How to do Website Rentals and Escape the Trap of Trading Time for Money

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with favorite niche real estate website thelangic.com and are you in the 9 to 5 grind? If so, and you want a really cool escape, then you're gonna love our guest today. Luke Vanderveer is the guy to help you escape your 9 to 5. And if you're feeling trapped and you feel like you're limited and you just need more time to build passive income, Luke is going to help you take control of your life. He has guided so many people outside of, you know, the whole traditional path of success. Go to school, scare nine to five, job, work until retirement. Right. That, that 40, 40, 40. Work 40 hours a week for 40 years, live on 40% of your income. And he's done it in a really cool way. And I'm super excited for you to learn about website rentals. What the heck is a website rental? Luke Vanderveer, welcome.

Thank you, Mark. Thank you for having me.

So, Luke, let's just skip the pleasantries and rewind the tape. How the heck did you start creating passive income with something called website rentals?

I'm having an allergy attack here. I started creating a passive income with website rentals by, well, first deciding to escape the nine to five, eventually bumping into the idea of lead generation, creating an agency, and then realizing that's not passive either, and building websites, digital assets, and all of the niches that I was already in, and then just renting that digital real estate to the businesses that I was previously working with or, well, really their competitors.

Okay, so let's, let's break it down into a true case study. Yeah. So walk me through this step by step.

Okay, so first thing people have to understand is anytime we need some kind of local service, what would you say that people do?

Anytime people need a local service, what do people do? I think they Google.

Okay, Google, Right.

They're going to Google or Perplexity AI or they're going to chat GPT it. They're going to go online and look it up.

Okay, all right, so let's, let's, let's run with that. Let's, let's break something in your house. We'll break the toilet. Your toilet just broke. You don't know a plumber. You're going to Google for this.

I'm going to go to Google or I'm going to call a friend.

Okay. All right, so the majority of people, at least with the stats show, go to Google. Okay, so we'll run with that one and then what are you typing into Google? If you're looking for a plumber. Plumbers near me, Plumbers near you. Okay. So then Google's going to geolocate. You pull your location, it'll pull up a bunch of plumbers in your vicinity. And out of all those plumbers that you can choose from, what. What page of the results are you going to?

I'm going on page one. I am not even going to page two.

Why?

I'm looking for that top three links because, Luke, I can always make more money. I can't get more. I can't get more time.

Right.

I'm not clicking around.

Right. You just don't want to waste the time. So this is everybody's reaction. This is what happens. Everybody goes to whoever the top guy is. So now imagine you. You built that website. Let's just pretend you have that website now and customers are calling it. What if you could just take those leads and refer all those customers to another business and charge them for it.

That sounds amazing.

That's what I'm doing.

Okay. I have lots of questions because, you know, the Google algorithm is a beast.

Yeah.

And I don't want to build my business on somebody else's land, essentially. So how do I keep up with the shifting tides of the googly algorithm so that I can remain in those top. On that top page, that. Those top three spots? Because I don't know, search engine optimization. And I don't see how I can. Maybe I could hire an agency to do it, but now I'm taking a risk and there's no guarantee.

Right.

And now I've got this overhead. It doesn't feel that passive to me yet. Luke, walk me through it. What am I missing as.

As the business? If you actually own the business and you're trying to do this for yourself. Not very passive. Right?

Right.

If you. If you're looking at this from. Let's create something passive, we're trying to choose the path of least resistance. So I'm going to look at the markets, city states, different niches, and try to find a combination of a niche in a city where the competition's not very high. The sales cycle is super fast. It's definitely worth a lot. And just looking at the people that are there, are there enough businesses that I could potentially work with? Right. So I don't want two or three. That's not enough. Because what if I, you know, pitch one of them? They don't like it. So I need at least, what, four, five, six businesses? Something like that. That's Cool. But now looking at the results, how are, what do their websites look like? Are their websites super, super detailed with tons and tons of content, lots of pages, and there's a career tab. I know the place is huge. If they have that. Are they dumping tons of money into this or is it like a one pager from 1980? Because if I can find that one pager from 1980, I know what my competition is like and I know that they're clueless. And if I find that, that means it can be very passive if I blow past them. So now I put up my own website. But it's going to be a lot better than theirs. And it's not just because of how it looks. It's the structure. It's what's in it. I'm going to talk about all of the content, all of the things that make me the top dog for that niche, even though it's not really the case yet. And once I take over that spot, I can find a person to work with who does match that description.

