Mushfiq Sarker's Proven Formula for Niche Site Success

Summary

In this conversation, Mushfiq Sarkar shares his journey from academia to becoming a successful entrepreneur in the field of website flipping. He discusses his early experiences building websites, the transition to full-time acquisitions, and the strategies he employs to maximize the value of online businesses. Mushfiq also delves into the intricacies of sourcing deals, understanding valuations, and navigating the market for buying and selling websites. He emphasizes the importance of leveraging existing traffic and optimizing revenue, while also sharing insights on different business models, including SaaS and e-commerce. In this conversation, Jon Stoddard discusses his approach to building a successful online business through content marketing and acquisitions. He contrasts the SaaS model with content-driven strategies, emphasizing the importance of quality content and audience engagement. Jon shares insights on acquiring a content agency, the impact of AI on content creation, and the significance of due diligence in web acquisitions. He also reflects on his work-life balance and the importance of starting from scratch in the online business landscape.

Takeaways

Mushfiq started his journey in online business while in college.
He transitioned from a career in electrical engineering to full-time website flipping.
His first business was a VOIP affiliate site that he sold for $25,000.
Website flipping allows for quicker liquidity events compared to traditional startups.
Mushfiq emphasizes the importance of optimizing existing traffic for revenue growth.
He teaches advanced strategies for website flipping rather than basic traffic generation.
Valuations in the content site market typically range from 35X to 45X monthly profits.
Mushfiq uses dealfeed.io to aggregate data from various brokerage platforms.
He prefers cash transactions for website acquisitions to mitigate risk.
Mushfiq focuses on content sites rather than e-commerce or SaaS businesses. SaaS models may offer higher multiples, but content businesses can be less risky and easier to manage.
Bringing traffic to a site is crucial for monetization, regardless of the business model.
Acquiring existing businesses can enhance audience engagement and revenue potential.
Quality editorial content remains valuable despite the rise of AI-generated content.
The online business landscape is evolving, but opportunities still exist for quality content.
Due diligence is essential when acquiring websites to ensure sound investments.
A balanced work-life approach can lead to greater satisfaction and productivity.
Imposter syndrome is common among entrepreneurs, but building legitimate businesses can help overcome it.
Starting from scratch is vital for understanding the online business process before making significant investments.
Leveraging age domains can provide an SEO advantage and expedite traffic growth.

 

 Watch the Interview:

Transcript:

Jon Stoddard (00:00.226)
Welcome to the top &A entrepreneurs today. guest is Moushfik Sarkar. He's bought and sold over 200 content businesses. Welcome to the show, Moushfik. Thank you, John. Thank you so much for having me. So I got to tell you, first of all, I went back to your background here and you've got a doctor of philosophy from, and at electrical and electronics from a university of Washington, huh?

How did you go from philosophy to buying and selling websites? Yes, it's a PhD. just a backstory, probably help you understand that. 2008 is when I got started. I was, I think, a freshman in college. And that's when I got started on how to make money online. I learned how to build websites and essentially built a few up and some were acquired. As I was college, I paid off all my student loans.

had money to live off of because I had these side businesses going on. But it was always supposed to be something part time. So I had a career. I mean, I was building up a career in electrical engineering. I got my bachelor's, did my PhD at University of Washington. So that was always the path I was taking. However, I always had this thing on the side that allowed me to, you know, stay debt free, have extra money for fun things.

And so it's always been on the side. went into the startup world, VC world, worked on a lot of startups, raised funding, went through all of that. But I was in the clean energy niche, like the industry, renewable energy. And there's so much red tape, so many things, like government, know, a lot of it takes a long time to see success. Whereas on the business world, I was

buying businesses and then selling them within a few years. I mean, the liquidity events were very quick, right? So come 2020, it's kind of- I have to get permission from anybody. No permission, right? You just have to find a buyer, close the deal, where everybody's happy, right? Whereas on the VC, where I had one company go bankrupt and then joined another one. And it's just, everything moves so slow. So come 2020.

Jon Stoddard (02:14.417)
I've always kind of been in the background in the different communities. People knew my name more or less. And so I said, okay, let's do the website flip.com, which was my outlet case studies, what I'm buying, what I'm selling, my insights all shared openly. And that actually started as a sub stack.com newsletter until it went into a website. So, you know, that took off and then I decided, okay, it's time to go full time into acquisitions.

and just do this, because I had a second PhD in buying businesses, right? So like, okay, got to stop that one and focus on this. So since 2020 April, I've been full time in this. Let me, let me ask you about that website flip. I'm going to share a screen here real quick, just to kind of, so this is your first, you just kind of learn how to do it. it's basically a newsletter, websites for sale and case studies, right?

Yeah, this is not my first website, but I've already flipped 150, bought 150 plus websites before I even got to this. So this is my brand. you have yours. This is the older, overarching brand. have a newsletter here where every single Wednesday, I because I have access to deal flow, I have access to off market deal flow plus on market through brokerages.

but what people are really signing up for is my insights. So I break down each deal, about three or four deals each week, give like, what are the easy wins? What are the pros, cons? What would I pay for it? And some data associated with each deal. And that's what the actionable insights the individuals get when they sign up and then they can go and buy those or just use it as a learning process. So that has really taken off every week I send that out.

