Ep 151: Buying & Growing Niche Websites That Make Money With Carl Broadbent

How would you like to replace your income with a niche website? Hey, this is Jaryd Krause, host of the Buying Online Business Podcast. And in this episode, I'm talking with Carl Broadbent, who has a portfolio of profitable blogs, one of which he actually teaches others how to make money from. In this podcast episode, Carl and I talk about how and why he turned to the internet to make money online, which is a very similar path to mine. We also talk about how to update our website's content.

Then we also talk about how much content we should update versus how much new content we should create, and what sort of ratio Carl likes to go by when building his niche website businesses. Carl and I also dive into the topic of content cannibalization and how we can actually stop that from happening within our own structures, content structures, and silos. Then Carl teaches us some of the mistakes he's made with his niche websites and how we can avoid making them in the long term, which I think is really important when you're looking to build a portfolio of sites that bring in passive income for yourself.

And then Carl starts to talk about how we can transform our content websites and niche websites into an actual community that thrives, with the byproduct of that being that it makes a decent amount of income. And lastly, we talk about why you should actually buy a content website instead of going through the startup phase, and why he continues and will continue to buy websites to skip past that startup phase.

This is such a valuable episode, you're absolutely going to love it. But before we get stuck in, because we do talk about buying websites, you should never buy a website without doing proper website due diligence. So I suggest you go away and get my Buying Online Businesses framework, which a lot of people have been raving about. I and all my clients use this framework to take the guesswork out of buying website businesses. So get that free framework at Buying Online businesses.com forward slash free resources.

There are other awesome free resources on that page too. So check that out. Let's dive in. 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. They do everything from start to finish. So from keyword research all the way to uploading your completed article, We've also had Bob members join ready-made affiliate sites built by Niche website builders.

So if you're looking to outrank and build better backlinks with niche website builders, I have a special deal for you. Head to nichewebsite.builders/bob. I'll 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 done for you affiliate site package to help you grow your website and get seen.

Instead of buying a crummy website that's being built to sell with no authority, buy a premium domain with built-in authority, great SEO, and fresh, quality content for your website. Head to ods.global to check out their great deals. That's odys.global. The link will be in the description too.

Carl, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much for inviting me. Yes, it's a pleasure to be here. Look, man, I'm really excited to have a chat with you. We've already had a quick little discussion off air and I'm just super stoked for you on how your progression in growing online has happened. And a lot of people listening to this are like, Yeah, I want to make an online income stream, right?

That's what a lot of people on the podcast who are listening to it want. So I want to ask you about the process. Normally, we don't really get into hero's journey stories on this podcast. We get straight into the stuff that's working at the time. And you know, there are quick bites of information that people love, but I think your story is going to be valuable for those listening. So why passive income? Why did you turn to the Internet? And what was your reason for wanting to do that?

I pretty much got handed my notice, a job that I had or a career that I'd been building for a number of years. I got called into an office and told, You're no longer needed. I was like, Thank you for the past seven years, but you know, see you later. So I went back on the job hunt, just like anybody else would. And I was lucky enough to get a job pretty quickly, but I had a few weeks gap in between.

And I just thought to myself, Okay, I've just given seven years of my life to this company. It's got me nowhere. And now I'm going into another job year to build up my career again, and who knows what will happen in this job? So I just thought about it and wondered if there was something different to do. So crazy as it might sound—and you know, everybody watching this podcast now has probably done this— I typed in how to make money online, it's as simple as that, and a video popped up.

Yeah, exactly, and it seems crazy, doesn't it? You know, it's guru status to say, you know what I mean, make money online, but I truly thought it was going to return a load of search results that are all scams and expensive courses and, you know, get rich quick schemes. I thought it was going to be, but luckily it wasn't. It was a video that basically just said, Do you want to make it a website? You can build a niche website, have it up and running in a number of hours, and do it now and start today. I was just like, Okay.

I looked at the video, and it was from Alex from WP Eagle, a YouTube channel, and it was a four-hour video on how to make a website. I pressed play, and I had my laptop, and I just watched it on my phone, watched it again, did a bit more, paused it, did a bit more, and I just did this for a full day, and at the end of the day I had a website. I am just a total internet and computer geek. You know, I don't know anything about them.

