Ep 297: Financing An Online Business, AI, Search & Business Models with Jaryd Krause

What’s holding you back from buying an online business? In this solo episode of the Buying Online Businesses podcast, Jaryd Krause takes on listener questions, diving into key topics that often challenge aspiring online business owners. Recently, Jaryd reached out to his audience, asking, “If you could have a free coaching session with me, what are the top three questions you’d ask?” The response was overwhelming, so he dedicated this episode to answer as many as possible.

Listeners can expect valuable insights on essential topics like mindset, AI trends, shifts in search, content site opportunities, and alternative business models. Jaryd also covers important considerations around risks, niche selection, business size, funding methods, and overcoming money blockages. For those looking to take their next steps in online business, this episode offers golden nuggets of advice. 

Catch this episode and explore more about online businesses!

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Episode Highlights

03:45 How to sell a low revenue company?

08:50 When do you need a mentor?

15:30 Do you need to focus on profits when buying a business?

22:00 How to scale an online business?

33:00 What online business to buy?

Courses & Training

Courses & Training

Key Takeaways

Jaryd emphasizes the importance of thorough due diligence, recommending his framework to mitigate risks. For smaller deals, investing in a due diligence framework rather than high-cost external advisors may be more economical.

Building a network, joining relevant groups, and engaging in cold outreach can help find deals before they reach larger brokers or platforms, allowing buyers to secure potentially better opportunities.

Scaling an online business to high profitability, such as $250K annually, is possible but typically requires substantial experience, dedication, and a long-term vision. Success in this arena often hinges on persistence, problem-solving, and staying committed rather than rapid gains with minimal experience.

Transcription:

What is holding you back from buying an online business? Hi, I'm Jarrod Krause. I'm the host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast, and today I'm speaking with you. Yes, the listener. This is a solo podcast episode. I'm recording it with me and my Pat Malone on myself, and what I'm doing is I'm just answering questions that people had sent in. I sent out an email.

A couple of days ago, asking people if you would have a free coaching session with me, what are the top three questions you would ask me? I had a bunch of people send in; I will have to do more of these because there's a lot of questions. We got through about 40 minutes, and I think it was quite valuable, but what I would love to hear is from you. Let me know if you thought this was valuable, and if you have some of your own questions, email me. I'm here for you. Now the things that we covered in this are mostly around mindset stuff.

Also around AI, search, what's happening with search, what's happening with content sites, and alternative business models to purchase. We also talked about risks, liabilities, niches, money blockages, or like online business blockages around niches, the size of businesses you should be purchasing, funding methods, how to find businesses, and how to finance these businesses. There's so many questions that I got to answer, and I'm sure you're going to find them valuable.

If you did so, please let me know. Also, this is not the only way I can help you for free. I have my due diligence framework, which does help you take the guesswork out of buying a business; buyingonlinembusiness.com forward slash free resources where you can get that. Now let's dive into the pod. Have you been lied to about how to increase organic traffic and grow your website?

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Firstly, I want to say for everybody that did submit questions and email me, thank you for submitting your questions on behalf of everybody listening because you guys are the ones that are creating the content. Stoke in the fire, give me the questions that I can answer.

So straight into questions now, the first one is from David S. There's a few Davids, so I just know what your question is and your first name and last letter of your last name. Then you'll know who this is for and what answer it is, but this is for everyone, really. So David's question is, can I realistically learn to buy, turn around, and sell early-stage low-revenue companies without much tech?

What mentor, acquisition, lawyer, or advisor might work with me, and would it ever be possible to achieve big things in a space that seems to belong exclusively to the private equity world? Great question, David. And the short answer is yes. Absolutely, there's a couple of questions in this. Can I realistically learn to buy? Yes. Can you realistically learn to turn around a business? Yes. And sell as well? Yes. Low-revenue companies, I'm not sure what price range you mean about that without knowing much about tech.

Absolutely. How do I know this? I started with the smallest of small online businesses that I purchased, and I was a plumber, and I knew nothing about the online business space. In fact, when I first started out, I had to Google absolutely everything and use Google University as my education. And now, when I started to teach people to acquire businesses, I first started teaching people who were tradies to get off the tools. So construction workers off the tools.