Yeah, that's valuable what you did to each one of those. I've got to ask you, can you go back to your memory? What was the first business you bought and how much you bought it for and what did you do with So the first business I actually built, so the story on that, 2008 when I was getting started, there was an industry that was actually very hot back then, VOIP, Voice Over Internet Protocol, Skype.

Jon Stoddard (04:35.349)
was just coming out and they actually pay people to refer them customers, not anymore. So was a Skype affiliate and all these different VOIP for business to business and also consumers because if consumers back then had to call internationally, you would have to use VOIP. There was no WhatsApp, Facebook and all these things that are available today to connect all over the world. So anyways, I started one of the top sites.

in that vertical that helped me pay my college, gave me that money to live off of. So that's 2008. I worked on it in 2009. 2010, the biggest competitor of mine just reached out out of the blue and said, what do you want for it? So I came up with a number and at that time it was a very low multiple. So I sold it for 25,000 at that time.

That have been at least a thousand based on revenue plus, because you're selling to a competitor. A strategic buyer doesn't matter what they pay for it. Sometimes the website generational, they don't even list the multiples on it because strategic buyer comes in and just say, Hey, we could plug it in or tuck it in and make money immediately.

Yeah, so the site I can share that is cheapest voipcalls.net. And now that actually redirects to voipreview.org, which was the biggest and today is still the biggest competitor and it's owned by a private equity company. So yeah, that was that I saw the whole process of building something and then selling it. And that's when I was hooked on buying and selling because it opened the market up to

if they're buying from me, I can buy from somebody else and then use my expertise, is search engine optimization, conversion optimization, monetization, and just plug those in, grow it and then just sell it again. Right. So as an affiliate, you were just trying to figure out how to bring eyeballs to your website. Exactly. Exactly. Just all do you focus on organic or did you do any paid traffic? I am mostly organic search and some social.

Jon Stoddard (06:57.837)
Cool. So what was the second website? What would that look like? go, my God, I made, you Yeah, I wish I could remember exactly what second, but I can tell you the gist of it. Back then Amazon was just growing. And so they had a very, very strong affiliate program, the Amazon affiliate, Amazon associates, essentially. They would pay, I think it was 10 % commissions and you get paid on everything on somebody's shopping cart. So

You could funnel people organically to your site about, let's say, blenders. And I'm just an example. Somebody clicks through, but they buy a blender, microwave, some other little things, and you get paid on everything. So it was very lucrative. So for many years, I bought and built up Amazon affiliate sites, essentially, which are like best of products, like best blender, best TV, all those kinds of things. Built up sites like that and sold those.

That was for about five, 10 years. Is that still viable business affiliate for Amazon? It's very hard. First, commissions have been cut from 8, 10 % down to 2 to 4%. Organic Search, Google essentially has tightened it down and said, okay, most of these sites are doorway sites, which is essentially funneling people from when somebody types in best blender to your site and then to Amazon. And they realized you don't need that. You can just show Amazon.

So you have to have higher, higher quality standards. You have to actually touch the product, which in the past was so much easier. You don't have to review the product. Google has come to a point, they're very smart now. so competitors, you have to compete with wirecutter.com, which is New York Times owned, where they go very rigorous and really review each of products. So if you do it right, it's still viable, but it's much more expensive to get started today than it was 10 years ago.

With such a small margin in there, it's like you're to be losing a lot of money or time and at least drive traffic to it for one to 2%. Exactly. So where did you start believing you go, hey, know, instead of heading towards the VC startup route and solar energy, I'm going to go, I'm going to buy and sell websites. Yeah, good question. So the website, essentially my thing was I needed to replace my

Jon Stoddard (09:21.441)
day job income. And that happened fairly quickly with the website flip.com launch after about a year or so operation. And so that's essentially what it was. I had to convince my wife that this was more sustainable and long-term than that. And it worked after a year. So simple. This website flip that we showed earlier, let me share that screen again, is, well, how do you make money from this? yeah. So

My newsletter, we have advertisers. I have courses. have four, about three, four courses. Consulting. Yeah, a lot of different digital products to consulting to advertising. What's the, where's the courses at? Another product? website flipping course. Yeah, exactly. So that's my most- that's cool. ... course. Yeah, so it's a video-based course. Video-based course.

course and due diligence PDF course on website flipping. That's awesome. How does that do for you? I mean, you got 13,000 people on your email list. That's great. Yeah, it's very good. It's six figures consistently. Fantastic. Do you do anything to drive traffic? Do you teach everything you know about driving traffic there?

So I don't teach about driving traffic. So in our industry, there's a lot of people who are teaching beginners how to build sites and monetize them and grow them. And then, so I didn't want to go into that route. I wanted to go into more people who have already built a site, maybe sold a site, and now they want to get into the portfolio game, building or buying multiple sites and positioning them, strategizing them and exiting.

