[Best of Quiet Light Podcast] How to Launch 26 Content Sites in 90 Days with Ewen Finser

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Hey, folks, it's the Quiet Light Podcast, where we share relentlessly honest insights, actionable tips, and entrepreneurial stories that will help founders identify and reach their goals.

Speaker A: Hey, folks, Joe Valli here. Another episode of the Quiet Light Podcast coming your way. First, I want to mention, yes, this is brought to you by Quiet Light Brokerage, but also the Exopreneur's Playbook. Look, you listen to the podcast, you know, I wrote a book. Why haven't you bought it yet? That's what I want to know, right? If you're listening and you want to buy an online business or you want to sell your business someday for maximum value, you got to buy the book. It's everything in my head, plus the rest of the team and what we've developed and done over the last decade. The reason I wrote it is because not all of you want to have a conversation with a broker. Not all of you will sell your business through a broker. So we just give it all away like we do here on the podcast. It's all there. Chapter 11 is all on add backs. Chapter 15 is negotiating deal structure. Chapter 3 is all about calculating sellers discretionary earnings. It's all there. Everything we do, it's in writing. It's less than 20 bucks and you need to buy it. So pick it up, buy it, go to exitpreneur IO or go to Amazon and do it. Okay. That was very self serving, wasn't it, Ewan? I, uh, just had to get that out there. It's funny, you know, I spent a lot of money getting the book done, getting it written. And I'm talking to our guest now, folks. He can see me. You can't see him yet because I'm flapping my jaw and in my mind, everybody that runs an online business or wants to buy an online business should buy this book because it's, uh, everything that you've done in terms of negotiating and buying, in your case, content sites or what many people have done in terms of selling online businesses as well. But I love when I'm talking to you. Actually just mentioned Walker Deibel a little while ago. Walker, as you folks know, is on our team and he wrote Buy then Build. I did an AMA at the, uh, acquisition lab, which is his group for people and trying to buy online businesses. And, uh, I love when I do a presentation and we do a Q and A about the exponent's playbook. And I really, people off that just sold their business because they realize how much money they left on the table. And in this particular case, he wasn't mad. It was a joke. But, uh, he left about $30,000 on the table because he missed a simple, really obvious ad back. Um, and he spoke up about it embarrassingly. So pick up the book, folks, and, uh, let's move on with this podcast. Today's guest is pretty impressive. Uh, he's built up a portfolio of over 50 content sites. Uh, is in the process of building five. I'm sorry, 26 more of them in the next five weeks. And so we're going to discuss two things here. Buy versus build with regard to content sites. And then how do you build 26 sites in five weeks? What kind of team do you need? What kind of processes, what kind of hair loss do you experience? What kind of weight gain, what kind of sleepless nights do you go through all that stuff? Our guest today is Ewan Finzer from ventureforth Media. Ewen, welcome to the Quiet Life podcast.

Speaker C: It's great to be here, Joe. I still have my hair.

Speaker A: You do. You still have your hair. And you've got a baby face. I'm looking at you earlier as we're chatting. I'm. Damn, I'm oldest kid. Not a wrinkle on his face.

Speaker C: That's subjective, though. I have three small children, three under five, so.

Speaker A: Oh, that'll hit you up.

Speaker C: I'm expecting those wrinkles to come soon.

Speaker A: They'll come very fast. It's the sleepless nights. Daddy, I need the bed. Daddy, get up. Change the bed in the middle of the night. Um, that's what I did for about three months straight. Drove me nuts. Anyway, content sites, buy versus Build. I always talk about Brad on the team. He rolled up about 30 content sites, sold it to a private equity firm. Your approach is different. You know, you have. You and I have talked about, you know, you becoming the Berkshire Hathaway of digital media. Digital sites. Um, do you. I know I've sold you a content site before. It was a fun one. We could talk about it a little bit. And I actually used that example. Uh, I think I used it in the book, but I talk about it with people that are the name and face of content sites and the challenges with that. Um, buy versus Build. We know Walker says buy. We know Amanda, who's been on the podcast talking about it, says build. Which camp are you in when it comes to content sites at this point?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I come back to, you know, asking the question, what is my competency? You know, what am I good at? For me, it's building content sites. So it's Obvious for me. I don't think it's obvious for everyone. Um, I think, you know, there are certainly good cases to buy. Uh, I would look at an acquisition. If you're a first time buyer just coming to the space, maybe don't have a ton of, uh, experience as an mba, it's probably a better mba, you're going to learn some real lessons. But be fully prepared. If you're buying a content site, you might lose your shirt, you might go to zero. Um, don't bet the farm on that one site, but treat it as a learning experience. And so, uh, that's kind of my philosophy. But very clearly, uh, through my actions, through what we've done, through how we're allocating capital, I'm in the build hand.

Speaker A: Okay, so statistically the larger businesses that we transact with those that we sell are actually less risky. So when you're talking about don't bet the farm on a content site because it could go to zero, uh, what's the farm, what are we talking about in dollars? And do you believe the same thing that larger, more established content sites with lots of benefits to it, and we won't go into all of them but go to organic rankings, lots of articles, rankings, so on and so forth. No cheating. Um, what are we talking about in terms of size and risk? Where do you see that as too small and too risky, too young, too risky versus, um, bigger and worth taking? By way of example, Chris Guthrie on the team just sold a content site for uh, over $3 million. I've sold one for just under nine. I've sold one for, I've sold many for a few hundred thousand here and there. But where's the threshold for you personally?

