NP 2: Chris Guthrie – Internet Entrepreneur, Buying and Selling Websites for Profit

This Post: NP 2: Chris Guthrie – Internet Entrepreneur, Buying and Selling Websites for Profit

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welcome to the niche pursuits podcast are you ready to discover some niche business ideas that actually work motivational kick to jumpstart your next big idea here’s your host Spencer Hawes hi everyone Spencer here from niche pursuits calm and welcome to my podcast today I have Chris Guthrie on as a guest welcome Chris hey Spencer thanks for having me on yeah it’s great to have you Chris Guthrie is a fellow resident of Washington State so it’s great to have him here he’s from Seattle Washington and is actually one of the few internet marketers that I’ve actually had a chance to meet in person we met last summer while I was in Seattle for a quick trip I lived just a few hours outside of Seattle and I was headed over there anyway so we are able to meet up and it was great um Chris has a blog over at make money on the internet com and he’s known for success with websites monetized with amazon associates and he recently sold a site for over six figures and now he’s focusing more on both building new websites and buying existing websites so Chris it’s good to have you on the show and I’m going to just have a few questions in regards to some of that yeah definitely I mean it’s this year haven’t had a new focus but we’ll talk about that for sure so yeah no that’s great you know first off I mean how did you get started really with your online business what drew you online what made you decide that building websites is the way to go yes actually I’m a pretty hardcore gamer so I’m always on xbox live and playing games after hours after work hours I when I first I first made the switch from full-time into full-time with websites I did a few gaming during the day but realize that’s not gonna help but anyways I’m a big gamer so back during the gamecube when that was first out so that kind of dates it awhile someone had this video game website that i was reading and it was about the nintendo gamecube and i noticed these little things the bottom of the site that said ads by adsense or ads by google or or whatever they said back then and and i asked the guy said how do you what are those and how much money you make from him he said you know oh those are just ads and I make you know two bucks a day from and at the time I was like okay well that’s two bucks but that’s still money that he’s getting just from doing something he’s interested in so that’s really kind of as soon as I heard about that that people that you could make money with these ads like I got to find a way to do it as well and so being the gamer that I am I actually you know when i was in college i created this video using clips from halo of just me shooting people and timed it to music and everything at a video editing class it was like double assignment i could use it as an assignment and so I used that as like the kind of a launching point for this video game form and then that forum was something that i use and i put adsense on there and so I started with game sites and that’s kind of how I got started but you know that site doesn’t get its pretty much dead now but that’s how I got started well it’s very interesting so if we look at the timeline there i’m trying to think of one game cube was around i mean but that’s what 2004-5 something like that or yeah the site that the first site that i started was gaming vids com with the Z it’s still alive so if people wanted to check out they can see but it was just a forum people would show you know they talked about different video games and so yeah it was kind of the first site that i created where I really made money with it and try for and that was in the around 2005-2006 one of the okay now that’s that’s kind of interesting because it sounds like essentially your first website that you put up actually make some money and did okay yeah I mean I did have one site that was before that on the nintendo nes and it was like classic nes com I wouldn’t suggest going that URL now I just remembered because I got hosting from us guy that I didn’t know about these huge major hosting companies i just did a search and ended up buying hosting from someone found out you know it was like oh get a free domain name when you registered for hosting and then he just took my domain name when he when his hosting company failed so so I mean I I mean if you’re you know listening in your beginner then everyone starts from somewhere and we all kind of make mistakes and that was mine is you know not going with reputable hosting company in the beginning and so that was the first sight but then after that it was the videogame form so so that’s kind of interesting I wasn’t expecting to maybe spend so much time you know on the first site that you built here but I find it interesting that you actually were able to get sounds like a pretty decent amount of traffic at least enough to you know make some money how were you able to market that website how are you getting your traffic yes it was a forum and the the main idea is I was like well I gotta have a way to get traffic and I didn’t at the time I didn’t really know much about SEO and I certainly didn’t know much about domain choices I don’t know why I would end it with a Z but I did and so I was I released this one video through halo and it was really popular and I started getting these friend requests on xbox live and all these messages from people saying they saw it on these different sites I think YouTube was around at the time but then someone posted one of my sites or one of my videos on YouTube a while ago and I