Ep 295: 15+ Online Businesses Acquired & Many More Started & Sold with Colin Ma

What should you do to grow your content website after these Google updates? Hi, I'm Jarrett Krauss. I'm the host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast. And today I'm speaking with Colin Ma, who has been a digital entrepreneur for the last eight years, basically nine years.

Now he's probably been focusing on building digital publishing brands through SEO. He's bought a bunch of businesses, started a bunch of content websites, and sold a bunch. And today he's working to grow the niche pursuits community to the number one online community for online entrepreneurs.

Now in this podcast episode, Colin and I have a long overdue chat. Colin's been in the space, in a very similar time frame to mine actually; he only just started after me, bought his first business not too long after I bought my first online business and he bought a content site and he's bought multiple content sites. He says at the start maybe 10 over 10, but he reckons as maybe more between 15 to 20.

We talk about what he's learned, a bit about due diligence, what you should be looking for when you're looking at acquiring an online business, things to be asking the seller, things to be wary of, and data to be out that you need to get. We also talk about some of the sites he's sold, how he's grown some of the sites, and more specifically, we talk about some of the things and the conversations he's been having with people in his community, in the niche pursuits community, around growing their content sites now after these Google updates.

And some of the results you've seen people get from some of the things they've been doing. So there's so much value in this podcast episode. If you're looking at buying an online business, this is great. If you're about to look at growing a content website, this is a great podcast that I'm sure you're absolutely going to love. Before we dive in, obviously we're talking about buying businesses.

Don't go away and do this on your own. Get my due diligence framework. It's what I use and a lot of my clients use. It takes the guesswork out of buying a business. Head to buyingonlinembusiness.com for it's free resources.

Now let's dive into the pod. Have you been lied to about how to increase organic traffic and grow your website? I too used to think that all you needed to do was add more content and gain backlinks. But this just doesn't work. More content and more links alone are not the answer. Nor do you need to butcher your website with generic SEO changes you picked up on some crummy online tutorial living with a Frankenstein website that's slow and clunky. And because they got sick of seeing great people with great websites struggle to grow them, I decided to do something about it.

I created an SEO service, which is not just about publishing content and getting links. Sure, we offer that, but first we give you quick wins, which are SEO tweaks we can make to your website that actually boost your rankings. And then we lay out a killer SEO strategy to acquire more traffic and revenue that outranks your competitors with less content and fewer links.

We've thoroughly tested this service on many websites before launching it and have achieved incredible results, which you'll see on our landing page I'm about to share with you. Now you can finally buy a business and give it to us to grow it for you. To check out our SEO service, head to buyingonlinebusinesses.com for forward-slash SEO hyphen services and book a call to chat with us to see what is the best growth strategy for you and your website. That's buyingonlinebusinesses.com forward slash SEO services and a link will be in the description too.

Colin, welcome to the Buying Online Business podcast. Thanks for coming on.

Hey, Jaryd. Thanks for having me. I'm excited. I've been a big fan for a couple of years, so it's nice to finally be able to join you actually on the podcast, not just as a listener.

Yeah, thanks, man. So good to have you on. I've known your name for a while now, and this is the first time we get to chat, and it's on a podcast. So it's going to be pretty real, raw and authentic for everyone. So yeah, excited to dig in. What got you in this space of buying businesses, like digital assets?

Man, yeah.

I was in my last, so this is 2015. I'm in my last year of college at a university. Studying computer science to be a programmer. I accepted my first job, but I wanted to get into real estate. I also live in California though, and real estate is pretty expensive in California.

There's got to be a different way to make some money or something. So I was on, like, aura.com. And I read about how people were like building websites and making money off of ads and stuff. like, wow, is this real? So I started researching a ton. And actually, I decided I was going to try to buy something and run it instead of just like, you know, I tried just a few blogs and that didn't work. So I bought something off a flip-up from a couple who ended up kind of scamming me. Yeah, my fiance is right next to me and she's never heard this story actually. So it'll be interesting to see how she responds.