Speaker C: Yeah, for me personally, I would say it's gotta be under 200,000, um, that I'm looking to buy. If I do have to buy. And it has to be a perfect fit. Like it has to be something where my overlapping competencies and the skills of our team and the relationships with vendors, um, and ad Networks is almost 80%, let's say overlapping. It's an obvious add on acquisition. Um, not looking to get into a brand new market, um, even at that price, um, I would be very hesitant without firsthand experience to go in there.

Speaker A: Is that because you feel anything over 200 is generally, uh, just a much greater risk leap wise? Or is it your business model where you're saying my sweet spot is under 200? That's what I'm stick to and if I'm not going to buy, I'M going to be building like we'll talk about in a few minutes.

Speaker C: Yeah, I would say it's somewhat related to my competency like you said. But on the flip side I would say objectively speaking I think that's an interesting framework to think about is there's the core competency on one side and what's objectively a good business on the other side. I think content sites in general, uh, and the anecdote you said where most of your sites sell for a few hundred thousand dollars, I think that's the large majority of a grown up content site is going to be in that maybe mid uh, six figure range. But a seven figure content site is relatively rare. It does happen like you said and it's amazing when it does. I just think as you climb the value chain, just a few of those assets are for sale. In general, I'd say looking at the macro environment broadly which I'd spend a lot of time looking at the big players like IAC, Barry Diller's company, they have a portfolio called dot- used to be about.com, um there's J2 Global, another publicly traded company. I think they own PCMag, New um, York Times. Obviously they bought the wire cutter a number of years ago. I look at these companies and say what are they doing? Um at the macro end you have these big uh, media companies who former newspapers, magazines or have acquired those assets. And um, then you have at the micro end a lot of people like me growing up, uh, solo operators, um, and maybe they have one or two sites. Um, but then in the middle there's not a whole lot of mid sized media companies. So I kind of see this um, gap basically in the market.

Speaker A: Um, you think you're going to grow up into one of those mid sized media companies? Is that your goal?

Speaker C: I hope so, I hope so, yeah.

Speaker A: And what's your definition of mid sized? Total revenue?

Speaker C: Yeah, so I would say you know when you're like our portfolio between V4M and some of other entities, you know, you know this year if we get to 5 million uh, page views, uh, uh, per month, that's a good month.

Speaker A: You know that's a lot.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's a lot. But it's you know if you think about, I look at some of the, the one company I would say might fit the mid sized is like Lola Digital. They're probably, I'm not sure what their latest stats are, I'm not privy to that but they're kind of in that middle territory. But there's really a gap.

Speaker A: We sold Ben a couple. Ben's been on the podcast.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Okay. So, um, you talked about in your sweet spot. So, uh, in terms of if it's 200,000 or so, it needs to fit in with all of your other things. That's so that you're not learning something new on that particular one and you can use all the current resources you have.

Speaker C: Yeah. I would also say though that there is the same Google updates that roll out every three months or so. They affect the big players just as much as the little players they do.

Speaker A: Okay, so something that's five years old.

Speaker C: Yeah. So actually longer sites in business, there's kind of this. You can say on the one hand it has an earnings history, but on the other hand you can say, well, it just hasn't been hit by the update yet and the hammer will fall.

Speaker A: How do you avoid being hit by an update? When I built my business, it was an E commerce business. It was a content business because we just wrote good quality content every month for five years and Google rewarded us. I didn't know how to cheat. I just wrote good quality content. Is that doable in today's world and is that how you avoid the Google updates?

Speaker C: So I would say up until 2017, 2018, in general, that was the case. If you just publish content, um, you'd kind of be on an upward trend if you were following the rules. I think the last couple years Google has kind of changed their approach a little bit. I think they're playing with the knobs. They're trying to figure out of these incumbents that are all producing similar, similarly high quality content. How do we tweak? How do we tweak them and emphasize different things? And so you're seeing the nature of the updates is less about, you're a bad actor and it's more about how do we meet the searcher's intent better, which can have massive effects, secondary and tertiary effects, uh, based on how you're structuring your content, what you're writing about, are you a review site and informational site. So even by following all of the best practices, you can still get caught up in these updates. And I think that's the biggest lesson to learn. In the last couple of years that's changed, I would say. How do we mitigate that risk? My approach is portfolio theory. Um, you know, in general, we're still up and to the right. You know, in a bad year, it's 50% year over year growth. In a good year, it's 100, 150%. That's individual sites. If you look too closely, and, uh, this is where I kind of. If you buy one site and you live too much into that one experience, you might learn the wrong lessons. Um, but individual sites do fall. We have some sites that have declined the last three years, but it's the portfolio effect that's really helped us insulate ourselves. We have every update. We have some sites that are positively affected, some sites that are negatively affected. Um, I try to understand why, but at the end of the day I say, you know what, we're just going to continue to produce high quality content. And sure enough, more of our traffic than not tends to go up and to the right.

Speaker A: How many content, um, sites do you have in your portfolio now? I said 50 at the beginning, but we didn't actually talk about the numbers, probably. Is it more or less?

Speaker C: It's more. So between a couple different entities we've set up Ventureforth Media. Generally, if it's not the 100% sole owner, it's the operator. Um, if it's an investment partnership. So between the various entities, we have over 100 now.

Speaker A: Um, and how many did you buy versus build?

Speaker C: I'd say four of them. And these are like micro acquisitions? Yeah.

Speaker A: Wow. One of them was mine. Okay, I sold you 25% of those that you bought. Was it just 20? Did I just sell you one?

Speaker C: Yeah, well, I think I might have picked one up, uh, like a very small one recently from one of the

Speaker A: other guys on the team.

