The Most Hands-Off $192K/M Business Anyone Can Copy - Ep. #315

We finished the month $192,500 last month.

Holy crap, in one month?

Yeah. Most of the sites are things like the Irving one where they're just sitting. I don't do anything. It's literally passive. The bigger ones are the ones I'm kind of on top of more because those are worth hundreds of thousands per site. So that I'm like watching a little bit heavier. Yeah, I'm looking at it as like, do you have to? No, I could just go chill and do nothing, but I would lose my mind. So I have to do something and that's what I choose to spend it on. At a certain point I'm like, passive is cool, you know, $4,000 or $5,000 coming in from that site.

I love that.

But like, if I can make 30 or 40 off that site, you got to make it worth my while.

So over 90% net profit margins. How many hours per week are you spending on this?

On this? 2 or 3.

Man, I'm fired up to do this myself. I'm the guy that's just supposed to ask questions, but now I'm like, oh geez, what—

I mean, the shiny object, man. It's, it's rough. It's rough.

It's real. It's very real. Is this a good thing to do on the side?

I love it as a side hustle idea because there's lots of people that have walked away from jobs doing exactly this. I know 3 people that have made more than a million bucks just since 2022 with doing this on the side of what they're doing. Eventually quit, but like, that's insane. So yeah, now I love it as a side hustle and it's way better than any of the ones I tried. And then in terms of like renting sites out, it's really not that hard. I'm literally just calling the person and saying, hey, I've got customers that want this. I'm like, if I send you some people, can we work out a cut? And the majority of people will say, yeah, cool, that sounds great.

So what should someone's first step be for getting involved with this business? Why don't you start by telling us who you are and what you do?

My name is Luke Vander Beer and I rent websites, lead generation websites, to businesses.

What got you into that? Um, like, what led you there?

I had a job, an HR job, and I did not like it, and I was searching for ways to quit. And I tried all these different side hustles— selling on eBay, selling on Amazon, uh, dropshipping, affiliate marketing. I paid for a course and learned Facebook ads. I tried to create a Facebook agency, actually made some money with that. Then my last attempt here before I kind of pivoted was an SEO agency. Started running an agency, picked up a bunch of clients, but it just turned into another job. It made more money, but I didn't want to be working all the time. I wanted to build something up front and then try to make it more somewhat passive so that I wouldn't have to be there grinding it out in an office for 45 years or whatever. I just don't agree with that thing that society pushes. So I was running an SEO agency, not for very long, under a year. And, uh, I just had a client call me in the middle of the night complaining about his results, which were stellar, and it really made me mad. And I woke up the next day and I just shut it down. And I was thinking about it, and I'm like, I don't know, how do I remove his control or take back the control? And the only way I could think of was if I own the asset, because then he can't tell me what to do. And so I was like, okay, I'll just build stuff in all the niches I'm already in with clients, fire all of them, and I'll just rent the site out. And then if somebody doesn't want to deal with it, I got 50 other people I could rent site to.

Yeah. So I guess in other, other industries you might call this vertical integration. Correct me if, if and or where I go wrong. Like you develop all these SEO skills, they're very valuable. You're implementing them for other people. It's working well for them, but you feel like, okay, I, I own a job. I don't own a business. I'm still kind of working hourly. I only get out what I, what I put in. This doesn't feel much better. It doesn't feel like as free as I thought it would feel. So like why drive all these results for other people when I can just vertically integrate, have my own website, drive results for myself and make this more passive, more scalable, right?

Yeah. I don't know why it didn't occur to me sooner. It just had that like trigger and it just made me so mad. I was like, I don't— I'm like, how do I get rid of this? Yeah, I just need to remove all of these people. Like, how do I make them like change the dynamic? And that was the only thing I could think of, but it worked. So I was like, okay, let's just keep doing this.

Yeah, it's kind of like a friend of mine. He had a Facebook ad agency for Shopify brands, for e-commerce brands.

Yeah.

And he got really, really good at turning $1 into $5, specifically driving people to Shopify sites to buy physical goods. And then he's like, why don't I launch a Shopify brand? Like, that's the hardest part is finding customers. I can find customers. And he did, you know, and now he's vertically integrated. He makes more money.

So yeah, so he's looking for like higher level uses of the skill set, which is kind of— yes, you know, taking me into other things. So I love this.

So you fired all your clients? Like you woke up, had this realization and said, I can't help you anymore or what?

All of them. I kept— I kept one of them. One, one's a friend. I kept him. Everybody else went. I was just like, I'm not doing this anymore. Here's some other people you could use. I'm done.

How much of like an immediate revenue or income hit was that to you?

Uh, it was $108,000 just gone.

Okay, a year?

Yeah.

Wow. And did you have like— had you started already building websites before you, you did this, or no, you started with a clean slate?

Nope, I just stopped. I'm not going to say it was the smartest move, it probably was not, but I was just confident in what I was doing. I was like, I can get results for them, I can get results for myself, screw it. So I just—

yeah, well, you, you burned the boats and it like, we're able to look back and say it was a good decision because we haven't gotten the numbers yet. But I assume just by nature of you being on this podcast, it's worked out well for you. So it was a good decision. And had you like kept, you know, in my church we say one foot in Zion, one foot in Babylon. You straddled the fence for a while. You may have never like felt enough pressure to go all in and to actually make this work. You may be worse off today had you hedged your bets a little bit.

This is true. This is true. It would have been slower.

Okay. Yeah. So you fire everyone except your friend, which makes sense. What do you, what do you do? What are your first steps?

I just started building sites in all the niches I was already in. So I built a towing site and I can share one of them because I shared that. Yeah, please. Towing site in Woodside, Queens. Another towing site in a different area, an HVAC, a limo, an electrical. How many was that? One more. I'm missing one. And a tree service.

Okay.

Um, and just started ranking all of them, all 6 at the same time. It took 2, 3 months to get them relatively close to like bottom page 1. Got the Google My Businesses and all that stuff set up. Leads are coming in and then it was like, okay, now I gotta furiously rent all these out. Rent out, rent out, rent out. Started calling people and renting these and then I'm right back to where I was with the same income. And I'm like, ah, okay. Problem solved. But it just created another problem. Same income.

