Speaker 0 00:00:09 Are you ready to get serious about building content sites and building a profitable business online. Welcome to the niche website builders podcast. We bring you the latest field tested tips, tricks and strategies for building a profitable online assets. We interview industry experts, share customer success stories and reveal our own experiences working on hundreds of sites to inspire and motivate you to make something happen. Let's do this.
Speaker 1 00:00:42 Hello. Welcome back to the niche website builders show today on the show we have Alex Cooper from WP Eagle. So we had Alex on the show back in episode two. Um, so Alex runs his own, uh, YouTube channel, um, has a good following of around 55,000 subscribers at the time of recording. And, um, yeah, he shares a lot of case studies, so he's he's so it originally started out as a mainly WordPress, uh, channel and website and as slowly over time, sort of migrated into, uh, doing more advice and guidance and help, um, videos on affiliate marketing. So, um, reasonably going back on the show again today was because he was recently sold at the site for around $70,000. And, um, the great thing about the sale of this site, I said it was a very public case study. So he's spent the last couple of years working on it and documenting that over a series of around 60 videos.
Speaker 1 00:01:41 So, um, it's kind of got to the complete beginning to end kind of story for, uh, that site. Um, and it's kind of a happy ending with the sale at the end. Um, so hope you enjoyed the show. Hope we check it out, just go through some of the things that he did over the, over the course of time and the things that he did, uh, to, you know, build value into that site and kind of grow it and then some of the tactics he used. So hopefully you find that interesting. Um, a couple of, couple of things to mention, if you haven't already checked out our age domains on our site, we're scaling up the number of domains that we've got on there at the moment. So, um, yeah, if you're interested in building a site on an aged domain and all the benefits that come with that head over to niche website.builders/domains, and also we have a new section on our website, which is the resources section, which you can get at niche website.builders/resources.
Speaker 1 00:02:36 And there's a couple of guides on there at the moment that you can kind of download. Uh, one is 10 quick, 10 quick and simple ways to increase display ad RPM or EPM V, and how to structure your review content to satisfy the Google product review algorithm update. So if either of those are interested, you interest to you, then head over their head on over the head to the website, but my teeth back in. And, um, yeah, hopefully those, those will be interesting for you as well. Okay. Without further ado, let's get on to the show.
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Speaker 1 00:04:15 Welcome to the niche website builders show. Today. I have Alex Cooper from WP Eagle on the show. Welcome Alex.
Speaker 2 00:04:22 Hello. Thanks for having me back again.
Speaker 1 00:04:25 I know, I know you are the first returning guest. You were on episode two of the niche website, builder Sharon. Now some 25, 26 later. You're back on again. So you're the first returning guest come on it, but, um, yeah, we have a good reason for you returning as well. Cause you recently sold, uh, one of your case study sites. Yeah, that's right. Yep. That's roof box.com. That's the one. So yeah, so, um, I guess, yeah, just take it, just take it from the beginning, I guess so, well, let's, let's, let's actually talk about the end a little bit. So the end is the, you managed to sell the site successfully. You've grown the site over around about two years and you sold the site for around, um, $70,000 just
Speaker 2 00:05:11 Received exactly. $70,000. Was
Speaker 1 00:05:14 That okay? Exactly. 70,000. So, um, yeah, texts back to the beginning thing. So what, what, what happened with best roof box? It was a, it was a case study site. Was it planned to be a case study from the beginning or just involve into
Speaker 2 00:05:26 That? Yeah, it was, it was, um, I set it up about two years ago, maybe two years and a few months ago. And basically I wanted to create a video tutorial on how to create an affiliate marketing website using WordPress, mainly as a way to promote hosting and domain names and plugins and themes and all the other good stuff that I talked about on my channel. So yeah, I needed to create a site at the time. I was looking to invest in a roof box myself because we were going to go camping. I think it was something like that. So I had roof boxes on the mind and I also realized that there wasn't a lot of information out there on, um, Reeboks is because I think I just got a new car as well. And I was searching on Google for the name of my car and roof box is trying to get an idea of which ones would be the best fit.
Speaker 2 00:06:18 And, you know, there wasn't much coming back really. So I thought, well, hang on, there might be an opportunity here and had a quick look on GoDaddy and found best route books.com was available. So registered that and create the site did about a two hour video or something on the full process of creating the site of WordPress. Then I decided that I was going to make a go of it because I'd done videos in the past where I created affiliate marketing websites, but never really followed through with them. I'd just create the site and then just let them sit. And they tick along and not, not do much. I thought this one I'm going to actually try and make a success of it, try and do a full case study. And I could share with everyone on my YouTube channel and yeah, that's basically what happened.
Speaker 2 00:07:04 So I tried to create videos every single month, which I think I succeeded in doing sometimes more than once a month at the beginning, I think, well, I basically shared everything that I'd done on the site shared all the earnings, shared all the traffic numbers, shared everything, complete transparency and yeah, they're all in a playlist on YouTube right now, if you want to watch them all. And I think a lot of people got quite a lot out of it because they're able to kind of follow along, see the progress that I was making. See when things went up, see when things went down so they could relate to that and know that it's normal and the growth of a website, but then yeah, ultimately towards the end, um, a few months ago when I went to sell it, it was pulling in, you know, over $2,000 a month, um, mainly from amazon.com, which is pretty impressive seeing as, you know, they reduce the commission rates as we were going along on that journey. And yeah, I was really pleased with it really pleased with it became a bit of an authority site within the niche really, or the niche I should say.