I really didn't, and you know, my wife came home, and she was like, What's that? I was like, A website, and she's like, Where did you get it from? Where did you buy it? I was like, I made it. I was like, Don't be silly; you don't even know how to turn a page, and I made a website in about seven hours, and from then on I was absolutely hooked. Obviously, I still had to start the new job. You know, I still had a website, but it wasn't making any money, so I just started working on it each night, watching YouTube videos, going on webinars, and reading books, and slowly I kind of pieced together that it is actually real and you can make money online, which yeah, who knew? Who knew it was the same thing?

I was living in Egypt at the time, and I just didn't want to go back to plumbing. And I was like, I want to travel. I just want to continually travel, and to do that, I need to make money online. So I just typed in how to travel the world and make money online. And mine was very similar. It popped up in travel blogging. People will write travel blogs. I was like, Oh, that's me. I'm done. I'm going to be a travel blogger.

And that's how my journey started. I want to, and you mentioned something pretty important that I like to do. I guess people would say, You're lying when you're trying to make money online because you said you still needed to get a job because your website wasn't making money. How important was it to have a job's income and income stream while you were working this out? How was that? Did you find that pretty important?

I wouldn't have been able to do it without having a job and an income coming in. I wouldn't be able to do it. And I actually think part of my kind of success on YouTube was me saying to people that I was showing them that what I was doing was saying, Okay, I woke up at six this morning, I wrote for an hour, I went to work, I've done a 12 hour shift, I've put the kids to bed, I've had some tea, and I'm going to write for another hour. And people are like, You know, you can't do this; you can't build a successful website, doing that's not possible.

And I kind of documented on YouTube what I was doing, and some days I'm getting on YouTube, and I was like, Oh, you know, I'm absolutely shattered, you know what I mean? I'm done today, but I'm just going to outline a post today; that's all I'll do. I've got half an hour, and I'm going to show up and tell people this.

And then, when they saw some success coming from my websites, people were like, Okay, maybe you can work and do this part time, and that snowball effect of it making a little bit of money, then you invest it and make a little bit more, and it keeps growing. And I think that's what helps me kind of in my channel, that I showed and documented that you can have a nine to five job or a full-time job and still do this. Yeah. I'm the same, and I teach people the same when they're trying to buy a business without another income stream.

The stress that you put on yourself to make it work can actually damage productivity, damage creativity, and damage the results that you get when you're trying to do it without an income stream coming in because you've really got so much riding on it. What do you think about that? Everything you have to do is no longer a risk that you can't afford to take. So it stops you from progressing, and you know that fear of trying something different and it not working when you've got limited time or resources can genuinely hold you back.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So through that journey, you've got some sites, and you're making your income now; this is your full-time thing, so congrats. What are you, from that day where your wife came home and it's like, You build a website, that's not possible, to now, what are some, like maybe two or three big mistakes that you think you've made as a content site owner that people, not so much about the starting phase, because a lot of people here are looking to buy content sites, but as an owner and an operator of a content site, what do you think some of the things that people should be looking out for or thinking about? I think some of the mistakes I've made probably more recently were maybe getting ahead of myself with some niches and thinking that it's possible to kind of rank content in any topic or any niche.

Sometimes you get into a little bit of a state above your status and think, I can do this. You know, I recently did a megasite. I had plans for putting thousands of articles on it and thought I'd test it with a good chunk of articles, 350 to 400, which to some people is kind of a lifetime's work to get 400 articles on a website, and I put this on in a matter of months, expecting it to absolutely rock it. You know, come out of the Google sandbox or whatever, it will rock it, and it hasn't. It hasn't done anything for literally 12 months. It's struggling, so sometimes you possibly get a little bit ahead of yourself; you think you know it, you think you've got it nailed, you think you know the process, and then often it comes back to bite you, and that one has done.

And then I think the other thing is that I think I've given up on some sites too early. When I say given up, I mean not totally giving them up but selling them or getting rid of them. When I think there are one or two sites I wish I'd held on to, I see what they are and think what I could have made of them. So yeah, I think that shiny object syndrome where you see something new and you want to move on, or you see that cash incentive that somebody offers you, somebody out of the blue just emailed me and said, I wanna buy one of your sites you've got in your video.

