Greg Elfrink - How To Create And Sell Your Own Media Empire

So to become a magazine style or a media empire, you gotta flip your thinking a little bit. It's not about getting people, getting articles ranked for people to click on your affiliate links. It's about how can I build an addressable audience? An addressable audience. Like typically that'd be your email list, but it's basically any kind of medium where you can, you know, on demand, basically reach out to this audience. You want to build an addressable audience.

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float Shark with your boy.

My boy, Matt Wolf. Jo. Hey, did you hit the red button?

I did.

Okay, it's on. Is this thing on?

It's on.

Cool. Okay. Today, who are we chatting with? Mr. Matt.

We're doing a round two with Greg Elfridge. If you remember, we had him on about a year and a half ago. He's from empireflippers.com and he's like one of the biggest experts on flipping content websites.

Yeah. So it's kind of relevant to a lot of us here in this podcast. So we brought him back on. Specifically, we actually had a previous guest, Matt Diggity, which you definitely should go listen to that episode. If you have not listened to this one first though, just cue that one up next. Basically, Diggity was, I love his last name. Diggity was telling us, man, there are some insane multiples for content sites, like media type sites. So he said, you need to talk to Greg again and he's going to break down this model and tell you some of the latest trends that are happening right now in 2021, even with pandemic and all the craziness in the world, like there's like, it's actually higher than, than, than Diggity said. They're like 50 plus times multiples monthly of profit of some of these sites. And Greg's gonna break down exactly how to capitalize on that and also actually create a site like that that could sell for crazy multiple.

Well, we had like a little bit of an email chain going back and forth with him and he said, I would love to teach your audience my media empire model. He was saying, you know, most people build a site this one way and then try to flip it. I have a different way of doing it where I'm trying to build a media empire that I can flip for much higher multiples. And he's like, can I come on the show and break that down to your group? And we're like, that doesn't sound valuable at all.

Not at all.

So we told him no but he showed up anyway and found the zoom link.

I don't know. He happened to show up at the right time. I was at Matt's house.

It was weir.

But yeah, I think the big thing you're gonna get here is it's kind of like putting everything together in a really helpful way, packaging a lot of the concepts you've definitely heard on this show and putting em in a nice little box that you can actually potentially sell for a lot of money. So you're gonna love it. You're gonna want the action guides. How are they gonna get em?

Go to flowchartgroup.com if you go to flowchartgroup.com that's actually where you can request to join our Facebook group. One of those questions there is going to ask for your email. If you decide to give us your email, we will email you the action guide to this episode. But you gotta be quick. You gotta do it within two weeks of this episode going live because we only give away the most recent two weeks for free. So go to flowchartgroup.com, join the group, give us your email, we'll hook you up.

Let's do this.

Go talk to Greg.

All right, round two is on. Greg, how you doing, man?

I am doing good. How are you two?

Solid. I mean, this is. We're pumped for round two here. I know it's the middle of the night for you, and you're probably more energetic than both of us combined. And I love it.

It's the Vietnamese coffee. So powerful.

You're much more of a night person than I am a morning person, so.

Oh, man. Yeah, with the toddler running around my house too, I'm like, man, I wish I had your energy right now. Vietnamese coffee. That's probably it.

This is secret.

Yeah, man. Well, Matt Diggity, you know, he was on the show not that long ago, and he's like, you got to bring Greg back on. Even though we've had you on before, there's been like, massive changes in the industry. And he pointed out specifically media sites being a massive opportunity with valuations. I mean, there's a buyer's market now that exists for the first time in years that you've seen. I mean, you have your finger on the pulse. So I think this conversation is going to be an interesting one. To dive in and kind of present this to the listeners is like, holy crap. You can actually kind of adjust maybe what you're doing now or maybe acquire something from you to flip it into something new.

Yeah, man. So all that to say is thank you for coming back.

I'm happy, I'm happy to be here. Just. Yeah, it's crazy what's going on right now in the industry. Like you said buyer's market, but I know you met sellers market. Just talking. Yeah, so.

We were talking a little bit offline, but I was telling them, I'm talking to your listener, I guess, telling them like this. I've been working at Empire Flippers as more or less the head of marketing now for several years. And I've been at EF total for like five years almost. April will be five years. And this is the first time where I feel pretty confident in saying this is 100% a seller's market. So the market is so flushed with cash, there's so many people getting into the space. Multiples are being driven up. Like it's a great time to be a seller.

I mean there's, it's, you know, we, I was telling you we recently had John Warlow on the show Built to Sell and he's, you know, he's automatic customer and he's. Now he's talking about selling your business and all of his books. And yeah, he was pointing out all these opportunities right now for sellers and buyers in some senses, you know, just the low interest rates and the fact that there's all these different ways to kind of acquire companies. But yeah, as a seller, I think this is where it's going to be really interesting because a lot of folks have content websites, they might have media websites and they don't know what to do with them. Maybe there's not a game plan. So I think it'd be cool to outline the opportunities you see on your side because you're seeing all these transactions. I think you said you had a eight figure transaction for the first time right through.

Yes.

We'Re about to close our second eight figure 1. It's funny how that happens when, like when you're. I remember when I first came on board and like I was Talking to our CEO, we were selling this $150,000 business and he was like, yeah, Greg, things change at this level. It's a totally different game. This was a big business to us back then. Now I'm not trying to diminish 150k business. Now that's kind of small for us. That's less than our average deal size, which is around $220,000 now. So yeah, we sold that first $12 million one literally just a few weeks ago and now we're about to sell A second one about 10. A little bit over $10 million or so. And when you're a broker, it's always this chicken and egg thing. Like, the seller is like, how can I trust you? You've never sold a business like this before that's this big. Right. So you need, like, the first one is like, okay, I guess I'll kind of trust you to do this for me. And then you do it, and it opens up the floodgates. Right.

Well, let's talk about. So right now you say it's a seller's market. What do you believe makes it a seller's market? I know we're getting bigger than you might have seen in the past. Why do you think that is? What do you think is making it. So there's a frenzy of buyers out there right now.

Yeah. So it's a few different factors kind of all converging onto each other as it happens when things like this happen. So one of the big ones is demand has grown dramatically. There are more people than ever getting into our space even a year and a half ago when last time I was on your guys podcast. This is a pretty niche thing. It's a niche within a niche within a niche when it comes to buying and selling online businesses. But it has become bigger and more mainstream as these aggregators, business aggregators, which we usually call them institutional buyers, but a lot of people call them brand aggregators, are starting to come into the marketplace where they're raising real money from family offices and private equities a lot of times in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars to buy digital assets. So that's creating all this buzz, right? Like, we have one of. One of our very good clients. They just became, I think it's the fastest profitable unicorn in America. And they're like, one of our clients doing this. Right.

It's good to be right along those type of people.

It was funny, I was talking to their growth marker because they do YouTube advertising. Him and I are pretty good friends. I was like, dude, I saw this comment on Twitter or whatever. People like, man, they're so good at targeting. I wasn't even looking this up on YouTube. And I see their ad because, you know, they tried to build private deal flow. I was like, can I see the ad? Just out of curiosity? He's like, yeah, sure. I watch it. It's like, it's the testimonial video that we filmed. That's me. You're recycling the footage I paid for. Good on you.

Yeah, right.

But, yeah, so, like, so that's one of the things, right? These people are coming in, it's creating all this buzz. Market people are excited. So that creates again more investors wanting to get involved with the cash on cash return. But then you have the more Black Swan event of 2020, right? Coronavirus that swept across the world. So in Q1, 2020, things were looking real bad. Amazon cut their affiliate commissions right at the height of it. Then from the FBA side, which we do a lot of FBA transactions, they were saying, no non essentials can come in. Logistics were up in the air. Everything was up in the air, really. No one knew what was going to happen. And investors don't invest when there's uncertainty. They wait for some stability. Even if it's bad stability, at least they know the rules of the game. So Q1 was absolutely terrible. Then Q2 came roaring back with all this dry tinder. That was. Dry tinder is a peeve line for money. On the side that they hadn't invested in Q1, they were trying to make up for a whole quarter of not investing, basically. And so that's driving up prices too. But that with the pandemic, basically everyone's shopping online. So you think, like, you hear about all these businesses dying during 2020, which is really sad, but you talk to e commerce entrepreneurs and they're having some of the best months ever because the pandemic has basically just sped up what was already happening. All these people moving online, even older generations, which were more likely never going to adapt to shopping online, are now forced to adapt to shopping online because they can't go out like how they used to. And they're also seeing like, wait, why haven't I been doing this for years? This is way better.

They're not going back, right? Like, this is awesome. Like my mom up in Alaska, she's like, I haven't been to a grocery store in 10 months. I have so much more time. This is great. You know, just gets it all delivered. Like. Like that option was there before the Black Swan event, but she just never used it because, like, it's new. I don't want to think about it. All that kind of stuff, right? So all that stuff is merging together to create this demand and multiples in the search for a yield. That's happening.

