They say, “Experience is the Best Teacher”.
That’s why listening to people who have gone through buying content websites can actually save you time and money. They knew exactly what works and what to do to achieve a favorable result!
For today’s special episode, Garth Adams came over to the show to share his entrepreneurial journey in running a portfolio of content websites. He has bought not just one, or two, but 14 sites in total.
Garth is the owner of the popular Australian travel companies I Know The Pilot and I Want That Flight. These travel sites have over 300,000 email subscribers and 500,000 FB followers and get many hundreds of thousands of visits each month. He also owns several game sites such as sudoku.com.au.
Garth and I have talked about where he bought his sites from and how much? What are the type of sites he bought and why he bought these? What are the lessons he learnt around the process of buying sites that first-time investors need to be aware of?
Garth also shared his experience in buying starter websites and what happened with those?
Lastly, he shared a handful of tips on backlink building, content creation, and how to run a portfolio of content websites like a Pro.
If you aspire to be a good and successful entrepreneur, learn more by tuning in!
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Episode Highlights
03:35 How Garth discovered the BOB community?
05:42 Garth’s background in buying content websites
09:00 Why is it NO good to buy starter sites?
12:30 Finding success in established sites
15:30 Choosing “the right” site
21:03 Lessons that Garth learnt in the Due Diligence phase
30:00 Interesting content creation and publishing strategies
33:57 What are the content strategies that Garth used for his sites?
37:02 What is Garth’s end goal in the online business space?
42:08 Where can you find Garth?
Courses & Training
Courses & Training
Key Takeaways
➥ In Garth’s experience, buying starter sites was not good. He didn’t attain the results he was expecting. But he did learn from that experience and do better on the due diligence process.
➥ When it comes to due diligence, Garth usually accesses Google Analytics and sees where all the traffic is coming from, and analyzes if there’s a possibility of growing that site.
➥ Garth’s advice for those buying online businesses is that you’ve got to have patience. When there isn’t something out there, don’t change your criteria. Just because you can’t find a good deal doesn’t mean you should exempt the worst deal, because you’re just going to do poorly out of it.
About The Guest
Garth Adams is the owner of the popular Australian travel companies I Know The Pilot and I Want That Flight. These sites have over 300,000 email subscribers and 500,000 FB followers and get many hundreds of thousands of visits each month. As well as travel, he also owns several game sites such as sudoku.com.au.
Connect with Garth Adams
Transcription:
Jaryd Krause (0:00)
Would you buy 14 content websites in the space of around two years? Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause. I'm the host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast. And today I'm speaking with Garth Adams, who is the owner of the popular Australian travel companies - iknowthepilot.com.au and iwantthatflight.com. You now these sites have over 300,000 email subscribers, over 500,000 Facebook followers and get many hundreds of thousands of visitors each month.
And as well as being in travel. Garth also owns some other sites such as sudoku.com. But we also talked about in this episode about how he bought 14 content websites, why he bought these websites where he went and bought them from and how much he spent on each of them and, and different tiers and what he learned from the different price ranges of the businesses, the businesses he bought was talking about those types of sites, why some were more valuable than the others we'll still go about this is very critical, the lessons that he learned around the process of buying websites and things that you as a first timer should be really thinking about and should be conscious of.
So you don't set yourself up for failure. Like so many people who come to this space of making money online and trying to buy websites actually do we also talk about his experience buying starter websites that sounded very, very good and what happened with those, how they evolved, then we move into the growth phase of some of the things that he did with his biggest sites in the travel space to get, many hundreds of 1000s of views per month versus what he was doing with these other content websites that you bought, which are a bit smaller. We talked about some of the backlink building strategies that he used because he didn't really need to build backlinks in the travel space.
But what he did with backlink building where he went and bought those backlinks from some a bit about his process of finding the right type of backlinks and having a bit of a criteria on what those backlinks should have Then we moved into content creation, and talked about, building content, what cheap content looks like versus good content, and everything in between. And we just end up having a good conversation really about being an entrepreneur and running a portfolio of content websites.
There's so much value in this podcast episode if you're looking to buy a website. And if that's you, please understand that, we talked about doing due diligence, and we talked about buying sites know that if you are going to do this, make sure you get my due diligence framework that I mentioned in the podcast episode that you can get for free, go to buyingonlinebusinesses.com/freeresources, and you can get my students framework for free and many other free resources that we have on that page too. Let's dive into this valuable episode with Garth.
Do you want to build or grow your content website niche website builders have helped hundreds of people that take their content websites from a few $100 per month to over 10s of 1000s of dollars per month with crafted content creation buying age domains and link building strategies. These strategies have helped people increase their Traffic Authority, monthly earnings and their website valuation too. Head to nichewebsite.builders/BOB/ to get 10% of any link building or 10% more from their content creation services. That’s nichewebsite.builders/BOB/. I'll put a link in the description too.
Garth, thanks for coming on. Welcome to the BOB podcast.
Garth Adams (3:37)
Hey Jack. Well, thanks very much for inviting me. It's good to be on it.
Jaryd Krause (3:41)
Yeah, man. I didn't realize until literally we just started our cold now I didn't realize that you actually had new the show. And you'd listen to a bunch of episodes. Did you say a year ago or something?
Garth Adams (3:55)
Yeah. So around about a year and a half ago is when I was doing the bulk of my buying of new websites. Well, new for me. And I discovered your podcast online. Like just on Apple podcasts. I was just searching for how to buy websites this information. And I just wanted to get a more of an overview I come met, like buying websites are very new to that I've been doing SEO and owning my own sub sites and growing them from scratch. But buying other people's sites is very different. And so it was good to discover your podcasts and get quite a useful lot of information out of yourself and your guests.
Jaryd Krause (4:31)
Awesome. Thanks. I'm so glad you got a lot from it. I also have a bit of a story for you as well, which is very interesting. I went to I went to email you the other day because we hadn't received an image just for the thumbnail for the podcast. So I went to email you and I typed your email address in one of my other emails and older email, a Gmail email and realize that we had already had a thread of conversations together back in 2014.
And yeah, and you actually, you actually reached out to me for one of your sites because I had a site in the travel space, travel blogging, I won't mention the domain. But I had a site in the travel space, you reached out and monitor a sponsored post and backlink. And we went, we've already done business together back in 2014.
Garth Adams (5:28)
Wow, it was crazy. Neither of us remember.
Jaryd Krause (5:31)
Like, yeah. It is a while ago in internet years, that's like, seven decades.
Garth Adams (5:37)
Yeah. Well, it's nice to meet you in person. Yeah, it's great.
Jaryd Krause (5:40)
It's great to catch up. So congratulations on being where you're at. I wanted to dig in and talk to you about, some of your travel sites and some of the stuff done with that. But first, let's, let's chat about some massage you bought, have you bought sites? Do you go through and buy some and what does the journey go for you so far?
Garth Adams (5:57)
Well, I'm like, I'll give you a little bit of a background as to why I even bothered to start buying sites. So I own I want that flight. And I know the pilot, which pre pandemic were quite successful travel sites, they were both getting about a million visits a month, I had several employees, everything was great. And I was thinking, ah, nothing can go wrong here. Then, of course, the pandemic hit, and everything changed.
The sites just went like completely dark, no one was traveling, and certainly no one was flying. I had to let all the employees go everything yet collapsed. That said, you really had no idea when travel was going to come back. So I just started looking around for other things. I already owned sites that weren't in the travel space from many, many years ago. And I got back into those did those up. The main one, there is sudoku.com. Today, you but then I was reading about starting sites from scratch. And I tried a bit of that, and then my experiences and just the time, it's going to take things to the Google Sandbox. And just a lot of things are starting things from scratch.
And then I decided it'd be much better to actually take existing businesses or existing content sites, mostly. And then using what I knew about SEO, and also what I know about advertising networks to quickly increase the income, hopefully, and then sell them from there. And so that was what sort of got me into it. And if travel, if we'd never had the pandemic, I guess I probably wouldn't have done this. That's, it's just how it is. And here we are, like us two and a half years later from and still very much feeling the effects of the pandemic. And in travel. Yeah, travel out of Australia is still a complete mess. So yeah, hopefully things will recover, we'll continue to recover there.
