AFP 24: 13 Misconceptions About Niche AdSense Sites

Justin:
Welcome to Episode 24 of the AdSense Flippers Podcast. You got Joe and Justin here, man. What’s going on?

Joe:
That was just really lame.

*************

Justin:
Welcome to Episode 24 of the AdSense Flippers Podcast. I’m your host Justin Cooke and I’m here with “Hot Money” Magnotti and John “The Intern” DeVries. What’s going on fellows?

Joe:
Yo! Yo! Yo!

John:
What’s up?

Justin:
So we’re going to be doing things a little bit different today. We’re going to slow it down a little bit. We’re doing kind of the buyer side chat so to speak and we’re just going to kind of talk and see how it goes.

Joe:
Yeah. We have a glass of wine, kind of relax or hanging out. We’re talking niche sites.

Justin:
I don’t know about the wine, man. I need some Johnny Walker. That’s what I need for this podcast.

John:
Yeah. So Joe and I will be like mildly buzzing.

Justin:
Hey guys. Fantastic! So much fun. Yeah, yeah.

Joe:
But anyway it’s a different format. I’m interested to see how it goes. We’re definitely playing it by ear a little bit more.

Justin:
Yeah. If you guys like this format, please let us know in the comments. If you prefer a more right to the heart kind of episode, then let us know that too. So let’s go right to our news and updates, man. What have we got? First thing we’ve got our iTunes giveaway.

Joe:
Yeah. We’re still rolling until the 30th with anyone who gives us a five-star review will get a free niche site.

Justin:
Everyone?

Joe:
Somebody, sorry. Let me clarify that. One person out of all the people that give us a five-star review, we will give the site, right?

Justin:
Yeah, yeah. That’s a little better.

Joe:
OK.

Justin:
Otherwise we will be giving away like 50 niche sites and that would kind of suck.

Joe:
It would kind of suck.

Justin:
Huh?

John:
You have a lot of reviews from that little contest.

Justin:
We did, man. Yeah, the US, UK, Canada. It’s pretty cool. Got a couple of people complaining though. Like, we’re in Germany. I like your podcast here. Why aren’t you giving us something? So we will have to do something outside of the four main English-speaking countries.

John:
What was the reason for the limitation?

Joe:
Because we don’t really speak German

Joe:
So we have no idea what they are saying.

Justin:
Well, there’s other thing too. I mean like I would have to go through each country, like Estonia, and find out how many reviews we have in Estonia. That’s kind of miserable.

John:
I thought there was some kind of limit.

Justin:
No. You have to like go into iTunes and like select the country so it’s kind of un-cool. Oh by the way, I should mention we have John “The Intern” DeVries with us today on this podcast and we’re going to be going to the heart of this week’s episode which is all about misconceptions about niche AdSense sites, misconceptions about AdSense Flippers. I think it will be really interesting, some of the ideas he had before he even got here.

Continuing with the news and updates though, we did the House of Hope thing, Joe. Talk about that for a second.

Joe:
Yeah. Well the boxing event I think went really well and they were the primary beneficiary of the boxing event. We went over there, took some pictures with the kids. It’s for cancer patients, children cancer patients that come from the surrounding country side, need a place to stay right at the hospital. These are kids with serious diseases and debilitations but we were able to brighten their day and make them feel really good. I have them try on the boxing gloves, did some posing with them and I hope we just made them a little bit happier.

Justin:
Yeah. It was cool. I mean they were a little nervous at first.

John:
They’re quiet.

Justin:
Yeah, really quiet but I think after a while, we start goofing around. I was trying to speak some Bisaya. They were laughing at me. That was kind of fun and we brought them some lunch and more importantly, I think we were able to bring them some needed medical supplies. I just wish we could have brought more. I wish we would have made a bunch of money with the boxing event but now that we’re out there and that we’ve done it, I think next year we probably have a better chance to getting more sponsors and making more money with it.

So really I think the best charities are the ones that are actually profitable, not the ones where you’re like give me money, give me money but if you can like make a business out of a charity, that’s the best charity there is.

Anyway, House of Hope, we’re going to put a link to it in the show. You can take a look but if you have some extra money and you would like to donate to them, I’m sure they would be willing to take food, supplies, that type of thing.

Next thing we got, we just had some sites for sale in our Buy Our Sites page but they are gone. We sold them.

Joe:
Yeah. I mean well, we have one package left so get it while you can. But we were going to like hardcore promote the Buy Our Sites page on this podcast and it doesn’t seem like we need to because man, they went really quick. But hey, check it out. The package, the one last package might still be available by the time you guys hear this.

Justin:
Let’s talk about it real quick. So we introduced a new thing. Instead of just individual sites, you can buy packages and some is from our Flippa auctions. So you can buy a package of 10 sites earning X a month and we have that now in our Buy Our Sites page. The updates are the same so last 30 days, last six days of revenue. It has all the information.

Joe:
Yeah. I really love this. I think it’s very powerful because it actually has an advantage over the Flippa auctions and the fact that the stats are updated automatically through the AdSense API. So you get a daily account of exactly that package, just going for it, and every site within that package.

