$50K a Year From 1 Website With 1 Hour/Month of Work (Copy This)⏐Ep. #226

It makes a little over 50 grand a year. I spent about an hour a month on it, maybe.

Geez.

Zero concept or understanding of coding. These domains are interesting. It's like, this is like the key to the entire website. I didn't like my livelihood dictated by someone else. Some of these folks online are under the impression that they need to quit their day job.

Yes.

I do not subscribe to that at all. I'd work nine to five, then I'd come home and work on these projects in the evening. It's just an hour a day.

What are the tools in your tool belt that you can't live without? Do you think directory businesses are still viable today in the age of AI? My friend Peter lives the life. He lives the dream. He's got a portfolio of niche websites that just pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. It took some time on the front end to build these up, but today he only spends a few hours a week managing these projects. So I had to know Peter as someone who's been reading your blog for 15 years, following your progress. How do you do it? What tools do you use? How. How can people copy you? He did with onions what I did with Buc EE's and Texas snacks. He just does things. Permissionless things. He partners with people he's never met. He's cheap, like me. He doesn't spend a ton of money, but he's patient and he's tactical and he shares his secrets with us today. So please enjoy this conversation with my friend Peter. I would love to hear this story. How did this domain name come across your desk and what made you find it interesting and end up buying it?

At this point in my career, I've been laid off several, several times. And that began to grate on my nerves. I didn't like my livelihood dictated by someone else. And if somebody made some, and I've lived through this through several startups, you know, executives make a horrible decision and it kneecaps the company and I'm held responsible. And I had a few instances where I was at a startup and I drove like I was in the marketing and I built a product for the team and it drove an extra couple million dollars for the team.

Team.

And they promoted me and they hired, I got an assistant. I trained the assistant up and then six months later they lay me off and keep my assistant for a lower salary. Oh man, that one really stuck with me. And that's when I was like, I got to figure out this stuff. I don't have a computer science Background. I have a history degree from Ole Miss. So I was like, I got to figure this stuff out. I have a background in SEO, a little bit in SEO, zero concept or understanding of coding. But I knew I needed to concentrate on it. So I started trying to teach myself to code. Coding led me to start building sites. Building sites exposed me to like AdSense and I could monetize the sites a little bit from AdSense and that started giving me a little bit of money. I mean not a ton of me, 50 bucks a month. And then it got to 300 bucks a month and I was like, wow, this is crazy. A more on me can generate revenue online, but there were small like piecemeal projects and the more I kept building, at some point I always have to think back on how I got exposed to expired domains. I was building sites and I realized it might be faster just to acquire a site. What's stopping me from going into Google, typing in some high traffic search term, reaching out to the owner to see if they want to sell the site to me in my head, like there's nothing stopping me from doing that. So I started attempting to do that. I'd reach out and for some strange reason tourism seemed fun. So I'd search tourism terms. Aruba. Who shut up for the term Aruba?

Buying sites. Do you mean buying domain names that are just sitting dormant?

No, no. Full operating websites that look like kind of mom and pop design. Maybe they were built in Dreamweaver and they hadn't been updated in five or 10 years, but they were ranked number two or three or maybe number one in Google for the term Cancun or some travel based website. And I could see within, you know, on AdSense, Google typically gives you around 70% of that click value. So I was like, well, tourism terms are quite expensive. They're $2 dollars, $3 a click. So if I built out a tourism based website and somebody clicks on a dollar ad unit, I'll get 70 cents per click. That's, that's pretty darn good. And heck, I can go down to Aruba or go to Cancun or, or go out west on a vacation. So I started building these small kind of travel based websites. It felt like, it didn't feel like work, it was just like vacation. I'm building vacation websites and there's some.

Arbitrage in here because the owners of these websites don't know that the cost per click is higher. You have that information that they don't have, right?

Correct. They'd always, shall always ask for analytics. And I could look at their analytics and say, oh my gosh, if I got a 3% click through rate, 1% click through rate on these ads, I can make 500, a thousand bucks a month, 2,000 bucks a month, and their ask price is three grand. Yeah, I'll buy it and, and bring it in house. So I'd buy the entire content and bring the domain over. And so that's when I started getting exposed to domains. So I'd get a deal on a site and my brain immediately went to the domain and say, and my brain was telling me I gotta get control of this domain. Cause if I control the domain, I control the whole site. Cause they could waffle and change their mind. But if I control the domain and they go back on their word, I can still screenscrape the information, pull it over and rebuild the site, but I have to own the domain. I was like, these domains are interesting. I was like, these are. This is like the key to the entire website. And some of the sites I was buying early on were just regular. They weren't terribly descriptive. But they ranked, they were old, they were trusted. But I kept coming across these really interesting new descriptive domain names. Like one of the early.

Go ahead. Sorry, before you go there, what are some examples of some old ones that you bought that were interesting but didn't quite work out?

Yeah, so one was, I've since sold this domain. It was called Travel Envoy and it was a directory of wineries and vineyards that you could visit. I bought this around 04 and.

