The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - $50K a Year From 1 Website With 1 Hour/Month of Work (Copy This)⏐Ep. #226

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

Check out my newsletter at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://TKOPOD.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and join my new community at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠��⁠⁠⁠https://TKOwners.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠━Beehiiv is the newsletter platform I’ve used for over a year and a half because their data shows you exactly what’s working. Get 30% off three months at ⁠⁠⁠⁠beehiiv.com/chris⁠⁠━I sat down with Peter Askew to dig into his unique path of building profitable online businesses from expired domains. Peter shared how he went from being laid off multiple times to teaching himself code, learning SEO, and eventually acquiring domains like DudeRanch.com and VidaliaOnions.com. We talked through the exact playbook he used to find these opportunities, how he evaluates traffic and monetization potential, and the surprising power of exact-match domains for building authority in any niche.Peter broke down how DudeRanch.com now makes around $50,000 a year from just one hour of work per month, why he sees boutique e-commerce as one of the best opportunities right now, and how his job board RanchWork.com became a steady year-round business helping thousands of people find ranch jobs.If you want to learn more from Peter, check him out here:Twitter / X: @searchboundBlog: DeepSouthVentures.comPersonal site: Askew.orgHere are some of the tools, resources, and sites Peter mentioned in our conversation:Expired Domains tool: http://www.expireddomains.netGoDaddy Auctions: http://auctions.godaddy.comNameJet: http://www.namejet.comSnapNames: http://www.snapnames.comDropCatch: http://www.dropcatch.comNamecheap Auctions: http://www.namecheap.com/domains/marketplace/buy-domains/auctionsClicky Analytics: http://clicky.comShopify: http://www.shopify.comShipStation: http://www.shipstation.comEnjoy! ---Watch this on YouTube instead here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tkopod.co/p-yt⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ask me a question on or off the show here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-ask⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Learn more about me: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-cjk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Learn about my company: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-cof⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow me on Twitter here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-x⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Free weekly business ideas newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-nl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Share this podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-all⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Scrape small business data: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-os⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠---

It makes a little over 50 grand a year. I spent about an hour a month on it, maybe. Jeez. Zero concept or understanding of coding. These domains are interesting. This is like the key to the entire website. I didn't like my livelihood dictated by someone else. Some of these folks online are under the impression that they need to quit their day job.

Yes. I do not subscribe to that at all. I'd work 9 to 5 and then I'd come home and work on these projects in the evening. It's just an hour a day. What are the tools in your tool belt that you can't live without? Do you think directory businesses are still viable today in the age of AI? My friend Peter lives the life. He lives the dream.

He's got a portfolio of niche websites that just pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. It took some time on the front end to build these up, but today he only spends a few hours a week managing these projects. So I had to know, Peter, as someone who's been reading your blog for 15 years, following your progress, how do you do it? What tools do you use? How can people copy you? he did with onions what I did with Buckees and Texas snacks. He just does things, permissionless things. He partners with people he's never met.

He's cheap like me. He doesn't spend a ton of money. But he's patient and he's tactical. And he shares the secrets with us today. So please enjoy this conversation with my friend Peter. I would love to hear this story. How did this domain name come across your desk and what made you find it interesting and end up buying it?

At this point in my career, I'd been laid off several, several times. And that began to grate on my nerves. I didn't like my livelihood dictated by someone else. And if somebody made some, and I've lived through this through several startups, you know, executives make a horrible decision and it kneecaps the company and I'm held responsible. And I had a few instances where I was at a startup and I drove, like, I was in the marketing and I built a product for the team and it drove an extra couple million dollars for the team. And they promoted me and they hired, I got an assistant. I trained the assistant up.

And then six months later, they lay me off and keep my assistant. assistant for a lower salary. Oh, man. That one really stuck with me. And that's when I was like, I got to figure out this stuff. I don't have a computer science background. I have a history degree from Ole Miss. So I was like, I got to figure this stuff out.

I have a background in SEO, a little bit of SEO. Zero concept or understanding of coding, but I knew I needed to concentrate on it. So I started trying to teach myself to code. Coding led me to start building sites. Building sites exposed me to like AdSense. and I could monetize the sites a little bit from AdSense. And that started giving me a little bit of money. I mean, not a ton of me, 50 bucks a month.

And then it got to 300 bucks a month. I was like, wow, this is crazy. A moron me can generate revenue online. But there were small like piecemeal projects. And the more I kept building at some point, I always had to think back on how I got exposed to expired domains. I was building sites and I realized it might be faster to acquire a site. What's stopping me from going to go.

going into Google, typing in some high traffic search term, reaching out to the owner to see if they want to sell the site to me. In my head of the law, there's nothing stopping me from doing that. So I started attempting to do that. I'd reach out. And for some strange reason, tourism seemed fun. So I'd search tourism terms. Aruba. Who'd shut up for the term Aruba?

Buying sites. Do you mean buying domain names that are just sitting dormant? No, no. Full operating websites that look like kind of mom and pop design. Maybe they were built in Dreamweaver, and they hadn't been updated in five or ten years. But they were ranked number two or three, or maybe number one in Google for the term Cancun, or some travel-based website. And I could see within, you know, on AdSense, Google typically gives you around 70% of that click value. So I was like, well, tourism terms are quite expensive.