So can you do this without much tech experience? Yes, absolutely. The next phase of the question is: what mentor, acquisition lawyer, or advisor might work with me? Here I'll put my hand up: I'm not a lawyer. but I am an acquisition advisor. I do help people work. I work as a buy-side &A advisor for people buying seven-figure deals and bigger. We're acquiring one right now for a client, which is great. And we handle a bunch of sourcing, finding the, like I said, sourcing, finding the business, going through LOI, we do the DD, we do negotiations, put their offer in, handle all the migration, help with the migration, and post-sale support.

All right, so if you want other sorts of resources as well, you can reach out to me too, David. I can help; maybe refer you to somebody else if you don't want to work with me. And then you also ask, would it ever be possible to achieve these big things in a space that seems to belong exclusively to the private equity world? Absolutely.

Depending on what size business you're looking at purchasing would be dependent on how fast the turnaround can be, the type of business, and the business model. Do you want to do a rollup? Do you want to build a holding company, roll it up, and sell it? If so, I can help you do that. What that means for people that don't know is buy a couple of businesses that you're merging together and sell them off or sell them off as one big package.

For example, maybe you buy an e-commerce business selling surfboards, and then you want to start to acquire a bit of the market cap. Then you start to buy blogs that are talking about surfing and filter that traffic into buying your surfboards.

Maybe you want to buy the digital marketing agency that's creating that content for those blogs. Maybe you want to buy the link-building agency that's getting the links for those blogs. Maybe you want to buy the marketing agency that's doing the PPC for your business, for the e-commerce side, and everything else.

And you just roll it all up and sell it as one big package. So that's how it's done. Yeah, so I hope that helps. David, the next person is Pranjal. I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly.

And there's three questions here. What online business would you suggest if I needed a monthly income of $2,500? So that's a really good question. As the market changes, so do multiples, and multiples differ between different business models. Now I'll just put 2,500 times 12, okay, which gives us 30 grand a year. I'll do this on my calculator because I don't do too much math in my head. I refer to the calculator because it's more accurate than my brain for calculations.

And so 30K a year in income. Now, if you wanted to buy something that's got a lower multiple, maybe you could buy something for the 60K range, which is a two-year multiple, all the way up to maybe a five-year multiple, right? So 150K, depending on a five-year multiple, might look like a membership business or a small software business.

So that's the size business that I would be suggesting that would need to be purchased in that range if you wanted to get $2,500 a month. Or anywhere around the 60 to 90 grand range, roughly, which is a two- to three-year multiple. And it's going to depend. The better businesses have the higher multiples. The second question is, What do I need to consider when buying an online business?

Well, that is such a broad question, and I can't answer it in just this one podcast episode alone. My whole question is dedicated to that—what you need to consider. First things first, I would learn how to find the deals and do due diligence, and then have an advisor like myself oversee the businesses that you've done due diligence on before purchasing to point out certain risks that you may have missed and/or growth opportunities in the next steps.

That's what I do in the buying online business community. I would say consider that. There'll be links all over my website. If you need help or have questions, reach out to me at jerry.buyingonlinebusinesses.com. And then the last question from Pranjal is, at what stage should I need your help?

Good question. Depending on when, I would say once you have the capital or once you're very close to having the capital, and it might take a couple of months to get comfortable learning the market and doing due diligence. Once you're pretty close to the capital amount that you want to spend, then start working with us. Yeah. Good questions.

Thank you. Ethan is next. The first question is funding methods—creative ones too. Funding methods depend on where you live.

If you're American, SBA is the most typical funding route. I can recommend you do a bunch of different things: e-commerce, lending; there's a bunch of different banks in the States that help people get SBA loans. Creative ones as well. You can use seller notes and seller financing, earn outs as well, structured into the deal, depending on the size of the business you're buying, and how aggressive the market is in that price bracket would be dependent on how much seller financing and/or seller notes and earn outs that you can do within that business.

