Because once you understand what that motor is, then you can test that against your own interests and say, oh, well, yeah, that is something I can see myself doing and I would enjoy doing that aspect of it or I could outsource that aspect of it or whatever. So, yeah, that's really, really critical. And I didn't get to your second point or second part of the question, but I mean, you want me to continue?

Yeah, please.

Yeah, yeah. So your second point was like, okay, how is that important for those of us who already have a business and what that process is? And that is super critical. To the extent that we can identify the key activities that are going to drive the growth of our business and we can write them down, know how to do them, how often way to do them, and procedurize all of that to the extent we can do that, that's the extent to which we're going to keep our business running. And then once we're satisfied that those repeatable, consistent tasks can be done that we know have gotten us this far and going to keep us going, then as owners, we can think about the other things like the new horizons and the different pane of glass to look out at and through and see what we can do to kind of take our business to another level. Which basically just means creating another set of processes to follow consistently.

Yeah, it reminds me of the book that I feel like is we've maybe mentioned a couple times on the podcast, but would be worth mentioning again. And it's called the E Myth. And it's actually the story in the E. Myth is somebody who has a food business. It's a brick and mortar retail pie shop, and talks about how like completely draining this pie shop is for the owner because they just show up and it's like the daily grind. But as they start to intentionally work on the business and not just in the business, Then they start to, they kind of fall in love with the pie shop again. And as it becomes less of a burden and more of this like kind of passion for them. And I kind of hear some of the same things that you're talking about, like how do you create, how do you work on your business and not just in it on a day to day basis? And I think it's one of the really big questions that people need to ask as they're building something online is are you interested in building a business or are you interested in building a following or a celebrity ness. And not that that's the hard line. There's some overlap that happens with that. And even if you are wanting to be an individual, influencer, kind of online entity, somebody that is known, there are things that you can do to create systems and processes around it. But there might be some ownership that you, as, you know, podcast listener want to have over your thing and you just don't, you just don't want to remove that and you just don't want to release that. And that's a pretty big consideration to make between like buying an entity, a business and growing it versus, you know, being a celebrity and having you be kind of the core piece of content. So for those people, Jeff, that, let's say they, they kind of want to be involved with it, they want to have a little their face as a part of, of the brand. Is it still possible for those people to acquire a business and build it or would you say you should? For those people, they should think about building something and then as they build it, introduce those processes that you talked about.

So these are people who want to kind of be the face of their business because they want to engage with.

Their followers and maybe they want to be the voice or they want to be the person crafting the content on social media. Is it still possible for those people to introduce some of these kind of business best practices around processes and scalability, even if they are kind of still the hub of the business, the content creator?

Oh yeah, absolutely. Because in any business you'll find that there's just so many administrative things that have to be done and so all of those can be procedurized, processized. And in fact it actually makes it more freeing for them to do the things that are unique to their personality because they can put a procedure around and often delegate or outsource things that, that, that aren't in that category. And in fact obviously the opposite is that the things where their face needs to be involved can't really be delegated or outsourced. Anyone?

That's great. So let's talk about specifics of what it looks like to actually buy a website. Is there a minimum dollar amount where you'd say, hey, if you're interested in starting, you should probably buy a website that's over this amount and otherwise it won't be worth it? And what is the range that people could expect to pay? Obviously, there's probably a pretty high ceiling on it. But for somebody that's just getting started, where would be a good place to start?