They're a dollar, $2, $3 a click. So if I've built out a tourism-based website and somebody clicks on a dollar ad unit, I'll get 70 cents per click. That's pretty darn good. And heck, I can go down to Aruba or go to Cancun or go out west on a vacation. So I started building these small kind of travel-based websites. It didn't feel like work. It was just like vacation. I'm building vacation websites.

And there's some arbitrage in here because the owners of these websites don't know that the cost per click is higher. You have that information that they don't have, right? Correct. They'd always show, I always ask for analytics. And I could look at their analytics and say, oh, my gosh, if I got a 3% click through rate, 1% click through rate on these ads, I can make 500, $1,000 a month, $2,000 a month. And their ask price is $3,000. Yeah, I'll buy it and bring it in-house. So I'd buy the entire content and bring the domain over. And so that's when I started getting exposed to domain. So I'd get a deal on a site. And my brain immediately went to the domain and say, and my brain was telling me, me, I got to get control of this domain because if I control the domain, I control the whole site because they could waffle and change their mind. But if I control the domain and they go back on their word, I can still screen scrape the information, pull it over and rebuild the site, but I have to own the domain. I was like, these domains are interesting. I was like, these are, this is like the key to the entire website. And some of the sites I was buying early on

were just regular, you know, just they weren't terribly descriptive, but they rank they old, they were trusted. But I kept coming across these really interesting new descriptive domain names, like one of the early, go ahead. Sorry, before you go there, what are some examples of some old ones that you bought that were interesting but didn't quite work out? Yeah, so one was, I've since sold this domain. It was called Travel Envoy. And it was a directory of wineries and vineyards that you could visit. I bought this around 04. And then he transferred all the pages to me. I bought it for 10 grand. and that I simply just added AdSense to it. And I did a poor job.

I didn't know how to code very well. So I added it to the site. And then it started, yeah, throw me whatever, a grand, two grand a month. And he didn't have any ads on it? Zero ads, nothing on it. So you bought it like as a business slash website. And that wasn't even on his radar. All you did was plug ads on it and wait.

I plugged ads. Yeah, AdSense ads on it. And then. And I had one affiliate thing and that actually worked pretty well. there was this cool map of all the like wine varieties where they're sourced from. And this guy, and sign up for an affiliate deal. And so if you go back in the internet archive,

you'll see this ad up on the top right hand side. Oh, yeah, you're going to pull it way back. 2004. Is this it? This is before I bought it. Isn't that beautiful? Look at that.

Oh, man. This is what you're looking for. These types of sites still exist today. For those that are listening, It basically looks like Craigslist. Blue hyperlinks, very ugly. And there are still mom and pop operators out of here that have websites like this that are very receptive to straight up offers to buy the website before I acquired it.

And 10,000 pages on a website, that's a moat. That's a lot of tedious work. I was kind of spitball in 10,000. It was a lot. It may have been 5. It was a tremendous amount of pages because it took me hours when I did the FTP transfer. he forwarded all the sites. I think I did an FTP because there were so many pages.

There was no easy way that I was aware of. This may have been me. So here, top right, that's a little affiliate link. QPR wines paid me. They paid me a few. This was like wine ratings. Yeah, they wound up paying me a month. Is this like a trip down memory lane for you?

Yes, it is. I haven't been it. So if you notice, it's great. To the right of that was my AdSense ad unit. So back then, there were no. AdSense wasn't including any kind of images within this they were straight hyperlinks that they'd pull. So I'd always try to add some kind of imagery. So that was that was some free clip art I found somewhere.

That's amazing. Add the ad on the right and then included all the normal navigation to the site. And then Wine Books, did that just take you to Amazon through an affiliate link? I may have left that for him and I just let him keep all the affiliate stuff from the Wine Book. Oh, here we are. I can't. Yeah. I don't remember ever put it creating my, because.

The affiliates were so small. The revenue shares, so I never bothered. I was making more from the AdSense. I just focused on AdSense and some intriguing affiliate deals. That little map up in the right converted quite well. You'd be surprised. Right here? Yeah, I don't know if they're still in existence.

It looks very intriguing. It looks like a periodic table. Yeah, it was really cool. Yeah, DeLong's Wine Info. It was really cool. And they'd ship it. They sent me one for free. Comes in that little.

This is a one memory lane. So this one was, One of the first big acquisitions I did, I bought it for $10,000. So let's talk about the unit economics of that $10,000. Like, what were you buying? Was there any revenue from anything? How did you come up at that price? I don't even know how we came.

I may have asked him what he was comfortable selling it with. And I believe he may have come around from what I remember, it was maybe 12 to 14. And I got him down to $10,000. So I could use that number and then look at the analytics and say, okay, how long would it take me? I was still working the nine to five at this. And I'm a big believer of this. Some of these folks online talk about this. You know, some online builders are under the impression that they need to quit their day job.

Yes. And they go all in on their project. Preach. And I do not subscribe to that at all. I ran my day job. I'd work nine to five. And then I'd come home and work on these projects in the evening every day. And I treated it.