Okay, so let's go back to Bob the plumber. So Bob the plumber is a solopreneur. He's got a really nice plumbing business.

Sure.

He's, he's in a good trade. Right. He, he probably has enough business because he's a plumber, because he's in that trade.

Okay.

I would assume. But maybe because I'm in Scottsdale, Arizona and it's hard to find good people because we're in such a fast growing city. Maybe Bob the plumber in Dubuque isn't as busy as he wants to be. And because Bob is a plumber and doesn't know about lead generation, he doesn't know about marketing. He's. He's not as busy as he wants to be.

Right.

Am I thinking about this correctly? Yeah.

This is the, this is the situation the majority of business owners are in. They don't know how to do the digital piece. They're good at what they do. They're great at their trade because they've done that for years. But they are stuck. And if they want to scale past if they're, if it's not the person who says, I'm happy where I'm at, it's the person who wants to grow. They're. What are they doing? They're going to have to pay to grow. The referrals can only take you so far. Right. It's not scalable.

Okay, so I'm going to pay to grow. But now I'm skeptical I'm Bob the plumber. Right. Because I don't know. Luke Vanderbier.

Right.

So how am I going to be. I'm Bob now. How are you, Luke, going to persuade me that you're the solution to my growing pain?

Well, so let's backtrack for a second. Bob has a bunch of options, right? What can he do to get more business? He can go buy some Google Ads. Now, chances are he probably doesn't know how to do that. So if he starts spending money on Google Ads, he's going to be spending a lot and probably won't get very good results. He can hire an agency. It's going to cost him a few thousand bucks monthly to keep this going and pull in all this traffic. Same thing if he does Facebook ads. That's even more complicated to set up. And agency work is, again, going to be a few thousand bucks a month. He can try things like billboards and radio and all that. So that stuff certainly works very hard to track that. You got it from where it came from. And it's also a lot of money. Billboards are not cheap. So the other option would be SEO. He probably doesn't know how to do that either. He can hire an agency, and just like all the others, thousands of bucks a month. And the agency pitch is, hey, I'm going to promise you that four months from now, five months from now, you'll be number one in getting all this work. So they're selling the dream, right? I don't have to do that because I'll just build it first. And when I have the customers in hand, then I contact him, and I'm like, hey, I've got somebody who needs your service right now. Can you help this person? And Bob says, yeah, absolutely. What do they need? And I just run through everything the customer needs. Great. Here you go. Take care of it. Let me know how it goes. And then I'm just going to check in with Bob, and if he does a good job for the customer and he wants more of these, I can provide this all day. And he's going to love working with me because I've already got the proof. I don't have to convince him of anything.

Okay, you've got me. I'm following. But now I'm Bob, and I love the fact that I've got this first free lead. I love the fact that I've got this lead source that can bring me new customers.

Yep.

How much am I going to get charged, though, by Luke for this service as it is, when I juxtapose it as far as the other options, which all seem very expensive.

Yeah.

Am I going to pay per lead?

You could. So there's lots of ways to monetize. I personally love flat fees because that's what's making it passive. So I don't have to look at this. But initially, we don't have that relationship where I can just pitch and say, hey, I want 1500 bucks a month. You don't know that you can trust me and that I can keep delivering. So initially, I'm sending you a few leads and we're working out some kind of commission deal. And I'm going to trust that you're an honest person and that if you close it, you're going to pay me. And if I keep sending you leads and you're paying me, this is great. Why don't we chat about switching to a flat fee so I can invest a little bit more in this and bump that volume for you. I can get this up to 30, 40, 50 leads. And if you're cool with that, then that's what I'm going forward with. If you're taking all these leads and you're not closing anything, I. I'm probably switching to somebody else other than Bob because I don't want to have to spend time training and doing other things. That's Bob's job, to be a good salesman and do his trade well. So if he can't do it, I'd rather. Path of least resistance. I'm finding somebody who can.