didn’t even know what it was but I started you know I basically just created this video I spent a lot of time making a cool video and there was another really large forum and I said hey can you post this on your form and I went to all the other halo sites and they posted on their sites and that kind of sent some traffic to my site and so I just because of the form and starting a form if you ever going to consider doing it is really difficult in the beginning and so you almost have to have some type of a major marketing event to really get any traction we have to have traffic from say a blog to try and you know funnel it towards your forum but I just had I just made like 30 accounts and I was on there talking to myself because people no one comes into a form and they’re gonna register if they see nothing there so I was talking myself for the first you know feat weeks but then after that it was fine it was people were there and then talk so if you got a need split personality that helps yeah that was making them I sound like myself or I mean some people might think oh that’s dishonest but it’s really just you know you have to get that initial amount of people on the forum and you can go get your friends to do it whatever but yeah in a way I mean it’s closed content you know as long as you’re maybe asking and answering relevant you know good questions it’s good content you know for the form anyways yeah so do you mind if I ask roughly you know maybe how much you are making at its peak that particular site sure yeah i mean i was running the site when i was still back in college so years ago now but it as peak it was getting half a million page views a month which is a lot of traffic but and this is kind of what really took me a lot longer down this path of trying to make money online and kind of why i started my blog and why i tell people that whatever they’re doing is dumb if they ask me because you know i only made at the peak five hundred dollars a month from adsense okay and you know that’s you know it’s good money and it was paying my rent because I was renting will you know four or five other guys at the time but you know half a million pages is certainly not enough money yeah i know that is I mean that’s definitely a lot of traffic but I think that’s sort of the case with forum sites is that you know it’s a low click-through rate type of site and things like that so that’s actually pretty interesting to hear that one of your first websites I mean 500 bucks a month I think a lot of people out there would be you know happy with that but you know was it that website that made you decide that hey you know this business of building websites online really could be a real success or was there some other breakthrough or something else that made you realize that your business could be a success I mean I think it was really just that it’s like I had some success making money with the sites unfortunately what didn’t really click for me it was thinking you know how else are people making money online in all their easier ways so I mean I still kind of spent a lot more time after that site with gaming forums and really I mean there’s no worse target market because you know a lot of the audience might be under 18 so it’s like advertisers aren’t really targeting them that much well maybe they are but through Adsense you know that they’re not clicking ads and buying things you know unfortunately i didn’t think okay what kind of how can i apply this to other types of niches so it wasn’t until you know trying to do these side for a while I then I was you know off at Microsoft doing a full time job game testing and then doing sales and then really them that I was just kind of thinking how can I really make money with sites and that’s kind of when I thought about you know product review websites because it’s much easier to sell something when you’re just reviewing it you know and that’s kind of what sent me into amazon in early two thousand nine so so I really think I wasted a lot of my time and and and could have I mean right now I’m making good money but I probably making considerably more if I if I’d really grasped the opportunity that was available yeah I think that’s probably the same for all of us if we could turn back the clock know what we know now from the mistakes we made you know and I that sort of is the way it was with me too you know I made made mistakes and sort of treaded water for two or three years as well now so you decided to move into building product related websites review type websites did you have a few small successes before you created your larger site because I want to get into the site that you recently sold for over six figures you know where there’s some other sites that you had or did you move right into creating this larger site that you eventually sold off I was building out some other smaller sites but you know basically you know the people listening and even you know you even can rate to this as well it’s when you’re first starting out odds are you have a full-time job already or if you’re in school then maybe you have extra time available if that’s the case you should be getting on right now but when i was doing this I was still in a full-time job so it was just be like I come home I’m working and then you know so my friends hate on me or something for I can’t go out right now or can’t go to dinner I don’t know I wouldn’t yeah I’d still hanging out the friends but I sometimes they’d be like you know I gotta work on this stuff because I was so I knew there was money to be made and that I needed to try and do it so I was doing I was doing other sites and having some success for some of those well but the bigger site once I started seeing more success