Yeah. And you say that a lot of, like the FBA is kind of a big, big driver of business for you. I think that was some of your bigger deals too.

Fulfilled by Amazon.

Yeah, fulfilled by Amazon, the acronym. Are there any other sites that you're seeing or assets go through empire flippers and selling pretty well right now. Like some trends in that regard.

Yeah, the trend is largely the same since last we spoke, actually. So Amazon fba, obviously a really big one for us. But second one is content sites. So this would be your affiliate site, Amazon associate display advertising site. As more people get involved in the niche in buying businesses, content sites always remain a very, very popular choice because you don't have to do anything necessarily. I should have said that you do have to do things when you own it. It's not like you don't do anything when you buy this business. But in terms of moving parts, it's a very gentle business to start in. In terms of investing, especially when you buy one and you're just like playing it conservative and just adding content, you're most likely not going to mess up the site unless there's a groundbreaking Google update or something like that, which could happen. But yeah. So content sites in general, always a big one and we're seeing those brand aggre. So some people think that's like only in the FBA space, but that's not true. They're all over. Like, we have one, they have a. They bought, I think it was a 1.2 or $1.4 million content site from us. And that's just like one in a portfolio of their sites. So these brand aggregators, they exist in all business models, not just in fba. FBA is like the darling of the day on it. Like how SaaS was maybe a couple years ago, but they exist everywhere.

Yeah.

Now, is there still value to Amazon affiliate sites now that Amazon sort of slashed everybody's affiliate commissions, probably not to.

The seller, but to the buyer. Because the buyer is going to look at that like, oh, here's an Amazon affiliate guy that didn't go out and find some private affiliate programs for them. It's like, I get to buy this traffic at a discount. Right. All I need to do is change this link. But with that said, Amazon Associates is still a really good program, very solid still. Especially in your really big site where you might not have a private affiliate program for everything, you could still make them very profitable.

So when you're seeing someone buy a site, I'm kind of curious because he's probably a good point. It's like to the seller, sometimes it's more of an advanced or, sorry, the buyer for an FBA site because they see the opportunity. Someone did all the hard work of creating the website, finding the products, maybe figuring out what's work. What's selling? What's not? Like, what are some things that you're seeing sellers do with a website that sells on Empire Flippers? Like, are there certain things that they're looking for? Is it like that where they're like, oh, they did all the work for me. I'm going to pay for that. Because they just kind of saved me years of work and heartache to figure all this out. Like, can you kind of prep yourself for that in a way, as a seller?

Yeah. So you're asking what can a seller do to help a buyer see that their website is that shortcut?

Yeah, that and the motivations of a buyer so they can kind of sync up in the right spot and get the valuations.

Yeah. This is a very good question because I always. And this works for both buyers and sellers. So if you ask a seller, like, why are you selling your business? Like, almost 100%? The first answer is like, because I want money. You know what? I want to make a big capital windfall. But that's usually not the real answer. Right. That's the superficial answer. Then you dig deeper. They're like, oh, I want to do other projects. And you're like, okay, let's dig deeper. You know, you're peeling back that onion a bit. Eventually you find out, like, well, I want to focus on other projects to take less of my time because I'm moving to this new house and selling this business allows me to make this down payment on the house for my new family. And now you're getting to the emotional reason. Right. So whenever I talk to buyers and sellers, I always say, dig deep. Find out who this buyer or seller is. It's just like copywriting 101. We all do it. Like, everyone listening to this podcast as a marketer probably is familiar with copywriting, Right? But for some reason, when you go to buy or sell a business, you take the copywriting hat, just throw it in the trash. Like, I don't need that anymore. The business is successful. But, like, the buyer or seller is your customer. Right? Like, that is your customer. You need to think about their own motivation. So when it comes to selling, thinking about a buyer, we recommend, at least I recommend for the seller to check out our buyer Persona content. There's about, like, six of them, and they all have very different motivations. For example, newbie norm, if you know you're a seller, dealing with someone who is a newbie norm, someone's brand new to the space. Like, that doesn't necessarily mean they don't have business acumen or money. They're just new to online business acquisition. You know, they're probably going not have as much confidence and so you're going to have to hold their hand a little bit more. And that's okay from the seller payoff. Like yes, you might have to hold their hand a little bit more, but when you give them a quality business, like you might have effectively changed their entire trajectory of their life in a positive way. Right. Because newbie Nords is just starting out and that's always going to be the biggest pool of buyers you're talking to because there's always more people coming in versus say investor Ivan, who that would be more of your brand aggregator. Someone who's raised millions of dollars to acquire businesses. Obviously their motivation is going to be a lot different. And if you're a seller, say you're Amazon FBA entrepreneur because they this example works really well with FBA and you have a one product business. So 100% of your revenue comes from a single e commerce product that you have on Amazon. Most buyers don't like that. Look at that. They're like, that seems super. Yeah, exactly right? Like, whoa, I'm going to spend $200,000 on this single SKU like. But an investor Ivan, not risky at all. To them. They don't care. They'll buy one product businesses all day long because they've raised millions of dollars. So your $500,000, $800,000 or even $3 million one product business is 100% okay to them as long as it meets their other strict criteria because to them is not as risky because of all the acquisitions they're doing. Right. So these are important things to know as a seller going into who am I dealing with for things you can do before you ever sell is ask yourself, like, would I buy this business? Just be honest with yourself. Like, would I? Does this seem like a good deal?

Why?

Why does it seem, you know, start interrogating yourself and if you're really honest with yourself, there'll probably be some answers like, this actually seems like not a good deal.

Okay, now I know it's not a good deal. How do I fix it? How do I make this a good deal for myself? Right. So you always, like, sellers are obsessed with evaluation for obvious reasons. But there's a second part of selling a business called attractiveness. So some sellers, they'll be like, say you're running this huge media site that's making $30,000 a month affiliate site and you have this badass team of writers vas all these systems and processes set up and the first thing the seller thinks, like, I'm going to increase my valuation by firing my whole team, get rid of that expense, huge valuation boost. Right? But then the buyer comes in and sees all the work that has to be done to maintain this business. He sees you working like 70 hours a week. He's just going to discount you like, hey, I'm going to need a higher team. I'm going to need to hire a team. So I'm going to need this for a lower price because the net profit is going to be lower. Right. So you almost get like no benefit for doing that. So I always tell sellers like, yes, valuation is important, but think about how can I make this business attractive as well?

Now, right now, would you recommend people go and start a site from scratch or is now a good time to go try to find like a site that needs a little bit of love, Buy the site, flip it and make your multiple. Like what sort of path are you kind of recommending people go down if they want to get into this world?

Yeah, so if you're just starting out, I probably wouldn't recommend buying. I think it's good to get your feet wet with building and that is a long game. So you don't, you don't need to build something until it's profitable, but you should be building something to where you're comfortable with the systems. Like that's the important thing. I always, like, if you want to go fast, I always recommend buying something. And if you have some skills, I think it's really good to buy something that doesn't look great on the outside or even on the inside. Right. Like you want to buy other people's problems. It's very similar to real estate investing. Right. Like if you, if I buy a house that only has like cosmetic issues and smells terrible and no one wants to go in it, right. I basically get the smell discount. Buy at this house for $30,000. I painted to cover up the smell or whatever and now it's worth say 60, $80,000. I just built all this equity for very little. Right. And so you, when you're buying an online business, you want to look at it in way, especially once you have skills. Now if you're brand new buying an online business, I probably wouldn't recommend buying too many problems because you probably don't know how to solve them yet. So like, like if you're brand new to buying, don't go like, I'm going to get this amazing Deal because there's a site with this Google penalty that's been banned from all its affiliate programs. Like, you know, you, you don't want to hunt for like the best deal. You're almost always going to be better off buying a high quality business for fair value. Like that's always gonna be better, at least until you get some skills. Then you can look at doing this like discount, I call it buying a business at a discount. Right. Where you're looking for these problem businesses with problems. But that's what I recommend. So if you want to go fast, buying is 100% way faster than building because you already have all the data and you can do all this low hanging fruit stuff like CRO on page optimization, new content, taking advantage of the high domain rating on the website. All this stuff you can't do when you're first starting out a site. If you put the split testing software VWO up On your, your 10 page affiliate site was one visitor per month. Your results are probably not going to change. But you don't have a lot to work with yet. So buying is always faster in my opinion.

I like that analogy. The whole, you can buy other people's problems and if you know how to fix them, then cool, that might be a good thing. But don't buy too many of them. But I like the fact that hopefully don't buy too many one at a time. But Empire Flippers, I know you guys do so much due diligence on every single thing that you guys post there. So you know, I like the fact that you've. And also the seller has done a lot of this work to kind of expose the potential holes or the gaps that a buyer can be on this side and be like, cool, well I know how to solve that problem kind of in advance. Right? They would kind of have that data before actually saying purchase. Right. Like they would have pretty good visibility 100%.