Different funding sources, creative ones; you can raise funds yourself through investors, family, and friends, and all have your own capital put into it. How to find off-market deals is a good question. Build a network and jump into Facebook groups, jump into LinkedIn groups, jump into different places that are buying and selling websites, make friends that are doing so, reach out to me, and just network. Right, that's how you find off-market deals. You can go out and do the cold outreach approach. It's very resource heavy, where I mean is like you find the perfect target business you wanna buy, and then you just go away and get a bunch of emails of those people that own those businesses and then pitch to them. Very cold approach; it's not super successful, but it does work, and a lot of big brokers sort of use this as a way to get business. And then once they have that, start to rely more heavily on the network and their brand. How to reduce personal risk as much as possible. What do you consider a personal risk? Now, an LLC is a limited liability company. So you can have limited liability by owning a business in that company. That is one way to reduce personal risk. In Australia, it's a trust. I am not a legal practitioner, and I can't give legal advice. Everything I do say in this podcast is not financial legal advice, because I'm not a certified financial planner or advisor or a legal practitioner in the law or legal accounting practitioner either.

So this is just based on my knowledge; there is a fair bit of it based on being in this space, but to reduce personal risk, then you can put your business in a specific trust or a limited liability company that can reduce personal risk. Hope that helps Ethan. Really good question or questions. Next we have Gloria. Gloria asks, I'm drawn to acquiring an online business because of the location independence it offers; I'm a surfer.

Yeah, Gloria, awesome. And chasing waves like myself. However, I'm a bit tech challenged without this expertise. What would you advise is the best way to develop more technical knowledge so that I'm poised for any AR disruption and can be a stronger leader? I.e., asking the right technical questions and guiding staff for growth. Really good question.

With tech challenges, I'm not techie at all. In fact, I don't like to get into tech much, and I don't believe we need to really be across too much tech in business. Business is a strategy, and business is a system that produces a result for people, and they give you money for it. AI is just some of the things that you can use, or tech is just some of the ways that you can help run and manage your business, and the tech and AI are always going to be changing.

So if we end up spending all of our time just in AI and researching different tech, then we're not really going to be focusing on getting results for our clients and people that are within our business. So, tech is important; it's good to understand, but as tech evolves, it's just going to get easier and easier and easier for us to use. So I wouldn't be too worried about not knowing enough about technology and/or AI because things will change very, very, very, very fast.

And a lot of the things, a lot of the discussions that people are talking around with AI are very speculative, even AGI. We listened to the ex-CEO of Google just the other day, myself. He's talking about how we just don't have enough capacity, bandwidth, and storage to run AGI and a bunch of these different types of fast-moving AI technologies based on the speculation that a lot of people are talking about in different podcasts and YouTube videos. So I wouldn't be too worried about tech. It will change and evolve for us humans to be able to use it more efficiently and easier.

The next one is that many of the businesses I'm reviewing are too small for our due diligence, and I don't understand the technical terms in your due diligence framework to adequately safeguard my investment independently. Is there a sweet spot monetarily, or is this question contradictory in nature?

Well, I'm not sure what size; without being this specific, I'm not sure what size business you're talking about. Maybe you're thinking of a business in the low six figure range or five figure range, mid five figure range. Yes, sure. Maybe going and paying thousands and thousands up to tens of thousands of dollars for due diligence from a due diligence firm. It may not be the best thing financially for you to do when acquiring a business, but is there a sweet spot?

Yes. Come and join the Buying Online Businesses community. It's a lot cheaper. We review your businesses for you and teach you how to do due diligence as well. Through the Buying Online Businesses course, you'll learn those terms. And these are terms that I don't think you should outsource learning anyway. I think you should understand these terms.

So when you become the business owner, you know how to run the business efficiently and well and grow it. And then when it comes time to sell it, know who you are; you know the terms on how to sell it as well. So just by being in a space and looking for business to buy, whether you work with me or not, you're going to learn those terms, and I wouldn't shy away from doing so. In terms of price, I'm not sure.

I would say as you get up into, say, the $300K plus range, there's different options for outsourcing due diligence services. As you get to the seven-figure range, then I would advise hiring an &A advisor like myself to acquire the business for you. And you'll learn those terms within the work that we do together.

Number three, originally I broached acquiring businesses and buying assets with profits, but after an exhaustive fruitless search, much due to not having an aligned criteria, I'm wondering if I'm thinking in reverse. With cash flow and net worth being the focus, what would your process look like to determine the best course of action? So she said she's broached acquiring businesses and assets with profits.