So this is more for people who are wanting to be website flippers, not just one-off website builders. and so it's, it's, it's kind of a more advanced audience. so I don't really teach how to get traffic because there's plenty of people doing that. teach how to structure your website for the maximum exit. So, so what is that? How do you, what do you teach for maximum exit? I mean, you just go in, you don't have to share your course, but,

Jon Stoddard (11:37.453)
Yeah, I'm happy to share as much. well, in the course I teach, know, valuation, due diligence, sourcing deals, right? That's the first aspect, how to negotiate for the best multiple, essentially, and what are the average multiples in different niches and different industries. So that's the first part. And then once you've acquired it, you know, also how you close on it, escrow, transfer processes, all of that, but then it's...

how to grow it. So that's what it ties into my easywins.io, which is essentially a hundred plus strategies. And also some are covered in the course on how to grow the revenue. And that could be that you source a deal that one of the easiest ways to increase revenue is most sites do not add display advertising. So advertising from Google Adsense or bigger platforms like

Ad Thrive media line, which are essentially the ads you see if you go to any website today. And a lot of people miss that. So that's an easy double in revenue, most of the time, sometimes three X in revenue. that's the, you know, essentially try to find deals that are missing those. Others are what's called conversion rate optimization. A lot of people get traffic and eyeballs on the site, but they don't know how to convert that to clicks to the affiliate brand. So where to add.

all the action buttons, where to add comparison tables, where to add images, those kinds of things I cover. And these are essentially the ways you can take a site from earning, let's say a couple thousand dollars to multiple thousands of dollars. And then I teach how to position that site for sale. So when is the best time to sell? Also how to put together your prospectus and then how to find the buyer on the other end. So it's a full A to Z of.

finding your first deal, positioning it, then finding the buyer on the end. I'm at the easywinds.io site. So this is just basically a kind of blueprint of what you could do to improve traffic and revenue of a site. Yep. This is essentially you have a site, either you bought it or you built it. Now you have traffic.

Jon Stoddard (13:51.371)
So how do you maximize the value of that traffic? And there's 120 strategies on how to do that. And it's just a table with the strategy, the easy win, some examples from some sites that I found details on why this works and what kind of win is it? Is it a revenue win or it's going to increase your traffic? And what's the impact? So there's very high impact wins. If you do this today, you'll see more revenue tomorrow and then there's low impact and you can sort it and play around with it.

if I bought a website, content website that's got a little bit of traffic, maybe 500 buy balls a month, maybe it's not 5,000, maybe it's 500 bucks at Flippa. And I understand that the traffic, there's an opportunity there. I have passion in mushroom business. You're going to say, hey, take a look at this list and what you can do to prove the website to do what?

What's the outcome here? Am I trying to sell it for five? If I buy it for 500, I'm trying to first sell it for 5,000 or what does that look like? Yeah. So a flip is essentially, yeah, you buy it for 500, you want to sell it for, yeah, 5,000, 10,000. And so, and you know, I don't recommend people using easy ways on sites that get 500 page views, views a month. It's just too little. It's really like 10,000 is kind of the range page views a month on our website.

That's when you can apply some of these tactics. So with a 10,000 page view a month, it might be earning at today's multiples, 250 to $300 a month. That's kind of the range. And then, you you go through this database and see, okay, which ones can I apply to take that 250, 300 to 450, 500, let's say double, right? Not always guaranteed, but that's kind of the average if it's high value traffic.

And so the traffic will stay kind of the same 10 K, but you're trying to increase the revenue. So taking more advantage of the existing visitors on the site, from taking two 50 to four, five, 5,500, and then you can wait a few months to get that average earnings up. So, then you can sell it for double what you bought it essentially. So what's more valuable if I took the traffic from 10,000 to 30,000, or did I.

Jon Stoddard (16:10.605)
take the revenue from 500 to 1500. Based on revenue. Based on revenue. That's more valuable, even though my, my, my, my, my, know, strong, point here is that my goal is always to buy something that has traffic, but increasing traffic takes a lot of time.

Now my website flip lifecycle is usually three to nine months. So I buy something and three to nine months, I'm ready to flip it. It just depends on the deal. So taking something from 10,000 to 30,000 page views usually takes a lot of new content, new people involved, right? And then it takes time for the Google to pick it up or social media to pick it up, get that traffic up. So it takes time. So what my thing is, buy something that has 10,000 pages, apply easy ways to get the revenue up.

so that you can now go and position that for sale. So taking something from $300 a month to $600 a month, you immediately double the value of that website. And then now you can sell it or you can just keep it in your portfolio and then work on increasing the traffic. Because you've applied these easy wins already and you're making $600 on the same 10,000 page visitors, if you increased that to 30,000 page views, then now you just, know, three X the revenue as well. So I'm always in the proponent that traffic comes later first,

take advantage of the existing traffic to the maximum potential. To maximize the revenue per traffic. Per visitor. Exactly. And you give all these, whether it's affiliate or whether it's advertising or Google AdSense or whatever it is. Yep. Yeah. love that. This won't work for e-commerce or SaaS business. is just content websites. Exactly. Yeah. How many students do you have on that? The easy wins. About 600 plus now. Yeah.

That's amazing. And do you keep a user group or a group Facebook group and they're all coming back to you? Yeah, I have a private Facebook group. Our industry is mostly on Facebook. And so yeah, I have a Facebook group and that has a accumulation of people from all of my courses in there and also others that I've kind of invited. So industry experts. So it's a very close knit group like control.

Jon Stoddard (18:31.901)
involved, who was actually added in. Yeah, Moushfiq, hold on one second.

