Ep 185: How To 10x A Website You Bought with Karl Kangur

Jaryd Krause (0:00)

How would you like to 10x the business that you just bought? Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast. And today I'm speaking with Karl Kangur, who is a serial entrepreneur with 14 years of SEO experience. Day to day he runs Sales and Marketing for an SEO agency called Smash Digital and their investments, arm Smash.vc. And he's had three successful exits in the industry and is an avid practitioner still running a portfolio of content websites on the site. In his podcast episode, Karl, and I talk about the types of websites he's bought and sold. We will talk about what types of businesses he likes to buy, why he's bought those businesses.

And we break down some metrics, like what are the things that he looks for in terms of DR, backlinks, content, all these different types of things when buying a content website, what a good one looks like, and one that he shoots for to buy, and why we will talk about where he's bought the sites of sale, not all just from brokers, we will talk about how and why you should have or build leverage before buying a site and how you can actually do that we dive in as well and talk about your available capital. Sometimes people are trying to invest as much money as they can into an online business, which makes sense because they want the bigger the business they get usually the less risk. And this is a very general statement. And the less work it can be in the more stable.

But how much of your available capital should you allocate to just the acquisition? And then how much should you spend on growth on the business afterwards, and we talked about the different percentage amounts throughout the podcast with car with talks, then we move on and talk about growing these types of businesses and how he's had success taxing to sites that his he's had, and then also doubling, some of the sites he's had and some that somebody has for different clients and case studies and stuff like that. And what are the some of the things that he looks for when wanting to grow a site.

And most of it comes through different types of monetization and tapping into things that the previous seller hasn't actually tapped into. Lastly, we talked about advice for first time investors. And there's something that Karl mentioned that I disagree with not totally disagree with. But some aspects I do disagree with. It's a great discussion between us. And it's and we talk about who's best suited to what type of growth path in the online business space who wants to replace their income with money online. So it's a very interesting conversation that we have. We are both on the same page. But initially, I disagree with some of what he was actually saying. So it's quite cool. Check that out.

Lastly, we talked about smash digital, the SEO agency that he works for, and we talked about the 80/20 of the SEO and backlink and the prices of the backlink backlinks they actually sell there as well. And there's different types of packages. This is so much value in this podcast episode for somebody who's looking to buy a content website and then scale it. So I hope you enjoy it.

Before we do dive in an episode we talk about buying websites a lot. Please, please, please do yourself a massive favor and don't go away and buy a website alone get my due diligence framework. It's what I and my clients have used to go away and fight. Help us take the guesswork out of doing due diligence for businesses that we have bought. And it's helped people make hundreds of 1000s of dollars and save people hundreds of 1000s of dollars. So don't do this alone, get my framework made a lot easier. You can check that out of buyingonlinebusinesses.com/freeresources.

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Karl welcome to the podcast.

Karl Kangur (4:14)

Hey, Jaryd, thanks for having me.

Jaryd Krause (4:16)

Looking forward to this chat mate. So you've been in the industry of buying and selling sites for quite a while now. When did you buy first site?

Karl Kangur (4:25)

So I actually started as a builder. So I've been doing this for 14 years. I'm 26. So that's literally more than half of my life. In the beginning, I was just building various sites, Amazon affiliates, content sites, a little bit of everything. Then I sold my first site when I was 16. Second one at 18. And then after 18. After that first exit, I actually started buying as well. And since then I've personally bought four sites. And then we have an investment company where we buy parts of businesses.

Jaryd Krause (4:52)

Yeah, cool. And so since you've grown multiple sites and sold them what sort of got you into buying them instead of going building them from scratch or starting from scratch.

Karl Kangur (5:02)

So my core skill has always been SEO, that's how I got started. And with SEO, the main thing is, it takes a long time to get out of the sandbox, so to say, and just to get the ball rolling. So oftentimes, you're investing for a year, year and a half just to really get traction with things. And we quickly figured out if you if you buy something that already has traction, you can kind of skip that.

So if the sides already getting some traffic, then it's just up to you to pick the right keywords, create better content, and you can just hit the ground, running much, much faster. And you can clearly see when Google likes the site, or it doesn't. So if you buy something and Google likes, you're kind of taking the easy way right away.