Okay.

And then he transferred all the pages to me. I bought it for 10 grand and then I simply just added Adsense to it. And I did a poor job. I didn't know how to code very well. So I added it to the site. And then it started. Yeah, throw me whatever. A grand, two grand a month.

And he didn't have any ads on it.

Zero ads, nothing on it.

So you bought it like as a business slash website. And that wasn't even on his radar. All you did was plug ads on it and.

Wait, I plugged ads? Yeah, Adsense ads on it. And then. And I had one affiliate thing and that actually worked pretty well. There was this cool map of all the like wine varieties where they're sourced from. And this guy had signed up for an affiliate deal. And so if you go back in Internet Archive, you'll see this ad up on the top right hand side.

Oh yeah, you can pull up way back 2004. Is this it?

This is before I bought it. Isn't that beautiful? Look at that. This is what you're looking for. These types of sites still exist today.

For those that are listening, it basically looks like Craigslist. Blue hyperlinks, very ugly.

And there are still mom and pop operators out here that have websites like this that are. Are very receptive to straight up offers to buy the website. This is before I acquired it.

And 10,000 pages on a website, that's a moat. That's a lot of tedious work.

I was kind of spitballing 10,000. It was a lot. It may have been five to 10,000. It was a tremendous amount of pages because it took me hours. When I did the FTP transfer, he forwarded all the sites. I think I did an FTP because there were so many pages. There was no easy way that I. That I was aware of. So this may have been me. So here, top right, that's 2006. QPR Wines paid me. They paid me a few. This was like wine ratings. Yeah, they wound up paying me a month.

Is this like a trip down memory lane for you?

Yes, it is. I haven't been it. So if you notice, this grape to the right of that was my AdSense ad unit. So back then there were no. AdSense wasn't including any kind of images within this. They were straight hyperlinks that they pull. So I'd always try to add some kind of imagery. So that was. That was some free clip art I found somewhere. Add the ad on the right and then included all the normal navigation to the site.

And then wine books. Did that just take you to Amazon through an affiliate link?

I may have left that for him. And I just let him keep all the affiliate stuff from the wine book he made.

Oh, here we are.

Yeah, I don't, I don't remember ever put creating my. Because the affiliates were so small the revenue share. So I never bothered. I was making more from the AdSense. I just focused on AdSense and some intriguing affiliate deals. That little map up in the right converted quite well. You'd be. You'd be surprised right here. Yeah. I don't know if they're still in existence.

It looks very intriguing. It looks like a periodic table.

Yeah, it was really cool. Yeah. DeLonge's wine info. It was really cool. And they'd ship it. They sent me one for free. Comes in that little. This is a what down memory lane. So this one was one of the first big acquisitions I did. I bought it for 10,000 bucks.

So let's talk about the unit economics. Of that $10,000, like, what were you buying? Was there any revenue from anything? How did you come up with that price?

I don't even know how we came. I may have asked him what he was comfortable selling it with, and I believe he may have come around. From what I remember, it was maybe 12 to 14. And I got him down to 10,000 bucks. So I could use that number and then look at the analytics and say, okay, how long would it take me? I was still working a 9 to 5 at this, and I'm a big believer this. Some of these folks online talk about this. You know, some online builders are under the impression that they need to quit their day job.

Yes.

And they go all in on their project.

Preach, preach.

I do not subscribe to that at all. I ran my day job. I'd work nine to five, then I'd come home and work on these projects in the evening every day. And I treated it. I don't know. You watched that old robot show, the Battlebot show, and I mentioned this on Twitter. Sometimes I compared it. These two little robots in. In this death den, and they're fighting each other. Which one, my nine to five or these projects that I'm building, which one can generate more money? And whenever my little side projects, maybe it never happens, but whenever my side projects can generate more money than my nine to five, that's when I'll consider it. Or maybe when they're getting close, that's when I'll consider dropping off and going full time. So I was still working 9 to 5 in these projects.

I call it the wing walkers code for those listening. I'm showing images of wing walkers on these airplanes. You never let go of one railing until you have control of the other railing. Right. And that's the same thing with testing side hustles, testing business ideas like, just don't let go of the thing until you have a better thing in hand.

Yes. Because it creates so much stress. I see some folks that do this, they'll quit. I'm giving myself nine months and oh my gosh, the pressure. And, you know, these weirdo ideas, in my opinion, don't come up in that type of pressure tank. It's when you're. When you're allowed to sit and daydream and curious. Heck, at 95, you're probably sitting at your cube five or six hours a day, just daydreaming on different ways to work on your project at night and doing two or three hours of actual work at your job. Why not get paid for that? Go home, work on your project and see where it can lead. And some of these projects, I mean, they don't require. They require somebody just to baby them constantly. And sometimes it's just an hour a day to push it in the right direction, make sure it's not going down, and it's fast and responsive.

You were having a ton of fun. This was a hobby, correct? This is just fun. And you could even monetize this fun. So. Right.