Much more passive though, right?

Yes. Yeah.

Okay.

It was so cool. I'm like, I don't know what to do with myself now.

So I want to— I want to— I love the story of the first thing because there's a lot to learn there. I just Googled it. Woodside is a neighborhood in Queens.

Yeah.

60,000 people, give or take. What told you to go to Woodside? What signal did you see?

There wasn't any kind of special reason for that one. That was just Somebody, I had my car parked outside my apartment and somebody smashed it so hard with like a garbage truck or something. It knocked it onto the curb and just destroyed it. And I had to call the towing company up the street. And I was just talking to that guy and he's like, yeah, I don't know where these leads come from. He's like, we occasionally get one like this. This is good, but I don't know how to do this. And I was like, I put towing in Woodside. Sounds like going to be some demand here. I can rent to this guy. And that's exactly what I did once I got the site up. It's just easy.

That's right. I just, I love that that story is so representative of what normally happens in the business building experience. Like you solve a problem for yourself, you see something nearby that tells, that gives you a data point that says there's demand here. And the statistician in me would say, um, ah, it's a sample size of 1. You can't trust that. But for whatever it is, something out there in the universe is just like screaming that to you. And usually that one data point is, carries the weight of so much more than one. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

And you, you said you shut it down and I want to get into that, but it doesn't matter because it gave you an— I'm assuming it gave you enough traction to keep going. What, what was the life cycle of that website like? How did it go? And then why did it get shut down?

That particular one was— it took 2 and a half months or so to rank. The, the organic piece was a little bit slower. The map was like number one instantly. Instantly. I didn't even have to do anything to it. I just put it up, number one. It was called Woodside Towing. That's the city. So I kind of hijacked the keyword and it was instantly number one. Nobody else in the general area, the towing companies there, had any kind of SEO skills or anything, just from kind of Googling around. So, uh, that was a major advantage. And it just started getting calls, 30, 40 calls a month, which was enough to get $600, $700. And I was like, all right, cool. So I rented it out to that guy and it was good for a while. But as I was doing the other sites and things, the GMB got suspended for some reason.

Google Business Profile.

Yeah, once that Google My Business, right, right. And once that one went, you know, the lead volume, there was still some coming in organically, but for that particular niche, a lot of people are calling the map. They're not gonna, they're not going in to like do a quote form. They're calling directly off mobile.

Yep.

So it pretty much tanked it. And I was like, all right, forget it.

So just shut it down. When you say renting it out, How exactly did that look? Did you find that one guy that you called and he's like, I don't know where these come from, and you started like— how did it work? How did you charge him?

When he picked up my trashed car, I was just asking him like, you know, how often does this happen? Then he was like, where do you get the leads from? And just asking questions, and it just brought out like, dude, I don't know, stuff just randomly comes in, I don't have any control over it, I've gotten screwed 17 times by other agencies, whatever, so I just let it go, whatever refers to me is cool.. And I was like, okay, cool. I'll come back to this guy. So I just ranked it and then I called him back and I'm like, hey, I'm the guy that had the thrashed car. I'm like, I got those leads for you. And he's like, okay, so how much is it going to be? And I'm like, how about $700? He's like, for how many? And I'm like, I don't know, 30, 40 calls. I'm like, how many of those are you going to close? He's like, 40, 50%. He's like, all right, cool. Yeah, let's do it. Sweet. That's it. So I just routed it to him.

Trying to do the numbers here. So let's say 20 closes a month. What does a tow cost? Is it— what was that?

A few hundred bucks. Couple hundred bucks. Yeah.

I mean, so we're talking like he's paying $700 to get back like $3,000 to $5,000.

Yeah. So it's a solid ROI for him.

Revenue. Yeah. Okay. So you just charged a flat monthly fee and you— it was looking like 30 to 40 calls a month and sometimes it gets a little less. Sometimes it gets a little more.

Yeah.

You charge them that until it starts to change. Okay. And I think it's one thing that I love about this business is how much surface area there is. So there are tens of thousands just in the United States.

Okay.

We'll only focus on that of not just cities, but neighborhoods, tens of thousands.

Insane.

Let's just say, let's be conservative and let's say there's 10,000 worth like ranking for. Okay. And then let's be conservative and say there's only 1,000 services out there, which I know there's more. Let's say home services, towing, local businesses. Let's say that's 10 million like service plus geography variations, 10 million. WoodsideTowing.com, GreenvilleGutterCleaning.com, like whatever it is, Greenville, Texas, Greenville, South Carolina, Greenville, whatever. And so with 10 million opportunities out there, there's a a lot of room for everyone and there's a lot of opportunity for there to be more demand than supply in any given geography and/or service, right?

Oh yeah, yeah.

Okay.

You just have to find something. The goal is to try to find something that's not a red ocean, right? Like everybody from the outside, people talk about all the same things. They'll go, they'll try to talk concrete, roofing, plumbing. You could do those. It's not that you can't get results there, but why would I compete against 50 companies when I can find the random one in the middle of nowhere that has no competition, that's going to be more passive. So let's go for that as long as it's worth similar.

Okay. So your first was Woodside Towing. What were your other 5 or 6?

It was towing, towing, HVAC, limo, tree service, and pest control.

Okay. Now, you probably quickly learned that you liked some of these either services or geographies more than others. What did you learn and why?

I, I learned that smaller, smaller cities were generally easier, simply because there wasn't as much competition. Like I was—

Define small.

60,000 to like 300,000, 400,000.

Okay.

Under, under 500,000. Safe bet. I didn't want to do like Manhattan. Like I'm not going to do 2 million people. Like I looked at towing. That was one of the things I Googled and I was like, there's 87 companies. There's no way I'm gonna compete well with that. You know, just too much work for the payoff.

