The Everyday Millionaire Show
The Everyday Millionaire Show
"We Make Money While We Sleep" - Mastering Online Business with Matt Raad
Unlock the secrets of financial freedom with Matt Raad as he shares his transformative journey from the farmlands of rural Australia to the bustling world of online businesses. Matt and his wife have embraced the power of the digital landscape to create a life of independence and choice, moving from traditional enterprises to the limitless opportunities the internet provides.
With tales of aesthetic overhauls, conversion optimizations, and strategic SEO tweaks, learn how even a neglected site can become a goldmine. From exploring lucrative ad networks to tapping into advanced affiliate opportunities, this episode promises insights into their philosophy of passive income, emphasizing why trading time for money is a thing of the past and why harnessing the power of the digital economy is a must in today's business landscape.
Welcome to the Everyday Millionaire Show with Ryan Greenberg and Nick Kalkas. All right guys, welcome back to another episode of the Everyday Millionaire Show. We are here with Matt Radd coming to us from Australia today. And Matt, how are you? How are you doing? You said it was 6 am, where you are now Absolutely Yep. 6 am, where you are now Absolutely yep, going well Nice. I see here on your bio that you are into mountain biking.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. That's where I'm meant to be right now, nick, but I had to trade the American market and then, obviously, chat to you guys, which is equally as awesome as riding mountain bikes. Yes.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Yeah, I'm big into mountain bikes and triathlons myself, so I have something in common.
Speaker 2:I'm training for a marathon ride right at the moment. So, um, also go out into the wilderness and here in Australia and do crazy stuff. Uh, you know four or five days and, um, yeah, it's lots of fun.
Speaker 1:Nice, that is awesome. So, intro I'm Ryan, this is Nick and, yeah, we're going to break down some of the stuff, some of the cool stuff that you've been doing in the e-business world. We'll call it so virtual businesses. So why don't you give us like a little elevator pitch on what you've done kind of through your business career?
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, so my wife and I are a little bit different to most people in the way we've generated our wealth, and I guess I mean probably like your listeners we've always been fascinated by passive income. That was our big driver, and we always wanted financial freedom as well, because both of us grew up in the country, in rural Australia on farms, and when we met we both had a shared vision of being able to live back in the country, generate wealth, but not work nine to five. So neither of us have ever worked nine to five and what we did was we just started. We realized very quickly that buying businesses was the way to go for us. We absolutely loved it. So we literally started what?
Speaker 2:30 odd years ago we bought our first business and never looked back, and it's not all easy. It didn't turn out to be a super easy path, but what was interesting was, through buying and selling so many businesses, we got to work with a lot of very high net worth like entrepreneurs who do that sort of a thing, you know, at the $10, $20 million level, and we were always looking for the ideal business model that would give us that like Rich Dad. Remember the book Rich Dad, poor Dad when that came out. I think Robert Kiyosaki absolutely nailed it in describing what, for us, was the perfect business, which is back then he was talking about like car washes and things like that, where you can put in a jockey to run it for you and you don't have to swap time for money. And that's what we're after.
Speaker 2:And when the internet came along, we realised this is the way to go, so we could suddenly apply what we used to do with online bricks and mortar businesses on the internet, except we get to work from home, raise our family and literally just work off a computer. And for us too because, like you said, ryan, we're based in Australia we're used to exporting and doing import wholesale businesses. All of a sudden, when we got online, there are no more borders, so we were straight away the first website we bought. We're in America within 24 hours and that was just game changer for us, because America is the biggest market in the world, the best market as well, as I'm sure your listeners would agree 300 million people and it was 24-7. That was also a game changer. So, literally, we go to bed, wake up in the morning and there's money in the bank account and we hadn't spoken to anyone. That was mind blowing, so we got pretty darn excited at that point.
Speaker 3:So before you went all in online and buying business strictly online and selling them online back when you were buying you mentioned a car wash. Were there any other businesses that stand out that you preferred to buy when you were actually buying physical businesses?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a really good. I should clarify that, nick. We didn't buy car washes. What we bought, what we loved, was manufacturing or wholesale import businesses. That's what we specialised in. So our first business was a manufacturing business.
Speaker 2:So what we did because we liked the idea of semi-passive income and also we wanted time freedom very much we never bought retail businesses because you're stuck to them and to this day we don't touch retail style businesses, even online. So we don't do any e-commerce type businesses either. So people think when we're talking buying and selling businesses, oh you must be doing e-commerce style businesses. No, we don't touch them at all businesses. No, we don't touch them at all. We've always done businesses that you don't need to swap time for money. So manufacturing and wholesale import businesses were awesome on that side.