So you get a good, diversified 10 to 15-site kind of package that covers many different niches, many different types of earners all the way from really low earners to kind of the medium earners and it gives us the ability here to put together some interesting stuff.

Justin:
Yeah, yeah. John, I’m not sure if you heard about this. We did a Flippa post about the problems of Flippa and shortly after that, like the day after – and I think they’ve worked on this for a while. It wasn’t our doing that caused them to come out with this but they came out with the verified AdSense earnings. So basically they have a similar system to ours where they will plug in to the AdSense API, verify the earnings in the sites and then you can actually look at like what their claimed earnings are versus what the actual are.

John:
This is the day after your post …

Justin:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pretty crazy.

John:
Is that one of your gripes?

Justin:
That was one of the gripes, yeah, that they don’t verify earnings. So last talking point I want to mention is an article on The Verge. It’s called Scamworld. You guys heard about this?

John:
No, I haven’t.

Justin:
OK. So there’s an article on The Verge and it talks about internet marketers and it says it kind of like puts off that – well there are some internet marketers that do real marketing but a blanket statement, 99 percent of them are horrible and here’s what they will do.

They’re just trying to get you to opt-in, opt-in, opt-in so they can then take your email address and hopefully get your phone number and have some telemarketer scam you on like a $5000, $10,000, $20,000 internet marketing package. That like that’s the goal, like they talk about Frank Kern and some other guys, some other major like product motch kind of internet marketers and really kind of throw them under the bus.

Funny thing is at the end of it, they mentioned some book and they have like an affiliate link to it at the end. So …

John:
You’re kidding me.

Justin:
No, no, no.

John:
No.

Justin:
Anyway, they go on a tirade about internet marketers but, you know, I mean the truth is, is that I have a little sketch about internet marketers before we started this. I know Joe did.

Joe:
Oh.

John:
He really did.

Justin:
He thought they were mostly crappy and I knew there were a few because I had found like Pat Flynn and stuff at that time but – that we’re good but yeah, I mean both of us really thought that most of the internet marketers will sketch.

Joe:
So many get-rich-quick-scheme kind of guys that I was really turned off by that element. But I mean I guess you have that in any sort of sales-heavy business.

Yeah, the mortgage company too. I mean pulling on people’s heartstrings in their house and saying, “Oh, this is your biggest investment. This is everything you had. You should take money out. You should get the pool. You deserve it. You should get the big car.”

John:
Same problem, different industry.

Joe:
Yeah, and they think that that’s abused anywhere and I was definitely negative thinking towards it before I got into it in 2007, 2011 and then there’s good people here in the internet marketing community. You just have to look for that and you need to wade through the bullshit and make sure that you find a good one.

Justin:
Well, I mean we’re talking a little bit about misconceptions. Let’s get right into the heart of this week’s episode.

*****The AdSense Flippers Podcast*****

Justin:
So probably a good idea to give a little intro into the heart of this week’s episode. It’s all about misconceptions with niche AdSense sites or with AdSense Flippers in general. I was having a conversation with John “The Intern” the other day and we were talking about some of the things that he thought when he was coming out here to the Philippines that proved to be a little different or untrue or he had a preconceived notion about how things were and we thought that would be kind of an interesting topic to discuss in the podcast.

So we have John here to kind of go through some of those questions he has thought of from the last 24 hours and kind of just roll through it.

John:
All right. The first thing I thought was that you guys lived in a little shack.

Joe:
Especially when you’re on the way from the airport.

John:
Oh! Lord yeah.

Justin:
Yeah, we were trying to freak him out too. It was really fun. So we were driving along the road and like the road from the airport to the house here is kind of like littered with shacks and like lean-tos and we get to tease him. We’re going down some little alleyways too and at times, we’re like, “Oh yeah, we’re right up here, man. We’re right up here.” And I could see the look on your face. You’re like trying to be cool about it but you’re like, “Sweet lord, what did I get myself into?”

John:
I figured everything was cool, right? But there was a little part of me that was like, “Am I going to show up and have this really crappy room and this little tiny place?” I don’t know.

Justin:
Poor bastard.

John:
All right. So I guess the first thing you sat me down to talk about this is I really had no idea – I don’t want to put this poorly but like I didn’t realize actually how easy it was to earn some money with AdSense, right? I thought it was probably really difficult to actually make any sort of decent income with AdSense sites.

Joe:
Yeah. I would say as long your keyword research is good, it’s definitely fairly easy to earn money with AdSense sites.

Justin:
Earn something.

Joe:
Yeah.

Justin:
I mean I don’t know. I don’t want to make it sound too easy. Let’s go out there and knock out some sites because that’s not exactly true but it’s easier than you think. I was thinking about this. There’s kind of a gap. I think it’s easy to earn a little bit with the niche sites but then there’s a gap between us. If you try to build out an authority site where people go back to it over and over again, it’s like a real authority site, you actually get a ton of traffic.

John:
Right.

