What if you could earn four figures a month working only a few hours a week? That’s exactly what Jake Lang did with a website about the pomsky dog breed, and today he’s on the show to share how he did it! Jake specializes in growing niche websites, which are websites that focus on a very narrow topic, and he teaches other entrepreneurs to do the same with his business The Entrepreneur Ride Along! I hope you enjoy this niche website case study, from inception to selling the website (and you won’t believe how much he sold it for!) and every step along the way.
Special Guest:
Jake Lang, The Entrepreneur Ride Along
Jake Lang is an author, entrepreneur, and founder of over eight online businesses. Jake now helps new entrepreneurs start and scale their first online business at TheEntrepreneurRideAlong.com where he shares his experiences along the entrepreneurial journey of starting and growing new businesses. It’s Jake’s mission to start a new online business every year and share everything behind the scenes through his books, The Entrepreneur Ride Along Podcast, and The Entrepreneur Ride Along Blog so that new entrepreneurs can learn from Jake’s mistakes, understand the struggles of starting a new business, and find the path to entrepreneurial success.
Key Topics:
- How to pick a quality niche
- The three main principles of SEO
- Why Jake chose building his email list over ads
- Letting your audience tell you what products to create
Mentioned in this Episode:
(The following links may contain affiliate links and I may earn a commission if you make a purchase)
- The Entrepreneur Ride Along
- Step One – Jake’s Book
- Pomsky Owners Association
- Long Tail Pro – Keyword planner
- SPI Pro Membership Community
Thank You for Listening!
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Transcript
Mindy Marzec 0:12
Hello, Hi, welcome. Thank you for listening to the Joy of Content podcast today. I am so excited to bring you this interview. We’re going to be talking about how to turn your passion into a paycheck. With niche websites. We’re talking about websites that focus on a very specific topic, because that is the best way to build a community of like minded people. And my guest has a case study about that. That’s going to demonstrate it perfectly. Today I’m talking with my friend Jake Lang, from the entrepreneur ride along. And Jake teaches entrepreneurs how to make money online with small, profitable niche sites. And that’s exactly what we are going to be discussing today.
Jake and I met through SPI Pro, which is a business membership community run by Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income. I’ve mentioned SPI pro many times before on this podcast. I really really love it. And one of the perks with SPI Pro is there are smaller mastermind groups that people members of the community can create to connect with other entrepreneurs who are basically doing the same type of business. So Jake and I are in a small mastermind group for website owners and bloggers and we meet virtually every other week to just discuss our businesses and talk about what’s working and what’s not working and where we’re struggling and we all help each other out. And I tell you it has been so incredibly helpful for me. I really encourage all of you to either form your own mastermind group with some business friends, or you can join a membership community like SPI Pro, which I just I get tons of value from almost every day I would say.
So, what I’m going to do is give you my affiliate link for SPI pro if you want to learn more about it and apply it to become a member. They accept members quarterly but you can apply anytime. So just visit fairytalesocial.com/spi Pro, that’s fairytalesocial.com/spi Pro and if you do apply, please be sure to tell them that I referred you just put my name in the referral box. Mindy Marzec I think maybe right now I might be the only Mindy in there. So you can say Mindy that Disney blogger. They definitely know me as that but you can put my name Mindy Marzec and I will receive a small commission for every new member I refer over to SPI Pro. And of course if you have any questions about SPI Pro, you can always email me or slide into my DMs over on Instagram at joy of content
So back to our special guest today. Jake he runs several niche sites, but the one we are going to be focused focusing on for this episode is called pomsky Owners Association. Pomskies are a breed of dog and you know I’m not a dog person. I’m a cat person, but pomskies are so adorable. This is the cutest little dog I have ever seen. Jake is going to talk more about the breed during this episode. But I really encourage all of you to do a Google Image Search for pomskies if it is a for you if you’re not driving or out for a run or on the treadmill. If you if you have the ability take a look at the pomskies because they are so cute. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. Jake is going to talk about how he created this niche site based on this pomsky breed and giving out valuable information to his community and just take you through the process of how he took this website from a simple idea to a profitable website that generated reliable four figure income for his family every month and then he eventually sold it you guys aren’t gonna believe how much he sold this website for it’s just incredible. So I’m very excited to introduce you to Jake Lang from the entrepreneur right along.
Hey there, Jake, welcome to the show.
Jake Lang 4:58
Hey, thanks for having me.