And I was like, Okay, and I was like, Here's 30 grand or whatever it was. I was just like, Okay, and I'm like, Done, take it. And then I kind of wish now, do you know what? I should have just held onto it. Why did I take it?

You know, I would have been making 15,000 to 20,000 a year, every year. So I think, yeah, selling sometimes means getting rid of them too early, just because you want to move on. You know, I'm a bit bad for that. I'm wanting to move on to new things too quickly, I think. Well, yeah, you've got the same thing as myself, and so many of us are like the curse of—I wouldn't say it's a curse, but we can drum it out of us—that shiny, not just shiny object syndrome, but just being an entrepreneur or a visionary, we want to be doing exciting new things, and what I've learned from people before Carl is that business, you know, A good business is a boring business, Yeah, where you do minimal work? And it makes good money, and there's minimal stress, And I'm just a huge advocate for that now.

Where I used to try a million different things, I now just want to see how much spaghetti I can cook up because I just want to cover this wall with as much spaghetti as possible, which turns into a massive mess really quickly. And we just end up running around in circles, right? Like those shiny object syndromes of even just other places that you can make money online. There are YouTube videos that show, you know, 20 ways you can make money online, and they all work, but they all just take up so much time. And to get good at it, you have to get good at it, right? Yeah, I mean, I've just been filming a video today. I'm going to do an end of year wrap up video.

And in there I say some of the failures and some of the things I don't think I've done right this year, and that is exactly one of them that I've spread myself so far. I was doing, you know, 17 videos on YouTube in a month, plus trying to run nine websites, plus organizing events, plus there was a mailing newsletter every month.

So I literally had to try to juggle so many plates, and I think you just spread yourself so thin that you actually don't get anywhere with any of them. They're all kind of plateauing rather than taking off. So yeah, I definitely think that is one thing that, you know, it's in my new year's resolution next year to really focus on a couple of things, a couple of core things in my business. Yeah, because I never did YouTube to have a goal.

It was never, or I'm building an audience up to do something, to have a membership group. It was nothing like that. I never had any plans, and I still don't. Yeah, if somebody said to me, Why have you got a YouTube channel? I'd probably struggle to answer that because I don't know. It was just to document my journey in the beginning, and then it kind of grew a little bit from there. But yeah, I've definitely spread myself too thin this past year.

Yeah, it's so easy to do, though, because what we get into is all of these podcasts, these YouTube videos, these blog posts, and these influencers telling us that you need to do this thing in your business to grow it. And if you don't, you're going to get, you know, you're gone. And then we go, Wow, all right, yeah, that makes sense. We need to go and try to add this thing to our business and add that thing to our business. Whereas, in fact, if we look at our business and tune into it, we can see that I've created a couple of pieces of content that worked really well, that made up most of my income. Like, just do that—more of that and less of what's not working.

And talking about content, Carl, a big reason I wanted to get you on here is because you're the man for this. I want to talk about content creation and how we can do it really well. Some SEO stuff as well, but once you've created content, how do you know, like in a blog on a niche site, which ones are not ranking so well and which ones are doing so well, and which ones you should cull and then which ones you should update?

Yeah, I mean, for me, I update, and I do it on a regular basis. I have a kind of rolling month method, so I will, every three months, look at a certain number of pieces of content on a site, see if it needs refreshing or updating. Basically, I just go by numbers. If a blog post for me brings anything over 200 page views a month, I don't touch it. It's enough. It's enough.

I haven't invested hundreds of dollars in a single piece of content that has to bring in a thousand, two thousand, or three thousand visits a month to be worth it. The majority of the content I create costs anywhere from $30 to $80 per post. So if that brings in 200 page views per month, then it's fine; I'll leave it; I won't touch it. If it's under that, then yeah, we can look at that. If it's only getting 50 or 100 page views, then it might be worth the time to update it and see if we can boost it. But what I would look at are the ranking positions on it.

So if that's only getting 50 page views a month, it might be in position one, but it might just not be getting searched. So it might be a keyword or an article that you actually just leave there because, you know, maybe that topic's gone out of season. It's not being talked about, it's not trending, and it's not in fashion anymore, but maybe it will be next year. So there are various factors, really. You have to look at it and think to yourself, You know, I'm only getting 50 searches a month.