But she believes basically she hasn't found any. I'm not sure where you're looking, and I'm not sure if I'm understanding this question correctly, but should you be thinking in reverse, like with cash flow and net worth being the focus, what would your process look like to determine the best course of action? Firstly is cash flow. Cashflow is going to get you resources to build your net worth.

So focus on yes, there's businesses out there that are already cash flowing, and then build that cash flow, sell it, and you can build your net worth doing so. That's how I've done it. That's how most people do it: they go away and buy things that are cash flowing to build up enough cash to then redistribute into other assets. And it could be assets within the online business space or property like myself. I love property investing, and I love buying online businesses. Love building wealth. Good questions. Thank you so much for those questions.

Gloria. Steve, Steve, his three questions are, well, I think it's maybe one question here is, does it make more sense to buy a list or build a list if the niche isn't quite right for my experience? Or should I buy a list and try and run with it even if it's not a niche I have experience in? I've run into issues before by not staying within a niche I have personally experienced or have personal experience in, but that was a brick-and-mortar business.

So his question is, Does it make sense to buy a list or build a list if it's not a niche? If you can't find anything in a niche with his experience, my answer is no. I don't think it does make more sense to build or start, but definitely buy a list. Yes, that's what I like to do, and that's what I like to advise. It's a lot easier to do so, but there is a limiting belief here, Steve, and that limiting belief, I'm going to call you out on it, is having to acquire something that is within a niche that you have experience in.

All the businesses that I've bought are in a niche that I have no experience in. Well, I learned a little bit about dropshipping in the first one, so I had a little bit of experience in that. The second one was tailor-made clothes, suits, and stuff. I had no idea. I had no business being in that niche, but it was a great business that made me 100% return on my investment in seven months, and it just kept cash flowing.

So was a great business and a great investment. The next one was within the furniture space. I have no experience in the furniture space, but that business made money as well. And then I went on to sell it. I bought content sites in the baby space. I don't have babies. I don't know what I'm doing with babies.

So I don't have experience in these spaces, but they've made me money and helped me build my wealth. And so if your goal is to actually make money and to build wealth, it's better to not have limited beliefs that we need to love the niche or we need to have experience in the niche.

That's not actually true. That's where a lot of people get hung up. Good question though. And no, I would not be looking at just building something based on something you have experience in. That's also a slippery slope because then you feel like you might be tied to that actual business because you have no experience in anything else. But you can be far more diversified if you just go.

I'm going to be the business owner, and I'm going to bring in the people that are going to help me with this. My Buying Online Businesses membership course program, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, just join the community as a course there—a zero-to-hero course that can help you get started and get you all the way through to acquiring an online business.

Like I said earlier in the podcast, I first started as a plumber, and then I started helping construction workers who had little to no experience in how online business even worked. Basically, they knew how to send a couple of emails and use Facebook, and then we're able to go and buy businesses.

So that's a good way to start. The second question from Breen is, if you try to acquire an online business with little to no money down, how do you get the seller to take you seriously? Well, you don't. You don't get them to take you seriously, and you don't just buy a business with little to no money down unless you're buying a business with seven figures, like high seven figures up into the eight figures where you're maybe, say, a $5 million business where you're putting maybe, let's say, 500K of your own cash down; that's only 10%, right? And the rest is financing—a seller note and/or creative financing. That only works in a larger spectrum.

People that are, if you're to be buying businesses under the seven figures, you're not buying it for little to no money down at all. And sellers won't take you seriously. Why should they? When the sellers can go away and get cash for those businesses anyway. Now the alarming thing, Breen, and everybody else listening is that you've got these people out there that are just absolutely fucking bullshitting you on the internet that you can buy businesses, money down.

And I'm swearing because it's fucked. And they're leading people astray. And I'm just saying it like it is. So yeah, there's some people that will tell you buying a boring business is easy. Buying a business off these people that are coming of age and retiring and then turning it around. One can tie; if it's a physical business, it can tie you to a location.

Two, it's an asset that's depreciating, so there's a lot of work in it. And three, the reason they're selling it for such a cheap price is because it is depreciating. And that's why you can get it for no money down. So, trying to read between the lines here, I've never said you can buy a business no money down ever on my channel, other than it is a possibility, but 99.99% of people aren't doing it.