I was like okay well if this one is making me this much money I’m going to pour in that much more effort and then it just kind of built on itself so I still had you know I still run the smaller sites because I like to kind of diversify but that’s kind of what I did with the bigger side so it sounds actually somewhat of a similar strategy that I’ve taken in that I you know essentially created you know several websites and maybe I biltmore you know than the normal person would but build several websites and the ones that do well I put more attention into and so it sounds like maybe you had a few and you saw one of your sites doing quite well so you started adding more content putting a lot more effort and energy into that is that basically what happened there yeah I mean it was kind of a round of technology sector so I was like okay well I me too this is a newer thing I’m just going to try it was a blog so I thought you know I’ll just try and be the absolute best source on the web for this specific niche and so that was kind of my real attitude as once it started making more money I was like okay I’m going to do this so I mean I even flew to the Consumer Electronics Show to try and you know cover the event live there one time so like it was really like a matter of scaling the effort with the site as I start making more money mm-hmm now was this a site that you created all on your own added all the your own content marketed on your own was it all just you or did you have people helping you out no I did everything actually for the site I was it was really kind of because so I was doing the amazon stuff and a few other ads and sites that i had that we’re starting to make money and that was in early two thousand nine and then by mid-2009 i was making several thousand bucks a month with amazon and adsense and all that so and then you know flash for a few more months in October 15 to the 17 that can’t remember exactly I always kind of trying to remember because it’s the day I got let go for my job right and that’s when I started spending more time and that’s why I went and flew out to the consumer electronic show like well making more money than my day job with these websites that i have and this site’s a bigger one so I’m just going to try you know dive in headfirst and really kind of try and spend even more time on these things so yeah so it almost sounds like losing your job was kind of a blessing in disguise and that I mean you already had a project that was earning money and this just gave you more time to focus on that yeah I mean I was upset at first because yeah I was I thought it’s a pretty good I thought it was a good employee yeah but I mean I i I’ve been told I was in sales and so I told the outside sales guy that I was working with because we’re pretty close in terms of you know we’re talking about different deals and everything and I told them that I was doing his web stops on the side and then when he had a kid he’s like yeah I’m gonna need you to spend more time at the office and I’m like why would I do that when I make right on my side so it was one of those things where you know I would still be spending all this time at the office 50 hours a week or so and then he’d want me to work even more but anyways it was definitely blessing in disguise because after getting fired yeah I’d pretty much tripled my income that that next year full time for myself so well that’s awesome and I do have some other questions but I want to ask a couple more on this larger website and can we mention the URL of that site yeah yeah it’s um it’s net book reviews com um I just can’t I mean I can’t really go into like strategies of how you know to make the exact same size nor would I even suggest anyone to try and copy it because it has the years of history of me basically having it be you know of course of my job yeah exactly i mean it a site like that isn’t something that you can build overnight it’s something that’s going to take years to get where it is so you started the site in was a 2008 did you say or early january 2009 basically january 2009 and then you actually sold the site when i sold it in late two thousand ten actually so that was about November 2010 about two years yeah little under two years yeah okay now that’s that’s good and can you tell tell us just a little bit about how the site selling the site went how you found somebody to purchase the site give us a few details on that yeah so I mean I went to after I lost I mean I went to so I was making all this money from my various sites with that site being included and I thought you know I need to get out there and try and meet more people and try and see how else I can really accelerate my business and so I went to shoe monies event its elite retreat it was like a five-thousand-dollar event so it was a much higher end event but at you know at the time I was still working my day job when I went so i went to New York got took some vacation time off to go to New York and go to this event and then two weeks later I got back and got fire so I was like damn i just spent 5 grand on this event and i thought it’s not a big deal because i spelled my day job i can use it as a business expense but so for the front of people i met there they’re all they were almost all at a much higher level than i was so I was actually able to email one of them afterwards and say hey I know you do you’ve sold some websites before japanee recommendations then he referred me to an investment Baker that he’s used to both buy and sell sites for and they’re great guys founders investment baking it’s like founders I be calm and so basically that’s how i found the investment bankers that helped sell the site and then you know they because their