Okay, so then you go to. Let's say you go to Daisy, the other plumber in Dubuque, and you say, hey, look, I sent these leads to Bob. Or do you not bring up Bob? You say, hey. You don't bring up Bob. Okay. You just say, hey, look, I've got more leads for you. And then if Daisy can close better than Bob, Daisy starts getting the leads. Yeah. I could imagine a scenario where Daisy and Bob both need the leads and they're both. They're both paying for a percentage of those leads.

They both. They both need it. Yeah. One person to make that. It's. It's a selling point. Like you. There can only be one number, one person for any particular keyword. Right.

Got it.

So let's just pick. Pick a word, you know, Dallas plumber. Okay. So there can only be one person that has Dallas plumber. There's one number one spot. Now, there can be a number one for Dallas Plumbing Service, Dallas Plumbing Company. But if you take over all those, there's only one company that's sitting in that spot. So if I have that, I can only. I can. I could work. I could sell the leads to everybody. But companies do that already. HomeAdvisor, thumbtack. The problem with that is that all of those companies, the, The Bobs and the Daisies are paying all kinds of money to buy shared leads. Everybody gets the same person, they all call the same customer, and the customer gets annoyed. And it also puts them in a price shopping mentality because they have so many options all coming at them. They're like, well, I can't tell the difference between any of these. So what's the cheapest you can go? And then it's a race to the bottom. So instead, because that's the experience all of them are currently having when they're buying leads from these companies. HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, Angie's List. I'm just saying, okay, what if I give you people that are coming organically and you're the only person that gets them in this market? Is that worth something to you? And that exclusive deal. So I just want a person that I can trust who does a good job for the customer and is easy to work with. And that might be Bob, that might be Daisy, whoever it is. That's the only one I'm doing this with. And then I'm going to move on to a different niche.

Interesting. Okay, so it's just with one person, you can do multiple niches.

Yep.

What's the hard in this? In every business, there's hard.

Yeah.

Where's. Where's the hard in Website rentals?

Google Maps.

Google Maps.

The map listings. Yeah, if you, if you Google something. Let's go with our Dallas plumber.

Okay.

You'll see people paying for ads. You'll see some sponsored results. You'll see the map pack with three businesses in it. You'll see 10 results below that, the organic search, and then you'll see a bunch more ads. If we're talking about SEO, we're looking at the maps, those top three people, and the 10 spots below it. In the organic search, you can get either or. But if you have all of it, you've got the majority of the traffic of the page. So ideally, we want all of it now to be below the maps and just get in the organic search. All we need is a website. We need a website. We need to do some good SEO, write some good content. We can get into that spot. It's going to take some time, but we can get there. Map listings we need a business specifically listed in there and that can be a challenge if people don't have that and only made it more and more complicated over the years to get that spot. So that would be the challenge.

That's the hard is Google map listings. Because if I don't really have a plumbing business, I don't really have a physical location.

Right.

I just want to be a website, a website rental business. I just want to be the lead generator for all the plumbers in my area. So in essence, I'm a better version of Angie's List.

Yeah, pretty much.

Okay, well, I don't have any SEO experience. Maybe I'm afraid of technology. Am I a good candidate for this passive income strategy or is it just who, not how? No problem, Mark. I'll teach you or I'll teach your team how to do this.

Yeah, so after, after years of just doing this and being able to walk away from a 9 to 5 and having friends ask me, hey, can you just show me this? I gave in. And I also started teaching people how to do it so I can teach people how to do that. Now if you're afraid of technology, online business probably isn't any online business probably isn't for you. There's other things you can do to make money. I just don't know how passive it'll be. I'm only familiar with some of mine, but in terms of the SEO skill set, there's, there's always a choice. You can learn everything I've learned for free. It's just going to take a very long time to do it. So it's the people that want to compress that timeline and then have people to lean on when they get stuck, which is inevitable.

