Many of you here are considering buying websites to gain passive monthly income. But, which one is better? Building a website from scratch and turning it into a business, or purchasing a content website?
I am here with Alex Cooper of WP Eagle to talk about the benefits of buying content websites, picking an excellent niche, choosing the right hosting for your website, creating good content and hiring writers, and getting started with affiliate marketing.
This episode is jam-packed with valuable information about buying and growing a content website. Click the play button now; you will learn a lot from this episode!
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Episode Highlights
2:53 – Why Buy & Grow A Content Website With Alex Cooper
9:40 – Why Alex buys websites instead of starting from scratch
11:20 – How to choose a winning niche
13:32 – Things Alex checks when buying a content website
17:00 – How to choose the best hosting
24:05 – How to create an article that ranks and gets lots of traffic
27:53 – Why you shouldn’t buy content & pay per word
30:20 – How to use A.I to create content for your website
Courses & Training
Courses & Training
Key Takeaways
➥ Alex experimented with buying websites on Flippa to gain experience quickly. He bought a website related to registry cleaners but later found out it was a scam. So, according to him, the goal now was to work with a website that was not generating large profits and see what they could do with it.
➥ Alex finds it harder to get their new websites ranking and generating traffic. He had difficulties with choosing the niche or domain name. He prefers buying existing sites with a history that they can analyze and see if it is moving in the right direction. He also believes buying a site can save them time and jump-start the site.
➥ Alex thinks that buying content by word is not an effective way to purchase content because some of the best content is not the longest. He gave an example of web developers who charge by the hour, and how efficient developers end up charging less even though they produce a better site in less time. He also prefers to pay for an article that meets specific criteria, rather than paying by the word or hour. He believed the article should be good, concise, and useful, and doesn’t necessarily need to be a certain length.
About The Guest
Alex Cooper is the brains behind the brand, and on his YouTube channel, he teaches affiliate marketing and WordPress to the masses. He started by sharing his skills one WordPress, “The world’s most popular CMS system for making Websites,” and that is still his passion. He does videos all the time and tries to help his community and followers to succeed in internet marketing.
Connect with Alex Cooper
Transcription:
Jaryd Krause:
How would you like to be a world-class content website investor? Hi, this is Jaryd Krause, host of the Buying Online Businesses Podcasts, and in this episode, I am speaking with Alex Cooper from WP Eagle. Alex is a WordPress and content website weapon, he’s bought and scaled many content websites and is dedicated to helping you do the same. In this podcast episode, Alex and I specifically talk about why it is better to buy a website over starting one from scratch and what that actually means. We also talk about how to choose the right hosting for your website. When you purchase a website, you need to have it hosted somewhere, so we talk about how to choose the right hosting for you and your website.
We also talk about how to decide if the niche of the website you’re looking at buying is actually a good niche before you go away and invest in that business. We talk about how to create content and how to hire writers. Also, why not pay the writers by the hour or per word how that can be bad as a payment system for creating content, and what you should be doing instead? We also talk about how and why you should use AI to help create your content for you, and so much more. This is such a valuable episode that you are absolutely going to love it. Now we did have some technical difficulties with this podcast episode, so I am hoping that the audio and the video all come together nicely. If they don't, we will iron out the kinks and put together the best version for you that we possibly can, so enjoy the episode.
Today’s episode is brought to us by Niche Website Builders which is a company a few of my clients are using and have used for content creation and link-building services that are everything from start to finish, so from keyword research all the way to uploading your completed article for you. We have also had BOB members buy readymade affiliate sites built by Niche Website Builders. So if you are looking to outrank your competitors and build better backlinks, Niche Website Builders and I have a special deal for you. Head to www.nichewebsite.builders/bob/ I will put a link in the show notes for you, but again, that’s www.nichewebsite.builders/bob/
Do you want to start investing in websites but don’t want to drop $20,000 on your first investment, check out ODYS where you can buy premium age domains to build a website on and add ODYS did for your affiliate site package to help you grow your website and get seen. Instead of buying your crummy website that’s been built to sell with no authority, buy a premium-age domain with built-in authority, great SEO, and fresh quality content for your website. Head to: www.odys.global to check out their great deals. A link will be in the description too.
Alex, hello and welcome to Buying Online Businesses Podcast.
Alex Cooper:
Hello, welcome, well I don’t know why I am saying welcome. Thanks for having me. So I have just been on the live YouTube stream.
Jaryd Krause:
Welcome to everybody else. I said to you before we hit the record buttons we don’t normally get into the hero’s journey story on this podcast but I think it’s going to be helpful for the audience, everybody listening. So I wanted to ask you like why did you know what was your motivation for wanting to get online like what did you do prior to this and what was your motivation for getting online ad when did that or when was that like what year?
Alex Cooper:
Oh, God. A long time ago, I mean I have done many businesses I think I quit my job maybe 15,16 or maybe longer 17 years ago and set up my own business and that was a Wi-Fi business when Wi-Fi was a quite a new thing and you used to have to stick a cord in your laptop to get Wi-Fi on your laptop and it didn’t work too well and was kind of slow but it was obviously going to be the future so I set up a little business where I was helping people get onto Wi-Fi installing it.
Which was fine but as I said the technology wasn’t that good at the time so often I would install stuff and then I would have clients and customers ringing me and saying the Wi-Fi isn’t working and so I was doing a lot of running around and a lot of crawling around in ceilings and all that kind of stuff and basically to cut a long story short I discovered Google ad words when I had that business in terms of getting Wi-Fi clients and that blew my mind in terms of how well that worked so I ended up ditching the Wi-Fi and doing the ad words becoming an ad words agency and we ended up being quite big and being one of the top Google partners.
But again I still had the problem where I would have clients ringing me like when I was on holiday and stuff saying there’s a problem with my campaign, can you help and all my websites went down and so I wanted to find a business where I didn’t have to rely on clients if that makes sense because I wanted more of that kind of passive income rather than selling my time and I wanted to make money without having to sell services and products to clients. So at that time, we had a client actually we were helping with their Google ad words that were a couple of affiliate marketers so that blew my mind in terms of what they were doing and how much money they were earning and the kind of products they were promoting so I kind of knew that affiliate marketing was what I wanted to do and I sort of fell into it when I set up my YouTube channel. I also wanted to do YouTube mainly because that was also fascinating how people were making a living off creating content on YouTube.
So I kind of combined the two together really and one of my first tutorials was on how to create a website with WordPress because I am also a big fan of WordPress obviously within that tutorial I had the opportunity to talk about hosting and domain names and plugins and themes and with all those things there is an affiliate program and kind of two married together and I started earning some hosting commissions and rest is history really.
Jaryd Krause:
Cool, cool. So what was your main motivation and I guess your main motivation and correct me if I am wrong was that you wanted to get away from hands-on tasks with the ad words into more of like a passive type income?
Alex Cooper:
I wanted to basically clients, it was mainly clients I found that clients were difficult to manage and added an extra layer of stress because you are always worrying about them always worrying about their if it was their ad words campaigns or their Wi-Fi whatever it was that I was working with when I was always worried about them and they would often need me at the most inconvenient times when I was on holiday or when I was just doing something and I also you know started a family a few years ago and that took up a lot of time so I wanted to basically free up some time.
So I definitely went into this business more about time rather than money and I know a lot of people when they discover affiliate marketing or niche websites or content websites are kind of drawn in by the money and people with Lamborghinis and private jets and all that kind of stuff but it was really more about the time and to be able to earn a reasonable income but have a lot more time.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, I am with you on this and that’s the whole reason I got into this is my goal when I first started is to just make enough money to cover my expenses so then I can have time to just go around and travel and surf and be selfish with my time so I was at that period of my life. So I am all about optimizing ourselves for time. So have you ever bought a website business before?