investment bankers and their brokers and all that they have access to people that you wouldn’t really have access to mm-hmm so it’s really kind of a I went to that conference met people that were a higher level than I was which is something I’d advise anyone else to do is to always try and be looking at you know where how you can get to the next level and trying to meet with the people that are at that level to help you and so I did that went to that conference met that person then I did that and then since that time you know I’ve had a few potential things I was going to work out with the brokers as well that would have been really lucrative to which kind of all come back to going to that event meeting people that were at a higher level than me interesting yeah so definitely networking helped you out quite a bit get the connections that you needed to make a sale like you did that’s good I you know we could probably spend the whole podcast on that website there’s actually quite a few other details that I’d like to ask about but i have a few other things because i know you’re working on new projects now and I want to kind of get into that so just this one maybe transition question sort of related you know maybe you know to your old website if somebody’s trying to build a large website like you did or you know trying to start you know something similar online what advice do you have for somebody building a brand new website that wants it to grow it into something large I think the most important aspect really is to look at the site and then also think about a true like marketing plan like how are you going to take this site and build it along each level to the next stage in terms of its income growth in traffic growth because oftentimes the less people do is they’ll build a site and they think okay I’m going to make this an authority site but they don’t have no idea in terms of what a marketing plan might look like to really kind of take the site to the next level so I can’t talk about a ton of strategies i did but what I was basically doing was looking at what other sites we’re doing in this space and I thought I’m gonna do one step further than what they what they are and you know I’m gonna try and break the news on this netbook or whatever faster than these people are so it was kind of a lot of that really and I think it takes a lot of hustle like I was calling companies getting them to send me the netbooks like a review them and you know so all that type of stuff is important if you were going to try and take a site and really build it up into an authority you got to be able to it’s going to be a pretty hard task that said you can certainly do it in the time that you have after your day job if you really focus on that one thing and the problem is that most people they hear one thing another like okay I can make my doing that or its iPhone apps even I get distracted like I was right so much tell me about their iphone apps making all this mind I’m like gonna make an iphone and then 1200 hours later I learned a lesson and didn’t not gonna make an iphone app which I mean I think you can still do it it’s just you know sometimes especially you know again if you have a day job you got to really focus on what you’re going to work on and so yeah now that actually is some great advice I think that it’s key like you mentioned is focus just determining maybe an overall strategy that you want to pursue I mean maybe people out there don’t want to build just one big website you know in my example I build lots of little websites but that was my focus you know I focused exclusively on that one particular strategy I implemented that strategy and it worked well for me I can see you know on the flipside just like you did that building one large website you need to be engrossed in that one website and if you truly want to be an authority it sounds like I mean you need to do a lot of you know the late word you need to be on top of the industry essentially to make it a great valuable resource so that’s a great advice now if you had let’s take a scenario if you had fifty thousand dollars to invest in new websites today would you go out and buy new websites or would you build your own from scratch I think that’s a good question there’s a couple things I would mention so a lot of why I believe that the sites I’ve been doing more recently in the sites that I’ve been buying have been successful is because I have this back history of failing so many times more times than most I think that has helped in terms of making sure I the stuff that I do work on its going to be successful and of course some of them don’t hit and they’re not successful but I have a bunch I’m much better at having them succeed now than went in the past and so I think with fifty thousand dollars i think it would be I would probably actually start just building your own sites on the assumption that I don’t have any knowledge how to actually do it because I think if you just have a lot of money but not really a lot of knowledge on how the ins and outs of websites make money then it can be dangerous to just go out and buy sites that said if you can find good brokers that can help you buy sites that are worth that are actually worth buying that you know they’ve done the due diligence for and helped you and that can help but it is dangerous to just you know hop on to flip out or whatever marketplaces and then just be like i’m going to buy the first site that says it’s making as much money without really being able to tell because there’s you know when you’re buying sites you’re looking at you know doing due diligence would be like looking to see what types of terms that it’s ranking for using like a tool like sem rush using