Now, good question; I really like it. You got me on my high horse, and you got me a little bit like against the industry, which is great because there's a lot of people that just talk absolute smack. The third question from Breen is, How likely is it to scale a single online business to over $250k profit with no experience?

Well, it depends on where you're starting. Is the business making 10 grand a month? Or is it, is the business profiting? Let's just say, for example, you want to get the $250K profit, and that's say it's a year. Now, if you buy this business and it's making 10K profit or just say 25K profit a year, that's a 10X return.

Now, with no experience, is that likely? What do you think? Likely not. But can it be done? Of course it can. A small amount of people can do it. I've gotten more than 10X returns on my investments and my businesses—thousands. Well, actually, a lot of my businesses are infinite return because they keep going and I started from nothing. So yes, and I had no experience, but it's not just about how much experience you have when you start.

It's more about how much experience you can acquire and how long you can stay in the game. That's what business really is about. How can you develop a mindset and clouse yourself enough to tackle the hurdles, the problems, and the challenges along the journey and stay in the game while keeping the business afloat and moving forward? That's what the game of business is actually about.

And that's what's going to get you a result in the long run if you have a long-term vision. But if you're trying to do this in a short period of time, then the likelihood of doing it in a short period of time, especially when you've got no experiences, is very, very low. So we should be in business for a long period of time. We should be in business to serve people, and the more we serve, the more value we provide, and the more we're going to get in return in terms of profits.

So when we start out and we have no experience like I did, I fumbled around for many years, and you might do the same until you work out how the game works and then until you work out how to stay in the game for a long period of time while serving as you go. So it's not likely to get that done very, very fast, with no experience, but you're going to be able to do it. If you commit to it, you can achieve it.

Good questions. I didn't realize that this podcast would go so long. That's why I'm just smashing through these questions. I would love to just spend like 10 minutes or 20 minutes on each question just to answer them. But to keep this value packed, let's continue through. David H has some questions.

Given the added risk, these are his three. Given number one, given the added risk to content sites from Google updates and rapidly evolving LLM technologies like chat GPT and as a systematic threat to traditional search, what type of online business would you suggest a novice investor in online businesses buying? Now he says he's gravitating towards a SaaS business model to avoid the headache of supply chain management. Still, my gut also tells me there are significant hidden risks with SaaS models.

David, there's going to be risks with every business you buy, and there's risks with everything you do in life, like walking across the street. Now, that doesn't really give you the as precise answer to Google updates and evolving LLM technologies and chat GPT and traditional search. I still believe media business, like maybe you don't want to go and buy a content site.

I have seen some content sites doing really, really well through this period, actually. And in fact, I just got off the phone on a site that has been growing. It's a 40K content site, and it looks pretty good for a 40K site; it's solid. Now, as you go up the chain, typically those businesses become a lot more solid as well, but I wouldn't be veering completely away from media businesses, one being content sites. Other types of media businesses, well, let me first talk to that as to why.

There are great people out there that are doing great things in the space, and they're achieving great results in growing these content sites through other traffic sources like Facebook pages and Facebook groups. We talked about this with Colin Ma. There's also Pinterest; you can also do YouTube; and there's so many other places you can get traffic from for these types of sites. Now, search is a tricky one.

That means by doing these alternate sources, you don't need to rely just on search. And that can change within each of these different things, like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, and all that's where you get your traffic from. It's all going to change. Everything changes all the time. That's the one constant in life.

We just need to be evolving and changing with it. And so I really do like businesses like newsletters. Newsletters are great businesses to go away and purchase. If you haven't checked out some of my videos on YouTube about newsletters, go away and have a look at them. Great businesses to buy.

I also like media businesses like YouTube channels; even Instagram accounts are great. Facebook pages and groups are great. You can go away and purchase those businesses. Outside that, I think Ecom's good as well. I've suggested against Ecom for novices because there's a lot more plates in the air. But if you are prepared to do that, then you can really get incredible results.