I don't know you watched that old robot show, the battlebot show. And I mentioned this on Twitter sometimes. I compared it. these two little robots in this death den and they're fighting each other, which one, my nine to five or these projects that I'm building, which one can generate more money? And whenever my little side projects, maybe it never happens. But whenever my side projects can generate more money than my nine to five, that's when I'll consider it. Or maybe when they're getting close, that's when I'll consider dropping off and going full time. So I was still working nine to five in these.

projects. I call it the wing walkers code. For those listening, I'm showing images of wing walkers on these airplanes. You never let go of one railing until you have control of the other railing. Right. And that's the same thing with testing side hustles, testing business ideas. Like, just don't let go of the thing until you have a better thing in hand. Yes. Because it creates so much stress. I see some folks that do this. They'll quit. I'm giving myself nine months. Oh, my gosh, the pressure. And, you know, these weirdo ideas, in my opinion, don't come up in that type of pressure tank. It's when you're allowed to sit and daydream and chew at, heck, at 9 to 5, you're probably sitting at your cube, five or six hours a day, just daydreaming on different

ways to work on your project at night and doing two or three hours of actual work at your job. Why not get paid for that? Go home, work on your project and see where it can lead. And some of these projects, I mean, they don't require. They require. somebody just to baby them constantly. And sometimes it's just an hour a day to push it in the right direction, make sure it's not going down. And it's fast and responsive. And you were having a ton of fun. This was a hobby. Correct. This is just fun. And correct. You could even monetize this fun. So great. And I was teaching myself to code. I was like, wow, this good stuff's weird. I'm not very good at it. I don't know if I have a ton of interest in it. But I'm fascinated by it. I'm glad I

understand. So the way I kind of taught myself to code was I am not a coder, but I'd basically just taught myself how all these puzzle pieces work. But so back to Travel Envoy. So I built it. I start recognizing this importance of this domain name. And I keep running across projects with really intriguing, just descriptive, like my friend north of Atlanta, Warren Royal, bought the domain bobbleheads.com at a domain name auction. Had no experience. some bobbleheads, very similar to you and me, you and Texas snacks and me and Vidalia. He has zero experience in the bobblehead world. Bought it at auction, I believe he spent 30 grand, and he started a custom bobblehead business from scratch.

And he currently now has 15 employees north of Atlanta. I've been to his warehouse a few times. And it's just the coolest warehouse to go visit because he has life-size bobbleheads, you know, like George Washington hanging around. And so I was watching what Warren was doing. I was like, this is very interesting and fascinating what he's building. And so he bought that at auctions. I mean, $160.

Do you know what his revenue is or what kind of volume he does nowadays? I don't know. You should get him on that. He is wonderful. He doesn't go on many podcasts. He so heads down on this business. He rarely, he'll show up on a few domain or podcasts from time to time, but he's always heads down on.

Oh, there you go. Let's just use his math. We produce over 250,000 bobbleheads each year. I'm looking at his prices. Nothing's under $100. Yeah. So 25 million, wow. That would be over 25 million a year if they were each $100, which most of these are 100 to 200.

Yeah. Yeah. See, and it's funny, Peter, because like most people wouldn't believe that. They're going to hear that like, no. You don't sell 25 million of bobbleheads a year. And it's like, no. Oh, I can never get the domain bobbleheads. All the kind of the cynical attitudes.

is so but go ahead, I'm interrupting you. Yes. No, like people just. There's just so many e-commerce businesses out there, not named Amazon.com that do millions, tens, hundreds of millions and billions of dollars a year, many of which have never been heard of. Yeah. I owned an e-commerce fulfillment company. And we would get leads all the time.

Like, I have this makeup brand. I have this food brand, this ice cream brand. We do 36 million. We do 20. And I'm like, where are you coming from? How are there so many e-commerce brands? Yeah. And in the context of this conversation, a lot of times, not every time, it starts with a really good, trustworthy domain name.

Right. Yeah. So he got bobbleheads. And then bobblehead came up, I think, a year two after. So he owns singular and plural. He owns the entire, you know, beachhead for this entire industry. Okay. I went to bobblehead.

And it should redirect to bobblehead. He tried to redirect everything over. So when you bought Travel Envoy, that 10,000. was just kind of goodwill. There was no really revenue, but you knew what you could do with it. And that's kind of how you valued it, right? I valued it based on the traffic. I could see how much traffic. I could roughly napkin math, a rough click through rate from my AdSense units and maybe some extra revenue from the affiliate deals. And I thought I could pay it off within six to nine months and I want to paying it off within six months easily. Oh my gosh. A lot of people are watching this. And I know what they're

thinking. A lot of them are thinking, well, this isn't relevant anymore. You just can't reach out to side owners and like are you kidding me it's 100% still relevant is ad sense brand new no of course not but there's there's even more arbitrage opportunities i i just bought a bunch of trees for my front yard and i wanted to buy them here you know close to me so i went to the website to try to shop around cool this is their website i love it i love these nursery dot com and i saw it and i'm like i want to buy this business and i go in the business and like the gentleman helping me is like 83 And they have this prime real estate. They've been there for 40 years.

You can't shop online. You don't know what their inventory is. They don't answer their phone. And it's like, of course, this is a much more expensive version of what we're talking about. But arbitrage opportunities will always exist. And when you and I are 80 years old, people are going to be buying sites from us to do better things with them. Right. Similar when I did my Vidalia project, the farm I partnered with, no website, no online presence whatsoever.