compete comfrey tool to see how much traffic there getting and if that kind of lines up with what they’re saying from google analytics getting on a skype call with the person and like having them walk you through the backend of the site etc all those and then even just like looking at the way they have their ads placed do you think you can improve them to they have an email list is there is it possible to create some type of a book or some type of product related to this and sell it all those things are possible because even when you’re buying sites people often get it caught up in at least in the internet marketing space where they think oh that’s the only place people really create products and sell well no quite the opposite there’s a lot more money to be made selling information type products and etc outside the space even if you look at like the truth about ABS would be a good example the Clickbank product that guy makes like seven figures a year just help people get better apps so I know it’s a fitness space and maybe it’s not the best example but there are other ones like how to jump higher I know there’s a jump higher guy but anyway so I’m kind of randomly I guess a bit but I would say if you kind of understand the ins and outs of what it takes to make money of the website and identity you can identify where a site can make be improved with your effort or through people that you can hire to help then it might be worth buying it’s just important to recognize that it’s it’s easy to invest money in a website and potentially get host because because websites are so risky just by their nature because you know if they get trapped from google and google changes something then all sudden your host right that’s also where they sell for a lot lower multiple then you know any other type of investment vehicle like a real estate property for rental etc you know mm-hmm what’s know some great details there so it sounds like you would lean towards if somebody is inexperienced you would recommend that they actually build their own websites and had some money to invest whereas if they’re more experienced such as yourself and you know done this before that you know maybe then would be a good time to go out and buy some websites yeah I certainly think it helps too it’s just kind of the same thing like I like for example my parents were had pushed me to try and think about business I don’t even know if they push me that much but anyways I was doing stocks in like sixth grade with my money they were using their account because I wasn’t 18 yet and I was investing in these companies and I was making money because the market was in general going up and then the late 90s came along I was like oh look at these internet companies I should invest in those because the internet is the next big thing and then you know flash forward a few maybe it’s even just a few months my drugstore.com stock is worth the dollar so it’s kind of like the same thing where if you just kind of hop into something and you don’t really have a lot of knowledge about it you could end up losing your shirt a little bit and so I think it’s important to really kind of if what anything really is to make sure that if you want to do it really dive into it and make sure you understand it before you kind of try and do it all right I totally agree and I would also say that if somebody does have fifty thousand dollars in this hypothetical situation I wouldn’t recommend that they spend it all really quickly building new websites either you know I would maybe take a very small portion of that and try your hand it may be a few websites if they’re very inexperienced if they’re experienced you know of course they can do whatever they want build new websites or by sites but yeah and one thing I’d add to is that if they were if you did a lot of do you have a lot of my to invest because I talked to people all the time that you know they’re successful in their professional world and they’re just looking at some other way to make money then certainly even just picking a topic based on something rid to your job or what you’re interested in and having kind of if you wanted to go the authority stylist I trout then one way you could do is you know you help out some of the content but you’re hiring people to do the content as well so it’s not just all you but then you know that way you’re not just because I wouldn’t want to say you got to spend all this work to be able to figure out what all it takes because there’s a lot of stuff that can be outsourced and without really thinking the integrity of the website you’re trying to build so right now so I really you know yeah so I know that recently you’ve been buying more sites yourself can you tell us a little bit about you know why you’re buying sites and what you look for when you’re buying a site yes so the biggest thing that in 2012 i was thinking I’m can be a few things i’m going to focus on tracking my numbers better on like a monthly and quarterly basis just like I was back my sales job so it’s funny because my old sales friends say I’ve come full circle but um so part of that was I was just thinking about scaling and you can certainly build sites and scale but what’s also good as being able to just take your money and leverage it into buying something that someone’s already spent you know several years or working on and then they’ve taken it to the level that they want to go and either they have all their chips in one basket and they want to exit so you know I can buy the site from them and then I can take it and then either you know run it and see all the things that I might be able to improve based on my past experiences of improving sites etc and so yeah so I’ll do and that was the