Speaker C: Yeah, Chuck Mullins. I think, uh, knew I was looking for something and found something for me.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you and Chuck go way back through Rhodium. And I had Chris on the podcast recently talking about Centurica, but we talked about content sites and the due diligence on them, and his advice and recommendation was the same as yours. Portfolio. The way to offset the risk in a content business is to build a portfolio of them. Of course, you've got to start with one, and you have to pick and choose. Do you start with a micro acquisition or do you start with something that's much larger and well established, like Guthrie just sold. Um, and either way, you got to have the chutzpah to do it, but then you've got to have something along the way of expertise in SEO, so you've gained it over the years just by immersing yourself in this. Or did you bring on experts to help you with SEO and rankings and making sure you're staying up with the latest best practices?

Speaker C: Well, I would say that I've played every part as a solo operator. I think I grew up with the Internet in a certain sense. My first inclination was to build some websites in college for beer money. So I had that experience of writing all the content, building the site, setting up, hosting, you know, literally building links, trying to do everything myself. Um, and then kind of graduating. You know, I got a day job out of college for a couple of years. Yeah, little did I know. And then I realized, you know, cubicle life is not for me. And so I kind of returned to that. Like, hey, could I. I know this website's only made a few hundred bucks, but what if I could turn that into a few thousand dollars and I could justify quitting my job, you know? And, uh, at the time, I didn't have any children. I was recently married. My wife basically told me that just go for it, rather than sitting in traffic on the way home, go to a Starbucks and just for a couple hours, just knock out the websites and then come home. Um, which wouldn't have worked now because I have three small children under five. But slowly hustling, doing all the work. Then the first thing we started outsourcing were the content writers. I'd recommend that as the first step, uh, if you're in that similar position.

Speaker A: U.S. or foreign content writers, mostly us,

Speaker C: I'd say English speaking.

Speaker A: How do you find them?

Speaker C: So we find them, uh, all the usual places upwork. Problogger is another good place. Uh, problogger jobs, um, great place to find expert writers. But for certain verticals, it's hard to find technical experts. I give it a good example. In the automotive industry, the most authoritative experts are not online writing about how to, you know, change an oil filter. They're actually mechanics. And so how do you incentivize those people to actually become writers really, and share their knowledge? And for that you might have to go off the beaten path. Uh, going into Facebook groups, um, going into, um, even, uh, on Craigslist, ironically, you know, finding where these people hang out forums and just putting up posts. And we have a great team. Amy, who's my coo, she's great at kind of sourcing that.

Speaker A: Uh, so if somebody's a mechanic but not a writer, how do you turn them into a writer? I mean, first, obviously incentivize them monetarily, but do you have people interview them and then they transcribe it and write it and do articles from that? Or how do you do.

Speaker C: We try to make sure they have some ability to Write online, uh, for sure, but it's maybe less polished, and that's okay. So we have an editorial process, and we have best practices in sop. Kind of a little mini boot camp, if you will. Um, it's got to the point where you've been thinking of spinning off, like, a service for. Not a service for content creation, because I think that's overdone, but a service for content team recruiting, because teach a man to fish, as they say. Give them the tools, give them the folks, help them find the right people. That's an asset that will last for a long time. But, uh, yeah, it's kind of training them in our best practices. But taking that raw, we prefer passion and expertise over, like, copywriting skills, if that makes sense.

Speaker A: So you've got over a hundred different sites, and how many? How many? I mean, you're working from your home office with a giant whiteboard with a lot of stuff on it right now, but I don't see people buzzing around you. Um, outsource everything, and if so, how many people do you have in terms of writers, editors, and so on and so forth?

Speaker C: Yeah, so we must have over 150 writers.

Speaker A: Now, how, uh, do you manage that? You get a head of hr, somebody that coordinates all?

Speaker C: Or is that your kind of. Right, we all kind of wear that hat, but. So I'd say Amy's our coo. But, uh, to that point, we've built a system, we've built a team, and we've built a software tool, uh, to manage this process. We call it the Content conveyor belt. And it's basically a portal where writers can log in. And rather than having editors or managers push down assignments, we offer them as a buffet. So if you're a writer, you know, Joe, you're an expert in automotive, but you also like whiskey, right?

Speaker A: How'd you know?

Speaker C: Okay, you're tagged to those two sites, and you'll only see those available topics from those two sites. But you get to pick. Maybe today you don't want to write about Spark Plugs. You want to write about Whiskey. Why should I, as the manager or editor, push that on you? You can pick. You have a rate per word that's tagged in the system as you Write. It's a WordPress editor, as you write, calculates how many words you've written. You, uh, submit it to an editor that pings the editor. They get an email notification to go check. They review the content. They can push it back for revisions or move it along into approval. And then there's An API pull that sends it from that central WordPress site out to the relevant website, all formatted correctly. And so all we have to do is schedule that for publication. Um, and then at the back end we have a payment utility that aggregates all of the articles you've written, all the word count your various rates per word, which could vary. For automotive, you might be getting 4 cents a word. For whiskey you might be getting 6 cents a word, kind of aggregates that creates an invoice. And then we have PayPal MasterPay integration. So one click payment to pay everyone. In theory, it doesn't always work. We're still, we're working on version two. We're really excited about it.

Speaker A: It's a grown up. I can't believe it. I mean when we worked together a few years ago, you were a child, but you're so mature now. You've got such an operation and systems and people giving you money for this stuff. That's an impressive process. And I know that somebody listening right now wants to write for you. So how do they get in touch to actually, you know, be that expert writer on automotive of whatever the subject might be?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think you know, uh, Ewan, ventureforthmedia.com, uh, it's like put in the show notes. But that's a good way to get a hold of me. I'm still.