Yeah, I, I think it's also important to note like demographics and like social, you know, cultural things, because Greenville, Texas has 60,000 people, but the market for towing is probably a small fraction of the market for towing in Woodside, Queens. It's just a different— it's completely different, right? So you can't automatically take that logic and say, dude, I'm gonna put any city of 60,000, I'm gonna put that plus towing.com. It won't always work like that. Not just because of, you know, cultural trends and societal things, but supply and demand. Greenville, Texas might already have 5 sites doing the exact same thing.

Right, right. So you're typically looking at the search results trying to figure out like, is this a good spot to go into? Combination of things on the maps and organic to see like, okay, what are my chances on this one?

Okay. So that's what you learned about like the size of the city. Did you learn anything about the industry that you that you choose, or did that not matter as much?

The industry didn't matter as much. I think it was more about the industry affected the conversation with the people when you're trying to rent the site out. That was the thing that was a little bit different because the towing person, I typically got the owner. The limo service, you get the secretary, and then you can't— you got to get through the secretary or the gatekeeper to get to the owner. So that was more of a pain. The HVAC was similar. Pest control, I got the owner. Tree service, I got the owner. So it's like, okay, now I have to try to pick things where there's enough companies that are small enough where the company's in the right range where I'm going to get the decision maker on the phone easier. Otherwise, I got to like walk in, which I've had to do before for some of the sites. I can find somebody.

You probably have a higher close rate when you're there in person.

Oh yeah, 100%.

So what are some, what are some services where you're most likely to get the owner on the phone?

Like towing, tree service is a good one. Pest control is okay. HVAC's not, plumbing's not.

What about landscaping? Just like guys mowing lawns.

Landscaping is okay. Landscaping, you can get some owners. I've got a couple landscapings.

Okay.

As long as they're doing landscape design and not just like mowing, because it's not, it's not worth enough. It's like doing a site for like haircuts. I'd have to generate 8,000 leads to be paid anything.

Yeah.

You know, if I want to do a flat fee.

So it sounds like the sweet spot is the fine balance between high ticket and owner cell phone number publicly available, right? Because lawn mowing is low ticket, owner cell phone number available, but it's too low ticket. Uh, towing is right there in that sweet spot. Something like dentistry, very high ticket, but you're not going to get—

you're never going to get a dentist. So then the only way you do that one is if you know somebody.

Yeah, but if you get the dentist, you could probably sell those leads for a lot. Oh yeah, yeah, like the gold standard.

It's like if that's your buddy or you got colleagues or somebody can introduce you to somebody and you have that intro, then cool. Or like pre-sell the idea up front, then I'm cool with those.

Okay. So what, what month was this when you first started this? What month and year?

February. February 19th, 2016. My mom's birthday.

Okay. 10, 10+ years ago. All right. Now, what did that first year look like? How many sites did you add? What was your revenue like, etc.?

I don't know how many sites I added. I was doing a lot, multiple a week. The first 6 sites just replaced— it got me right back to basically where I was around that a little over $100,000 mark, $9,000 or something a month. $9,500.

From your first 6 sites?

Yeah, because they're all a lot. That's right.

Because you said you replaced your income with that.

Yeah.

Okay.

Just those 6, which was cool. So that was nice.

What tools were you using to build these sites at the time?

Uh, originally Weebly, just because it was an easy drag and drop builder. There's, I think Wix was a thing, but I didn't, the interface wasn't intuitive. Weebly felt more intuitive.

And what do you use today?

WordPress.

Okay.

WordPress. It's just easy to scale.

Is the exact match domain name important for this?

I would heavily recommend it. It's going to make it a lot easier, especially for a beginner.

So geography plus service dot com. That's the formula.

If you can. Yeah, but it doesn't have to. Like, you know, if I did the Woodside Towing thing, maybe Woodside Towing is not available. I can do Woodside Towing Pros. I still got the keyword in the city in it. So I'm still gonna get the same kind of effect.

What are some examples of domain names where you've gone kind of outside of that pattern and it still worked well?

I don't generally. I'll do like a .net before I'll throw in other words, but you know, let's say like Irving Carpets instead of Irving Carpet Cleaning. Like I've done some niches like that, like city and then a plural like carpets. I'm like, that's not really a keyword, but it was close enough where I got the hit from the city relevance and the hit from the topical relevance of the item.

Okay. How much weight would you say like the name slash domain name carries with regards to your success versus like everything else that you have to do?

5, 10%.

Okay.

I think it just makes it easier up front. You get results a little bit faster because you have that branded.

Yeah.

It takes a little bit longer, but you know, long term, if you're trying to sell it, then you'll get a higher multiple with a brand. If you're trying to just keep it, it doesn't matter.

Okay. And a brand would be like you're generating leads in multiple geographies for one service under like a a key brand name, not just like the name of the city. Okay.

Right.

Are you doing that at all?

Yeah.

What, what niche is that in?

Concrete.

Okay.

There's several, but concrete's one I don't care about sharing. Everybody tries concrete.

Yeah. What made you pick that? Just the combo of high ticket, low competition?

It was another thing where it's just, I knew it was worth a lot, so I was like, all right, well, let's just give it a shot and see. And after the good results with the first few sites, I was like, it's an easy thing to write about. I know a ton about it now from all the Googling and trying to do the research on it. Whatever, like how hard could it be to spin up a few more of these? So just sort of throwing them up all over the place.

So are those under different names or is it all under one company name?

There's one LLC and then there's, you know, DBAs across a million places to have, you know, map listings and organic under it.

Okay. So it's not like, it's not like Luke's concrete.com with like locations in a bunch of cities. It's like city name concrete, other city name concrete, and that's all under one umbrella. Yes.

Yes. Yes.

Okay, so if the name slash domain name is 5 to 10%, what is the other 90% of finding success here?

The content's a huge piece. I think people underestimate how important that is. The content of the site is like the foundation of a house, and if it's not strong, it's like building a house on sand. You're not going to make any money, and it's going to make it so much harder to work to like rank it.

Mm-hmm.