Speaker 2:The big downside of that if you're listening to this and you're interested in buying bricks and mortar businesses, if you're a young person, I wouldn't recommend doing manufacturing or wholesale import businesses because all your capital's tied up in a warehouse and it really managing cashflow is really tricky.
Speaker 2:On those bricks and mortar businesses you can make a lot of money, but it takes a long time because of the way, because you've got to keep reinvesting every last cent back into physical inventory on a shelf, and that's why, when we got online, we said, no, that's crazy, we're not doing that again. So we made a pact with each other we're not buying e-commerce style websites, so instead, what we buy is basically advertising sites or affiliate sites. So we literally just there's hardly any risk compared to I should say there's always risk, but there's hardly any risk financially compared to manufacturing wholesale businesses or e-commerce businesses, because we don't have to keep investing into physical inventory. All we do is just make money off ads. So you set up the website or you buy the website. If people come to the website and click on an ad, we make money while we sleep. It's a pretty simple business model and to this day, we keep it that simple.
Speaker 1:I like that. So for one when you are like. For us it's easy. If we want to go buy a house, we can look online on on the mls. We could see this house is listed for sale. This is going for auction. How are you doing that with these websites? There's millions of websites out there. Is there a place, is there a marketplace that somebody's going to, to look for these e-businesses that um are potentially for sale?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so when we? It's an interesting question. When we first started online, there were no marketplaces where we just did what we used to do with bricks and mortar businesses. We would privately approach people. We'd just send them emails and say hey, we're cash buyers, do you want to sell your website? That's how we used to do it with bricks and mortar businesses as well A lot of cold calling. But over the years this marketplace has matured significantly and now there's heaps of brokers out there website brokers so the main one.
Speaker 2:If any of your listeners are interested in just even looking into this marketplace, you go to flippercom. It's really famous. It's the biggest marketplace in the world. You can buy websites from like a thousand bucks up into the tens or hundreds of millions. But there's lots of other website brokers Effie International, quietlight, empire, flippers, website closers. When we last. Every year we update the list of places to buy websites on our blog and last year there were 24 brokers all selling, all with hundreds of deals to thousands of deals every day of the week Because, like you said, ryan, there is millions of websites out there.
Speaker 2:So now what this marketplace is like and I think this is why it could be of interest to your listeners. It's kind of like the real estate world, so there's the equivalent of real estate agents out there. But you still have to do your due diligence and we actually I was mentioning to you guys before we often get asked to speak at real estate conferences here in Australia about what we do because it's such high cashflow. So we find we have clients that a lot of our clients are real estate investors. They're very successful with it and typically they're asset rich, cash flow poor. So they like listening to our strategy because they can use the cash flow from websites to help cash flow their we call it their property addiction.
Speaker 2:Liz and I we don't do property. It's not our thing. We've only ever done businesses, and particularly online businesses. So really what we do is like what you guys do in real estate we buy, renovate and hold for the cashflow or we flip them, and it's exactly the same idea as what you guys do. We're looking for, kind of the worst house in the best street. We want to do a basic makeover and then we can kind of renovate it over time as well, but then what we're trying to do is increase the rents that we get from the websites. That's basically our goal.
Speaker 3:So how is analyzing an online business, when you're getting ready to purchase it, different than analyzing a physical business with a location?
Speaker 2:um, it's actually very similar, but there's just the tech side layered on. So the two when we're analyzing these two, um, by the two main things that we're looking at is the profit and traffic. So the any business lives and breathes by its profit and that's, in general, that's how most businesses are valued as well, that most businesses are valued on a three times the net profit. So online businesses are exactly the same. So if the business makes 100 grand a year net like that's real profit, not turnover then you would expect it to sell for anywhere around 300,000. So that's the profit side. And really good question, nick how does it differ to bricks and mortar? The bit where it differs is.
Speaker 2:The next most important metric when you're analyzing an online business is the traffic. It lives and breathes by the traffic and these days, traffic to a website is an incredibly valuable asset. Even though it's virtual, it's a hugely valuable asset and what we do is when we're doing due diligence, I'd say verifying the profit is actually pretty easy because everything's tracked these days, whether you like it or not, every click is tracked. So when you know what you're doing and particularly money flows with online businesses they're pretty easy to track what we really want to do the due diligence on is the traffic. Where's the traffic coming from? Where's it going to on the website? How many people are visiting and when I say traffic I mean the amount of eyeballs or visitors to a website each month. And in certain niches traffic starts to become very, very valuable. It becomes even more valuable if the website has something like a list or a following. So social media traffic can be worth money or viewed as an asset.