Right. Okay, so where is the passive piece of it?

Yeah, the passive piece of it is building these lead generation websites, these digital assets in cities where for the whatever niche you're working in, the competition is so low that new people aren't coming into the market all the time. And when you find that and you take over that spot, the websites generally don't move. They just stay there when they're moving all the time. You either screwed something up with how you got it there in the first place, your link building strategy, or your the way your website's structured or, or it's just a competitive market, which is what it is most of the time. But by choosing what I would call low hanging fruit, those easy win markets, you can have a scenario where the website is up, it's generating leads or customers referring people Automatically without you being involved. The call tracking number on the website is forwarding calls to the business. Things that are coming through the quote form are being emailed to the business. The business is getting all kinds of work and you're not touching it. And your only responsibility is looking at a call report that comes in to make sure the volume looks stable. And as long as that person is still getting calls, they're still happy as long as you negotiated a fair price. And for me personally, I like to try to give people a minimum of a 10x return, which I know they can't get anywhere else, so that when they're working with me, it would be stupid to leave. So by stacking all these little things in my favor, I don't have to look at it, which allows me to have a lot of websites where I haven't logged into them for years and they just keep paying. And then if I do notice something like call volume is weird, then I dive in and do a little bit of research to make sure everything's cool. And if I have to do more work, I have virtual assistants and things that I've trained to do the things we need to do, and I'll just deploy them to fix whatever that is. So the passive piece is like once you've built the number, you want to hit whatever your financial goal is because you can rent these out for thousands a month. You get to that number, then you can just chill. You can focus on other things. You can just check the report and make sure it's all good. And if it's all good, you don't have to do anything. But if you're actively building, not passive at all. A lot of work.

Okay. Yeah, I mean, I mean, look, nothing really is passive.

No, there's always something. I mean, I still have to look at reports there, I still have to double check things, make sure this is cool, but I don't have to actively be in there doing things every day.

Yeah, that. That's how I really define it. If it's a. If it's a one time build and then you get recurring passive income. Yeah. By doing that. And you can still. There's still the build part that is actually active, the building. There's no getting around it. Even if I inherited a billion dollars, there's no getting around the work of deploying that capital and being efficient with the money.

Right.

Okay, I got it. So, Luke, what's the worst mistake you see newbies make in the beginning?

This. This will sound self serving, but it's. It's the truth. It's not not being will people who are better than you and ask for help whether it's paying them or not. However that goes, free internship if you can get it. Whatever it is, find people who already know how to do it and leverage them. Don't try to figure it out or go to YouTube University. It's going to take forever. So if you want to get whatever that goal is, what I do for everything is just find the person who has what I want and figure out how much it's going to cost. See if they'll teach me. And it's the shortcut. I think it's the only shortcut to success.

I, I agree. I mean it's, it's, it definitely is a smart cut. For sure.

I like that.

Yeah, it, it, it definitely is. And oftentimes I'll, I'll see people, they have scarcity mentality where they're skeptical. Yeah. And it, that, that mindset really, to your point, it just delays and delays and they're not really factoring their time and putting a value on their time properly. Now look, if you've got tons of time and absolutely no money, okay. I think you have a problem to solve there where you need to start figuring out how to make some money so that you can afford the mentorship. Right. But if you have, if you're in that nine to five and you have a good job, the best investment is yourself and finding that mentor to smart cut it. But you know, I'm a, I'm a land coach and so it, it's funny because when I go another podcast, it does sound self serving but it is the correct answer is the biggest mistake people make is not getting proper mentorship and trying to figure this out on their own and then actually costing them more in time and mistakes.