main reason why is that I was like I can make money building websites I built sites and sold them I’ve built small sites and made money with them and they still sit there but you know what are some other challenges that I can do and how else can i make money with websites and so buying sites was kind of the main thing that i was thinking about doing and it’s it’s still their art and the main reason why i like is that there’s a lot of opportunity because you know most people you know you would never look at like a traditional newsletter like an investment type journal or newspaper etc they’d never talk about someone buying websites as a way that they’re making money whereas you know we’ve now you hear people saying that you they’ll be talking about domain names and people about domain names to make money so it’s kind of like you kind of know that’s been passed a little bit the domain name thing right so I mean that’s kind of why I went into it and also just because I know I spent a lot of time building out some good websites and I know other people have as well about different topics they’re passionate about and so they to the point they want to sell that I’m certainly happened to buy and I can leverage the capital that I developed through my through my business and then an ultimate ultimately it’s just a try and scale I mean I’m still working out of my house but I think I’d like to kind of break out a bit and start to hire some people as well so yeah I know it’s a great you know purchasing websites is a great way to leverage you know you’re both your existing knowledge and the you know additional cash that you have on hand because building your own website it can take years or months to build it up to a level that you know has some decent income coming into it it totally makes sense from an investment perspective if you’re able to purchase something that has an existing cash flow and you know particularly if you’re able to you know change some things on the website to improve the amount it’s earning each month you can increase the return on your investment quite a bit now as far as where you’re buying websites what would you say is the best place to look for those I kind of do a little of both originally I wasn’t looking as much on Flippa because I always just assumed that it was too picked-over but I’ve talked to a few people that are still buying sites on flip in buying pretty good one so I’m kind of retaking another look at it really it’s just a matter of word I want to direct my attention to for the day and so sometimes it’s going out hunting for sites and in that aspect it’s kind of like door door sales where I would do the things I would normally do when I’m building a site like he would research market research determining if there’s too much competition to really try and beat them or what it would take to beat them in the serps etc and so then sometimes I’ll just contact people and say hey I see how the site would you be interested in selling and then I get people that will just not reply because again it’s a numbers game and I’ll get some people would say a million dollars and I’m like okay there’s no way your site’s worth a million dollars all the time people get upset at me slam the door in the face kind of like it’s it is kind of feel like a door door sometime right I had one guy say how do you people keep fighting me that’s funny um but then you know I found a site like found a site that was I bought for 500 bucks from a guy and he hadn’t updated in six months it was back when i was doing some more review sites and i was thinking about you know what are the review said i could build out and the bottle from for 500 bucks hadn’t been updated in six months that’s why i knew i could probably contact him and he would be okay with selling it and puts mad amazon links on it and some adsense and that wintered there that winter holiday because i bought in the summer it had made about three or four thousand dollars for me so right yeah and then like another example like i bought one from just another blogger that mentioned i’m looking to semi site but i don’t want to do the auction process you know anyone and i was like i’m looking at buying sites about that was a crafting site that one’s copycat crafts com if you wanted to look at that and bought that site about i was almost 10 months ago now but about four thousand dollars it was making one hundred and fifty dollars a month so on the face of it you think that’s a pretty high multiple to buy a site at but i could see that it was getting you know a quarter of a million page views a month and it wasn’t monetized very well so all i did was just improve the monetization continue to pay someone else to write the content and then that site was paid off in a seven month time period and now it’s just seven hundred dollars a month of income that the site’s making for basically no work I guess nice so would you say that that is one of the main things you look for when you’re buying a site is maybe high traffic low monetization or poor monetization on the site is that one of the key things you’re looking at yeah that’s certainly one thing and also like I’ll mention if someone says potential in a listing that’s usually like a like a warning word yes a lots of potential it’s just kind of like you know if you’re looking for a house and someone you’re real estate and shows you something and the the roofs falling in and it has a lot of potential wrench arm right so it’s something can I get it be aware of but yeah I mean I’ll look for a true potential where it’s like they clearly knew how to make a site and even this even using that earlier example she had she knew that there was more she could do the site but it was just something