Speaker A: I wanted to get that out. I hate making people wait till the end to get that stuff. So Ewan is spelled E W E N, right?

Speaker C: Correct.

Speaker A: All right, folks, Ewen at ventureforth Media. And ventureforth is, uh, fourth spelled out. Or is it?

Speaker C: It's the numeric with the th.

Speaker A: There you go. All right, cool. All right, so let's talk about how you're building 26 sites in five weeks. First, where do you get the dough for it? Second, what kind of staff does it take? And how do you pick the topics that you're going to write about?

Speaker C: Yeah, so you know, in terms of the doe, so we have a pretty nice kind of bootstrapped operation. Ventureforth Media, I'd say probably 50 to 60 of the sites live in that entity. That's an accumulation over the last seven years of haphazard growth. One thing I realized was that as a bootstrapper and many of the listeners might empathize with this, your budgeting decisions are really driven by very dynamic variables. You're allocating capital based on you got some bills to pay, how much are you taking out? It's not systemized. I've seen the overall growth Trajectory, it's great for Venture fourth, but I didn't have a good understanding of the causality behind it. Uh, and so what I wanted to do back in 2019 is do an experiment, launch 10 sites with $250,000, um, and launch them all at the exact same time, give them the exact same content inputs. Um, I call it Fire Bullets and then Cannonballs. It's a Jim Collins concept, but I've borrowed it heavily. Uh, and launch the sites at the same time, see them grow and then wait to see the response, wait to see what kind of traction they get in Google before doubling down with an additional allocation. So we reserved let's say 50,000 for each site or 30,000. The initial bullet might be 10 to $15,000 to get maybe 100 articles up on each site and then let them sit kind of in parallel. They're in different verticals, but we wanted to see, okay, where are kind of test our assumptions. Where are we wrong? I love niche selection. I think I'm pretty good at it. But I've been wrong and I've been pleasantly surprised by things I thought would work out. And so I kind of let the data speak for itself. Um, and in that portfolio was interesting. It's, uh, called Centric Yield Media. And in the last couple of years we're coming up, we're over two years now, we've kind of grown the sites obviously from zero. I think towards the end of May, we were doing $14,000 to $15,000 per month. So we kind of look at the back of the napkin math and the first year it's nothing. You're literally like crickets. You're kind of pissing money into the void.

Speaker A: I was going to say, how long does it actually take to start generating money on, uh, those.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, you're in the Google sandbox for six months, so you can forget about seeing any traction there. Then by year one, you're starting to see some early seeds that are sprouting. But then I'd say by month 15, 16, you're starting to see some really interesting hockey stick things happening because all of your content is suddenly maturing together and Google is indexing it all and it's a really fun time. Um, and then to me, it's like, when do we get our money back? And so if you take a 10 to $15,000 a month portfolio, do the back of the napkin, apply 3x multiple on a forward basis, you can see, okay, we've gotten depending on where you'd sell it. And all the variables basically a 2x asset value on the $250,000 invested. So, of course, the sites could go down. A lot of things could happen. But that was an important validation for me that if we just extend our time horizon and be a little bit patient with how we're doing it, we can get a 2x or anywhere from a 30 to 50% IRR for those investors out there. And so then I said, how can we blow this up a little bit and go bigger? And so the 26 sites in May that we.

Speaker A: Ask a question first, uh, a couple of things I just want to Clarify. Of the 10 that you launched, how many were successful? Meaning you at least made your money back?

Speaker C: Yeah, that's the fun part. So we modeled. I built this model of ten sites. I called them. Uh, there was, like, three of them. I would say they're cannonballs. Um, you know, maybe three to five of them. And then.

Speaker A: And that's a good thing. Cannibal.

Speaker C: That's a good thing. Cannibal means it gets the second dose. Like, it gets the additional allocation because it. It kind of exceeded our expectations in that cohort. Um, and then I call. There's a couple in there that are late bloomers, so they just take a little bit longer. We had some really good examples of those where, you know, they didn't arrive on time, but they arrived a little bit later, and they spiked up. And we got our attention. They got the cannonball. And then we modeled a couple, uh, that were just. They grew, but they never met there. Maybe got to, like, you know, three to five thousand sessions a month, which, you know, isn't enough to really monetize, isn't enough to write home about. It's not a complete failure, but it's not interesting. And then we modeled one dud. We're like, just, nothing works. And so, interestingly, we found it's fairly similar in the results. Um, however, what we didn't model was, on the upside, uh, the dispersion of the cannonballs. Right. So we have one that quickly grew to five to $6,000 a month. Very, very quickly. And so I call those in the new model we're building, I call those the rockets. So, trying to adapt our methodology a little bit, but.

Speaker A: Yeah, right. It's cannonballs. So, you know, we don't use cannonballs anymore. All right. You got to rock it. Okay. Okay. So those are pretty good numbers and pretty good, uh, percentages. From, um, an investor standpoint, you talk about 25, 30% internal rate of return. Can you quickly Identify or ah, define IRR versus ROI for a potential investor. Because I know you've talked the talk.

Speaker C: Yeah. So IRR is, I mean it's a new concept to me. I don't have an investment background, I don't even have an mba. Like I'm um, kind of an idiot when it comes to finance. But uh, learning about irr, basically what it does is it introduces time into the equation and it says on an annual basis because that's obviously getting a great return at 10x and it's great, but over what period? And so IRR basically says, how do we annualize this even if all the payout comes at year five? What could we look back historically and say, okay, this is the annual, uh, rate of return. So that's what IRR basically does.

