Thoughts on the "Rank and Rent" business model?
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I had a 4 person caller team pitching localized rank and rent to supplement my agency for awhile. What did I find? That folks were more interested in just buying the sites with their current rankings. Had a lot of trouble renting them out, so we changed the model. This was before the days of Google Places / Knowledge graph listings so things may be very different now.
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Because I need money to live
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I'm attempting to do this with my locksmith website. You can read up on my progress here: https://www.buildersociety.com/threads/journey-to-mastery.1901/
It wasn't my original intention when setting it up, but i'll keep you posted with how I go.
I know another guy who does the whole "rank and rent" (where I got the idea from). He finds niches where he can rank locally with ease, sometimes he gets hyper local (eg a specific suburb in a city). Some of his sites will get 15 enquiry a month, some will get 100s. He will rent out one site, or he may package up a number of smaller sites depending on how much the person is willing to spend. The benefit of doing it this way is people can choose where the enquiry comes from. "I'll have the enquiry from suburb A & B, but I'm not interested in people from suburb C"
Another benefit is he can show potential clients concrete results through analytics and tracking phone calls etc. When you can say to someone I'm getting X amount of calls, do you want them? People take notice. It's a tangible investment for them.
A recent discovery for me is when it come to calling businesses I have found I have gotten a better response from businesses that are already paying for adwords. They have already shown they are willing to pay for leads, and they also know the value of a lead. After a bunch of 'nos', I tried targeting these guys and I already have 3 follow up calls from today alone.
According to the guy who already does "rank and rent", to rank locally, it will take at least 3 months from website creation to page #1 - even for him who has got the process down pat.
Hope that helps
It wasn't my original intention when setting it up, but i'll keep you posted with how I go.
I know another guy who does the whole "rank and rent" (where I got the idea from). He finds niches where he can rank locally with ease, sometimes he gets hyper local (eg a specific suburb in a city). Some of his sites will get 15 enquiry a month, some will get 100s. He will rent out one site, or he may package up a number of smaller sites depending on how much the person is willing to spend. The benefit of doing it this way is people can choose where the enquiry comes from. "I'll have the enquiry from suburb A & B, but I'm not interested in people from suburb C"
Another benefit is he can show potential clients concrete results through analytics and tracking phone calls etc. When you can say to someone I'm getting X amount of calls, do you want them? People take notice. It's a tangible investment for them.
A recent discovery for me is when it come to calling businesses I have found I have gotten a better response from businesses that are already paying for adwords. They have already shown they are willing to pay for leads, and they also know the value of a lead. After a bunch of 'nos', I tried targeting these guys and I already have 3 follow up calls from today alone.
According to the guy who already does "rank and rent", to rank locally, it will take at least 3 months from website creation to page #1 - even for him who has got the process down pat.
Hope that helps
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All of this
1. Business owners are more likely to buy the site.
What you can do is sell the site and upsell ongoing services SEO/linkbuilding/social media monitoring/posting. Make it clear that the site is going to lose rank if it is not updated / social media integrated. IFTT for the win, on your side.
2. Go local and even hyper local
Biz owners know shit about SEO. Show them result #1 for "your suburb luxury furniture" and "yourbizname" and they love it.
3. Check if they buy ads.
Adwords, big locally / yellow pages / local paper, etc.. this means they have a marketing business.
1. Business owners are more likely to buy the site.
What you can do is sell the site and upsell ongoing services SEO/linkbuilding/social media monitoring/posting. Make it clear that the site is going to lose rank if it is not updated / social media integrated. IFTT for the win, on your side.
2. Go local and even hyper local
Biz owners know shit about SEO. Show them result #1 for "your suburb luxury furniture" and "yourbizname" and they love it.
3. Check if they buy ads.
Adwords, big locally / yellow pages / local paper, etc.. this means they have a marketing business.
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I'm happy to buy or rent in pretty much any local vertical you can think of. Spam the hell out of my inbox.
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Yeah... I just don't like the idea of rank and rent when you can just charge per lead, or in a basis dependent on no. of leads being generated.
Some of the people who rank and rent are renting them out for so low a price its ridiculous. Not to mention the whole overlay thing is completely stupid because most people's websites suck. It's better IMO to create your own lead gen website that's higher converting, and then make more money by selling on a lead basis.
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Seems like it would be a lot more difficult to sell leads rather than just sending the traffic to the service company.
But I'm probably just saying that because I've never done lead gen so I don't even know where to start lol
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Bro, if you're going to go through all the work of busting ass for 3+ months to rank a local site, you might as well choose the more profitable option and sell leads by the batch (recurring monthly revenue after a determined threshold), or simply by the lead.
Better yet, if you're going to spend 3+ months busting ass to rank a local lead site, you might as well target moderate-to-high competition niches where business are hitting great margins off of high ticket services.
I'm just getting started myself, but the "rank-to-rent" bullshit sounds like another marketers angle for a bizopp info product.
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I agree, thanks for the advice. I've got an idea for a national lead gen site that I've just started building so I'm going to give it a shot. Prefer this idea over affiliate sites as well.
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You rank and rent when you're good at seo relative to getting money out of customer; or don't have the volume to justify the investment in building a sales system.
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If you're really good at A sometimes just doing more of A rather then maximizing the value B and C results in a higher yield for your time and effort.
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If you're really good at A sometimes just doing more of A rather then maximizing the value B and C results in a higher yield for your time and effort.