Jaryd Krause (7:58)
I hope, and I'm sure they will as well. And yeah, sorry to hear about that. It's, it's a massive spanner in the works, but I just want to take my hat off to you, Gotha going, alright, this has happened, what, what do I do now, and you've gone out and actively done something different and started working on other income streams, which is so cool. So I definitely applaud you for that some people just put their head in the sand and go, Well, hang my head.
Garth Adams (8:26)
I would have loved to have done that. But before we unfortunately, the mortgage was not given. Anyway, it is what it is. And lots of people had a much worse, so you just take what you're given, really. So anyway. So the first things I actually looked at findings, I wanted to have a scalable process as possible. My initial idea was to have a few sites and have them so increase the traffic and flip them. And actually, I think I got some sites built for me from a forum.
I can't remember which one it was, but I built, I bought a few basic starter sites. And all the reviews were fantastic, and everything was golden. And the guy produced them, well, the company produced them, and they did everything that they said, but certainly the results when we're not there. And I think at the time, I didn't have enough knowledge about how to take these starter sites, which really, I needed to do more due diligence about what I was getting, because like a few months afterwards when things weren't going so good. I had a much closer look at the content and I realized up everything looks fine but the HTML under the hood there's no h2 there's no h3 He's just Yes bold and increase the font size and intellect things are terrible for SEO.
Yeah. So that's sort of I think I bought two or three sites and they sort of never really went anywhere. I've still got them Then, I don't know, a few dollars a week or a month. Yeah, after that experience, and instead of taking a fair bit of time, that's afterwards I swapped to buying sites.
Jaryd Krause (10:10)
Yeah, I've noticed. But I mean, I just want to jump in there as well, before we move into the buying of sites. A lot of people want to like find out, ah, well, I can buy a business instead of start one. And then they look at doing DD due diligence on a lot of deals. And they realize like, oh, a lot of these aren't the greatest deals, and I can't find the right one. And they were always looking for the path of least resistance. And so people will go, go, what I would say is a step back, and go, I'm going to buy a Starter Site that somebody's built, because, the hard part is the startup phase.
And they go out and do that they get burnt, and they go, Jared has spent a lot of time and a lot of money. Now I've got a now I'm going to come back to buying something that's actually established, though, it's alarming how many people actually go through that through that journey? Because it is does look quite attractive, hey, we're going to go live data site? Yes, it's a lot cheaper and makes more sense, in theory, right?
Garth Adams (11:10)
I think at the stop, and I get a lot of these people that you just don't know what you don't know. So, you've been told this stuff, you think you've investigated everything, and you've got realistic timeframes. But it just doesn't happen. Well, for me, it didn't happen. And I'm guessing, for a lot of these people you're talking about it didn't happen, at the end of, usually six months, the rankings weren't starting to appear, I bought, various link packages and everything like that.
But these people recommended without putting too much thought into it myself, because I didn't want to scale it. And I was also, dealing with some other stuff with the travel side. Apps, perhaps I shouldn't have accepted everything on such face value.
Jaryd Krause (11:53)
But we've all we've all been there though, like we've all made mistakes and learn from it. And we've spent a lot of money on things that haven't needed us and ROI. So it's definitely a part of the journey. I think we all we all go through it. But if not just by us having the conversation about hopefully, we can prevent people from having to too many people from having to do the similar thing.
So then you move so then you went alright, this didn't really work out. So then you move to like, let's buy some established sites. What did that look like? Did you is that when you sort of went Oh, Jared has got this podcast here. Started looking at brokers.
Garth Adams (12:25)
And then yeah, well, I was listening to you and niche pursuits and 30 hackers and a few of them sort of signs. So you guys, I imagine you're you sort of know each other? Yes. Yeah. And yeah, it was very interesting listening to that. Listening about content creation, listening about SEO, listening about link building, and all that sort of stuff. And also buying businesses and how to increase traffic and profitability and all that sort of stuff. I yeah, I decided to buy a site. And then it's sort of like, where do you where do you go? Do you go through Flippa, which seems pretty crazy. Or do you go through to spend a lot more money and go through somewhere like Empire Flippers.
At that stage, having just doubted myself with a whole bunch of status sites, I didn't feel comfortable going over to Empire Flippers. And, racking down 50 or 100, grand, I actually went probably even riskier than Flippa, went on a Facebook group, and bought a site there. It didn't happen straightaway, it actually did do a fair bit of due diligence. But the very first sight of what was it 900 US and it was really, just to see how the process was going to go. I've done a fair bit of examining lots of different businesses, but I chose one that was very cheap. It was only making like 30 US a month or something like that.
Anyway, it was like, six figures like that. But I think even if I was totally scammed, and I thought this is, a 50% chance or something of a Facebook group, I wouldn't lose that much. And I would learn something from it. But look, that site actually went fantastically, the seller was fantastic. He was very accommodating and understanding that I've never done purchase before, because there's a reasonable amount to it, that you're going through escrow around doing the domain transfers, doing the transfer of an asset tracking, like Google Analytics, and then you’re AdSense and all that sort of stuff.
And he sort of walked me through it not unfortunately so much that it didn't make a mistake later on with a different site. But anyway, incredibly after a month, and through no work of my own, basically just exploded in traffic. So it must have been all the good work that he did. And it just went very well. And so I had a very good experience with that. And fairly early on, which was quite unexpected. And that sort of gave me confidence the refer for more purchases.
Jaryd Krause (14:59)
Cool, congrats. Yeah, that's really good. I've had that experience as well. This first business I bought, I had to work really, really hard to get the results. The second business I bought, I did, basically nothing. And we got 100% return on investment back. Yeah, it was crazy. And I was like, hey, look, I just bought the right thing. And at that time, probably similar to you buying this site is like, I didn't know much about buying sites, let's be honest as myself. So that was pure luck. So what have you done with that site? That's done well, and then what sort of have you what else have you done in the space of buying?
Garth Adams (15:39)
I did buy a considerable number. So I think all up, I've bought about 14. On that site, I refined a list of criteria. I've heard a number of people talk about it, the best way to get value is right, choosing the right site, its right in the purchase process. If you can buy a site that's either under monetized or it's got sort of easy SEO wins, you can definitely in the first couple of months, increase the traffic or increase the profitability.
And it all comes down to choosing the right site. So profit isn't found. I've just wrote down a list of in here, the things that I've got to look for any each of the site he is and also here are the sorts of sites that I'm comfortable with. So definitely content sites. So I get immediately on Flippa, just exclude FBA, or any apps or all this sort of stuff. There might be great businesses, and they're wonderful, but it's not for me, I haven't got the expertise there, then it's like, okay, I wrote down a sort of, like 10 steps of things that I've got to check, once I get once I'm sort of interested in a site, then you've got to ask them, Can I get access to Google Analytics, and then you want to have a process that you can just run through as quickly as possible, so that you can check out a site within 10 minutes. And you can, at this stage are more sort of excluding and looking for reasons to knock the site back, you've already sort of said in your mind, okay, this, this looks pretty good.
But now you just want to say, Okay, where's all the traffic from? And then you've initially it looks like, you're getting this huge amount of traffic, but you find it's all from China, then you're like, Okay, I'm not actually. And it's say, you're getting a ton of traffic, but the sites making very little money, and you're thinking, Okay, if I swap that AdSense and put in, say, he's only got published or whatever, then I'll double my money.
But then if you find all the traffic from China or India, well, that's not going to work. So you need to find that out quickly. So you're not wasting time later on.
Jaryd Krause (17:35)
I'm curious, did you since listening to the podcast a while ago, and buying such Did you at all get the modules framework that we give away?
Garth Adams (17:45)
I didn't. You should get it. I haven't really bought many things. I've got a few subscriptions to tools.
Jaryd Krause (17:56)
The free this is a free like you can get it for free. It's free. That's what I said you should.
Garth Adams (18:05)
That's what I said you should pay enough attention. Yeah. Yeah. No, it sounds great. I had my own mind sort of framework. Not really a framework more like a little Pamphlet, like a checklist, right? Yeah, just a 10. Same questions. Once I've got sort of Google Analytics, which made me comfortable in purchasing the site or finding out more.
Jaryd Krause (18:27)
So you've bought 14, are we all roughly around the $1,000 range, increase it a little bit or once you bought a few you get your confidence up.
Garth Adams (18:36)
You haven't lost all the money. So they definitely increased in price. There was the ones for 1000. I'll just have a quick look here. Then, another one, I bought one, which was sort of based on a database of elevations for about 12,000. Us, one on ceiling fans for 14,000. Us. And then it went up and up. And then finally the most expensive one was around about 100,000 Australian on mobile phones, I was very confident I was getting a good deal with that one.