So we, we, so we don't actually do due diligence. This is a common misunderstanding though because we are a curated marketplace. So we do vetting and we, and we differentiate those two because due diligence is like I'm looking for a site with no Google penalties, this many backlinks of this kind of referring domain. So all that kind of stuff versus vetting is like we're making sure the business is legitimate. It's not scammy, it's an actual opportunity. It's real. What the seller is saying is real in terms of traffic and profit and loss. And we do that because we did Due diligence. I have people that come up to me when I'm at a conference when that used to be a thing, they'd be like, why would you sell a site with a Google penalty? That kind of like destroys the integrity of the marketplace because it's a lower quality site. Well, it destroys it for you. But there's specific buyers who only look for those sites. That's the kind of site they want to buy. Right. So that's the difference between vetting and due diligence. But yes, what you're saying is correct. We always coach a seller and this is really good for your audience. If they want to sell a business and they don't want to use a broker, if they want to just go private, it's better not to oversell your business. Instead, it's better to highlight all the problems to the buyer because you never want to sell the business based off potential. Like, we get people like, oh, this is the next $10 million idea. It's like $100,000 affiliate site. Like, it's not there yet.

The buyer is just going to look at you and give you this awful deal. Like, well, if you believe it's the next $10 million deal, I will give you a dollar every month until we hit that. Then I'm going to give you this huge balloon payment. It's a sure thing. You don't want to sell on potential because that ruins your chance to have a good deal. Usually instead you want the buyer to be selling themselves on potential. And how you do that is by being honest with your problems. It might not even be a huge problem. Maybe you have an E commerce store that is mainly SEO driven and you try to run a bunch of Facebook ads to it and just, you couldn't. Like, you broke even, you made a little bit of money, but you just couldn't make it work. And that's not necessarily a problem. It's probably for you, you couldn't make it work. But that person can see, maybe they're a Facebook ad expert, like, oh, I totally know where you went wrong.

So that's how you get the buyer thinking on potential for themselves, where they're going to make you a much better deal because they'll see the opportunity in front of them.

That makes sense. Yeah. Well, I'm kind of curious because I want to piggyback on what you said with building stuff, the media properties. So this was the thing that really got us to kind of talk again. And with Matt Diggity, he's like, okay, let's Bring Greg on. Because there's a type of sites and you were telling us that you basically have a framework or kind of an idea around how to build a media empire, which a lot of the valuations, they're very attractive right now and kind of curious your thoughts about or I guess defining what a media empire actually is for people first. But why are those so valuable right now? And maybe some steps on how we can kind of set ourselves up or people listening to actually build one for themselves.

Yeah, so I love content sites. I'm a content marketer. So this is like my favorite business model. So I started off with the analogy. Most people building out a content site as like your typical affiliate, Amazon, associate, display, ad, whatever. There's two kinds of sites. So you have the brochure and you have the magazine. So if I'm walking down the street and I hand you a brochure selling like ovens or microwaves or whatever, there's like two things that are going to happen there, right? You're going to take this brochure and either buy what I'm selling in that brochure and throw it away, or you're just going to throw it away and not buy. But either way you're throwing away the brochure, right? That has no intrinsic value to me. I'm not keeping this brochure on me unless I'm like a weirdo, I guess, collecting brochures, which I guess is a could happen.

Hey, oven man, come on.

I got this collection of oven brochures, but if I had a magazine instead about like kitchen, home and living, whatever that happens to sell red ovens or whatever inside of that magazine and hand it to you. And if you're into that space, you might be a subscriber in my magazine. So now I get to sell you all sorts of stuff all over again. So I bring up this analogy because most affiliates I talk to, they are amazing marketers or they're amazing at getting traffic, but they often don't see the big picture, what they're doing. They think the business model is just, okay, I'm going to rank this article, people are going to come to it, they're going to click my affiliate links and I'll make money. That's the business model. They're not wrong. But there's a short sighted business of what it can become. So to become a magazine style or a media empire, you gotta flip your thinking a little bit. It's not about getting people, getting articles ranked for people to click on your affiliate links. It's about how can I build an addressable audience? An addressable audience. Like, typically that'd be your email list, but it's basically any kind of medium where you can, on demand, basically reach out to this audience. You want to build an addressable audience. So, okay, how do I do that? Like, well, starting A website called bestredblenders.com, probably is not going to help you. You want to like Kitchen Hero or something like that, you know, something that is a bigger brand message. So you start off as a brochure site, Pretty much everyone does. You start building that email list and that each stage as you build this media empire opens you up to all sorts of new revenue doors that didn't used to exist. So once you have that email list going and say you have a sequence of emails going out to various affiliate content or, you know, just branding good, valuable content, you can look at that sequence, say, like, okay, this sequence, even as an Amazon associate affiliate, is making me, say, 120 bucks of profit by the time they go through my funnel. Oh, now you are able to do something that a typical SEO affiliate can never do, which is run some cheap retargeting ads to get people not on your email list to come onto the email list. Because if you're paying like say 30, 50 bucks per subscriber, which I imagine would be pretty expensive in most niches, you're still going to make money on average, right? With your retargeted, with your, with the audience that's got pixeled on your website. So now you're able to start branching out to different forms of marketing to become a real brand. You're not just held up by Google, so you're slowly divorcing yourself to where you're just solely relying on Google. Now Google probably always will be your main breadwinner in these sites, but as you become a bigger media empire, you keep opening up more and more of these doors of possibilities. So another revenue possibility opens up with email is there's a bunch of private affiliate programs and even not so private ones that won't let you be their affiliates unless you only promote them via email. And some affiliates are like, why would they do that? Like, well, it's because they don't want you to compete with them on SEO or Facebook ads, right? So just to get into the game, you need to have an addressable audience for this kind of targeting. I have a few affiliate friends, they're not actually SEO, so it's kind of ironic this ended up happening to them, but they had like this news website that was just like took way off in Google and they bring them into their email list and they have hundreds of thousands of subscribers now and they just like all he does is just segment his list with different email only affiliate offers basically and makes crazy amount of money off of that. So that's like the first step. You want to go from this brochure like slowly towards this magazine. You build this email list, you start getting good at email marketing, a little bit of retargeting, nothing crazy yet. And then you really start scaling up your content production. You build that team of good writers. You start like. Usually the way I would recommend to expand is to hire a content manager first. Then one great way to get a content manager for your media site is go onto Reddit, into the subreddit that is your niche and find someone who's just insanely passionate about you.

Love that, such a good piece of advice.

So I have this friend, he has a little affiliate site that makes like two, three thousand dollars a month. And he bought this site, he didn't build it and so he was talking to the seller. So how much do you pay this writer? He's like, what do you mean? I don't, he's like, what do you mean you don't pay this writer? This guy's publishing like five articles a day for you. It feels like he's like, no, he's just really into it.

The guy who was writing, he's like this high powered lawyer in New York and he just is extremely passionate about this stuff. So it wasn't even in the legal niche. It was something about, I can't actually tell you the name, but it's a passion. It sounds like, yeah, he's really into it. So my buddy, once he took over the site, he offered to pay the guy a little bit of money and it wasn't much, just regular writer rates and the guy was over the moon. What you're going to pay me for this? So that is the best place to find the content manager. And the reason why you want that person to be your content manager is cause that allows you to scale to the cheaper writers, say like your text brokers or your freelancers or whatever to where your content manager knows the niche, knows what is right or wrong, and can help that writer massage that piece at scale for you easier. So that's like the first step of growing your team in this media empire.

So essentially you'd have the content manager like so they'd bring in a writer, the writer would essentially Write like a first draft and it's the content manager's job to polish it up at and make it the quality that the site's looking for.

Yes, exactly. And they're able to bring their expertise of actual niche knowledge, which I'm sure, as you two know and most of the audience, a lot of our SEO friends aren't exactly niche experts in the website that they're building. Right, right. So you bring someone in who really is, that brings an extra flair for your content. If you're making that person your content manager, not just your writer. I feel like a lot of people make the mistake where they just make that person their writer and that in my opinion, handicaps you like that Content manager doesn't really need to write anything for you. They should instead be reviewing all the other writers because that's where you're going to get real bang for your money on that expertise.

So that would be my first step. And once you have all this stuff, once you're scaling, once you're doing well, this will be different for every site. So maybe you get to this stage and the site's making 2k a month or maybe it's making 10k, 12k. The next thing is like, how do I want to expand further? I probably should have said this earlier, but you want, when you build these websites, you want to build it in a broader niche. If that wasn't obvious, like it shouldn't be super specific because you want room to grow and ideally you want back.

To like the oven example just to kind of call back there. It's like, yeah, not, not an oven website, but like a home goods or whatever type site. Obviously not home goods, exactly. Yeah, that idea.