Jaryd Krause (5:43)

Yeah, spot on. Why I like to explain growing businesses is or growing anything in life, even personally is getting data, getting feedback from the universe, one of those tools can be Google, getting data and feedback from them on what's working, lean into more of what's working and do less of what's not working around. When you buy an online business, you can get all of that data straightaway. And sometimes the previous owner, will, we would say a lot of the times the previous owner haven't really tapped into that, if you if they don't know how to.

So many growth strategies that come from that. So we'll talk about growth strategies, I'm sure. And you mentioned creating better content, all that sort of stuff. But I want to dig into your portfolio a little bit. What is your so you bought four sites? Before we dig into the portfolio? What did you what did you learn? Like, what was the hardest part about buying the sites like the due diligence? Where did you find them? What was some of the lessons that you've learned through the purchasing phase?

Karl Kangur (6:41)

Yeah, I think the biggest lessons lesson has been just to take your time with it. Like when you have the capital to actually buy something, it's easy to just like cut corners, like, Oh, this looks pretty good. This is our right, there's some opportunity here, but like, you really have to, like resist until you find something you've probably heard it like, if it's not a hell yes, it's a no.

And that's really the approach you need to take with these sites, like something needs to be an absolute no brainer. And that's when you make the biggest returns. Because especially most of these sites being SEO based and so on, there's always a risk, when you buy a business, there's still risk, you're going to get hit by Google update, or something's going to happen or anything could go wrong with it.

And then if you're taking that risk, and you've got like a small edge for buying in, it's not really worth it. So if you're going to take the risk, you need to have something that has, potential to have a home run. So like the first major site I bought, it wasn't major, when I bought it, it was it was for about 30k, it was making $1,000 a month. And I 10x that in one year. And that was just I knew ahead of time that it was under monetized and was going after the wrong keywords. And like, I already knew the exact plan I was going to have when I was buying it, it wasn't like, Oh, we're going to change some buttons here optimize this a little bit. It was really like planning for a home run.

Jaryd Krause (7:56)

Yeah. And it's so much easier to build a business. So say you're trying to build something on a platform, if you buy a platform that's really solid and really stable and doesn't have too much risk. So much easier to build. On top of that. It's like in property, a lot of people say the profit is in the purchase.

And I strongly believe that it's so true, obviously, to 10x, your site, you had to put in some work would have been easier doing it on a on a better platform than say, just trying to buy something quickly, I find that a lot of people that come to Bob, and the community have money, they have this pressure that they put on themselves that they want to achieve a certain amount of an income goal per month, and quit their job within a certain amount of time. They want to try and do it within like a six month time frame or a year timeframe.

And they put so much pressure on themselves that they kind of forced themselves to buy any business, which is where we come in and we pull the reins in a bit and say Hey, hang on a second, let's you're spending money that you've saved over the last five to 10 years, let's make sure you're doing it in a in a just way that's going to serve you not rock you back and put you back even further than where you are as you're starting now. What other things did you learn through the tutorials phase and buying?

Karl Kangur (9:06)

I think it's important to invest a lot more than you should I think a lot of people buy these sites and they don't really plan for growth budget. So they have 100k, they'll buy a site for 100k. And then it's like, Okay, now what you're going to write the content yourself, like, how are you going to make this ROI back, right. So I feel like at least 30% of the purchase price you need to set you set up for growth for our content or more links and things like that. Otherwise, the site's going to be stagnant. And if you leave something stagnant for too long, it's inevitably going to decline. Because I feel like momentum with online businesses is pretty critical.

Jaryd Krause (9:44)

I totally agree. You want to keep things going and you want to be able to if if your goal is to increase it, you need to have money to invest in it. Right. So what are some of the things that you look at when you're looking at buying a content site? What are some of the things that you go That's like my allow you to see that it's a good investment like, pretty quickly, because I've been asked this question in my group as well like, what are some things that I look for, then when I see a site, I go, yes, this, this is potentially a great one to buy. It's sort of like you can only really identify once you've looked at so many sites, what are some of the things that you, you see that a significantly valuable or good to have in a good site, looking to buy one.