Justin:
Right. So now you have to have a ton of traffic and your CTR goes way down because it’s not as like tightly-focused on the keyword.

John:
Yeah.

Justin:
So like niche sites are great. Big authority sites that get a ton of traffic are great but that in between is kind of difficult. You know what I mean?

Joe:
Yeah.

Justin:
Like that’s kind of the danger zone. I think it’s better to be really niched down and focused or to be extremely large with a ton of traffic.

Joe:
Also getting from here to there can be very dangerous too because you can wind up spending a whole lot of money trying to scale your process only to come out and find out that four or five months from now that you mess something up and it’s not really giving you the return that you expected.

Justin:
Yeah.

Joe:
So that’s why it’s important to approach this thing slowly. Make sure that you have the right thing going on but yes, I mean getting some sort of money in the door quickly with niche sites is definitely not that hard.

John:
Yeah. I think the second point kind of ties into the first one in that – so I think it’s kind of a misconception on the internet that you need a really large site to make any money with AdSense because there’s a lot . I think they’re only going to get a couple of cents per click, right? So coming on here, I thought you guys must have an insane amount of websites and an insane amount of ads and clicks because if you’re only getting two cents per click, it’s a lot of clicks that are adding up.

Joe:
Well, we do have an insane amount of websites but – no, I think that the earnings per click thing, where that myth comes from is because most people put AdSense on their general blog, right? That’s not really about anything.

John:
Targeted.

Joe:
And they get those five-cent clicks and they go, “Oh my god. How am I going to make any money out of this?”

John:
How to get eight million page views to make this worthwhile.

Joe:
Right.

Justin:
Yeah. How to build a chain link defense, right? I mean there are probably not a lot of advertisers for that so they get their three-cent click on the one advertiser that’s there and they go, “Oh my god. AdSense CPC is really low.” But when you’re highly targeted around a particular subject and you know that subject has the advertisers, you’re much, much better off. That’s why the niche sites work.

Joe:
And that’s why the keyword research, Justin, is so important. When Justin first taught me the keyword research, that’s when it really clicked for me and I said, “Oh, now I understand why advertiser research and that portion of your keyword research is important.” It’s not just first page evaluation. It’s not just finding low-hanging fruit. It’s also making sure that the money is there.

John:
Right. One of the big things that I thought about before I came on here is I was really surprised that you guys sold most of the websites that you built, right? Coming from a newbie’s perspective, I’m thinking, OK, you’re spending all this money and time building all of these websites. And then instead of just keeping recurring revenue which is you’re selling to other people, you’re just moving it to the side and getting rid of it and then repeating the process again. I was thinking coming out here, “Why don’t they just keep all the sites they ever built and then six years from now, they will have 20,000 sites?”

John:
You will be making a million dollars a month or whatever.

Justin:
Well here’s the thing. We found something that works. So creating starter sites that earn was a process that we found effective. So we figured we wanted to scale at least that portion of it, right? And unknown for us, rebuilding out a mini niche site to like a semi authority site, that’s an unknown. So we would like to do that and we still would. I mean we’ve talked about that in a recent blog post but that wasn’t our bread and butter. So the idea was to scale it up until we were creating enough sites to where we thought it was valuable, making us good money and we’ve done that now, right?

So we flip them all into that point and that’s where we’re starting to get into newer things because we’re at a level where we’re now both really comfortable with it. So that’s why we’re selling so that we can quickly scale and not come out of pocket to grow our niche site creation.

Joe:
Yeah, and then that just took on kind of a mind of its own where I enjoy the flipping part. I enjoy interacting with the customers and showing them about the sites, teaching them a little bit more about the sites, having them try to expand the sites, working with them, get them up and running on their first AdSense account or whatever. I think that’s a little bit more interesting than just sitting there and chugging out niche sites all day.

Justin:
I feel a little disingenuous when we say OK, here’s how you should build out the site after you buy it from us because we don’t have as much experience there. I know – and I’m pretty clear about that. I say, look, here’s how I would do it if we were doing this and we blogged about like our new plan to build out these authority sites but it sucks not having actually done it.

So I think once we have done it and we found some success, we found out what worked and what doesn’t, we will be in a much better position to tell people, “OK. Here’s how you do it,” and honestly, we may hold on to more sites at that point as we’re building them out to these sites for sale to a higher end buyer.

So we can build up $500 a month sites and then flip those for $8000 to $10,000, right? Then we will be doing that and we will stop at that point and make money selling those sites for a while, right? And then a few of those, maybe we take even further, right? But we figured that out first.

John:
So when I got out here – actually, I haven’t told this to you guys yet. So as I was going through the whole process of learning about how they can work and learning from your team, analyzing the spreadsheets and stuff, it’s complicated as hell, right? You guys have a lot of different stuff, a lot of different moving parts and there was definitely a point where I was like I’m not sure. I wasn’t concerned that I would be able to understand it but getting my mind about all the data and all the different kinds of spreadsheets and stuff you guys had is definitely a task. It’s really complicated.

Justin:
We were talking the other day and you were like, honestly, if it was me, I probably wouldn’t have started off tracking as much data as you guys …

John:
I wouldn’t, yeah.