Yeah, yeah, you want to be broader so you have room to grow. And ideally you want to have a website in a niche that supports multiple different monetizations because that becomes very important later on in this whole journey. So you want to see people ideally selling E commerce products, affiliate programs, even SaaS can be a potential monetization. I've actually seen a couple content site creators create a SaaS based off their content site and not just in the business niche either. I saw one guy do, I think was in gardening, which was pretty cool. But then you also want to look is there info, courses, things like that. And then you want to get a little bit creative too. So I know this one site, I don't know the actual revenue numbers, but I know the owners and based off what they do, I think this is probably a seven figure content site. So they have this very interesting thing. You come to the website and they have a bunch of different affiliate articles, all that kind of stuff. But you sign up for their newsletter, they have a upsell where it says get insider knowledge once a week on this niche. And you have an ad free experience whenever you come to the website. $5 a month. So they built MRR inside of their content right from the gig just by being a little bit creative. Yeah, yeah. And that, that's probably making them 10, $12,000 a month based off the size of the site alone. Which is insane, you know.

Well, to a buyer, I mean, I'm sure the valuation goes way up because of there's a recurring now as an element that they control.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I have another affiliate friend who did something very similar. They would do, you know, sell a little info course for like seven bucks and then the upsell would be to join this like Facebook group that you pay like 2, 3 bucks a month for. And you have it filled with like, you know, when you first started, you have to fill it with a bunch of great content. But eventually people inside of the group keeps it as a self perpetuating value add because thought leaders will start to be born in this group and then they're carrying the weight for you for the most part. And people in the price of entry is so low or like whatever, it's like two bucks and they forget about it forever. And now you're building an addressable audience not just in your email list, you're building it on social media. And there's all sorts of cool things like growth hacks you can do with groups that can be really powerful. So to get back to growing the media site, it's all about how like where can I start and how do I keep growing? How do I expand both in revenue and in traffic and not just like affiliate revenue, but how can I expand my opportunities for revenue? So there's a website that's quite popular in the homesteading edge about, I think it's like called Backyard Chickens or whatever, like how to raise chickens. And they have a whole podcast on raising chickens and they're a huge website. So eventually you as a. Yeah, this is just started off as a blog, right. Like your typical content site. Now they have a podcast, right. So that's kind of like the next stepping stone in this. Right. You got the blog which is the written media. Now you're getting word or audio as their next media channel with a podcast. And podcasts are not that difficult in terms of cost to Actually set that up. In fact, your content manager, who's super thrilled with the niche, might be the perfect person to be hosting that podcast. Right. And even if they're not, the beautiful thing about a podcast is you can take someone who is somewhat inexperienced and might not know that much about the niche, but they're good at interviewing and just get experts on and the expert teaches the host. What about the niche? Basically, as long as they're inquisitive, it will still be a good conversation. So once you do something like that, now you're really branching off. Now you're becoming something very different than your typical content site. Because right here, like, first of all, 90% of affiliates are never going to build an email list. And if they do, they have this weird habit of never emailing them. So I've seen, this is something I've actually seen with sellers a lot. They'll be like, oh, I have this 10,000 subscriber list. How much value does that add to my business? Well, how often do you email them? What's your data on it? He's like, I've never emailed them at all. They're primed to go for the buyer. Okay, so this has actually hurt your valuation. So you would have been better off just promoting an affiliate program.

Right.

Because the email needs to actually drive revenue and traffic. Right. So most affiliates will not do that. And by the time you get to a podcast or video stage, you're competing with like 1%. Like almost no one is doing this. Right. The beautiful thing of doing this podcast, not only can you use that addressable audience you've been building with your email list to supercharge you through the podcast ranks, through Apple and Spotify and all that kind of stuff. But you are now, which will bring you more organic traffic right from those search engines. But you also expand your revenue. With what we were just talking about earlier, you, there's all sorts of revenue opportunities with podcasts, such as sponsorships, product pitches, you start having other high ticket tools or high ticket items like an info course or a software company, or like SaaS or whatever. This is a perfect channel because podcasts are a fantastic place to bond with your audience from a marketing perspective. They might not be like the powerhouse, like driving a bunch of new traffic to you, but they are definitely one of the best nurturing marketing mediums out there. That's why we have three podcasts.

That's exactly right. Yeah. Well, yeah, you have a new one even coming out too. Yeah, it's a quick plug called Opportunity.

Right. Everyone on this podcast, stop listening.

Go download the Opportunity. You're out of here.

Put them off the show, man. Kick them off the coast.

Well, it's been nice having you, Will.

I have blacklisted myself.

But yeah, we do have a new podcast. I think it's really cool if people want to check out. It's called the Opportunity. It's where we interview actual buyers of digital assets. So I feel like you always hear the seller side and the big exit, which is awesome. So this was a content gap I wanted to fill. And where we interview actual buyers from our marketplace and other marketplaces about their story. Like, what happened with the deal? How did you raise the money? Why did you do this instead of real estate or something else? And how did it go? What happened? So you get to hear all the stories with the buyers. So I think it's pretty cool.

Yeah, well, it's like a unique perspective that is just kind of unseen or unheard so much on the buyer side. And then back to the model itself. I really love the fact that, I mean, it's actually a lot of the stuff that we talk about, email building, build solid content, have a foundation of content traffic from all numerous sources. But like, as you said, it's. It's kind of building blocks. You know, you start with the written content and that's a great.

You don't want to start with everything. No.

Hell no. Yeah. And I think that's where people maybe get the hang up. I know we talk about a lot of different models on this podcast and a lot of like bolt ons to say a foundational site, but I love the fact that like start with the basic, you know, blog or some kind of written content around a niche that's. And then I love the fact that you have a content manager who is passionate about the industry or that space, you found them on Reddit or subreddit that like those people are just, I mean, they're rabid for whatever it is if they're part of that group and they're active, you know, they're reviewing so much content so they know what's BS and what's not, you know, and then you have someone that broker writers.

What's.

What's going on.

Yeah, man, it's crazy. I mean, I just love the fact, I like your thinking of. And like you said, there's a, there's a big, big issue if someone's not looking big enough macro in what they're working on. And if they're just so micro thinking about like, oh, I Got to get more subscribers or I got to build this piece to get ranked perfectly for this keyword. It's like, yeah, it's cool, but where does that fit into the big machine here? And your goals, I think that's what you're helping to identify. It's kind of sealed a lot of stuff in my brain, too, which is cool, for sure.

And the beautiful thing about this is as you get bigger, it just snowballs on each other. Right? Just like having a high doctor allows you to rank new content, easy as you get a huge email list or like your Facebook group, there's people downloading your podcast. By the time you start a YouTube channel or to the next thing, like, you can use all that audience as like, your gunpowder, right? To, like, just make a huge entrance into whatever you want to do. This is why I say, like, if you have a $5 million content site, you could almost instantly. I shouldn't say instantly. You could pretty close build, like, a $2 million e commerce business on the back of this content site. Like, if you have that home and kitchen site, you start a really cool spatula that's branded with the content site. Like, guess who's going to be ranking number one on the Amazon marketplace pretty quickly, Right?

So this is the power of content that I feel like a lot of SEOs and affiliate marketers don't understand, which is ironic considering the whole business model is basically content and building an audience, but they let the audience just kind of leak away after they built it, which is a real shame.

It is, Yeah. I think that's where we're, like, on this podcast. I feel like a lot of the listeners kind of have a leg up or a head start a little bit in this, because we talk a lot about what you're saying here is like the key pieces to a media site that actually makes it valuable. It's almost like all these components, but now this is the full picture. So if someone did want to sell a website for high six figures, seven figures, maybe even eight figures, yeah, like, what's to say? What you're sitting on now is a great foundation, or maybe you can bolt on maybe a website on Empire Flippers is like the core foundation written site. Find a content manager, you know all the tactics and strategies of how this fits together, and you could package that up into something that's very lucrative and maybe sellable on Empire Flippers. Again.

I love this. Very skilled.

If someone built a site like this, like, if it's like even 60 to 70% successful, as I think it would be, I think it'd be fairly likely to be a seven figure site because look, we've sold what I would consider a brochure website that is still in that first stage. That was seven figures on our marketplace, that was making enough money to be a million dollar content site. And it didn't do any of this complex stuff that I talked about. It had an email list but didn't really use it much. So I don't want the audience to walk away thinking like, oh my God, in order to have the seven figure site, I need to do this insanely complicated plan from Greg. You don't have to, right. You can take it up to a certain level, but every interlocking piece you add makes your business a deeper moat that a competitor will never be able to copy. If you are in this super highly competitive affiliate niche and you make a YouTube video, well, no affiliates make a YouTube video. Almost zero of them are, especially in the SEO space. So. So you have just made it that much harder for your competitors to beat you. And that's the beauty of just tacking on one at a time, making it a bigger and bigger juggernaut in the niche.

Now is there more that you'd add to it? Was that like the whole process or is there more to it? After podcast YouTube, what would be the sort of next phase you would work into with this media site?