Karl Kangur (10:27)

So I look for three main things. The first of all, I want something that's super stable, I don't like sites that go up and down these massive swings where every Google updated, it goes up, and then it comes down again, it goes up, like, I don't like that there's plenty of boring sites out there that have just been slow, slow increase, or even just flat for a long time. But I feel like those are at least a safer bet.

And that's something that's really important to me. The second thing I look for is for monetization. So if someone doesn't know how to monetize, ironically, that first site was the biggest dog on website monetization. And when I bought them, they were making $1,000 a month, but they were experts on display advertising. So they were only running ads on the site. And it was all about Google AdSense and media dot net. And like, all these ad networks, and like none of those companies paid any, any good commissions, it was like, tiny percentages, but the site had tons of visitors, it had tons of authority on Google, like, it could have rank for so much more.

So immediately, I could jump in and start promoting like some SEO Tools back then, I think I became an affiliate for long tail Pro. And I was like, oh, publishers, you want to monetize your site, just publish more content. And now we start getting recurring commissions off different software, and so on. And so that was an easy one. And for the current site that I bought a couple of years back. And I've also TEDx since then, it was the same approach. It was the biggest social media marketing blog. That means they could promote Buffer, Hootsuite. And that's about it.

And like, they only talked about social media marketing, but I was like, in my eyes, this side is about everything online marketing, online business. So now I can talk about pretty much anything, creating an online course starting their podcasts doing webinars, ecommerce, like you name it. And that just opened up so many more avenues for monetization that they didn't have before. So that's probably the second thing.

Jaryd Krause (12:25)

Yeah. And it looks like you added in so many more categories, or maybe not many more, but a few more categories and keywords that allowed you to create more content, as well, but have still be relevant within that niche. Is that right?

Karl Kangur (12:41)

Yeah, I think a lot of people like underestimate what relevance is. So they thought it's about social media marketing. In reality, it was everything online business, anything growth, anything I started publishing these site had so many backlinks from being the industry leader, and publishing, kind of a really related industry started racking just as well.

Jaryd Krause (13:01)

Talking about sort of like leaning into growth strategies, you mentioned to the sites you've bought, you're growing them quite differently to most people. Let's break. Let's break those down. So let's start with site. Number one, actually, let's give them names do they have? Are you open to sharing the names? Or would you rather keep them private, like a niche, put it in a niche category.

Karl Kangur (13:25)

I'd say the first one, let's say it was website monetization. And with that, the growth strategy was just expanding beyond what they were talking about, like the site didn't really grow in traffic that much, maybe a little bit for publishing new articles. But it wasn't that much growth, it was more about changing the monetization, and just finding something more profitable. Like, imagine, if you have, if you seek out to buy someone's like, hobby chess site, they talk about chess, but it's DR 60, site, tons of traffic, they got some ads on it, and you're like, wait, but I can also talk about different board games, I can do affiliate with that, maybe there's some kind of membership site for learning chess, that's 99 bucks a month, maybe they have an affiliate program, they're not promoting that.

So looking for looking for wins like that. And then with the second one, kind of going back a little bit, I mentioned, there are three things I look for. The third thing I look for, is the site has to have a lot of authority. If anything's DR 60. Plus, it's probably a good site to buy. Because a lot of these a lot of the sites I personally like to buy or tend to buy are from the founder. It's not from these groups. They're not from other site flippers. I want a site built by someone who's passionate about the industry. And that means they're probably not online marketing experts.

They're not monetization experts. They're probably doing a lot of these things wrong. So maybe they have one or two categories that are doing really, really well in terms of income, and they've never really doubled down on that one category. So I'll just jump then double down and cover everything in that one topic.

Jaryd Krause (15:02)

Yeah, got yeah got. Yeah, that's a good point people that are actually passionate about the work they're doing. And they're not digital marketing experts, you can come in with your digital marketing experience. And that's leverage in itself. And that's what we should be looking for when we're buying a business is finding leverage in something that we can add to it basically coming back to your second step, but that was the first site.

So that's in like monetization and was at monetization. The niche. Yeah, website like display advertising, display ads. Yeah. And then so for the second one, what's the second way you can go in the second one, other than partnerships are the first one.

Karl Kangur (15:42)

The second major one was about social media marketing initially. And then I pivoted into everything online marketing. So again, I because the side was so authoritative, it was the industry leader. I just started writing about webinars, webinar hosting, podcast hosting, like all these different tools, and a lot of these are recurring revenue and things like Amazon as well.