Mindy Marzec 5:00
I’m super excited to talk to you about your pomsky site. I’m saying that right pomsky. Okay. And you’re here to talk about basically turning your passion into income into a paycheck with niche websites. So first of all, perhaps the most important question of this interview, do you say niche or niche?
Jake Lang 5:23
I say niche What do you say?
Mindy Marzec 5:26
I say niche Can we still be friends?
Jake Lang 5:28
We can still be friends because I don’t know what the right way to say it is I just, you know, I struggle with speaking English anyways, it just, it’s my only language but yeah, I look trust me.
Mindy Marzec 5:40
I know what you mean. But I’ll try to say niche for this episode for you.
Jake Lang 5:48
Or you do that just for me. That means a lot.
Mindy Marzec 5:52
Okay, so turning your passion into income with niche websites. But first before we get into the pomsky site, which is just so adorable. Go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us how you got started with online business. I was reading on your website that you started all this kind of as a side hustle while you were still working a regular nine to five job so tell us how you got started.
Jake Lang 6:14
Yeah, sure thing I started for the first time I tried my first website back in 2013 When I was a senior in college and then just my first website that ever started were total flops didn’t work. I had no clue what I was doing. But in 2014 I finally started my first successful online business, which was selling online courses in the insurance industry and that’s for helping people pass these certifications, pass these exams and the insurance industry which I was studying for in my day job so I’d started on the side and that really took off and I still am that business essentially still my best performing business to date. And I have found out that I’m addicted to starting online businesses so I just keep doing it. And I’ve started eight niche online businesses in the past eight years and it’s my goal to start a new one play with one practice on that site every single year. And then I share it on my website, the entrepreneur right along where that’s just an ongoing case study of here’s what I’m doing, here’s what’s working, here’s what’s not. So that’s kind of where I’m at now and I just keep starting these new little businesses.
Mindy Marzec 7:24
Okay, I have to ask, do you still have all eight websites?
Jake Lang 7:30
No right now I’m only holding a portfolio of three of them because I actually just sold the pomsky site. So we’ll get into that later. So I used to have four but a couple of them just just didn’t work and it was taking up too much time. Some of them totally flopped, and some of them didn’t have traction. So I just kind of put them off to the side and finally they don’t
Mindy Marzec 7:49
so those eight that you mentioned some of them last it using your words they flopped
Jake Lang 7:56
absolutely just didn’t work at all because I did not know what I was doing but good learning lessons and you know, I wouldn’t be here without those flops.
Mindy Marzec 8:03
I just I wanted to touch on that because I think it’s really important for people to hear that. You can look at someone and think, Wow, they’re so successful. They have these amazing websites, but what you don’t see behind the scenes is the stuff that they tried that didn’t work out and every entrepreneur has that.
Jake Lang 8:21
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, my first website that I ever tried, I assumed I knew what people wanted to buy. I was trying to sell direct mail marketing leads. I was basically I just programmed through my university I could get like different addresses for commercial and residential addresses based on certain demographic criteria. Most ago, I’ll start a business and I will sell it to small businesses. Here’s an Excel file of all the addresses of people living in your neighborhood so you can send them your your marketing flyers. And I’ve started the business going around and trying to sell my address list and I just got laughed off the phone over and over again because people are like, we don’t need this. We don’t want to buy this we get all the information free from Google as all these other services that do it for free. like nobody’s gonna pay you for this and it’s like okay, I was totally wrong. I just assumed people would buy this and I’m in the wrong market here.
Mindy Marzec 9:17
You learned a lot from that. I’m assuming
Jake Lang 9:19
a great learning lesson because now I’ve never made that mistake again. I know I talked to people at least figure out what they’re struggling with or I started a new business.
Mindy Marzec 9:28
Love that well. Okay, so let’s turn our attention to your pomsky site, which I talked about in the introduction. And you mentioned briefly that’s the site we’re going to kind of focus on as as a case study for this episode. Tell us Okay, first of all, if you’re listening to this episode, and it’s safe to do so, please go to pomsky owners association.com or just google image pomskies And take a look at these cute little faces. They are the most adorable dog breed. Jake Can you tell us a little bit about the pomsky dog breed and why like how did you get this idea? Did you own pomskies yourself? Tell us everything about this dog process?