Speaker 1 00:08:07 Yeah. Yeah. I know. I constantly do that as well. I'm going to American ways of saying things, these things, the bad habit. So tell me, um, yeah, so, um, yeah, so w we didn't really get you to formally introduce yourself, you know, go back to episode two, if you want Alex to formally introduce himself, but yeah, in short, I guess, you know, um, you know, if you, if you don't know Alex, you know, he runs his own channel, which used to be people got a really great community there. Like you've got really great bunch of people and Alex is Alex, his videos really, really engaging. And, um, he does a great job over there. Um, so I'd recommend going and subscribing if you, if you get a chance to come over the 60, uh, I think the 60 videos in the playlist over the, uh, for, for that case study. So it's a decent archive to kind of go through if you don't want
Speaker 2 00:08:55 The, kind of the short version. I think the last video, um, kind of summarize is the journey from start to finish if you can't be bothered to watch 60 videos.
Speaker 1 00:09:05 Yeah, no, yes. So tell us from you. Uh, okay. So you came up with the idea of best roof box and then you kind of kicked it off and got started. So I guess that involve choosing a theme and I guess choosing a domain name and everything.
Speaker 2 00:09:20 So, yeah. And, you know, in hindsight, maybe it wasn't the best domain name. It was quite restrictive in terms of the avenues that I could go down, you know, mainly talking about roof boxes, which is fine. Um, I guess I'm just old school, you know, I remember when you could register a domain name with some keywords in it and it would rank for those keywords purely because they're in the domain though. So I think I've still got that way of thinking. And I don't know if it was coincidence or what, but, you know, if you do a search on Google right now for best roof box, the site is like number three or four on page one most Googles. So, and if that had any, uh, if the domain had any influence on that, but, um, yeah, I mean, the bottom was when I, when I've written about every single car and every single, you know, use of a roof box, camping, fishing, skiing, and everything else when I want it to them, you know, talk about other things. It was a bit tricky, you know, I could have branched out into other car things, you know, bike racks or trailers, or, or just, you know, going out on a journey in general and you know, all the car accessories that you can talk about to do with that. But then maybe on the, on the flip side being specific has its benefits as well.
Speaker 1 00:10:33 Yeah. I mean, sure. It doesn't totally fit for that stuff, but I mean, does it really matter, like say you were doing bike racks and someone saw best roof box.com in the SERPs, but they're going to, nah, that's not
Speaker 2 00:10:45 Sightful. Yeah. What do they know about bike cracks?
Speaker 1 00:10:50 Exactly. I don't think, I don't think it would be a problem if you want it to expand out into that. Obviously, ideally it's more brandable, but
Speaker 2 00:10:57 Yeah, I think nowadays everyone wants to go down the brandable route, but oh, I don't know. I'm still, I've got a new site that I'm working on called best pressure washer.com. So I still haven't learned my lesson.
Speaker 1 00:11:08 Cool. We'll talk about that one in a bit, then that'd be interesting to distance that, oh, here, here, what you doing with that new case
Speaker 2 00:11:14 Study. Okay. But, um, so you're um,
Speaker 1 00:11:18 Yeah, so you've okay. You see, you've chosen then I did. What about content? Is it, did you ever write any of the content yourself? Have you always had that? Um,
Speaker 2 00:11:26 I, I outsourced all of it pretty much. Um, so I've got a few writers that I use on a regular basis and yeah, they did quite a lot of it. I also use some article broker kind of services like texting and those guys, and yeah, that's how we got the content done towards the end when I wanted to, um, basically create articles around every single car. I saw an opportunity to have people searching for roof box and then a car name and of course, hundreds of cars. And I wanted to get that content out fairly quickly. I tried an approach where I basically used the AWP plugin and so, you know, best or roof boxes for a, uh, Renno clear. I don't know. I don't think they have the rental clear in America actually, but you get the idea and then I'll just drop in AWP, um, product boxes and maybe just an intro paragraph.
Speaker 2 00:12:20 And surprisingly, because there wasn't a lot of competition on those longer tail car related terms that content did rank quite well. And then to give it an extra nudge, I started using, uh, conversion AI, or it's now called jarvis.ai, which is an AI copywriting tool and started using that to fill out the articles a bit more. So writing a product description about the, uh, the products that we talk about rather than just the AWP books, writing a blog introduction or blog opening paragraph and writing a summary as well with that. So with that method, and also with the help of my editor, I was able to get content out really quickly and we're able to then cover pretty much every single car that's sold in America. They say I've got a, did a search on Google for the, you know, um, annual sales on the cars in America.
Speaker 2 00:13:11 So there was a big spreadsheet that you're able to download and it showed you all the cars that had been sold in the states in that year, starting with the most popular. And that's how the article plan went from there. We just worked through that spreadsheet starting with the most popular. And it was actually a few of those articles that did really well. I think, um, the Subaru Outback, um, was a particularly strong article, which is car I've never even heard of it. I don't think it's even available in the UK, but obviously very popular in the states. And, um, very popular, uh, for roof boxes did come across a few problems because I wasn't aware of all of the different types of cars in America. We would accidentally sometimes write articles about cars that may be weren't very suitable for books, sports cars, or that kind of thing. Yeah. Convertibles and, you know, trying to write an article about that was quite tricky.