Alex Cooper:
I have, yeah. I first dabbled with buying websites on Flippa which is probably a place where a lot of people start, it’s like the eBay of websites, isn’t it? And I just wanted to pick something up that wasn’t doing huge amounts just earning a little bit of money and just to see what I could do with it because I saw that to be a quicker way to get involved in terms of exercise and I think I had already created this on my own sites at that point but I just wanted to buy one and Flippa fascinated me and I ended up buying a website that was all around registry cleaners which am I later found out a bit of a scam actually.
They are bits of software that you put on your PC and you know this was back in the day of you know windows 2000 or whatever when you know it often runs slow and everything so you get this bit of software and it’s supposed to clean out your windows and make it run better but as I said it turns out most of these bits of software are a bit of a scam which you know it taught me a few lessons especially when it came to affiliate marketing that I as an affiliate, you know there are a lot of products and things that may look tempting in terms of what you want to promote, maybe they pay a good commission but you really want to promote stuff and talk about stuff that you are comfortable with and that are actually good solid products that you are happy to recommend and I think that’s the real essence of affiliate marketing, isn’t it?
It’s recommending good stuff that you like and that you use so yeah I learned a few lessons with that so I ended up selling it again actually on Flippa I don’t think I made any money but I don’t think I lost any money. I did some work on it and then I sold it. Since then I bought a couple of other sites and nowadays you know because I am on YouTube I often get people approaching me saying hi I have got this site for sale, are you interested? And yeah if it’s a reasonable price and it’s got potential I will tend to buy them especially if the person gives me some sob story like I need the money for my sick mother or something which happens quite a lot.
Jaryd Krause:
So what would, other than their reason and helping them out which is very generous of you, why would you choose to I am just curious on this, why would you choose to buy these ones rather than starting them?
Alex Cooper:
Mainly because just of the time, you know. I have got a few new sites on the go and it seems longer now just to get sites ranking and get the traffic going, I mean it’s a lot harder than it was in terms of getting on Google and getting some authority and churning out the content and then also realizing that may be you are not in the right niche or you have chosen the wrong domain name which is again stuff that has happened to me.
I have got a site at the moment I did an update video for it today actually and it’s just not working, it’s just like a flat line I just can’t get t moving. So at least if you buy a site you can see the history of it and you can see whether it's moving in the right direction. So yes, basically just to kind of save some time and kind of jump-start the site.
Jaryd Krause:
It’s great to hear that from somebody like yourself who has a lot of experience starting sites, getting sites running, and finding product market fit but that’s the reason I got into this as well is like I tried to start a travel blog and then I tried to some other websites as well and it was just really hard and this is still like 7, 8 years ago when it was obviously easier than it is right now.
Alex Cooper:
It still wasn’t easy but it was maybe easier yeah.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, easier, correct? Because you are right about the niche thing and I think that the hardest thing is when you are trying to start something from scratch finding that product market fit, right? Sometimes you have got that domain that may not be correct like the best domain, you may not be in the best niche that is trending or it takes longer to get product market fit in terms of having enough content to make ad revenue or affiliate revenue. There are a lot of variables when starting and especially when you are completely green, right?
Alex Cooper:
Yeah, and it’s impossible to say, I mean you can do all the research and there are loads of tools and stuff to try and help you find the perfect niche and you can do some competitive research and all stuff but it’s never the same as actually looking at a site that’s been established for a year or two and seeing exactly is it working and what’s working?
Is there potential in terms of maybe expanding the bits that are working because even within a niche there are going to be certain areas of content that work well and others that don’t? And that is the best way to learn what works and what doesn’t work is to actually do it and by doing it you are going to be spending a lot of time and a lot of money to find that out.
Jaryd Krause:
Talking about the start is like we don’t have much time when we want more time and the same with our money we want to, you know not that we want to I mean personally I don’t, a Lamborghini doesn’t interest me but you know having some more money to be able to put into more …
Alex Cooper:
You don’t want to waste money that’s for sure.
Jaryd Krause:
Exactly.
Alex Cooper:
And that can happen with a young site you can end up spending a lot of money on content and all sorts of things and not all of it is going to deliver a return I am afraid.
Jaryd Krause:
Well, I find that the people that have had success that have a good affiliate site or advertising site whatever it is, what type of content site normally they have started multiple sites, they have started more than one. It hasn’t been oh cool I will start one and it's just gone really well. They probably started 5-10 or even more before they…
Alex Cooper:
Yeah, they are kind of hedging their bets a little bit.
Jaryd Krause: Yeah, exactly. It’s a kind of bar investing, you are investing your time and your money in something that’s new they need to spread their risk because they don’t know what they invest in.
Alex Cooper:
Yeah, definitely. You have to start multiple sites I think and see which ones which is difficult especially if you are starting out and you have got limited resources it’s very tricky to do that and I get this question all the time from people that watch my stuff on YouTube saying when should I start a new site or when should I give up on a site? I am not sure if it’s working and it’s hard to know especially if you only got one or two sites and yeah it’s very difficult to predict.
Jaryd Krause:
When you are starting a niche site or a content site, what are some of the things that you do to see if you were going to buy a niche website?
Alex Cooper:
There are a few things; the main thing is checking what content potential there is so that’s just doing some research, and Google doing some searches, you can use tools like Ahrefs or any other keyword tools out there but basically, I am looking for what other websites are out there and who is coming up in Google for certain searches around the particular topics? Are they big established sites? Are they affiliate sites? Are they answering the question that’s the key thing really and are they answering what people are searching for accurately and in a quality way? If not then there is potential there.
If it’s going to be an affiliate site then I am looking at the kind of products that we can talk about and recommend, the higher value the better, and digital products are good as well. You don’t want the site to may be talking about books or something like that because margins on that are going to be too small to make any money. So yes checking out the competition and looking just for the potential; is there content content that could be written but hasn’t been written yet? Is there content that’s working on the site that could be expanded or could be taken in different directions? They are the main things and also do I like them? Am I interested in it? Is it something that that’s going to kind of excite me in any way? Otherwise, it’s just really dull and that can be a problem.
That’s for sure, I mean I don’t write so much content anymore, I use writers or I use well yeah I just use writers and AI tools but they are generally used by my editor as well. I don’t tend to do it myself.
Jaryd Krause:
The business, the niche is scalable and I am sure there’s room to move and see what other competitors are doing that could inspire us if we are going to purchase the business that we are looking at purchasing and also give us a bit of knock us back into the realization of where is the business at that you are looking at purchasing versus like how far it’s going to have to go on a journey to meet that same level that the competitors’ at and is that actually possible. I think that helps in buying a niche as well, would you agree?
Alex Cooper: Yeah, definitely. The thing is it’s not to worry about the competition, it’s just to see you know what they are doing that you could maybe do better and maybe areas within that niche that they have missed or they haven’t serviced particularly well. A lot of people I think that when it comes to competition in any business they think they want to try and come up with an idea or a niche that doesn’t have any competition but generally if there isn’t much competition then it isn’t a very good niche.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, that’s great it’s so true. So I want to about the hosting, say somebody has found this website to buy and they have gone cool with it. It’s in a good niche and they have done their due diligence and it looks good and they are in that process of doing the migration which is always fun especially if you are even for me, it’s just not something I love doing but if you are brand new to this, it’s a task in itself so it does help to have a somebody help you with that.
But when you know often somebody’s going to have to go it’s like I am going to buy some, I need to get some hosting to transfer all of this site and data into and you talked about helping people choose to host, what are some of the things if somebody is buying a site, should be thinking about or asking when they are going to choose what type of hosting they should be using for say a blog site or a niche site that they buy?