That's 50 visitors a month, and that's because it's position seven, which is fair enough. Then we need to see if we can knock it further up, and will it jump it up into those 200 paid views a month? Because I kind of go on a bit of a quantity basis. So I publish a lot of content. I kind of love John Dykstra's methodology, where he just creates a ton of content and is the same. He doesn't have to be number one in every article. It has to bring in a couple hundred paid views a month. And that's enough.

When you've got 700 articles on a website and they're all bringing in 200 page views a month or more, then you're doing well. So yeah, that's really how I do it. Looking at analytics and dates, Google Search Console is one of the best things you can do. So since you create a lot of content, what's your ratio of new content created per month? I guess it's the number of new pieces created per month versus how many you update per month. What's like, do you have a ratio that you use?

I used to try to update around 20 to 25 articles per month. That's what I used to do. And then, as the portfolio got bigger, it kind of turned into a three month process. So now I kind of just look at what websites are not doing well. So if a website in general seems to be on the decline, then I will go into it. So at the moment, I have one pet website; it's a case study, and everybody knows about it. And it's been dropping off a cliff. The traffic's dropping off; I've had every SEO expert look at it. None of us can figure it out. So I am going back over some of that content, and we are refreshing that.

So there's a lot of focus on that site. So I'll pull some of my team off of writing new content and just put them on there. So rather than it being a fixed ratio, sometimes it's a bit of crisis management. And if it looks like something's going down, then we'll jump on it. But if we still see that green upward trend at that point, Yeah, it's a really good point. And so, say a site is going downhill like that and you need to update the content. What are some of the things that you typically do to update the content? You look at it, you order it, and then what would you be changing to make this better?

So number one, one of the biggest reasons content doesn't do well is that it just doesn't meet the search intent, meaning it's not hitting the target audience. So you may be getting clicks on it, but it might not be the people who want to read that content.

I'm looking at it; is it relevant to that search? So is it coming up in searches for the right topics and the right keywords? So the person who reads that title and clicks it knows what they're getting. If they're not getting what they want, they're going to bounce, and they're not going to click through to any more articles. So the main thing for me is looking at it as a reader, as if I've searched for it.

So I've seen that title in SERPs; I've clicked it; what am I getting?

And half the time, in fact, probably 75% of the time, it's not right, it's not meeting there. It's full of fluff, it's full of waffle; it's just not what they're after. And that's what we tend to look at. It doesn't tend to be anything more technical than that.

You know, you could say, Okay, we'll try and win extra snippets; we'll try and win secondary snippets. So we'll go after the main title snippet, and we'll answer the question straight away. Then we'll go after H2 and H3 paragraphs, and we'll try to win snippets in those paragraphs.

Do we need any more internal, external links? We can do all that, but the biggest failure is usually that it's not what people expected to read when they clicked it. Wow, so that's basically the 80, 20 of it is just, guess if your titles are clickbait and they don't get the result that they want from the article? Is that an example?

Yeah, or it could just be ranking for the wrong keyword. What you expected it to actually rank for, it may not be. So, as a prime example, you could be writing an article about golf clubs. I'm a keen golfer, and I used to have a golfing website, so let's say you might be writing an article about custom fitting of golf clubs, and you write an article about golf clubs, and it primarily ranks for, let's say, golf club grips, and you don't realize that because you've not checked it, you just think it's getting traffic, so you leave it, but people are actually wanting to know about custom fitting of golf clubs, and that's what your article suggests, so they click that, and then all you're going on about grips and angle lie and shaft, you know, materials.

And it's not actually about the custom fitting process. So you've accidentally run into something you're possibly not targeting with that article. So, and that's usually the problem. That you're just not satisfying the reader with what they expected it to be. So, and often that can be just a small change. You know, you could just change the H1 heading. You could just change that and actually go, Okay, they're clicking on this and wanting this information, but they're not getting it, they're getting this other information, so I'll rebrand that a bit so that article suits them.

So instead of upsetting 90% of the people, you're now already upsetting 10% and pleasing 90%. So sometimes it can be as simple as that. Yeah, cool, cool, that's really good. I want to talk about content cannibalization. Yep. What is it, for people who don't know what content cannibalization is, and what does it look like? Usually, you're just ranking two articles for a very similar keyword. So you might be trying to create a silo or a structure of articles all around one keyword.