So I got to tell you, I did an interview with Michael Barofslavsky. I think he like does this thing also. You guys friends know each other, where of each other? We're friends, yeah. Yeah. that's very cool. Yeah. He's done a couple of funds. last time I talked to him, he's on his third fund to help him buy websites. Do you do the same? I do not. I do not do that now. You don't need to do that now or don't want to do it or what? It's not need.

So I can give you why I personally think you're not a good... We do content websites, right? And we're relying on kind of one primary traffic source most of the time, which is Google search engines, Google being Yahoo, where Google is like 90 % dominance here. And so there's risk. Risk is that Google has algorithmic changes, reshuffle who's on the top and things like that. And so knowing what I know since 2008, it's very hard for me to collect multi-million dollars.

for a fund and then acquire sites when I know that there is a high chance if I buy something, $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 value, it can half value overnight. These are things that happen like websites I buy and tomorrow, I bought it for 10,000, let's say it's worth 2,000 now because Google did an algorithmic update. So I can't sleep at night knowing I have.

multi-million dollar fund and you know there's this risk involved. So I'm okay with doing that with my own money, just not with others. So what is your average acquisition today that you do yourself? Price point. Yeah, price point. Yeah, I'm usually in the 25 to 60,000 range. And you just buy all cash. Tell me how that goes. If you find something on Flippa or all the other websites out there.

Jon Stoddard (20:28.929)
Yeah, the process. Yeah, so I spend a lot of time daily sourcing. Let's say I find something, you know, I negotiate close and most of our deals are cash through escrow.com essentially. of the company or partial? No, most is 100%. Partial things and buyouts and earnouts and all that stuff happens in the 300k plus in our industry.

Yeah. Okay. And you do, you don't do any of those or you've done some or I sell sites in that range, but I don't, I don't allow earn outs. So it's cash only. and, personally, I have not bought anything in the 300 plus range. So no experience there. Yeah. My expertise is honestly taking something from 25 to 50 K and selling for 200 to 300 K. That's what I'm good at. That's, that's a nice bump there.

So you bought, let's say you bought 50 K, you saw it bounce on my flip up. Do you find that their valuation method is fair and rational? So flip up, just give suggestions. it's an auction, marketplace. whatever happens happens. so I wouldn't say flip up will be a good example. Yeah. Other brokerages here within our space is empire flippers, quiet light, FE international. and

Yeah, in my opinion, they do value it properly. One thing just to note is I have a tool called dealfeed.io where I aggregate. Let me go to that. Hold on.

Steal feed.

Jon Stoddard (22:10.957)
And I've got it right here, dealfeed.io. Because IOs cheapest, right? No, actually it's not. It's like zoom.io. The reason he bought it was because it was the cheapest. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's cheaper than a .com. That's for sure. All right. So I'm going to share screen and take a look at dealfeed.io. So this is another

offer you have? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's free. Okay, dealfeed.io, right. Essentially, what I the biggest issue I had in this industry is there's all these brokers, there's no standardization of data and one place to find it all. So I connected directly with these brokers, I had them some of them build their own API, force them to add some already had API's.

So we connected and bring all that data into my central database and structured it and added some insights and other things which I'll go over. And essentially what I did here is just Quietly Broker, Jeffy International, Empire Flippers, some of the other smaller boutique brokerages bring those deals here, structure it in a tabular format. Now you can sort through based on what are your investment criteria. So back to answering.

The question, which was, I on evaluations? Most of these brokerages do list at a high valuation, high multiple. Savvy buyers are negotiating that multiple down to what is today in our industry. 35X, we go on a monthly multiple FYI, not an annual. So 35 times monthly average profits. 35 times monthly average. Yeah, 35X is the content side, right?

content sites, content sites, exactly. So 35X monthly to 45X monthly is the typical range. Quietlyte, I've worked with Joe Valley before. Do they have sites in the 25 to 60 range that you buy from or is that where you sell them? No, that's where I sell them. So Empire Flippers minimum is 80 to 100K valuation. Quietlyte FE I think is a couple hundred thousand.

Jon Stoddard (24:32.717)
list price. So the arbitrage opportunity that I do is source privately, which not everybody has an option. Source through Facebook groups. There's a lot of Facebook groups selling content sites, about three or four of them. I own one as well. And people list sites for sale there. You have to sift through 100 to find five that are good because there's a lot of garbage. Flip up is one of my best ways to source undervalued deals.

and then essentially do my whole framework and then sell to Empire Flippers, Quiet Light, F International or better yet. you started Flippa and then went off market deals on Facebook and then you apply all your learnings, then sell them through the higher brokers like Empire Flippers or Quiet Light or. Exactly. that's a new one on the market in the last couple years. Micro acquired is great. not.

It's good for SaaS and econ, not for content. Yeah. Okay, go ahead. So you source all these deals. Are these off market deals or these on market deals? On market. Yeah.