Yeah, it's, it's so interesting because it's like I followed your podcast. I saw the episode where you talk about sub2 transactions for real estate. Now that I've never heard of the person who was on your podcast before. But I'm part of Pace Morbi's program, his mastermind. So it's like I didn't try to just like figure out real estate. That to me that's a stupid idea. Why would I do that? It doesn't make any sense. What a tremendous waste of my time. I know my time is valuable and money is abundant, but our time eventually will run out. So with that limited, scarce resource, I want to protect this as much as I can. So I'll Deploy any amount of money I need to, to shortcut. So why not go to the person who already knows what they're doing? So, you know, I've done that with real estate, I've done that with ads and different things. I wanted to learn whatever it is. I've always gone to whoever that person is that I resonate with and then I just pay them whatever it is to learn the thing. And every time it's worked out because it's just building my, my value, making me more valuable to the market. Alex Hormozi says it, it's The S&ME 500. I love that.

I love that. Yeah, it's true. And you know, it's interesting because if you don't pay, you won't pay attention.

Right.

And so even just in that alone of investing yourself, you're going to show up because you don't want to let yourself down. Yeah. And you've got skin in the game for sure. So Luke, what are the call. What's the cost structure of a rental website business? I would imagine I've got some virtual assistants.

Yeah.

I've got hosting fees. Maybe I have Google Ad fees.

I don't typically do Google Ads.

You don't do Google Ads.

Okay. You can all organic that to pick up clients and things. But I don't do, I don't do it like that.

Okay, so walk me through the cost structure.

Yeah, I mean the costs are kind of a joke if you compare it to a lot of businesses, the domains number one. So what, you know, 10, 15, 20 bucks a year per domain hosting. I like SiteGround. It's 35 bucks a month for their mid level plan and you could put 50 websites on it. So it comes down to like 10 bucks a site a year and like 50 websites is enough. Anybody can get rid of their job with that. Yeah, you don't even need that many to get rid of. You can get rid of your job with way less than that. So that's plenty. Call tracking software, there's lots of them out there. 50 bucks a month rank tracking to see where you show up in the search results for the different keywords. Another 10, 15 bucks and then some SEO tools to look at what your competitors are doing, what keywords you should go for, looking at their content, getting a little bit of spying on the competitors and analysis. Try to figure out what the easiest path forward is. And all of that stuff. Under 150 bucks a month to run that. And then all this stuff, you can, you could do it yourself if you Want to build, you know, $100,000 a year, $200,000 a year. You could do that without VAS. If you want to hire VAS, you can go full time to the Philippines and get a person with an MBA who's extremely smart that you'd have to pay $50,000 for in the US and you can get them for a thousand bucks a month. So you just have them do whatever you need to do. You just break up the pieces that you want offloaded.

Excellent. Excellent. So you got low overhead for sure. The. The interesting thing about the model for me is picking the niche. Yeah. And is. So that is actually the fun part. And I'd be curious how ChatGPT or the large language models is actually benefiting the website rental niche.

Well, so what's interesting about this is that a lot of people are trying to use AI to write content, and it's an obvious application. I don't blame people for trying, but I ran a test with this. I tested multiple sites that I had across different niches and similarly sized cities, similar price targeted services as best as I could to try to keep it like a good study and straight. AI content dropped rankings across the board by multiple spots enough where it seriously affected business on those sites. So I suffered so other people don't have to on that one. I also really just wanted to see what would happen because I had a feeling it was going to be like that, but I couldn't prove it. Now I can prove it. Okay, so my thought would be, if you're trying to speed things up and everybody immediately goes, oh, I'll just have ChatGPT write all this stuff. Use it to create the structure of the things you want to talk about. Use it to give you ideas of the outline and all the different things you should consider. Don't use it to just say, hey, write me this and then publish it. That's not the way to win.

Right.

You want the strong foundation. And aside from the website structure, the content is a critical piece because if you do not have that correct, it's like building a house on sand.

Yeah. Do I need to hire a web designer? Do I need to hire a copywriter?