But what they don't realize is that they are often negatively impacting an article that might be doing well. So you might have one article that's fighting against another one. And what happens is that instead of both of them going up the search, It symbolizes both of them and eats away at both of them. So both of them are pulled down in the search rankings because they're conflicted. And how do you avoid that?

It is difficult to avoid it, and it's usually hard to spot when it's actually happening. And often people will just delete one of the articles, and suddenly one article shoots to number one because it was being held down and pulled down by the other one. Technical SEO experts can probably find a way, but yeah, I mean, usually it's just tracking through Google Search Console and seeing the rankings of both of those articles.

It might be more; it might be, you could have 10 articles that are all fighting against each other. Sometimes it's worth combining them all into one. And then you find out that one article goes up in the SERPs rather than 10 of them being pushed down to pages three and four. So yeah, it can get difficult, it can get hard to spot.

And it's very difficult for a publisher to delete something. is one thing you'll find with all publishers, the panic of deleting an article or cutting it down as well. You may find that if you've got cannibalization in a couple of articles, it might just be as simple as taking one paragraph out of one of those articles. But the thought of having to delete a section of it can be terrifying because you've either paid for that article or spent a lot of time writing it. But it is difficult. I've not come across it a lot, to be honest.

I think it's just a case of not structuring it correctly. So they're fighting against each other, and I realize it probably would have been better to make them one, but it is difficult to spot. I just want to pause this episode for an immediate update. Online business owners and website investors, SEO, and digital marketing are changing forever.

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Buying and Building Online Business in 2022. We're going live on January 28th, and you can register at buyingonlinebusinesses.co/onlinesummit. That's buyingonlinebusinesses.co/online summit. There'll be a link in the description too. Yeah, cool. So staying on content creation AI for content creation, do you use it? Um, if you do use it, why?

Why not, and where do you see this going for bloggers, niche site owners, and content site owners? Yeah, personally, I don't use it. I used it when it first came out. But last year, the big craze came into the public eye. Everyone started using it. And I did try it, and I did promote it a little bit. I was using it for things like YouTube intros, product descriptions, catchy titles, and blog titles. I was using it for that kind of thing.

I did try to create actual full articles using it, but I struggled. I struggled. I spent more time trying to get it to do what I wanted it to do, and I could have just written the article. So, as a fact, when I fact-checked it a little bit, again, it wasn't brilliant. Now, some people have learned to use it very well. So, some people have learned to use the tools to the best of their ability, and I think that's what the problem is. I think sometimes we get these tools, like Ahrefs and things like that.

Skills to use them, how they should be used. If you'd gotten the developer of Ahrefs and said, Okay, show me how to find keywords with this tool for X, they would do it. Whereas if you asked you and me, we would probably struggle, and it would probably take us so long to actually find them that it might be time wasted. So I think learning to use those tools—and I know there are some people who're doing really well with AI content creators—will do fine with them because they know how to use them to their best ability.

But personally, I have a team of writers, and, you know, they're human beings who do proper physical research and, you know, fact find and check everything. And if they don't, they're not going to get paid. So they do great work. And, you know, I didn't want to get rid of my team and replace them with AI tools. So I have nothing against them, to be honest. You know, if you can create a great piece of content that is correct, reads right, and ranks well, good luck to you. I do think it will be big in the future.

I do think the next few years are going to see some massive changes in it. I think the tools will get better. I think the usability is better. And I have no doubt that it will be a serious tool for creators in the next couple of years. But right now, I think it's still quite hard to actually use them to their fullest ability, and I've never bothered just because I've heard so many people talk about that.

Carl is like, There's just a lot of work in learning it and tweaking it, and you know, at the moment, I think it's still too hard to really replace a human being that knows about the content and the space that they're writing about and putting that thing that you can't actually see or measure, which is love, right, putting that little bit of love into those pieces of content.

I want to ask you about... You tend to find that content writers are really passionate about the work that they do. So they take pride in what they do. I had to email a writer today and just say she cut off one of the sentences, so one of the paragraphs, the sentence, and she was devastated. I got about four emails apologizing, and I'll get straight on with it. She was absolutely devastated that she'd done it. You don't get that from AI content. Not at all.