The site unfortunately hasn't done quite as well as I would have hoped. But in the end, it'll make its money. But it wasn't the homerun that I was hoping for. But yeah, the last site that I bought was actually no, some like the 10th or so was the site on laptops, and that has just exploded in traffic and reacts very well to new content. So these days, I'm actually spending most of my time just growing that site called that and that was I think 20 20,000 or so is us. Okay. So yeah, so all over all over the place.
Jaryd Krause (19:57)
Yeah. And become used to buying and so with that laptop site, what is That is that affiliates and ad revenue or is it one or the other mostly.
Garth Adams (20:05)
When I bought it, it was all affiliate, or Amazon affiliate and it was earning around, I think it was like 500 to 600 us a month, it had a decent amount of traffic, I think it was getting around 25 to 30,000 visits a month. And I thought, here's a great opportunity to put Ads on it and see how that goes. And again, I felt like I was getting a pretty good deal. The site was reasonably priced just on based on the Amazon income, adding the AdSense Oh, I didn't add AdSense, I think I added Ezoic at the time, and that basically doubled the income immediately. So I do a pretty good deal. Yeah. And just went from there.
Jaryd Krause (20:49)
Cool. Congratulations on all of those purchases. I'm going to come back to growing these sites soon. And, and some of the similar things that you've used or have done with I want that flight. And iknowthepilot.com.au. But first and foremost, like what are some of the things that you learned through doing due diligence and looking for sites, and it doesn't need to be specifically about due diligence, it could be about the buying process, it could be about the finding process, but what are some of the things that you learned that will be helpful for beginner investors as well.
Garth Adams (21:18)
Well, you need to act pretty quickly. There's been plenty of times when I have thought, Okay, this is a great deal. And something's $50,000 you don't want to just throw it away or jump too quickly. But yeah, if but if it isn't going to deal, and it looks like that, to me, it probably looks like that to someone else. And so you really do need to pull your finger out and just the message, that person immediately tried to get access to Google Analytics and get the deal underway as quickly as possible. Otherwise, you just got to lose it.
And after I think I went through a period of about a month and a half and hadn't bought a site. And it was like, I'm still working on the sites that I've got at the time, but you want to buy new sites, because you eventually want to get to the stage where use your buying and selling sites at roughly the same time. And if you're not buying any new sites, you're not going to get to that to that stage. But at the same time, you've got to have patience, when there isn't something out there, like don't change your criteria, just because you can't find a good deal doesn't mean you should exempt and worst deal, because you're just going to do poorly out of it.
Jaryd Krause (22:28)
I'm so glad that you said that. Because we have a lot of people in our community are learning how to do due diligence and find a site and in that process, they might see a case study of somebody that's bought a site within three months or and achieve X amount of results, they go cool, I'm going to set my expectation, you're going to buy a site at this size, make this much money, I'll be making this much money within three months.
And that expectation is absolute killer, because they don't meet that expectation. They might go away and go, Alright, I'm going to buy something just to be outside of my criteria and rush into something or they do the opposite thing. And they just go shiny object syndrome, go find that thing that's super shiny, chase it, which is buy a Starter Site that 90% of them don't work out, they get burns. And this because they don't realize that the person that got a site within three month period might not have a job and have a lot of time. Whereas the person that's put the expectation at three months, they've got a family, they got a job, and they got to do this thing on the side.
And they get to the three month period, they're stressed out and they're like, How can I not How have I not done this, I'm a failure. They try and make it work. That person who bought one within a three month period, has probably done six to 12 months of work in a three month period because they don't have a job. And they've gotten so much better at due diligence. And they've done due diligence on say 50 sites or whatever. And they're skilled and trained up to take action. Whereas the person with a family and has a job they're not, they don't have the ability to do that. So I'm so glad you mentioned that because this is one of the biggest chinks in the armor that people have and failures that people make when they're trying to buy sites and try to get into this is like talent. Yeah, time is of the essence of course, right?
That's why we have a turnaround time of 24 to 48 hours of reviewing businesses for our clients so they can they can get information, get better questions and white one as soon as soon as they're ready. And why we also train them up so they don't actually have to rely on us to review them. So they can do it themselves and execute straightaway. So time is of the essence but also don't rush too fast because sometimes we do need to slow down to speed up right I'm so glad you mentioned that.
Garth Adams (24:40)
It's very hard to be patient if you haven't had if you've got these goals and nothing's happening. Yeah. And also, if you don't purchase anything for one and a half months, it really feels like that's been a bit of a waste. But the even worse than If you buy to dump sites, they get hit by Google penalties that, could have been avoided because they were using risky link, building all that. Yeah. Anyway, that's, that's true.
Jaryd Krause (25:12)
That's yeah, I'm so glad you mentioned that. Did you buy these sites with the intention of taking the skills that you had learned from your previous content sites to input into the scallop? Like, use your leverage lead?
Garth Adams (25:26)
Well, that was the initial goal. The more than I did it, the more like some of the things that I was doing with under the pilot and I want that flight where applicable, definitely, in basic SEO of getting the titles right, getting internal links, Rives, page navigation, all that sort of stuff was right. But I also wanted to keep them at arm's length, as well, much more inclined to be risky, and buy link packages and buy, SEO packages, with these sites that are purchase rather than I want that flight. And I know the pilot, yeah, I want that fly, but I know the pilot, there's no way I would, risk getting banned or anything like that with them.
So but with these other sites, I'm much more inclined to give that a try. Also, once you've got a fair few sites, and if you've got some that are on the cheaper end, you're more inclined? Well, I was more inclined to just try things out, and just go, Okay, why don't we try this seller or this sort of thing. And that was interesting, too. I started out at various forums, buying link packages, you kind of get what you give them there, they would say, Here's five links from Dr. Such and such sites and everything, and he's go, okay, but then I found by actually going on Fiverr, that you can get not only cheaper prices, but you actually get to choose exactly which sites, a guest post will go on, or a link edit and stuff like that. And then you can actually run those sites through eight refs Ahrefs. Gosh, I've never even heard of that one.
And you can actually say, okay, yes, the Drs. Good, but this site is getting no traffic, so clearly, it's not really going to be worth much. Well, suppose as much as we know about SEO, this probably isn't going to be worth much. Whereas you can just choose, this one's got Hi, Dr. Hyde traffic, and having a look at the actual site. It looks like a real site. It's not just put up there to sell links and stuff like that. And yeah, and that was a much better progression than right at the start when I was just buying link packages and getting whatever.
Jaryd Krause (27:39)
And how much you paying for these links on Fiverr?
Garth Adams (27:45)
Roughly, ah, all over the place between 50 to 250. Us again, I'm Australian, but I all these things in US dollars. So yeah, between 180 and 400, Australian, all 100 Australian ones, they for high DR like 70, 80 tons, hundreds of 1000s of traffic, and you get a guest post, which will be linked in the proper categories and everything like that.
And buying guest post is another whole learning curve as well, because the these people will promise you no, definitely get a guest post then you get a guest post thing you've actually got to check if there's like a robots no follow or no index on the page. Or if the page has just been posted to a section on the site, which never is linked to. So it'll pay you guest posts will never be indexed and stuff like that. So you need to check all that.
And ideally, you're asking that, once you've done it a couple of times and find out these things, then you make sure you ask the sellers before you begin, okay, is this going to happen? Or just insist that that's going to happen? If you do link purchases through Fiverr? There's a pretty good process for you. Okay. So you can actually check the work. Oh, this is no good. Can you change this? And if they never get around to changing a thing, you're able to just reverse the sale, which is good.
Jaryd Krause (29:14)
Yeah. Cool. Cool. Yeah. So I guess you'd have a checklist of like, the parameters that each link should meet or each post should meet for it to be viable to continue the payment.
Garth Adams (29:26)
And, yeah, because it sounds like it’s just one checklist after another, doesn't it?
Jaryd Krause (29:31)
Yeah, that's what it is. My phone, not just for business, but like just personal stuff is just full of checklists, we live in the life yeah, content creation. Did you have a similar strategy? So the back the link strategy, obviously with your premium sites, in the travel space, you're not going to risk buying link packages and having a not so good link profile. So you're going to premium at How different boy.