Justin:
Yeah, and so we’ve been in this situation before in other businesses where we start off with something relatively simple and then you kind of build on that and build on that and you end up a couple of years later without all the data in the place that it needs to be, without the tracking set-up because it just kind of grew into this monster that is not managed. So we’re pretty good at making sure that from the beginning, we try to set up recording of data that we know possibly that we will need later. Now we missed some stuff. There are things now that we’re like, “Oh, crap. I wish we would have tracked this.”

John:
Some things you got rid off to.

Justin:
Yeah, things we got rid off. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe:
Yeah, but I think it’s more of a general philosophy than having to iron trap sort of a process for everything, right? And our people know that too is that we like to track tasks as granular as possible and when we can do that in a nice, comfy spreadsheet, we do it. And so that was done with Try BPO tasks. That was done with the outsourcing tasks before we got to AdSense …

John:
Yeah. When you guys worked with that same company, did you do it then too?

Joe:
Yeah.

Justin:
Well, it wasn’t done before we started doing it, right? So it was a mess and so that was part of our job there. Our task was to kind of clean that up and start tracking or recording some of that data and putting it where it used to be and using it for what we need it for. So we did a lot of that. We transferred. We migrated from an older CRM to a newer, slicker CRM and made sure we’re putting the data in the right place that wasn’t set up right before. So these are the types of things we did there. We knew how important it was for future businesses, later businesses.

John:
Yeah. If you could go back, would you do it any differently?

Justin:
What do you mean? Adsense Flippers

Joe:
Yeah

John:
in terms of the process of how you built this.

Joe:
CRM right from the beginning.

Justin:
Yeah. Probably the CRM would have been nice. Knowing that – but here’s the thing. No, I’m not going to say that because if we went back when we said, OK, we would have gotten CRM from the beginning …paid $3000 for this and $5000 for that. Hell, no. Would we have done that, Joe?

Joe:
No. It has to be

Justin:
it would have worked and been successful, yes.

Joe:
Knowing what I know now.

Justin:
Yeah.

Joe:
Of course.

Joe:
Hindsight is always 20/20, right? But yeah, I mean it would have been a little bit of organization because honestly in the beginning when we started out, I didn’t see it very successful. So when I set it up, I was probably like all right, here’s a spreadsheet to track this bullshit like …

John:
I love that Justin was like the champion of this idea and now you do all the books and like migrate the sites and he writes the blog posts and that’s all …

Justin:
Joe is like, “Damn, man. I got to track all these stuff?” These are the keyword research …

John:
You’ve taken on more and more of the operations of the actual business and then you’re the one who are like, “I don’t think we should do this.”

Joe:
Yeah.

John:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very funny. Yeah. Actually, speaking on the same point, I was kind of a little bit worried coming out here because I thought maybe you guys are – well, you do sit in front of your laptops all day but so do I. But maybe that’s like all you guys do. You’re not really business guys. You just kind of came upon this cool idea and you both – you sit around in WordPress typing blog posts all day.

Joe:
Yeah. I mean I think that although my background was engineering, that’s not what I am. I’m definitely a business person first and I try to evaluate things from that kind of perspective. I think it’s important to keep that in mind and everything we do is with the business in mind, right? The business is an entity in itself, right? That you have to take care of it and all that kind of thing.

Yeah. It’s interesting that you see that. Did you feel like you’ve learned a lot from that or …

John:
Yeah. You guys are basically totally removed almost from that process of building websites. So basically you built the process out of it as soon as it looked realistic.

Justin:
Yeah. Well, we’re not big fans of it.

Justin:
I mean it’s not like a lot of fun and I’m one of those kind of flighty kind of guy. Like, it has to be fun for me. I have to enjoy what I’m doing and so when I no longer enjoy it, it gets really boring and miserable. So that’s a pretty good time to set a process and start to delegate and pass the work on, for me, right?

Similar – Joe just does that anyway. Joe is more – like he will just start having people stamp it up for him. He passes through better than I do. So like I will forget sometimes that we are an outsourcing company, that we’re outsourcers. I will forget to outsource my own stuff sometimes whereas Joe, he will pick something up and then toss quicker than I think is sometimes cool but he’s much better at that overall than I am.

Joe:
Yeah. I would rather have like a little bit of a framework in mind and pass that off to my people and have them break it a little bit and then take it back and then figure it out and then work with them a little bit, that kind of thing. I still have to know the process so I can figure out what I want to do. But what I hate doing is holding off and trying to get things absolutely 100 percent perfect before you hand them off to somebody else.

That takes way too long. You’re always saying, “Well, you need to refine this. You need to make it a little bit better. What about this thing? What about questions?” You say, “Well, you can improve this part of the process.” You know what? Hand it off to your core people, your good key people that do things well.

Justin:
Use the skill transfer process to do it.

Joe:
Use the skill transfer process and then if something is broken, take it back. Fix that piece

John:
Right.

Joe:
And then you can pass it off again, yeah.