And I was teaching myself to code. I was like, wow, this stuff's weird. I'm not very good at it. I don't know if I have a ton of interest in it, but I'm fascinated by it. I'm glad. I understand. So the way I kind of taught myself to code was I am not a coder, but I basically just taught myself how all these puzzle pieces work. But so back to Travel Envoy. So I built it. I start recognizing this importance of this domain name. And I keep running across projects with really intriguing, just descriptive. Like, my friend north of Atlanta, Warren Royal, bought the domain bobbleheads.com@a domain name auction. Had no experience in bobbleheads. Very similar to you and me, you and Texas snacks and me and Vidalia. He had zero experience in the bobblehead world. Bought it at auction. I believe he spent 30 grand. And he started a custom bobblehead business from scratch. And he currently now has 15 employees north of Atlanta. I've been to his warehouse a few times, and it's just the coolest warehouse to go visit because he has life size bobbleheads, you know, like George Washington hanging around. And so I was watching what Warren was doing. I was like, this is very interesting and fascinating, what he's building. And so he bought that at auctions.

I mean, $160. Do you know what his revenue is or what kind of volume he does nowadays?

You should get him on the. He is wonderful. He doesn't go on many podcasts. He's so heads down on this business. He rarely. He'll show up on a few Domainer podcasts from time to time, but he's always had heads down on.

Oh, there you go. Let's just use his math. We, we produce over 250,000 bobbleheads each year. I'm looking at his prices. Nothing's under a hundred dollars. Yeah. So 25 million.

Wow.

That would be over 25 million a year if they were each $100, which most of these are. 100 to 200.

Yeah, yeah.

See, and it's funny, Peter, because like most People wouldn't believe that they're going to hear that. Like, no, you don't sell 25 million of bobbleheads a year.

And it's like, no, oh, I can, I can do. Get the domain bobbleheads. All the kind of the cynical attitude. So, but go ahead, I'm interrupting you. Yes.

No, like people just, there's just so many e commerce businesses out there not named Amazon.com that do millions, tens, hundreds of millions and billions of dollars a year, many of which have never been heard of. Yeah, I owned an e commerce fulfillment company and we would get leads all the time. Like I have this makeup brand, I have this, this food ice cream brand. We do 36 million, we do 22. And I'm like, where are you coming from? How are there so many e commerce brands and crazy. In the context of this conversation, a lot of times, not every time it starts with a really good, trustworthy domain name. Right?

Yeah. So he got bobbleheads and then bobblehead came up, I think a year or two after. So he owns Singular and Plural. He owns the entire, you know, beachhead for this entire industry.

Okay. I went to bobblehead.com and it redirect.

Should redirect to bobbleheads. He treasures everything over.

So when you bought Travel Envoy, that $10,000 was just kind of goodwill. There was no really revenue, but you knew what you could do with it. And that's kind of how you valued it, right?

I valued it based on the traffic. I could see how much traffic. I could roughly napkin math, a rough click through rate for my AdSense units and maybe some extra revenue from the affiliate deals. And I thought I could pay it off within six to nine months. And I want to pay it off within six months easily.

Oh my gosh. A lot of people are watching this and I know what they're thinking. A lot of them are thinking, well, this isn't relevant anymore. You just can't reach out to site owners and like, are you kidding me? It's 100% still relevant. Is AdSense brand new? No, of course not. But there's, there's even more arbitrage opportunities. I, I just bought a bunch of trees for my front yard and I wanted to buy them here, you know, close to me. So I went to the website to try to shop around.

Cool.

This is their website.

I love it.

I love nursery.com and I saw and I'm like, I want to buy this business. And I go in the business and like the gentleman helping me is like 83 awesome. And they have this prime real estate. They've been there for 40 years. Wow. You can't shop online. You don't know what their inventory is. They don't answer their phone and it's like, of course this is a much more expensive version of what we're talking about. But arbitrage opportunities will always exist. And when you and I are 80 years old, people are going to be buying sites from us.

Correct? Yeah.

To do better things with them. Right.

Similar. When I did my Vidalia project, the Farm, I partnered with no website, no online presence whatsoever. So when I started recognizing these domains were quite interesting, I was like, what's fascinating? How do I get a domain like Warren has like bobbleheads dot com. You know, I wasn't able to register them in 95. It's 04 at this point. I was like, oh, I, I missed my opportunity. I didn't have any opportunity by these domains. The windows closed now and I rarely ever think from that perspective. But I kept digging through and at some point I got exposed to the expiring domain name market. And I think you're familiar with it. You know, somebody doesn't renew a domain for whatever reason. The domain goes back to the registrar and the registrar puts it up for auction for open bid. And Roughly every day 50 to 100,000 domain names expire. So it's a tremendous amount of inventory that you can sift through. Because at first I tried to buy. So this is more of a marketplace try. Okay, what's a good Godaddy? Auctions is one of the biggest. So they built their own auction platform to sell domains within there. So if you just do. I think it's auctions.godaddy.com Yep. Shows some of within the. The expiring side. So go to advanced search right there and then go to type and then do expiring auctions and then go estimated value and then go down on. Say they add. I'm sorry on that top search results go down, down a little bit more.