So if I can get them before it was 1000 bucks a month off display ads, well, now if I promote one tool, where the average customers 100 bucks a month, I get 30% Commission's, this starts compounding really, really fast. So similar thing, just kind of abusing the site's authority to cover, more profitable things. So I think, you really need to figure out what is the best way to kind of monetize.

And then you want to find these hobby sites in the same industry that are not run by professionals, and then kind of loosely tie that back, so if someone has a personal blog about Amazon FBA, and they're only teaching how to do it, but they don't have a course they don't promote any courses, they don't promote any tools. They're just kind of sharing their journey or something. Like that would be like a perfect example.

Jaryd Krause (16:52)

And so to find these sites, where would you where are you looking for these? These last four that you've bought? Where did you find them?

Karl Kangur (16:59)

I've gotten to off just private, like network, just meeting people at conferences. Got the site? Mm, Cool. Cool. What is that? How much is it doing? And then going from there, and then Fe International, I bought two off there. And then basically just keep an eye on all the all the marketplaces. But I think most of the best deals you're going to get just by reaching out to people.

So if I decide, I want to be an affiliate for, let's say, Jasper, previously Jarvis. Yep. Which is like an AI content writing tool. They've got a great affiliate program, I think it's like 30, or 40%, its 100 bucks a month. And it's like, it's like one of those magic tools, like it's an easy sell, right?

So what if I find a site, and I just came up with this before the podcast, I might actually go ahead, do it. Find some site that teaches writing teaches how to write better headlines how to write essays, have to write short stories, like some kind of like Kindle publishing site or something like that.

And I bet they're not monetizing. Using that. And now you reach out, maybe they're getting some Kindle book sales, maybe they've got like a $20 eBook they sell. And now instead, I'll create like, a 14 day email course on that side that pushes Jarvis. Because every time its 40 bucks a month on each affiliate sale like that. And that just keeps compounding. So make it a part of their course. That funnel is much better than selling your book.

Jaryd Krause (18:28)

Yeah. So what you're basically doing is you're finding leverage through monetization, like through Jarvis before even buying the site. And I'll ask you, it sounds like you're a pretty big fan of the recurring commissions. Is that is that a strategy that you implement in most of the blogs that you're working with?

Karl Kangur (18:52)

Yeah, so most of the sites I have are in like digital marketing, or that type of niches, and software just makes sense. Like, if I get you to sign up for Convert Kit or Mail Chimp or something like that is very painful to switch like an email marketing platform.

If someone if someone sign up, they're going to be sign up for three, four years, they're also going to keep upgrading their plan. They started off with 1000 contacts, then its 5000 minutes 20,000. And like, even if I unpublished that post, I'm still getting keep getting those commissions for lifetime. So any kind of recurring things I think are the best, or the other option is like high ticket thing.

So if you have a course, most online courses, the expensive ones, two grand three grand five grand, they give you a 50% commission, so I just need to get one sale to like make a big difference.

Jaryd Krause (19:41)

Yeah. One to two three sales a month and you can start to earn a start getting a couple of grand more a month just from those programs sales.

Karl Kangur (19:50)

Right, exactly. So if we come back to site number one, the website monetization 100,000 visitors a month, can I sell them one course for $2,000? Just one person and it's already doubled the income of the site. Yeah. So looking for like, no brainer opportunities like that.

Jaryd Krause (20:06)

Moving into the SEO agency, when you first when people come to you, or when you first look at a site, what is the first thing that you sort of look at when you audit a blog? Like, so you've just purchased? One, what's the first thing that you look at?

Karl Kangur (20:20)

The first thing is always,, identifying what the end goal is, what do you want to rank for? So identifying three to five most important keywords, whether it's for a client, or for a side, we're buying, and then looking at top five versus current where we are currently. And identifying that gap. What's, what do we need to do to get to number one, so if I'm buying a site, and it's a DR 40, and everyone's Top Five is DR 60s, Link building is going to be my number one bottleneck, if we're more authoritative, then it could be tech issues, better content, like all these other things.