John:
You have to. You’re like you never hear about it. Like…

Justin:
Oh, yeah. Our outsourcing company. Well we have clients that are fantastic. We’ve had for a long period of time and so the work we do there is pretty standard. We’ve done it for a long time. We track the metrics. Everything is kind of in place and we’re not really growing it, right? So it’s kind of like we have long-standing clients. We’ve already done all the work to get the metrics in place there and to attract and record that stuff. So we get updates and we get weekly updates in that business and it runs on its own basically.

Joe:
Yeah. Think about this. One of the clients owns his own office here. I mean through us but like yeah, he has his own capture center, so the people there and everyone there. It is effectively his own business through Try BPO and we make an overhead on that. But I mean really besides HR and accounting, there’s not much for me to manage there because he’s managing the people directly on an everyday basis.

Justin:
And to the projects that we do manage and we look at the reports. We reply to them. If things seem to be a little off, we make sure we get that fixed. But it’s not a goal or focus of ours right now. We were talking about maybe the end of the year, there might be some stuff having to do with outsourcing and I think there’s real value especially to like marketers who need help with outsourcing. I don’t know that we’ve had internet marketers as customers and they’re some of the worst customers …

John:
that doesn’t surprise me at all

Justin:
Yeah. I mean people – well, I just want this person for like six hours a week or they think, “I want two people both at 40 hours a week,” and that they don’t really know what to send them.

Joe:
Or chasing them down for payment.

Justin:
Yeah.

Joe:
I mean already it’s hard enough to do accounts receivable especially from medium-sized and big businesses that …

Justin:
Well, big businesses own you on that, right?

Justin:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you’re like oh my god. I owe these guys. Don’t cancel. Please pay me so I could pay my people. You know what I mean …

Joe:
Yes. So the worst is shady internet marketers that know that they can outsource to you and there’s not much they can do once they have you in a rear.

Justin:
Well honestly, just internet marketers that aren’t really business people and so they’ve never outsourced before anyway. They probably never had staff before and they hear about outsourcing through some crazy other internet marketer selling him on outsourcing and then they go, “I will just outsource everything. I will just hand it off and they’re going to be super sharp and just get exactly what I want and just do it for me.” Well, no.

John:
they didn’t manage their AWeber accounts so they really have no idea what to do with people.

Justin:
Well, did you think this too before you came out or did you think that like I can find someone in the Philippines and pay them a couple of hundred bucks a month and they’re going to be – maybe not as good as me but pretty much, right? Did you kind of think you can hand off like a multitask kind of process to them and they would just own it?

John:
Yeah. You know, I did. It makes perfect sense to me now that I’m here and interacting with some people and having the chance to sort of manage some of them.

Justin:
Yeah.

John:
But going into it, like the reason that these people are so much less expensive, they’re not coming at their work with the same skill set that you have. If they were, then you couldn’t utilize them for $1.50 an hour. So by default, you’re going to have to take care of certain management and you got to prioritize.

Joe:
Yeah. Well culture is different too, right?

John:
Absolutely, absolutely.

Joe:
So the two combine, education and culture leads to a worker that’s very task-driven.

John:
Right.

Joe:
So that is what the Philippines is great for. That and customer service. Those kinds of issues, they are making a run with it but you get objectives. You get outside the box. You kind of just say, “Hey, run with that.” I mean your objective is to do X, Y and Z.

Justin:
I think that’s a little harsh. I mean I think that there are people in the Philippines that can do that, that are multitasking, that can do it but they’re not cheap. They’re not bargain based on pricing so they know that they’re going to get more. They know that they work more so you have to be willing to pay. I mean even if you pay only 1200 bucks a month for that person directly which is really not bad and you’re talking like the best kind of thing.

I think the Philippines would do well to really improve their education. I do agree with you on that. I mean I think that is a bit of a problem across the board but that I think will really help propel them and help the income level here go up.

John:
Yeah, I’m not trying to harp on the country. It’s just a matter of fact, right?

Justin:
Yeah.

Joe:
Yeah, it is.

John:
In fact the difference between here and there.

Justin:
Yeah.

Joe:
Yeah.

John:
We’re making a total shift here. So I don’t really – you know, I still don’t really see you guys in the internet marketing space because this is probably to my own perception but when I think of internet marketing, like I bought like a couple of those like binder books that you would get, like late 90s …$7,000

Justin:

$17.95 ebooks.

John:
Yeah. No, no …

Justin:
Oh, these are the real books.

John:
Payments of like 20 bucks for like four months …

John:
… CDs and they tell you how to like build your internet business with all this internet marketing bullshit.

Justin:
Who’s the guy in the beach that talked about putting the little things in the newspapers? And like you put out a bunch of those and you get paid a bunch of money and you put in there like how to make money, put in little things in these papers or something. Lapre, Don Lapre or something. He went to prison recently. I don’t know. Don Lapre …

Joe:
Yeah, you’re right. When people say internet marketing, people think make money online, which is not exactly true, right? I mean internet marketing could be actually making – you don’t make money online by telling other people you make money online. You make money online by actually making money online.