Oh, right here.

Yes sir. And then. And then go down, do it and click it again. Now go to choosing their own. Check out JTM.com is expiring. Oh, three letter three letter callers dot com. I mean look at that domain tracking application.

Golftor dot com.

Yes.

That could be a travel website.

Oh my gosh. So this is, this is a deep rabbit hole. So when I got exposed and this was around 04 exposed to expiring domain auctions, I was like, oh my gosh. Hang on. Because I was trying to buy domains direct from original registrar from original owners. And you know, they'd want, I mean, and they're worth it. They'd want 100 grand, 500 grand. I was like, I can't. It's too risky for me. And I found this. This is simply a patience game. If you simply sit and wait. Crownmolding.com look at that cool one, dude.

You could buy all the interesting crown molding that the world has to offer. You could sell crown mold, it could be drop shipped directly from the manufacturer. You don't have to have a big warehouse.

You could do the recycled crown molding out of old historic homes.

Yes. Oh man, I know.

So this is, this is where I started looking at them. Not, not really with the intention of building. I was looking at them from. Maybe I buy them and flip them. Maybe I'd try to buy them and make some adsense money off of them. But then some of these other names, crown molding would pop up and then they'd start inspiring me to build something. I was like, crown molding. Oh my gosh.

Rent my house dot com. Yeah.

And so this, I started doing this every single day. And I'd buy some. I'd buy one, build a small site, figure out how to monetize it. Maybe it had existing traffic, maybe it had direct traffic, maybe it had had a previous identity to it and figure out ways to build on that. So I'd build a few there. But it was more piecemeal efforts. And I was like, man, I'm getting tired of doing these small. I'd rather wait and find a big one that expires and maybe just wait. I'm not in a hurry. I'll just sit maybe and hang out and just monitor this thing every single day and wait for an interesting domain that expires. And that's when Duderanche.com popped up. It popped up oddly, a ranch up in New York State owned it. They owned it. Dude ranch got sold two or three times and then the last owner ran it into the ground and shut it down. Sold the, sold the property. If you want to go into archive, it's pretty fun to see the old version of Dude Ranch.com so you can see it.

I'll do that now.

And it used to be called Roseland Ranch. And so they own the domain they used to advertise on Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy.

No way.

Vacation. Yeah, I'll have to forward you the tweak. I found one of the ads that they had. So I, I reposted it on my Twitter feed somewhere. Here's another one. It looks Roseland Ranch Resort. And if you scroll down, you'll see usually they'll have. Oh, you may have seen us on Wheel of Fortune.

This is 2003 with that. Oh, here it is.

Yeah, it's before. So they. This expired and went up for auction in 09. Okay, so I start. I waited when I made that decision that I was gonna sit and wait. Almost like catbird's seat and almost just empty mind and just wait for something to pop up that's expired. That inspires me to build. I like the. My first version.

I built 2009 and I built it. Yeah, even this looks awesome, though.

I mean, I built press. So at that point, I'd gotten exposed to WordPress and I had some rough idea. I had an SEO and paid search background, Love analytics. And I was like, okay, I'll. I'll build it myself to make sure I can advertise. And then dude Rancher started buying ads from me. I was like, sweet, I think I can make this work. And only then go ahead.

Yeah, advertising. How do they start buying ads from you? Like, how do they find.

Oftentimes? So it started the easiest way for me. I think I could have done this via email or phone, but they unfortunate. They have a yearly conference every year. They hold it at a dude ranch, typically. So I was like, sweet. Now this is kind of killing two birds with one stone. I can start visiting dude ranches because I need to visit a few to get the feel of these. Just because I'm. I'm basically representing the industry by owning this domain. It's. It's crazy. Owning one of these names and folks will assume you are an expert in that field. The trust and immediate authority. Yeah, with a. An exact match. Descriptive.com. generic exact match is wildly powerful.

I've been using Beehive for about two years, almost as long as they've been around. And I got to tell you, watching other creators stay stuck on basic newsletter platforms is painful. You're losing thousands of dollars because you don't know what your subscribers are worth. And when potential sponsors ask who reads your newsletter and you say entrepreneurs or moms, you lost the deal. But Beehive has a survey feature that's brilliant. You can set up a few questions about demographics and spending habits that you send them through right after they subscribe. So instead of telling sponsors, Oh, I have 5,000 subscribers, you can say, I have 3,750 homeowners making over $75,000 thousand dollars a year who spend $200 plus per month on home improvement. And that's proof that their ideal customers are reading your newsletter. Go extract your email list from whatever platform you're stuck on because it's probably costing you thousands in lost deals. Beehive makes migration easy. You can move all your emails in minutes so you can get paid what you're actually worth. Head to beehive.com Chris for 30% off your first three months. That's B E-E-H-I-I V.com Chris. You'll thank me later.