Absolutely. Was this in 2015? do you want to mention the price or whatnot? Yeah, yeah, I'm happy to. It was like a starter site for 15 grand. But the kind of reason why I bought it at that price was they're going to teach you how to run it and be profitable. And essentially, they've worked with other people too. They had me talk to some of their past clients. Sounds legit. Essentially, they have you buy traffic from these illegal networks to get visitors to your website and get AdSense income.

And so in the first month or two, we start low on traffic. see a couple, a couple hundred dollars coming in and then maybe three months later, I'm just completely banned from AdSense. And I mean, there were some yellow flags and some red flags. So wild west days. That's nine years ago. was very, very different than it is now.

Yeah. But I kind of kept going down that route. think this is legit. And then I stumbled on actually Spencer's blog niche pursuits and I finally understood what an affiliate website was. I had my first website about swimming pool equipment and my friends just thought it was so dumb. They're like, you're writing about swimming pools. Do you know anything?

I'm like, my family had a swimming pool growing up and that's kind of the inspiration. I know those cleaners; these robotic swimming pool cleaners can go for a couple hundred bucks. And I started running that in June of 2016. And by December, it had made its first dollar by May of 2016. So 11 months, I think it made like 23 grand to that month. For one month. Congrats. Yeah. So swimming pools—it's seasonal, right? So you're going to see a big increase during the summer, which for us is in May.

But man, I mean, I was making good money as like a software engineer, but there were times when I would wake up at like 8 AM and just from like an Amazon affiliate, I already made more money from my blog than I would have made that day working. So that kind of gave me the confidence to build more affiliate sites, eventually build a team and go deeper down that rabbit hole.

Yeah. They're awesome, man. So you bought a site first before you even started one, right? Yeah, exactly. I was looking at different stuff and I was browsing Flipper for months. And then when this opportunity came, they're like, yeah, we're going to teach you how to make thousands of dollars and you can do it easily. And then you can scale it up. We have a portfolio of 15 and we're making six figures a month. like, dude, this sounds awesome. 15 grand, that sounds amazing, right?

Yeah.

But man, there were some yellow flags, like they didn't use their real names. They use kind of like these phony stock photos as their profile images. And then, as part of the agreement to sign, you're not allowed to mention their names in any public forum. And I thought that was odd. Should we name them now? mean, it's been a long time. Will and Eva, Will and Eva, but I don't; I don't even know if that's their real names. Correct. You're exactly right. How do you know? Yeah.

I know they're in Canada. think Will and Ava; if they want to go come after me, they sure can try. I don't know what's going to happen. Sometimes I'll just look them up and I think I found their profile one time, but it's very non-descript. Yeah, it's probably fake. Yeah. Who knows what they're doing now?

Yeah. Yeah. mean, good lesson. Good lesson. Really good lessons. So you bought one and then you started, started to start one. And then where did you go? Did you keep like starting them or do you have more?

Yeah, so for that first wind pool website, I earned 23k. I'm like, wow, this is a real thing. I don't know what I'm doing. Legit good. Yeah. So I'm going to hire a company to help me manage this because I don't know what I'm doing. And I don't think it was the company's fault. Maybe it was probably the way I had done SEO.

But two months later, it was sinking down dramatically, not just because of the seasonality, but because it lost a lot of its rankings. So it's like 23k in May, I want to say like 30k in June, and then maybe 12k in July, which is a great month objectively, but we just see the rankings starting to plummet.

And so I kind of let that company go, but I started other sites. started the site in like a gardening space and I think a pet space, just content sites, affiliate marketing, and informational articles. I had hired a few people to basically write and format the articles because I started actually going back; I started the swimming pool website, like basically when I started my first job.

So I was driving two and a half hours a day and then I was working eight and a half. And then I would come home and spend three to six hours writing a single blog post. And it was rough. You know, I actually know exactly how you feel exactly because I was travel blogging in 2013 doing similar.

Well, I was actually doing probably a little bit more hours, like doing more than eight-hour days and then traveling maybe slightly more, but coming back home, even if you're doing a six-hour day or a four-hour day at work and adding the commute on top of it, you'd come home and you don't want to be doing work and your brain's not at its best, at its peak. It's just a slog.