Speaker 1 00:14:04 Yeah, for sure. Um, yeah, I think the Outback, I think you can, I feel like you can get it, but I might be wrong, but maybe it's a different name because these aren't like the, um, the estate
Speaker 2 00:14:12 Version, it's like an estate sort of car. Yeah, yeah. Obviously very popular over there. I mean, the other thing I noticed over there was that they're very into pickup trucks. I mean, obviously I guess in hindsight, and we did a few articles on those because I could see that they were popular cars and I wanted to write an article about them, but it seems that yeah, people don't tend to put route books boxes on pickup.
Speaker 1 00:14:33 No, they probably put it in the pickup truck
Speaker 2 00:14:35 Already got enough room. So yeah. But yeah, it was fun. And, um, you, you guys did some link building, which I definitely think helped. Um, because the current owner, the buyer still keeps me in the loop in terms of how well the site's doing and it seems be continuing to grow. And in fact last month was even stronger than the month before, which was the one I sold. It was it the month before that, anyway, it still continues to grow. So that's good though. It is kind of seasonal, which again is something that I wasn't, well, I was aware that it could be seasonal, but I didn't realize the kind of effect it would have in terms of the sales and the traffic. And it's something I think you need to keep, keep in mind when you're choosing a niche and that seasonality.
Speaker 1 00:15:18 Yeah. And I guess there's always going to be, there's going to be new models of cars coming out all the time. So school it's going to be opportunity to add new content and refresh
Speaker 2 00:15:24 It. Yeah. Yeah. That's for sure there is. And the roof box has changed quite a bit as well. There's always new new models and makes coming out on that.
Speaker 1 00:15:33 So that was check. Was that generally the approach for content? Was it generally best roof box for
Speaker 2 00:15:38 Cars? Yeah, it was generally best X for Y um, best roof box for fishing rods. Um, best roof books for a BMW. That kind of stuff, though. We did have some other guides on, you know, aerodynamic roof boxes, some more information or content like does a roof box affect your fuel economy, um, how to reduce the noise of a roof box, that kind of stuff, which were, they were fairly short, um, but fairly useful. And they were questions that people were searching for, but generally it was best X for Y. So there was a bit of a worry with the recent Google updates that the site may have may get affected because Google were allegedly clamping down on those kinds of sites that didn't want that. And unless you're able to offer some really in-depth reviews, which now my reviews were okay, but they were only using information that we've managed to get off the internet.
Speaker 2 00:16:29 Of course, I didn't have every single different car and every single different roof box to test out and do videos and all that stuff. So a little bit concerned, but though the site seemed to coast through the update filing and say the traffic continues to grow. So I think that update may affect you. I think it depends on what niche you're in. The thing is there wasn't a lot of other content out there either that was that's any, any good, you know, there was a few, um, roof box shops and retailers that had YouTube videos. They obviously did have access to quite a few products, but you know, there wasn't that many, they weren't that up to date. So yeah, the site was, I was able to go through the Google updates. Fine.
Speaker 1 00:17:08 Cool. And to have it, did it have any ad revenue?
Speaker 2 00:17:12 Yeah, it did. It was running his own. Eric started off with that sensor then switched over to Zoe, come in and that, you know, skyrocketed the earnings, um, and compared to AdSense and yeah, I mean, I had to have a little bit of back and forth with Zoe cause I think everyone does just to make sure that it wasn't overwhelming in terms of the amount of ads that they put on the site and toned it down a bit. But yeah, it was, it was owning a reasonable income, although saying that the new owner, um, removed as quick, as soon as they got a hold of the site and just kind of removed all the ads and just wanted to kind of focus it on, on the affiliate side of things, which I guess it's fine. I mean, there's always that, that doubt or that question in your mind, whether the ads are taken away from the content, which in turn is taken away from your affiliate income.
Speaker 1 00:18:01 Yeah. I think it's worth testing, especially if you've got higher value, uh, affiliate products. Cause you really don't want to distract them away from that. Even one sale could be big. Well,
Speaker 2 00:18:11 I mean, that's the thing that was, again, more luck than judgment that roof boxes are a great product to promote because you know, the cheapest ones, you can get a bag that you can put on your car, which is maybe a hundred dollars. Then if you want a nice, good size hard shell kind of roof box, there they're a thousand dollars. So even if Amazon are only given two or 3%, it's still reasonable.
Speaker 1 00:18:36 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's what I was testing. I think most of the time, most of the time people find that ads don't really distract. Don't really take away.
Speaker 2 00:18:45 I guess the only reason is because they slow down your site too much or if they, um, make the content difficult to read. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I always made sure my affiliate links were near the top of the article, so, you know, trying to get the message across quick. So when someone's looking for a roof box for fishing rods, I hit the article on that topics. Like these are our recommendations straight away and then, then go into the detail. But yeah,
Speaker 1 00:19:07 Yeah. Yeah. So what was, what was the split between, uh, the revenue then? Sorry. Um,
Speaker 2 00:19:13 Well I think like just what's on my, like maybe the last month that I checked, it was maybe a two and a half thousand from Amazon and 300 from ads. So still the bulk was from affiliate and from Amazon.