Well, you know, it really depends on people's goals because you can buy a website for like $100 that's sort of a template that has no traffic and doesn't make any money. But, you know, there's a few pages up there and some pictures on it. And so I would not recommend that you buy at the very lowest end like that, because the whole point is you're buying a process and you're hopefully buying some traffic and a revenue stream, an income stream. And so if you're doing that, then you're definitely above the hundred dollars and you're into probably less than $5,000 somewhere in that range. And because at that level, there are some websites that have consistent traffic and making a little bit of money, they're typically at that level, they're pretty risky because they probably haven't been around that long, or they're using techniques that are a little bit higher risk to get their traffic. Or maybe they're not diversified in terms of the way they do things. All the traffic may come from Instagram, for example, or all of it, Facebook or something like that. So they're more risky. But I'm answering the question in this way, and then you move up the stream. And I'm answering in this way because there may be people who want a website that's never intended to grow to be a big business or for the family to be able to live on. They want maybe a side income or something. And so a very small website might actually, let's say they care about travel. There are a lot of little travel websites that are for sale that people have created that they've gotten bored with or whatever that have some traffic and something, and they would be able for someone interested in that to just pick it up and then work it and build it up without starting from scratch. Food websites are the same way. I see recipe websites somewhat frequently. Mom blogs, same thing. I think you could start small. On the other hand, if you're really serious about A business, and you don't want to buy something that has risk or a lot of risk, then you probably need to move up the chain, and you need to get up into the 20 to $50,000 range. And then if you're really serious, if you're trying to replace your income and do it pretty quickly, then you're going to be looking at a couple hundred thousand dollars or something like that, depending on what your budget is and what your goals are. And even more so, it really depends on kind of what you want to do with it. A lot of people, I find, actually have funds to buy a very large business, but they want to start small just to kind of educate themselves. And so they want to exercise that muscle of doing a transaction and seeing how that works.

It's kind of running a 5k before you sign up for the marathon. Like, okay, I can do a 5K. Let's level that up a little bit. My hope was that you were just going to keep going all the way up the price scale until you said, and I imagined you putting a pinky to the side of your mouth, $1 billion. But that would be a little bit out outside of the range. But even that, I feel like some people hear 100,000 and it might as well be a billion dollars. Like, it's just such a substantial amount, especially if you're, you know, like, the idea that somebody would have $100,000 to. To. To buy a website, it's like, well, man, like, let me, you know, fix the leak on my car. Which side story? There was a time a couple of years ago where I was taking our Hyundai Sonata through the car wash and felt this, like, my pants getting wet. And I was like, what the heck? And I looked, and there's literally a direct drip from my door onto my pants, which I probably shouldn't have been paying for a car wash. I probably should have gotten some. That car fixed. But, you know, for most people, it's like, hey, I want to. I want to make sure I have these basics taken care of. But does somebody need to save up $100,000? Is this something that. Do people ever acquire a website like they would a house where they have a loan? Is that something you'd recommend? Or is it too risky to do that? Are banks open to having that conversation? What does it look like as you move up that scale and start to be intentional about paying a little bit more, but maybe not having the cash for that? What would your recommendation be in situations like that?

You know, if we were looking at the paragraph that you just spoke, there's like seven question marks in it.

Yeah, that's one of the things. That's one of the things that I've noticed about any interview that I do is I'll ask like five to 10 questions at a time. So you can, you can pick any of those and run with them.

Well, they're really good questions because borrowing money, getting funds from other places is an important consideration and you obviously would only want to do that if you really needed something of scale. So if you're trying to replace your income or you want to grow something significantly to the extent that either you don't want to put your own savings at risk or, or you just simply don't have that much savings, the answer to part of the question is yes, it is available. Increasingly there are Small Business Administration SBA loans that are available. For many businesses. Getting banks to loan money is possible, although it's more challenging just to have a personal relationship with a bank or find a bank that will loan you money. Because many of them don't understand online businesses. They don't have the security of physical assets. Most of the time they're just kind of digital or intellectual property based assets. So it's a little bit harder to get loans directly from banks, although it's still possible. Lots of people raise money from family and friends or even other investors to make purchases once they have a little bit of expertise in operations.

Sure.

So all those things actually are quite possible. And part of it is just your mentality about borrowing money. I've always done everything with my own money. I felt very good about that all the time. I have people offering to fund purchases and so far I haven't taken them up on those offers.

There's definitely risk upon risk that is introduced when you are thinking about buying anything. And then when it's an online business, maybe there is even more potential for risk versus let's say a commercial real estate purchase or something like that, which would be traditionally a little bit less risky. But then also anytime you layer in debt on something, there's risk with that. So can definitely understand that. And like you said, kind of a philosophy decision for a long time and.

Then you introduce new parties to be beholden to as well. So part of the fun of being an entrepreneur is to kind of be beholden to fewer people.

Yes. Right. Right. To no one, potentially.

Yeah. Although we've all learned that that doesn't actually work out that way because we care about our customers, we care about our employees.