Jaryd Krause (30:00)
As your content current content publishing and content creation strategy, and I'd say it'd be very different, right? Because I've looked at those travel sites. And it's very, it's not the norm of content sites when you think of a blog for those travel sites compared to ones that you're buying. So what worked well, in the travel for the travel sites for you in terms of content creation, and what are you finding is working well, with these sites you bought.
Garth Adams (30:22)
With the I want that flight and I know the pilot because they attract so many links themselves? I didn't have to go around and buy too many links. These days, when I was first starting out, definitely just.
Jaryd Krause (30:35)
Back in 2014. Right. Yeah.
Garth Adams (30:39)
That was it was they started a long way before then.
Jaryd Krause (30:44)
Probably 14 2014 is what, six years ago.
Garth Adams (30:49)
Six years ago?
Jaryd Krause (30:50)
Is a six years ago. I think it's more like eight, eight, sorry, yeah, my mouth is very off there. Yeah. So how long have you had how long? Have you had the travel sites? And did you start in?
Garth Adams (31:01)
Early 2000s? Early 2000s. Maybe me, me? Me? No, I want that flight was before Sudoku. So yeah, very early 2000s, like 2001 or so.
Jaryd Krause (31:16)
From Scratch, yeah, built back from scratch.
Garth Adams (31:18)
Onto the pile, it's much, much more recent, that was probably around 2016, the way those sites get traffic is actually mostly through email subscribers. And I send out deals and they respond and all that sort of stuff. And then luckily, people have been responding to, like deal. So they get by linking to me and linking to I know the pilot and stuff like that. But look, no one is going to link to these sites that I bought these insights insides.
Like some of them are okay. And definitely I have this one that was based on elevation, because that was that was like an old site. And it basically told you the elevation of any point on the world, given your latitude and longitude made attracted, it gets, I don't know, three or 4000 visits a day, just through SEO from all around the world.
Who knew and that one has a whole lot of historical links. But other sites that I bought were to do with sort of have a login to your accounts, like various accounts, like your Netflix account and stuff like that, yeah. And people are not going to link to these sites. And the English on some of the sites is not spectacular. So you've got to be out there purchasing links, I bought these sites knowing this and just wanted to try and wanted to see what worked and all that sort of stuff. So very, very different.
Jaryd Krause (32:53)
I'm so glad you said you bought these sites knowing this, that the English isn't the best. And like when people come to me to buy a site for 20k is very different to buying a site for what you're going to get for 100k, or a bit more with a 20k, you need to be very lenient with the quality of the contents and the backlink profile and, and all those sorts of things. It obviously has room for growth, but it has a lot less put into it usually a bit more risk than say a bigger site, of course, and that's a very general statement. But yeah, it's something for people to really understand is like, sometimes when I talk about like the ideal site, people like cool, I want to buy the ideal site, and they've got 20k like, well, we're 20 car you might not be buying.
Garth Adams (33:43)
What I have been explaining in the showroom.
Jaryd Krause (33:44)
Yeah, and I'm getting the Toyota. Yeah, exactly what sort of content strategy have you done for these sites.
Garth Adams (33:53)
Sites with say this first one that I bought for 900 bucks, its English was not good. And I in no way improved it. Accommodate that I was getting was dirt cheap. But I actually hired writers, again through a forum. And it was just ridiculously cheap. I think I was paying $2 an article or something like that, but it was honestly barely readable. And so I would go through and just pick up the most glaring grammar mistakes, and then post that, again, I knew this was not a sort of a quality thing. But I just wanted to see, what was working for that particular site.
And again, there's no way I do this on I want that fly to honor the pilot or any site that I really wanted to take to the next level. But I sort of thought this site is already on a very junky sort of niche. The content is already not great. And at this stage, I was very much experimenting with what's going on. I also thought that this site was in such danger of getting banned at any time, I felt that it's not worth spending a whole lot of money thinking that I'm going to sell it, because I don't apart from me buying it for 900 us, which wasn't a lot, either.
Even if I get the earnings up to whatever, no one's going to buy this for 10 grand, because it's just looking like any could be banned at any time by Google. So I didn't feel that it was worthwhile investing too much money in it. Where is the content for other sites and the content from my main site now, I've actually found writers through Upwork that have got, good to excellent English, and that are able to research articles on that, and they're still quite cheap. But the quality is worlds away from this cheapest site. Also using tools like Grammar that definitely helps.
So if you can, so I've actually purchased as a subscription for my writer, or former writers so that they can take whatever they've written, make sure that it sounds as well as they can, and is in a quicker time as possible.
Jaryd Krause (36:06)
Yeah, that's great. That's great. Yeah, we all know that quality over quantity is what Google's wanting. But sometimes there's the game of like putting out quantity at the start just to get rankings. And just to get, some runs on the board.
Garth Adams (36:21)
Well, I'm sure you've heard of people with AI created sites, getting hundreds of 1000s of visits in a quick time, just because they can pump out it reasonably good quality articles very quickly. Yes, which is, I think, worrying for the whole content business. But yeah, I think over the next three to six months, we'll probably see some action there.
Jaryd Krause (36:43)
I'm hoping so because Google doesn't need more content. They need better content. And Google, I'm sure we're going to put parameters around that. So where do you see yourself going with, buying sites and growing sites? Do you feel like you're going to long term hold on to a couple and sell the majority? And just continue working on those ones that you're getting traction with? Or are you looking at purchasing more as well.
Garth Adams (37:10)
It just kind of depends on travel, I'd much rather get back into travel, Get back, get the gang back together, as it were, yeah. The employees at the moment, it's not really a feasible, I think, a viable thing just yet. I mean, the travel is definitely improving, but there's no reason to invest a whole lot in it. Given the state of leisure travel around about October last year, I just noticed that one of the sites that I bought in, I think it was July or so was just really reacting well to any new content. And so I would split my time, at that stage, I would split my time between about five or six sites, and I would, get two articles to them, probably about three or four articles a month to each site.
And that was sort of working reasonably hard. But one of the sites would just increase in rankings. And the those new content would immediately rank was all the other sites were not doing badly, but doing kind of expected, just muddling along, it was sort of okay. And then so roundabout, October, November, I just decided, right, I'm just really going to concentrate on this new site. And then Google also had its product review, update, and I owned a few sites that were in well, in the firing line, basically. And I have no problem with that update. Because I think a lot of sites that were existing on Amazon reviews probably deserve that.
If you I don't know, if you've ever tried to buy anything online, and you read a review, probably just like me, you're going to this person, to really have a look at this thing or doing nothing at all ,yeah know, I was being generous there with asking the question. So I would really only trust review video reviews, you can at least see the person doing and that's what Google's going for. And I think that's fair enough. So anyway, so that called a few other sites that I had, which was not ideal for me, but I think it's good for the internet. Yeah, that's why I also decided to just concentrate on sites that will be earning money through ad revenue.
And this main site has just been occupying my time since then. And I think I showed you a traffic chart. Yeah. You get it up now to get over 17,000 visits a day. And a very, very healthy chart yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, I don't think I've been exceptionally clever with it. But I have been a recognized that this site is didn't react well to content and have decided to focus on that to the exclusion of other stuff. So I spend all my time on that site. Now. The sort of just treading water. And I'm just pumping as much quality content into it as I can. I don't purchase any links, I guess that's time to sort of say that that site is actually built on an expired domain.
Jaryd Krause (40:17)
Built on a five to nine. And then he bought it as a, as somebody built that site on an expired domain.
Garth Adams (40:22)
Yeah, so somebody had already bought it and built the site. And I think they'd had it for a year or two already. So I had a look at other expired domain sites before that, and I think I've actually purchased other sites. And I've definitely have no problem with expired domains, or age sites, or whatever you want to call it. But I realized that there's a definite risk in the first month or the first year, or maybe whenever the Google could just wake up and just go, Hey, wait a second, you're out.
But I think at this site had already been around for a while, since it had expired. And so the risk of that was very low. So I haven't actually had to buy any links at all, for that site exponent is really good. And it's now attracting organic links through people linking to articles that are on the site. I wouldn't say a whole heap, but at least is getting some cool.
Jaryd Krause (41:13)
And what niches that in that.
Garth Adams (41:15)
Again, it started with laptops, and it really focused on reviewing laptops, and then a few of the problems you might have, like how to reset this particular sort of laptop, or how to do this sort of thing. And then it's just expanded to basically anything, tick each of the articles or research that using a Griefs. Again, and determining whether this is a good niche to go into how many articles that I can get out of it, what's the search volume, all that sort of stuff. Cool.