Speaker 1 00:19:28 Oh, how much traffic was he getting for? Uh, how about, I suppose it changes,
Speaker 2 00:19:32 Right? It, it does change, but yeah, as we were going into summer, let me just see I've I'm sure I've got the figures just here. It was, it was getting about 33,000 users and that was turning into about 47,000 page views. Um, and yeah, we had, by that point 287 bits of content, 27. Okay. 2 8, 7, some long. Um, but I say a lot of them, especially the car ones, uh, not so long, I'm quite quick to put together using tools like AWP and Jarvis.
Speaker 1 00:20:13 Okay. Yeah. I think that's in quite low on the ad revenue side, I think for, for that, but every niche is different and yeah, it was a 300 for 33,000. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:20:25 I don't know what, I can't remember what the EPV was I was getting or whatever
Speaker 1 00:20:29 He, him to here. Yeah. Okay. So, um, yeah, so the content, um, and, and when, when you were kind of deciding what the content should be, that you were writing, like, did you have a sort of work count in mind? Did you, were you trying to correlate it? What the workouts are in the SAPs or, or how did they decide? I mean,
Speaker 2 00:20:53 I always had a rule of thumb that I wanted, you know, a thousand words, 1500 words. But when you're just answering a question, like the aerodynamics of a roof box and, um, you know, how to reduce noise of your rift box, sometimes you can write 2000 words. So yeah, it was just looking at what the competition wasn't often there wasn't much competition. So it was, you know, we just wrote enough to cover the title and answer the question and deliver some useful information. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, that was it. I mean, it was, it was a journey, it was a complete journey. And I spoke to other people in the space, people like Doug Cuttington and other guys, and I think you've had on this show, um, your good friend of your channel and, you know, I'm sure you're aware of Doug is always very sensitive about sharing sites, sharing earnings, because I think he had an experience or he had an acquaintance had an experience where they shared a case study and they're happy with copying it.
Speaker 2 00:21:50 There are people doing negative SEO against it and, and all that. So there was always that doubt in my mind and that fear that someone may copy it and indeed some people did try and copy it because when I was doing research for articles and stuff, I would often stumble across sites that were very, very similar to mine in terms of notes on us using the same theme, same articles, maybe just spun a little bit. Um, but what I learned from it is that if you're first in there and if you're confident doing what you're doing, and if you're doing a good job and you've managed to build a bit of an authority for yourself and for your site, then it doesn't really matter if people copy it because they haven't got a chance against you because you're the first one there. And you've got the quality and the content and yeah, they can't touch you.
Speaker 2 00:22:32 Um, and I remember one evening I was bored and I was on Reddit and I made the mistake of kind of searching for myself within some of the internet marketing forums. I dunno why. Cause I actually, cause I spotted my name and someone was saying, oh, do you know any good internet market shows? And people will recommend the Charles and my name came up. That was nice. Um, but then I thought, I'd see if there's anything else out there. And I came across a few threads where people were talking about the case study and they were saying, you know, he's useless. You don't know what he's doing. Look at the state of the site you put together, these articles just using AWP thinks they're gonna rank. And I just remember that everything, you know, God, maybe, maybe it's not going to work out. I'm going to make a big fool of myself for this case study. But alas, um, I think I spoke to some people in my discord and that about that some of the community members and may, you know, turn it around and helped me with some positive feedback and comments and I plowed on and ultimately I was able to, you know, prove to myself, if not everyone else that you know, it can be done and you just got to keep going and, and have that confidence in yourself that you're doing the right thing.
Speaker 1 00:23:40 Oh, for sure. I mean, I think, you know, I've always said that the thing that people, people that generally don't make it or fail is because they gave up too soon, often happened so many times you do Cokie going, if you push on hard enough, if you keep going, keep pushing, you will get there in the end. Just sometimes it takes longer than others. That's all.
Speaker 2 00:23:59 Yeah. But I have confidence that it is going to work if you're doing all the right things. Um, it should work. I mean, obviously niche does have an effect on these things, but generally, I mean, it's hard to pick a terrible niche. I wouldn't have thought. And I think probably, you know, quite quickly if it's not, not working, but this site, you know, within six months of launch, I think it started to go up, the traffic went up and, you know, there was a few sales came in through Amazon and you know, if you start getting that, then it obviously shows that there's something right. And you just got to keep going.
Speaker 1 00:24:28 And it was a fresh domain as well. So I assume so it
Speaker 2 00:24:30 Was, it was, yeah, it was registered by me.
Speaker 1 00:24:34 Yeah. Oh, I honestly think that, um, I, I've never been brave enough to put a case to the other. I think it's always because like every time I start, I have a big plan in mind is that I can't possibly share this one because I've got such a huge plan. Maybe I should just get one that's really narrow, like roof boxes, you know, there's not got a big scope, but like I always think I'm not, I'm just can't do it. But then, but honestly think that the people that have shared that I've seen share them, I think they benefit actually from it because you get a lot of backlinks from people sharing the case study. Right.