And I'm sure that you did that for a while. I know that I did that for years and years and years. And that's the hard part about making money online space. People think, even if you're to buy a business, like, I'll just buy it and it's there and it's easy. Well, no, you need to learn it.

The larger the business you purchase, yes, it's a lot easier because you have got resources and can hire a team to do all that sort of stuff. you don't need to; it's not really time; it's also that you're spending, but there's a lot more to it than people will really make out, right? Yeah.

And I feel like at that time there was a lot of content saying pretty much anyone can buy a business and learn how to run it easily. Well, now I know that's definitely false and it kind of was always maybe not entirely true.

But yes, in 2013, you said you were working a job and then coming back to like work on your business. Yeah. So I got the idea to start a blog in 2013, March, 2013. I started a travel blog and then drive that for like two years and didn't make any money after a year of doing it. I think it was started 2014.

I started a e-commerce business drop shipping and I had a bunch of products and I knew nothing about digital marketing. So we made like no money and it was not working. at the end of 2014, well, six months prior to the end of 2014, I decided I would try and buy something. And that's when I bought my first one in early 2014. So just basically around roughly the same time as you. I bought my first one for 15 grand as well, actually. From someone in Will and Eva?

It was actually from an Indian guy, which I was very like, not to be in politically correct here, but there was a lot of like worry about, you know, Indian traffic at that time and He was an Indian person. was a little bit like, I don't know how quality this is, but he was living in Australia, apparently. so anyway, I bought it and it did send me okay. And then I bought three, three businesses in three years. I realized that was too much because they weren't like just blogs. bought two e-commerce businesses. One was a membership business and I got into blogging sort of content sites after actually. Yeah. So tell me about, did you just continue starting them after this pool site?

What did you do with the pool site and then did you end up acquiring more? So I started to build more sites. I held onto the pool site for another couple months or for another couple of years. It was probably making around 30 K a year for those years before selling it and another site to have you ever heard of the income store?

Yeah. the one's the income store debacle where the Ponzi scheme, the Ponzi scheme. Yeah. So I ended up selling it to them actually through Effie International. For those of you who don't know, the income store was like, you can invest like a hundred K or like 300 K and you're like guaranteed returns and they would buy these online businesses, but they were cracked down to be a Ponzi scheme. Did not affect me. I got my money. I got my cash.

Yeah, absolutely. But it was brutal. And I think that might've been like three years ago now that the Ponzi scheme came out and there was a lot of content out there on YouTube about it. I know Amelia Gardner was really good at like posting updates on the lawsuit. And it was pretty brutal because a lot of people bought into this like online business fund and actually went and invested into this and didn't really get the returns they were expecting.

Apparently they did have a bunch of online business that were making it. You sold yours, it was making money. I'm sure you sold it for a valuable price. They did have a bunch, but they were basically robbing Peter to pay Paul. And they just weren't able to keep up with it because they were getting a lot of investors in.

And a lot of people that just went like, they went liquidation and it was a bit of a Ponzi scheme because they were robbing Peter to pay Paul. And it's a massive shame, I would say, Colin, because you've got other great people in the space that have set up these sort of group buyers. know Dom Wells did. Dom set up some group buyers where investors could buy in a group.

And then he went actually public with a company where Bill could invest in his publicly traded company now, which is great. it's getting an email from him is they're getting great returns. And it's nice to know that his is public and there's a lot more that needs to be shared and stuff. guess ones that aren't, there might be a bit of research and D D you need to do, but yeah, interesting time. So sold that one to them and then where did you go from there?

Yeah, think at that point, I had a portfolio of sites. I was running anywhere from, I think my whole model was half anywhere from like three to five websites making money. Then three to five kind of starter sites that you're always building to kind of be your next ones and constantly buying and flipping sites.

So I don't know exactly where I was at that stage of the journey, but probably at its peak, was probably running around 15 sites. I had a team of like six people in house, maybe about five to 10 writers, training out these content sites. And some I would continue to flip. Like I would buy some sites from Empire Flippers or Flippa, grow them and then make a profit.