So I think once you got all these inbound channels coming in and you have good email funnels coming in, or you have good email funnels made, I think then is like usually a pretty good time to start exploring paid traffic in a big way. I think you could even start exploring paid traffic in terms of cold traffic. Probably once you know your numbers on an email funnel, like once you know the metrics, you can start exploring that. But now that you have all these different data and different channels that people are coming into, you can really start exploring cold traffic, which is almost unlimited in terms of your scalability now. Right. But at this stage I would probably focus more on how do I expand my revenue even further. So if by revenue I mean revenue options, not like just scaling what's already there, but how do I add something else? So I would look at info product first because that's super high margin. And inside of the actual info product, you could have your affiliate links to all the stuff that they need. Like if you're teaching someone, I don't know, metalworking. I was just watching this YouTube video on how to make swords because I think it's cool, like you like teach people how to do it, right? There is like this info product that has all these affiliate links to all the things you need to go and do this, right? So you can make money on the back end there. And you can make money on like the group of people who are just like obsessive with weird medieval stuff like me, because they were nerds. They want to join this $1 a month group to talk to other actual black blacksmiths, right? So like there's an opportunity there. Other things you can do that are not in info course because not every niche is going to be able to support that. But a lot of broad niches will be able to is your own physical products, right? Like again, one of. So I have to back up and tell you this really cool story. So there's this. I'm a big content marketing guy, big content marketing nerd. There's a story of this company. They sold soldering equipment and they had an option like, okay, we have a big enough budget basically to buy a Super bowl ad. If we wanted to, we could buy a Super bowl ad. Should we? Probably not. This is probably a bad company, right? So what they decided to do with their money instead is they went and bought a bunch of content sites about building computers, engineering, anything tangentially related to soldering. And most of these content sites made money. They were profitable display advertising websites, more or less, but they all had their own email list too. So they went and acquired all these little content sites with their marketing budget and at the end of the day they could send out an email that is incredibly targeted to people who would buy soldering equipment that reached an audience size much bigger than the super bowl ad. And they could do it for free as, as many times as they want. That's the power of an addressable audience and that's the whole point of the media empire, right? Like by the time you get to the point where you're starting an FBA business on top of this, like your addressable audience is so powerful, there is a very good chance you're going to be able to beat a lot of people in a lot of different categories on Amazon just through the external traffic you're sending to that listing. And then Amazon's going to shoot it way up, right? Of course, I would always recommend once you get the Amazon side going good, to have your own e commerce components so you collect even more margin. Only use your media empire to make the Amazon rankings go wild and stable and then switch over the actual website to your own Shopify or not. Shopify, but some E commerce software yourself. So that way you don't have to pay the big Amazon fees. Right. Because you have the audience. Right. You only see the traffic over there because Amazon is just another marketing channel at the end of the day. That's. So what I would think about is like, how do I keep expanding my options? And this makes you untouchable. Right. Like if Google like changes their algorithm. So what if Amazon changes their algorithm? Who cares?

It makes you just. It's very hard to take away your power at this point for sure.

Now.

When it comes to selling a site on Empire Flippers, at what time do I start to look at, okay, this site is potentially able to be sold. What's sort of the minimum viable product? Not that you should shoot for the minimum viable product, but what's like the minimum viable product where it's sort of viable to go and sell it?

Yeah, so it's very small. A lot of it's funny, when I first came on board, people were like, oh, Empire Flippers, where you go to sell the small businesses? And I'll be like, oh no, what sells small businesses on mic? But we do sell a lot of them. So the minimum numbers you have to hit, say you are an affiliate site owner. You just need 12 months of $500 per month, average net profit and that's it. And six months worth of analytics. You can use clicky too. If you're one of my tinfoil hat SEO friends, I think.

Analytics, but either one works. So six months of the analytics data, 12 months over $500 per month, your website would probably be. Probably be worth around 18, $20,000 around there. And we get those sites all the time. It's just most people don't see them because we sell them so quickly. It's like, oh, they don't ever sell it, but we sold 20 of them in the last month or something like that.

But that's the minimum.

So somebody couldn't go and create a site, generate some money for three months and be like, cool, this thing's cranking, let's go sell it. It's gotta have that history behind it.

So we would take maybe six months, but if it's only three months, we probably want to take it. And to be honest, if you believe in the site, I would highly recommend you not sell something that quickly because you're just doing yourself a huge disservice. This, by the way, is a big reason why buying is so much faster than selling. Because when you're selling, if you want to Have a good multiple. You want to have 12 months, which will give you the best possible multiple. But then you also have to say, well, which 12 months? So I want to do it in the first year of me owning it, where the first seven months was like nothing in terms of my profit, or do I want to do in the second 12 months where my profit actually has traction and now we have a good average net profit. A good site that you might sell might take you 18 to 20 months to get to a level where you're happy with what you're going to get on that valuation versus if you bought something. Just because you buy something doesn't mean it doesn't have any data. It still has the, the 24 months the seller put into that site. Right. So you can go and do all your tweaks in like say six months, dramatically increase the average net profit and then sell it because the site has more than 6 months of data price, 30 months of data. Now you just happen to own it for six months. So that, that's one of the big advantages of being a buyer over a seller when it comes to fast sells, ironically.

Yeah, but when it comes to actually selling, like is there a, how long does it, it kind of look like for say a media type site, maybe a six figure level. What's that process look like in terms of time?

I can tell you right now actually because.

I'm writing the industry report. So it's like this 25,000, 30,000 word report I do every year where I analyze all the hundreds of businesses we sold and the different trends. So for content sites, on average it's between like 21 to 27 days across all sizes. So from your $20,000 to your million dollar content site, you're looking at less than a month typically to sell one of these businesses. And honestly, if it's a quality business and it's worth like less than $100,000, there's a good chance you'll be sold in like a week because these are very high demand sites. I was on a podcast, I forget which one. And this guy asked me like, what would you do if you only had like 50k? You need to make a really good deal? I like, well, I probably want to shop with us because if you're thinking that you're, if you think that you're going to make like on this $50,000 website, like, all right, I'm going to put you, put $20,000 down and pay you $30,000 later, like you're going to lose the deal. Because at that sub 100k level there's so many full on cash buyers like you just can't compete unless you're buying all cash at that level. That starts to change once you get above $200,000.

But.

But basically especially underneath $100,000 and kind of between 100 and $200,000, those tend to go pretty quick if they're a quality site.

Makes sense. I mean it's. Yeah, financing is cheap. There's a lot of cash buyers in that sense that could just buy it right outright and maybe wrap it into some other business that they already have.

Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. These sites are great for Amazon FP people. For exactly what I was just talking about earlier, I like.

How about on the multiple side of things? I know this is obviously a big span, but you're working on the reports right now it looks like. So what kind of multiples are you.

Looking at the data?

Yeah, what do you got for us? Any interesting juicy nugget.

So average sales price and this is actually outdated. This is actually lower than what it actually is. But this is based off the whole 12 months of data that we have. So it's skewed from beginning of the year to here. But an average content site is getting between 30 to 33 of their monthly net profit. I think this time last year it was like 26 or 27 if I remember right. So that's a huge increase. Actually I can look at it right now. It might not be as big of an increase.

Oh wait, no, I can't look at it because my buddy put this data together. He just put it as percentages. So unfortunately that's all right.

It's a good multiple sounding.

Yeah, fantastic multiple. We've seen affiliate sites. The biggest one we sold and this was like 2 years ago I think was for 51x, I want to say. So you can get way up there if you have a good content site. And that was before the seller's market back then when we sold that one, I think our averages were probably closer to 25 to 26. And the appreciation of these multiples tends to be quite slow until this year or last year rather. And now they've been just kind of skyrocketing. So it's not uncommon to see an affiliate site for say 34, 36x right now if it's a good site, of course.

Now is that multiple of annual or of monthly?

Monthly, sorry, monthly.

Okay. I just want to make sure I clarify that.

Go to the moon.

So we don't use Annual ebitda, which makes some people frustrated with us because other people use annual EBITDA but we use monthly. And the reason why is because when we. Well, first of all, when we first started we were selling sites that might only have a month's worth of data. So like not really going to use the annual EBITDA on that. Right. These were like way back in the day when we were selling like $100 sites. So they kind of grew out of that. But as time grew on, we just feel like monthly multiples just feels better with online business. Like it feels more granular. It feel, I don't know, like it's a volatile niche or industry versus say like a brick and mortar business. It's much more predictable about what's going to happen with it. So we just think monthly makes sense. It's funny, you can always say, see, who, who is the Empire Flippers brand person when they use a monthly multiple instead of annual. Marketing is working. You're my people, my tribe, my tribe is here.

Yeah, well, you know, we talked to, we talked to a lot of people like in the startup, like venture capital, like kind of worlds like that. And you know, you're always hearing, you know, numbers like 5x and 10x and stuff, but they're usually referring to annual revenue. So when we start Talking about like 40, 50x, I'm just like, whoa. Let me just make sure we're talking about the same thing here.

It's funny, we didn't grow out of that whole PE family office space. We grew out of the digital nomad movement. Right. Our whole company. We're remote and we travel all around the world, live anywhere we want. So I remember when I first learned that people use annual because I grew up thinking monthly.

Oh yeah, that makes sense. Now. This is why people can't believe what we're selling these businesses for because they don't understand what we're doing. So it probably has hurt us a little bit by doing that. But I like it. I think it makes sense to me.