Alex Cooper:
Yeah when it comes to hosting I think you know the main thing you want to check is the performance of your hosting company, it’s really important that your site loads really quickly and it delivers a good experience because that affects your working on the site. I have worked on sites before on slow hosting and it’s just it’s frustrating when your site’s loading really slowly and it’s frustrating to your visitors which is not a good thing as well and it then also affects your search engine rankings so performance is key.
Uptown is also really important and a level of support especially if you are kind of new, you are going to want a company that’s there to help you. Where I am now, I use a company called Spiderweb, they’re a small company here in the UK but I have got a direct line to Phil who is the company owner and in charge of all the servers and he just kind of looks after everything for me, so if I buy a site if I sell a site, he takes care of all the migration process in the transfer so if you get to that point, I would highly recommend it where you just basically have your own server guy to just deal with all that stuff because it can be nerve-wracking especially if you are moving sites around.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, that’s right. I think that the hosting thing is interesting where somebody’s just bought a website and they are like okay I need to get hosting but I’ll just spend all this money on the site, I don’t want to spend too much money on the hosting but if you are buying content site its kind of the opposite you want a premium host so the site loads fast.
I know that I was once in this boat where I was cheap trying to do things on a budget trying to be really, really cheap and when I first started one of my sites, I was on shared hosting as well, and when I decided to change my hosting because look I am coming into a bit of money and like I want my sites to load faster and be better I changed hosts, and it wasn’t much money it was like double the price may be and I went from $20 a month to $40 a month or you know $15-$30 but I went from between 8-14 second load time down to like 1-2 second load time which was phenomenal just be changing the host and nothing else.
Alex Cooper:
Yeah, don’t go cheap on the hosting it’s very important and if you can get a dedicated server or someone that can manage it then I definitely recommend that you do that. I used to recommend shared hosting and if people are just starting out then maybe they haven’t got any money then it’s perfect and it’s fine your site isn’t getting much traffic anyway so it doesn’t matter too much but as soon as it starts getting a bit of traffic and you want to start may be putting some ads on and that kind of thing then you do need to take your hosting very seriously.
Yeah I was just saying that a lot of hosting companies seem to go through cycles so I have recommended a number of companies in the past that I wouldn’t recommend now, it seems that when they are kind of smaller they offer a much better service but they tend to the get quite popular because they are offering a good service and then they get bigger and bigger and bigger and ultimately they often get bought out by a big large corporation and that’s when things start going wrong so you know sometimes it’s worth just keeping an eye on the hosting and when that renewal comes up it’s may be worth checking out and just think about migrating and stuff and moving sites isn’t fun but it can be worth it because I used to recommend companies like site ground they are not as good as they were, I used to recommend to host which is a hosting company in this country which were very, very good and now they are not, so yeah it’s something you have got to keep on top of hosting for sure.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah thanks, that’s a good shout-out. So somebody’s just got their site hosted and they have bought it and they are like all right cool, now let’s roll up my sleeves and let's start creating content and they have got no idea how to create content. What are some of the things you would recommend people to learn when doing some content creation is it like learning keyword research? What if someone was to come to you and say I just bought this blog, it’s in WordPress where would you guide them and how would you guide them to start creating solid content for that?
Alex Cooper:
Okay well end of the day, with content all you are really doing is helping people. There are people out there on Google searching for stuff right now, searching for information and they are putting questions in and they need answers so that’s what your job is and obviously, you can find out those questions the best keyword research tool I still think is Google, you just go over to Google, start typing things in and there will be suggestions that come down, there is the old alphabet method which is very popular, for example, best deep fat fryer for and then you type a, b, c and then you see all these suggestions come up and that’s all ideas for content.
You go down to the bottom of Google and there are people also asking and they may not necessarily be their own articles, they might all form one article because they might be subheadings within a particular piece of content. So yes it’s finding out what people are looking for and the information that they need is then looking on Google and other search engines to see how well it’s been answered and what the information is like that’s already out there and I think it’s just about delivering that information in a really clear, concise way.
I think we got to a point where we were getting bogged down by word count and people were saying you need to write 2000 words, you need to write 1500 words, I think you need to write as many words as need to be written to actually deliver that information in a clear and concise way and using bullet points, using diagrams, maybe videos just not masses and masses of paragraphs, you know how often do you need an article unless it’s something you are really interested in, generally you are kind of scanning through you just want the information quickly so if you can deliver that you will do well. In terms of putting the content together, you can write it yourself, or you can outsource it to writers which is again a bit of a learning process and a bit of a trial and error there, you try different guys out, different people out and see what happens or you can try eight AI tools which I have been playing around with quite a bit recently and they are not replacement for writers but they are a really good tool if you suffer like me with writers block and find it difficult to get started writing, they can help you with that, they can help you get that first paragraph down and kind of help you structure stuff together.
Jaryd Krause:
Cool. That’s awesome. I totally agree with the word count thing and I am tending to see what Google’s doing is trying to give people the answer quickly and in the shortest form possible that is what snippets are and I am so glad you mentioned the numbers and the bullet point lists so people can get the featured snippet.
Alex Cooper:
I think it’s really important now. There are so many articles and you come across them now I see them on so many websites they are so full of fluff, full of waffle and people are literally putting words in just to make the word count longer and that doesn’t help anyone, and Google especially now is becoming far more sophisticated on how it indexes its content and how it sells content and it knows all this fluff and it doesn’t want it, no one wants it.
Jaryd Krause:
I just read an article last night because I am choosing a new pillow and it was just like the ideal layout like when I am, I am sure you are similar to me that when you go to a website now that you if you are reading something, you are kind of like oh this is good versus this is bad, helping us to identify what’s good content and what’s bad content but it’s www.ecoconsciousliving.com and it’s the best natural pillow for sleep and they just it is just phenomenally well written in terms of the some of the other sites that I went to was just like those big walls of text like you are actually reading a book if people want to read the book go away and pick up a book like you don’t want to read on your screen on your internet right?
But just this covered every single topic without it being fluff like you said and then move on to the next thing I needed to think about in a pillow and then the next thing and it highlighted all the things I need to think about and then offered two suggestions rather than offering 25 suggestions.
Alex Cooper:
Again you are not helping people you are offering 25 suggestions that’s what a lot of these shops do. You need to go to Amazon, type in the pillow and there will be 50 pillows coming up but yes which one is the best? I don’t know. People are like this one or this one that’s it. People struggle with choice, my wife is terrible with choices and that’s why she would never go to somewhere like the subway because that’s just like too many questions, too many options.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, yeah. It’s decision fatigue, every human has it to a certain extent and I think you can write a better article, you can write better content if you are focusing on the solution like what we are saying it’s a different mind frame in how we write an article and how we produce that piece of content info. If you are focusing on the solution and giving the best value to the audience or the reader then you don’t need to offer them 25 pillows.
Alex Cooper:
No you don’t. Just answer the question as well that’s the key thing you know if you are searching for what’s the best pillow for a bad neck or something like that and the first paragraph or two should answer that question and it shouldn’t be a little waffle about how maybe you have got a bad neck because you were lifting bricks and you know the other day they have all that fluff trying to build up a picture whereas it should be if you have got a bad neck, either this pillow or this pillow depending on your budget, that’s it.
Jaryd Krause:
You already know you have got a bad neck because that’s why you are on the page.
Alex Cooper:
Often they repeat it and explain why you might have it but you don’t need that’s why we found that you know actually going in straight in with like a product table maybe this is our best pick at the very top of an article and people tend to click on that and they won’t even read the article and they’ll just go to okay that one is the best, editor’s choice or whatever, click buy.