But I think my best result came actually from building out from an expired domain. had this site, it was a health site. And making a hundred bucks a month. So it's worth like three grand or so. And someone was like, Hey, I'll actually trade you this expired domain for your business, your site. And I've known this guy for a while. He's in the space. He's a good guy. His name is Israel Godet. I don't quite know the pronunciation, but yeah, he gave me the expired domain. He's like, Hey, this is what I would do with it.

I'm like, sure, I've never messed with an expired domain, let's just do it. And the domain was vssmonitoring.com. It was like this old software company that went, that got bought out. So they let the domain go, but the DR was like 52 or something. Pretty good tech space. It had monitoring in the domain. So I tried a couple of different things. I tried like blood pressure monitors, other types of monitors.

Those didn't do super well. But then when I discovered the computer monitors, there's a tons of different computer monitor like long tail keywords, computers for gaming, computers for XYZ, or sorry, monitors for gaming, monitors for XYZ. And it kind of went down that kind of like PC tech route of like mouses and keyboards, which is a lucrative niche and it did really well. within like six months, and this was like three or four years ago. So SEO was harder than it was in 2015. Within three or four months, it was making like 10 grand a month.

Cool. Yeah. And it was awesome.

But got hit by like an algo update, went down a couple, maybe down at 60 a month. And then it started like, we just started building out again where I was basically with 30 articles a month, which I think websites at my level was a pretty good velocity. Wow, man. Congrats on that. So how many sites do you think you've started and how many sites do you think you bought? Man, started? Cause it's been nine years journey so far. far. that's a lot of time in there. Yeah. I probably started around 30 or 40. I probably bought around 10.

But most of the ones that I started were not winners, but the ones that were winners. Percentage, what percentage? Because this is, I speak to people that are great at starting sites and are like busting my balls to get to like 15 % of them or 20 % of them be decent. Yeah. mean, I from the ones, from the ones that I started of like the 30 or 40, I'd probably say, man, maybe like five to 10, maybe like five were like really successful.

And then I would say another five to 10, I would be successful in that they made a little bit of a profit. Maybe I got them to like $500 a month. So they were kind of like able to pay for their content. And then when I sold them, I made a little bit of money, but selling a website for like 10 or 15 grand, you're not profiting that much your initial cost of a website is probably a five to 10 or something. But I consider those if I made like five or 10k off a website, I would consider that personally, a mild success. Yeah.

For people listening, also depends on how much you invest into that as well. Yeah, that's a good point. The way I started it was I had a team to help do a lot of the keyword research and we kind of start with a batch of like 20, 25 articles and do one or two articles a month.

The initial investment was probably 1500 bucks and then maybe another 100 bucks a month for a year. And by then we know we're not, have a winner. I think there's different strategies. I know people who have a much higher success rate. They only have three sites, but they really put like their persona out there and try to build a real brand. I wasn't doing that. I was building these shitty content.

I'm sorry. I know how to cuss on here. These shitty content sites where it's like who the hell are writing this? There's no actual expertise and it's just faking authority through different ways. I do think I did that in a pretty clever way for my tech website that did really well.

Cause this is when EATS kind of started to be a thing. What we would do on our review articles, we'd still have just a random someone from Kenya who was a writer or someone from Serbia. But on the top we would put this banner reviewed by like nine people, 27 hours, 43 different products looked at to choose these nine. So I think we did some creative things that maybe weren't totally honest to kind of fake it. Yeah, lot of people do it. Yeah.

So from buying and selling, most people listening are looking at acquiring something. What advice would you give to them? People probably 10, roughly around 10 businesses. I'm back now, it's probably actually closer to like 15 to 20. But I would say buy businesses with a lot of upside. At first I was like, okay, yeah, let's just buy this website with a lot of number one rankings. It'll run on autopilot. Now you just have nowhere to go but down from there.

unless you're like really good at SEO. Even then it's just so difficult, especially in, I think, the content space. I've mostly bought websites in the content space. Can't give too much advice on e-commerce or anything. But also just get other people to look at it. Whether you have friends in the space.