30:13 I was like, Well, that's what happened; deal with it. And we won't even tell you that it happened. Exactly, exactly. So I do like that interaction and the thought that somebody's put some pride into the work. But like I said, I'm not going to go on YouTube and slate AI content or anything like that. I think there are people who are successful at it. And good luck to them. At the moment, it's not for me. If I can type a keyword in, I press go, and it's absolutely perfect and factually correct.

Then we might talk, but the minute is not. Yeah, that, and even I think people should realize that when that does happen, the game's almost over because anybody can just do that or can do keyword research really well and then get an article. So there's going to be those challenges with that too, I think. So I want to talk about a content site that is more than just a content site with articles but also a community, because this is becoming the standard for a good content site. It's building a community.

So how do we take a standard content site that somebody might buy that is about golfing, and say it's just a bunch of really good articles that rank quite well but don't have a community? How do we bring that into the picture? I think by personalizing it, some personalization will be added to that website.

If I'm doing a website about golfing and I have some interest in it, then you've got to reach out. You've got to reach out to fellow people who are in the hobby or the sport, and you've got to get their interaction, and you've got to get them on board. Because people will see it. I have a fishing site, and I've just actually managed to get a writer who loves fishing. He just absolutely lives and breathes it. and you can just tell.

You can just feel the connection to the articles and the person. And I'm not saying everybody can reach out and find somebody, a specialist in whatever particular niche they're in, it is very hard. But I think you have to try and have that element. So whether it be product research you're doing, then getting your hands on the product, seeing the product, you know, actually living and breathing it before you write about it.

If it's informational content, then reaching out and talking to people—you know, groups, Facebook groups, and things like that—and trying to get that connection out to those groups. I had a perfect example, I had a skincare website. This is what got me started right at the beginning, and that was very personal.

It was personal to me and personal to my family, and I reached out to as many people as I could who had this skin condition, and I found a lady who was really suffering with the issue, but she had an amazing story. She battled this condition, and she was featured in newspapers, TV documentaries, and everything else.

And we got that connection. We made that connection. And she then started writing for the website, and it just made that website so personal. Anyone who read it just instantly knew he'd gone through this problem, he knew what my son was going through, or he'd hit the nail on the head.

We suffered from that, and it was great. It wasn't salesy, it wasn't selling. You could just feel the authenticity of that website, and I think that was just because it was people living that condition and talking about it, so yeah, I think personalizing it in such a way as possible and building that group around it can be done. It can be done. It's very difficult. It depends on what the niche is.

Some people don't want to be involved, and some people might not, especially if it's around a lot of products and stuff that people think is salesy and they want to use you as a sales platform. So that can be difficult. But sometimes the genuineness of you, your blog, or your website can come across. And then that really helps.

I'm so glad you mentioned that. This is going to be a big eye opener for people listening, looking to buy a website business, a content site, or even start one. A lot of people just want to make money online; they want to be behind the screen, and a lot of personalization has been taken out of content sites in the last few years. There are good ones out there that have it, which is good. And they just crush it.

And it's not so much about the focus on making money, it's about how we really touch people, really help people, even if it's just a good information article. And yeah, we can have ads on the site, but the main priority is helping somebody. And I think that people who go into it with that intention without having to just be able to hide behind a screen can do that with good writers who can run it and build a community, like you said.

So I think that's something that really needs to be done. I think a lot of people in our game really need to step it up in that area. What do you think about that, Carl? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, right at the beginning of this podcast, one of the things I said was, You know, I regretted letting some websites go too soon.

That was one of them. Yeah. Now I regret that because, you know, it wasn't a big money-making machine, but it helped people. It really touched people. It was being featured. It won something like a second, I won't say the actual skin condition, website away, and I sold the website, but yeah, it won't like second place in like the most helpful blog in that category, and it won that two years on a trot, and that was just fantastic; it was getting featured in magazines, and it was really helping people, and like I said, that young lady who then started writing for me, it helped her, you know, for about three years, she said you've helped me through so many hard times just writing about my experience, and I was like, no, you've done, and it was beautiful.

And it just grew from that. People could just see that it was such a genuine site. And like I said, you know, there were products on there for people to buy, but they weren't pushed down their throats. The main emphasis of this was, again, sharing my experience with that medical condition that my family had. So I think it shone through.