So basically, just reverse engineering, engineering, the first page results, and then going, working backwards from there, okay, if it's, a difference of 100, DR 50 links, I can figure out in my head, how much it would cost to kind of close that link. And if I've only got 50 posts on the site, but my competitors have 200, okay, 150 articles, 2500 words, each design, which is going to cost me to get to the same point.

So always kind of working back from what's missing, and then mapping out like, Okay, if I wasn't number one, how much money do I think Could I could I make with this, what kind of a difference would it make, and is the cost between the two worth?

Jaryd Krause (21:34)

Yeah, like that. And coming back to what you first said is like you 30% of your budget should go towards reinvesting for growth, right. And because you could go away and identify a couple of things that you need to invest in, but not have the money right now. And you need to save it each month from the business and maybe your personal income to put it into that right, like you can't grow as fast as you might want to grow.

Karl Kangur (21:59)

That's why I only buy with the high authority sites like DR 60, minimum, really good link profile, things like that. And I think most people should do the same thing. Because content getting better content, you can you can solve that problem. But the vast majority of people in our community, the number one thing they struggle with, is link building.

But if you're already have a super authoritative site, you don't really need to worry about worry about link building, then it's okay, how do I keep the content machine always going. So what does a good backlink profile look like to you, and then the easiest way to assess it is just the basic like hrs. Or domain rating or domain authority. And just you can get a pretty good idea from that. And then if you dig deeper into the links you want to set filters, look at all of your links, one link per domain minimum, DR 40, do follow and just look at the quality of those links, you can see how many are legit, why those happen.

And then, you do the same for your competitors. And you have a pretty, pretty good idea of what each site is setting at and what the difference is, and what it would take to close that gap.

Jaryd Krause (23:01)

Close that gap. And so you're looking at your competitors to see what their link profile is compared to the site that you're buying, and then getting an estimation on what it would cost to beat their link profile. Is that right?

Karl Kangur (23:14)

Exactly. Or at least get to the same level? Yes. Even if you're if you're close to the same level. So I like to look at SEO, like, DR is the number one thing I look for, for competition, because if you have perfect content, perfect on page, in my experience, you can shoot up about 15 to 20 points in authority.

So if I might have 50, all my competitors are 60 or 65, I can still like realistically compete with them if I put in the work. But if everyone's in the 80s, I don't have a chance, maybe one in 20 posts, we'll get lucky and get up there. But you want to make sure that gap is kind of minimal. So you have a higher success rate every time you publish.

Jaryd Krause (23:50)

Yeah, so like a gap of like 20 or more the a lot harder to achieve, especially when you go from to get from, I mean, to get from 60 to 80. Yeah, to get from 60 to 80 is very different to get from 20 to 40.

Karl Kangur (24:10)

So the second side, I was talking about the social media side, that's been a DR 77 for last two years. I'm just stuck there. It's not going anywhere. But I also I don't need to go any higher.

Jaryd Krause (24:21)

Are you actively? Are you actively doing Link Building for that as well? Still a little bit? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's it does take and you really want those quality links to really make the difference, right? No, you don't like to go for anything less than a DR 60. When you look at the backlink profile, are you Is there a certain amount of links that are above DR 40 that you want to see like is there like 50 100 that you want to see for.

Karl Kangur (24:48)

Really no magic number? I think it's always about looking at your competitors and what they have. And then, just comparing against that because industry to industry that's going to change so much and to come back to your point. I do buy sites that are less than DR 60s. Well, I feel like DR 60 is like my sweet spot.

If you're 16 above, like, I know, I can make things work. But there are strategies for lower authority sites as well. I have one Amazon affiliate site, that's currently I think, Dr. 35, there's one that actually started. But like, the strategies, there are so much different for growing, then there's much, much bigger focus on building links, and so on. And it's, it's something that's difficult to scale. And anytime you're building links, and it comes with a certain risk, even if you do it, right.

But the strategies for one of the biggest wins I had for our Amazon site, that was the DR 35, is buying out smaller competitors, because then it becomes publishing volume game, how many articles can I get live? And finding good writers is always the hardest part. And one of the ways we took that site from 3k, a month to six came on, I saw on like one of these bias, oh, my business like Facebook groups. Someone’s like, Oh, I'm selling a gaming site. I'm like, Okay, can we fit gaming into this one site? Okay, yeah, it's kind of irrelevant.