Speaker A: Uh, it takes into account that the current value is zero because you're starting from nothing.

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker A: It's not like you're buying something for 100,000 that's generating profit already. You're buying something that has zero profit and you're going to have to have time to let it mature.

Speaker C: Exactly. But also from the investor standpoint, time is money. And so I wanted to make sure that we were bound by certain objectives that were not just over promising and then continually kicking the can down the road. At some point the buck stops and what's the return?

Speaker A: So let me just throw out one more thing before we move on to um, how you built these 26 and the goal in five weeks and whatnot. Um, you raised capital for that. Are you still raising capital? Um, are you interested in that? For people that are in the audience that want to make an investment, want to allocate their money to some online business, um, model, but are discovering that they don't have the bandwidth to do it themselves. Can they just throw money at you and get a nice 25, 30% IRR or you're not, you've raised enough capital for the time being?

Speaker C: Well, for that fund we have. But what we tried to pioneer with the last fund is a flexible model. We raised from 12 different investors, uh, for that $800,000. A lot of people from our network, mutual friends that we might share. Um, because there was an appetite beyond just a single capital source, which is what I use for Centerkiel, kind of a family office. Um, but yeah, so I'm trying to open it up a little bit because I do like honestly doing this in more of a community setting and working with other investors. And so what we've kind of created is a template to do, uh, future funds in a similar type of way where we might do themed funds. We might kind of mix up the recipe a little bit, but basically have the same template where accredited investors can participate. So I would say, to answer your question, yeah, I'm always interested in making those connections. Um, and so, yeah, feel free to reach out to me after in the show notes. And, uh, I'd love to connect and learn more, really, about what someone's objectives

Speaker A: are before we'll put details in the show notes. Yeah.

Speaker C: Yes, that'd be great.

Speaker A: For sure. All right, so you talked about niche selection. You're building 25. I'm sorry, 26 sites in five weeks. Where do you start? How you do this?

Speaker C: Yeah, so it starts. It starts with, uh, a little bit of anxiety.

Speaker A: A little bit. Okay, good for you. Uh, I'd have a lot.

Speaker C: No. Yeah. So this was a big stretch for us. As I said, the most our team had launched in one go was 10. But I felt like 26 was a good stair step. It's not insane, right? It's not a hundred sites that would be insane. Insane at this point. So we had to build our content tool that we talked about to a point where we felt like we import all the topics. That's another feature of it is I can just, uh, upload a spreadsheet with all 3,000 topics and it can tag it and auto feed it into the conveyor belt. And I don't have to manually do anything. So that's great. But I had to make sure that that kind of process would work and that the kinks were worked out. I also had to make sure that we had the processes in place to hire and onboard all those writers, because as we're launching new sites, we have to expand the team. The good news is we have a lot of existing writers who can probably write about some of those other topics. But there was still probably 50% of our effort, uh, was spent on really sourcing the writers, um, and then making sure we had the editors in place to manage them. And so kind of the infrastructure questions.

Speaker A: Um,

Speaker C: and then. Yeah, and then for me, what I spend most of my time doing, this is probably hits on an earlier point you had, is the niche selection. That's what I really enjoy. If I could do nothing else all day long, I would look at keyword data, look at trends data, look at E commerce trends, and figure out where are there gaps in the market. And so that's kind of maybe a unique aspect of what we're doing, is we're building sites typically in markets where there aren't a whole lot of competitors. And that might sound counterintuitive because a lot of listings we see, um, are kind of historically facing. Right. It's like what someone thought five years ago was a good opportunity, but that's changed. By definition today the world doesn't necessarily need another coffee site or, uh, I don't know, like home gym site. But there are new verticals that are very, very interesting, that are emerging or that, uh, are what I call late stage e commerce adoption. They're just coming online now.

Speaker A: How do you find those? I mean, you just can't think of them in your head and start typing. You've got to look at data and trends and where do you do that?

Speaker C: Well, I will say I do start with the shower thoughts. Right. Everyone has them writing those down. Uh, I'll be just walking, taking kids for a walk and I'll think of something. It'll come to m me like a lightning bolt. I'll just write it down. And I have this whole list of this filtering process that I run through. I look at the three things I look at. One would be, um, is there enough keyword volume? Is there a gap here that if someone were searching for this term, does it get enough search volume?

Speaker A: What is that level?

Speaker C: Yeah, so I'd say I look at it as a basket. So it's not just one keyword, it's the whole entire grouping. But I'd like to see enough meat on the bone. So a site that could get to a few hundred thousand visitors, uh, per month. And so extrapolate that based on the volume. Um, and then I look at is the juice worth the squeeze? So if we were ranking number one, how are we monetizing? Because there's plenty of verticals out there that pay pennies in terms of ads. Don't have affiliate networks. So I spent a lot of time digging in, you know, to that. What are the emerging affiliate programs that are coming online? You know, a good example of that is like direct to consumer lumber, for example. That was never like five years ago. It was hard to order. Like go on a website and order lumber to your home. Yeah, that's a thing. Now there's actually affiliate programs, you know, even like, or for flooring or things like that. There's a lot of interesting markets that are just coming online now. And so I spend a lot of time looking at that. And then the final step is what's the competition? And so if there's huge, not huge sites, but Very authoritative sites, uh, already in the market where you go to the first page of Google for a top term and it's littered with experts. I'll probably avoid those. The one give or tell that I like to see is forums. I see a lot of forums in the top 10 results. That tells me that it's a very underserved market because forums are not really trending right now. They're typically legacy things that people asking questions that literally aren't being answered. And if Google's surfacing a forum in the top 10, that's basically a desperation sign of like there are no good optimized pages out here. And so that's what I look at to the third point there.