Jaryd Krause (41:43)
Congratulations. That's excellent. I think that's a great, great episode. Just now I think we should maybe get you back on if you're open to it in a couple of months or a year or so and see where you're going with it all because hopefully, yeah, thanks so much for coming on. Where can we send people to check out more about you and what you're doing?
Garth Adams (42:03)
Ah, look, I don't keep much of a social media profile these days. Maybe just if they want to get in contact through LinkedIn. I think I've given you the link we'd like to have a holiday anytime soon. I know the pilot or I want that flight.
Jaryd Krause (42:17)
Yeah guys, check out those two sites. They are awesome sites so much value in them I checked them out the other day so have a look. There'll be links to those in the show notes too. Garth thanks so much for coming on. Garth Adams (42:23)
Yeah, well, thanks very much for having you have a great day. Jaryd Krause (42:25)
You too, everybody that is listening. Thank you for listening as well. Please, if you are open to it, do us a massive favor by sharing this podcast episode with somebody that is looking at trying to just make money online, possibly buying a site or growing a site. Share this podcast episode with them. It helps us help more people.
Would you buy 14 content websites in the space of around two years? Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause. I'm the host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast. And today I'm speaking with Garth Adams, who is the owner of the popular Australian travel companies - iknowthepilot.com.au and iwantthatflight.com. You now these sites have over 300,000 email subscribers, over 500,000 Facebook followers and get many hundreds of thousands of visitors each month.
And as well as being in travel. Garth also owns some other sites such as sudoku.com. But we also talked about in this episode about how he bought 14 content websites, why he bought these websites where he went and bought them from and how much he spent on each of them and, and different tiers and what he learned from the different price ranges of the businesses, the businesses he bought was talking about those types of sites, why some were more valuable than the others we'll still go about this is very critical, the lessons that he learned around the process of buying websites and things that you as a first timer should be really thinking about and should be conscious of.
So you don't set yourself up for failure. Like so many people who come to this space of making money online and trying to buy websites actually do we also talk about his experience buying starter websites that sounded very, very good and what happened with those, how they evolved, then we move into the growth phase of some of the things that he did with his biggest sites in the travel space to get, many hundreds of 1000s of views per month versus what he was doing with these other content websites that you bought, which are a bit smaller. We talked about some of the backlink building strategies that he used because he didn't really need to build backlinks in the travel space.
But what he did with backlink building where he went and bought those backlinks from some a bit about his process of finding the right type of backlinks and having a bit of a criteria on what those backlinks should have Then we moved into content creation, and talked about, building content, what cheap content looks like versus good content, and everything in between. And we just end up having a good conversation really about being an entrepreneur and running a portfolio of content websites.
There's so much value in this podcast episode if you're looking to buy a website. And if that's you, please understand that, we talked about doing due diligence, and we talked about buying sites know that if you are going to do this, make sure you get my due diligence framework that I mentioned in the podcast episode that you can get for free, go to buyingonlinebusinesses.com/freeresources, and you can get my students framework for free and many other free resources that we have on that page too. Let's dive into this valuable episode with Garth.
Do you want to build or grow your content website niche website builders have helped hundreds of people that take their content websites from a few $100 per month to over 10s of 1000s of dollars per month with crafted content creation buying age domains and link building strategies. These strategies have helped people increase their Traffic Authority, monthly earnings and their website valuation too. Head to nichewebsite.builders/BOB/ to get 10% of any link building or 10% more from their content creation services. That’s nichewebsite.builders/BOB/. I'll put a link in the description too.
Garth, thanks for coming on. Welcome to the BOB podcast.
Garth Adams (3:37)
Hey Jack. Well, thanks very much for inviting me. It's good to be on it.
Jaryd Krause (3:41)
Yeah, man. I didn't realize until literally we just started our cold now I didn't realize that you actually had new the show. And you'd listen to a bunch of episodes. Did you say a year ago or something?
Garth Adams (3:55)
Yeah. So around about a year and a half ago is when I was doing the bulk of my buying of new websites. Well, new for me. And I discovered your podcast online. Like just on Apple podcasts. I was just searching for how to buy websites this information. And I just wanted to get a more of an overview I come met, like buying websites are very new to that I've been doing SEO and owning my own sub sites and growing them from scratch. But buying other people's sites is very different. And so it was good to discover your podcasts and get quite a useful lot of information out of yourself and your guests.
Jaryd Krause (4:31)
Awesome. Thanks. I'm so glad you got a lot from it. I also have a bit of a story for you as well, which is very interesting. I went to I went to email you the other day because we hadn't received an image just for the thumbnail for the podcast. So I went to email you and I typed your email address in one of my other emails and older email, a Gmail email and realize that we had already had a thread of conversations together back in 2014.
And yeah, and you actually, you actually reached out to me for one of your sites because I had a site in the travel space, travel blogging, I won't mention the domain. But I had a site in the travel space, you reached out and monitor a sponsored post and backlink. And we went, we've already done business together back in 2014.
Garth Adams (5:28)
Wow, it was crazy. Neither of us remember.
Jaryd Krause (5:31)
Like, yeah. It is a while ago in internet years, that's like, seven decades.
Garth Adams (5:37)
Yeah. Well, it's nice to meet you in person. Yeah, it's great.
Jaryd Krause (5:40)
It's great to catch up. So congratulations on being where you're at. I wanted to dig in and talk to you about, some of your travel sites and some of the stuff done with that. But first, let's, let's chat about some massage you bought, have you bought sites? Do you go through and buy some and what does the journey go for you so far?
Garth Adams (5:57)
Well, I'm like, I'll give you a little bit of a background as to why I even bothered to start buying sites. So I own I want that flight. And I know the pilot, which pre pandemic were quite successful travel sites, they were both getting about a million visits a month, I had several employees, everything was great. And I was thinking, ah, nothing can go wrong here. Then, of course, the pandemic hit, and everything changed.
The sites just went like completely dark, no one was traveling, and certainly no one was flying. I had to let all the employees go everything yet collapsed. That said, you really had no idea when travel was going to come back. So I just started looking around for other things. I already owned sites that weren't in the travel space from many, many years ago. And I got back into those did those up. The main one, there is sudoku.com. Today, you but then I was reading about starting sites from scratch. And I tried a bit of that, and then my experiences and just the time, it's going to take things to the Google Sandbox. And just a lot of things are starting things from scratch.
And then I decided it'd be much better to actually take existing businesses or existing content sites, mostly. And then using what I knew about SEO, and also what I know about advertising networks to quickly increase the income, hopefully, and then sell them from there. And so that was what sort of got me into it. And if travel, if we'd never had the pandemic, I guess I probably wouldn't have done this. That's, it's just how it is. And here we are, like us two and a half years later from and still very much feeling the effects of the pandemic. And in travel. Yeah, travel out of Australia is still a complete mess. So yeah, hopefully things will recover, we'll continue to recover there.
Jaryd Krause (7:58)
I hope, and I'm sure they will as well. And yeah, sorry to hear about that. It's, it's a massive spanner in the works, but I just want to take my hat off to you, Gotha going, alright, this has happened, what, what do I do now, and you've gone out and actively done something different and started working on other income streams, which is so cool. So I definitely applaud you for that some people just put their head in the sand and go, Well, hang my head.
Garth Adams (8:26)
I would have loved to have done that. But before we unfortunately, the mortgage was not given. Anyway, it is what it is. And lots of people had a much worse, so you just take what you're given, really. So anyway. So the first things I actually looked at findings, I wanted to have a scalable process as possible. My initial idea was to have a few sites and have them so increase the traffic and flip them. And actually, I think I got some sites built for me from a forum.
I can't remember which one it was, but I built, I bought a few basic starter sites. And all the reviews were fantastic, and everything was golden. And the guy produced them, well, the company produced them, and they did everything that they said, but certainly the results when we're not there. And I think at the time, I didn't have enough knowledge about how to take these starter sites, which really, I needed to do more due diligence about what I was getting, because like a few months afterwards when things weren't going so good. I had a much closer look at the content and I realized up everything looks fine but the HTML under the hood there's no h2 there's no h3 He's just Yes bold and increase the font size and intellect things are terrible for SEO.