The content's really, really strong. Sometimes the site will just rank without a single link. So that is my goal every time I launch one. Like, how good can I make this? So I have a whole process for that. I'll go look out at all the competitors in that niche. I'll see what they're talking about. And I'm just going to double, triple, quadruple whatever they're doing. And I'll make sure I'm including, you know, commercial and transactional keywords. So it's not just like a Wikipedia, but whatever, I'm blowing them away. Like they have their, you know, 3 bullet points on the item. I have 1,000 words on the item every time for all services and they have no chance. So then if all else is equal, I win.

So when it comes to content, if you had to choose between, between quantity and quality, you would choose quantity?

I would choose quality, but I'm doing both. I'm doing quantity with quality.

Like, I guess I'm saying like more content, more articles, more blogs on one website. I don't care about the blogs.

I don't care about the blogs. I'm talking like website structure, home, about, content, contact page, and then service pages for every service. Like right now, if you just went and Googled a lot of places, it doesn't matter what the niche or city is. You'll see a lot of companies that don't have service pages. They'll have a page with like a bullet point list of what they do, like a roofer. They'll say like roof repair, roof installation, you know, roof inspection, but they don't have a page for it. And if you don't have a separate page for it, you're basically telling Google, I do all this, but Google's like, well, all right, like I don't believe you. Which one's more important? What, like what? You're just confusing it. But if you had more authority from you, you're like, oh, okay, so you do roof repair in this spot. Cool. Okay, what else do you do? Yeah, you need all the specific things and people don't do it.

Are you, are you able to show your concrete site to share your screen?

I'll show a carpet cleaning one. I picked, I use this one as my example because it's the lowest paying one. So if somebody kills it, spams it, whatever, I don't care.

Okay. And are you using AI to generate any content?

My VAs do it. So they'll use it and then kind of human edit it and then send it over for a quick scan. To make sure it's okay. Okay.

What model or tool do they use to do that?

I don't micromanage, so I'm not exactly sure. I'm pretty sure it's Claude.

Okay. Because it's like two schools of thought. Some people are like, you can't just make art content with AI. And then the other school of thought is like, people need their questions answered. So all else equal, like a good, well-written human content is better. But for a lot of categories, there's nothing. There's not enough. So even AI written is better than nothing.

This is true. So you want me to show the screen?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Let me make sure I got the window here. So like, this is one of the first sites. I haven't touched this thing in years. So there's probably, there's actually a lot of stuff I would change, but basic idea still stands. Right. It's got the city and the niche right in the name.

Yep.

.com. Phone number in a big easy spot. Click the call button. If you look at it on mobile, you know, what you do and a way to contact you is immediately apparent. And then there's two options. I see people do something with, you know, they'll have like a phone number or a quote form, but never, they don't always have both, which doesn't make sense. The thing I've learned with this is some people don't want to call you. Some people don't want to talk right now. They're just like, nope, I'd rather just be a little bit more passive and get a quote this way. So this grabs those people. But then other people are like, I need something now. Cat just peed on the floor. That's the person that calls that. So you gotta have both.. And then it'll just be a lot of stuff like, you know, reasons to trust us. And look, I'm looking different keywords. So carpet cleaning is the one I want, which was up here. We got a variation down here. And then going into some of the other services that are part of the carpet cleaning umbrella. And like the, you know, the GMB thing went down for this too, like years ago, but it just doesn't, it doesn't matter at this point.

It won't die.

No, it's, uh, it's still sitting there. Number one, you can probably search it. I'll probably come up. And then just pages for each of the items. So a lot of companies won't do this. They'll just have like a bullet point list of these, you know, 5, 6 things and then, you know, that's it.

Yeah.

And it's not, that's not helpful to Google.

Yeah, I just Googled carpet cleaning Irving, Texas and you're number one right there.

Yeah, cool. So it's like that just stays there super glued.

And I'm like 45 minutes from Irving. So this is very relevant. To me. Yeah.

I mean, I, you know, I try to pick spots like that. You can, you take the skill, you can apply it to anything. So it's kind of like shiny object syndrome. You got to watch that because it's really, it's really tough. If you could do it for anything, you're like, oh my God, I could do it on this. I could do it on that. It's really hard to block all that out and to try to pick stuff, but you got to be really rigorous. Like, okay, this one looks good and follow the process and try to pick something that's going to be easy. So it stays like that because like, I don't want to sit here and like do content or have to keep managing links and all these things. Yeah.

So how long has this site been up?

That's— oh God, you'd have to look at the domain thing. May 2017, '18, somewhere around there.

And how much has it made lifetime, would you guess?

It's been rented at $500 a month. So whatever that is times however many months it's been.

$50,000.

I mean, geez, something like that. Yeah. And your cost on that has been $10 a month, probably less because it's shared hosting across there, like the cloud, million other sites.

Has it been the same person that you're selling these leads to the whole time?

Yeah.

They probably love you. They're probably making way more than that or they would have churned by now.

They're just— I find this with a lot of these. There's really not much churn. I think part of it is there's— it's sticky because organic is just better. The leads are just better. I've run ads before. I can see it's higher intent. And the person from You know, on the customer's perspective, right? Think about them. They search like, you know, carpet cleaning, whatever. They see a billion results they can pick from. You're like, who do you pick? They're assuming that the person that's number one, Google must have put them there for a reason. Now we know that I just manipulated it to get there, but they don't know that. They assume like, oh, well, Google must know. So they just trust in Google and choose the first one. And studies support that, which is cool. So those leads are just better.

Yeah. Are there certain niches that you would recommend people never touch?

Oh yeah. Okay. Elevator repair. There's one. Don't touch that. That was cool. I had a, I had a client do it in New York City. They're ranking number one for that and we're getting all kinds of leads. Went to rent out the site and I'm like, wow, this was an easy one. Never thought of this. We found out that the elevator companies do really long-term contracts and then they charge you hefty fees to break the contract.

Contract.

So even though people wanted to switch to save money, they wouldn't actually do it because they'd have to pay so much to get out of it. So we couldn't rent out the site.