Jake Lang 10:10
Well first also you might not be saved to visit the website because you’ll end up leaving with three dogs Oh my gosh. Yeah. So I started this one back in 2016. And when I started this website, I actually never seen a pomsky in person. I’d never met a real pomsky Oh, really? Yeah. And I didn’t own pomskies I owned dogs my entire life. So I’m very familiar with raising dogs owning them training them. But I found this particular niche. So I’d mentioned I’d started a couple online businesses at this point I would have my eyes open for opportunities and and niche potential. So this one actually stumbled across from a variety different places almost and I start seeing pomskies everywhere and a pomsky is a mix between a a Pomeranian and a Husky is a Pomeranian husky. So it’s this little it’s basically a mini husky, they’re adorable, these little fluffy things. So I saw SARS popping up on social media. And I was I follow a couple websites where you can you can buy online businesses. And I already been seeing this dog everywhere and then I saw somebody selling a website called a Pomeranian Husky calm. Let’s go to the strangest actually about the pomsky and they had like 60,000 people visiting their website every month and that’s when the light bulb went off like oh, there might be a niche here. I didn’t know people were actually interested in the pet niche and niching down to a specific dog like this. So started researching and just saw that there was some opportunity here there wasn’t a lot of people talking about reputable or providing reputable information about the pomsky breed. There’s this one website oh just sold to somebody else who kind of just took it and tried to monetize it. And I learned that there was actually a lot of scams around the pomsky breed that there was a lot of puppy mills with it, which are just unethical breeders that basically breed the dog to try and make money and they don’t care about health or anything else like that. They basically don’t care about the dog and it’s it’s really unhealthy for the puppies. And there was also a lot of people that were faking selling this dog they said hey, I have this dog, just wet. No. wire transfer me. wire transfer me $500 And you’ll get this dog in a couple of weeks and over and over again just pieces. It was always like grandmother’s and these little ladies that were just didn’t know better where they would find a websites that were ranking like in the top 10 on Google for pomsky and like three of them were scams and people were just sending money these scams and they complain about on Facebook and say I lost money don’t go with this. This website it’s a scam and so I kind of saw that I was like, Okay, I know the SEO game. I know how to create websites. I’m going to do this as a practice website to practice my SEO. I will shut down the scheming websites and I can rank number one and tell people hey, these are scams. And I can at least talk to people that own this dog breed. And reputable breeders and give real information about here’s what this dog is how to train it. Don’t buy from these people don’t buy from pet stores don’t buy from puppy mills. Here’s all the information you need. Here’s how to identify scams and here’s how to identify as a real person that owns and actually loves these dogs. So that’s how it started with just kind of a hobby practice for SEO. I didn’t monetize it for the first two years because it was really just helping people and it was practice for for me and that’s how the website started.
Mindy Marzec 13:39
That’s awesome. And I can tell that you’re really passionate about having dogs and giving dogs a good home and making sure that we get these bad apples off the internet or at least give people a place where they can safely obtain a or adopt I should say a puppy and I love that I’m a cat person. We don’t have dogs but if I got a dog it would probably be a pomsky
Jake Lang 14:06
They’re adorable. And and yeah, so we’re my wife and I love dogs. So we’ve got three of our own and we were just talking before this episode that I’ve got two foster dogs here that are just hanging out at our house until somebody adopts them. So we’re all about dogs here so it’s easy to start this website and skip the talk about cute dogs is easiest thing you can do.
Mindy Marzec 14:24
Yeah, for sure. Okay, so let’s talk about what were your first steps. So you had this idea. You found a niche that wasn’t being served and you decided to start a website I think a lot of people get tripped up with Okay, I have the idea what is step like what’s the first steps to take? So obviously you need a website. And you have to have some knowledge of SEO in order to know what to write about and how to get it ranked on Google so people who are searching for pomskies can find it. So can you tell us how you first started the website and what your first content pages were?