And I'm like, Okay, how good is your content? How many articles do you have? I went through his content, he wasn't making a lot of money. So he would, he was willing to sell the site at a much lower multiple. But when I merged that site into mine, I've got 150 new articles, and my authority is higher, and instantly get a massive jump in rankings.

Jaryd Krause (26:27)

Tell us how you merging these like, technically, with like, this main site that you merge into this gaming site, the emerging into the main site? How are you doing? How are you doing this, technically, firstly, do a content audit.

Karl Kangur (26:37)

So any anything on their site that's garbage or two unrelated, I get rid of. So I only want to keep the best, the best content pieces, make sure it's actually good. Like if a writer wrote this for me, and I've had to pay them what I publish this or not, that's kind of the content audit process. And then I take all the best pages, move them over standard WordPress, copy, paste, keep the same URL structure, and then do just redirects URL by URL. And then anything that I deleted, I went through year one to the homepage.

Jaryd Krause (27:07)

Okay, so anything that's been deleted, that you don't put on this on the site on the main site, you just three, I want it to the to the main homepage.

Karl Kangur (27:15)

And every post that I keep, you just keep the same URL that you posted.

Jaryd Krause (27:19)

On the main site, and then you redirect it to that URL. Yeah, yeah. Got you. And did doing that show you a boost India, and also more traffic.

Karl Kangur (27:30)

So in that case, I didn't get a big boost in Dr. because it was a really low authority site. Okay. So it was like a DR 15. Site, but they had tons of content, they didn't know how to link? Well, that's why they never made money with the side, you already had some authority.

So we just took their good content. And that saved us countless of hours of dealing with writers and getting those 150 articles. And yeah, we saw massive boost in traffic and income because we had the authority to rank for those topics.

Jaryd Krause (27:59)

Yeah. And you're just adding content to the authority that you already have. It's a really good strategy growth by acquisition and actually not buying a content site just for its income, but buying it based on its content has and merging it into the main site. I like it.

Karl Kangur (28:17)

Yeah. And it's especially valuable, because, most of the time sites are valued on their actual income. Yeah, but no one takes into consideration the value of the content and the, especially the time it saves you. So it's actually a really good way to just basically not have to write content. And then the income is kind of a bonus, because you're no, you're going to make that back anyway.

Jaryd Krause (28:39)

Yeah. And so there's some that those are some more aggressive growth strategies you call it, you could call them aggressive. Once you've done a lot of the harder work in the first sort of six months to a year, maybe two years, what does it what does it look like you in the, at the point where you want to sell that because you've grown it? Or if you want to keep it? What, what does just managing the site's look like? Is that how much content are you posting regularly? And what are some of the things that you were doing sort of not hardcore growth phase but more so management phase?

Karl Kangur (29:11)

Yeah, so the first slide I flipped in year, so it literally connects to that one year sold it and because I felt like that hit 70 to 80% of its potential, like Yeah, we could push it more but not that much more be a lot of work. And then it's always the risk of something going wrong, right. So it was good time to sell with the current site. Even though I've already texted, I would assess its potential.

I know for a fact one of my competitors is making literally 10 times more than me. So there's, there's a long way to go there's still so much opportunity, so I'm not even I'm not even considering selling yet, because even if he's making 10 times more, that means I can easily double my sights though. So I'm not going to touch it, maybe if I get it to five times bigger and things start to slow down.

Karl Kangur (30:00)

Okay, maybe it's time to let it go. But I always, I try and think like longer term work in this go, do I think I'm capable of doing that? If the answer is no, then sell it before something keynote gets messed up. If I'm confident I can do it like right now the salesman plateauing a little bit because I'm busy, busy with the agency. But I'm still keeping the long term in mind that I know this can easily grow, if I have the time to give it.

Jaryd Krause (30:27)

And so what does it look like when you don't have like, when you're only spending a couple of hours a month on it? What are you still posting regular content? Or and you having other people do the Link Building for you? Like, what does that look like for you?