So they weren't high-intent searchers?

Yeah, they did. They just— they, they would not break the contracts because it costs so much. And like, you wouldn't know that unless you called people ahead of time, which you're probably not gonna do.

Yeah. Um, anything— any other niches that are stay away from?

Uh, jet rental. I did that one. That was pretty cool.

I had like private jet rental.

Private jets. Yeah, I had a site that was crushing it for that. It was bringing a lot of stuff, but I had a person who was taking the leads and he was essentially a jet broker because I couldn't get the jet owner. So he was trying to like, you know, uh, middleman it. I'll sell those leads and it's like a middleman on top of a middleman. So it was kind of a pain. And then once he kind of fizzled out because he started trying to just jack up the prices of some insane thing and try to get like a money one on just one shot. And I was like, dude, you're just wasting my leads now. But then I couldn't really find anybody else to do that with. Yeah, that's like another one. There's some that just, you know, not every one of these is going to work out, so, you know, it's okay. But, um, yeah, I took a shot on some big ones like that just to see because it was— it would have been worth a lot.

Is the— if we were to call this like a supply and demand marketplace, the demand side being the number of business owners willing to buy these leads and the supply side being the number of leads that you're actually generating, which is harder for you, finding someone to buy the leads or actually generating the leads?

I think it's finding a buyer, finding the right buyer. Because there's tons of people who will give it a shot, but people that are serious and that have the right mindset, much harder to find.

Yeah.

Right. There's a lot of people who are just like, oh yeah, I work entirely off referrals. And then I'm like, okay, well, you know, $1,000. And they're like, $1,000? And I'm like, dude, you're going to make $20 grand just off the revenue on these few that just came in. Like they don't, even if the math makes sense, they still don't always go with it. So it's like not logical. It's like an emotional thing for them.

They're prideful about it.

Yeah.

Have you give them lead? Sorry, go ahead.

I'm just saying it's just something you got to deal with.

Do you give them leads for free to capture them or does that not work?

I generally do it for a few days. I don't want to go more than that because to the core, I believe free has no value. So I have a hard time doing this to begin with because I'm like, I'm, I did work to get this and now you're just taking it and blowing it. So I'll give them it for a few days and then we'll see how they respond. And I'm just kind of watching like, First off, the people that I'm going for are people who are already paying for ads. I'm not just going to Google a random person. I'm looking for people who are actively spending money. Okay. Google Ads, Facebook Ads, I don't care what it is, but I want to see that they're investing in themselves because at least they already have the mindset. And then once I know that, okay, I know something about them, I'll give them a shot at this. How— one of the questions I'll ask is, are you like, how soon are you going to follow up with the customer? Like, here's this person, they want this now. Like, how soon can you get to them? And if they tell me today and they don't call today, They're done. I'll just find another one. I'm like, I need to trust them and they need to communicate with me and it needs to be professional. Sometimes I'll just call them, shadow call, see what happens. And when they pick up the phone, hello? Super shopper. Yeah, it's like, you're not a business owner. Answer the phone like a business professionally or you're out too. So I just have a list of things like if they do this, you're done immediately to the next one to try to find the right person. Because once you do, then you don't have to touch it.

Yeah. So do you use like the Meta ads library to see who's advertising on Meta and then Yeah, that seems advertising on Google. You just Google that, you just like literally Google it as if you're looking for it and—

yeah, yep, yep. And I'll just look for people that are local because like sometimes it's Google, you'll Google somebody, it'll be like a national company. I don't want that either because I don't want some call center. I want a local person who's trying to run ads.

Okay. If you build a site, let's say it's, you know, uh, greenvilletowing.com, you build that on July 1st, how long do you wait before trying to find a buyer for the leads? Do you want to see leads come in first or what?

Uh, I don't know, a couple months. I don't—

let it simmer.

Yeah. Like I've gone back and forth on this. I don't have really a set rule for this one. Um, I have a VA that does the kind of outreach now, so I don't really have to do anything. Um, 2 months or so, something will start coming in and then I'll have them looking for somebody to at least start testing the waters anyways. Like, hey, you know, we got something cooking here. Would you be open to this if we sent you some stuff? Like just get a cut and I'll try to do like a referral or a commission thing up front. And then immediately flip it to flat fee when I see them close some things. But then I'll like, I'll test them because I don't trust them. So I'll call the customers and pretend I'm doing a satisfaction survey and see if they actually went with that person, how much they charged, and if the stuff lines up with what the business owner's telling me.

How, how many of your deals are rev share versus flat fee?

Uh, vast majority are flat fee. Rev share is just something I'd done recently. I was out in Vegas on, uh, Dropping Bombs with Brad Lee, and he was talking about rev share. And like, after we got off the pod, and I was like, my God, why didn't I think of this? So I came home and I immediately started doing rev share. I reached out to my highest paying clients, like the bigger flat fees, $4,000 or $5,000 a month clients. And I was like, I got a way I can get you more leads, but I want to change the structure of how we're doing this. And just pitched a bunch of them on rev share and immediately started doing that. And my income went way up because it was just at a certain point, I'm like, passive is cool, you know, $4,000 or $5,000 coming in from that site. I love that. But like, if I can make $30,000 or $40,000 off that site, I'll throw in a few more GMBs and do some other things to get this going, but you got to make it worth my while, which was the rev share, which made a huge, huge difference.

What percentage do you take?

20%.

Okay. Just off the top of the gross revenue.

Yeah. It'll depend on the niche though. Cause like I got a landscaping one, that one I can't, that one's net because the gross, it's weird to like try to calculate that. Um, because they had so much materials and all these things. So I like, I, it depends on the niche, whether I'm going gross or net. And then if it's gross, it's lower. If it's net, it's going to be higher. And you really have to have a high level of trust with that. That business owner has to have a high level of trust in you to want to do this because you're taking a significant portion of what they're doing.

Oh yeah. And how do you, how do you trust them or know that they're closing what they say they're closing and that their margins are what they say they are?

I'm asking for read access to their CRM and their payment system.