For online businesses, I think for this type of industry. Yeah. The type of owners that are selling these types of properties and building, it's easier to wrap our heads around this and how we can actually make that happen. I want to make sure to give you let us know about the EF capital a little bit too because that's the new thing that you guys are rolling out at Empire Flippers. I think it's relevant here too.

Yeah. So this is brand new. Like as of this recording at least it's like two days old. It's very new. Yeah.

I was just going to say the emails that were going back and forth before this call, I think in the email it was back in November, you were saying, this is so new I can't even talk about it. But then this interview ended up happening two months later. So it sounds like that's what you were referring to in the email that was kind of hush hush back then.

Yes, a hundred percent. That's what it was. So I'm very excited by this. So basically one of the big problems.

One of my big goals at Empire Flippers is people ask me who my competitors are and I tell them I have competitors of today, which are the other brokers in the space. But what I consider my real competitors, the competitors of tomorrow, are investing in real estate, investing in the stock market. I want people to think about investing into digital businesses as part of that mix. I want to go more and more mainstream. But the problem is buying an online business is the exact opposite of buying an index fund. Index fund super, super passive. Just put in your money, you watch it grow and that's it versus buying an online business. You actually have to work.

That's active investing. You can't just buy it and watch the money grow. You're going to buy it and just watch it get destroyed if you don't do anything. So this is a big problem with active investing. People want the powerful returns, but they often don't have the time or the knowledge or both to go and do the work even if they have the money. So what we did, we spent the last few months very diligently working to build this whole fund system called EF Capital that basically what we do is we take our Rolodex that we've built over the years of these super high net worth accredited investors, or even not super high net worth, but they're still accredited investors and connect them to talented entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur who has built say a 300,000 or a $600,000 business, they probably know they probably have the exact same skills they need to run a one to $2 million business. It's just they haven't bootstrapped themselves up to that level yet. But they have all the skills because those problems at a scale level are often very similar to what you're dealing with at the $300, 400k level. So what we did is investors can come in, put their money, invest into one of these operators that we have vetted. Most of these operators have sold businesses with us. We literally know that they know what they're talking about because we built their profit and loss statement. That's so cool.

We're basically in bed with them in this. Like, we've seen everything they've done. Right? So they have a big. They have a history with us and the investors. They can put in as little as $10,000 to a single operator, and that operator uses that money to go and acquire a business from our marketplace. We keep it on our marketplace because we want to make sure the business is meeting our standards in terms of the vetting quality. So they go inquire a business from us, and then they start running it. And the investors will get 60% split, the operator gets 30%, and we for managing the whole deal and the investor communications, all that kind of stuff. And the legal structures, which was quite expensive to get this all approved by the SEC and all that kind of stuff, because I think we just had an opinion letter written from them as well. I'm not sure if we've gotten that yet. But anyways, we have been talking to them a lot with our lawyers to set up everything. This is why I've been talking about it. Yes.

So this is really cool because basically what happens is now an investor could come in, put in money, and own fractional shares of an online business. The operator, who knows that they can run a bigger business but they don't have the capital, can effectively use this financing, which doesn't really exist in our industry at all, to go and buy these bigger businesses. And the sellers of these bigger businesses that are, say, between 700,000 to even 3 million, they're kind of in this awkward no man's zone where it's too big for most Main street buyers, but too small for most family offices or private equity to even look at. It almost gets easier to sell a business over $10 million because it opens up actual financing channels at that point, versus a $2 million business. So this gives an opportunity for a bit of everyone. And from an investor perspective, it's way more mainstream. It's as close to a index fund as you can get in our space, where you just put the money in and every quarter you're going to get paid quarterly dividends based off the previous quarter of the business. So that's EFC in a nutshell. EF Capital. Yeah.

So it almost reminds me of, like, the house flipping shows that you see on, like, HGTV and stuff, where there's like, a guy who's the money guy and then there's the guy who's like the hands on who gets in and rehabs the house and then they split the money. Right. It's kind of the same concept, Right. But with websites, 100% man.

HDTV, we're putting on a cool fireplace.

I love the model. It's a perfect analogy and I like the fact that there is the ability to. It's a win win all around. I mean it's like what, three different wins there and probably even more. And it helps some of these. I like the fact that they're all kind of wrapped into the Empire Flipper community or family, I guess because it kind of, I don't know, I guess the trust and the fact that you vet in all these different ways. There's a lot of trust built there and I think it's going to help a lot of people who just want to invest their money and not need to or want to touch and get their hands dirty and other things. I mean maybe it's even smarter than the market right now. Investing in the world markets. It's like I'd almost like to invest in myself. And I'm like, well now you're investing in like minded people but that are vetted by folks like yourself and Empire Flippers. I think it's a cool model.

Yeah, you got, you got people that have money but don't have the know how to actually ramp up an online business. And then you got the people who know how to ramp up the online business but may not have the capital to invest in it. Just bring those two people together and let's fly.

This isn't like exactly brand new. Other people have tried to do this, but I feel like at least from my perspective, and I'm a very biased perspective because I work for Empire Flippers. Right? But in my perspective, like these two groups of people, the very talented entrepreneur and the investor who sees a deal, but they can't act on that deal because they don't know how to run it. These two people don't usually meet each other and when they do, when it does happen, there's a lot of skepticism involved. Right? Like are you actually what you say you are? And the seller's like, are you going to allow me to run this business? How's this relationship shit going to work? And it could be rocky and murky and just not easy. Right. So that's like one of our big things is making that easy both on the investor side and the operator side. And we have some investors that run online businesses. Like we have a few people that have SEO websites that are investing into the FBA deals because they realize like, no, I don't want to be 100% reliant on Google. So I can and, you know, mitigate my risk by having ownership in FBA businesses. But I don't want to learn the business model. I don't have enough time. So they just invest into a proven operator. So similar deal there.

Yeah, it's like building a portfolio and other spaces to kind of hedge what you're already doing actively in your own business. So that's cool. All right, we're going to. How do you find that? Is it just@empire flippers.com or do you have other sites for all this stuff?

Yeah, yeah. So it's empireflippers.com capital and you'll see the whole sales letter. It explains everything in detail. We have a blog post also coming out that will go basically cover the same stuff as that sales letter. And we're working on making a short form video as well to make it easier. I always start off with a long sales letter whenever I write anything because I'm long winded for one. But I also think it's just better to overcome everybody, every objection so people understand everything going into it.

For sure.

Yeah, man. And how can people find the Opportunity? The newest podcast of. What the. You said you have three now, right? Is that what it is? Two or three?

Yes, we have three at the moment. Technically we've had like five over the years, but for various reasons we shut down the other two. But yeah, the newest one, you can find it on Apple, you can find it on Spotify. It's just called the Opportunity. You'll see the Empire Flippers logo on it. It's hosted by my good buddies Sarah and Brandon. So they're the ones interviewing the buyers. And if you have an iPhone, I would love it if you guys leave a review. Because I always tell Sarah and Brandon, like, I'm going to get you guys in trouble if you don't give me like more reviews.

Like, you know, when their boss tells them they're like, all the anxiety Greg needs to review, I just mess with them. You don't have to leave a review if you don't want to.

If you like it, go do it. I mean, do it for our show too, if you haven't already.

Spread the love. Love.

Come on.

Doesn't cost anybody anything to leave a review.

Dang, right?

This is awesome, Greg.

I mean, this is the best CTA ever.

So many CTAs too, man. This is cool. I think you just you wrapped a nice bow around these big concepts, but I think it's really helping a lot of our listeners and us probably because we'll. I'm sure we'll discuss much further after we hang up with you, because we always do. So thank you for that. You kind of of brought perspective in different forms here for us so we can make the most out of our time and hopefully sell some big money sites with Empire Flippers.

Yeah. Thank you for having me. Hopefully your audience got a lot of value and always a pleasure, guys. I'm glad to hear you two are doing well and thanks for inviting me back.

Have a good one. That was Mr. Greg L. Frank, round number two. Yeah, there was a little bit of. It was a good reminder of kind of.

A lot of points. I feel like he did talk about a couple things from the last episode. So yeah, if you want to deep dive into the motivations of selling and what were some of the other topics of the first episode we did with Greg.

That was a year and a half ago. You expect me to remember all.

Probably should have totally read the notes.

From back in the day. Yeah, we didn't remember. I mean, I think there was a couple overlap because I remember he was talking about the like the investor Ivan and that kind of stuff. He was talking about that in the first one. But you know, you also got a little bit more of his backstory and what Empire Flippers is built around. And you know, at the time that episode came out, the sort of state of buying and selling businesses, which has changed dramatically in the last year and a half since we did that interview. So, you know, there was some overlap, but we kind of got a new sort of state of the industry with website flipping and we also got a sort of. We didn't talk about the how to build a media empire last time. That is a whole new concept that he wanted to bring to the table for this episode, which is why we brought him back on, is we wanted to have him break down that like, you know, most people will go and build like a website that's like a one trick pony. I think the real thing is to focus on media content sites, on broader topics. He wanted to make sure that he came on and sort of broke down that process. So I know that's the biggest difference between that episode and this one is that thing that he mapped out. But also they've got the. The Empire EF Capital. Right. They've got EF Capital now, which is a freaking awesome concept.