Jake Lang 15:04
Yeah, sure thing and also for this website because there was limited competition. And half of the competition was scammers that aren’t really using SEO. They’re kind of using it by by accident, but since their websites get shut down so quickly, they’re not investing a lot in marketing and SEO. So it was pretty easy to rank simply by using three basic principles of SEO being find a keyword that people are searching for. Get some external backlinks to it so I was sharing my resources out there with other dog websites and rescue websites, and then do some internal linking within your website to make sure it all kind of links together. And with those three aspects of SEO as the rank on the first page pretty quickly, for I think my first keywords that I started writing about were where I just used I use a longtail Pro for my keyword research. But you can also use things like Google Keyword Planner, which is a free tool and said honestly just using Google suggested search results of each type pomsky and see what people are commonly searching. I would just use those three tools to kind of figure out what keywords are people generally searching and then longtail pro Why would use to figure out if there’s a lot of competition there Can I rank easily how many people are searching for it? So that was my first step to find a couple of keywords with the first one being I forget the exact keyword but it was something along that the size of a full grown pomsky And then when a keyword was simply what is a pumped key. And how big does a pomsky get? How To Train A box key and really simple keywords like that, that word, basically question and answer key words or somebody who had this question and they’re typing it into Google and there’s no reputable information out there because the people that were reading about it were nobody was focused solely on the pomsky dog breed. They were writing about dogs in general. And they’d have a page or two about pomskies Because it was getting popular. So it came in and I was like I’m just gonna focus on pomskies Here’s all the reputable information. So I just took a lot of keywords like that in questions that people are asking now and that’s what I started writing about when I did that by talking to people that actually own these dogs, and a real breeders of these dogs and rescues that have these dogs to get real information. And I was very transparent about that on my website that hey, I don’t own this dog. But this is an association of pomsky owners. So that’s why all this information comes from the owners, the rescues people that actually interact with this dog so I’m just gonna give you the real information, even if I don’t necessarily own this dog. And that’s how the blog started ranking as it started getting shared and and started getting some links from that because I was the only one out there really doing that the real research providing a real information about this type of dog.
Mindy Marzec 17:45
Right and I think that just illustrates the importance of niching down. You know, you might be a dog lover and want to start a dog or even an Instagram page or a Facebook group about dogs but if you can niche down to a very specific breed, like the pomsky then you’re going to build your community and get your Google results that much faster, I think.
Jake Lang 18:11
Yeah, exactly. That was my thought at the time too was I love dogs but I’m never gonna I’m never going to break ground with trying to rank for something about dogs and talking about dogs as there’s so many people talking about that. But I’m very, very specific on this niche dog breed that nobody’s really talking about. But I can become pretty popular and I at one point or before I sold the website I was the world expert on the Pumpsie dog breed I was literally the number one person in the world that people go into for information about this type of dog.
Mindy Marzec 18:41
That’s incredible and well deserved. And you know, I saw on your, on your website that you say that you were working on these sites while also working full time. Were you doing that with this pomsky site as well?
Jake Lang 18:54
Yeah, this one was on the side as well. So I left my job officially in early 2021 to take on this portfolio of online businesses full time but before that I was about six or seven years I was working in the insurance industry as a product analyst which is kind of like a financial analyst basically and I just did all these things on the site just for fun and started monetizing them.
Mindy Marzec 19:17
And how often would you say when you first started this site that you worked on it maybe like per week, and how quickly did you start to see traffic to it?
Jake Lang 19:27
Let’s see per week, I would say a couple hours here in there because as I mentioned earlier, I also had that insurance education business, which that was the one that was making money selling courses and and that one was the moneymaker. This one was just a practice. Well, I would say I was maybe doing three or four hours a week on it. If that and that was like I had time on my commute in the morning. Because I would take the train into work. I was working in Boston at the time, but like an hour ride into work hour ride home from work at an hour I’ll lunch break. So every day I had like three hours during the work day where I could just write blogs or answer emails and then it may be doing our back at home. So every day I had two three, up to maybe four hours to work on my businesses, which helped me get them going really quickly. So within the first month I was getting traction from this pomsky website. And I was getting traffic I’d say within a month or two I was getting at least 1000 people per month visiting the website.
Mindy Marzec 20:25
That’s great. And where did you build this yourself on a WordPress platform?
Jake Lang 20:30
I did yeah. And at the time, I was using a free WordPress theme and then once I started picking up traction, I switched over to Thrive Themes, which is our WordPress theme. That’s a really easy drag. and drop builder and that’s what I did to polish it up and make it look nice as it started to grow. But I
Mindy Marzec 20:47
think it’s important to know you just started with a basic free theme. You know, you didn’t do anything fancy. And again, I want to touch on that because I think people have these ideas and then they get stuck because they want to make it perfect. Like they want the first iteration to be perfect. And it totally doesn’t have to be
Jake Lang 21:04
no if you go back and look at the first iteration of this website. It’s gonna hurt your eyes. It was needed a lot improving over the years, but it’s an ongoing project forever. your website’s never going to be perfect. You’re always going to be tweaking it.
Mindy Marzec 21:18
That’s so true. And I you know, no matter how ugly that website would have been, it still helped people by answering their questions and that’s the important thing.
Jake Lang 21:27
Exactly. I was the content that mattered and that’s what people cared about.