So when I started recognizing these domains were quite interesting, I was like, well, that's fascinating. How do I get a domain like Warren has, like bobbleheads.com? You know, I wasn't able to register them in 95. It's 04 at this point. I was like, oh, I missed my opportunity. I didn't have any opportunity by these domains. The windows closed now. And I rarely ever think from that perspective.

But I kept digging through. And at some point, I got exposed to the expiring domain name market. And I think you're familiar with it. somebody doesn't renew a domain, for whatever reason, the domain goes back to the registrar, and the registrar puts it up for auction for open bid. And roughly every day, 50 to 100,000 domain names expire. So it's a tremendous amount of inventory that you can sift through. Because at first, I tried to buy. So this is more of a marketplace. Try. Okay. What's a good. GoDaddy Auctions is one of the biggest. So they built their own auction platform to sell domains within there. So if you just do, I think it's

Auctions.govaddy.com. Yep. Shows some of them within the expiring side. So go to advanced search right there and then go to type and then do expiring auctions. And then go estimated value and then go down on to say they add, I'm sorry, on that top search results. Go down, down a little bit more. Oh, right here. Yes, sir.

And then go down, do it and click it again now. Go to add to choosing their own. check out JTM.com is expiring. Oh, three letter domain. A three letter callers.com. I mean, look at that domain. Oh my gosh. You can build some call tracking application.

GolfTor.com. Yes. That could be a travel website. Oh my gosh. So this is a deep rabbit hole. So when I got exposed and this was around 04, I got exposed to expiring domain auctions. I was like, oh my gosh, hang on.

Because I was trying to buy domains direct from original registrar, from original owners. And, you know, they'd want, I mean, and they're worth it. they'd want 100 grand, 500 grand. I was like, I can't. It's too risky for me. And I found this. This is simply a patience game. If you simply sit and wait, crown molding.com.

Look at that cool one. Dude, you could buy all the interesting crown molding that the world has to offer. You could sell crown molding on your website. It could be dropped ship directly from the manufacturer. You don't have to have a big warehouse. Dude, you could do the recycled crown molding out of old historic homes. Yes. Oh, man.

I know. So this is, this is where I started looking at. at them, not really with the intention of building. I was looking at them from maybe I buy them them and flip them. Maybe I'd try to buy them and make some adsense money off of them. But then some of these other names, crown molding would pop up. And then they'd start inspiring me to build something. I was like, crown molding. Oh my gosh. Rentmyhouse.com. Yeah. And so this, I started doing this every single day and I'd buy some. I'd buy one, build a small site, figure out how to monetize it. Maybe it had existing traffic, maybe you had direct traffic, maybe it had had a previous identity to it and

figure out ways to build on that. So I'd build a few there, but it was more piecemeal efforts. And I was like, man, I'm getting tired of doing these small. I'd rather wait and find a big one that expires. And maybe just wait. I'm not in a hurry. I'll just sit maybe and hang out and just monitor this thing every single day and wait for an interesting domain that expires. And that's when dude ranch.com popped up. It popped up. It popped up. oddly a ranch up in New York State owned it. They owned it. Dude Ranch got sold two or three times and then the last owner ran it into the ground and shut it down, sold the property. If you want to go into archive, it's pretty fun to see the old version of Dude Ranch.com.

So you can see it. I'll do that now. And it used to be called Roseland Ranch. And so they owned the domain. They used to advertise on Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. No way. Yeah, I'll have to forward you the tweak. I found one of the ads that they had. So I, I reposted it on my Twitter feed somewhere. Here's another one. It looks Roseland Ranch Resort. And you'll, if you scroll down, you'll see, usually they'll have, oh, you may have seen us on Wheel of Fortune. This is 2003 with that. Oh, here it is. Yeah. It's before. So they, this expired and went up for auction in 2009. Okay. So I started, I waited. When I made that decision that I was going to sit and wait and almost like catbird seat and almost just empty mine.

and just wait for something to to pop up that's expired that inspires me to build. I like the, that's my first version. I built. 2009. And I built it. Yeah. Even this looks awesome, though.

I mean, I built the web press. So at that point, I'd gotten exposed to WordPress. And I had some rough idea. I had an SEO and paid search background, love analytics. And I was like,

okay, I'll, I'll build it myself to make sure I can advertise. And then Dude Rancher started buying ads from me. I was like, sweet. I think I can make. this work. And only then, go ahead. Yeah, advertise it. How do they start buying ads from you? Like,

how do they find you? Oftentimes, so it started the easiest way for me. I think I could have done this via email or phone, but they, I'm fortunate they have a yearly conference every year. They hold it at a dude ranch typically. So it's like, sweet. Now, this is kind of killing two birds of one stone. I can start visiting dude ranges because I need to visit a few to get the feel of these just because I'm, I'm basically representing the industry by owning this domain. It's it's crazy owning one of these names and folks will assume you are an expert in that field. It's immediate authority.

Yeah. With an exact match, descriptive.com generic exact match is wildly powerful. I've been using Beehive for about two years, almost as long as they've been around. And I got to tell you, watching other creators stay stuck on basic newsletter platforms is painful. You're losing thousands of dollars because you don't know what your subscribers are worth. And when potential sponsors ask, who reads your newsletter and you say, uh, entrepreneurs or moms? You lost the deal. But Beehive has a survey feature that's brilliant. You can set up a few questions about demographics and spending habits that you send them through right after they subscribe.