Speaker 2 00:25:06 It's absolutely true. Yeah. I mean, well, you mentioned I've done 60 videos, so that's 60 links from YouTube for a start to the site because I was obviously ref referenced the site and the description and there was, there was one day actually I was looking at the analytics on the site and there was a huge spike of traffic, uh, just for like a day or so I thought, oh, that's a bit weird. So I kind of looked into it a bit more and I obviously did a video about it and I was getting some feedback and it was because I can't remember the exact name of the group, whoever did it, but it was an internet marketing company that had been, I think they offer training and they'd use the site as a case study within their training. So they'd link to it. They shared it with a whole load of people and obviously it was traffic that wasn't ever going to buy a roof box, but, um, it generated links. And when I look at AHS for the site, a lot of the links come from kind of internet marketing and affiliate marketing sites, people talking about it, people blogging about it. So yeah, you're right. I think maybe using the CA having a case study is a good thing.
Speaker 1 00:26:11 Yeah. Cause you've definitely looking at it now. It was a, they are 50, I think I've gone off the page now, 51 with 410 referring domains. So yeah, like that suggests, you know, there's a good balance of high authority sites linking to two. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:26:25 I mean, I picked up a good deal quite quickly. I don't know why, but yeah, there was, there was some good links that we pulled in and, you know, I did try different link building services. I used the half. I'm sure you're aware of the Hoff again, just because I wanted to try them out. And I also knew that it would make some good YouTube content. So they offer a guest post for $500 for one link. So I just knew that that would make a great YouTube video, the benefits of these links. I don't know, maybe they did bring me some great deal or maybe they didn't. I don't know. I also did, um, got the half to make me some videos. So he set up a little best route box video channel and they have the service where you basically send them an article and they'll turn it into a video. And I had quite high hopes for that. But when the video actually got sent to me, it was just like a guy just kind of reading. And he had this look in his eye. Like he, you know, he'd always wanted to work in Hollywood, but now he kind of ended up making videos about roof boxes and what should we do for the Hoff?
Speaker 1 00:27:28 Yeah. He's probably doing that for everybody. It's like, you know, on toilets, fishing rods.
Speaker 2 00:27:34 Yeah. He's talking about all sorts of random stuff. It's not quite the glamor that he had hoped for him maybe, but actually they still get quite a few views. I think people are probably disappointed when they watch them because they're a bit dull. But, um, I dunno, I had actually a viewer make me some other really cool videos where they were just kind of like intro videos with some cool music and lots of B roll of roof boxes and they were quite cool. And I'm pretty sure actually, if I'd have carried on with the project, I would have explored video a lot more by maybe not have someone like reading to the camera, but you know, just doing screen grabs and text and music and whatever. Cause I think, I think that could work quite well.
Speaker 1 00:28:18 Yeah, I think so as well, if, uh, if there was a lack of
Speaker 2 00:28:22 There wasn't a huge amount of videos. I mean, ideally it'd be great to get hold of some roof boxes and, and show people how many fishing rods you could get in one. But alas, I don't have the later fishing rods to move boxes, but I guess we really want it to dominate. That's what you'd do. You'd buy those things. And I guess you could always send them out to route to Amazon afterwards.
Speaker 1 00:28:39 Yeah. That's that might catch onto that after your like 50th roof box. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:28:44 That was the other thing that happened in terms of returns. I remember doing videos and getting really excited about selling a, a thousand dollars roof box on Amazon and seeing the sale come in on Amazon and then like two or three days later, they'd have returned it to Amazon. I don't know why maybe they try to fill it to their convertible or something after reading some of my advice.
Speaker 1 00:29:03 Yeah. And I've had that before I started knowing like I've had people that buying a like $3,000 mattress and you're like, this is what a great, you know, who returns a mattress. Surely like they, you know, they return the mattress. Like who does that? Like <inaudible>. Yeah, exactly. So, um, cool. Uh, any other, any other thing, building companies you used
Speaker 2 00:29:29 To, you got your, did some great things putting in some great articles with your shotgun skyscraper yep. Where you pulled in? I think it was maybe 50 links. I can't remember. It was a lot of links and some great articles. And that was again where you started kind of diversifying my content a bit and offering more information about things like road trips, traveling with your pets. So I think, yeah, I've kind of held onto the site. The future of it would have been going into that kind of travel road trips space and you know, diversifying a little bit from the roof boxes and just talking about this stuff, because people are definitely more likely to link to that kind of content rather than the best route books for a Honda.
Speaker 1 00:30:13 Yeah. But that's, that's, that's not, it's got some authority now you might as well use that and build down, oh, build some shoulder niches. So yeah, I think that's
Speaker 2 00:30:22 No, well, I mean, it was his first sight. He was looking at, had a chunk of money. It was, he just sitting around, which is nice thing to have, but, um, he, um, he wanted to invest. I mean, it was a funny thing. It was, you know, I reached out when I wanted to sell the site because I'm planning on moving to Spain and I wanted a big chunk of money mainly for the visa application, because it's easier to get a visa in theory, if you've got a chunk of money in the bank. Um, so that's why I wanted to tell us. And I reached out to you guys. I reached out to all my contacts and said the is up for sale, who who's interested. And yeah, that's how I ultimately sold it through, through my network. So I didn't have to use any agency or broker didn't have to pay the fees involved with that.