Yeah. And this is free, huh? So what do they have to do to take a look at the information and the name of the site where to start negotiating with the seller? Yeah. So pick one, click on the arrow on the far right. can, yeah, you can get more info and then you just go a few view full listing that will take you to the brokerage platform and you have to follow their procedure to go through that process. this is Empire. I worked with, I sold my website through,

Joe McNotty and Empire Flippers. I thought they just were starting to focus all on FBA. Yeah, there's been a big boom in the FBA space last year. Yeah. Yeah. So this is a time saver in itself. That's fantastic. Yeah. That's the goal. Three sites are based in China. What do you like to invest? You like doing content sites or

Jon Stoddard (26:46.175)
e-commerce or FBA or? No, my, my, I, I bought one FBA business, you know, five, six years ago that failed. So I realized I just stick with what I'm good at media content. What was it? It was a wallet business. So it's all white labeled from, and branded a private label, essentially from China brought to the U S and Amazon shipping center. You know, typical Amazon FBA.

yeah, it's not for me. They don't work out. Was that a startup or was that a, you bought it and you tried to fix it and drive traffic eyeballs. Yeah. So the product was all done. Source had reviews, everything. The listings were done. Amazon, some sales, some ads that the previous owner did. So it's kind of all set up for me with, with some background. and then I just had to kind of generate more sales. However, it's, it was not, something that was easy.

But not for me. So yeah, so your SaaS business, what do you think of SaaS business? Do you work doing that? You like it? Don't like it? Yeah, so SaaS, it's tougher. My background being an engineer, technically I shouldn't be able to do SaaS, it takes a... So essentially there's two prompts here. With SaaS, you still have to drive traffic organically.

So it's just like any content site to bring eyeballs and people buying your service. But then on the other end, you have to provide a technical service. You have to have developers to build some kind of product. my- It provides value, right? You either make money from it or you save time or something. Yeah. So I kind of take SaaS and say it's two aspects versus content sites, which is just one aspect.

I can do the same on the first aspect of SaaS, which is bring eyeballs to my site and then be a partner, an affiliate partner, a referral partner for existing SaaS companies and just get my commission. I find that much easier than to build an entire SaaS. Yes, SaaS has higher multiples. can get 10x. It's great. My business model is not that sexy.

Jon Stoddard (29:07.765)
at the end of the day, anybody's willing, the end of the day eyeballs are important. I can bring eyeballs to anything. All right, so that's what's valuable. I'm not getting the 10X annual multiple that SaaS are getting. I'm getting more 2X, 3X annual multiples with content size, but I'm happy with that because it's much easier, less risk. I don't need to have developers pay them $100,000 for their services. So it's easy for me. Yeah, to write. What do you, just curious, I admire,

Neil Patel, just what he's done with his digital marketing agency. And people ask me like, what's a tuck in? go, well, look at Neil Patel. What did he did with Uber suggest and answer the public? That's millions of eyeballs and he bought it for a good price, but he just added so much traffic to his little empire. And look, he's paving the way kind of what I want to do right now. I have an audience.

I have a brand right now I'm going and acquiring similar businesses that service my audience. Right. You know, I don't know when this podcast will actually go live, but you know, I just acquired a content agency, right. What's the content agency? Yeah, it's a club. don't know if I can share this, but I'll share it and we'll figure it out. Clockwork copy.com. Clockwork copy.com. Okay.

So, this is a digital marketing agency. People actually doing SEO and whatever. Yeah. Exactly. So I've been always on the lookout for a content agency because, come on, I'm in a content business and 90 % of it is content. I mean, the value. So I've been looking, a lookout for buying an agency and partnering into it. And so I sourced this one because this individual who's my other partner in this, original person who started this, they're New Zealand based.

The writers are all New Zealand, individuals who are college grads, lawyers, doctors, educated people. So they're writing the content. Usually what happens with content agencies in our space outsourced to non-native English speakers. So the quality of content is very, very low. So essentially that's why I partnered into this. Now we can service my niche website industry very easily through my audience, but also we'll venture into e-commerce content.

Jon Stoddard (31:33.823)
SaaS content for their blogs, which is a higher value proposition. And you're just going to be like Neil Patel.com and be a digital market agency. He does like a hundred million dollars, over a hundred million dollars. Yeah. That level probably not, but yeah. So with this content agency, yeah. We're hoping for a million annual revenue within the next year. So let me ask you about, I use Jasper.

Now pretty religiously because it just saves me a ton of time for right video descriptions, right? Product descriptions, everything. What's the, you're feeling on chat GPT and Jasper and right. Hiring somebody to write content with somebody can like a chat GPT can write it within, give you six different alternatives really quick. Yeah. Honestly, there's a lot of talk.

the that, hey, content sites are not going to have any value because AI can just do it. And Google is just going to show those AI results. You don't need to read a thousand word article. Here's my approach. And it's always been like this. There's always value in quality editorial and expert written content. You just cannot get that with any chat GPT or anything. Now, if you're searching for

How many calories is in a Snickers chocolate bar, right? You don't need a thousand more article to explain that. That's a one sentence max. that's, that's those per those keywords and those terms are perfect for chat GPT and quick answers. But if you're looking for what is the best diet where I can put in, have a Snickers a daily, because I really like it. You know, that takes a nutrition that takes more expertise. That's somebody's opinion, which I, I evaluated some chat GPT.