I know there's a few services, I think, if you're like Centurica, if you're buying like maybe a six-figure site or something, I think that's a premium service. But talk to community. I'm helping Spencer run a community, the Niche Pursuits community. Some people come in and be like, hey guys, I'm buying this website, can I get a second pair of eyes?

And some other people volunteer, but I will always personally try to take at least 15, 30 minutes looking at it like, hey, here's what I think. Here's the upside, here's the downside, pros, cons, et cetera. Always get a second pair of eyes. And if something feels off, don't buy it. There's always plenty of opportunities in this space. that's good advice. Absolutely. This is why I have a job, Is being an experienced set of eyes to look at these businesses.

Looked at, I don't even know how many ridiculous. Is that what you do? actually have should have looked at this profile. All right. Don't work with Sancherco work with Jaryd then. No, no, I'm fine. Like Sancherco is like, if people are going to buy a six figure site, you can get your DD run through that. But I also I'm a buy side &A advisor as well for seven figure plus deals.

Yeah, okay. Anything under that we we normally review businesses, but I'm not attached. People can go work with anyone as long as they're just keeping themselves safe and doing it in the right process. My goal is to make sure people are getting ripped off. Yeah, it happened to you. It's happened to so many people and it's not fun when people come into the space with the right intention to make their lives better. And then you've got these people out there that are just doing the wrong thing ethically in terms of selling just a dud for more than it's worth a dozen.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. And actually, I think there's two patterns I think that I would give that I've identified personally where it's kind of yellow flags. One is if a seller is trying to like really push and rush you for like no particular reason, like I find that when they put a lot of pressure, there's something shady going on. And then two also, a lot of times it's like, why are you selling the business or why is it going down? it's because I ignored it. But a lot of times that's a lie.

So don't always trust the seller as to like, yeah, it's going down because I ignored it. Well, actually they're still posting like three times a month for the past six months. That's not totally truthful. So yeah. You got it. You got to read between the lines.

That's one of the specific questions we ask is like how regularly are they posting? How many posts have they got? What's their cadence? What does it cost them? And normally when you ask a bunch of questions to maintain a light, it costs a lot of like capacity in your head, right? So just don't do it.

For those people that do lie, they're trying to chase themselves and keep up with the lie rather than the honest, truth. So you can normally detect it with smart questions. I'm glad that you pointed that out, Collins. It's pretty important. the more information you get, the more you can start to see that you don't need to rely on that word.

Yeah, get a good sense for the seller, not just the business. Can you trust the seller? mean, like you said, you bought a site from an Indian guy and you were wary and it's not necessarily because he's from XYZ country. It's your first deal. It's always easier to deal with something like familiar.

Like, yeah, my first businesses, I mean, they were from Canada, but like, yeah, I would prefer them to be heck even in the same city as me, even though it probably wouldn't really amount to anything. Like you're just looking for more common ground for these deals because you want to get to know the sellers as much as the business.

Absolutely. And I bought from other Indian people before, these websites, content sites. I'm just looking at the data. It's got nothing to do with the person. Now it's just simply because buying first site. So I want to chat about what you are up to now. Like what do you do for work now? You're working with niche pursuits with Spencer. What's your portfolio look like? Got one? Yeah. I'll start with a simple question. My portfolio is basically non-existent now.

I've kind of just moved on from content sites. found them not as interesting personally, and I always have to like what I do for work. But yeah, I mean, I think one of my favorite projects that's super fun is helping Spencer run his niche pursuits community. I've always wanted to be in the education space. And actually, in high school, I wanted to be a teacher. Then my mom told me teachers in the US don't make a lot of money. you know, I like eating good food. So I was like, all right.

Maybe when I'm older, I'll teach, but I have a decent amount of experience in this online space. so, you know, basically the Bish Bursuits community, it's right now about 150 people, digital entrepreneurs, and we have a very active discord group. help throw, but we put people in masterminds so they can come together in small groups, chat about their business, get to really know each other, set goals, which is really important for us, and then be accountable for their goals and really grow together.