Speaker 1 00:31:05 Yeah. It's not easy if you can do that. I know Adam, Adam was looking to buy it quite aggressively at one point, but yeah,
Speaker 2 00:31:11 Adam was looking to buy it and he got me thinking actually that, you know, there was definitely a time to sell it because there's people interested problem with Adam was that, um, because we're both in the UK and I'm a VAT registered company I'd have had to charge Adam an extra 20% on top of what enterprise. So that, that made it difficult. It actually ended up, um, miles Beckler who I think you've obviously, you know, another YouTuber. He, um, he was one of the people that emailed, he put me in touch with one of his associates and friends and business partners, whatever, and that's how I ultimately sold it. So, um, I think that's something definitely worth thinking of when you're looking to sell a site rather than go straight over to empire flippers or flipper or any of those guys just reach out to your network first and just see if any of those people want to buy it. Cause you'll save yourself a lot of money and a lot of kind of back and forth. So we just very simply had a chat on Skype or whatever. I shared the analytics shared the Amazon dashboard, shared access to the site. And um, he had a quick look over a day or so, and then came back and said, yeah, I definitely want it. Let's do an escrow. So we just did it with escrow, which, you know, there is a fee involved in that, but it makes, you know, the transferring of the money a lot easier.
Speaker 1 00:32:25 Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yes. Um, yeah. I mean, if you can do it, if you've got the connections, I mean, we've got a Facebook group, which is best, not best website flipping group, is it? Yeah. Niche website, flippers is the group. So I mean obviously still have to, do you still recommend checking out the people you're selling to and making sure you do it through escrow and stuff like that? Cause they're not all vetted people in that group, but that's, that's got that. Group's got 10,000 people in it now. So there's a good chance that you might be able to find someone who's interested in your site. Yeah. I'm in
Speaker 2 00:32:55 That group. I think it's, it's a good way to do it. Yeah. But of course you do need to be very careful when you're dealing with and everything, but generally I'm not heard of any horror stories of website transfers going wrong. Well, either I'm sure there are some,
Speaker 1 00:33:08 Yeah, I guess just unless you, well, actually I have, I had, I had heard of one actually. Yeah. Unfortunately I have one client of ours that I think the, I think all of the, um, she, she was just, wasn't the experienced person that she was at first sight as well. She wasn't experienced by her unfortunately. And um, she ended up, uh, the guy that yeah. Falsified the income falsified, the, the, the traffic essentially. And, um, yeah. Which is sort of partied with the money on those terms, thinking it was all good. And then as soon as everything was transferred, I was making no money at all and actually it was
Speaker 2 00:33:45 Stolen. That's just being a scam. Isn't it? I mean, she was scammed. Yeah. Yeah. You got to be careful though. Nowadays you can log straight. They contributed to give you access to the analytics. So you can actually log in and have a look at the live analytics rather than worrying about screen shots. And same with Amazon. You can now allow people into your Amazon associates account so they can actually check the earnings, you know, in real time. Yep. Yep. I guess if you got earnings from other organizations, it could be quite tricky to check.
Speaker 1 00:34:13 Cool. So, um, yeah. So tell us, you've got some, um, uh, I know you've got some other websites. You've got your breast pressure washer.com and I got weird along.com as well. Um, are there any other case studies? So, um,
Speaker 2 00:34:27 Okay. There's yeah, there's weird along.co UK, which has just turned a year old. I'm going to record an update on this one this week and on best pressure because I've kind of neglected those two. I wanted to do in a similar way to best route books, but I've never kind of have focused on them as much as I should have done maybe cause I was working on a roof books now they are getting a bit more attention. Um, again, there's four videos on how I created both those sites wheel along is a UK site about it started off as actually being in a wheelbarrow site, very random, but it's kind of expanded into anything with wheels. So we've got platform trolleys, we got, um, shopping trolleys, we got foldable trolleys for the beach, you know, where we're talking about lots of trolleys, not as high value as roof boxes.
Speaker 2 00:35:09 Um, but as it's UK, the commission rates are better on Amazon. So I've never done a UK site before. I wanted to see how that went. I dunno, what's going to happen when I come to sell it again. Remember I had that VAT problem if I want to send it to a UK buy, but we'll see that's pressure washer was a site that I set up because I wanted to do a tutorial using thrive themes. Um, so yeah, that's what I built that site with. Um, it's building up nicely. It started to kind of get that up would on the impressions within Google search console. So it started to now get some impressions and be indexed and weed along is it's getting a few sales. In fact, that's, that's already starting to tick along. Um, and yeah, I love five in terms of the look and feel it's like, it's the best, uh, affiliate, the best looking affiliate website I've ever made.
Speaker 2 00:35:55 Then know what effect you I have on the rankings, but we'll see. Then I've also got a knowledgeable mind.com, which was a site that I bought a little while back. I bought it because a viewer approached me and said, oh, I've got this site. I really need to sell it because I need some money for something. I was feeling particularly sympathetic that day and said, all right, I'll take it. And it was getting some traffic and it was adding a bit of AdSense revenue when I took it over it, I fought all, it's a bit of a mishmash of articles and I cleaned out some of the articles and changed the theme of this month stuff. And now it's hardly getting any traffic source. He completely killed it, but I'm going to use it as a little project because it's very broad. It's like an informational site about random things like journaling, numerology facts. And it had some pictures, I'm sorry, art kind of articles like how to paint a rose and other random articles, which is good because I can now write about anything, but I'm going to use it as a kind of a case study and I'm going to generate the majority of the content using AI and just see if you can build a site with AI content, I guess we'll find out. So that's what I'm doing with a bit of fun.