Speaker 2:So that's coming back to your question. That's the really to me. That's the fun part of the due diligence that we do is looking at that traffic side. It's quite different to a bricks and mortar business in that sense, but the cool thing is everything's tracked. So when you know what you're doing, you're a little bit like a detective. You're just kind of looking at things and looking at where the traffic flows and then you're just kind of relating it back to the market, to the niche.
Speaker 2:And the cool thing is most of the tools that we use now are free. To analyze this stuff. You use a tool called Google Analytics. If anyone owns a website, they should know what that is. It's just a free tracking app from Google that tracks every click on a website and so any website that's for sale should have Google Analytics installed, and then you can just get a live log, literally get a live login, and it's really cool. It's like the ultimate due diligence tool and literally you get to see everything. So if a website doesn't have Google Analytics on it, we don't buy it, we don't touch it.
Speaker 1:So what are some of the most common things that you're changing when you buy a website to try to value add to, you know, compared to real estate? We change the kitchen, we make new cabinets and what do you do typically to make this website bigger or better?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's exactly the same thing. We do a basic makeover, so the visually, the way the website looks, but what we're actually doing there is changing the user experience. So typically a lot of. So the sort of sites we love buying are sites that are what we call passion sites, where people have an interest in a hobby or maybe it might be an interest in how to make money or whatever. They start a blog, they run it for many years and then they neglect it because they don't know how to make money out of it. They're not that sophisticated with it, they're the gold, because they typically are real sites and they've built up good followings. And what that means is we can come in and work on three key areas to typically double the website, and that is profit and the conversions and then getting the traffic up. So what we look to do is we do an initial makeover make it look nice. That's like a coat of paint making it look nicer. In doing that, we're fixing up the conversions because we're also making sure that the traffic that comes in is aware of any offers or call to actions that we might have on the website. Often people don't highlight that enough actions that we might have on the website. Often people don't highlight that enough, so we will link to the main sales pages and things. So that's fixing up the conversions. And then we tweak the content so it's more engaging and works better for what's called SEO search engine optimization. So ultimately our goal is, once we've done that initial makeover and we've got the site stabilized, the two main levers that we start to pull then is getting the traffic up through a content strategy. But also the really easy way that we fix things up is through getting better affiliate offers on there or better ads.
Speaker 2:So I'll give you an example. So one of our clients who's American father and son team they made millions of dollars out of commercial real estate in America and they did our course bought a website for a million bucks that makes 300,000 a year net. So that's exactly a three times multiple. What they did to double that was basically change the ad network. So it was a long-established website in the pet niche. If you'd seen the website you'd be blown away. It's a pretty average-looking website. You'd have no idea that it was worth a million dollars and making $300,000. And literally people would come there looking up information around pets and if they click on an ad, like a Google ad, or click on an affiliate link. This guy was making around 300 grand.
Speaker 2:So when Dave and Connor bought it, in the first six months they did a makeover, made the site look better and then they put on a much better ad network. Guess what the ad revenue went to within that time? It doubled, it went to 600,000. So that then valued the asset at around two and a half mils because it was such a leading website. And that's just through changing the ads. So I know I make it sound simple. Obviously they took on a risk and all that sort of stuff and there was more to it and they worked on the traffic and things. But realistically the bottom line change that made the biggest difference was just changing the ad network. Because there's ad managers out there now that can optimise the ads for you all automatically. You don't touch it at all, you just hand over the ads to them and they take a cut, a percentage.
Speaker 1:So pretty powerful stuff um, and then the other yeah, no, I was saying that's.
Speaker 3:That's very interesting. It's pretty, pretty awesome to hear. So, basically, the website itself doesn't sell anything, but whatever that person is going to the website for, they may have these ads pop up. If it's like a, like you mentioned, like a blogger who loves trail biking, and then there's a website for somebody to buy a bike, that may pop up as an ad, that's pretty interesting and and or you or or nick, you get an affiliate commission.
Speaker 2:So if I own a mountain biking website because I'm passionate about mountain bikes, so, ryan, you'll be reading that that website, I'm presuming, you want to go to. Australia one day you want to look up.