Yeah. So that's sort of I think I bought two or three sites and they sort of never really went anywhere. I've still got them Then, I don't know, a few dollars a week or a month. Yeah, after that experience, and instead of taking a fair bit of time, that's afterwards I swapped to buying sites.
Jaryd Krause (10:10)
Yeah, I've noticed. But I mean, I just want to jump in there as well, before we move into the buying of sites. A lot of people want to like find out, ah, well, I can buy a business instead of start one. And then they look at doing DD due diligence on a lot of deals. And they realize like, oh, a lot of these aren't the greatest deals, and I can't find the right one. And they were always looking for the path of least resistance. And so people will go, go, what I would say is a step back, and go, I'm going to buy a Starter Site that somebody's built, because, the hard part is the startup phase.
And they go out and do that they get burnt, and they go, Jared has spent a lot of time and a lot of money. Now I've got a now I'm going to come back to buying something that's actually established, though, it's alarming how many people actually go through that through that journey? Because it is does look quite attractive, hey, we're going to go live data site? Yes, it's a lot cheaper and makes more sense, in theory, right?
Garth Adams (11:10)
I think at the stop, and I get a lot of these people that you just don't know what you don't know. So, you've been told this stuff, you think you've investigated everything, and you've got realistic timeframes. But it just doesn't happen. Well, for me, it didn't happen. And I'm guessing, for a lot of these people you're talking about it didn't happen, at the end of, usually six months, the rankings weren't starting to appear, I bought, various link packages and everything like that.
But these people recommended without putting too much thought into it myself, because I didn't want to scale it. And I was also, dealing with some other stuff with the travel side. Apps, perhaps I shouldn't have accepted everything on such face value.
Jaryd Krause (11:53)
But we've all we've all been there though, like we've all made mistakes and learn from it. And we've spent a lot of money on things that haven't needed us and ROI. So it's definitely a part of the journey. I think we all we all go through it. But if not just by us having the conversation about hopefully, we can prevent people from having to too many people from having to do the similar thing.
So then you move so then you went alright, this didn't really work out. So then you move to like, let's buy some established sites. What did that look like? Did you is that when you sort of went Oh, Jared has got this podcast here. Started looking at brokers.
Garth Adams (12:25)
And then yeah, well, I was listening to you and niche pursuits and 30 hackers and a few of them sort of signs. So you guys, I imagine you're you sort of know each other? Yes. Yeah. And yeah, it was very interesting listening to that. Listening about content creation, listening about SEO, listening about link building, and all that sort of stuff. And also buying businesses and how to increase traffic and profitability and all that sort of stuff. I yeah, I decided to buy a site. And then it's sort of like, where do you where do you go? Do you go through Flippa, which seems pretty crazy. Or do you go through to spend a lot more money and go through somewhere like Empire Flippers.
At that stage, having just doubted myself with a whole bunch of status sites, I didn't feel comfortable going over to Empire Flippers. And, racking down 50 or 100, grand, I actually went probably even riskier than Flippa, went on a Facebook group, and bought a site there. It didn't happen straightaway, it actually did do a fair bit of due diligence. But the very first sight of what was it 900 US and it was really, just to see how the process was going to go. I've done a fair bit of examining lots of different businesses, but I chose one that was very cheap. It was only making like 30 US a month or something like that.
Anyway, it was like, six figures like that. But I think even if I was totally scammed, and I thought this is, a 50% chance or something of a Facebook group, I wouldn't lose that much. And I would learn something from it. But look, that site actually went fantastically, the seller was fantastic. He was very accommodating and understanding that I've never done purchase before, because there's a reasonable amount to it, that you're going through escrow around doing the domain transfers, doing the transfer of an asset tracking, like Google Analytics, and then you’re AdSense and all that sort of stuff.
And he sort of walked me through it not unfortunately so much that it didn't make a mistake later on with a different site. But anyway, incredibly after a month, and through no work of my own, basically just exploded in traffic. So it must have been all the good work that he did. And it just went very well. And so I had a very good experience with that. And fairly early on, which was quite unexpected. And that sort of gave me confidence the refer for more purchases.
Jaryd Krause (14:59)
Cool, congrats. Yeah, that's really good. I've had that experience as well. This first business I bought, I had to work really, really hard to get the results. The second business I bought, I did, basically nothing. And we got 100% return on investment back. Yeah, it was crazy. And I was like, hey, look, I just bought the right thing. And at that time, probably similar to you buying this site is like, I didn't know much about buying sites, let's be honest as myself. So that was pure luck. So what have you done with that site? That's done well, and then what sort of have you what else have you done in the space of buying?
Garth Adams (15:39)
I did buy a considerable number. So I think all up, I've bought about 14. On that site, I refined a list of criteria. I've heard a number of people talk about it, the best way to get value is right, choosing the right site, its right in the purchase process. If you can buy a site that's either under monetized or it's got sort of easy SEO wins, you can definitely in the first couple of months, increase the traffic or increase the profitability.
And it all comes down to choosing the right site. So profit isn't found. I've just wrote down a list of in here, the things that I've got to look for any each of the site he is and also here are the sorts of sites that I'm comfortable with. So definitely content sites. So I get immediately on Flippa, just exclude FBA, or any apps or all this sort of stuff. There might be great businesses, and they're wonderful, but it's not for me, I haven't got the expertise there, then it's like, okay, I wrote down a sort of, like 10 steps of things that I've got to check, once I get once I'm sort of interested in a site, then you've got to ask them, Can I get access to Google Analytics, and then you want to have a process that you can just run through as quickly as possible, so that you can check out a site within 10 minutes. And you can, at this stage are more sort of excluding and looking for reasons to knock the site back, you've already sort of said in your mind, okay, this, this looks pretty good.
But now you just want to say, Okay, where's all the traffic from? And then you've initially it looks like, you're getting this huge amount of traffic, but you find it's all from China, then you're like, Okay, I'm not actually. And it's say, you're getting a ton of traffic, but the sites making very little money, and you're thinking, Okay, if I swap that AdSense and put in, say, he's only got published or whatever, then I'll double my money.
But then if you find all the traffic from China or India, well, that's not going to work. So you need to find that out quickly. So you're not wasting time later on.
Jaryd Krause (17:35)
I'm curious, did you since listening to the podcast a while ago, and buying such Did you at all get the modules framework that we give away?
Garth Adams (17:45)
I didn't. You should get it. I haven't really bought many things. I've got a few subscriptions to tools.
Jaryd Krause (17:56)
The free this is a free like you can get it for free. It's free. That's what I said you should.
Garth Adams (18:05)
That's what I said you should pay enough attention. Yeah. Yeah. No, it sounds great. I had my own mind sort of framework. Not really a framework more like a little Pamphlet, like a checklist, right? Yeah, just a 10. Same questions. Once I've got sort of Google Analytics, which made me comfortable in purchasing the site or finding out more.
Jaryd Krause (18:27)
So you've bought 14, are we all roughly around the $1,000 range, increase it a little bit or once you bought a few you get your confidence up.
Garth Adams (18:36)
You haven't lost all the money. So they definitely increased in price. There was the ones for 1000. I'll just have a quick look here. Then, another one, I bought one, which was sort of based on a database of elevations for about 12,000. Us, one on ceiling fans for 14,000. Us. And then it went up and up. And then finally the most expensive one was around about 100,000 Australian on mobile phones, I was very confident I was getting a good deal with that one.
The site unfortunately hasn't done quite as well as I would have hoped. But in the end, it'll make its money. But it wasn't the homerun that I was hoping for. But yeah, the last site that I bought was actually no, some like the 10th or so was the site on laptops, and that has just exploded in traffic and reacts very well to new content. So these days, I'm actually spending most of my time just growing that site called that and that was I think 20 20,000 or so is us. Okay. So yeah, so all over all over the place.
Jaryd Krause (19:57)
Yeah. And become used to buying and so with that laptop site, what is That is that affiliates and ad revenue or is it one or the other mostly.
Garth Adams (20:05)
When I bought it, it was all affiliate, or Amazon affiliate and it was earning around, I think it was like 500 to 600 us a month, it had a decent amount of traffic, I think it was getting around 25 to 30,000 visits a month. And I thought, here's a great opportunity to put Ads on it and see how that goes. And again, I felt like I was getting a pretty good deal. The site was reasonably priced just on based on the Amazon income, adding the AdSense Oh, I didn't add AdSense, I think I added Ezoic at the time, and that basically doubled the income immediately. So I do a pretty good deal. Yeah. And just went from there.