Copywriter might be helpful, actually. It might be better to have somebody who doesn't know SEO so they're not just trying to jam in keywords in any random spot they could find just to talk about whatever the topic is, like a human and write it for a person and not for a machine, a robot. And in terms of the design, you can have something Very basic. I have websites that are ranked at a national level that are built on Weebly. Weebly is a drag and drop Builder. Weebly, Wix, WordPress, it doesn't really matter. The concepts of what to do apply and the builder doesn't matter. Then the amount of money you spend on a website doesn't matter. The $50,000 website that looks all fancy can sit on page 10 with all of the other websites that don't look very fancy and cost 20 bucks if they didn't do any of the other stuff. Right. So that money doesn't matter.

Interesting. Interesting. Well, Luke, this has been a really eye openening podcast and we're at that point now where your mentorship has been invaluable. But I want to ask you for another tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something else actionable for the art of passive income listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives. But before we do that, I have to give a shout out to our sponsor, which is flight school. Learn how the next 16 weeks can actually transform your life. Go up that mountain of land investing quickly, safely and efficiently with our land investing expert team and start building that passive income without any renters, rehabs, renovations or roads. I know you're thinking the tuition, it ain't going to cost you nothing. Guaranteed you're going to make it back 180 days or less. Just show us you did the work schedule. Call with one of our land investing experts. Go to land geek.com forward slash training. The land geek.com forward slash Training. Luke Vander. What is your tip of the week?

Can I share a quick story with this one?

Yeah.

So people have heard of a vision board, I'm sure when, when I was doing different side hustles, trying to figure out what to do. The first side hustle I ever did was multi level marketing. And people told me this idea of a vision board and I laughed. I was like, this is stupid. I'm not cutting out pictures from magazines and putting it on a thing and hanging it on the wall and just praying that this happens. But I followed their advice and I did it anyways. Just tried to. It was a process of thinking through the things you want and trying to identify it so you could envision this future state. And I put it all on this board. I found this a couple years ago, like, I don't know, 11 years, 10 years, something after I originally used it. Haven't seen it in forever. I have everything now that was on that board. So. Well, I guess what I got from this was. Was take a second to just consider what you want your lifestyle to look like. Come up with the amount of money you want to make, what you want to be doing, what you want to spend your time doing, whether it's, you know, spending things with family or places you want to go or things you want to have, whatever that looks like. Take a second to identify all that and then figure out how much money it's going to cost and what type of lifestyle or what business fits that lifestyle so that you can kind of reverse engineer the business that makes that possible and then go learn about that business and jump.

I love it. I love it. I subscribe to a service called MyMind. I think it's MyMind.com and you can really make it a vision board really easily in there. And it uses AI and search. It's pretty cool. Um, you should check it out. But that's not my tip of the week, by the way, because my tip of the week, as good as your tip of the week was, is really going to move the needle in your life. Get out of the 9 to 5. Go to website rental, coaching.com website rental, coaching.com and learn more from the guy who invented all of it. Become your own Angie's List. Luke Vanderveer. This has been amazing. What should I have asked you? I didn't ask you.

Oh, man, I don't know. Everybody always drags me into the weeds with all kinds of technical stuff, but that's not what the people want. I don't know.

All right, are we good?

I think we're. I think we're good. Did we. Did people have value?

Okay, well, I want to thank the listeners and just remind you that the only way I'm gonna get Luke to come back for a part two is if you do three little favors. Follow rate, review the podcast, send a screenshot of that review to support Atlantic.com and I send you for free a signed copy of Dirt Rich or Dirt Rich too. Depends on what you want. And even if you have both books, just do it for yourself, selfishly. Because people like Luke look at our. Our ratings, and they decide, do I want to go on that podcast or another podcast? So it just helps you get better guests. So please do that. And, Luke, let freedom ring. Thanks, everybody.

Thanks for listening to the Art of Passive Income podcast. Are you ready to learn how you can start building a passive income without renters, rehabs, renovations, or rodent? Schedule a free consultation@thelandgeek.com forward slash training. Let freedom ring.