Like QuickBooks?

Which is again, this is why they have to. Yeah, HubSpot or Stripe or whatever they're using.

Probably this structure probably doesn't work for a brand new customer. You got to get to know each other for a while.

No. Yeah. You need it. You need an existing relationship or you got to be really good on the phone.

Yeah.

I had it. I had that recently with a paving company. That one actually I have, it's like fake equity in the company, which I could talk about, but like that was a completely random one. That wasn't a new one, but that's, I don't know. We just had a really good rapport. That doesn't happen much.

Yeah. Now you say do other things for you. Are you willing to just put paid ads like Google Ads or LSA into it to drive more leads for them? Because the numbers on that could make sense if they're sharing revenue, right?

Yeah. Yeah, it absolutely could. I mean, for me, so I do a bunch of different things like the rental things is one. I've been buying businesses, I've been doing these revenue shares and equity deals. Those are like the 3 core ones. My goal is always to try to make— try to pull myself out and make it as passive as possible for me. So running ads and all these other things, I don't want to deal with it. Um, but I have pulled in friends of mine who do that with their agencies and just give them a cut of my cut and then try to negotiate a little bit more for me. Talk to the business owner and be like, all right, I know we're at 20, I got another guy who could do this. I'll work with him and manage that relationship. If you bump us to 25, I'll give a piece to him. I'm like, you don't have to deal with it. Nothing changes on your end. I'll just drive you way more leads. We're gonna have it from Facebook now and Google. And then just try to keep stacking this with people I know.

Yeah, okay.

It's just a little bit more to manage.

What can you— like, what are you looking for in the first 3 minutes when it comes to a niche or a city that tell you this is a winner?

It would— you want me to just walk through one?

Yeah, please.

So people are like, you know, where do I find a niche? It always makes me laugh. Look around, all the trucks that drive by you with car wraps on the side of them. But, um, I like going to thumbtack.com/near-me, and then they have all these different categories. Of things, and each under each category is just a million businesses that you could just look through and start Googling these. But I personally really like home improvement, so I'll just start going through these and just take a niche and start Googling it. So like, you know, we could do asbestos testing. Let me just— asbestos testing. I'll just pick a city. We'll try Dallas. All right, cool. So I just popped in asbestos testing for Dallas. Um, I skipped over all the sponsored, don't care about that. Looking at the maps, I want to see really low, so like less than 10 reviews if possible. I'd like to see where they don't have a website, or maybe instead of a website they have like a social media profile. Like I've seen people's Twitters, I've seen Facebooks, all kinds of stuff. Those type of things in here tells me these people don't know what they're doing. So that's—

yeah, and they're ranking highly regardless, right?

Right.

They're begging for a competitor.

And then looking in here, I also want to see, like, looking at the names of the businesses, nobody has an exact match. So if I went Dallas Best Testing right now, I'm in this map somewhere automatically just by virtue of my name being the exact keyword when nobody else has that. So I like, I like the map, how the map looks. So let's go organic now. Now organic, I want to see local companies. Now the first thing I see, this dude's got an inner page. From a content perspective, one page on somebody's website that may have, you know, a couple hundred words on it or something is not going to beat an entire website built on that topic around that location, right? Like, if I build a Dallas, Texas environmental consulting thing or an asbestos testing, there's no way this guy's one page beats my entire site. So I'm not worried about inner pages. So he's— him, I don't—

so this guy's number one.

Right, yeah, which is interesting because so that means like, okay, that's a great sign. And then a Yelp. I'm like, I don't care about Yelp either. Google would rather have me, but the old, you know, all these local companies aren't doing a good job, so whatever, I'm just gonna steamroll them, right? So I'm going in here and I'll just kind of look through. Don't care about sponsored. And then here we go again, inner page, inner page, inner page. You know, that might be a local one. That's—

you say inner page, you're just looking at the domain. It's— you're not just seeing the domain, you're seeing a subpage on their domain.

Yeah, yeah, like, right, like the little caret, right? Asbestos testing, whatever. So we can click on one. Yeah, so it's like, all right, he actually did okay. Like, this looks like the H1 for his page, cool, and he's got some content and stuff, but like, there's really not that much.

It's not the only thing he does either.

Yeah, and like, you know, what is— what is he got, 400 words maybe on the whole page? So it's like, if I create a website and I got, you know, 1,500 on that topic, and then I go into detail on all the service pages on the same thing, I'm telling Google, I'm a beast, I know everything about this, this guy doesn't know anything, come on. And then Google's looking at me like, okay, this, this might be a better option for the customer. This person seems to know more.

Yeah, right.

But like the map, I, I don't love— I like a lot of the stuff I see, but I don't love how it's like 32, 30, 42. And because I want to do both, I want the map and organic, I'm skipping this even though, you know, the bottom looks nice. So then I'm straight back to Thumbtack.

Uh-huh.

Cool. So I'll just go down the list. Let's try mold remediation. We'll stick with Dallas. Let's just do Old Remediation, if I could spell. Okay, so we're skipping the ads down to here. Old Remediation, 15, 46, 138. So like, I don't like that either. Nope, too much. Instantly done. And I'll just do this. I'll keep going through the list and figure out like, okay, which one of these might work. What about radon mitigation? That's interesting.

These are all very high ticket too, right?

Yeah, like we had radon at my parents' house like years ago. That thing was like $6,000 for them to install some kind of crazy system to like put it out.

Look, this first one has one review.

Yeah, so like there, this is interesting. Nobody even came up for the map. That's so—

Yelp right there.

I want to—

let me, let me try something else here and see if there's any other Another thing you could do is go to trends.google.com and compare two, uh, search terms against each other. Put radon removal in one, radon mitigation in the other, and you can see, all right, wait, well, you know, nothing showed up for mitigation because no one really searches that. They all search for removal. So you don't want to get a false positive either, right?