Jaryd Krause (20:49)
Cool. Congratulations on all of those purchases. I'm going to come back to growing these sites soon. And, and some of the similar things that you've used or have done with I want that flight. And iknowthepilot.com.au. But first and foremost, like what are some of the things that you learned through doing due diligence and looking for sites, and it doesn't need to be specifically about due diligence, it could be about the buying process, it could be about the finding process, but what are some of the things that you learned that will be helpful for beginner investors as well.
Garth Adams (21:18)
Well, you need to act pretty quickly. There's been plenty of times when I have thought, Okay, this is a great deal. And something's $50,000 you don't want to just throw it away or jump too quickly. But yeah, if but if it isn't going to deal, and it looks like that, to me, it probably looks like that to someone else. And so you really do need to pull your finger out and just the message, that person immediately tried to get access to Google Analytics and get the deal underway as quickly as possible. Otherwise, you just got to lose it.
And after I think I went through a period of about a month and a half and hadn't bought a site. And it was like, I'm still working on the sites that I've got at the time, but you want to buy new sites, because you eventually want to get to the stage where use your buying and selling sites at roughly the same time. And if you're not buying any new sites, you're not going to get to that to that stage. But at the same time, you've got to have patience, when there isn't something out there, like don't change your criteria, just because you can't find a good deal doesn't mean you should exempt and worst deal, because you're just going to do poorly out of it.
Jaryd Krause (22:28)
I'm so glad that you said that. Because we have a lot of people in our community are learning how to do due diligence and find a site and in that process, they might see a case study of somebody that's bought a site within three months or and achieve X amount of results, they go cool, I'm going to set my expectation, you're going to buy a site at this size, make this much money, I'll be making this much money within three months.
And that expectation is absolute killer, because they don't meet that expectation. They might go away and go, Alright, I'm going to buy something just to be outside of my criteria and rush into something or they do the opposite thing. And they just go shiny object syndrome, go find that thing that's super shiny, chase it, which is buy a Starter Site that 90% of them don't work out, they get burns. And this because they don't realize that the person that got a site within three month period might not have a job and have a lot of time. Whereas the person that's put the expectation at three months, they've got a family, they got a job, and they got to do this thing on the side.
And they get to the three month period, they're stressed out and they're like, How can I not How have I not done this, I'm a failure. They try and make it work. That person who bought one within a three month period, has probably done six to 12 months of work in a three month period because they don't have a job. And they've gotten so much better at due diligence. And they've done due diligence on say 50 sites or whatever. And they're skilled and trained up to take action. Whereas the person with a family and has a job they're not, they don't have the ability to do that. So I'm so glad you mentioned that because this is one of the biggest chinks in the armor that people have and failures that people make when they're trying to buy sites and try to get into this is like talent. Yeah, time is of the essence of course, right?
That's why we have a turnaround time of 24 to 48 hours of reviewing businesses for our clients so they can they can get information, get better questions and white one as soon as soon as they're ready. And why we also train them up so they don't actually have to rely on us to review them. So they can do it themselves and execute straightaway. So time is of the essence but also don't rush too fast because sometimes we do need to slow down to speed up right I'm so glad you mentioned that.
Garth Adams (24:40)
It's very hard to be patient if you haven't had if you've got these goals and nothing's happening. Yeah. And also, if you don't purchase anything for one and a half months, it really feels like that's been a bit of a waste. But the even worse than If you buy to dump sites, they get hit by Google penalties that, could have been avoided because they were using risky link, building all that. Yeah. Anyway, that's, that's true.
Jaryd Krause (25:12)
That's yeah, I'm so glad you mentioned that. Did you buy these sites with the intention of taking the skills that you had learned from your previous content sites to input into the scallop? Like, use your leverage lead?
Garth Adams (25:26)
Well, that was the initial goal. The more than I did it, the more like some of the things that I was doing with under the pilot and I want that flight where applicable, definitely, in basic SEO of getting the titles right, getting internal links, Rives, page navigation, all that sort of stuff was right. But I also wanted to keep them at arm's length, as well, much more inclined to be risky, and buy link packages and buy, SEO packages, with these sites that are purchase rather than I want that flight. And I know the pilot, yeah, I want that fly, but I know the pilot, there's no way I would, risk getting banned or anything like that with them.
So but with these other sites, I'm much more inclined to give that a try. Also, once you've got a fair few sites, and if you've got some that are on the cheaper end, you're more inclined? Well, I was more inclined to just try things out, and just go, Okay, why don't we try this seller or this sort of thing. And that was interesting, too. I started out at various forums, buying link packages, you kind of get what you give them there, they would say, Here's five links from Dr. Such and such sites and everything, and he's go, okay, but then I found by actually going on Fiverr, that you can get not only cheaper prices, but you actually get to choose exactly which sites, a guest post will go on, or a link edit and stuff like that. And then you can actually run those sites through eight refs Ahrefs. Gosh, I've never even heard of that one.
And you can actually say, okay, yes, the Drs. Good, but this site is getting no traffic, so clearly, it's not really going to be worth much. Well, suppose as much as we know about SEO, this probably isn't going to be worth much. Whereas you can just choose, this one's got Hi, Dr. Hyde traffic, and having a look at the actual site. It looks like a real site. It's not just put up there to sell links and stuff like that. And yeah, and that was a much better progression than right at the start when I was just buying link packages and getting whatever.
Jaryd Krause (27:39)
And how much you paying for these links on Fiverr?
Garth Adams (27:45)
Roughly, ah, all over the place between 50 to 250. Us again, I'm Australian, but I all these things in US dollars. So yeah, between 180 and 400, Australian, all 100 Australian ones, they for high DR like 70, 80 tons, hundreds of 1000s of traffic, and you get a guest post, which will be linked in the proper categories and everything like that.
And buying guest post is another whole learning curve as well, because the these people will promise you no, definitely get a guest post then you get a guest post thing you've actually got to check if there's like a robots no follow or no index on the page. Or if the page has just been posted to a section on the site, which never is linked to. So it'll pay you guest posts will never be indexed and stuff like that. So you need to check all that.
And ideally, you're asking that, once you've done it a couple of times and find out these things, then you make sure you ask the sellers before you begin, okay, is this going to happen? Or just insist that that's going to happen? If you do link purchases through Fiverr? There's a pretty good process for you. Okay. So you can actually check the work. Oh, this is no good. Can you change this? And if they never get around to changing a thing, you're able to just reverse the sale, which is good.
Jaryd Krause (29:14)
Yeah. Cool. Cool. Yeah. So I guess you'd have a checklist of like, the parameters that each link should meet or each post should meet for it to be viable to continue the payment.
Garth Adams (29:26)
And, yeah, because it sounds like it’s just one checklist after another, doesn't it?
Jaryd Krause (29:31)
Yeah, that's what it is. My phone, not just for business, but like just personal stuff is just full of checklists, we live in the life yeah, content creation. Did you have a similar strategy? So the back the link strategy, obviously with your premium sites, in the travel space, you're not going to risk buying link packages and having a not so good link profile. So you're going to premium at How different boy.
Jaryd Krause (30:00)
As your content current content publishing and content creation strategy, and I'd say it'd be very different, right? Because I've looked at those travel sites. And it's very, it's not the norm of content sites when you think of a blog for those travel sites compared to ones that you're buying. So what worked well, in the travel for the travel sites for you in terms of content creation, and what are you finding is working well, with these sites you bought.
Garth Adams (30:22)
With the I want that flight and I know the pilot because they attract so many links themselves? I didn't have to go around and buy too many links. These days, when I was first starting out, definitely just.
Jaryd Krause (30:35)
Back in 2014. Right. Yeah.
Garth Adams (30:39)
That was it was they started a long way before then.
Jaryd Krause (30:44)
Probably 14 2014 is what, six years ago.
Garth Adams (30:49)
Six years ago?
Jaryd Krause (30:50)
Is a six years ago. I think it's more like eight, eight, sorry, yeah, my mouth is very off there. Yeah. So how long have you had how long? Have you had the travel sites? And did you start in?
Garth Adams (31:01)
Early 2000s? Early 2000s. Maybe me, me? Me? No, I want that flight was before Sudoku. So yeah, very early 2000s, like 2001 or so.
Jaryd Krause (31:16)
From Scratch, yeah, built back from scratch.