GPT outcomes and they waffle, they were fence sitting on everything. They didn't give a specific answer. Like because I was six, four, two 25, I'm a perfect candidate for tape. This is your, should be your nutrition. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So those kinds of things take some credentials. that that's where the VAT. So our content size space nowadays is

Jon Stoddard (33:46.477)
Let's just publish hundreds of articles answering all these very long, what I'll call long tail keywords like for the pet niche. Can my rabbit eat chocolate? I mean, that's like very long and you can write a 500 or 1000 word article ranking. And those will go away over time in my opinion, as it will go to more higher value content that requires more expertise. Google gets smarter about indexing. Exactly. Exactly. So.

Is our industry done? No. Is it going to change? Of course it's already changing. So yeah, I mean, don't have any strong opinions more than that, but yeah. Yeah. That's, that's fantastic. Congratulations on that. What kind of price did you get on a digital marketing SEO company agency in their New Zealand, right? Yeah. So most agencies sell on one year to one and a half year annual.

revenues agencies. like that. Because I bring an audience, bring partnerships, bring growth opportunities. Didn't have to pay much. It was just 50-50 kind of structure. The partner was happy to kind of... It's like, I could... Neil Patel asked me to buy my company and I know what Neil Patel could do. I said, well, yes, can I keep like 30 % of it and you just do what you do? Yeah. Because I know my $1 million company would be worth $50 million and

Just like three to five years. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. can't share it on Facebook. Yeah. what's the, tell me a little bit more about, I'm going to go back to the big, the big part of your business, the, web acquisition.

Jon Stoddard (35:33.197)
I'm gonna bring it up. Here it is.

Jon Stoddard (35:40.279)
Coming up, coming up, here it is. Online Businesses for Sale, share screen.

Jon Stoddard (35:47.799)
All right. So are you a

You probably go to the homepage, just click the logo. There you go. All right.

So what is this? What is that web acquisition? Yeah. So this is my attempt to sort of separate out some of the offerings from the website flip.com. One of the biggest things people hire me for is due diligence, due diligence for, excuse me, websites and businesses people want to buy. Also strategy on how to grow.

And those kinds of things. I launched webacquisition.com, which is my &A agency mergers and acquisitions. So I help people with, if they find a deal, you know, I'm going to do the due diligence report for it. I'm inside Amazon, FBA, e-commerce and domains essentially. that's this, sir, this is my, first agency essentially. Yeah. And will this roll into your, new agency? you think, or no, this is a separate.

So this is my mergers acquisition agency. We'll have a content agency and hopefully more in the future. So what do you look at on the content site? Can you give an example of what a report would look like if I found a site doing 30? Yeah, click on content site there. Number one option there. sorry. here it is, content site. Content. And then view sample report right at the heading.

Jon Stoddard (37:26.765)
Yeah, so this is a sample of a site that was a 7-pipe flip. So yeah, just we look at a lot of It's a 20-page report. We're looking at traffic revenue breakdown, content quality, what links are pointing to it, missing information that we need to ask the seller. We have a couple &A advisors, myself, plus some other experts that...

look over the report and essentially give their personal thoughts. So everything you need all in a box kind of structured for you. So revenue analysis summary pass, what's the, that's a report saying pass. What do mean? Yeah. Pass as in there's no red flags. That's good to go. There's nothing passed. Yeah. Pass warning fail essentially. So quick looks for, I mean, quick tips for the user.

Yeah, so SEO analysis summary warning when you say that that means there's opportunity or that means don't buy it. Yeah, so these due diligence report our red flag report. So warning means we saw some issues. It's not a red flag. We say don't buy it at all. It's something you need to be aware of and maybe fix after buying it.

So when you look at these and somebody brings you these and you pay for it, do you just give a independent review of it or you say, wow, that's something I'd love to have?

no, mean, you got to separate that wall there, right? Yeah. I mean, if, if it hasn't happened yet. Okay. But I'm also sourcing deals and if a deal comes where I have been looking at it and somebody else is looking at it, I'm not going to take that money. I'm just say, look, honestly, I'm actually looking at this myself. I'm sorry. I can't help you. It's a conflict of interest. minimalist vegan, that's a good,

Jon Stoddard (39:30.861)
Did somebody buy this and the site and then turn it around? Yeah, somebody bought this after we did. Sorry, we did the review because we're not going to share somebody's confidential report. We did this review independent. Nobody paid for this site was the sale of fire flippers and I and somebody else had bought it. Not my client, somebody else. Yeah.

Yeah. And what are these reports cost? it's a 1490, $1,490. How long does it take? Because websites, don't have a lot of time to send an auction. Exactly. Yeah. we do a, we have a very quick turnaround. You pay a little bit more, about $2,000. But if get a quick turnaround, it's, we like to say seven days.

But honestly we do in two to three days. that's, that's pretty cool. Yeah. With, with like brokerages, what you can do, with a bigger price, pricing like a 200 K above usually, but then Pyreflip is specifically the buyer who's interested can unlock and lock in the deal essentially with an offer. and then tell them Pyreflip was I'm getting a third party valuation and analysis done. and then contact us and then.

Pay us and we'll go through this process and Empire for Pros will actually wait until you have had time to review it. And that's They'll give you a week. There's a, you know, so there are some options in there to give you some time to exactly make an analysis of this. Exactly. Exactly. And do you find your students that bought your course, they're in there asking for this. So it's kind of like an upsell to them. Yes. Yes, absolutely. The people who have gone through my course.