Jaryd Krause:
And I find that if we are going to go back to hiring and you know like you said it is a process trying to find somebody which is a good writer if you are going to go through at work or what not, if you don’t have a good content brief or good structure of how you want to have the writers to write the content and you just go can you produce an article with this keyword you are most likely going to get a fluffed out content because it’s in their best interest, they are getting paid by hour and they want to create something that’s a bit bigger but it’s got more words whereas if you keep it refined and you keep them on task then you can have a better-produced article, right? Would you agree with this?
Alex Cooper:
Yeah. I do agree and I think buying content by the word I think is a false way to buy stuff because some of the best content is not the longest content, is it? I always thought that when I used to sell web design services I have done that before, WordPress sites, a lot of web developers and things would say okay I would charge you by the hour, my rate is $100/hour, which I thought it was a bit weird because the really good web developers, the really efficient web developers they would put out a site in a lot quicker time which would make the client happy but then they would actually end up charging less and then the slow guys that are very inefficient and didn’t take ages to put your website together they end up getting paid more.
So I think the whole by-the-hour or by-the-word kind of way of selling this kind of service is not the right way, I would rather say I will pay you this much for an article and it needs to tick these boxes and be this structure and be really good. And if it’s 500 words that’s fine if it’s about how you boil an egg but it doesn’t need to be that long, does it? It just needs to be good concise and useful. You don’t need to write 2000 words about it.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah exactly. When you think about the hiring process and how you are going to or I wouldn’t say the hiring process but the payment process the way you incentivize their work really is really matters, if you are incentivizing people to do it per hour or per word, you are basically incentivizing them if they want to make more money they need to drag it out and do it as long as possible versus where you want to do it the other way, you want to pay per results and which is what you have done, he’s like give me a 500 word or give me an article I don’t care how many words it is but you’re going to pay per article, per results and you are basically incentivizing them to do as quick as possible because the more they can do the better and the more money they are going to make, that said you want to have good quality control so when you are asking for pay per results, you need a highlight in the job description this is what article needs to have in at least a bullet point list, a table or whatever it is all that sort of stuff, right? That’s probably the best way to structure paying somebody for a piece of content that I find.
Alex Cooper:
Yeah, for sure. It’s definitely the same way when I was selling websites it would be this is how much it is for the website and there are no hours or anything like that. This is the project and this is how much it will be.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, I want this change to my website and I want it to look like this and I am paying for it to look like this, how much will it cost me not how many hours it’s going to take you? So let’s move on to AI, I am interested to see how you are using AI tell me more, so you are going to have an article written or you are going to have an article produced, and someone like me or yourself have the writers’ block, what are you or how are you using these AI tools?
Alex Cooper:
Okay well I came across, it was called conversion AI in the beginning, now its called Java’s AI and in the beginning, they just had these kinds of individual tools so if you wanted like an intro paragraph for a blog post, it could do that. If you wanted a product description or to write about a product it could do that as well so it was pretty cool. You could feed in features and benefits about products in a kind of bullet point form and it would turn it into a paragraph but now they offer long-form edits so you can create an entire blog post straight off a blank page and there are a few caveats to it; you do need to kind of guide this technology, it’s still is a robot.
I mean it’s not kind of spinning content or anything like that, some people think it’s like the old days where we had these articles spinners where they basically take existing content and they would run them through a thesaurus and change all the words and make it into a load of gibberish. These technologies seem to work differently, they have kind of crawled the web and learned a lot of information and they know how to structure sentences and paragraphs and then they use the information they have learned to create these paragraphs. I have checked all the content that I have created with these tools through all the different plagiarism tools and services and it’s all completely clean you know I have had some great success with it but you need to put the structure in so I would always kind of research and find out all the subheadings and things that I want in the article and very similar to how you brief a writer, you need to get all your subheadings and key points that you want to include and Jarvis or whatever tool you are using a kind of helps you fill it out and put it together.
The articles do need editing, they do need fact-checking, and they are not very good at kind of being used to research information, you need to do your research and know what you want to write about because often they will put bits in that just aren’t true. So you just have to check that but I have had some great success with Jarvis AI on my YouTube channel I have a live stream often on a Thursday afternoon UK time and I have worked with those tools live on YouTube creating content and yeah sometimes it spews out a whole lot of gibberish but you then just do it again and for a third or fourth time lucky you get some really good stuff that you can work with. A lot of people seem to think that it is a replacement for writers which it is certainly not, it’s just another tool like Grammarly or Copyscape.
Jaryd Krause:
So would you say it does save you time? I mean if you are doing it 2-4 times, is it going to be better to do it that way anyway versus just trying to sit down and force yourself to be creative in, right?
Alex Cooper:
I think it’s for me, it does save me time because I am really bad at getting creative and writing paragraphs and coming up with good stuff. It gives me enough that I can kind of use it either edit it, sometimes it's fine just as it comes out but it’s easy for me to click the button four times than it is for me to write four different paragraphs off of the top of my own head. So yeah I have been very impressed and for the very specific tools like if I have got a bit of content may be I have written a paragraph and I just think uhhh it’s not very good. I can out the whole paragraph and it’s got like a content improver tool as well and it will rewrite the paragraph so I can you know press the button 3 or 4 times rewrite that paragraph very quickly and then go okay that’s the best one that’s the one I want.
Jaryd Krause:
Awesome and so this one’s a conversion AI, is that right?
Alex Cooper:
Yeah it's called Jarvis actually now that they rebranded.
Jaryd Krause:
Okay.
Alex Cooper:
My link is www.wpeagle.com, check it out if you want to that’s an affiliate link and yeah I think they are a really good company, they have got a really good interface I have had one of their team on one of my streams chatting about the tool. There is a whole load of different tools out there and it’s definitely a space that’s changing over time and that’s one of my favorites and one that I have been using. They have this boss mode which basically you just type commands in so maybe you put a paragraph in and you can say rewrite the paragraph above and it will do it, it’s really clever stuff but it has its limits.
Jaryd Krause:
love it well everything does, right?
Alex Cooper:
Yeah when it comes to that.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. Awesome, I am going to put a link to that in the show notes. Also for your life where can people go to check you out on YouTube and also your website this has been tremendously valuable and I am sure people are going to be like hey I want to get on this life and check out some new content.
Alex Cooper:
Yeah, okay. On YouTube it's WP Eagle, I say I am live generally twice a week; Tuesdays and Thursdays, we just hang out and talk about sites and I look at some people’s sites and I share my sites. That’s the thing with my channel I am very open with all of the sites, so one of my biggest case studies recently was where I created a roof box website which is for the boxes that people put on their cars, that was a project from scratch I created a whole video on how I created the site from scratch then every month I did an upgraded video over the two odd years that I had the site, so building up, adding the content, sharing all the earnings, all the traffic every single month and then ultimately I sold that site just a couple of months ago, sold it for $70,000 so that’s a great case study because it shows you can do it from scratch, you have got to be patient and you have got to put a lot of work in and I have got a few other case studies that are running at the moment for more recent sites again and they start off with a full tutorial on how I create the site.
Then I follow up with update videos every month on the earnings, traffic, all the content, and all the other work that I have done with the site, any link building or anything really, share everything which I know a lot of YouTubers they don’t do because they are scared of getting copied and all the rest of it which does happen to some of my sites, they do get copied but it's just all part of the game, isn’t it really?
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah I mean you are putting out great content and you are coming from service first and I think that’s awesome. Thank you so much for coming on Alex, it has been great to chat with you, really appreciate it.