Speaker A: Okay, and um, your goal, I think you said 100 articles is that do you have a benchmark that you're trying to, you know, get written, produced and indexed within a certain amount of period? Is it 100? You have a magic number.

Speaker C: Yeah. So I'd say for each site it's probably around 120 or so articles, uh, for the first trial phase, like the bullet phase, um, within the first three months.

Speaker A: So that's exactly where I wanted to go, 120 in the first three months. And how do you, I mean do you go through a, ah, pre launch process of categorizing all of the articles? Do you come up with all the article names or, and then you categorize them so you know how you're going to build your site or do you just let it flow and post them?

Speaker C: Yeah, so exactly what you described before, we create what I call a wireframe or a scaffold. This is what it looks like. Here are the main pillar categories, here are the child categories. And that's the hard work, that's the, you know, deciding what goes in what category helps create a very, uh, good discipline around the whole process. Um, it helps you conceptualize the niche. And so that's very important process for me, um, and also for the team, even for the writer. At the bottom rung, at the very bottom of the kind of the structure, knowing what the plan is like, uh, here's a wireframe. This is what the categories will look like even if it's not built out. Here's the designs, here's the schematics, basically. So that's very, very important.

Speaker A: So that's really important. So you know where you're going. Right. Uh, and the goal is to get 120 up in the first 90 days. Do you post them as they're produced or do you dump Them all at once.

Speaker C: My theory on this is get everything live as soon as possible. It's not gonna look pretty, but it's not gonna, no one's gonna visit it anyway. And it starts the clock with Google. It starts pinging Google, saying one or two articles are published, and that's very important. Kind of the starting gun, so to speak. So I bias towards action in all cases.

Speaker A: Do you do any paid media?

Speaker C: Um, no, not yet, but I'm very intrigued by it.

Speaker A: Why?

Speaker C: Because I think there's some interesting leverage that can be achieved if you have articles that are ranking organically, you know, what they're converting, um, and then just kind of running paid ads against that, uh, if you have the margin.

Speaker A: And, uh, that's acceptable to Google, uh, that may be paying out affiliate fees or, you know, things of that nature.

Speaker C: Oh, yeah. I mean, there's some. I think it's best reviews or I can't, I can't think of the exact domain, but there's a couple big players that do this as they're part of their business model. Um, you know, I don't have the appetite. I mean, I'm not an expert with paid media, but it's very interesting. It's something we are exploring.

Speaker A: You just said best reviews. So do in your portfolio of 100 plus, do you have any review sites?

Speaker C: So it's interesting that the concept review site itself is just something really interesting that I thought about. You know, we, we don't think of any of our sites as review sites anymore. We think of them as content brands. And so to act, even if you're doing, uh, even if, you know, 30% of your content is our product reviews and recommendations, having the other 60% or 50% being authoritative, informative content, tutorials, you know, questions and answers, you know, how, you know, not just what's the best, you know, uh, lawnmower, but how to maintain your lawnmower. You know, how, you know where to find replacement parts, you know, you know how to, you know how to grow your grass. You know, what's the difference between Bermuda grass and crabgrass? You know, uh, all those questions. So we, we build, it's very important for us to build an authority brand versus just a review site. All of our sites do have review elements, but we kind of like, we look at it like you want to visit the homepage and not necessarily know that it's a review site, if that makes sense.

Speaker A: Wasn't there just a Google algorithm update related to review sites?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's called the quality rater. Guidelines, which is like Google's arcane kind of textbook on what they give their reviewer, their manual review team to look at. Um, and so yeah, they basically said that they're going to kind of look closely and what is a review? What is a quality review? There's a lot of sites out there and this is like the underbelly of the industry that are scraped content, spun content. Now with the AI tools coming out, they're kind of AI created Frankensteins. And then you also have a lot of folks overseas and in different countries writing content, which there's various problems with that. Um, so yeah, that's a huge issue.

Speaker A: Let me ask, I have two questions in terms of the brands, uh, content, brand review sites. That's going to be my second question around that. But let's go to that overseas comment. Uh, before we started hitting, before I hit record, you had said something about one of the first things you do if you're looking to buy a site is to actually read an article. Just touch on that for a moment. So for those out there thinking about buying a content site versus building like you're doing.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean I think it's a similar practice that's been told in every industry. Right. Even the E commerce industry might be like, order the product, feel it, like, use it as similar in content. Content is the product for our purposes. And so what I kind of do is just throw the domain into Ahrefs or Semrush, find the top article that's getting most of the traffic and just sit down with a cup of coffee, read it front to bottom, every single word. Does this sound like an expert? What can you glean just from this? Because that's, to me that's 99% of due diligence there. And so I've seen some really convoluted processes and spreadsheets that people have that look at like 90 different points and blah, blah, blah. It's like at the end of the day, what's the essential point? You know, it's the quality that's the durable aspect here. Um, it's not necessarily the backlink profile that's also interesting.