So they started advertising with me from, from the conference, and then they started signing up direct. And then I met a friendly competitor. He ran guestranches.com and he and I would notice sometimes a rancher would cancel me, but they'd keep guestranches.com. sometimes they'd cancel guest ranches and keep me. And I was talking to David and I was like, david, hey, what. What if we. What if we partner up and we corner the market or pseudo corner the market, because if they cancel both of us, they're going to lose about 50% of their traffic. It's going to be very difficult for them to consider canceling us.

Yeah.

And so we partnered up and we did that for, gosh, eight years or so, maybe longer.

Wow.

He's based in Littleton, Colorado, so I could always fly to Colorado, hang out at his place, and then we take road trips and go around to all the dude ranches nearby.

How much did this domain name cost?

Duderanch.com so it went up and it was the pending delete, and it cost 17, 18,000 bucks. Basically just under 18,000 bucks.

And what signals did you look for before spending a dime on this to tell you that this was worthwhile?

Average tools. I wanted search volume. I want to fish where the fish are. So there was a lot of search volume for the term dude ranch. But I want to make sure there's an album called dude ranch from some band. So I want to make sure they're looking for dude ranch vacation.

Isn't that Blink 182?

I think so, yeah. So and then I was like, okay, I need to really, I can look, but maybe a small percentage of that traffic is looking for the album. But it's mainly folks looking for vacations. So I could look at dude ranch vacations. And that was still strong search volume. Then I'd look, I'd pull dude ranch Colorado, dude ranch Texas, Idaho, all the states, all still strong search volume. I was like, okay, this is good. I have one side of the equation. Somebody looking for a vacation. Then I went to the dude ranches. Like, what's the average ticket price of a dude ranch vacation for a family of four? It roughly ranges 10,000 to 30,000. This is just me spitballing off the top of my head. I was like, okay, let's just assume 30% margin. So the rancher is making three grand on one booking. I still have these rates. I still have 575 as my flat yearly fee to be included on the site. And it's just a one time fee. I don't take any cut of the conversion. I just drive leads constantly. I have about 60 advertisers that makes a little over 50 grand a year. And so I built that over, over the years, wound up buying David out of guest ranches. So I own it and rebuilt it. So. And it has very, very low overhead. It has hosting and domain renewal and I pay a friend that has more experience at PHP and the back end of WordPress just in case the site goes offline, it goes sideways. I can ping her. Please help. Something's wrong with the site or there's some plugin update and you know, the payment page is broken. Can you please help? So I lean on her, but she's, I mean it's, it's only a couple hundred bucks a year to lean on her, but it makes me sleep better. So very good margins. It's not a million dollar business, but man, very, very fulfilling. But that one taught me I do enjoy these small, fulfilling projects.

How much time does it take? A week?

I'm working on this right now. I have two other projects, Vidalia and Ranch Work, that have kind of consumed a majority of my time. And I'm trying to figure out how I can devote more time or, or maybe hire someone to help me. I spent about a, an hour a month on it maybe, but it deserves more than that. So I'm trying to see if there are avenues of possibly getting some help, possibly selling it to see if there are avenues who could do. But I'm kind of stingy or strict on if I consider selling it. It's going to have to be somebody, a good buyer. I can't let this thing go into somebody who's going to put AI content slop on it or cover the site with AdSense. Even though I used to use AdSense, it isn't built for that. It's built for leads for dude ranchers.

It represents the industry. You feel like a sense of stewardship over the industry. And you want the next owner to do the same.

Yeah, and in short terms, yes. But that one just taught me. Oh, my gosh. Okay, this is quite interesting, but I always had Warren, my friend, to run bobbleheads.com. so I'd run this. I'd run dude ranch, but it's sort of seasonal, has its peaks and valleys of traffic. It's like, I still have time. I was still working 9 to 5 when I was running dude ranch. I was like, I still have open time in my schedule. What else can I build? Vidaliaonions.com expires, goes up for auction. I don't intend to buy it. I write this big long story on my little blog, but not blog, my little. I write an essay on the background of. Of how I acquired Vidalia and also write about how I acquired Dude Ranch on. I think it's deepsouthventures.com is where I have deepsouth ventures.com.

Okay.

Yeah, deepsouth ventures. Or you can go to askyou.org by.

The way, I have been a loyal blog reader for over a decade.

Oh, thank you. Well, it's mainly. I tell you, it's almost therapeutic just to dump it out of your brain because it gets all clogged up in there and it helps me to kind of just dump it out on the page and then kind of structure it. I have very short attention span, so if it appeals to me, I hope that it would appeal to somebody else because it's very difficult for me to read or focus. So if it allows me to focus on it, it. Yeah, very therapeutic.

So. So if I were to wrap up the story of Dude Ranch in a sentence, this is oversimplifying it, but you paid 17,000 for the domain. It was expired. You had to be 18. You had to be patient. But you were. You bought it at that point. You started kind of reaching out to the industry. You started getting natural traffic because there was so much search demand. You love it. You loved it because there was search demand and it was high ticket. Right. And that's a great. And there was not much supply meeting that search demand. You built it on WordPress. You kind of started reaching out to the industry. You partnered with another partner website, and today it does about $50,000 a year from one hour per month of work.