So instead of telling sponsors, oh, I have 5,000 subscribers. You can say, I have 3,750 homeowners making over $75,000 a year who spend $200 plus per month on home improvement. And that's proof that their ideal customers are reading your newsletter. Go extract your email list from whatever platform you're stuck on because it's probably costing you thousands in lost deals. Beehive makes migration easy. You can move all your emails and minutes so you can get paid what you're actually worth. Head to beehive.com slash Chris for 30% off your first three months. That's B-E-H-I-I-V-com slash Chris. You'll thank me later.

So they started advertising with me from the conference, and then they started signing up direct, and then I met a friendly competitor. He ran guest ran guest ranches.com. And he and I would notice, sometimes a rancher would cancel me, but they'd keep guest ranches. com. Sometimes they'd cancel guest ranches and keep me. And I was talking to David, and I was like, David, hey, what have, what have, we, what if we partner up and we corner the market or pseudo corner the market? Because if they

cancel both of us, they're going to lose about 50% of their traffic. It's going to be very difficult for them to consider canceling us. And so we partnered up. And we did that for, gosh, eight years or so maybe longer. Wow. He's based in Littleton, Colorado, so I could always find a Colorado, hang out of his place. And then we take road trips and go around to all the dude ranches nearby. How much did this domain name cost? DudeRanch.com. So it went up and it was the pending delete and it cost 17,000, 18,000 bucks basically, just under 18,000 bucks. And what signals did did you look for before spending a dime on this to tell you that this was worthwhile? Yeah, average tools to use. I wanted search volume. I want to fish where the fish are. So there was a lot of search volume for

the term dude ranch, but I want to make sure there's an album called Dude Ranch from some band. So I want to make sure they're looking for Dude Ranch vacation. Isn't that Blink 182? I think so. Yeah. So, and then I was like, okay, I need to really, I can look, but maybe a small percentage of that traffic is looking for the album. It's mainly folks looking for vacations. So I could look at Dude Ranch Vacations and that was still strong search volume. Then I'd look, I'd pull Dude Ranch Colorado, Dude Ranch, Texas, Idaho, all the states, all still strong search volume. I was like, okay, this is good. I have one side of the equation. So I'm looking for a vacation. Then I went to the DUD Ranch.

I was like, what's the average ticket price of a Dude Ranch vacation for a family of four? It roughly ranges $10,000 to $30,000. This is just me spitballing off the top of my head. I was like, okay, let's just assume 30% margin. So the rancher is making $3,000 on one booking. I still have these rates. I still have $575 as my flat yearly fee to be included on the site. And it's just a one-time fee.

I don't take any cut of the conversion. I just drive leads constantly. I have about 60 advertisers. It makes a little over 50 grand a year. And so I built that over the years. I wound up buying David out of guest ranches. So I own it and rebuilt it. And it has very, very low overhead.

It has hosting and domain renewal. And I pay a friend that has more experience at PHP and the back end of WordPress. This is in case the site goes offline. It goes sideways. I can ping her and say, please, hell, something's wrong with the site. or there's some plug-in update and, you know, the payment page is broken. Can you please help? So I lean on her, but she's, I mean, it's only a couple hundred bucks a year to lean on her. But it makes me sleep better. So very good margins. It's not a million dollar business, but man, very,

very fulfilling. But that one taught me I do enjoy these small, fulfilling projects. How much time does it take a week? I'm working on this right now. I have two other projects, Vidalia and Ranch work that have kind of consumed a majority of my time. And I'm trying to figure out how I can devote more time or or maybe hire someone to help me. I spent about an hour a month on it, maybe. But it deserves more than that. So I'm trying to see if there are avenues of possibly getting some help, possibly selling it to see if there are avenues who could do.

But I'm kind of stingy or instruct on if I consider selling it, it's going to have to be somebody who is a good buyer. A good buyer. I can't let this thing go into somebody who's going to put AI content slop on it or cover the site with AdSense, even though I used to use AdSense. It isn't built for that. It's built for leads for dude ranchers.

It represents the industry. You feel like a sense of stewardship over the industry and you want the next owner to do the same. Yeah. And in short terms, yes. But that one just taught me, oh my gosh, okay, this is quite interesting. But I always had Warren, my friend run bobbleheads.com. So I'd run this.

I'd run Dude Ranch. But it's sort of seasonal, has its peaks and valleys of traffic. It's like I still have time. I was still working nine to five when I was running. Dude Ranch. I still have open time in my schedule. What else can I build? Vidaliaonions.com expires, goes up for auction.

I don't intend to buy it. I write this big long story on my little blog, not blah, I write an essay on the background of how I acquired Vidalia. And I also write about how I acquired Dude Ranch on, I think it's deep south ventures. com is where I have that. DeepSelfentures.com. Yeah, deep self ventures. Or you can go to asku.

By the way, I have been a loyal blog reader for over a decade. Oh, thank you. It's mainly, I tell you, it's almost therapeutic just to dump it out of your brain because it gets all clogged up in there and it helps me to kind of just dump it out on the page and then kind of structure it. I have very short attention span. So if it appeals to me, I hope that it would appeal somebody else because it's very difficult for me to read or focus.