Speaker 2 00:37:04 I'm probably gonna do another tutorial soon on it and start another case study on, on something. Just need to find a good niche. Another Amazon, um, case study, I think.
Speaker 1 00:37:14 Cool. And you had no plans or you didn't with these other sites, you didn't, you were just using Amazon, right? For a, for that
Speaker 2 00:37:20 You weren't using just using Amazon. Um, I mean with best, uh, roof box, I did want to sign up with some other companies. There's an America. There's like REI are a massive retailer for outdoor stuff. And they had a lot of re foxes. I really did want to offer some alternatives on the site to Amazon. And for some reason they just would not accept me into the affiliate programs. I think there was one company that did some random mountain sort of hiking company that sold a few roof books. But generally, even though I said, look, I'm sending this much traffic to Amazon. We're getting this much traffic to the site. I think I could probably sell quite a few bits and bobs, but Nope, they never accepted me. So Amazon was just easier. I still think that nine times out of 10, someone will probably buy from Amazon over another retailer and the other retailers, they weren't even offering much more in terms of commission. That conversion rate is going to be way lower.
Speaker 1 00:38:17 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Even despite despite the commission rates numbers and quite often still is the best option.
Speaker 2 00:38:25 Yeah. People buy it's one click buying isn't it. And so many other random things I commissioned on. It was always quite fun looking through the Amazon reports and looking at what were buying along with their roof boxes.
Speaker 1 00:38:37 Yeah. Yeah. Go on. You've got a print on demand website as well, right?
Speaker 2 00:38:41 Yeah. Yeah. Um, so that was another case study. I mean, I think I'm out of my depth on that one. Maybe there's some other YouTube channels that are far more experienced and authoritative on print on demand, but I thought why not? WordPress is a lot of people will do print on demand with Spotify. So I wanted to do something with WordPress and WooCommerce. So yes. Should we have these designs that we've been playing around with on my live streams we had like these, um, these mugs they're like for affiliate marketing and say, you know, this is obviously about your content. You don't fluff your content, keep it to the point. Um, but then if you've ever seen any of the Franklin Hatchett adverts, um, stop, give me things that will your time and other quotes, just, you know, what people had said on my live streams, like, you know, you're just thinking wrong.
Speaker 2 00:39:31 And so we had all these mugs and I thought, well, I could do a print on demand website, affiliate, marketing, mugs.com and create the site, uh, lovely looking site. Um, very nice clean theme. I used, um, print full, always get the computer as a printer file as well as very computer print full to, um, fulfill it to though on hindsight, they're really expensive compared to some of the other ones might have to adjust that. And I thought, what I'll do is I'll just then put some ads up on Facebook. You know, you've seen how they do it. You see all the ads on usual time. You just simply put some ads on Facebook and then the sales come streaming in. The one problem with that is because I've chosen affiliate marketing as the niche for the mugs. When I try and target affiliate marketeers with a mug, the cost is very expensive on Facebook.
Speaker 2 00:40:21 There's loads of other ads, people trying to sell thousand dollar courses to these people. So yeah, I ended up burning quite a bit of money on Facebook and then selling the mugs. So I'm going to rethink that one a little bit because I wanted again to make a case study out of it. But I think I might struggle to sell mugs the less, I maybe remark it to some of my viewers or something like that. I think it can be tricky. And also the mugs like $15 each, which I think is probably too much, whereas my UK, um, print on demand company that does like these t-shirts and classic WP Eagle mugs, they charge like a five or a mug. So yeah. Print on demand is pretty, not something I'm going to explore too much. I prefer the other thing with print on demand is you've got customers and stuff to do with that's true.
Speaker 1 00:41:10 That's true. Yeah. Yeah. Well, um, you know, I like the fact that you give them these things to try
Speaker 2 00:41:16 And I'm always up for giving these things to try. I mean, I hope that the tutorial was quite useful because it shows you how to, it does show you how to create a print on demand site with WordPress, which is obviously better than using Spotify, I think. Yeah. We'll see. I'll try to figure out how I can get touch with, um, with affiliate marketers and from what I hear from other people in the kind of print on demand space, it's generally just one product that actually generates most of your sales. I just need to find what that product is, what that mug is that Phillip marketeers are just dying out for crying out for him.
Speaker 1 00:41:53 Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I don't really know much about sprinting someone. I know, I know lots of people try it and like not to be what is hard, but you just got to find the right niche, the right angle. I think, like I say,
Speaker 2 00:42:05 Yeah, I think so. And maybe get out and watching lots of wholesale Ted, she's a big mover in print on demand on YouTube. And there's a few other people out there that, yeah, I just killing it, but I think there's a lot of trial and error, quite a bit of money that you burned through just to find out what works and what doesn't work.