Yeah, that's correct. And I get free travel and I get to go visit all these. I've been to 50 dude ranches over the past.

Oh, man, 14 years.

From, gosh, from Georgia to, I mean, There are a few dude ranches in Georgia, I mean Colorado, Wyoming.

That's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in and of itself.

Yeah, I mean it's just, it's wonderful to go meet these folks and, and it's some of the most hard working. I mean, talk about a difficult business to run seasonal for them. Some run cattle, not many, but it's mainly hospitality. It is summer camp for adults, sometimes private, but you get to go chill. If you have a family, you can take your family and all the kids unplug. They're out playing in the creek or going to the campfire and no one's staring at digital devices. It's wonderful. You can go trap, ski to ride horses or fly fish, go on river rafting trips. It's. It's one of the coolest vacations I've ever been exposed to. And we can even dovetail into ranch work. So I got ranch work out of which was my job board from dude ranch. My partner had it and we don't have to talk long on ranch work, but it's another blessing where I can help folks get a job on a ranch, any type of ranch, cattle ranch, an outfitter, an equestrian ranch or a farm, and even dude ranchers. So I can still, I can double serve my dude ranchers, fill jobs and fill heads and beds for their ranches. So he had it on the side and sort of abandoned it. I saw it. I had a friend in Atlanta that built a nursing job board and had a good exit on it. Shane had a good exit on his nursing job board. I searched around a WordPress and there were some off the shelf themes for job boards on WordPress for like 60 bucks. So I bought an off the shelf job board theme, hacked it up on the back end to be just better, like better architecture for SEO. Got out on a super fast server and then started sourcing jobs from dude ranchers first and then sourcing them direct from ranchers, maybe on their website. And then slowly organic listings started coming through and then the seasonality aspect came back up again for dude ranchers and then they need to hire their crew again for the next summer. Then I get a wave of job listings and then word of mouth started working and then people started repeat buying and it started running. And this one has just been one of the biggest blessings.

Yeah.

And again this one goes back to memories and happy. Not a lot of memories, but it's. I'm helping someone find gainful employment on a, on a ranch and a lot of times it's somebody that maybe grew up on a ranch and maybe and they're in the big city now. I just raised prices yesterday, so I added a diamond level yesterday for those listening.

100 bucks to post a job for the cheapest plan. What are. What's the difference between these plans and how did.

Mainly duration. So silver will run for 10 days, gold will run for 30 days. And there's a quick turnaround. I'll take 24 hours. I hand curate every single listing. So live in 24 hours. Because it goes through my eyeballs to make sure it's a legit. If it seems sketch or something off, it rarely happens. But if it does, I just refund them and say we're not quite the right fit for you because we're not going to be able to drive you good leads. And then we have free. If it's a ranch that you know is in financial trouble and they need some help, like, I never want to turn them away. So I try to have a free option that allows them because I know I can drive a significant amount of traffic. And I'll. On this page, I also allow job seekers. They want to pay me.

It looks pretty active. Yeah, they do. So they pay you to put this.

Yeah, they pay me to extend. And I filled one. This Amy right there. Amy W. She emailed me this morning saying, peter, can you pull my listing down? I found something. And I was like, you helped her find a job? That was. Heck yes. August 4th, I found her a job.

What did she pay for the month?

Huh?

What did she pay?

99 bucks.

Wow. 99 bucks to get a job. And did you email all of your job. Like, how did you promote her?

Yeah. So I've listed on the site. We get 1.3 million visits a year to this site. You get a tremendous amount of traffic. I have 12,000 people on our email list. I have 25,000 plus on our private Facebook job board page.

Wow.

So I cross posted on everything.

Of all your projects. Is this kind of your. Your cash cow, one of your favorites?

Yeah, probably right now. Yeah.

Good for you.

If you want a fun one to go into archive.org go into archive.org and do ranch work. You'll see some of the early versions. I think he just took us off the ball and it was dormant.

Go.

Yeah, maybe a little bit after, though. He may have a version of it on those pages. Yeah, he probably has. He built it in 98, so it's a good. It looks like that first. Like your gardening site. Maybe some Comic Sans in there.

Oh, yeah.