John:
And then you have to be able to tell them about it because it’s what you do.

Joe:
Right.

Justin:
Well there’s a bunch of people that don’t do that at all, right? There’s a bunch of people that have niche sites that make money that don’t talk about it. I know a guy. He has a blog, a personal blog where he talks a little bit of his travel and stuff.

John:
Yeah.

Justin:
But he makes his money from niche sites. He doesn’t blast it. He’s not talking, trying to sell other people on how to make money making niche sites. He didn’t do any of that. He happens to make his money on niche sites. I think there are a lot of people out there and those are the – they’re not really in the internet marketing space. We are a bit in the make money online space. It irks me a little bit but if we are going to be involved in that, then I hope we can be involved in changing it too.

That’s one of the reasons I’m building niche sites. If we can put out some of the crappy ebooks and they put them out of business, that’s a good thing to me, right? And hopefully our next version will be even more advanced and going to more detail and that kind of thing. So like to hurt and be disruptive to people that are charging for crappy information.

I don’t mind people that charge for good information that they consolidate but crappy information, we should shut those guys down.

John:
Yeah. I feel like if you guys had sold the guide, that would have distinctly put you into thevIM piece at a low level. But you had been there, right?

Justin:
OK. So you wrote so much of the guide. You were writing that, that you were thinking, god, I mean it will be nice if I was validated through sales of the guide to like show that I was – did your work. That’s fine. Don’t even worry about it. Like, it’s good, man. The value we got out of giving the guide away for free is worth it. I’m happy, happy with it.

Joe:
Yeah. And I’m happy not to be included in that class of people that’s charging for information that could have been gotten for free.

Justin:
You know what? Hold on. OK. So we just did an interview with Matt Paulson, right? And he charges for information that’s free. He consolidates information, sends it out on the newsletter and he charges for that information. I wouldn’t feel unhappy being in that – part of that crowd. I’m fine with that. I think that’s a good and reasonable thing to do.

John:
It’s a free option, right?

Justin:
It is a free option but it comes with the wrong time of day. It doesn’t give us much detailed information. I mean if you really want it to be good, you got to pay for it, right? So he gives part of it for free and charges you for the good stuff but that’s fine. I mean you can get all that for free. You can research it yourself but it’s OK. I mean if he’s consolidating that from multiple sources, I think it’s a reasonable approach.

Joe:
Yeah. And I guess as long as it’s not a trick, you’re not – it has some sort of return on investment …

Justin:
Yeah.

Joe:
… where you actually get this financial data and you’re able to turn this financial data, this stock data into valuable stocks for you, that’s a good stock. Then yes, that’s worth the money, right? Our guide would be the same thing I imagine but I love the fact that we gave it away and I think it will come back in spades.

John:
This kind of ties in though. Coming out here, I wasn’t sure if you got – this is a bubble what I thought before I got here. Like, we should re-title this. Forget about niche sites.

John:
I wasn’t sure if you guys were like totally legit or just totally full of it, right? Because you look at your website …

Joe:
I can’t believe you flew halfway around the world and you thought we might be – there was a percentage chance that we might be full of shit.

John:
Yes, there was – I would say about three percent of me. It was like I could hit the ground and these guys could either have A, some sort of major social or physical problem. Like some of this is really weird to me. Like I got to get out of here, right? Or a 97 percent chance that at least it was going to be OK. Like maybe I kind of not like you but I work hard and do my job in six months or two months or whatever and then go home but actually it’s true. Like, after we talked over the interview, I was pretty confident that you were good guys.

Joe:
Normal.

John:
So I thought like maybe …

Justin:
Our website still kind of sucks, man. We’re working on it.

John:
We’re working on it.

Justin:
It will get fixed.

John:
But that was a big part of it because you – like I would show it to people because people would say, “Where did you get this new job?” because I’m telling them like I’m going to Asia. What are you going to Asia for? I have a job. Why did you pick a job in Asia? Why don’t you just get a job here?

Justin:
Yeah, yeah.

John:
And I would say, “Well, here’s the website of the guys that I’m going to be working for,” and they’re like, “Is this a scam?”

Joe:
No. You know, it’s funny you should say that because I show people that – like our income report from January. I’m like oh, we made $45,000 in January. I will show good friends of mine the website. They will go like, “This website is terrible.”

John:
Yeah.

Joe:
It sucks. Like yeah, but you have to understand – yeah, but your website sucks.

Justin:
Nothing else matters. Your website sucks. So let put it this way how many people that turns off before they even get a chance to meet our quantity. That’s bothersome too. Like …

John:
I don’t know. You did it right. Well you do build the content. You build the audience. You build the tools of the business, all that. I think you guys made a good decision there but at the same time, a lot of people are real down on design. Like oh design, it’s pointless. It doesn’t matter. I disagree. It does matter. As soon as I go there and I look at it, I go, “Uhh.” And once I read it and then I’m going to say, “Oh this is cool,” right?