Garth Adams (31:18)
Onto the pile, it's much, much more recent, that was probably around 2016, the way those sites get traffic is actually mostly through email subscribers. And I send out deals and they respond and all that sort of stuff. And then luckily, people have been responding to, like deal. So they get by linking to me and linking to I know the pilot and stuff like that. But look, no one is going to link to these sites that I bought these insights insides.
Like some of them are okay. And definitely I have this one that was based on elevation, because that was that was like an old site. And it basically told you the elevation of any point on the world, given your latitude and longitude made attracted, it gets, I don't know, three or 4000 visits a day, just through SEO from all around the world.
Who knew and that one has a whole lot of historical links. But other sites that I bought were to do with sort of have a login to your accounts, like various accounts, like your Netflix account and stuff like that, yeah. And people are not going to link to these sites. And the English on some of the sites is not spectacular. So you've got to be out there purchasing links, I bought these sites knowing this and just wanted to try and wanted to see what worked and all that sort of stuff. So very, very different.
Jaryd Krause (32:53)
I'm so glad you said you bought these sites knowing this, that the English isn't the best. And like when people come to me to buy a site for 20k is very different to buying a site for what you're going to get for 100k, or a bit more with a 20k, you need to be very lenient with the quality of the contents and the backlink profile and, and all those sorts of things. It obviously has room for growth, but it has a lot less put into it usually a bit more risk than say a bigger site, of course, and that's a very general statement. But yeah, it's something for people to really understand is like, sometimes when I talk about like the ideal site, people like cool, I want to buy the ideal site, and they've got 20k like, well, we're 20 car you might not be buying.
Garth Adams (33:43)
What I have been explaining in the showroom.
Jaryd Krause (33:44)
Yeah, and I'm getting the Toyota. Yeah, exactly what sort of content strategy have you done for these sites.
Garth Adams (33:53)
Sites with say this first one that I bought for 900 bucks, its English was not good. And I in no way improved it. Accommodate that I was getting was dirt cheap. But I actually hired writers, again through a forum. And it was just ridiculously cheap. I think I was paying $2 an article or something like that, but it was honestly barely readable. And so I would go through and just pick up the most glaring grammar mistakes, and then post that, again, I knew this was not a sort of a quality thing. But I just wanted to see, what was working for that particular site.
And again, there's no way I do this on I want that fly to honor the pilot or any site that I really wanted to take to the next level. But I sort of thought this site is already on a very junky sort of niche. The content is already not great. And at this stage, I was very much experimenting with what's going on. I also thought that this site was in such danger of getting banned at any time, I felt that it's not worth spending a whole lot of money thinking that I'm going to sell it, because I don't apart from me buying it for 900 us, which wasn't a lot, either.
Even if I get the earnings up to whatever, no one's going to buy this for 10 grand, because it's just looking like any could be banned at any time by Google. So I didn't feel that it was worthwhile investing too much money in it. Where is the content for other sites and the content from my main site now, I've actually found writers through Upwork that have got, good to excellent English, and that are able to research articles on that, and they're still quite cheap. But the quality is worlds away from this cheapest site. Also using tools like Grammar that definitely helps.
So if you can, so I've actually purchased as a subscription for my writer, or former writers so that they can take whatever they've written, make sure that it sounds as well as they can, and is in a quicker time as possible.
Jaryd Krause (36:06)
Yeah, that's great. That's great. Yeah, we all know that quality over quantity is what Google's wanting. But sometimes there's the game of like putting out quantity at the start just to get rankings. And just to get, some runs on the board.
Garth Adams (36:21)
Well, I'm sure you've heard of people with AI created sites, getting hundreds of 1000s of visits in a quick time, just because they can pump out it reasonably good quality articles very quickly. Yes, which is, I think, worrying for the whole content business. But yeah, I think over the next three to six months, we'll probably see some action there.
Jaryd Krause (36:43)
I'm hoping so because Google doesn't need more content. They need better content. And Google, I'm sure we're going to put parameters around that. So where do you see yourself going with, buying sites and growing sites? Do you feel like you're going to long term hold on to a couple and sell the majority? And just continue working on those ones that you're getting traction with? Or are you looking at purchasing more as well.
Garth Adams (37:10)
It just kind of depends on travel, I'd much rather get back into travel, Get back, get the gang back together, as it were, yeah. The employees at the moment, it's not really a feasible, I think, a viable thing just yet. I mean, the travel is definitely improving, but there's no reason to invest a whole lot in it. Given the state of leisure travel around about October last year, I just noticed that one of the sites that I bought in, I think it was July or so was just really reacting well to any new content. And so I would split my time, at that stage, I would split my time between about five or six sites, and I would, get two articles to them, probably about three or four articles a month to each site.
And that was sort of working reasonably hard. But one of the sites would just increase in rankings. And the those new content would immediately rank was all the other sites were not doing badly, but doing kind of expected, just muddling along, it was sort of okay. And then so roundabout, October, November, I just decided, right, I'm just really going to concentrate on this new site. And then Google also had its product review, update, and I owned a few sites that were in well, in the firing line, basically. And I have no problem with that update. Because I think a lot of sites that were existing on Amazon reviews probably deserve that.
If you I don't know, if you've ever tried to buy anything online, and you read a review, probably just like me, you're going to this person, to really have a look at this thing or doing nothing at all ,yeah know, I was being generous there with asking the question. So I would really only trust review video reviews, you can at least see the person doing and that's what Google's going for. And I think that's fair enough. So anyway, so that called a few other sites that I had, which was not ideal for me, but I think it's good for the internet. Yeah, that's why I also decided to just concentrate on sites that will be earning money through ad revenue.
And this main site has just been occupying my time since then. And I think I showed you a traffic chart. Yeah. You get it up now to get over 17,000 visits a day. And a very, very healthy chart yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, I don't think I've been exceptionally clever with it. But I have been a recognized that this site is didn't react well to content and have decided to focus on that to the exclusion of other stuff. So I spend all my time on that site. Now. The sort of just treading water. And I'm just pumping as much quality content into it as I can. I don't purchase any links, I guess that's time to sort of say that that site is actually built on an expired domain.
Jaryd Krause (40:17)
Built on a five to nine. And then he bought it as a, as somebody built that site on an expired domain.
Garth Adams (40:22)
Yeah, so somebody had already bought it and built the site. And I think they'd had it for a year or two already. So I had a look at other expired domain sites before that, and I think I've actually purchased other sites. And I've definitely have no problem with expired domains, or age sites, or whatever you want to call it. But I realized that there's a definite risk in the first month or the first year, or maybe whenever the Google could just wake up and just go, Hey, wait a second, you're out.
But I think at this site had already been around for a while, since it had expired. And so the risk of that was very low. So I haven't actually had to buy any links at all, for that site exponent is really good. And it's now attracting organic links through people linking to articles that are on the site. I wouldn't say a whole heap, but at least is getting some cool.
Jaryd Krause (41:13)
And what niches that in that.
Garth Adams (41:15)
Again, it started with laptops, and it really focused on reviewing laptops, and then a few of the problems you might have, like how to reset this particular sort of laptop, or how to do this sort of thing. And then it's just expanded to basically anything, tick each of the articles or research that using a Griefs. Again, and determining whether this is a good niche to go into how many articles that I can get out of it, what's the search volume, all that sort of stuff. Cool.
Jaryd Krause (41:43)
Congratulations. That's excellent. I think that's a great, great episode. Just now I think we should maybe get you back on if you're open to it in a couple of months or a year or so and see where you're going with it all because hopefully, yeah, thanks so much for coming on. Where can we send people to check out more about you and what you're doing?
Garth Adams (42:03)
Ah, look, I don't keep much of a social media profile these days. Maybe just if they want to get in contact through LinkedIn. I think I've given you the link we'd like to have a holiday anytime soon. I know the pilot or I want that flight.
Jaryd Krause (42:17)
Yeah guys, check out those two sites. They are awesome sites so much value in them I checked them out the other day so have a look. There'll be links to those in the show notes too. Garth thanks so much for coming on. Garth Adams (42:23)
Yeah, well, thanks very much for having you have a great day. Jaryd Krause (42:25)
You too, everybody that is listening. Thank you for listening as well. Please, if you are open to it, do us a massive favor by sharing this podcast episode with somebody that is looking at trying to just make money online, possibly buying a site or growing a site. Share this podcast episode with them. It helps us help more people.
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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.
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