Alex Cooper:
Yeah well thanks for having me, it’s been fun.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, its been fun. Everybody that is watching/listening on YouTube, please smash the like button because that is going to help this podcast episode get shown to more people who are looking to buy websites and growing content sites, so please smash the like button especially if you liked it, why wouldn’t you? If you are not watching this on YouTube or listening to this on YouTube, what are you even doing? I am joking. By the way, come to my YouTube channel if you aren’t on my YouTube Channel check it out because I have more great content on specific videos of just myself talking about buying sites and growing sites so check that out. Thank you everybody for listening. I will talk to you soon.
How would you like to be a world-class content website investor? Hi, this is Jaryd Krause, host of the Buying Online Businesses Podcasts, and in this episode, I am speaking with Alex Cooper from WP Eagle. Alex is a WordPress and content website weapon, he’s bought and scaled many content websites and is dedicated to helping you do the same. In this podcast episode, Alex and I specifically talk about why it is better to buy a website over starting one from scratch and what that actually means. We also talk about how to choose the right hosting for your website. When you purchase a website, you need to have it hosted somewhere, so we talk about how to choose the right hosting for you and your website.
We also talk about how to decide if the niche of the website you’re looking at buying is actually a good niche before you go away and invest in that business. We talk about how to create content and how to hire writers. Also, why not pay the writers by the hour or per word how that can be bad as a payment system for creating content, and what you should be doing instead? We also talk about how and why you should use AI to help create your content for you, and so much more. This is such a valuable episode that you are absolutely going to love it. Now we did have some technical difficulties with this podcast episode, so I am hoping that the audio and the video all come together nicely. If they don't, we will iron out the kinks and put together the best version for you that we possibly can, so enjoy the episode.
Today’s episode is brought to us by Niche Website Builders which is a company a few of my clients are using and have used for content creation and link-building services that are everything from start to finish, so from keyword research all the way to uploading your completed article for you. We have also had BOB members buy readymade affiliate sites built by Niche Website Builders. So if you are looking to outrank your competitors and build better backlinks, Niche Website Builders and I have a special deal for you. Head to www.nichewebsite.builders/bob/ I will put a link in the show notes for you, but again, that’s www.nichewebsite.builders/bob/
Do you want to start investing in websites but don’t want to drop $20,000 on your first investment, check out ODYS where you can buy premium age domains to build a website on and add ODYS did for your affiliate site package to help you grow your website and get seen. Instead of buying your crummy website that’s been built to sell with no authority, buy a premium-age domain with built-in authority, great SEO, and fresh quality content for your website. Head to: www.odys.global to check out their great deals. A link will be in the description too.
Alex, hello and welcome to Buying Online Businesses Podcast.
Alex Cooper:
Hello, welcome, well I don’t know why I am saying welcome. Thanks for having me. So I have just been on the live YouTube stream.
Jaryd Krause:
Welcome to everybody else. I said to you before we hit the record buttons we don’t normally get into the hero’s journey story on this podcast but I think it’s going to be helpful for the audience, everybody listening. So I wanted to ask you like why did you know what was your motivation for wanting to get online like what did you do prior to this and what was your motivation for getting online ad when did that or when was that like what year?
Alex Cooper:
Oh, God. A long time ago, I mean I have done many businesses I think I quit my job maybe 15,16 or maybe longer 17 years ago and set up my own business and that was a Wi-Fi business when Wi-Fi was a quite a new thing and you used to have to stick a cord in your laptop to get Wi-Fi on your laptop and it didn’t work too well and was kind of slow but it was obviously going to be the future so I set up a little business where I was helping people get onto Wi-Fi installing it.
Which was fine but as I said the technology wasn’t that good at the time so often I would install stuff and then I would have clients and customers ringing me and saying the Wi-Fi isn’t working and so I was doing a lot of running around and a lot of crawling around in ceilings and all that kind of stuff and basically to cut a long story short I discovered Google ad words when I had that business in terms of getting Wi-Fi clients and that blew my mind in terms of how well that worked so I ended up ditching the Wi-Fi and doing the ad words becoming an ad words agency and we ended up being quite big and being one of the top Google partners.
But again I still had the problem where I would have clients ringing me like when I was on holiday and stuff saying there’s a problem with my campaign, can you help and all my websites went down and so I wanted to find a business where I didn’t have to rely on clients if that makes sense because I wanted more of that kind of passive income rather than selling my time and I wanted to make money without having to sell services and products to clients. So at that time, we had a client actually we were helping with their Google ad words that were a couple of affiliate marketers so that blew my mind in terms of what they were doing and how much money they were earning and the kind of products they were promoting so I kind of knew that affiliate marketing was what I wanted to do and I sort of fell into it when I set up my YouTube channel. I also wanted to do YouTube mainly because that was also fascinating how people were making a living off creating content on YouTube.
So I kind of combined the two together really and one of my first tutorials was on how to create a website with WordPress because I am also a big fan of WordPress obviously within that tutorial I had the opportunity to talk about hosting and domain names and plugins and themes and with all those things there is an affiliate program and kind of two married together and I started earning some hosting commissions and rest is history really.
Jaryd Krause:
Cool, cool. So what was your main motivation and I guess your main motivation and correct me if I am wrong was that you wanted to get away from hands-on tasks with the ad words into more of like a passive type income?
Alex Cooper:
I wanted to basically clients, it was mainly clients I found that clients were difficult to manage and added an extra layer of stress because you are always worrying about them always worrying about their if it was their ad words campaigns or their Wi-Fi whatever it was that I was working with when I was always worried about them and they would often need me at the most inconvenient times when I was on holiday or when I was just doing something and I also you know started a family a few years ago and that took up a lot of time so I wanted to basically free up some time.
So I definitely went into this business more about time rather than money and I know a lot of people when they discover affiliate marketing or niche websites or content websites are kind of drawn in by the money and people with Lamborghinis and private jets and all that kind of stuff but it was really more about the time and to be able to earn a reasonable income but have a lot more time.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, I am with you on this and that’s the whole reason I got into this is my goal when I first started is to just make enough money to cover my expenses so then I can have time to just go around and travel and surf and be selfish with my time so I was at that period of my life. So I am all about optimizing ourselves for time. So have you ever bought a website business before?
Alex Cooper:
I have, yeah. I first dabbled with buying websites on Flippa which is probably a place where a lot of people start, it’s like the eBay of websites, isn’t it? And I just wanted to pick something up that wasn’t doing huge amounts just earning a little bit of money and just to see what I could do with it because I saw that to be a quicker way to get involved in terms of exercise and I think I had already created this on my own sites at that point but I just wanted to buy one and Flippa fascinated me and I ended up buying a website that was all around registry cleaners which am I later found out a bit of a scam actually.
They are bits of software that you put on your PC and you know this was back in the day of you know windows 2000 or whatever when you know it often runs slow and everything so you get this bit of software and it’s supposed to clean out your windows and make it run better but as I said it turns out most of these bits of software are a bit of a scam which you know it taught me a few lessons especially when it came to affiliate marketing that I as an affiliate, you know there are a lot of products and things that may look tempting in terms of what you want to promote, maybe they pay a good commission but you really want to promote stuff and talk about stuff that you are comfortable with and that are actually good solid products that you are happy to recommend and I think that’s the real essence of affiliate marketing, isn’t it?
It’s recommending good stuff that you like and that you use so yeah I learned a few lessons with that so I ended up selling it again actually on Flippa I don’t think I made any money but I don’t think I lost any money. I did some work on it and then I sold it. Since then I bought a couple of other sites and nowadays you know because I am on YouTube I often get people approaching me saying hi I have got this site for sale, are you interested? And yeah if it’s a reasonable price and it’s got potential I will tend to buy them especially if the person gives me some sob story like I need the money for my sick mother or something which happens quite a lot.