So it's like he. Look, he was listing their first and last names over there, looking for jobs, but then he pushed it just to a landing page, saying, hey, I've kind of shut ranch work down. Hey. Thank goodness he didn't pull it offline. So it was still live and active. And he had a link to another Facebook page that was deleted at some point. So I said, what does this ranch work? Because, like, my friend did a nursing job board. Maybe I do. I was like, how about this, David? So here's my deal to him. I was like, hey, here's what. Let me try this. There's. I found a job board theme on WordPress. Point the name servers to me. I'll do all the work. I'll build the whole site, and if I get a job listing, I'll give you 25% and I'll keep 75% for my hard work and any money. If I put a little AdSense on the side, I'll keep the AdSense revenue. And he is a great partner. He's always like, Richard Branson. He's like, screw it, let's do it. Who cares? Yeah, let's do it. Just like Aries was to me when I came into Vidalia. I was like, screw it, let's do it. That sounds fun. Let's try it. So he was like, yeah, let's try it. That sounds good to me. So he jumped in, changed the name servers to me, and I got to work and built the first version just off the shelf job board theme. And it started working, and it had enough. Just a little bit of trust and authority at that point and started driving traffic to the site. And then I started filling jobs, and folks were happy with me. And then I. The first version of the job board was trying to force people to set up an account in order to place a job. And I don't like my ran. I don't like anybody to jump through hoops. Yeah, I like the projects being like a. Like a gumball machine. I sometimes compare them to. So that was what the page was right there, right before I acquired it. It was like, okay, go to our Facebook page if you want to go. If you want to look at some jobs, you guys just talk among. Talk amongst yourself over there is basically what he's saying.

Yeah, you cut this 75, 25 deal, how long did that stay in place? Did you ever end up buying the domain entirely and having it all to yourself?

Yes. Yeah. So if you go to that same Deep South Ventures, I write all about this project as well if you want to hear the entire backstory. But yes probably with David we had it for if you go to essays at the top and then if you scroll down the very bottom I have like the top. I look at traffic and you can see must ride mule to and from work location and there that's the ones the whole story behind it. So I think it was I'd have to read this article again to figure out how long we had it together. I think it was five or six years and I could see it was working every single day. Chris I wake up, I look at expired domains and I try my best to post a job. I like consistency on my job board to be to alert folks that this thing is alive and kicking and there is somebody babying this site to death. And I like every single day hopefully posting multiple jobs if I can if I have enough free and paid submissions. So after six years David needed some cash so I was like hey, how about I buy it from you? I think it was ten grand. I have it in that article. I'm able to continue working on these projects. This is a great year round project where Vidalia is seasonal. Dude Ranch is seasonal ish and this one is is year round and I like being able to run this one year round. Then kind of move a little bit of my attention over to Vidalia when it needs it in its season and then move a little bit over to Dude Ranch in its season. But every, all every day throughout the year I'm kind of focused on ranch work.

In this whole your realm. The type of stuff that you're doing with these domain names. What has you curious today that you maybe you Weren't curious about five or 10 years ago. What types of niches or is it directories or AI tools Oddly to your.

Point early right when we started this I'll tell you Boutique E Commerce in regards to something you can spin up very quickly and get customers, you don't have to wait on this timing aspect of a directory marketplace the fact you can set something up even I'm a I'm a snob on really good domain names. You really don't need a great domain. I lean on.com and I suggest.com because folks default to it but you don't need an amazing one. I tend to buy them. But Boutique E Commerce man is legit and there are so many small niches that you could run out of a small little you could run out of your house to start and then do like my friend Warren Royal at Bobbleheads ran out of his basement and then when it started justifying larger expenses, he got a warehouse and now he has his own warehouse out in Asia. That is his own custom bobblehead preeting out of his warehouse. But small boutique channels and you can use search to justify. And it's funny, I've been leaning on a lot of social stuff for Vidalia and man, it's powerful. Creating really good videos of. I created a 30 second ad for Vidalia and it was three clips. Me walking behind the tractor when we're harvesting, me holding up a Vidalia with my hand and then me walking through our packing shed. And then I just filmed I wong it and I kind of wrote a quick script and it wound up being about 30 seconds which seems to be a good sweet spot. It was like this is a Vidalia onion. You know they're custom, they're boutique onions only grown in Georgia and we are a Vidalia farm. We can ship it direct to your door. Consider us click the link in bio if you want to try one of these little special treats.

What are some other examples of boutique e commerce outside of the bobbleheads example that you've seen or heard of recently?

Oh gosh man. I've seen like individual. This cool one. I don't even know the name of the business. It was like what is that? Little Red. The little red pull truck for kids that kids get in. But it was like a Ritz Carlton version of a pull behind for kids to sit in that you can pull them behind like a. Like a red wagon. I don't know why that name a little red wagon, but it was yeah, like a. Like a Maserati version of a little red wagon. Like individual seats, cup holders, fancy and you could pull your kids around in it. And this guy was running that business. I was like, are you.

That sells so well with ads.

Oh my gosh. That Andy is his multimillion dollar business selling these custom high end little red wagons. And to your point earlier I was like, are you kidding me? There is a. I was like, yeah, it would do really well in social and you can pull kids behind it. It sort of looked like that. It was more look like a little red wagon, but like a fancy little red wagon with custom seats. I can't remember the day. Maybe I can find it and email it to you later. But I was like multi million dollar business.

I was like, wow.