So if it allows me to focus on it, yeah, but very therapeutic. So if I were to wrap up the story of Dude Ranch in a sentence, this is oversimplifying it, but you paid $17,000 for the domain. It was expiring. 18. You had to be patient, but you were. You bought it. At that point, you started kind of reaching out to the industry.

You started getting natural traffic because there was so much search demand. You love it. You loved it because there was search demand and it was high ticket, right? And that's a great. And there was not much supply meeting that search demand. You built it on WordPress. You kind of started reaching out to the industry. You partnered with another partner website.

And today it does about $50,000 a year from one hour per month of work. Yeah, that's correct. And I get free travel. And I get to go visit all these. I've been to 50 dude ranches over the past. Oh, man. 14 years from, gosh, from Georgia to, I mean, there are a few dude ranches in Georgia. I mean, Colorado, Wyoming.

That's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in and of itself. Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's wonderful to go meet these. folks, and it's some of the most hardworking. I mean, talk about a difficult business to run. Seasonal for them, some run cattle, not many, but it's mainly hospitality. It is summer camp for adults, I sometimes describe it. But you get to go chill. If you have a family, you can take your family and all the kids unplug. They're out playing in the creek or going to the campfire and no one's staring at digital devices. It's wonderful. You can go trap skis or ride horses or flyfish, going

river rafting trips. It's one of the coolest vacations I've ever been exposed to. And we can even dovetail into ranch work. So I got ranch work out of, which is my job board from Dude Ranch. My partner had it. And we don't have to talk long on ranch work, but it's another blessing where I can help folks get a job on a ranch, any type of ranch, cattle ranch, an outfitter, an equestrian ranch or a farm, and even Dude Ranchers. So I can still, I can double serve my dude ranchers, fill jobs and fill heads and beds for their ranches. So he had it on the side and sort of abandoned it. I saw it. I had a friend in Atlanta that built a nursing job board and had a good exit on it. Shane had a good exit on his nursing job board. I searched around on WordPress and there were some off-the-shelf themes for

job boards on WordPress for like 60 bucks. So I bought an off-the-shelf job board theme, hacked it up on the back end to be just better like better architecture for SEO. got out on a super fast server and then started sourcing jobs from dude ranchers first and then sourcing them direct from ranchers maybe on their website and then slowly organic listings started coming through and then the seasonality aspect came back up again for dude ranchers and then they need to hire their crew again for the next summer then i get a wave of job listings and then word of mouth started working and then people started repeat buying and it started running and this one has just been one of the biggest Yeah. Again, this one goes back to memories and happy. Not a lot of memories, but it's happy. I'm helping someone find gainful employment on a, on a ranch. And a lot of times it's somebody that maybe grew up on a ranch and maybe they're in the big city now. I just raised prices yesterday.

So I added a diamond level yesterday. For those listening, 100 bucks to post a job for the cheapest plan. What are what's the difference between these plans? And how did, mainly duration. So silver will run for 10 days. Gold will run for 30 days. And there's a quick turnaround. I'll take 24 hours. I hand curate every single listing.

So I put live in 24 hours because it goes through my eyeballs to make sure it's a legit. If it seems sketch or something off, rarely happens. But if it does, I just refund them to say we're not quite the right fit for you because we're not going to be able to drive you good leads. Then we have free. If it's a ranch that, you know, is in financial trouble and they need some help, I'm. I never want to turn them away. So I try to have a free option that allows them because I know I can drive a significant amount of traffic. And on this page, I also allow job seekers.

They want to pay me. It looks pretty active. Yeah, they do. So they pay you to put this? Yeah. They pay me to extend. And I filled one this. Amy, right there, Amy W.

She emailed me this morning saying, Peter, can you pull my listing down? I found something. Wow. And I was like, heck. Find a job. That was heck yes. August 4th. I found her a job. What did she pay for this? Huh? What did she pay? 99 bucks. Wow. 99 bucks to get a job. And did you email all of your job? Like, how did you promote her? Yeah. So I've listed on the site. We get 1.3 million visits a year to this site.

Holy cow. So we get a tremendous amount of traffic. I have 12,000 people on our email list. I have 25,000 plus on our private Facebook job board page. Wow. So I cross-post it on everything. Of all your projects, is this kind of your cash cow? One of your favorites. Yeah, probably. Right now, yeah. Good for you.

If you want a fun one to go into Archive.org, go into Archive.org and do ranch work. You'll see some of the early versions. I think he just took his eye off the ball and it was dormant. Go. Yeah, maybe a little bit after. He may have a version of it on those pages. Yeah, he probably has. He built it in 98.

So it's a good. It looks like that first like your gardening site. Maybe some comic sands in there. Oh, yeah. I was just like, he, look, he was listing their first and last names over there. Jeez, Louise. People looking for jobs. But then he pushed it just to a landing page saying, hey, I've kind of shut ranch work down.

Hey, thank goodness he didn't pull it offline. So it was still live and active. And he had a link to another Facebook page that was deleted at some point. So I said, what does this ranch work? Because my friend did a nursing job board. Maybe I do. I was like, how about this, David? So here's my deal to him.