Speaker A: Yeah, thank you. It's not rocket science, right. Sit down and have a cup of coffee, read it. Because that's the most part valuable part of the asset is the content. It's no different than if you're um, if you're gonna buy a house, interview realtors, look at their other listings, look at their virtual tours, things of that nature. If you're gonna buy a business, if you're gonna sell your business, have a conversation with the different brokerage firms, but look at their actual listings. And no, I don't mean the teasers online. Sign the non disclosure agreement, download it, grab a cup of coffee, go through it and then make your decision. Simple really, what you're doing there. Okay, let's talk about a com. This is your content brand portfolio that you're building. So you might be an expert on, you know, in the lawn industry, right. If you're reviewing lawnmowers. But how to, you know, the difference between Bermuda versus. I don't know what other kind of grass there is. I know I've got a fescue. I've got tall fescue. There you go, there you go. I just cut that green stuff out there and I have an electric lawnmower

Speaker C: or a battery operated lawnmower.

Speaker A: I've got one of those egos that great. Anyway, um, some of these type of products or physical products that you could be talking about and reviewing and they actually have websites where they sell physical products to consumers and they have brands on Amazon and all these aggregators trying to buy um, FBA businesses. Is there a future merger between content development and selling on your own website or selling on fba?

Speaker C: Yeah, so we've definitely thought of that. It's a very intersection of content and commerce. I mean that's kind of the point, right? Ah, we come from the content side. There's obviously this big aggregators coming from the product side. Um, but I do think you have to, at some point they do intersect. And at what point in the value chain, where do we want to sit? Basically? Um, I'm very a, ah, very firm believer in staying within my core competency. Um, so really what we're focusing on is the kind uh, of the delivery mechanism or user acquisition really. Um, and we're very comfortable handing that relationship off to a brand and saying, we'll send you the clicks, right? You convert them. Um, at some point. It's interesting to think about maybe for certain industries if we have uh, enough data we can say, you know what, there's no product. Like, I don't know, there's no product in this one vertical that if we could create it or source it, it might make sense. But that would have to be a very specialized case. The one exception to that rule would be information products. We do like brands or building brands that do have that. So if you sell a, uh, $10 ebook or something, um, that's nice if we can do that. But that's Kind of the limit of our expertise. Because really I see physical inventory is a whole different, completely different animal.

Speaker A: Right. You're dealing with importing from overseas or manufacturing and running out of inventory and working capital to keep it in stock and then a whole bunch of different headaches. So your focus then would simply be to send the traffic and earn that affiliate commission.

Speaker C: Exactly. For now. We'll see. We'll see. I will say on the macro side, when you're talking about these aggregators, they are very interested in how do we, particularly on fba, how do we get eyeballs elsewhere, whether it's creating their own Shopify store or developing their own content, um, or even layering on their own affiliate programs on top of Amazon. I think thinking the secondary and tertiary effects of what's happening that massive whales, those whales that have been dropped in the pool of unicorns really is amazing. It's what's happened last couple of years. What are the secondary and tertiary effects of that?

Speaker A: Yeah, they have to go beyond just selling on Amazon. They have to get the source of traffic that leads to uh, that landing on Amazon and go off as well. They have to. There's just no way, no way they can continue to do only Amazon stuff. My opinion, my two cents. Anyways, I get a little insight to it. I talk to most of them and I know that um, you and I didn't talk about this, but we've had an average of like four and a half offers on every listing year to date. Which is, you know, when you bought the last site from me personally, that wasn't the situation. Right. It was, don't list it above 2.74 so it doesn't round up 2.8 online because nobody will buy something for 2.8. The world's changed a lot obviously and this has been fascinating. Um, uh, on the, on the 26 sites that you're building in five weeks, what was the starting date? Just out of curiosity.

Speaker C: So we, we launched those first week of June and they're actually all up right now. Um, and they're all live, they're all the content is in the pipeline. So it's uh, my work is done. Which is, which is great. Our team still has to execute and have to oversee that.

Speaker A: But yeah, actually on that, one of the follow up questions to those, you know, the 120 articles that you're going to have up in 90 days, do you stop then or do you just slow the pace of articles? Do you continually write new content towards that niche subject forever?

Speaker C: I look at My role as a capital allocator and I like to measure everything. So I'll stop and I'll say, let's wait, let's go quiet. We have this ebb and flow. Ideally we're going to have a number of funds launching at various cycles, so it'll always feel busy. But in each portfolio there's kind of a period of work and a period of rest and be patient and measure. And the idea, this whole idea of content budgets on a recurring monthly basis I think is very flawed because things can change.

Speaker A: Interesting. I mean, Chris Yates and I chatted about this and there have been, uh, some scuttlebutt chatter about, you know, the content development being an ad back. And I don't see it that way because it's cost of doing business and you're going to continue to write content on a regular basis. Especially if you've got a site that's up and running and it's successful. What's the risk of when you know that you're 15 months in and site number 22 is starting to be that rocket? Are you going to allocate resources to it or you're just going to sit back and ride the ship?

Speaker C: You know, I kind of like to ride the ship until it finds its natural resting point. Uh, you know, where does it fall, where does it plateau? Um, because otherwise I feel like there's too much cause and effect, you know, uh, in there to untangle.

Speaker A: You don't have content is driving the trip. Well, you can traffic, you can measure that.