It's like what else is out there that you could add an extra widget to that you could sell D2C is not easy but you can ramp it out very quickly if you do. If you just know cursory so you don't even have to lean on search. You could do social and create some really good video on your phone and edit it on capcut and get some good audio and you're off to the races. And it's very inexpensive. And track transactions through Facebook Pixel and you're ready to go. At least test it and see if it sells. That's been one that's interesting. All kind of food ones are fascinating. There's a pickle company I think they're. I'm fascinated. I haven't bought them yet but they've been showing up in my feed.

I think it's.

I love my pickle but I think it's olive my pickle. And it's a free promotion for them. But I haven't tried it but it's like legit pickles. And so they're touting the health benefits of these specialty pickles that they send. So I love kind of food based. I mean look how well designed this site is.

That's beautiful site.

It is. It's beautiful. And so they're. They're touting the health benefits of theirs. What's different of their pickle versus the pickles you may get at the grocery store? I think they go into that maybe down the page like why ours are different. Ours are better for Gut Health.

Yeah, yeah.

It has all this extra stuff that's better for. Yeah, yeah. There is the ultimate Gut Health bundle.

What are the tools in your tool belt that you can't live without? Like websites like for doing research, finding expiring domains. What's like a rapid fire list of tools.

I love Clicky analytics is what I use to monitor clicky clicky.com okay.

It's better than stupid GA4.

Yeah. I've never. I got rid of GA probably five or six years, maybe longer than that. I rely on Click for everything. SEO and paid search were very beneficial to me. Learn the basics of SEO. It can still ignore what everybody's saying about, you know, artificial intelligence, SEO, it all leans on the same principles. In my opinion, it's still going to rank and pull up content that matches your niche. I don't use Autonomy. I have Shopify for the transaction. For Vidalia Shipstation to manage are tens of thousands of orders every single year because I got to make sure these things land and our customers get it. And I'd like to find out that the box has been lost before the customer realizes that the box has been lost. So I can ask UPS or just ship them a make good before it even lands and then even recognize that the original box was lost.

What about like for looking at domain traffic and expiring domains is GoDaddy auctions your go to for that if an.

Old domain that was registered in 95 has failed to renewed it pops up. It does not pop up over at GoDaddy it only pops up at NameJet or Snap Names. So I'll look at GoDaddy NameJet Snap Names Namecheap created their own auction platform to auction their own names so they have their own those three and drop catch. I use domains as an inspiration to build. I tried to build on ideas first and I never seemed to get anywhere. When I shifted my perspective to build and be inspired by domains, things started working. I was like I'll just use the trust and authority from this name, see if I can build something and let it do some of the heavy lifting and I can be the dude behind the keyboard.

I like to say the same thing. I like to start with like a marketing channel and then work backwards from that. And that's essentially what you're saying, right? Your domain name is the grandfather of your marketing channel and you start there and then work backwards. Correct.

Other tools see it so it's. Those are the primary from the expiration process. There's a site called expired domains. Is it.net I'd use it sometimes but it's a pretty good. It's a firehose. Let me pull it up and make sure I have the domain. It's a.netired domains.net and it is just a almost a wall of text on the website. But you can set up a free account. There's no cost and they do searches across properties so you can do searches across name jets, snap names, GoDaddy namecheap sometimes drop catch and try to see if a name pops up through those. I'm kind of old school. I just go direct. I just go to drop catch, see what's up there. Go to good adding see what's up there.

Do you think directory businesses are still viable today in the age of AI?

Yes. Dude Ranch is a good example because my site's providing photographs, video, background information. So the photographs have been helpful and they want a kind of a trusted source to look at what I'm seeing. I mean my Traffic's up almost 40% was 39% year over year on that project. My rebuild helped but AI is helping as well because AI is making Suggestions on Here are some ranches, but hey, here's duderanche.com It's a pretty trusted authority. You can also go search on dude ranches with pickleball that are an hour away from a major airport. AI is kind of the Cliff Notes version. They can kind of point you in the right direction. I don't know if they'll ever be. I mean, if there was a directory business for sale that was in my price range, I would seriously consider acquiring it and looking into the numbers to see if it might fit into my portfolio. But I'm pretty happy with my little three projects. Dude Ranch has such interesting social media potential and I'm not doing a very good job promoting it from that aspect. So I'm trying to see if there might be an interesting person to either buy the whole thing out or I am. It's so low touch for me. I'm. You can tell I can. I love the industry and enamored with it and I. I don't mind keeping it if there's a good partner who can help either write content, do great social media that has experience with that and doesn't mind going visiting some of the ranches and. And kind of getting feet on the street.

You're at Searchbound on Twitter deepsouthventures.com for your blog. Where else can people find you?

AskYou.org is kind of O r G.

A s K E W A s.

K e w.org is kind of just the. Just a little homepage. Links to some of my essays that I've written, links to projects, links to failed projects that I've built. Most importantly, things I've tried, domains I've bought and donated. I bought olemiss.com and donated to Ole Miss.

That's amazing. Yeah. Roll Tide. All right. Peter and I could not stop talking, so I had to split this into two parts. Please come back a week from today to hear about even more niche websites that Peter started, how he did it, what tools he uses, et cetera. Thanks for listening here on the Kerner Office.