And then additionally, we have one to two calls a week where we either bring in an expert of a certain topic, like the past five weeks, we focused entirely on Facebook traffic. So we brought in three experts, had some office hours, and then we'll also sometimes just do a shoot the shit call. Very casual. can, we can talk about anything from our cats to our family. does end up being very business focused, but those are nice too. And I think we built a really nice community where people.

I think for me, it's really rewarding for people to join the community and just be like, yeah, because of this community, it's helped me add like $2,000 a month to my business revenue or like I've been able to get this much. So to me, that's my favorite thing hearing about helping someone change their life. I'm with you.

That's why I do what I do. The fulfillment that you get from it is amazing and you've helped somebody drastically. Yeah, cool. So you run that. Is there anything else that you're up to? Like have you got into real estate at all or? Not.

Business wise plan on buying my first personal property with my fiance so we can move closer to where she worked. I'm fully remote so it doesn't really matter where I work but she drives two hours a day right now. So you can be closer to work for her, option. Yeah. So I'm not as much into real estate but I kind of invest in the stock market and have maybe a little more crypto than I should. Well, I mean, it's looking poised for some good months ahead. think not that I'm an expert on that.

What are the of maybe some of the conversations you guys are having for these content site owners in your community around what's going on with Google traffic and authority, gateway pages and affiliate links and ads on sites. What are some of the things that you guys are talking about and some of the things that you've seen have helped content site owners sort of like recover or help themselves in their business in the last year? Cause it's been a rocky ride for a lot of people in that space.

Yeah. Yeah.

And actually a lot of people who join us are from a content website space. You know, and that's also Spencer's audience, right? But so the questions you asked, how do I recover from traffic? What do do about ads? These are all some of the most asked questions in the community. And the biggest thing we've been focused on right now is less about SEO recovery.

We've done very little talks about SEO. We have an SEO channel. We have an SEO mastermind. People talk about it, but we're focused on a lot of diversity. There's a lot of SEO content, but like we just we're finishing up a Facebook cohort, there are people who with Facebook pages making four figures a month, not even driving people to their website, but just through Facebook's referral program can have a meme page on Facebook, not even send traffic to your own website and be making thousands of dollars per month. So a lot of what we're doing about is okay. And then there is ways where you can drive traffic through Facebook to your website.

How do you do that? We bring speakers on. I can't talk about that, but I moderate those conversations. I have questions. We've also talked about Pinterest, YouTube, basically a lot of different programs for people to diversify their earnings and traffic. And we have members who are very engaged and sometimes not engaged at all.

A lot of our very engaged members are seeing great results, which has been fantastic. Like I think in the first mastermind we had in the Amazon Influencer program, are you familiar with what that is? well, not Amazon Influencer program. No, I don't. Sorry.

Yeah, it's interesting. The Amazon associates program, their affiliate program, the influencer program is if you're an influencer, you have social media, you can apply, they'll accept you or not based off of some vague criteria. But if you're accepted, you can essentially upload videos, reviewing a product, and those videos will be placed on Amazon's product page. Cool. And if people watch it, you get a commission. So you don't even have to drive traffic, you just have to make the video, get it through some luck, get it ranked.

And like, basically, like one person was publishing 200 videos to her account, not knowing that there's something wrong with it. We identified it within like a month or two, she's earning four figures a month from that. it's basically answer the question. It's hard. It's so hard to recover Google traffic as your traffic. I'm sure there's some people who have the secret sauce, but a lot of people don't. think it's more seen and finding other sources of traffic in addition to Google. That's a big thing we're working on with.

most of our members. Cool. And what, would you say is like sort of getting the best results? Like you mentioned Facebook pages is a page, I guess it would depend on the niche, but a couple would be pages, Pinterest and YouTube's a tricky one because it's resource heavy to get traffic in terms of like cost per video post. Yeah. I mean, let's see, there's a group of people who are doing really well at the Amazon influencer program. And, know, I talked about writing a blog post and it's taking six to eight hours.