Speaker 2:Matt's website about mountain biking, where's the best places to ride. And while you're on the website, you might see my article on flat pedals, because I love flat pedals and I'll say here's the five best ones. And when you read my review of how good they are and it will say if you want to buy it on Amazon, click on this link. And when you go over to Amazon, I'm not the store, I've just put an affiliate link on there. So I have to do nothing except put an affiliate link, that's it and you're cookied. And if you buy those pedals, I get a commission 4% or 5%. So 4% or 5% sounds pretty lame, but it's not. In retail world. That's actually for doing nothing and not holding any stock. That's pretty amazing, and Amazon is a selling machine. So whilst you're on Amazon, you'll probably buy five other mountain biking stuff, things. So I get a commission on all of that as well. But then, if I own the website and I want to trick it up, what we teach is Amazon's just the starting point. You can go to the actual manufacturers or the wholesalers of the flat pedals and say hey, I've got the leading review article about flat pedals. Will you give me an affiliate link. Often you can get your affiliate commissions up to 10% or 20%. Now we're talking doubling and tripling how much money you're making off that one article. So that's what we do across the website and America is.
Speaker 2:Your listeners probably don't realize this, but America is very sophisticated in this affiliate marketing world. That's why we love having websites that are based in America. Americans are very comfortable with buying things online, but also business-wise, what we found, what blew us away, is how many affiliate offers you can get through American companies. It's just mind-blowing. We don't have to stick to the standard Amazon stuff. We can often get much higher commissions.
Speaker 2:We've been able to negotiate on websites. We buy these sites and they're only getting 20% affiliate commissions with old-fashioned affiliate networks. When you get into some of these private affiliate networks that are available in America, we were getting those affiliate commissions up to 40%. That's life-changing amounts of money on a website and even on a small little $10,000 website or a $20,000 website, that's significant money. So you only need to own a portfolio of a few say, 20 grand websites and all of a sudden we're making way more cash flow than you guys do in real estate, risking hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on real estate. So that's where I think the two strategies come together really nicely real estate with websites.
Speaker 3:So what part of life are people most interested in? Is it fitness and food for those type of websites?
Speaker 1:oh, what was that? What's?
Speaker 3:the best.
Speaker 1:What's the best industry?
Speaker 3:drive the most eyeballs to the site. In my opinion, it would be something like fitness and food. When I see a lot of food ads or like food videos pop up on social media, there's like millions of views just for somebody like cooking some food. Is that similar to these websites?
Speaker 2:that. That's the bizarre thing. You're're spot on, I think you nailed it. So the real answer to that is what are the best niches in our opinion? Passion niches, so how to play golf or anything to do with health, wealth and happiness, so how to get healthier, how to get wealthier or how to be happy and happy. We talk about passions, but one of the bizarre things is I was going to mention food blogs are massive now.
Speaker 2:When we first started teaching this back in 2010, we said to people don't go on the food blogs because they're too much work. They're not as passive because you've got to keep producing all these recipes and stuff, but over the years we can't ignore it. Food blogs now, like at one one of our events, one of the world's top brokers, I was saying to people I still wouldn't do a food blog because they're just so much work. And he laughed and said matt, I'm going to correct you there. And he brought up his laptop and he said I'm looking at a at. I've just sold three food blogs. In one of them I just sold for five million dollars. It's just a 10 year old blog. I sold another one for $2 million and I'm in the process of selling another one for over $10 million and he goes.
Speaker 2:Sorry to tell you, matt, but food blogs are hugely popular now with the big high-end institutional buyers because they've got such big followings. Like you said, nick, they've got millions of views. Any site with millions of views is worth a lot of money generally, and you should probably. If you own a site like that and you're listening to this, you should probably go and speak to a broker or something. We're not brokers, we just teach people how to do this. But passion niches, anything where people are passionate about. That's our bread and butter, that's how we make our money.
Speaker 3:And where would you find a broker to sell a blog or a website like that.
Speaker 2:And where would you find a broker to sell a blog or a website like that? You just Google website brokers Flippa will come up all the other ones. Go to our blog and look it out. We've got an article the top 24 places to buy and sell websites. I'd just go and speak to any of the big brokers. They're all really good at it. They've got a whole M&A team, mergers and acquisitions teams. They're very experienced.
Speaker 2:Now One of the guys we know who's been in this industry for a long time Thomas Smale from Effie International. When he started out, he started out around the same time as Liz and I online and he decided to become a broker. When he started out, all he was selling was like $10,000 websites. That's all that was around up to maybe 100 grand. Now he's based in New York. He now has a team of 50 brokers and the minimum deal they'll do is seven figures. They're regularly doing eight figures and they're into nine-figure deals. So they're doing 10 deals in tens of of millions. That's how much this industry's grown. So there's and that includes food blogs, pet sites um, yeah, any of those.