that she built kind of on the side but she wanted to focus on her main network of sites which was getting you know close to two million pages a month so because it was just yeah so it was just a matter of I don’t want to focus on this anymore I need to get out and that’s what some people do lots of times when I’m buying sites that’s a lot of it is people like I bought aside from someone that basically was like I can’t take working from home anymore I need to not do it anymore so you like went and got a new job and but I bought aside from em Celtic yeah so there’s it’s there’s a lot of those opportunities and then you know finding the sites to buy it certainly you know the most difficult aspect of it is finding a good site worth worth buying and so it can take a lot of time and that’s something that I’m looking at finding a way to outsource whether by telling people that if you find me a site that i buy i’ll give you like a percentage of the total sale price or something like that or just finding people to go out and paying them to contact people for me and then I’ll take over when it gets to the final negotiations but yeah yeah cuz I could definitely see that would be very time-consuming if you have to contact several website owners before you get any interest at all so it can be yeah sort of a hunting game for quite a while I’m sure so it sounds like you’re interested in sites for sure that are not strictly for the cash flow for example I mean you want sites that you can sort of revamp and rework and increase the income quite a bit whereas I know that there are other sort of strictly investors out there that they just want to buy a portfolio sites do nothing and just collect the dividends or the income each month yeah exactly i mean that might be a business model in of itself right it’s just finding people with a lot of money so i don’t have to spend my own capital buying sites and then hiring the team of people that manages them that’s something i considered too but yeah i think that like lately to some of the sites i bought that on there on the lower ends I’ve been burned either by different google updates and so that’s kind of why this year especially i am only buying sites for ten thousand dollars or more and so i bought one for ten thousand dollars in january and i wanted to buy a few more that they didn’t work out in the last few months and so this quarter I’ve got to spend some more time because I have a goal to buy at least one hundred thousand dollars with the sites in 2012 and and then with that being to just basically I’m buying them for the both the potential they can be improved but also if they are bundled to be resold later which is one option but it’s tough they’re in different niches because then they kind of just sold separately right but yeah it means even just buying for the cash flow is a good good practice to because if you can have someone to write the content for them and it costs less than the site makes and it has good soil foundation then it’s not a bad strategy right and just to again clarify you aren’t or at least up to this point you haven’t bought any of those sites off of Flippa these are all sites that you’ve either you know contacted the owner on your own or they may be contacted you through your blog or something like that yeah but i should add to that it’s partly because I’ve just been so paranoid I think I’m probably overly paranoid because because i have a blog where i talk about high make money and people know that i make relatively good money i guess i don’t i’m always kind of private irrational fear of like people like finding what i’m looking at buying and so i know that if people go on flippa them they can see my name on there right and so I kind of thought you know Wi-Fi I can either go with an unknown name and no picture where might be difficult to convince a seller that I’m a legit buyer or I can just stick with my my name and go on the idea that if I sell something that people kind of know more about me and that it’s I’m more legitimate than perhaps another seller so I kind of went with that additional strategy and so that’s kind of why I have been buying sites it’s because of this irrational fear over maybe it’s a rational i don’t know people always like to copy sites so that’s kind of why right i’d advise never to tell anyone but I just do it sometimes I guess yeah so well maybe it’s not irrational I mean have you had any experiences in the past where you’ve noticed the people of either copy to site that you had made public or somehow they found out about one of your websites through your blog definitely yeah i have i have a few sites that Mike one that I’d mentioned inside a course that I was selling an Amazon course and that site i used i continued to rank for it number one position for even throughout most of the google changes it was about 18 months and then finally you know enough people had seen the video before someone was someone spent with maybe some more SEO expertise started to maybe not necessarily more expertise than me i don’t know but they feel like I mean it is that it’s yeah they’re like because they know just from looking at my numbers I’m saying here’s the site that I have and this is how much it’s made and so they know immediately that they can just go and build the same site and so that’s why I have to have two dedicated servers with websites and different Adsense and different company names and they’re all on different servers and right and yeah and so yeah it’s kind of one of those catch 22 s being a blogger I guess is because you want to be as public as you can about the information that you’re sharing but unfortunately there are and experienced this myself where people have found you