You can shoot a video reviewing a product, three to five minutes, no editing. You don't have to make it look perfect. That can start making money within a week. And you're not at this point, it's going to be hard to earn like five figures monthly from it. I'd say that side income, but that's a really good one.

And then we've gone deep down the Facebook page hole and group actually, where, you you can drive traffic, you can create, you can drive traffic to your website to kind of capture leads and display income. You can make money through the Facebook referral program.

We have one guy who started a group and it just in the past two months grew to like a hundred thousand people pretty much organically. You he did a little bit to get it started, but like no paid. It's just blown up. And now he's getting like sponsorships and figuring out how to monetize that. It's very niche dependent though.

You know, like there are people killing it with Pinterest. I think there's just so many ways to make money online. It can be a little overwhelming. think. Yeah. What helps with the community is, know, you have people doing a little bit of everything. So depending on where you want to go, there's people to talk about it. But then we'll also try to, as a community, we're calling these cohorts where we're focusing on one subject at a time. This first cohort is a Facebook cohort, six week program.

Then in November, we're starting our email marketing and newsletters cohort. Yeah. like the sound of that one. I'm big into email marketing and newsletters. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great way for people to own their traffic sources, right? Like you own your email list. You don't own any traffic from Facebook or Google.

Yeah, and it's just underutilized by so many content site owners in the sense that you not only own it, but it allows you to give so much more value to your audience. And that's what your content should do anyway, is like bring them in, add value, and then just you get the chance to add even more value and they'll pay you for it. Yeah, 100%. But I think the issue is, and this is the issue for me, a lot of people are just setting up these shitty content sites where you're like, no name, no brand.

So I mean, I think if I were to do a content site now, it would be something that I care about and love and really want to build a brand in. Cause I think that's a lot of like, yeah. And working with like some bigger sites lately that I like work on as projects and theory of mine has always been like brand. If people are searching for your brand name or your name, that's a pretty big sign that people are that you there's something you're doing right. If people are looking you up. So yeah, absolutely.

And Google loves brands and brands have trust, right? So people love trust, which is, mean, it's a shame because there were a lot of people that were making a lot of money through content sites and some weren't doing so good, some were, but it's the positive side to it is kind of helped make search better and the internet better in terms of having less content that isn't so good that ranks really high. It is better for the internet and it is better for humans in the long run.

It's a shame that it just stopped working. The tap turned off for a bunch of people. But also on the positive side for that, it helps people realize let's level up and turn this into a... If we actually care about doing the right thing and making money and adding value at the same time, well, value comes first, then they're going to level up in their business and turn it into a brand, right? Yeah, 100%.

And I think that's the right approach and the direction we're going in. Even though Google has screwed up a lot of real brands though lately. Yes. There are some great smaller brands producing great content that have been kind of punished. Like what? don't know if you heard about these sites like house fresh and something dodo. Okay, there's yeah, there's just like these very real brands doing like real content, but they just got destroyed by Google like lost 80 90 % of their traffic.

And there's a ton of brands like that. That said, you should still build a brand. It's not as easy as it used to be. But I think that's really the only way to succeed in the long run, even if it doesn't guarantee success. absolutely. Colin, so good to chat and have you come on the pod. Where can we send people to check out more about what you're doing with the community and maybe get in touch with you as well? Yeah, I'm on, well, man. So the community is community.nichepursuits.com.

I'll put a link to that in show notes for you on too. Yeah. And Jaryd, I can actually get you kind of like a special code and we can get your listeners like a discount on their first month. Cool. If people are interested in trying that out, so we can connect offline on that. I don't have a personal site.

You can reach me at email, call an lmotgmail.com. I'm on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it. And I can share that with you as well, Jaryd, but I don't really use it to be honest. I haven't built much of a personal brand myself. I know the irony in that.

Yeah, but I mean, you're a valuable resource. You may have not focused on building it personally, but your name is known in the space. And yeah, I just want to thank you for what you've done in the space. It's great. And thanks so much for coming on.

Yeah, Jaryd, thank you so much for having me, man. Like you said, this has been long overdue and it's been a blast chatting, man. Likewise. I'm looking forward to more. I'll to you soon. Definitely.