Yeah, yeah. It literally allows us to invest in things that we know. And that's what I think I like about it the most. I've always heard the advice from people. It's like, okay, well, do you trust yourself? Do you trust your abilities as an entrepreneur and maybe the market and where it's going and your foresight and things? It's like, cool. Well, invest in yourself. If you don't understand something, you probably don't want to invest in it. Well, shoot, this is pretty cool because you can invest in other online properties that maybe you don't understand all of it. Like fba. Like, I don't know that, but I know the general concepts and the trends and all that. Like, sure, if it's the right thing and operator.

And if you're someone that knows what you're doing with your like marketing too, there's career opportunities with that as well. Just being a guy that goes in and fixes these websites up using the capital that EF Capital helps provide.

I mean, it's really, it's a cool little clothesline looped system there that they're building. But yeah, I mean, you nailed it in the fact that the media site and the abilities to build something that is using a structure like Greg laid out here, I think is the biggest takeaway here. And the fact that right now there are some of the most popular or valuable assets you can build online that you could sell within a year and potentially profit amazingly and then maybe roll it over into something else or just keep building it.

Well, I was telling him after, after we hit record that like creating a website that generates $500 in profit per month for 12 months sounds like a pretty fricking easy achievable goal. He said you might get 18, $20,000 off that website if you were to go sell it. And it's like, dude, if you can't make a website with some good content that gets up to $500 a month, like, I don't know, you need to, you need to go back and listen to some of our older episodes about how to, how to drive ads and how to do se, all that kind of stuff, because you should have the skills to get to a $500 a month business.

Well, think about just the basics we talked about here with Greg. But yeah, like you said, we have so many episodes where we've talked a lot about the, like, if we were to start over again, here's how we would do it. Or, you know, building a media property this way. You know, SEO your content, run some ads, get some eyeballs. But really like, he's saying, grow that addressable audience for us. We'll. We'll call that sometimes an owned audience. You know, like an email list. We've been harping on that for a long. But, you know, building an email list immediately separates you from the majority of sellers out there and just business owners in general that you might be competing with in Google, in Facebook ads or wherever. It's like, I mean, we've said this, and you probably heard it many times, but it's like, if you have an email list, you control the narrative, really. You can make cash happen. It's your little ATM machine, which is a. A, you know, bad little analogy thing. But, like, really, you can control when the money comes in. And yeah, if the. Maybe the Target is just 500 bucks a month, it's like you do that for six to 12 months and you're rocking. Maybe you. You just create an asset that's sellable. If it's rocking, just keep growing. Maybe. You know, that's what Greg was kind, kind of saying, too, is. But it's back to basics. I think that's the big thing is zooming out, looking at the macro, the big picture, and be like, all right, what the hell am I building here? Not just, like, I want to get into affiliate marketing, because so many people reach out to us and just have that thing. I want to start affiliate marketing. And I don't know if that's just because us talking about it a lot, but, like. And it's cool. But at the same time, it's like, okay. Like, I was. You know, there's a lot of service providers that just, like, are kind of up and down with their revenue. Feast or famine or their. And I get it. We've been there. I've been there. Cause I was like, but if you don't have, like, a. A container for these folks, and if you don't build a property that actually allows you to kind of slowly build this foundation up, I mean, it's really hurting you more than anything. So I really like the aspect of just simplifying this. And it's like, yeah, you can layer more as it builds, but don't just try to do everything at once. Don't just do one little component and forget the rest, because you're kind of just shooting yourself in the foot there. Yeah.

Yeah. I think last time we had them on, actually, it was like, right in the middle of when we were trying to ramp up Homebrew Academy, which was a site that we acquired with Brad Costanzo and the Whole game plan was to ramp up the revenue, ramp up the traffic, and then flip the site. We did end up flipping it, but we ended up flipping it for less than we bought it for.

We sold it to one of the operators that was helping us out. Yeah.

And so just kind of like listening to this conversation, it's probably not too hard to analyze, like, why that one didn't work. We didn't have that sort of.

We didn't have that content manager that was also a subject expert.

Right.

We had a content manager, Carl, who now owns the business. He was the content manager. He hired the content writers and things like that. The problem was he wasn't that subject matter expert. He was an expert in SEO and marketing and that sort of thing, but not in home brewing. Right.

So he had writers, but not a manager. Remember that? We had a couple of subject writers before Carl. Yeah, before Carl. But yeah, we didn't have a manager that actually was like, okay, this is legit. Yeah, we had a lot enough eyeball balls were like, yeah, looks pretty good.

Yeah.

Well, that's kind of, that's kind of the difference of like, what made. We're just thinking out loud, like why Homebrew Academy wasn't a super successful flip for us was we either had just writers that we went and hired to write, but we weren't the subject matter experts to double check them. And then we had a sort of content manager who also wasn't a subject matter. Subject matter expert. And then on top of that, you know, I think we struggled a little bit to find really viable revenue streams for it.

Right.

There was, there wasn't as many affiliate offers out there as we would have liked to see. And there wasn't a lot of like, I mean, I guess there were a lot of like e commerce products that we could have gotten behind, but the revenue behind them was too low through FBA or through Amazon Associates and stuff like that. So, I mean, it had quite a bit of issues. But listening to conversations like this sort of help us go, okay, I think, I think I see where, where we went wrong with a couple of those deals.

I like this, actually. Yeah. Because you're totally right. And I like the fact that we can now look back and analyze this property that we, that we bought into with Brad Costanzo. And we've talked about that here in the podcast, like, you know, over a year ago now. Yeah. And, you know, Carl came in, he helped out on the SEO. He now owns the website. But you're right, like this content manager aspect, which is really the only big star on this. Like my notes right now is that I wanted to bring it up is like, it's so brilliant. The fact that you have a content manager that you don't necessarily have to pay well or maybe not at all because they're passionate about this niche. You find them on Reddit, specifically a subreddit that they're hanging out in. So what we, I mean it's almost like we can probably. Let's go back in time actually really quick, just like spend like a couple minutes and be like, all right, so if we were to purchase Homebrew Academy.

Again, I wouldn't purchase it.

Okay, let's take. Yeah, I know, I wouldn't either right now. But if we were back when we were then we would look at the website, we would, would. I think we would zoom out. Like Greg is saying we were too micro on the thing. If you think about it, we're like, okay, so we have traffic coming in, we have an email list and like we gotta shore these things up. And we're like, yeah, it's all true and everything. Like we had an addressable market that Greg said. So we actually had all these things but we weren't macro enough thinking about. Okay, so. Because we were in the weeds a lot of it.

Yeah.

Which were like, well that's mistake number one. Three of us in the weeds. That really shouldn't be in the weeds.

Yeah.

Uh, we should have got a content manager. Probably should have zoomed out and like Greg was saying, leverage all the affiliate offers and maybe not think about making a bunch of money off the bat. You know, we had an info product too. So it's like eh, just get the thing to like thousand dollars a month. And I think it was doing that for a little bit. I don't know when we had actually put effort into it. But it's like you do that with a content manager running that thing and you know, we probably could have sold that in like 12 months for a substantial amount.

We lost money. I'm fairly on a low month. It was making at least $500 a month.

I think so.

So like we probably could have put it on Empire flippers and gotten 18, 20K out of it. Now today, that's today's multiples. Who knows back when we actually were trying to sell it.

Yeah, but I mean like zooming out, we could have had a little bit more of these pieces in mind. We would have had peace of mind too because we sunk a lot of our own time and energy into it. So if you think about it, we would totally approach it completely different.

Do you miss it, Joe?

I don't. I don't either, but I don't regret it because we learned a crap ton.

And we learned so much.

I just love talking to someone like Greg because he's like, all right, I've seen a ton of deals, I'm going to zoom out. He's not like close to any one of these deals that happen, you know, Like, I think that's the advantage. He's seeing these trends and he's just given us the trends. And what I realized here is like, huh, we've been micro a lot. We know a lot of those things. A lot of like, you listening guarantee, you know a lot of these things that he was talking about. But like, the question is, have you applied it in this way?

Yeah.

And have you actually got the multiple sold it if that's your game plan or have you grown something to this level? At least 500 bucks a month. I mean, I don't think a lot of us have. You know, there's a lot of people that haven't yet. I think this is like a nice little maybe a wake up call and be like, hey, there's a big opportunity right now to just use the fundamentals that you know and kind of package them up in a way that's really smart. And it's not like you really need to do all the heavy lifting. You could just kind of steer the ship. Have a content manager do a lot of that checks and balances for you.

Well, that's the beauty of a content site is your content manager is essentially the person running the site. Like you can make some decisions around like, okay, we should probably get some email opt in forms on here and we should get some automated emails that go out to the list and things like that. But other than a handful of things that you can kind of install once and then they're kind of running, your content manager is the person who should run the site.