Speaker 1:So the brokers are really good these days, really good so for, like a blog, if you're purchasing a blog, do you have to then keep up with writing that blog, um, as the new website owner, or do you hire somebody to do that? Like, how does that?
Speaker 2:work. We've always hired someone to do it, so that that's the easy part. So that's a bit that we teach. So we teach beginners how to do all this and that is probably after the tech skills that you need to learn. That's probably the biggest bottleneck for people is figuring out how to keep that content going and you build a team. So we're not talking complex team Like we hire our staff off a place called off a website and you can check it out upworkcom.
Speaker 2:Most of the people in our community. 80% of us get all our staff from Upwork, so you can hire writers. That's the other thing that's evolved a lot. There are writers in any niche you can think of that are absolute experts. They all want to work from home. Particularly after COVID, it's even easier now. There's so many good, talented people just doing it as a side gig as a writer on Upwork or Fiverr. There's heaps of those sites, but we'd mainly use Upwork or Fiverr, do you think?
Speaker 1:AI is going to change that. It is changing it. I was just about to say that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's where it gets interesting, because as we record this now, ai is evolving so much, so we don't recommend you use AI-generated content, but you can use AI-assisted planned content. So that's generally what our job is as the website owners, and that's the fun, creative part. Part is we teach people how to do what's called keyword research and then how to direct a writer to write the piece of articles that we want, and these days it's so much easier. You can do it with AI, like the planning of the articles. So I'm not particularly good at English I failed school, I didn't do well but I make my money online with these content sites. So if I can do it, anyone can, and we have a lot of people too, like in this day and age, a lot of people where English is not their first language. Now, with AI, it's a lot easier for those guys, too, just to plan out the articles. You don't write the articles with AI, but's a lot easier for those guys, too, just to plan out the articles. You don't write the articles with AI, but you plan it out and then a good writer can knock out articles easily from a good plan. So that's one of the things. I guess that's kind of the main work that we do. I can give a really good example of how it works.
Speaker 2:We've got a young couple who are actual coaches with us, nathan and Alexa. They're laptop lifestylers. So they're young, they're in their 20s, they travel the world, they live in a different country for three months at a time until the visa runs out and then they move to the next country. They've actually settled back in Australia now and they've started a family, but up until recently that was their lifestyle and they own a portfolio website. So they did the real estate thing, but as young people they just maxed out with the bank, so they'd learn off us how to buy these passion sites. And, obviously, living on a laptop, they live in Thailand and stuff. They're not experts in gardening, right. They've bought two gardening sites and first one's around 20 grand, makes two to three grand a month. So they're in a portfolio of sites that make anywhere from a thousand to four grand a month. So that's each site. So it's a good income, but the best deal they bought, which I just absolutely love.
Speaker 2:They were doing a bit of outreach, looking for, um, what's called linking opportunities, and they found this website here in australia. This guy had neglected it, he hadn't touched it. They noticed no one had blogged on it for a long time and it was a 14 year old website on gardening. And they just emailed and said, hey, mate, do you want to sell your website? And the guy said, yeah, I was just going to close it down. So they they got it for 400 bucks. Right, this is a website Now, because they already knew the niche. They're not gardeners, but they've got two writers that they use off Upwork and they just got them to work on that website.
Speaker 2:And all Nathan and Alexa do is and I know I'm making this sound easy, but this is the fun part they literally spent about two weeks going really deep into the keyword research and understanding what content gaps are sitting on that website. So they did the initial makeover, fixed it all up and then the site's kind of passive at that point. So then what they did? They did this they've researched what content needs to go onto the site. They got their two writers to start writing, who are gardening experts that Nathan and Alexa never met them. They just hired them off Upwork. That site now is generating. That little $400 website is now generating. We're coming into spring. Here in Australia that site is now generating net four grand a month. So that is powerful. That's the power of this when you've Now Nathan and Alexa have been with us for a few years.