Speaker 1 00:42:23 So have you got to move a move date yet then for moving? No,
Speaker 2 00:42:27 No, no. I haven't even gotten a date for our appointment with the consulate to go and, you know, have our interview of the Spanish inquisition or whatever. It's just, yeah, it's a complete nightmare. But, um, we weren't, we weren't talking about it eventually
Speaker 1 00:42:43 Once you've now gone. Yeah. I never mentioned that. Well, once you're on, once you're on the beach, you know, and we get to see your feet over your laptop, it'll be fine. Yeah. So are the future plans, um, for WP Eagle, um, for you?
Speaker 2 00:42:59 Um, well from WP I wanted to do, um, I do want to do another Amazon case study another one, like best read books and, um, go from there. Um, we've also got a, um, theme that we're about to launch, um, myself and Carl, who I know again, friend of your channel called bent and family, who is a, my man who looks after all my websites, does all the hosting and all that kind of stuff. So he's quite techie. The three of us had got together and put together a thing. Basically we wanted a theme that's affiliate, marketing focused. We wanted a theme that's really, really fast out of the box without the need for too many plugins. So, you know, getting 90 plus on Google page speed, really simple. And that was it really? So, um, we put together a theme it's called popcorn, not officially launched yet.
Speaker 2 00:43:49 We're still, um, just testing it out, which reminds me, I need to send you a copy of it for you to have a little play with it. Um, and yeah, it's just going to be something that we, it's going to be a premium theme of thinking of selling it for about $99 and yeah, it's designed for affiliate marketing. So for example, it's got a box that you can easily put a affiliate disclaimer in and add that to your posts and just start the little, little things that affiliate marketing need when they're setting up a site, of course, I'm currently recording a video which should be done fairly soon where I'm building a site with the theme, it's going to be a start to finish tutorial and cause the themes called popcorn, I've set up a popcorn site. It's all about popcorn makers. Can you eat popcorn with braces and answers to other very important questions?
Speaker 1 00:44:41 Wow. Yeah. I w I've got a lot of popcorn questions. You I'll help you with the content
Speaker 2 00:44:47 Have popcorn sometimes not pop, um, lots of good questions. Can you cook popcorn in a skillet, uh, lots of things. And of course also the best popcorn machines for movie night and best popcorn machines, that kind of stuff. So, yeah. I'm going to get that side up with about 20 or 30 minutes of content. I mean, it's not really going to be a proper case study size such as just a site to a, to shelf the theme or any yeah, yeah, for sure. But it's a bit fun. So yeah, that's quite exciting. We never done anything like that. I've always wanted to, um, develop something ever since I started the channel and did WordPress stuff. I've always wanted to do a plugin or a theme, but never quite managed it. So, um, yeah, it's gonna be quite exciting.
Speaker 1 00:45:29 Excellent. Look forward to that then. So like yeah. Let us know when it's announced.
Speaker 2 00:45:31 Yeah. Well, we'll send you a copy now anyway, and you can, you can have a look. Yeah, that sounds good. And I'm hoping that you might say something nice that we can add to the website.
Speaker 1 00:45:41 Awesome. Yeah, that'd be great actually. Um, yeah, yeah. Send it over. I'm gonna take a look. No, to do that. Yeah. I think, um, is there anything else that we should have talked about, um, about the best roof box or anything else before we wrap up? Um,
Speaker 2 00:45:57 I think that's about it. I mean, for those you haven't seen me come check me out. I'm starting to do more shorter videos. I think nowadays people are time poor and it was so attention poor and you know, it's all very well. And we put it together hours, sorry, videos that are like two or three hours long. Um, but not many people get to the end of those. So you have started doing some YouTube shorts and Tik TOK and all that kind of stuff to try and deliver hopefully useful little bits of information in bite-sized little chunks. And I'm also using my live stream, which is one of my favorite things to do. I do live streams on Tuesday. So I'm going to be doing one later today and also on Thursdays. And you know, I go for an hour or two and we talk about lots of different things. And occasionally I do say something that's mildly interesting or mildly funny or useful. So yeah, I've taken on a, um, a company to help me with that. And they're basically going back through a lot of my old streams, trying to find those useful little nuggets and then chopping them up and putting them into little bite-size videos. So I'm hoping to kind of up my YouTube content production, um, that way, but we'll see how that works out. Okay.
Speaker 1 00:47:08 Excellent. That sounds cool. Excellent. Well, thanks. Thanks for taking the time to answer. Share your story a bit about the case study. It's really good. It's about two to two and a half years old. I'm all right.
Speaker 2 00:47:20 The site, let me have a look was officially, was launched and uh, I don't know. It's oh, too. It was launched March, 2019. Cool. So yeah, that makes it two months, two years and three months, four months. I like that. Excellent.
Speaker 1 00:47:39 Well, um, yeah. Well, good luck to the buyer of the other side. Look forward to seeing what he does with that going for well, yeah,
Speaker 2 00:47:46 I mean, they're, they're kind enough to share with me how it's going. They sent me the earnings and figures for the last one. So that's pretty good to keep it
Speaker 1 00:47:51 On accident. Yeah. All right. Thanks Alex. Um, enjoy the rest of your day and a good screenwriter speak soon. Thanks again for tuning in, and I hope you enjoyed the show. If you're listening to the podcast version of this episode, please subscribe on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts, please rate and review. As this will allow us to grow our audience and create more shows like this one. If you're watching on YouTube, please subscribe to the channel and click on the bell to be the first to know about any new episodes that we release until the next episode. Goodbye.