Jaryd Krause:
So what would, other than their reason and helping them out which is very generous of you, why would you choose to I am just curious on this, why would you choose to buy these ones rather than starting them?
Alex Cooper:
Mainly because just of the time, you know. I have got a few new sites on the go and it seems longer now just to get sites ranking and get the traffic going, I mean it’s a lot harder than it was in terms of getting on Google and getting some authority and churning out the content and then also realizing that may be you are not in the right niche or you have chosen the wrong domain name which is again stuff that has happened to me.
I have got a site at the moment I did an update video for it today actually and it’s just not working, it’s just like a flat line I just can’t get t moving. So at least if you buy a site you can see the history of it and you can see whether it's moving in the right direction. So yes, basically just to kind of save some time and kind of jump-start the site.
Jaryd Krause:
It’s great to hear that from somebody like yourself who has a lot of experience starting sites, getting sites running, and finding product market fit but that’s the reason I got into this as well is like I tried to start a travel blog and then I tried to some other websites as well and it was just really hard and this is still like 7, 8 years ago when it was obviously easier than it is right now.
Alex Cooper:
It still wasn’t easy but it was maybe easier yeah.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, easier, correct? Because you are right about the niche thing and I think that the hardest thing is when you are trying to start something from scratch finding that product market fit, right? Sometimes you have got that domain that may not be correct like the best domain, you may not be in the best niche that is trending or it takes longer to get product market fit in terms of having enough content to make ad revenue or affiliate revenue. There are a lot of variables when starting and especially when you are completely green, right?
Alex Cooper:
Yeah, and it’s impossible to say, I mean you can do all the research and there are loads of tools and stuff to try and help you find the perfect niche and you can do some competitive research and all stuff but it’s never the same as actually looking at a site that’s been established for a year or two and seeing exactly is it working and what’s working?
Is there potential in terms of maybe expanding the bits that are working because even within a niche there are going to be certain areas of content that work well and others that don’t? And that is the best way to learn what works and what doesn’t work is to actually do it and by doing it you are going to be spending a lot of time and a lot of money to find that out.
Jaryd Krause:
Talking about the start is like we don’t have much time when we want more time and the same with our money we want to, you know not that we want to I mean personally I don’t, a Lamborghini doesn’t interest me but you know having some more money to be able to put into more …
Alex Cooper:
You don’t want to waste money that’s for sure.
Jaryd Krause:
Exactly.
Alex Cooper:
And that can happen with a young site you can end up spending a lot of money on content and all sorts of things and not all of it is going to deliver a return I am afraid.
Jaryd Krause:
Well, I find that the people that have had success that have a good affiliate site or advertising site whatever it is, what type of content site normally they have started multiple sites, they have started more than one. It hasn’t been oh cool I will start one and it's just gone really well. They probably started 5-10 or even more before they…
Alex Cooper:
Yeah, they are kind of hedging their bets a little bit.
Jaryd Krause: Yeah, exactly. It’s a kind of bar investing, you are investing your time and your money in something that’s new they need to spread their risk because they don’t know what they invest in.
Alex Cooper:
Yeah, definitely. You have to start multiple sites I think and see which ones which is difficult especially if you are starting out and you have got limited resources it’s very tricky to do that and I get this question all the time from people that watch my stuff on YouTube saying when should I start a new site or when should I give up on a site? I am not sure if it’s working and it’s hard to know especially if you only got one or two sites and yeah it’s very difficult to predict.
Jaryd Krause:
When you are starting a niche site or a content site, what are some of the things that you do to see if you were going to buy a niche website?
Alex Cooper:
There are a few things; the main thing is checking what content potential there is so that’s just doing some research, and Google doing some searches, you can use tools like Ahrefs or any other keyword tools out there but basically, I am looking for what other websites are out there and who is coming up in Google for certain searches around the particular topics? Are they big established sites? Are they affiliate sites? Are they answering the question that’s the key thing really and are they answering what people are searching for accurately and in a quality way? If not then there is potential there.
If it’s going to be an affiliate site then I am looking at the kind of products that we can talk about and recommend, the higher value the better, and digital products are good as well. You don’t want the site to may be talking about books or something like that because margins on that are going to be too small to make any money. So yes checking out the competition and looking just for the potential; is there content content that could be written but hasn’t been written yet? Is there content that’s working on the site that could be expanded or could be taken in different directions? They are the main things and also do I like them? Am I interested in it? Is it something that that’s going to kind of excite me in any way? Otherwise, it’s just really dull and that can be a problem.
That’s for sure, I mean I don’t write so much content anymore, I use writers or I use well yeah I just use writers and AI tools but they are generally used by my editor as well. I don’t tend to do it myself.
Jaryd Krause:
The business, the niche is scalable and I am sure there’s room to move and see what other competitors are doing that could inspire us if we are going to purchase the business that we are looking at purchasing and also give us a bit of knock us back into the realization of where is the business at that you are looking at purchasing versus like how far it’s going to have to go on a journey to meet that same level that the competitors’ at and is that actually possible. I think that helps in buying a niche as well, would you agree?
Alex Cooper: Yeah, definitely. The thing is it’s not to worry about the competition, it’s just to see you know what they are doing that you could maybe do better and maybe areas within that niche that they have missed or they haven’t serviced particularly well. A lot of people I think that when it comes to competition in any business they think they want to try and come up with an idea or a niche that doesn’t have any competition but generally if there isn’t much competition then it isn’t a very good niche.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, that’s great it’s so true. So I want to about the hosting, say somebody has found this website to buy and they have gone cool with it. It’s in a good niche and they have done their due diligence and it looks good and they are in that process of doing the migration which is always fun especially if you are even for me, it’s just not something I love doing but if you are brand new to this, it’s a task in itself so it does help to have a somebody help you with that.
But when you know often somebody’s going to have to go it’s like I am going to buy some, I need to get some hosting to transfer all of this site and data into and you talked about helping people choose to host, what are some of the things if somebody is buying a site, should be thinking about or asking when they are going to choose what type of hosting they should be using for say a blog site or a niche site that they buy?
Alex Cooper:
Yeah when it comes to hosting I think you know the main thing you want to check is the performance of your hosting company, it’s really important that your site loads really quickly and it delivers a good experience because that affects your working on the site. I have worked on sites before on slow hosting and it’s just it’s frustrating when your site’s loading really slowly and it’s frustrating to your visitors which is not a good thing as well and it then also affects your search engine rankings so performance is key.
Uptown is also really important and a level of support especially if you are kind of new, you are going to want a company that’s there to help you. Where I am now, I use a company called Spiderweb, they’re a small company here in the UK but I have got a direct line to Phil who is the company owner and in charge of all the servers and he just kind of looks after everything for me, so if I buy a site if I sell a site, he takes care of all the migration process in the transfer so if you get to that point, I would highly recommend it where you just basically have your own server guy to just deal with all that stuff because it can be nerve-wracking especially if you are moving sites around.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, that’s right. I think that the hosting thing is interesting where somebody’s just bought a website and they are like okay I need to get hosting but I’ll just spend all this money on the site, I don’t want to spend too much money on the hosting but if you are buying content site its kind of the opposite you want a premium host so the site loads fast.
I know that I was once in this boat where I was cheap trying to do things on a budget trying to be really, really cheap and when I first started one of my sites, I was on shared hosting as well, and when I decided to change my hosting because look I am coming into a bit of money and like I want my sites to load faster and be better I changed hosts, and it wasn’t much money it was like double the price may be and I went from $20 a month to $40 a month or you know $15-$30 but I went from between 8-14 second load time down to like 1-2 second load time which was phenomenal just be changing the host and nothing else.