Speaker C: Um, you can. But I think I like to kind of see what the first batch, because again, it's about capital allocation. So I don't want to be auto spending. Right. Have it on, like, have a fixed budget for each site and then find I'm digging the hole in the wrong direction because over on the other side of the portfolio there's another site that's growing like gangbusters with far less investment. I should probably pivot that money from the lower ROI activity to the higher one. But that requires knowledge and it requires data and it requires comparative analysis. And so that's why I do it that way. To your point about add backs, I think it's a very interesting discussion in the industry. It's nuanced, I think, from an operator standpoint. Is it 100% add back? I don't think so. Is it some combination there? Yes, I think it is. Because, uh, I have some personal examples where we've stopped writing. We haven't published any content in 6 months, 12 months. The site continues to earn in theory, over time. Will it drop off? Maybe, but I think it's a lot about the type of content you're writing and I'll say that even within verticals. And here's a good example, a tech blog, the shelf life of that content is three to six months next year. Talking about last year's iPhone, that's a depreciating asset out there. Um, however, if you're talking about how to grow tomatoes, that's going to stay the same hopefully for a while. Um, so maybe this is a good kind of tip I guess for people that are looking to buy content business. What is the shelf life of that content profile that you're buying? Is it something that requires frequent updates in the tech space or is it something that's more reference material or tutorials? What is the inherent moat around that content? Um, so I definitely look at that. So I think it does vary like for a tech site.

Speaker A: Yeah, I would say just back to the lesson that no two business models are alike. You gotta analyze um, each one on a case by case basis. You know, I'd look personally for a much longer time period of six months. You know, with no new content I'd be looking at uh, you know, logic in math and say, okay, for the last 18 months I've posted nothing and traffic has tripled. That means it's not going to come crashing down next month.

Speaker C: There's also a delayed effect too. Right. So when you fire the new content it kind of takes a while to get digested by Google. The benefit of buying a site sometimes is that you have that inherent domain authority where if you publish a piece of content it's ranking in three days on the first page. With a newer site that typically takes a while and even for a middle tier site it might take a little bit. So you do have a delayed effect, uh, where you're not getting instant feedback. And so that's part of the problem I think.

Speaker A: How much are you investing in each site? Right, we've got 30,000, 25, $30,000 per site. You've got money allocated towards writers and you've got a, ah, website that you're developing to. I would imagine the site's very simple, not very expensive at all.

Speaker C: Right, well we start with a minimum viable product, basic WordPress branding, WordPress theme. We actually have on the tech side, uh, we have clonable basically infrastructure. So it has all the plugins, all the theming, all the basics. Right. So we just one click we can roll Out. We actually can roll out 26 sites fairly quickly. It's getting in and actually producing the content. That takes a while, hiring teams.

Speaker A: Okay. Um, so most of the funds, if you're allocating 25, $30,000 per site, most of that money is going towards writers.

Speaker C: Yeah. Content is our biggest line item. I'd say 85% of our expenses are content.

Speaker A: Cool. And I think I could talk to you for another hour or so. Um, but I'm not going to do that to the listeners. But what I would like to do is revisit this. Right. You launched June 1, I think, is what you just said a few minutes ago. Um, maybe we can come back and get you back on before the end of the year and get an update on the portfolio of 26 that you've launched and see how things are going. You up for that?

Speaker C: I'd love to. Yeah. I mean, I love to, uh, love that accountability, too.

Speaker A: So what we're going to do, folks, I'm actually going to put it on the calendar now. So he and I are both committed to it. And we're going to record again with an Update on the 26th, see how they're doing. Any. Any last advice for those that are, uh, going to buy. I'm sorry, build versus buy.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I think again, I just kind of start, finish where we started with the. It's. It's a very personal decision. And I think there's this interesting discussion about, you know, what is a good business. Right. There's this objective criteria that we kind of all agree on. It has a moat, has all these things. The problem is sometimes businesses, I've found, that have really nice boats are really hard to operate. You right, so. Or like we've talked some personal examples where the founder is very tied to the brand.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: You know, so that has a great moat, but there's a flip side to that. It's harder to operate. And so I would just come back to what's. Do a personal inventory. What are your competencies? Even if you're outside of the space coming in, what can you take from that outside experience that you can kind of put in your fully developed skill set or developing or undeveloped, kind of put those things in different buckets. When you look at these businesses, identify the components and place them on that spectrum and say, that kind of becomes your dynamic risk, you know, toolbar, if you will. It's very personal. And so I don't think there's such a thing as a perfect business. I think it's more what is your competence and how will you operate this business? Build your own P and L based off of your own experience, not versus what the broker is telling you.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I love that. It is personal no matter what, right? You're going to be immersed in it day in and day out, even if it's just two hours at Starbucks before you get home, before you have kids. Um, because you got to put the time in. You got to be, you know, energetic and motivated to put the time in. So I totally agree on the personal side of it. This has been fantastic. Ewan, uh, thanks for coming on. I appreciate you taking some time out of your. What must be an incredibly busy day. And I look forward to having you back on in six months for a checkup, see how things are going.

Speaker C: Thanks so much, Joe. I really appreciate it.

Speaker A: My pleasure, man. Thanks folks. Thanks for hanging in there, uh, with another episode of the Quiet Life podcast. I loved that episode. All about content development. Buy versus Build. And what Ewen is doing is simply amazing. The way that he's got that content conveyor belt with, uh, 100 different sites and hundreds of writers just picking and plucking content subjects that they want to write on and submitting it and getting paid is brilliant in my opinion. So thanks for hanging in there. Please. If you like our podcast, enjoy what we have to say. Subscribe to it, like it. Subscribe. Whatever service you do that will help boost our rankings, give us a review. It'll uh, help, uh, bring more high quality guests like you and Finzer and so on and so forth. Thanks. Appreciate uh, it. We'll, uh, chat with you next week.

Speaker B: Today's podcast was produced by Rise25 and the Quiet Light Content Team. If you have a suggestion for a future podcast subject or guest, email us@podcastuietlight.com Be sure to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. And subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker A: Sam.