Now, just because you've gone through a course, you're not going to turn around and buy a multiple hundred thousand dollar deal on your own. So you probably order one of these reports on a site that you're interested in, get my thoughts. And then now you have a due diligence report that you can follow. You have my course you can follow. Now you can, you can build the confidence to DIY over time. Yeah, that's cool.

Jon Stoddard (41:51.821)
So that's just a sample. And you've done over 200 of these yourself, or it's all your partners and everybody? Yeah. 215 plus probably 218 now, flips and broker deals. So mostly about 80 % flips. So that's me buying personally and then growing and selling it. And then we also have a brokerage, very boutique, very, you maybe. What's the brokerage?

You have to go down the website for .com and then under services

Jon Stoddard (42:29.421)
the website flip.

Jon Stoddard (42:39.399)
and then under products.

Jon Stoddard (42:45.197)
products. Yeah. So again, what we 3 % be, let me explain. Let me explain for a finders fee brokerage. So we connect you. So sellers will come to us. We'll evaluate and see if we pass as our due diligence and honestly one out of 50 do. So we're very picky.

And let's say if it does, we listed in our Wednesday newsletter that I was saying where we do an analysis and say this is an off-market deal. Buyers express interest. We connect you directly to seller with the buyers and you close on your own. We don't provide transfer support, question answer support, all of that that the brokerage is- We're not facilitating intermediary in Exactly. We're just saying, okay, I found you a buyer. You pay me if you close. And we're on a trust situation.

call buyers and all sellers have paid me. We haven't had a situation where they haven't. kind of separating. They're already in your ecosystem anyway. They don't want to piss me off. mean, it's not the right thing to do for 3%. That's not a lot of friction right there. Yeah, exactly. Come on, man. I brought you together. That's worth something. If you want a full service brokerage where they handle everything is 15%. So it's actually 3 % is very good for people who are savvy enough to

transfer a content website, which is actually very, easy. Yeah. Yeah. So your email list is like 13,000 or is it more than that? Yeah. It's about 14,000. Yeah. 14,000. And that's buyers, sellers, you know, doers. Exactly. Can I ask you like, what does your day look like? mean, how are you? Yeah. It used to be more stressful, but I've hired some people.

And so it's a less stress now. work maybe three hours a day, honestly. Three hours a day. But you know, it's like three hours focus on the laptop. It's I'm always on my phone, right? Sourcing deals and talking to people and chatting, right? Those things. I'm not counting that, but yeah, three hours of focused work. Yeah. Yeah. And how does your life change since you decided not to be a PhD engineering and working on solar startups or?

Jon Stoddard (45:04.909)
you know, renewable stuff. Yeah. You know, life is good. I enjoy what I'm doing. I don't have to work as much. there's no eight hour days unless I want it. I, and then I need it. So yeah, flexible. and all of that, I do have what's called imposter syndrome, right? I have some issues. do think you have imposter syndrome? Amazing stuff here. Yeah. Where there are some, I mean, there's, okay, there's the Neil Patels in front of you, but there are.

millions of people behind you going, hey, show me, please show me. Yeah. Yeah. There's a sense of, okay, yeah, that's the way I'm solving that is to build and partner on more legit agencies and businesses that I can put my face on. And so that's going to be solved over time. It's just a personal thing. But I do have another issue I have is I got an education. spent eight years, right? More than that, going through that process. And it was kind of a...

in a way. Because 2008 is when I got started in the content space. I probably should have done that full time then and there. I maybe just did my bachelor's engineering and just said, okay, I'm going to do this buying and selling. But spend a lot more time on education. So I have that side of me is like saying, okay, should I do something in the energy space? Should I buy a solar business? Should I do something there? And that's still something in my...

back of my mind that one day I want to buy some kind of a renewable energy business, just because I have expertise there that I don't want to waste. Yeah. It feel like you have some kind of attachment to it that you have to do, guess. Yeah. And honestly, lot of people say, no, you don't. You don't have to do it because I've been kind of through a lot of the bankruptcies and trauma involved with this kind of energy industry.

So it's always like, okay, I find something really interesting that looks good, like a solar business or something. But then I think about, my goodness, the headaches involved. And then I stop myself, right? yeah. Yeah, you know, I've had this discussion online where somebody, New York marketing from NYU, a professor for marketing from NYU said, hey, you know, Elon's making a big mistake. He doesn't know what he's doing.

Jon Stoddard (47:22.157)
and go, it's still worth $140 billion even though the stock's down. Two launches per day and landing them. What are you talking about? Should you buy, like spend four years at New York University at $60,000 a year or buy a niche website taught by Moushfiq and start flipping them every day when you're 18, 19, 20 years old? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, obviously. That's how you answer the question. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like to call you. It's not easy. Right. What are we doing? It's not like, a lot of reach out to me like, I want to make $10,000 a month. Tell me what to do. Look, it's not easy. can buy some. tell them what the specifics do you tell? Yeah. And the reason I say this is like some people, lot of people call it, I'd like to buy a business in three months. Yeah.

A $2 billion business in three months? That's not going to happen. First of all, you got to source a ton of deals. First, you got to line up your financing and are you eligible? Then you got to negotiate with a ton of people. And even if you talk to 500, you may get two LOIs. Yeah. 90 days go by pretty fast. Yeah. Yeah. It's a little different with like the way you explain it, because maybe they're buying more physical business or maybe they're buying a SaaS or e-commerce with content sites.