Speaker 2:They're actual coaches of ours. They know what they're doing, but that's a powerful money-making skill for anyone. These guys absolutely love it. And what my point there is, most of their work in fixing up all their sites, and particularly that site, is just the keyword research. So they say you can see the interviews with them on our podcast. Basically, once a year they go back over each website and spend a couple of weeks doing keyword research, planning out all the content, and then their job is just to direct their team of writers to write the content and post it. That's it. I know I make that sound real easy, but really that's what the business model boils down to. And then that site just makes money off ads. That's all it does. They don't sell any physical product, they're not selling gardening equipment, they just get affiliate commissions. So that's the power of this skill.
Speaker 1:So part of your business is you are coaching people on how to buy and operate these websites as a consultant, basically as a consultant, essentially a business consultant. No, I don't do it as a consultant.
Speaker 2:We run online courses, so people do study at home courses. So this business e-business what we do now started as a passion business, just a side thing for us many, many years ago, back in 2010, because we did used to get asked to speak at events and people wanted to learn what we do. Over the last decade or so, it's just evolved into something that we absolutely love and we realized we're really good at teaching beginners how to do this, even though we do it at a very advanced level. We love teaching beginners and typically I'm going to stir you guys, but real estate investors who are asset rich but cash flow poor, and particularly since COVID, what we've noticed is there's a lot of burnout out there. So a lot of our members are professionals, burnt out or or high-income earners.
Speaker 2:Here in Australia we have a big mining industry as well. We have a lot of FIFO workers. Do you guys have that in America? Fly-in, fly-out mine workers? They're very, very highly paid, but they work in the mines. They earn hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they're all burnt out. It's really hard work. So that's who we teach people that that are. If you're listening to see, if you want, ideally you do it as a side hustle. You don't quit your day job because you're earning lots of money. But we teach people who want that extra security, um, by starting a really nice semi-passive side hustle, and that's how we teach people but you're so you're just posting.
Speaker 1:You have like a video course or a written course and you just yep, you get, you purchase that and then you follow the course and hopefully you find the same success that you found okay and then we have coaches, who are all graduates of ours, so they all have their own either six or seven figure online businesses.
Speaker 2:So, like nathan Alexa, they're coaches. We've got a whole bunch of them. There's about six. Maybe there's more than that now I think there's more than half a dozen of us. So they set aside time where they can coach our clients and help them through it.
Speaker 1:Awesome, pretty cool. Yeah, that's actually pretty cool. So that's something I definitely would like to look into because it seems, I mean, you're making it sound super easy. What are some of the pitfalls, what are some of the negatives kind of on this business that you're doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a really good question and that's what I've got to be careful of, because I get excited and I do make it sound easy. You've got to realize people like Nathan Lexer have been with us for many, many years. This is not get rich quick. It's exactly the same as buying any bricks and mortar business. There is risks involved and the biggest risk is in the due diligence and the biggest risk is actually knowledge risk. People jump onto these brokers and literally, if we go on the flipper right now, there are over 300 online businesses listed that net more than 10 grand a year.
Speaker 2:Now that sounds very attractive, but if you don't know what you're doing, you're making a huge mistake buying that site because there is tricks to this. You're making a huge mistake buying that site because there is tricks to this. There is things you need to learn. There's a technical side. This is a, this is a highly skilled, money making um, I guess opportunity. But as a result, it's like, say, you want to become a plumber. So here in australia, plumbers are paid a lot of money right now because there's a big building boom. You can't just go out and become a plumber overnight. You've got to do an apprenticeship. It's exactly the same with this. We suggest you study it part time and learn it, and because the risks are understanding due diligence, what you're getting into, also the knowledge risk of understanding the tech side. And then the other risk is you do need to.
Speaker 2:Once you start buying bigger sites, you need to know how to run them and, ideally, you need to have a team in place. So the good news is, though, you can learn all this stuff. Unlike bricks and mortar businesses, most bricks and mortar businesses get a decent one. You're looking at six figures. You can get into a good little website for under a thousand bucks or under $5,000. So if you got a bit of money, in that sense, it's a relatively low risk compared to bricks and mortar businesses to learn how to do this. So that's what we recommend people do is, if they're interested in it, learn on a very small website, ideally under a thousand bucks. So it doesn't matter if you smash it, break it, whatever, and then you just start stepping it up and you commit to the journey, but there is definitely risk and it takes time to learn the thing. So you need to learn how to do due diligence. That's probably the biggest risk, just like with real estate. You don't just blindly buy real estate. You got to know what you're doing.