I think people could see that. And like I said, that was one of the sites I wish I had. I wish we had kept hold of that one, because I still think, I mean, it's still out there, and it's still helping people. But yeah, I think I could have added to it. I think we had more ways to go on that, yeah. I think we could have done a lot with that sign and helped a lot of people.

Yeah, good work. That's really good. I think the most valuable thing that you got from that may have been that you realized that the difference between just being a website business and actually being a resource is putting love into it to make it a resource, and then the byproduct is, you know, that it makes money. I think that's one thing that you probably learned about being realistic.

I'd be realistic with it. And it was never going to be the biggest site in that category. It was never going to rank all the medical websites that are out there, like WebMD and stuff like that. I would have to be realistic. And that's what happened. It was like Ricky and Jim from Income School. It was them who kind of said to me, Are you going to need to make money here to kind of, you know, just do this as a hobby? And at that time, I was like, Okay, you know, I'm in it for a living. I need to make a living.

They were like, Well, you know, you need to make money. to make you money. And this site's fine, but it's not going to make you a ton of money; it's going to help people, and you're fine; keep it going if you want to do that. But if you want to make money online and do it for a living, then you need to create something easier to rank; there are easier websites to make money from. And that's primarily why I ended up selling it, because the money that I got from that site I used to launch my portfolio of websites. So there was no harm in it; it was done with good intentions.

I probably kept hold of that one, but then again, if I had, I probably wouldn't be where I am now. So, you know. I'm a big believer that everything happens for a reason. Yeah. And I wanted to ask. The last thing I want to ask you is about buying sites. Would you ever consider buying a website? Have you bought one? If so, why would you buy one over starting one? I have bought sites, but only small ones. I've never bought anything larger than $5,000 or something like that. I think I bought a few at three and 4,000.

The reason I would buy them is just to leapfrog, you know, the Google sandbox and that six, seven, or eight month waiting period that is painfully slow to go through. I've actually started building a lot of sites now on older domains because I'm just so impatient. And those first six or seven months are, you know, why so many people give up. I'm an experienced content creator and website builder now, and even I get fed up and bored with that period.

And after six months of only barely getting a trickle of traffic, even I am sometimes ready to throw in the towel. So you can imagine what the summary is like on their first ever website, and they're trying to go through that. So if you can buy a website that's already getting traffic, it's got a few backlinks, and every time you press publish on a piece of content, it indexes. That's all I want.

I'm not bothered by rankings. I just want to make sure that if I press publish on a piece of content, it appears. You know, that's all I want. And if it can do that, then the floodgates are open. I can then just go at it. And that's what I tend to do across all my sites. Whatever shows promise, we then pull our attention to that, and we throw everybody out there. And I think that's what you get when you buy a site. If it is a genuine site and everything's clean on it, then the floodgates are open.

It's that green light, go, go, go, content, content, content. I think that's a great piece of advice for people who are like, I want to make money online. And for somebody who knows what they're doing or, even longer, has experience, they know that it's going to take that long. It's still a long timeframe for it to get indexed. And for somebody who's just starting out, could you imagine that it must feel like six years?

It's crazy, especially if they're putting money into it. So if they're not writing themselves, when you tend to write yourself, the time goes quicker. Because if you're only managing to write one article a week or even two, six months will just fly by. But if you're putting money into this, if you have a site that's brand new and then you spend $1,000 on content in month one, then in month two you ramp it up and it's 2,000 in month three, by the time you get to month six, you're explaining to your partner about this site and they go, Great, what's it earning?

You go, I've got 400 visitors this month and it's made three dollars or something; it's just crazy; it sounds insane, and that's the point most people go, Oh, you know, let's stop or let's get rid of it and sell it and get his money back, so yeah, jumping the gun by buying a site is definitely an option; it's always an option. Yeah, awesome. Let's talk about your upcoming events. When is this event? What is the event, and when is it?

I'm pretty excited for you about this. Yeah, I'm excited myself. Yeah, we've been talking before; weren't we about to? It's pretty much the focus of my life at the moment. It's called the Affiliate Gathering. And we're calling it an Expo. It's basic, like a conference, but it's not serious. It's where we're going to get a group of speakers together and a group of affiliate marketers, bloggers, and YouTubers together in May. So it's May 2020, Friday the 20th of May 2022, So next year we've got six months left at the time.