It's so much; once you get the thing right in Ecom to grow it, you just put more money in it and it scales, and it scales well. So Econ is another good one you can get into. SaaS, under the mid-six figure range, I'd be sticking away from SaaS models just because these larger SaaS businesses can just turn the business you're at purchasing into a feature. But yeah, digital product business is great. Membership businesses, KDP as a digital product—it's a good type of business idea.

Hopefully that helps with that first question. The second question from David H. He says your training videos do a fantastic job of identifying and accessing microeconomic risks and opportunities for online businesses. Thank you, David. However, you sucky, Jared. No, I'm joking. He says, however, do you happen to have any suggested resources for evaluating macro-environmental risks and opportunities for the industry in which various online companies operate? This might be a good content block to add to your training videos. David, great suggestion.

Thank you very much. Depending on the size of the business you buy, it will be dependent on how relevant macroeconomics actually is. Do I follow much macro-environmental things around online businesses? I think it's, Where do you stop?

You can only get so; you can only go further and further and further. And it's not just about online businesses. It's affected by offline businesses as well. And then it's affected by spending. It's affected by inflation, affected by interest rates; it's affected by the whole world and how all the economy works.

So I would suggest thinking and looking at all the resources on macroeconomics on different podcasts and YouTube videos. I have got a guy that I am friends with; his name is Jason Vazino; he's a bit of a crypto lord. I met him through just some friends in business, and he talks about macroeconomics.

He talks about the property market cycle, he talks about S&P index 500 index, and he talks about all these different markets and how they move differently and why. That's one guy that I have consumed a bunch of his videos just because I'm good friends with him. Yeah, I don't know.

And I also talked to friends about this sort of stuff. So I don't really have a lot of resources, but thank you for asking. I would say that's something for you guys to go away and check out, just macroeconomics.

Now the smaller the businesses, the less likely they're going to be affected by macroeconomics. The larger, yes. Third question from David. All else being equal, what business acquisition price ranges are most advantageous for investors to target? I'm assuming there is significant competition in business listings under $50,000, but what is the sweet spot for someone wanting to purchase, grow, and resell an online business?

That's possibly a limiting belief, David, on where to start out. I would say start with where you can start. Don't try and get to the sweet spot and take too much time. I would say start where you can start and grow yourself to get to any spot. Yes, there's significant competition in the 100K range. As you start to get above 100K to six, 700K, there's less competition.

Above the 700K and the seven figures, there's a lot less competition, right?

But the competition as the prices increase only gets fiercer and fiercer because they are typically more experienced in the space of online businesses. So yeah, I don't think there is a sweet spot, really. If you can buy anything, like just start where you can start. All right, good questions. There's another David H, which is a different David. His first question or a couple of questions is, okay, there's three here.

Given the number of people you've successfully coached through acquisitions, what percentage of them come from corporate America, those who specifically earn a higher salary and want to escape the rat race? Reason being, if you have a higher salary and want to escape, then you should be able to put a decent down payment down and creatively finance the rest, right?

Okay, good question. Now that is also a limiting belief for everyone because you should start where you can start. Like I said before, if you think this is only for people that are in corporate, it's not the best way to go about this. It's just, it's horrible to think that way, right? I started with 15K and bought my first business 15K. Was I in corporate? No, I was a construction worker.

And so let me answer that question around through the people I've coached: how many are from corporate America? When I first started, very little to be honest, when I first started, was about 90 plus percent of people were construction workers, because I just wanted to help construction workers that I knew and were in Australia get out of the construction industry and not be tradies anymore. most people, and that's why a lot of my training is relevant to beginners all the way to advanced, and then people buying seven and eight figure businesses, because I started from like, crown zero with not much money, plumber, construction worker, and zero experience in online businesses.

And so most of my audience were that as well. And then eventually, as I started to grow and my business evolved, more and more people with more and more money started coming in. And eventually it moved to a little bit of corporate America—not much, maybe 20% or corporate jobs. And now probably we've got like 40 to 50% of the people that I work with are in corporate, and the rest are different jobs like nurses, shift workers, and construction workers.

So you also say the question; half the question from David is that if you have a high salary and you want to escape, then you should be able to put in a decent down payment and credibly finance the restaurant. Well, yeah, of course that's possible, but it's also not about how much you make. It's about how much you keep. And I've noticed that people that are in corporations are typically the ones that spend the most amount of money.