Karl Kangur (30:40)

So I use our own SEO agency for the link building. So that's kind of always going. Currently, the issue is I have two writers, and they're not full time, people, that kind of freelancers. So I've getting like one, two articles a month. But if I was actually full time on this managing it, I'm actually currently trying to hire two content managers who, whose job was to find four or five writers each and like, push it right. So that's kind of the difference.

But there's also times where, both of my two writers currently, we're busy. And we didn't publish anything for like four or five months, and nothing happened to the site, obviously. And that's another benefit of like, these more established sites, like it doesn't just go away. No one's going to overtake a Dr. 70 site in a couple of months.

Jaryd Krause (31:25)

The hard work has been done, you can you can leave it for a little bit. I want to ask some newbie questions. Like, for people that are just thinking about jumping into this space? First one is what would you what advice would you give to somebody that's wanting to buy their first online business first content website.

Karl Kangur (31:45)

Real the one for I really think, I really think you have to go through the process, like the entire process, because you can outsource everything you can outsource link building, you can outsource keyword research, the content and so on. But, If you've never done the job yourself, you don't know what a good job looks like. So even if you go through one of these courses like authority hack, or affiliate lab or big pick any one, and you actually try and start a site, I think you've learned so much in that process.

And it kind of sets you up for things you're going to know how to evaluate good backlink versus back bad backlink. Because one was really easy for you to get when you were trying to add legs, get one, you couldn't build yourself. So interesting, I think I think the skills give you a massive advantage.

Yeah, I've had two of the smaller sites I've sold, were sold to first timers. So the first Amazon affiliate site I ever sold, two brothers from Canada who had restaurant businesses bought it. Yeah, and the site was on like a massive upward trajectory as I sold it, and they never did anything with it. They did one redesign two years later, which made the site look even worse.

But other than that, they basically tank the site. So like most first time buyers tend to tank sites, I feel like at least as far as I've seen, both from Friends, selling sites and so on. So I do think like getting some experience actually running a site first. And the various skills involved. I think that's an it's going to save you a lot.

Jaryd Krause (33:21)

Of money. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, I actually don't, I don't totally agree with it, but each to their own, everybody's got their own opinion. Reason being is because I believe that you i There is lawyers out as a totally agree, is because I agree with a big portion of what you're saying, in terms of, it's good to know how the site works and what work needs to be done.

And when you're hiring writers and link builders to hire the right ones for them to not take advantage of you and give crappy work so what you should be expecting but at the same time, you can buy a business and do really, really well for example, we've I've got a lot of examples of newbies that have bought sites that have had zero experience, you know, myself a plumber, but a lot of other people in the community. So there's two there's I think there's really more than not just our two routes of learning to start one from scratch yourself or me just go out and buy one there's different ways you can go.

But I believe there is a certain type of person that would be best off starting a site from scratch before they purchase and then there will be a different type of person that should go and buy one without having to start from scratch to save a bit more time and money and get up to date. So I think there's really many different routes but I want to I don't want to discard what you said because it's so true like there is it is better for a majority or percentage of Perth people to start from scratch too, for sure.

Karl Kangur (34:49)

Yeah, like I said, it's such a vague question. And when we're talking about newbies. There's so many different types of newbies, the stay at home, stay at home mom who's got 20k and once, buy an Amazon affiliate site. And as kids who manage all this stuff, like, it's a side hustle thing, you know, yeah, probably don't buy one.

But if it's someone who's committed to this, they're going to be learning at the same time figuring out like, what actually is SEO, and I've got 200k in the bank, I'm going to buy one for 50. And then experiment with that and learn on the way, you know, that's a very different story.

Jaryd Krause (35:21)

You spot on it is a vague question.

Karl Kangur (35:24)

I do think there's, there's also kind of like a middle ground, like in these communities there, there's a lot of experience people who are running sides, but maybe I've had not had like, amazing success, maybe don't have as much capital. So you could do some kind of partnership where you both of you are involved, you put up the cash, they help you kind of operate it, and you work through it together. I think that could be another good option. That's something I've personally done as well.

Jaryd Krause (35:49)

Yeah, I like that so much. And I'm glad that we're talking about the different variations of how somebody can do this. Because I know a lot of people that come to me and, and go, Jaryd, I've just I'm almost done. Like I've started a site, I went nowhere started and you know, 90% of all startups fail, it's really hard to do. And they got a little bit of money, and they're holding on to it very, very tightly. And they want to make sure they don't stuff up.