Yeah, I'm trying to pick whatever the main keyword is. I don't know the niche, so I don't know what that is. I'm assuming it's mitigation, but You know, I tried both and we see the same guy. There's, he's one person who's got one review and the only category is environmental consultant. So it's like we could check Google's categories right now and see if there's something related to radon. I don't know if there is, but this might be the category we pick, but I'm loving the fact that there's only one review. He's got a branded thing. He put his LLC in the title of his GMB. So he doesn't know what he's doing.

He's 68 years old.

He's, he's, he's 97. These other people, we got. Another thing, here we go again. Inner page, inner page, a directory. There's that dude, so he's clueless. Then we got National Radon Defense. That's probably a national site. I see Texas, I see a Reddit, maybe somebody that's local, Better Business Bureau, and Angie's List. So it's like, here's a winner right here. And how much is radon worth? So I know that if I put up a site for this, I could probably be number one in a month just with content without doing any link building at all. And if I get a GMB for this, Google will probably either boot this guy or create the 3-map instead of a 1-map.

Mm-hmm. How are you able to get Google Business Profile listings for all these things in all these cities? Because it's getting more strict, isn't it?

Yeah. I mean, I generally work with a contractor, so I'll generate leads organically first, um, which is obviously a little bit harder. But then once you have those leads, I reach out to the person, I'll make a deal., and then once I see that they're paying me and we have our established relationship, it's going a little bit, then kind of like my rev share idea, I'm just going back to them and saying, hey, you know, I've got a way that we can get a lot more leads coming in, but I would need your help. Like, you down to help me get this?

Okay. It's like he's creating a false competitor, basically. Yeah. I call it illusion of saturation.

Yep. I'll have him help me do it. I mean, there's guaranteed ways to do it. You could just spin up LLCs, but I won't do that unless it's worth a lot of money because then you're taxes and all the other stuff that comes with it.

So outside of picking the name, picking the niche, getting the Google Business Profile, what are some other best practices for ranking quickly, like SEO best practices?

Go into all the competitors' sites, Google whatever the niche is. So we just did radon mitigation. Look up all the competitors and see what they're talking about. I take notes and just get a big list, and then I'll go into other cities too. So like, you know, Dallas might have no competition, but San Diego might have killer competition.. And I want to know where the competition is crazy because they'll have better stuff.

Mm-hmm.

So I'm gonna go into all the top cities and see who's got it. And once I have an idea of all the things we could potentially talk about, then I'll go look at the keywords and see like, okay, what should be a page and what shouldn't based on volumes. 500+ keyword searches or so, let's do something. 50s, don't really care. I'll weave it in where I can. And that's kind of how I'm building out the overall structure. And then once that structure's created, that content's gotta be really, really good. So I'm trying to weave the keywords in there. I'm trying to make sure it answers questions, structuring it for AI, doing a lot of like making sure the HTML is lined up correctly. Like, what is the umbrella keyword versus the things that should fall under that logically? Because that's how Google's looking at it. And then creating some structure with frequently asked questions. And for that, you just go to ChatGPT and type it in. Like, um, you know, I'm trying to rank a site for radon mitigation in Dallas. What are the common questions that consumers have about this? And it'll spit out like, ask Yelp and ask Reddit, or like, ask all the social media sites. You can put that right in the prompt and it'll pull exact quotes from Yelp, Reddit, Facebook, all the social profiles. And now you have stuff you could write about, and then you just throw that right into the content on whatever the related page is.

Yeah. So if this business, this industry has seen any disruption from AI, it's been positive disruption. It's made it more scalable. Yeah, more doable.

Yeah, people get worried about the AI taking away searches and whatever, but it doesn't. This is the last thing to be affected because people still want to talk to a person. They don't want an AI answer. They want somebody to answer the phone and like install this thing for their house so they don't die.

Yeah. What, um, do you use any other third-party tools for finding the supply and the demand imbalances in these markets, or are you literally doing what you just shared your screen and showed me?

Uh, I mean, two. So SEMrush, if you want one that's like already out there. And then I have a, I have an AI engineer friend who built a private one for me that it just kind of does the research for me, so I don't really have to do the manual Googling anymore.

Yeah. What are your numbers like today? How many sites do you have? What's your monthly revenue, profit, etc.?

It's 232 sites. Uh, you're gonna have to do the math on the profit. I'm not gonna know what that is. Um, but if we finished the month $192,500 last month—

holy crap, in one month?

Yeah.

And growing, I imagine?

Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just from last year, it's drastically different. The— I have to thank Brad because the, the introduction of the revenue share, just that idea, jack this up tremendously just because you can make so much more of one person and I don't have to keep taking on more clients. I can just grow one person, which was sick.

What do your costs look like? I mean, you've got a virtual assistant. That's not much.

It's usually around $50 grand for the year. So like one VA is $1,200. The other one's $1,000. Cloud hosting is like $300 a month. CallRail is like $500, $600 a month. I'm on a legacy plan at this point. So that's cool. They didn't boot me. Rank tracking would be like $150. And then Volter for cloud servers all over the place for map listings and things. And then my VAs just kind of manage it all for me. So I don't really have to do much other than just kind of oversee, check in.

I was going to ask for your tech stack, but I think you just listed it off.

So yeah, that's all of it. Yeah.

When you're tracking, like people are getting this many calls, they're actually answering, they're calling back. That's all done through CallRail.

Yeah. VAs are doing all that. I'm not doing any of that. I look at a rank report on Mondays that the VAs send me and a call tracking report to see that numbers are stable. And like we I have so much data over the time, I can see general trends. So like if there's seasonality or weird things that happen, and as long as it— they both look okay, like if rankings tanked but the call volume's still the same, I'm like whatever. But if rankings went down and call volume went down, then I'm like okay, let's see what's up and we'll look into it. But generally most of the sites are things like the Irving one where they're just sitting, so it's not— I don't do anything, it's literally passive, I don't do anything with it. The bigger ones are the ones I'm kind of on top of more because those are worth hundreds of thousands per site. Like, so that I'm like watching a little bit heavier.

Yeah. So over 90% net profit margins. Um, how many hours per week are you spending on this?

On this, 2 or 3.

Wow.