It's really easy to get started. You don't need to buy. So this is what I beginners. If you never have experience with SEO, social media or monetization, any of that, you have to build from scratch for just like how I started. Build something from scratch. Understand the process, monetize it, then flip it, sell it. That's when after that come to me and then learn my processes and start to buy. I never tell anybody, yeah.

You've got 10, 110,000, all you have $100,000 in the bank. Yeah, come into my platform, give me all your money, I'll help you. No, no, no. I say go away, go to my friends over there at authorityhackers.com, which is an affiliate lab.com. These guys are the people who give training and courses for building sites from scratch. Go get their courses first, learn the whole process for a year, two years, then come to me. So it's very critical. don't want people to think, I have so money.

Jon Stoddard (49:43.745)
from cryptocurrency trades that I made, you know, selling Bitcoin. And now I see Mushfique making six figures. Look at this, all these case studies. And I want to do it too. And I want to dump a lot of money. I've seen a lot of people lose a lot of money buying sites on Empire Flippers because they had the money and Empire Flippers is a brokerage, right? Their thing is to the seller side, right? That's who they represent. they're going They work for the seller.

Yeah, and so they don't, it's not their fault, right? Buyers need to be educated. And so they buy it and they have no idea what to do next on a multiple hundred thousand dollar website. They don't know what to do next. So that is the wrong approach. Starts on your what to do. Easy wins.io. Yeah, I mean, still it's like you really got to fine tune the practice just like anything. You're not going to go and if you want to start playing basketball, you're not going to go and go play college ball. You got to start.

Yeah, you start small. So that's true. That's what I tell people. you know, start doing layups before you Exactly. Point shots. Yeah. What is a basketball? Learn what is better first. So yeah, anyways, short story, build, buy. Do you, I'm looking back at your site, the website flip and you've got as featured on Empire Flippers, Flippa, SEM Rush, Knits Pursuits.

entrepreneur domain magnet. That's Michael Barislawski. Investor club, quite a lot at Joe Valley. What's EZOIC? E-Z-O-I-C. There's a display advertising network. Yeah. Advertising network. AppSumo. that, what do you do with AppSumo? Essentially I was featured on their site for some purpose. Maybe an article I wrote or product, some recommendation.

When that happens, I put the logo on there if they're well known. I'm in the future. Yeah, that's cool. can do it. Niche website builders and Odysseus. is how you... Odysseus is one of my oldest, most loyal advertisers. They're essentially a marketplace for age domains. So domains where you can buy a branded domain with a history. Maybe that company went bankrupt and the domain is available. You can buy it and build a business on top of that again. So it's one of the ways I build.

Jon Stoddard (52:04.501)
nowadays rather than starting fresh on a $10 domain that you get from GoDaddy or Namecheap or whatever. Why is that? Because it already has an age to it with the Google SEO? Yeah. Yeah. It has age in terms of maybe it's 20 years old. It has backlinks. So it's SEO value, essentially. And so you can kind of repurpose that SEO value to get a boost. Now it doesn't always work. 50 % success rate for me as a professional.

So it's better than buying a new brand new domain. And I have a cemetery of domains in my go daddy. So do I. do I. Yeah, it really depends for me. Time is more valuable than money is weird to say, but it is. know, my hourly rate is multiple hundreds of dollars. So I'm willing to take a risk on a domain that cost that's aged.

that's couple thousand dollars, maybe $5,000 and have a chance that I can get that, take advantage of the existing age and SEO value to get that boost initially. If you're starting fresh on a domain that's $10, it's never been used before fresh. There's no backlinks, there's no SEO towards nothing. .com, .net, whatever. It can take 12 months for Google to start to bring traffic to your site if you did everything right.

That's something I don't have patience for because I know what to do so I can kind of expedite that process. So that's why I use age domains. Yeah. And do you talk about that in the easy wins? Yeah. Of course on age domains. That's another point. Yours on age domains. That's beautiful. How to source, how to build and how to structure it. There's a lot more technicalities involved with that than just buying a business. Well, Shwet, this is amazing, man. You built a nice little business here. I really appreciate the time spending with me on it. Sure. Yeah.

It's great. So somebody watches this. What's the first thing you want them to do? The first thing I want them to benefit. man, I love what this guy's doing. I'm attending him. I'm doing it. I want to start. Where do I start? Just sign up for the newsletter. Look, I have courses and that's great, but you don't need to buy my courses if you're on a budget. Courses to save you time.

Jon Stoddard (54:22.291)
Everything I talk about is an article on the website flip.com. have over 200 articles that I wrote personally. So if you have time, but not enough money, then read all my articles. You'll learn everything from scratch. If you have money, but not time, that's why I built the courses. So the website flip.com is a great way to connect with me and learn. I'm very active on Twitter at the website flip. You can see a lot of day-to-day things that I'm doing. Yeah.

I think the two spots. Beautiful. Thanks so much for spending the today to with me. Thank you, John. Thank you. right. Let me stop record. I hope this video has inspired you. If you need help buying your first million dollar business, make sure to visit me at dealflowsystem.net. If you like this video, make sure you subscribe down below. Comment on it, share it, tell everyone about it. And thanks for watching.