I was like, hey, here's what I. Let me try this. I found a job board theme on WordPress. Point the name servers to me. I'll do all the work. I'll build the whole site. And if I get a job listing, I'll give you 25% and I'll keep 75% for my hard work. And any money, if I put a little ad sense on the site, I'll keep the ad sense revenue.

And he is a great partner. He's always like, I like, Richard Branson. He was like, screw it. Let's do it. Who cares? Yeah, let's do it. When I came into Vidavidia, it's like, screw it. Let's do it.

That sounds fun. Let's try it. So he was like, yeah. Let's try it. That sounds good to me. So he jumped in, changed the name servers to me, and I got to work and built the first version, just off-the-shelf job board theme. And it started working. And it had enough, just a little bit of trust and authority at that point and started driving

traffic to the site. And then I started filling jobs and folks were happy with me. And then I, the first version of the job board was trying to force people to set up an account in order to place a job. don't like my range. I don't like anybody to jump through hoops. Yeah. I like my projects being like a like a gumball machine.

I sometimes compare them to. So that was what the page was right there right before I acquired it. It was like, yeah, go to our Facebook page. Yeah. If you want to go, if you want to look at some jobs, you guys just talk amongst yourself over there is basically what are you saying. Yeah. You cut this 75, 25, 25 deal.

Yeah. How long did that stay in place? Did you ever end up buying the domain entirely and having it all to yourself? Yes. Yeah, so if you go to that same Deep South Ventures, I write all about this project as well, if you want to hear the entire backstory. But yes, probably with David, we had it for, if you go to essays at the top. And then if you scroll down the very bottom, I have like the top.

I look at traffic and you can see Must Ride Mule to and from work location. And that's the one. That's the whole story behind it. So I think it was, I'd have to read this article, again to figure out how long we had it together. I think it was five or six years. And I could see it was worth. working every single day, Chris. I wake up. I look at expired domains and I try my best to post a job. I like consistency on my job board to alert folks that this thing is alive and kicking and there is somebody

babying this site to death. And I like every single day, hopefully posting multiple jobs if I can't, if I have enough free and paid submissions. So after six years, David needed some cash. So I was like, hey, how about I buy it from you? I think it was 10 grand. I have it in that article. I'm able to continue working on these projects. This is a great year-round project where Vidalia is seasonal, Doudrances, seasonal-ish. And this one is year-round. And I like being able to run this one year-round, then kind of move a little bit of my attention over to Vidalia when it needs it in its season and then move a little bit over to Doud Ranch in its season. But every day throughout the year, I'm kind of focused on ranch work. In this whole, your realm, the type of stuff that

you're doing with these domain names, what has you curious today that maybe you weren't curious about five or ten years ago, what types of niches or is it directories or AI tools? Oddly, to your point, early right when we started this, I'll tell you, I'll tell you, boutique e-commerce in regards to something you can spin up very quickly and get customers, you don't have to wait on this timing aspect of a directory marketplace. The fact you can set something up, even I'm a snob on really good domain names. You really don't need a great domain. I lean on dot coms and I suggest.com because folks default to it.

But you don't need an amazing one. I tend to buy them. But boutique e-commerce, man, is legit. And there are so many small niches that you could run out of a small little, you could run out of your house to start. And then do like my friend Warren Royalabobbleheads ran out of his basement. And then when it started justifying larger expenses, he got a warehouse. And now he has his own warehouse out in Asia.

That is his own custom bobblehead creating out of his warehouse. But small boutique. channels and you can use search to justify. And it's funny, I've been leaning on a lot of social stuff for Vidalia. And man, it's powerful. Creating really good videos of, I created a 30 second ad for Vidalia. And it was three clips, me walking behind the tractor when we're harvesting, me holding up a Vidalia with my hand, and then me walking through our packing shed. And then I just filmed, I won it and I kind of wrote a quick script. And it wound up being about 30s. 30 seconds, which seems to be a good sweet spot.

It was like, this is a Vidalia onion. You know, they're custom. They're boutique onions, only grown in Georgia. And we are a Vodelia farm. We can ship it direct to your door. Consider us, click the link in bio if you want to try one of these little special treats. What are some other examples of boutique e-commerce outside of the Bobbleheads example that you've seen or heard of recently?

Oh gosh, man. I've seen like individual, this cool one. I don't even know the name of the business. It was like, what is that little red, the little red pull truck for kids that kids get in? But it was like a Ritz Carlton version of a pull behind for kids to sit in that you can pull them behind. Like a red wagon, a little red wagon. I don't know why that name. Yeah.

A little red wagon. But it was like a like a Maserati version of a little red wagon, like individual seats, cup holders, fancy. And you could pull your kids around in it. And this guy was running that business. Oh, man. Are you what? And that sells so well with ads.

Oh my gosh. That annie goes, his multi-million dollar business selling these custom high end little red wagons. And to your point earlier, I was like, are you kidding me? There is a, I was like, yeah, it would do really well for in social.