Justin:
Yeah. I agree. I mean look at that ThinkTraffic.net right now. They just did a redesign. Pretty sexy, man. Pretty sexy. I’m liking that. If I first got on that site, I would say, “Well, OK. He has got a nice design. But what does he have to say?” Right now, some of the stuff, I will be like, “OK. Well this guy is good.”

Joe:
Yeah. if you think of good desin it takes a lot of thought, takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of ideas and I think we didn’t want to focus on that in the beginning. We want to focus on making money and get it up and working and I suggest that for most businesses unless you have something that really is related to …

John:
A design business.

Joe:
Yeah. Well, design business or something like directly consumer related. If your conversion sucks, then your business is going to fail, that kind of thing.

Justin:
Well, we know this is born out of experience, right? We blow some money on projects that didn’t have legs and we didn’t know it. So after going through a few of those, you get a little gun-shy. You’re like, this time, let’s just try to build it out first and see what happens. Let’s see if we can make it work first.

Joe:
Right. But we are going to do a redesign of AdSense Flippers …

John:
So – all right. So this kind of ties into the next one a little bit too is this idea of, “Does your content and everything build trust?” So when I first get to your website like we were just talking about, immediately the trust factor goes down a little bit because this is a website about business, about selling websites. And if you don’t have enough money to make your website, then maybe you’re not legit, right?

Justin:
Yeah, yeah.

John:
So anyway, the reason that we’re sort of trying on a new format with the podcast, right? Is that I was saying to you yesterday or whatever, I feel like I’m not necessarily talking to Justin and Joe or listening to Justin and Joe, whatever. I’m listening to the podcast …

Justin:
Yeah, yeah.

John:
I feel like I’m listening to podcast …

Justin:
We’re like show – we show …

John:
It’s really good. It’s really good. It’s really professional. It sounds good but like there’s this human element that’s missing that I personally think is really valuable.

Joe:
Yeah. Well, you know why because everything else in our life is so process-driven that we try to …

John:
This is really true.

Joe:
We try to approach the creative side that way too. I mean because it’s the only …

Justin:
You know that.

Joe:
Yeah. That’s the only way we could really do it on a consistent level and get it done. I mean hey, I’m loving this new format but we’re already up to maybe like an hour of recording time …

John:
We will cut a lot of it.

Joe:
Yeah, I’m sure we will cut a lot of this but what I’m saying is if you want a bang-out material, you want to get new content out there, I’m not sure that the show monkey routine might work a little bit better.

Justin:
I love that.

Joe:
Yeah, there’s a reason why content houses and these types of places, they work. They make money. It’s because they have a process for it.

John:
Yeah, but that’s a terrible model for your podcast.

Justin:
I’ll be your dancing monkey.

John:
… after a content house. You want me – this is you talking into a microphone. You’re talking to thousands of people right now.

Joe:
I understand what you’re saying and I agree with you but it’s hard to be like on point weekly and just kind of shoot off the hip.

Justin:
Yeah, because . Like I don’t want the podcast to turn into like Justin and Joe bullshit time, right? I want it to be actually useful and actionable. I mean that’s kind of the goal. I feel if it’s not that way, we’re doing a disservice to our listeners.

John:
Wait. Why was that even in here, on the list?

Joe:
I have no idea. I have no idea.

John:
I was right and it’s all true but I don’t know how it ties into our podcast. Let’s see here. Yeah. OK. So one of the big things that – it’s cool that you guys want to educate people on how to build niche sites and stuff, but I think it’s also easy to get into the mindset that this can be done quickly or cheaply. And this is not really the kind of business that you dive into if you’re either broke or you have no time. You can’t be one of those two and be …

Joe:
It can’t be both of that

John:
You can be one or the other.

Joe:
Yeah. You can be one or the other but you cannot be both, for sure, because otherwise, you’re either going to wind up with a small number of niche sites. And if you get unlucky, you’re going to not make any money and wind up either spending your money or spending time building them and go, “Oh, that doesn’t work,” or you’re going to get extremely lucky, find a couple of successes and go, “Oh, I should quit my job and dump all my time into this and all my money,” and then six months from now go, “Oh my god. I lost everything.”

John:
Yeah.

Joe:
Yeah. So you have to be very careful. That’s what we always say. Approach it slow and steady and really learn the process and make sure you’re going on the right road.

Justin:
Let’s say that only 20 percent of our sites are “winners,” right? And you’re only building five sites a month. You could build sites, five sites a month for three months in a row and then three months to see if they make money. You’re now six months into the game.

John:
Yeah.

Justin:
And you could be making – even if it’s working, 120, 150 bucks a month, six months down the road. That’s not very promising, right?

John:
No, no.

Justin:
So I mean if you really want to make a good amount of money, you have to get a. It’s all relative too, like how much money does it take. We were down about 10 grand. So if you have 10 grand to blow on trying to get out our way, then you can do that.