This is going out, and Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. We've got some amazing guests. We've got Ricky from Income School, John Dykstra, Ben Adler, Mealy Gardiner, Leon Angus, and Sean Maas. There are tons and tons of people there, and plus, we've got some—we just announced some—so on the day while there are presentations in the main hall, we're going to have some workshops going on as well.

So we've got people like Tyler from Ezoic, who's going to come in and show you how to maximize your ad revenue on your website. We've got Fiverr coming along, and we've got niche website builders who are going to do a workshop. So there are some fantastic things going on all day. It's going to be absolutely crazy. There will be things going on all over the place. It is also going to be filmed.

That would be the best way to meet like-minded people. If not, there is an online platform where you'll be able to, and we're going to stream it all day. Now we're not just going to stream the main speaker, we're going to stream in the corridors. We're going to meet people, we're going to chat, and we're going to be interactive. We're going to ask questions, and you're going to be asked questions because we're going to have a Q&A session. And you're going to be able to answer a question online, and we'll be the panelists and even people in the audience.

And that's why I wanna get across. It was called an affiliate gathering because it's just a gathering of people. It started off like that. It started off with me talking to about 20 bloggers and affiliate marketers and saying, Should we get together? You know, we've had a horrible year with COVID and everything like that. Should we get together next year? And it was like, Yeah, let's do it. And then I asked somebody else, Oh, I'll come, oh, okay, you come. Oh, and I'll come, and I'll bring my friend, okay. Before I knew it, it was like 50 people saying, Okay, we're coming. I was like, We're okay.

This and make it something a little bit bigger. I remember you asking me if there was anybody that you thought would be, you know, might like to come, and I was like, yeah, what about these guys? And you're like, Yeah, they're coming. Yeah. Okay. And then when you told me the list, I was like, Well, a lot of people have been on the podcast. So I don't have many people to contribute anymore. Yeah. I mean, people, you know, Ricky from income school was one of my first choices. I know Ricky from my past experience.

I had a competition with them, and they pretty much got me started in this whole business. So yeah, I personally know Ricky's a great guy, and yeah, Ricky jumped at the opportunity. I think it's a good way for some of the speakers to also reach out to their audience because they have it; some of them have membership groups, some of them have a YouTube audience, but it's not just the speakers; the amount of influencers and people that are going to be there is crazy.

There are some people who haven't even announced it; they haven't even said anything; they've just bought tickets, and I've seen the names on the list. It's like, Wow, they're coming. They would have been on stage if I'd known, and you'd have been on stage, but they're just showing up. So not only are you going to meet the people that are on the speaker list, but you're also going to meet people in the audience and in the crowds.

And I think that would be a great way to, you know, see some of these people that you've either read about or seen on YouTube and just interact with them and ask them questions you've always wanted to ask them. They're going to be there in person.

That's awesome. So where can we send people to check this out? AffiliateGathering.com. Yeah, just go to AffiliateGathering.com and you'll see ticket sales are on there, all the information is on there. Tickets are selling really well. I'm really pleased. So I think it will definitely be pretty much sold out. And like I said, there are six months left to go.

But if you can't make it in person, get the online ticket because it is going to be live, but they will make sure that if you buy an online ticket or you come in person, everybody will get a downloaded edited version of the whole event. So you'll get it all. So if you don't get to see a certain workshop or a certain speaker on stage, you'll be able to watch it back with your own personal copy of the whole event.

So no expense has been spared on the filming. It's a very professional team that's involved in that. This is not just me behind the scenes trying to arrange this. The conference team and management team that I've got and that we've employed are running the whole show behind the scenes. And then we have a full professional film crew that's coming in on the day to do the whole live streaming and filming.

So yeah, I'm really excited. I'm slightly nervous now, but probably more excited than nervous. Yeah, that's good. Awesome guys, check that out. Go to that link. It'll be in the description. Carl, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Please think about two to three people that either own a content site or are going to own a content site in the future and share this podcast episode with them so they can learn what mistakes they can avoid and what they can do to set themselves up for success with their content sites.

That's it, guys. I'll speak to you soon. Bye.