Yeah, that's why these things are so scalable. And that actually excites me so much because I'm like, ha. This is all the stuff we literally.

Talk about when Joe gets to say.

He just yells, freaking out your kids maybe over there, but now they're yelling too. But no, man, I mean, that was kind of my big aha. Even though a lot of this stuff, you know, we've heard, it's just kind of package it up a little different, just look a little bigger picture with this all because a lot of Us, when we're in our own business, we're too damn close to all this stuff.

Yeah.

I mean, that's why we're starting to help some people. Like consult with them is in our big, like, proposition, I guess, or value add to folks is like, hey, we're further out from your business. We're more macro that allows us to see the gaps in your business. Yeah, I mean, simple as that, you know, and like, it's kind of interesting because like when we see a business and we've been talking, I've been talking to a lot of them, but like, it takes two seconds to find a gap and be like, I would do this, this, this, this. And usually it's like, what? And that's kind of what Greg was doing here. Yeah.

Well, going back to something you just said a minute ago about. Well, anyway, so with sponsors on this podcast with sponsors, this will make sense in a second. On this podcast with sponsors, we sort of go out of the sort of normal realm of sponsorships. We don't get CPA rates. When we do have sponsors on the show, we basically bundle things up. We say, look, you get, you know, you get a mention in our newsletter, you get a mention on our website, you get a banner ad, we'll mention you in the email list and then you also get the shout out on the show. Right. Well, what I feel like Greg was kind of saying is a lot of people who create a website, they have this like, website that sells, you know, it's got a handful of content pieces and it promotes a couple products. And they say, cool, here's my content website. It's generating money. Let's go sell it. Well, if you want to get much, much greater multiples for your business, think of what else you can bundle into the deal with the sell. Right. So that's why he was saying, you've got your website that's generating revenue, but if you have a podcast on top of it, you have an email list on top of it, you've got a YouTube channel on top of it, you've got a Facebook group where people who are in your community are interacting. Now all of a sudden you're able to sort of step up that multiple number. Because you're not selling just a straight up website that makes X per month, you're selling a website that makes x per month plus this community, plus this email list, plus this podcast, plus this YouTube channel, plus this Facebook group, plus, you know, now all of a sudden you've sort of rolled up all of these things into A bundle which makes that all encompassing thing look really, really, really strong and really, really valuable. Right. Like Homebrew Academy. We talked about a lot of these things, but we just didn't have the bandwidth to implement them. But if we were to have a podcast for it, we were to have a YouTube channel attached to it. It, we were to have a. Well, we had a Facebook page, not a group. We had a Facebook page. I don't believe there was a Facebook group.

Oh, I don't know. I thought either way we had a.

Maybe there was a group.

If there was a group. I don't think I was very active in it because I don't even realize there was a group.

We actually had a group because there were a couple moderators from like the previous owner.

I remember the page, but I don't remember the group.

I don't know.

But yeah, yeah. So you know the. But if we had all of these things and you bundled all them all in, it makes this sort of bundle of a business look a lot more valuable. So if we did make that podcast and we did have like a Facebook group, which we probably did. I don't know, if we knew more about the fact that we had a fucking Facebook group, we probably could have gotten more money for the business.

I mean, I'm happy that it's in Carl's hands right now and he knows the business. I hope he's doing well with the business.

It's been a while.

So Carl, if you're reach out to us, I know we're in the same Slack channel, so we just ping you right now. But point matter. Yeah, like when you're describing that, Matt, I'm envisioning an onion, essentially. It's like you have. The core of the thing is really your website. Like in that sense, it was just a WordPress blog, nothing fancy. Had a bunch of articles about brewing beer and like how to, you know, get equipment, build equipment, whatever. It's all homebrew crap. Yeah, that's all it was. Nothing fancy, but then, then the layer of that onion. Yeah, we had an online course too. I don't know if you mentioned that, but like that's a profit center, an asset. Facebook group, YouTube channel. We weren't on YouTube. I don't think thought about a podcast. Yeah, it's like all these things develop that onion. They're just new layers that the more layers, it's more of a moat. Like you know, Greg was saying is like, okay, well what other homebrew website is doing all of this? I mean, Some of them were, but you know, well.

Cause he was. He kept on referring to. To it as a media empire, not a media website.

Correct, right.

A media empire is encompassing of all of these things outside of the website and outside of that website, you know, that just really ups the value to a buyer. They're. They're. They're looking at like, man, they have the attention of people here, they have the attention of people here, they have the attention of people here. And they have this website that's spitting off money every month. All of that combined is hugely valuable because they may not even care about the website. A lot of people even mentioned on this episode, a lot of people will go and buy the businesses just because they want that email list or they want that attention and they want to direct their attention to whatever it is they're selling.

Sure.

Right. So if you can sell a bundle of attention.

Right.

That is what I think is super valuable to companies right now is like they have the attention of these folks on Facebook, on a podcast, on a YouTube channel, SEO wise. They have this attent. These multiple streams of attention. These multiple streams of attention are what companies want to buy right now. Yes, there are companies that want to buy the revenue streams as well, but to get these big valuations, they're actually more buying the attention than the actual revenue streams. At least. That's sort of like my high level takeaways from what he was trying to tell us.

Probably. Yeah. It gives buyers another reason why they buy you and not the other guy.

Yep.

I mean, really? Yeah, that's. I love it. We got to flip a damn site, Matt. It's been too long. I mean, okay, I guess. Homebrew, cash. I mean, I wouldn't call it flipping. We sold it.

Typically, a successful flip means you made money on the deal.

Yeah. And maybe not flipping is the right term, but like, maybe. I don't know. It's just, I think later in the year because we have some. We have some plans for this year, I think, later in the later half of the year.

Yeah, that thing. What was that? I don't know.

At a coughing fit. Maybe it's the Rona.

It was. Jeez, don't talk about that.

Okay.

Far enough away from you, I think. Yeah, let's do something this year, though. I think that's. That could be a fun little sandbox to play in or operate with someone else.

Yeah.

Well, on that note, we've got another interview to jump on here, so we should wrap up this outro here.

Good call. All right, so Wrap it up with Grab the action guides to this episode. As always, two weeks of it going live. They're free for you. Go to flowchartgroup.com you.

Not you, though. Just you.

Yeah, just you. The one that Matt pointed to.

You know who I'm talking.

You decide who he was pointing to. So go to flowchartgroup.com make sure to enter your email address and the little questions. It's actually on Facebook, so don't miss the question about your email. Put it there.

If the site works when you go to flowchartgroup.com, that means it was you that I was talking to.

Yeah. Doesn't work well. You're out of luck.

Sorry.

Keep listening. So get the notes. Two weeks, and they'll be in your inbox. And we also have Easy Webinar that we do. Yeah, easy webinar. I mean, I'm pretty sure that would work really well with any of these websites that you build as well. I mean, it's one of those value adds.

Oh.

If you had an automated webinar running on the back of your business. So let's say you had a website, like a home brewing website, and you had a webinar that pitched a course on how to do your own home brewing, and it was an automated webinar that people can land on every day, and it would sell your product. That would probably boost the valuation of your damn company, wouldn't it?

That would have sold our courses every day. Probably some extra affiliate stuff on the back of growing an email list.

So don't do what we didn't do. Wait, does that make sense? Don't do what we didn't do.

Which is. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

Go get Easy Webinar and put a webinar on the back end of your offer, and it'll make it more valuable. And we'll even hook you up with a discount for listening to Hustle and Flowchart.

Wait, don't do what we didn't do. I'm still stuck on that. Actually.

It'd be do what we didn't do.

Yeah, that's it.

Yes.

Yeah. Don't do what we did do.

Don't do what we did do or do what we did do? Yeah, but. Okay, let me simplify this. Put an automated webinar on the back of your business, and it will. And if it's making sales, it will likely increase the valuation of your business. Business.

And the beauty of that, and Greg hinted to this in the episode, is once you know the value per email Subscriber based off of, you know, you can pump some paid traffic, nearly unlimited traffic. And guess what? That webinar is going to help you raise the value per subscriber.

What?

What?

What?

What?

We're making you all money, folks.

Get your webinar tool and that tool that we recommend. And you've heard it before, I'm sure, and we use it is easy webinar. So go to easywebinar.com hustle. It's easywebinar.com hustole. You'll get a fatty discount. So go check it on that page. We love those guys. Thank you for supporting this show. And also, please rate, review, subscribe, share, share, whatever lights your fancy.

Burn it to a DVD or CD and send it to somebody who still has a CD rom.

I'm all about the eight track, my friend. I sound better that way.

Burn it to an eight track. How does that work?

I don't know about.

You still put stuff on an eight track? Yeah, that's before our time a little bit. Let's be honest. We grew up in the cassette age.

I'm pretty gray, but I'm not that gray. Yes. All right, thank you for listening, y'.

All. Bye bye.

Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliff's Notes version of every episode where you can can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice, simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com find this episode that you just listened to, and give us your email address, and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

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