Yes, 100% and in some ways, I think being an entrepreneur or a business builder is like the ultimate in behold. It maybe isn't the word, but, like, it is as much as possible, thinking about how you can serve other people, whether that be people that are part of your team or customers or things like that, as it is about people serving you. Um, and it seems like that's something that you've done as well, Jeff, which is. Which is I. Really something I really appreciate about you. Um, so we're coming to the end here. You know, we're able to just kind of dip. Dip our toe in. And there's a lot of stuff that goes into this. And I know that this is kind of what you focus on. I mean, obviously you. You run the business, but then you talk the businesses. But then you also talk about what it's like to run the businesses and to do this and to, you know, be really smart and strategic about investing in websites. So, Jeff, for people that have heard this interview, they've. Their interest has been peaked. They want to learn more. Where can they go to connect more with you? I know that you've recorded a couple podcast episodes, a few podcast episodes that you've published. You also have your website. There's a course that you have and some additional material. Can you talk about all of those things and where people can find those and learn more?

Yeah. And Bjork, one thing is that I really appreciate about you is you've kind of done the same thing. Like, you've gone down this path at the same time in parallel. You teach people how you've done it. And, and, you know, for me, it's. It's great fun to do that. People ask me, well, you know, if you're so good at buying websites, why do you, you know, why do you sell a course? And. Well, and there's multiple answers, but, like, for, you know, one of them is it's just kind of. It's fun to help people. Second one is, it's like this asset that I've built. Like, I know how to do something and that my knowledge is value. And like, people who are business people, they have to leverage their assets, and so I just leverage it. I learned how to do a thing, and then I teach about it in parallel. So anyway, where I sell my course is flipminds.com flipminds.com and if you go to flipminds.com food, then it'll take you to a page where there's a couple of giveaways there. There's some case studies about websites that I've purchased in the past. And there's also evaluation tool that kind of helps you estimate value of site that you might purchase. So that's a good place to get started there. And my podcast, rather, is called the Website Investor. It's pretty new. It's short format, just like six minutes per episode. And I try to, like, be succinct as I possibly can and give you good content in a short period of time. But, yeah, you know, most of. So I do have this education business, but. But the vast majority of my income and my time and effort is spent on my own little portfolio of sites.

How many sites do you have, by the way?

Well, about a year ago, I sold a dozen or so. I have about six right now that are the core sites, and then I still have that many more that are.

Yep, not the core sites.

Not the core sites. Yeah. But, yeah, it's really. I. I don't recommend building portfolios, honestly. You should narrow down and focus on key things.

Yep. Love that. Great conversation, Jeff. Really fun to talk through some of the stuff, and I know that it'll introduce that. That additional angle that people can think about when they're trying to understand, like, what does this look like for me? What does success look like? And maybe it's not building something from the ground up, but instead it's looking at what's available on the marketplace and saying maybe there's something I could purchase and from there I could build it. And I think that's a really important consideration for people to make as they think about, you know, building into what success looks like for them. So thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Jeff. We'll make sure to link up all of those things, things that you talked about in the show notes and don't be a stranger. We'll. We'll be in touch. Thanks for being on the podcast.

Oh, great. My pleasure. Really enjoyed it.

And that is that, my friend. And the end of the episode means that it's time for our reviewer of the week. And this review. Review comes from itunes. And this week's review comes from Dale and Valerie from the new food blog unstoppablefoodie.com and it says, really enjoyed this podcast. My wife Valerie and I just started our food blog, unstoppable foodie approximately three months ago on 9 3, 2018. All the information and insights shared were super valuable. We'd love to hear how the duties are divided between spouses. He's referring to our recent episode with a couple cooks. This is critical for finding the right balance between skills and passions. Thanks for sharing. We appreciate all that you do for the podcast audience as well as our subscription to Food Blogger Pro. You are always adding value. Thanks for that review. Dale and Valor. We are so thrilled you're enjoying the podcast and your Food Blogger Pro membership. We are so thankful for you and for you, dear listener. Thank you so much for tuning in this week. We hope you have an amazing, amazing start to your December to the start of your holiday season, and from all of us here at FPP hq, make it a great week.