Speaker 3:So how difficult is it when buying, let's say, a $1,000 website, to get those affiliated links, because I'm assuming at that purchase price you're not going to have any existing there. So what does that look like for someone to reach out to someone to get that link on their website?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's actually really easy to change affiliate links. That's relatively easy To get the best ones. The real skill is in building up the traffic. That's why traffic is so valuable, and understanding how to analyze traffic and how to build it up. That's what we're really aiming to do, because once you start to get lots of traffic, you've got a lot of negotiation power with the affiliates and you just start making lots more money. So changing the monetisation on a website is actually technically it's literally a five-minute job. You just swap out the affiliate link. That's easy. It's getting the better offers you need to have the traffic.
Speaker 2:Improving traffic can take anywhere from 12 months. Plus it's a journey, unless you do paid traffic. That's a different thing and you can do paid social traffic as well. That's another strategy. But just fixing up like, say, general search engine traffic, these taking it takes minimum 12 to 18 months to fix that site up. But if that's the beauty of buying an existing big site or like an existing or like that gardening site that Nathan Alexa bought, that did take them 12 to 18 months, but now it's making four grand a month net passively for them, so it's worth it. So this is why this is a really good side hustle type thing. It's not a get rich quick thing. It's more something you do in the evenings, a couple of hours a week, type activity. So you build it up over time. I mean, every site varies. It depends. There's so many variables to this. There's so many different sites. We teach a very specific methodology because that's what we do and it works. You can buy sites that you could pump lots of paid traffic at, and then it's just how big is your budget and that's what the big corporates are buying. So there's lots of different opportunities out there.
Speaker 2:I guess my main advice is start small, start on a tiny site. Okay, it's not as exciting, but you're not going to blow any money, unnecessary money or anything like that, because there is a bit to learn. There's a technical side too. You've got to learn how to fix up websites and stuff like that, just like you've got to learn how to renovate a house. You don't just listen to you guys and go all right, cool, I'm gonna go. You know, ryan and nicks, you know that sounds unreal what they're teaching. I'm gonna do the same. Just walk straight into a, into a town and buy the first house you look at. You gotta understand how to renovate it, how to match it to the market. You know, you know all that. And then the legal sides, all that sort of stuff. It's exactly the same skill, same same kind of ideas with online businesses. There's things you got to learn first before you step it up into the big deals.
Speaker 1:So this is just a question because I'm generally curious when you are doing most of your business in the United States, are these websites coming with like an LLC? Is there like some sort of entity structure, or you're just buying a website that potentially creates cash, so it's not a legal American business, essentially that you're buying. No.
Speaker 2:We're not allowed to, so it's too complex. No, and that's a good thing. So websites are traded every single day. It's just the pure website. So essentially there's two parts to a website. So put aside the LLC bit, the actual website, that's all I want. I don't care about the LLC, because that could have all sorts of skeletons in the closet. All I want is the domain name and the files that build the site. So the domain name is like the address, the street address, so gardeningcom. That's pretty much the address. And then the actual website that you see visually. That's just got files like technical files that builds that. That's like the building. That's the bit that we renovate. So they're the only two things I'm interested in.
Speaker 2:Okay, you definitely don't buy the LLC behind it. Definitely don't buy the LLC behind it.
Speaker 1:So when you run these websites for you, since you live in another country, you're just setting them up to be paid into your Australian bank account. Yep, yep and that's it.
Speaker 2:And we just sign. Here in Australia, we just sign, we've got a tax treaty. Australia has a tax treaty with America and we just sign. It comes from America. It's called a W-8 form. We just declare our tax in. It's paid in America.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you are paying American tax and Australian tax and Australian tax.
Speaker 2:So there's a percentage. It's reduced. So we sign the W-8 form. So if you're in America you don't have to do that. You just pay your tax in America. Everything's tracked by the way. You can't avoid paying the tax.
Speaker 1:You got to pay it somewhere. Right, that's what I figured. Yeah, I figured it's all online. There's no cash business.
Speaker 2:No, there's no cash with it. It's all online, everything's tracked, and the IRS and what the equivalent here in Australia called the ATO they track it all. It's very easy and if they do an audit, it's really so. The good thing about websites what I love about them is sounds bad that everything's tracked. It's actually not. They're really flexible. What the tax department cares about is that as long as you're paying the tax because there's such high cashflow. So if they audit, it's really really simple to show them how much money these things make, because you just see the money come into the bank account. It's really simple. You pay the tax on that.