Alex Cooper:
Yeah, don’t go cheap on the hosting it’s very important and if you can get a dedicated server or someone that can manage it then I definitely recommend that you do that. I used to recommend shared hosting and if people are just starting out then maybe they haven’t got any money then it’s perfect and it’s fine your site isn’t getting much traffic anyway so it doesn’t matter too much but as soon as it starts getting a bit of traffic and you want to start may be putting some ads on and that kind of thing then you do need to take your hosting very seriously.
Yeah I was just saying that a lot of hosting companies seem to go through cycles so I have recommended a number of companies in the past that I wouldn’t recommend now, it seems that when they are kind of smaller they offer a much better service but they tend to the get quite popular because they are offering a good service and then they get bigger and bigger and bigger and ultimately they often get bought out by a big large corporation and that’s when things start going wrong so you know sometimes it’s worth just keeping an eye on the hosting and when that renewal comes up it’s may be worth checking out and just think about migrating and stuff and moving sites isn’t fun but it can be worth it because I used to recommend companies like site ground they are not as good as they were, I used to recommend to host which is a hosting company in this country which were very, very good and now they are not, so yeah it’s something you have got to keep on top of hosting for sure.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah thanks, that’s a good shout-out. So somebody’s just got their site hosted and they have bought it and they are like all right cool, now let’s roll up my sleeves and let's start creating content and they have got no idea how to create content. What are some of the things you would recommend people to learn when doing some content creation is it like learning keyword research? What if someone was to come to you and say I just bought this blog, it’s in WordPress where would you guide them and how would you guide them to start creating solid content for that?
Alex Cooper:
Okay well end of the day, with content all you are really doing is helping people. There are people out there on Google searching for stuff right now, searching for information and they are putting questions in and they need answers so that’s what your job is and obviously, you can find out those questions the best keyword research tool I still think is Google, you just go over to Google, start typing things in and there will be suggestions that come down, there is the old alphabet method which is very popular, for example, best deep fat fryer for and then you type a, b, c and then you see all these suggestions come up and that’s all ideas for content.
You go down to the bottom of Google and there are people also asking and they may not necessarily be their own articles, they might all form one article because they might be subheadings within a particular piece of content. So yes it’s finding out what people are looking for and the information that they need is then looking on Google and other search engines to see how well it’s been answered and what the information is like that’s already out there and I think it’s just about delivering that information in a really clear, concise way.
I think we got to a point where we were getting bogged down by word count and people were saying you need to write 2000 words, you need to write 1500 words, I think you need to write as many words as need to be written to actually deliver that information in a clear and concise way and using bullet points, using diagrams, maybe videos just not masses and masses of paragraphs, you know how often do you need an article unless it’s something you are really interested in, generally you are kind of scanning through you just want the information quickly so if you can deliver that you will do well. In terms of putting the content together, you can write it yourself, or you can outsource it to writers which is again a bit of a learning process and a bit of a trial and error there, you try different guys out, different people out and see what happens or you can try eight AI tools which I have been playing around with quite a bit recently and they are not replacement for writers but they are a really good tool if you suffer like me with writers block and find it difficult to get started writing, they can help you with that, they can help you get that first paragraph down and kind of help you structure stuff together.
Jaryd Krause:
Cool. That’s awesome. I totally agree with the word count thing and I am tending to see what Google’s doing is trying to give people the answer quickly and in the shortest form possible that is what snippets are and I am so glad you mentioned the numbers and the bullet point lists so people can get the featured snippet.
Alex Cooper:
I think it’s really important now. There are so many articles and you come across them now I see them on so many websites they are so full of fluff, full of waffle and people are literally putting words in just to make the word count longer and that doesn’t help anyone, and Google especially now is becoming far more sophisticated on how it indexes its content and how it sells content and it knows all this fluff and it doesn’t want it, no one wants it.
Jaryd Krause:
I just read an article last night because I am choosing a new pillow and it was just like the ideal layout like when I am, I am sure you are similar to me that when you go to a website now that you if you are reading something, you are kind of like oh this is good versus this is bad, helping us to identify what’s good content and what’s bad content but it’s www.ecoconsciousliving.com and it’s the best natural pillow for sleep and they just it is just phenomenally well written in terms of the some of the other sites that I went to was just like those big walls of text like you are actually reading a book if people want to read the book go away and pick up a book like you don’t want to read on your screen on your internet right?
But just this covered every single topic without it being fluff like you said and then move on to the next thing I needed to think about in a pillow and then the next thing and it highlighted all the things I need to think about and then offered two suggestions rather than offering 25 suggestions.
Alex Cooper:
Again you are not helping people you are offering 25 suggestions that’s what a lot of these shops do. You need to go to Amazon, type in the pillow and there will be 50 pillows coming up but yes which one is the best? I don’t know. People are like this one or this one that’s it. People struggle with choice, my wife is terrible with choices and that’s why she would never go to somewhere like the subway because that’s just like too many questions, too many options.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, yeah. It’s decision fatigue, every human has it to a certain extent and I think you can write a better article, you can write better content if you are focusing on the solution like what we are saying it’s a different mind frame in how we write an article and how we produce that piece of content info. If you are focusing on the solution and giving the best value to the audience or the reader then you don’t need to offer them 25 pillows.
Alex Cooper:
No you don’t. Just answer the question as well that’s the key thing you know if you are searching for what’s the best pillow for a bad neck or something like that and the first paragraph or two should answer that question and it shouldn’t be a little waffle about how maybe you have got a bad neck because you were lifting bricks and you know the other day they have all that fluff trying to build up a picture whereas it should be if you have got a bad neck, either this pillow or this pillow depending on your budget, that’s it.
Jaryd Krause:
You already know you have got a bad neck because that’s why you are on the page.
Alex Cooper:
Often they repeat it and explain why you might have it but you don’t need that’s why we found that you know actually going in straight in with like a product table maybe this is our best pick at the very top of an article and people tend to click on that and they won’t even read the article and they’ll just go to okay that one is the best, editor’s choice or whatever, click buy.
Jaryd Krause:
And I find that if we are going to go back to hiring and you know like you said it is a process trying to find somebody which is a good writer if you are going to go through at work or what not, if you don’t have a good content brief or good structure of how you want to have the writers to write the content and you just go can you produce an article with this keyword you are most likely going to get a fluffed out content because it’s in their best interest, they are getting paid by hour and they want to create something that’s a bit bigger but it’s got more words whereas if you keep it refined and you keep them on task then you can have a better-produced article, right? Would you agree with this?
Alex Cooper:
Yeah. I do agree and I think buying content by the word I think is a false way to buy stuff because some of the best content is not the longest content, is it? I always thought that when I used to sell web design services I have done that before, WordPress sites, a lot of web developers and things would say okay I would charge you by the hour, my rate is $100/hour, which I thought it was a bit weird because the really good web developers, the really efficient web developers they would put out a site in a lot quicker time which would make the client happy but then they would actually end up charging less and then the slow guys that are very inefficient and didn’t take ages to put your website together they end up getting paid more.