For, for the rental sites. The other, the other things I'm doing, like the EquityShare stuff and whatever, that's newer, so I'm spending a lot of, quite a bit of time on that. But I guess it's like, I'm looking at it as like, do you have to? No, I could just go chill and do nothing, but I would lose my mind. So I have to do something, and that's what I choose to spend it on.

So what should someone's first step be for getting involved with this business? Just going and finding their niche and learning WordPress. Is WordPress very difficult to learn for something like this?

I mean, there's lots of tutorials and things for WordPress and you could use drag and drop like Elementor, Divi, Bakery Builder, all easy things that give you a menu of items like the title on a page, drag paragraph. You can just play with it and learn it. Yeah, content stuff, easy to just Google things, domains and stuff. We just went over niches, we just went over. I think the only thing that people are going to have a problem with is probably link building. So like if people are trying to do the whole YouTube University learn for free thing, follow one person instead of multiple. So at least the puzzle pieces will line up instead of taking one thing from that guy and one thing from this guy and trying to jam the pieces together.

Yeah.

And then in terms of like renting sites out, it's really not that hard. The conversation is you have leads in hand, you already have something valuable. I'm literally just calling the person and saying, hey, I know you don't know me from Adam, but I've got customers that want this. I'm like, if I send you some people, can we work out a cut? And the majority of people will say, yeah, cool, that sounds great. And then I'll just test the relationship.

What do you use to invoice them every month?

Stripe. It's always Stripe. I'll get their credit card, have it on file, autopay. I'm not doing invoicing because I don't want them to have any control. I want all the control.

Do you think that SEO skills, tactics are more important or is the right niche selection more important?

Niche is definitely important, but the SEO piece, the, the, that SEO piece is the last little bump that can make something go from worth $400 a month to worth like 4 grand a month.

What did— so your first 6 sites replace your income. What did your first year, second year like? How did your growth look like from that first year until today?

Kind of like one of these because it was, it was pretty incremental literally until last year. So it's been kind of like a little wave going up. And then this past year was just a straight ramp just because of the revenue share thing. I just picked the highest, the biggest clients and went all in on trying to grow those.

Is this a good thing to do on the side? Like aside a full-time job as a side hustle?

I love it as a side hustle idea because there's lots of people that have walked away from jobs and all kinds of stuff doing exactly this. I know 3 people that have made more than $1 million just since 2022 with doing this on the side of what they're doing. Like eventually quit, but like, that's insane. So yeah, I love it as a side hustle and it's way better than any of the ones I tried.

Yeah, and we've all tried a lot.

So much better. Yeah, I think it's a great thing. I think— and then pivoting, like, I would highly recommend trying the revenue share because that makes even more. And then I've also known something called profit interest. It's kind of like a— it's like fake equity, revenue share. Yeah, it's like, uh, allows me to participate in revenue share now, but I also can take a piece of the company when it sells. And like, I just got a paving deal for that. Their company's worth $3.5 million and I just got 20% of it. So I'm gonna try to push them as high as I can with SEO and see what I can do. And then eventually when they sell— I don't know when that's going to be, 10 years from now, 15 years— that's going to be worth a lot of money. So it's like I get the I'll get the big thing now, but I'll get a big chunk at the end too.

Man, I'm fired up to do this myself. Um, I'm the guy that's just supposed to ask questions, but now I'm like, oh geez.

I mean, the shiny object, man. It's rough. It's rough.

It's real. It's very real.

It's rough.

Well, Luke, where can we find you? Where can we learn more about you, uh, and everything you do?

Yeah, I mean, you want to learn about my stuff, it's, it's website rentalcoaching.com.

Okay. Is there anything we should have covered that I neglected to ask you about?

Um, I don't, I I guess there's a couple things. There's a lot of, I think one of the things I've learned that I kind of wish I knew sooner was the other uses of this. It just never really occurred to me until recently. I was doing this renting websites for a long time and it created a tax problem, a good one. And I was talking to my CPA the one day and she's like, you're going to have to pay a lot this year. And I was like, okay. And she told me, I almost had a heart attack. And I was like, okay, how do we not pay that? And she's like, legally? And I was like, yes, legally. And she goes, you can buy real estate or buy a business. And I was like, okay, I have real estate that's not done much for me. What do you mean buy a business? And she's like, just buy an existing business. Lots of baby boomers. Go buy one that's already working and you can take all the FF&E, the furniture, fixture, equipment, trucks, all that stuff, and offset some of your income so you don't have to pay taxes on it. And I was like, cool, what's the downside? And she's like, well, next year you're going to have that company making you money too. So you're going to have even more tax problems and you get to do it again.

Well, and then you, you got to run a business or you got to hire someone to run this business.

I'm like, all right, well, whatever. So I'm like, fine. So I did that. I went, I went and I learned about acquisition and I ended up buying a catering company and I have no experience in catering. Um, I was only comfortable with this because of this background, like knowing SEO, knowing lead gen. I knew like, even if everything fell apart, their website's doing nothing, ads aren't doing anything, I can get the leads. So I'm like, whatever, how hard could it be? So I bought it. I took an SBA loan. It was like $230,000 down or something. I bought the company $1.7 million. I took my brother out of his job. He was an operations manager at a car wash. And I was like, hey, if I gave you half the company, would you run this? And he's like, absolutely. So I put him in to keep me passive and he ran it. So I've just been a passive partner on this, just pumping it with leads and it just pays me while I chill. And then I've just been— I just didn't think of this sooner. So I'm like, this is awesome. So now I just keep trying to buy more businesses to offset more taxes and use SEO to grow it.

And it's been It going well, the catering business?

It's great.

It's awesome, man. That's interesting.

I got to look into that because I've just been teaching people how to do that too. Like a lot of people with me, I've been trying to show them that too, because everybody wants to just go as big as possible. And I'm just looking, what is the highest use of this skill set? I think that might be it.

Yeah. Okay. More vertically integrated. Luke, you're the man.

Thank you. Absolutely. Thanks, Chris.

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