Speaker 2:The beautiful thing about websites is they're very flexible entities in that they can easily be transferred into whatever entity you want. I'm not giving financial advice here. You need to speak to your accountant to make sure what's the best setup for you, but they're very flexible. They're not like traditional bricks and mortar businesses, which take a lot longer to transfer, and also, I guess, like real estate that can be a bit trickier to transfer. You've got stamp duties and things like that. With websites, you can literally transfer a domain name in five minutes's just click of a button so you can move it from entity to entity, depending on um where, what company you want it sitting in or what. We use trusts here in australia as well, um, so it's that side's really convenient. It's very flexible and you can literally be located anywhere in the world. You can. Yeah, you're just buying a com domain name, that's it.
Speaker 3:So I guess, in regards to driving traffic, do you ever buy just domain names that are nice keywords, that if somebody searches it, yours may come up first just because of your domain name.
Speaker 2:Yes, so we're not. Good question, nick. That's a hobby thing for me, like we're not domainers, so we've got friends that make lots of money out of demaining. So, you know, sitting on it's kind of like collecting fine red wines and stuff. You know people sit on domain names, but that's, that's not something we're experts at, it's not really our wheelhouse. But we will buy what's called premium domain names for what you just said, because they've got good keywords or just a good name that might pop up when someone types into a phrase into Google.
Speaker 2:But in terms of just outright demaining, because if you start looking into this you'll see people do make money off sitting on domain names, but we don't recommend it as a beginner. It's kind of that's an art, not a science. It's like collecting red wines. The value of domain names is in the eye of the beholder, and it's not easy to value them if you don't know what you're doing. But in general, though, we do, all things being equal. Being equal, though, we do look very carefully at the main name and we like a high quality descriptive domain name yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:So you're looking for websites that are already kind of operating but they might just need a little boost or they need a little help, and yeah, we don't buy better domain names.
Speaker 2:We, we want. We want it's the asset underneath it. It's all the other cool assets that come with it. That's what we love is that's where you uncover all the value. So, like Nathan Lex with that gardening site, the original owner had no idea that it was so valuable. It's been around for 14 years. That alone is worth a lot of money, particularly in that. And they know that niche really well because they had a much bigger site that makes them already thousands and thousands of dollars a month. So they knew that, hey, there's a lot of money in this niche if we can get the traffic. And they knew that on his site he had some really good assets, mainly in the form of very genuine, high quality, well-written articles, because he was a passionate gardener for 14 years. So it was all real. And the age of the site there's a bit of a list with it. All those things add up to being valuable assets. That's what we're looking for, not just the bare domain name. That's awesome.
Speaker 1:So how can our guests find you? If they wanted to buy your course and I'm generally interested I might buy it myself. So how can they find you?
Speaker 2:This is Google. My name, matt Rad R-A-D, and I should come up there somewhere, but you can go to because it's a mouthful the name of our company here in Australia. Our website is ebusinessinstitutecomau and we've just got a free masterclass on there. It's a 90-minute masterclass and we go into a lot more detail about the sorts of sites we buy and at the end of it there's an offer if you want to do our course. So it's probably easiest for people just to do our masterclass. You can go anywhere on our website. There's lots of buttons to look at it. Also easiest for people just to do our masterclass you can go anywhere on our website.
Speaker 1:There's lots of buttons to look at it. Also.
Speaker 3:Check out our interviews as well, you'll just see our students what they're doing. That's awesome, nick. You have any more questions? No, that was very um helpful in in that regard. As far as buying businesses online, like what we're used to, like ryan mentioned is real estate and, you know, starting businesses that are physical businesses, so it was a nice eye-opener.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you. Good questions. It's always fun to talk about this topic. I think it's something that's really good for the future just to have as a we call it securing your future. It's just a nice backup skill to have. If you know how to generate money online, I think it's a really powerful skill for the future.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it just seems like you know what we always push is like a lot of. We own a couple of different businesses and different houses. You want to spread your income amongst many different you know avenues and this is seems like something that could be mostly passive passive, but a nice little income stream with low liability and risk involved.
Speaker 2:Yeah, at the small level. There's still risk when you're getting into the bigger sites, right, right, of course, yeah, but yeah, at the small level, absolutely, and that's actually how we start out is teaching. We love the idea of diversity. Liz and I have always owned multiple businesses, and so websites are a no-brainer for that. We recommend multiple websites to protect yourself. Diversification works really well with online businesses. Yeah, awesome.
Speaker 1:Well, matt, thank you for coming on the show and we look forward to getting this content out to our listeners and hopefully, some of us at least me. I'll be checking out your website and your masterclass and we'll hopefully be talking soon, Thank you.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for having me on guys. That was unreal.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening.