So I think the whole by-the-hour or by-the-word kind of way of selling this kind of service is not the right way, I would rather say I will pay you this much for an article and it needs to tick these boxes and be this structure and be really good. And if it’s 500 words that’s fine if it’s about how you boil an egg but it doesn’t need to be that long, does it? It just needs to be good concise and useful. You don’t need to write 2000 words about it.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah exactly. When you think about the hiring process and how you are going to or I wouldn’t say the hiring process but the payment process the way you incentivize their work really is really matters, if you are incentivizing people to do it per hour or per word, you are basically incentivizing them if they want to make more money they need to drag it out and do it as long as possible versus where you want to do it the other way, you want to pay per results and which is what you have done, he’s like give me a 500 word or give me an article I don’t care how many words it is but you’re going to pay per article, per results and you are basically incentivizing them to do as quick as possible because the more they can do the better and the more money they are going to make, that said you want to have good quality control so when you are asking for pay per results, you need a highlight in the job description this is what article needs to have in at least a bullet point list, a table or whatever it is all that sort of stuff, right? That’s probably the best way to structure paying somebody for a piece of content that I find.
Alex Cooper:
Yeah, for sure. It’s definitely the same way when I was selling websites it would be this is how much it is for the website and there are no hours or anything like that. This is the project and this is how much it will be.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, I want this change to my website and I want it to look like this and I am paying for it to look like this, how much will it cost me not how many hours it’s going to take you? So let’s move on to AI, I am interested to see how you are using AI tell me more, so you are going to have an article written or you are going to have an article produced, and someone like me or yourself have the writers’ block, what are you or how are you using these AI tools?
Alex Cooper:
Okay well I came across, it was called conversion AI in the beginning, now its called Java’s AI and in the beginning, they just had these kinds of individual tools so if you wanted like an intro paragraph for a blog post, it could do that. If you wanted a product description or to write about a product it could do that as well so it was pretty cool. You could feed in features and benefits about products in a kind of bullet point form and it would turn it into a paragraph but now they offer long-form edits so you can create an entire blog post straight off a blank page and there are a few caveats to it; you do need to kind of guide this technology, it’s still is a robot.
I mean it’s not kind of spinning content or anything like that, some people think it’s like the old days where we had these articles spinners where they basically take existing content and they would run them through a thesaurus and change all the words and make it into a load of gibberish. These technologies seem to work differently, they have kind of crawled the web and learned a lot of information and they know how to structure sentences and paragraphs and then they use the information they have learned to create these paragraphs. I have checked all the content that I have created with these tools through all the different plagiarism tools and services and it’s all completely clean you know I have had some great success with it but you need to put the structure in so I would always kind of research and find out all the subheadings and things that I want in the article and very similar to how you brief a writer, you need to get all your subheadings and key points that you want to include and Jarvis or whatever tool you are using a kind of helps you fill it out and put it together.
The articles do need editing, they do need fact-checking, and they are not very good at kind of being used to research information, you need to do your research and know what you want to write about because often they will put bits in that just aren’t true. So you just have to check that but I have had some great success with Jarvis AI on my YouTube channel I have a live stream often on a Thursday afternoon UK time and I have worked with those tools live on YouTube creating content and yeah sometimes it spews out a whole lot of gibberish but you then just do it again and for a third or fourth time lucky you get some really good stuff that you can work with. A lot of people seem to think that it is a replacement for writers which it is certainly not, it’s just another tool like Grammarly or Copyscape.
Jaryd Krause:
So would you say it does save you time? I mean if you are doing it 2-4 times, is it going to be better to do it that way anyway versus just trying to sit down and force yourself to be creative in, right?
Alex Cooper:
I think it’s for me, it does save me time because I am really bad at getting creative and writing paragraphs and coming up with good stuff. It gives me enough that I can kind of use it either edit it, sometimes it's fine just as it comes out but it’s easy for me to click the button four times than it is for me to write four different paragraphs off of the top of my own head. So yeah I have been very impressed and for the very specific tools like if I have got a bit of content may be I have written a paragraph and I just think uhhh it’s not very good. I can out the whole paragraph and it’s got like a content improver tool as well and it will rewrite the paragraph so I can you know press the button 3 or 4 times rewrite that paragraph very quickly and then go okay that’s the best one that’s the one I want.
Jaryd Krause:
Awesome and so this one’s a conversion AI, is that right?
Alex Cooper:
Yeah it's called Jarvis actually now that they rebranded.
Jaryd Krause:
Okay.
Alex Cooper:
My link is www.wpeagle.com, check it out if you want to that’s an affiliate link and yeah I think they are a really good company, they have got a really good interface I have had one of their team on one of my streams chatting about the tool. There is a whole load of different tools out there and it’s definitely a space that’s changing over time and that’s one of my favorites and one that I have been using. They have this boss mode which basically you just type commands in so maybe you put a paragraph in and you can say rewrite the paragraph above and it will do it, it’s really clever stuff but it has its limits.
Jaryd Krause:
love it well everything does, right?
Alex Cooper:
Yeah when it comes to that.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. Awesome, I am going to put a link to that in the show notes. Also for your life where can people go to check you out on YouTube and also your website this has been tremendously valuable and I am sure people are going to be like hey I want to get on this life and check out some new content.
Alex Cooper:
Yeah, okay. On YouTube it's WP Eagle, I say I am live generally twice a week; Tuesdays and Thursdays, we just hang out and talk about sites and I look at some people’s sites and I share my sites. That’s the thing with my channel I am very open with all of the sites, so one of my biggest case studies recently was where I created a roof box website which is for the boxes that people put on their cars, that was a project from scratch I created a whole video on how I created the site from scratch then every month I did an upgraded video over the two odd years that I had the site, so building up, adding the content, sharing all the earnings, all the traffic every single month and then ultimately I sold that site just a couple of months ago, sold it for $70,000 so that’s a great case study because it shows you can do it from scratch, you have got to be patient and you have got to put a lot of work in and I have got a few other case studies that are running at the moment for more recent sites again and they start off with a full tutorial on how I create the site.
Then I follow up with update videos every month on the earnings, traffic, all the content, and all the other work that I have done with the site, any link building or anything really, share everything which I know a lot of YouTubers they don’t do because they are scared of getting copied and all the rest of it which does happen to some of my sites, they do get copied but it's just all part of the game, isn’t it really?
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah I mean you are putting out great content and you are coming from service first and I think that’s awesome. Thank you so much for coming on Alex, it has been great to chat with you, really appreciate it.
Alex Cooper:
Yeah well thanks for having me, it’s been fun.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, its been fun. Everybody that is watching/listening on YouTube, please smash the like button because that is going to help this podcast episode get shown to more people who are looking to buy websites and growing content sites, so please smash the like button especially if you liked it, why wouldn’t you? If you are not watching this on YouTube or listening to this on YouTube, what are you even doing? I am joking. By the way, come to my YouTube channel if you aren’t on my YouTube Channel check it out because I have more great content on specific videos of just myself talking about buying sites and growing sites so check that out. Thank you everybody for listening. I will talk to you soon.
Want to have more financial and time freedom?
We help people buy established profit generating online businesses so the can replace their income and spend more time doing what they love with the people they love.
Host:
Jaryd Krause is a serial entrepreneur who helps people buy online businesses so they can spend more time doing what they love with who they love. He’s helped people buy and scale sites all the way up to 8 figures – from eCommerce to content websites. He spends his time surfing and traveling, and his biggest goals are around making a real tangible impact on people’s lives.
Resource Links:
➥ Buying Online Businesses Website – https://buyingonlinebusinesses.com
➥ Download the Due Diligence Framework – https://buyingonlinebusinesses.com/freeresources/
➥ Visit Niche Website Builders – https://www.nichewebsite.builders/bob/
➥ Check out Odys’ great deals – http://odys.global/
➥ Flippa (Website Broker) – https://bit.ly/3WYX0Ve
➥ GoDaddy (Website Hosting & Buying Domains) – https://bit.ly/3YiRkWV
➥ SEM Rush (SEO tool) – https://bit.ly/3lINGaV
➥ Link Whisper (SEO tool for internal linking on websites) – https://bit.ly/3l7K7Ld
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