know websites that I’ve created even though I never you know mention them / you know directly on my site where they do just you know what they’ve done with your website they try to outrank and and it affects you know real earnings that you know we’re trying to bring in so it’s one of those things you know I totally understand your fears about you know public auctions on flippa and things like that you know people do know who you are and there are people out there that unfortunately will try to copy or or do other things to what you’re doing as well but yeah yeah so but for the most part that’s that’s some good resources that you gave us as far as strategies that people can go out and you know by their own websites either through contacting owners they can do it through flip of course and any other advice that you give for people that are trying to buy websites yeah i think that i should add to is that the the flip a thing you can certainly go on and by sites and if you aren’t out there advertising how much money you’re making and that’s actually something that’s kind of why I’ve stopped doing income reports because I don’t like I don’t want people to know look I’m making you know X thousands of dollars a month from this source then people will find the sites that i have and then where i connect the sources and then try and do the same thing again it’s it’s probably a little too much for worrying about what other people are doing but it’s still something that’s i know that even from your own examples and from past conversations we’ve had that it’s certainly worth making sure you aren’t out there with a bullhorn or something yeah no def not attention to something I mean people take notice and so yeah it’s sort of one of those things that there’s any aspiring bloggers out there that just be aware of you know the potential out there for people to you know try to you know people out there trying to make money and of course they see others being successful they’re going to try to replicate that any way that they can yeah and one one thing I’ll finally add 2 is just I spoke with someone that had a site ranking for a very lucrative keyword and I contacted it was related to a site that I had and I said you know why don’t you have your face on there and you know try and do this whole personal branding thing and you know try and have this aspect and what he said to me is something that I think is really valuable especially if you’re thinking about doing a blog I’m talking about making my online etc he said I don’t care about being famous all I want us to make money and so and I he told me and he kind of showed a few things because I kind of talked to him for a while he certainly is making a considerable amount of money and he doesn’t he doesn’t care about going to the conferences and speaking there and there are a lot of people that you know will never go up in front of a public audience and say this is how much money I’ve made from this project or you should listen to me and read my blog right but oftentimes they’re the ones making a considerable amount of money doing the things that there’s not telling anyone ya know i think that there’s a lot of listeners probably out there that sort of this situation they want to be in they want to be sort of tired you know doing their thing and maybe nobody else knows about it so there definitely are a lot of people out there doing that for sure so Chris maybe you can tell us about any new projects that you have going on anything you have planned that you’d like the listeners to be aware of yeah I mean I just the new projects i think i’ve started even kind of was just with the 2012 an idea of scaling is that for the past several years I’ve been in this business I continually run into problems that I experience with that I believe can be solved through software solutions and so that’s why I mean even we partnered on a theme through niche website theme com and i’ve had plugins built like an Amazon plugin easy azon calm and so those those types of projects are things that I’ve been working on this year is just creating software to solve a lot of the headaches that I had my own business which I if I was having him and people were doing similar stuff to what I was doing then I assumed that they’d have them too so those are some of the other things that I’m doing and probably the best way to keep track of what I’m is just through my blog make money on the internet calm and i’m on twitter at Chris Guthrie so yeah great no thanks for that i’ll post some of those resources to some of the projects that you’re working on obviously we’re working on the niche website theme together but now that i totally makes sense that you see a problem in your own business or a way that you can do things more efficiently there’s likely to be lots of other people out there having the same problem so it makes a lot of sense to be able to work on new projects that help both you and other people out as well so any parting words that you’d like to leave for people listening in no I think I’m just glad you’re able to have me on and I hope that most of all that people just kind of either listen to the success or failures that I’ve had and also to yours as well Spencer and then they just decide on a course of action and start going for it and I know that you’re available on email i’m sure and i am too so people wanted to send me an email after this or if they have a site they want to sell there you go go ahead and contact me it’s chris at make money on the internet calm so yeah great thank you very much for sharing yep Chris’s blog is over and make money on the internet com Chris thank you very much for being on the podcast today I appreciate your time very much you [Music]