John:
I was going to ask you that. Like give me a number. Let’s say I want to make $4000 a month Or do business I can go travel through Asia. How much money do I need upfront to build a 4000 a month …

Justin:
Well, I can’t give a good answer to that because you may spend $15,000 on it and make $300 a month because you screwed up or whatever. You’re going to donk it up, right? So I can’t really give a good answer. If there was a magical formula like how much do I have to spend to make $4000, $5000 a month, I mean then everyone will do it. It will be magical and we would all be internet millionaires, right? Like, unfortunately it doesn’t work that way buddy. We were 10,000 in before we started turning a profit. I could say that.

John:
OK.

Justin:
How much will it be for someone else? It could be 4000. It could be 40. I don’t know.

Joe:
Yeah. I hate mentioning these numbers because I think it cheapens us or it like makes people googly-eyed. Like there are some people out there going, “Wow, they spent $10,000?” And there is some guy …

Justin:
On a risk. Yeah, $10,000 on a risk. That’s insane.

Joe:
Yeah, and there’s one guy driving a Cadillac right now. He’s going, $10,000 …

John:
Who are these jokers?

John:
I’m unsubscribing to this podcast.

Joe:
So it’s really all relative. It’s so relative but just if you’re going to create micro niche sites like we have, then you’re absolutely – you have to create a lot of them in order to make sure the numbers work out.

Justin:
I think that’s it for the heart of this week’s episode. Let’s get right into our ninja marketing tips, tricks and our plans for the future.

****The AdSense Flippers Podcast continues****

Justin:
So I got the first ninja tip. It’s actually not a ninja tip. I don’t know, man, but it’s a good show.

John:
Why do you even say ninja tip?

Justin:
I don’t know, buddy.

John:
What’s a ninja tip?

Joe:
Because when we first …

Joe:
… the podcast, we were looking for something catchy. We were looking – because we wanted to say like marketing tips, tricks and plans for the future. So we needed a word and “ninja” sounds very like whoo, ninja.

Justin:
I would say it’s kind of horrible. It’s one of those like kind of cheesy marketing terms but …

Joe:
Yeah.

Justin:
One of those things, man. Anyway, our first tip is Undercover Boss. It’s a TV show I’ve been watching a while. I guess it’s a bit more popular in the US. Have you seen it, guys? No?

John:
No.

Joe:
No.

Justin:
So here’s the deal.

John:
i did

Justin:
Oh, you have?

John:
Yeah.

Justin:
OK.

John:
Yeah. I watched it with you …

Justin:
Yeah, yeah.

Justin:
So they take a CEO. Normally it’s like a major corporation CFO, that kind of thing, and put them on like the frontline jobs. And so they go undercover and they wear makeup or hair piece or whatever the hell, and go to the frontline jobs and they are on the frontline working with these employees, trying to figure out how their business runs on that level.

And what’s interesting is you can tell like the sharp guys from the not so sharp guys. The not so sharp guys are like in this position where they’re like, “I’m wondering if I’m going to do a good job,” or they’re just kind of goofing around and not really taking this seriously. The really sharp guys are saying, “OK. How can I make improvements to my business?” Process-wise, how do I look past one person complaining about their pay to a pay problem across the organization?

John:
Yup.

Justin:
Right? And what I learned a little bit about from this show is some of these people really do care about their frontline employees more than you would think, right? Especially as an employee, right? When you’re in the US, you think about these CEOs that are making crazy money and they’re regular people too. So it’s an interesting – especially with the financial times that are going on, to see these high level guys at low level jobs and kind of what their lives are like. Undercover Boss, man, it’s a cool show. You should check it out.

Joe:
So the next ninja marketing tip, trick or plan for the future is just kind of a little tip here. For all you Android users out there, you should check out Chrome Beta. It’s kind of a new browser for Android. It’s very similar to your Chrome browser on your laptop, on your desktop and it allows …

John:
Well, if your phone is the size of your desktop, then yes, I’m sure it is very similar.

Joe:
No. What I mean is the UI, the functionality. It actually will sync up and show your open tabs that are open on your computer and save the same passwords and sync the passwords. You can sync form data. So if you like filled any usernames or you’re..

It can be synced across multiple devices. So …

Justin:
That is cool and don’t worry too much about, John. I think it’s the wine and the cold medicine kicking in right now.

John:
It is so messed up.

Joe:
Dude, that is something. What are you doing? Like a robo bomb over there? What do they call that stuff?

John:
Well, I tried one earlier today. I don’t know what it’s called. I just consumed it and then I had another one like …

… and neither of them clear up my nose but both of them made me feel like I got dumped in a pool of bleach and then taken out and then I’m going to be attached to a balloon or something. I don’t know.

Joe:
That’s what you get for taking random drugs from my drawer here.

John:
Yeah, because it feels like.

Justin:
You don’t really help me out.

John:
This is all your fault.

Joe:
Yeah. All right.

Justin:
All right. Well that’s it for episode 24 of the AdSense Flippers Podcast. Different format. We really like to know what you think so please let us know in the comments on AdSenseFlippers.com. If you like this format or you like the more fast-paced, like actionable stuff, either way, let us know in the comments. You can check us out on Twitter, @AdSense Flippers. We would love to hear from you.

Joe:
Bye-bye everybody.

John:
See you.