Mindy Marzec 21:31
Yeah. Okay. So you mentioned that you had this website for a couple years before you started monetizing. So how did you know when it was time to start monetizing or how did you What was that first opportunity that you saw that you could be like, Okay, now I can start to make money on this. Was it through banner ads, or did you sell a product or how did you first start monetizing?
Jake Lang 21:53
The first thing I did was when I started seeing some traction and some website visitors, that actually the main reason I started monetizing it was because I realized that I could take money that I generated from this website, and I could donate it to the rescues. We volunteer a lot. A lot of dog rescues. And in the beginning, I really did not want to monetize this website because I was like, it’s just an information website. I’m just helping people I feel kind of dirty, taking advantage of a dog and monetizing it. Do I realize I can actually monetize it and use that money for good. And also I’m doing people a disservice by not monetizing it because I could be selling products that help people. People are asking me a bunch of questions that could be products and I got nothing for them. So that was what kicked me off is okay, I need to actually sit down and start helping these people more monetize it. So I started with Google Adsense and I’m just not a AdSense experts. So I was only making like $20 per month with that really under optimized and after a couple of months with data actually switched everything over to copy the funnel of my insurance website, which is utilizing email marketing so that I started sending everybody to my email list. I replaced all the ads and started getting people to opt in for free download to help you own and train this type of dog. And then I started asking people on my email list, I had my second or third email in there, which is a simple question saying, Hey, what’s your number one challenge with the pomsky breed right now basically saying, Well, what are you guys struggling with? And I used the answers from that survey to determine what was the biggest pain point in my target market. And I learned that that takes probably 70 or 80% of the couple 100 People that replied all in a same in different ways of saying it said that they were struggling with training this type of dog because it’s really energetic because because Huskies are really energetic and there’s a lump Iran and dig into. So a pomsky, which is a mini Husky basically, has the same exact challenges and people buying this little dog did not realize there’s gonna be so full of energy because they saw this cute little fluffy dog. And then they get it and they’re like, Oh my God, this thing runs for six hours a day. I can’t keep up with it. No.
Mindy Marzec 24:11
Jake, I think I just lost my chances of getting a positive. We’ll never go for that. But anyway, continue to show
Jake Lang 24:19
the pictures you won’t die until you get a dog. Yes there.
Mindy Marzec 24:25
Okay, so people need a training. So so how did you run with that?
Jake Lang 24:29
So then the first thing I did is I started writing and I published a book on how to train the pomsky dog. It’s called The Complete Guide to pomsky training. It’s still out there on Amazon. It’s the number one selling book on the pomsky breed for a while when you just type in pomsky to Amazon will be the first thing that popped up. I don’t know if that’s still true. But it was a book dedicated I talked to trainers and owners and people that were familiar with both pomskies and huskies and how to train these type of dogs really focused on energy and chewing and digging and the big pain points that people talked about and put it all into this book. And sort of selling that on Amazon and self publish that book through the Amazon KDP program. And that book would then feed into a membership that I launched so I had a couple of revenue streams here I’ll walk through them once the book was going I realized that picking up traction and bring in a really qualified leads because people were reading that book and then they were visiting my website to download the I gave some free downloads away in the books and then they would visit my website to get on my email list to get those free downloads. And then one more that wanted to be involved in the organization of the pomsky owners association. So I launched a membership for pomsky owners, where it was basically a static relatively static membership where I put a bunch of content in there basically like a big online course with a bunch of training videos, and more content about training this type of dog breed. And I gave a little community where the pomsky owners could talk to each other. And then once a quarter I would actually send people a free gift I would just use AliExpress for drop shipping. That’s something like a free dog toy or free, you know, custom dog tags or something that’s just saying hey, thanks for being in the membership. Here’s that use a free gift. And with the membership there are essentially registered as an owner of the pomsky Owners Association.
There’s only $20 per month or 200 For the years that the pricing was, but people started buying that. And that ended up getting up to. I think in the end, it was maybe 50 or 60 members that were part of this membership. And so I was pretty good chunk of recurring revenue from a little membership program. And then the last last monetization revenue stream was an affiliate program where I was running blogs about the best products for the pomsky breed through Amazon affiliates where it might be the best dog food for pomskies The best to toys for pharmacies, the best treats for pomskies endless opportunities there so I had a ton of affiliate blogs out there. And the best affiliate program I was part of was for the online dog trainer.com which is they have a whole slew of dog training video is not specific to a pomsky breed but they have a really good dog training website with like virtual dog trainers that you can talk to. And anybody that signed up for them. They were a membership. They were like $30 per month to join their membership. I would be paid a $20 commission every single month, or anybody that I refer to them. So a bunch of people signing up for that affiliate program. So it’s like another membership, in addition to my membership, but it was an affiliate program. So all of that combined in this website grew to about 2000 up to maybe $3,000 per month in profit just from this a little niche about the policy dog.