And you can pull kids behind it. It sort of looked like that. It was more look like a little red wagon, but like a fancy little red wagon with custom. seats. I can't remember the day. Maybe I can find it and email it to you later. But I was like, multimillion dollar business. I was like, wow. It's like what else is out there that you could add an extra widget to that you could sell? D2C is not easy, but you can ramp it out very quickly. If you do, if you just know cursory, so you don't even have to lean on search, you could do

social and create some really good video on your phone and edit it on Cap Cut and get some good audio and you're off to the races and it's very inexpensive and track transactions through Facebook pixel and you're ready to go at least testing see if it sells that's been one that's interesting all kind of food ones are fascinating there's a pickle company I think they're I'm fascinated I haven't bought them yet but they've been showing up in my feed I think it's I love pickle but it's olive my pickle and it's a free promotion for them but I haven't tried it but it's like legit pickles and this and so they're touting the health benefits of these specialty pickles that they send. So I love kind of food-based. I mean, look how well-designed this site is. That's beautiful

side. It is. It's beautiful. And so they're they're touting the health benefits of their what's different of their pickle versus the pickles you may get at the grocery store. I think they go into that, maybe down the page. Like why ours are different. Ours are better for gut health. Yeah, yeah. It has all this extra stuff that's better for, yeah, yeah, there is the ultimate gut health bundle. What are the tools in your tool belt that you can't live without? Like, websites like for doing research, finding expiring domains. What's like a rapid fire list of tools? I love Clicky analytics is what I use to mount. You say clicky? Clicky.com. It's better than stupid GA4. Yeah, I've never, I got rid of GA, probably five or six years, maybe longer than that.

I rely on click for everything. SEO and paid search were very beneficial to me. Learn the basics of SEO. It can still ignore what everybody's saying about, you know, artificial intelligence SEO. It all leans on the same principles, in my opinion. It's still going to rank and pull up content that matches your niche. I don't use a ton of me. I have Shopify for the transaction for Vidalia, ship station to manage our tens of thousands of orders every single year

because I got to make sure these things land and our customers get it. And I'd like to find out that the box has been lost before the customer realizes that the box has been lost. So I can ask UPS or just ship them and make good before. even lands and then even recognize that the original box was lost. What about like for looking at domain traffic and expiring domains? Is GoDaddy auctions your go-to for that? If an old domain that was registered in 95 has failed to renewed, it pops up, it does not pop up over at GoDaddy. It only pops up at Namejet or Snap Names. So I'll look at GoDaddy, Namejet, Snap Names. Name Sheep created their own

auction platform to auction their own names so they have their own. Those three and drop catch. I use domains as an inspiration to build. I tried to build on ideas first and I never seemed to get anywhere. When I shifted my perspective to build and be inspired by domains, things started working. I was like, I'll just use the trust and authority from this name, see if I can build something and let it do some of the heavy lifting. And I can be the dude behind the keyboard. I like to say the same thing. I like to start with like a marketing channel and then work backwards from that.

And that's essentially what you're saying, right? your domain name is the grandfather of your marketing channel. You start there and then work back. Correct. Other tools. Let's see it. So it's those are the primary from the expiration process. There's a site called expired domains.

Is it dot net? I'd use it sometimes, but it's a pretty good. It's a fire hose. Let me pull it up and make sure I have the domain. It's a dot net. Expired domains. Dot net. And it is just a almost a wall of text on the website.

But you can set up a free account. There's no cost. And, And they do searches across properties. So you can do searches across name jet, snap names, GoDaddy, name sheep, sometimes drop catch, and try to see if a name pops up through those. I'm kind of old school. I just go direct. I just go to drop catch, see what's up there, go to GoDaddy and see what's up there.

Do you think directory businesses are still viable today in the age of AI? Yes. Dude Ranch is a good example because my site's providing photographs, video, background information. So the photographs have been helpful. And they want a kind of a trusted source to look at. What I'm seeing, I mean, my traffic's up almost 40%. It was 39% year over year on that project. And my rebuild helped, but AI is helping as well because AI is making suggestions on here are some ranches.

But hey, here's dude ranch.com. It's a pretty trusted authority. You can also go search on or dude ranches with pickleball that are an hour away from major airport. AI is kind of the Cliff Notes version. They can kind of point you in the right direction. I don't know if they'll ever be. I mean, yeah, if there is, if there was a directory business for sale that was in my price range, I would seriously consider acquiring it and looking into the numbers to see if it might fit into my portfolio. But I'm pretty happy with my little three projects. Dude Ranch has such interesting social media potential. And I'm not doing a very good job promoting it from that

aspect. I'm trying to see if there might be an interesting person to either buy the whole thing out or I am, it's so low touch for me. I'm, you can tell I love the industry and enamored with it and I, I don't mind keeping it if there's a good partner who can help either write content, do great social media that has experience with that and doesn't mind going visiting some of the ranches and kind of getting feet on the street. You're at searchbound on Twitter, deepsouthvengers.com for your blog. Where else can people find you? Ask you.org. kind of ORG. ASKEW.

Yeah, ASKEW. Dot ORG is kind of just the, just the little homepage links to some of my, my essays that I've written, links to projects, links to failed projects that I've built. Most importantly, things I've tried,

domains I bought and donated. I bought Oldmiss.com and donated it to Ole Miss. That's amazing. Yeah. Roll tight. All right. Peter and I could not stop talking so I had to split this into two parts.

Please come back a week from today to hear about even more niche websites that Peter started, how he did it, what tools he uses, et cetera. Thanks for listening here on the Kerner Office.