But there's another portion of people that do start sites, and just go alright, this online game doesn't work for me. And it's a massive shame for them to give up on their hopes and dreams. When there could be another hour doesn't mean buying an online business. But there's different ways to do it.

What people will take in when we have a podcast yourself and I Karl, and many other guests, people take what we say sometimes for absolute gospel, and there's only one route and only one route is the only way that they should be doing it when it's not actually true. Because there's a lot of people that come to me out or listen to a podcast or YouTube video not mine other people's and say, this is the is the way that I need to grow my business?

Well, not really, because your business is different. And each human being is in a very different position. So you're right, it was a vague question. But I'm so glad that we're explaining the variations that people can take to suit them best for sure.

Karl Kangur (37:06)

I think one of the most valuable things about you know, starting with buying is that then people realize, like, Oh, this is a real thing. This is something that's possible, you start seeing the income coming in you, you make a change on the side, you can see oh, I made less, or I made more and so on. And it kind of gives them faith like, Oh, this is possible and stops him from giving up. Like, I was lucky when I started at 12.

My first three sites were a success. Well, that's and, and after that, I think I'd been doing it for about three years. At that time. I was like, Okay, I'm going to double down on this same formula. In one summer, I started 20, Amazon affiliate sites, one doing all the research, setting everything up, setting the sites up, want to ordering content, getting all the content going, back then it was like micro niche sites, it was like 20 articles, you know, five bucks each is a very different game. Yeah. And, month three, doing the link building 20 sites, only three of them ever made money.

And at that time, I kind of knew what I was doing already. I had a model that work. And even then, not everything has. So, I do think a lot of people get discouraged and don't realize that it is now to a certain extent about luck.

Jaryd Krause (38:16)

Yeah. This is what I'm beginning to learn as a business owner in life. And sometimes you can do all the right things. And in that time period, that you do all the right things, the environment around you, isn't suited to that. But sometimes you can do things half assed for a certain period of time and the environment around you allows you to just be very lucky.

Because you're in the right place at the right time, in the right area, doing the right doing a couple of the right things. The I'm glad that use I'm glad that you mentioned, you crushed it with the first three, and then you had 20 that you started, and then three of those 20. So it's like a 14% success rate or something like that, even with the experience that you've had. But that said like, the formula, and I wouldn't I would suggest if you had done less than 20. So you did five, you probably would have had at least one.

Karl Kangur (39:12)

That would have been better.

Jaryd Krause (39:15)

That's what you learn when you're young and you're a teenager and you've got all the energy and you've I've been there. It's really good to give it a crack because you're learning at an earlier stage. And that's why I think most people should dive into this as soon as they can hang out for a moment. Yeah. Yeah, Karl's been absolute pleasure having you on. Thanks so much for coming on board. Where should we be sending people to check out more about what you're doing with the agency?

Karl Kangur (39:40)

Check out smash digital smash digital.com. So that's our SEO agency. We don't do any technical stuff. We'll help audit aside. But what we focus on is that is a true ad 20 of SEO and that's link building. And what we pride ourselves on is, you know, everyone can buy these guest posts. You can go on any marketplace by guest posts for tuner bucks we specialize in high end link building that you really can't get anywhere else.

We're talking minimum DR 50 like high end links on legit sites. So if you have a legitimate business that deserves to be featured on some of these bigger sites, you really want to crank out that authority that's where to go and if you want to follow me personally at growth Karl on Twitter, not super active but always there to kind of chat.

Jaryd Krause (40:24)

Awesome Karl can we are we able to talk about the price ranges of the packages for the backlinks or just happy we'll go straight to the site.

Karl Kangur (40:33)

Job we started 2.5k a month and I'd say the average cost for high-end link it goes between 500-800. So you know, the more you spend the cheaper it gets, basically. But this is very much for affiliate sites we can't do that cannot do this for affiliate sites. We do the same type of guest posting as for everyone, yeah, as everyone else does. But any kind of legitimate, bigger site software, site service business, you know, that's kind of our sweet spot.

Jaryd Krause (41:03)

Yeah, with the solid do awesome love it guys, check out Smash Digital. There'll be links to that in the show notes.