So the savings rate is typically the same for people that are not in corporations. If not, the people that are not in corporate typically are better savers because they're just not saving as much, but they're better savers because they have to be. So they learn the hard way, and that's how I did. That's how I learned the hard way as well.

So yeah, it's a bit of a mix, but the limiting belief is that if you're not in corporate, then you can't achieve this, which is absolutely stupid. Most of the people that I've helped haven't come from corporations. And that's what I'm passionate about: helping people create better lives for themselves and from all areas. All right, next question from Gavin. Do you think content sites with display ads are still good business models? If so, what do you think are the levers to scaling quickly?

If not, what kind of online business would you pivot to? Course, e-com, et cetera. Content sites with display ads, some of them, are still good, and it really depends on the niche and the value the content provides. And Google has had a vendetta against content sites that have just display ads or display ads and affiliate links or just affiliate links or vice versa in combination of all of both, right? Now, but I have seen sites that have made like 70% of their revenue from display ads and 30% from digital products. And the digital products have helped bring that traffic up.

Then you can have businesses that have a little bit of display ads, like 30% display ads and the rest digital products. And I would say, gone are the days now of just a cheap content website, making money through just display ads. And what I mean by cheap is like cheap content, not super valuable.

Do I think they're good business models? I really didn't think they were good business models ever, to be honest, because you're not really adding value; you're just spitting out content to put ads on, and hopefully people land on the page and you make some money. It's not a good business model.

It's business is all about serving and creating value. And like I said before, the more value you create, the more you serve, the more you'll get in return. So yeah, I'd be sticking away from the cheap businesses like that. There are some that do well, though. Like I said, there's some that have different products and services attached.

Maybe they do some lead generation as well. I would not be just discrediting all content sites because there are some content sites that just create great content and then they maybe gather emails and sell affiliate products through their email list or have a big newsletter where they get that sponsored.

They might sell digital products from their site as well, and they might not have any display ads or affiliate links on their site, but it's a great content site, and they make their money through the backend. So just be wary; not all content sites are crap, but there are a lot that are content sites and cheap. What online business models would I pivot to?

Any, I think media businesses are really good forms of businesses. So like I said before, newsletter businesses, digital products, you mentioned courses, yes, Ecom as well. But I just think digital products are great. Really good for beginners. Newsletters are good for beginners. Any media business is good for beginners. Yes, so there's so much there in that podcast episode, guys.

What I noticed is that people—some of the questions were about other people and other situations that are outside of you. What my feeling was was that most of this was around mindset and people trying to overcome some hurdles and blockages that are preventing them from getting in the market, acquiring a business, or making money online. And that's the biggest thing that stops us, like, can I do it? Right? The question is, Can I do it? And the answer is yes, but only if you want to, right?

If you want it bad enough. And so that's why I tell people to focus on what their vision is—what sort of life they actually want to live. And the more you focus on, what you focus on is what you get. And then, these blockages just start to get pushed out of the way. And so yeah, if you guys need any help with any of that sort of stuff, let me know.

I hope this podcast was valuayou, Thank you to everybody for listening, and thank you to everybody that sent in your questions. I think I'll do this again. What I would love for you guys to do is provide me some feedback.

Do you think this was valuable? If so, please email me, jared at buyingonlinbusinesses.com, with some questions for the next podcast, because I'd love to continue answering these questions for you so you guys do not have to get stuck or have things that you need to get answered before you start to take action. I want to give you those answers.

Let me help you. That's what I'm here for.

All right, love, bye.

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Host:

Jaryd Krause is a serial entrepreneur who helps people buy online businesses so they can spend more time doing what they love with who they love. He’s helped people buy and scale sites all the way up to 8 figures – from eCommerce to content websites. He spends his time surfing and traveling, and his biggest goals are around making a real tangible impact on people’s lives. 

Resource Links:

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➥ Download the Due Diligence Framework – https://buyingonlinebusinesses.com/freeresources/

➥ Surfer SEO (SEO tool for content writing) – https://bit.ly/3X0jZiD

➥ Rank Math (WordPress SEO Plugin) – https://bit.ly/3Acyjf4

➥ Ezoic (Ad Network) – https://bit.ly/3NuVR5P



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