Mindy Marzec
That’s incredible. And again, this is just working on the website, maybe five hours a week.
Jake Lang 1:39
I’d say most of it after I was because I I did a lot of blogging in the beginning then it kind of tapered off as I was working on other projects and other websites. So I would say by the end of it the last year or two maybe not even five hours per week, maybe just one or two hours per week just answering emails and posting on Facebook.
Mindy Marzec
That’s great. And I mean that’s it’s just so impressive and I want to go back and maybe do just a quick recap of your journey because you touched on a lot of really important things and I want to make I want to make sure people hear this point because I think it’s really important. You basically took your lead from your community from your readers. You surveyed them via you got them on your email list, and then you were able to send them a survey, find out their pain points. And then you took that and you said okay, how can I solve these pain points for my community? I can write a book. I can look up a reputable online training course. I can create a membership where they can have their own community to talk to people. You didn’t necessarily just put those things out there. You found out that that’s what people were looking for.
Jake Lang
Yeah, exactly. I didn’t want to assume because I told you I made that mistake with my first business why let them call you really tell me? What do you guys want and what are you struggling with? What are your challenges and then I can figure out something that can solve that problem for you with my products and services.
Mindy Marzec
I just I love it. You know what it You make it sound so simple. And I know it’s that simple, but I think a lot of people get tripped up that creating a niche website is really difficult and it’s not you just put in about five hours a week and it took a while took a while to build your community. This is a long game. It’s not a get rich quick scheme. But you you just had the idea. You created the website, you’ve started working on it and then you built up your audience slowly over time and you are solving their problems with with products and I think you also touched on something where you felt a little skeezy profiting off of this because it was a hobby for you and it’s Yeah, and there is you know a sensitivity when dealing with dogs and breeding and and buying and selling dogs of course. But I love the fact that you first thought well I can donate this to charity, but then also that you were doing your community a disservice if you didn’t create these products for them because you were ultimately helping the dogs by helping the owners right?
Jake Lang
Yeah, absolutely. It was a big mindset hurdle for me that was just getting in the way and it was hurting my audience because of my own thoughts in my own head and my own fears really got in the way of I could have been helping people a lot more in those first two years. It just took me too long to get this book out there in the membership and all the stuff that really helps a lot of people.
Mindy Marzec
Yeah, I think a lot of people are scared of being salesy and we all kind of need to get over that hurdle myself included.
Jake Lang
Oh, yeah, been there plenty of times. It’s tough to get out there and you know, put yourself out there and then convince people to buy your products and services. When you just want to You’re the reason you start the business is to help people help you is a little weird selling but you need to sell people to help people at the next level.
Mindy Marzec
For sure. Okay, I can’t believe that our 30 minutes are just flying by here, but I want to kind of wrap up everything and maybe you’ve already mentioned this, but what would your advice be for anyone who has an idea for a niche website? What’s your advice to help them get started on it?
Jake Lang
Yeah, I would say the most important thing that we touched on here is about the idea and that is going niche specifically don’t go broad like we talked about with with dogs you know, the more niche specific your idea becomes, the larger your market becomes because there’s less competition. So start with that idea. And really just open yourself up because really, anything can be a business so just keep your eyes out for those niche opportunities like this one. Pumpsie dog breed who would have thought that could be a business and I don’t know if I mentioned but I spirit I did mention, but I didn’t give you the end of the story that I ended up selling this website last year and I sold it
Mindy Marzec
right. Yeah. I’m so sorry. I totally I totally forgot that. Yeah, go ahead and tell it please tell us more about that.
Jake Lang
No, I completely forgot to close out the monetization with what happened with that website. And I ended up selling it for 95,000. So it’s a nice little payday for this tiny little niche website. And that’s what these niche sites can turn into.
Mindy Marzec
Oh my gosh, okay, wait, I’m I’m so mad at myself that I totally skipped over. Because that’s really important that you said 95,000.
Jake Lang 6:38
Yeah, for a little website about the Pomsky dog breed who would have thought
Mindy Marzec
and I’m sorry, how long did you have this site for?
Jake Lang
So I had it since 2016. But I really didn’t start monetizing until 2018. So it’s about two or three years until I hit that valuation.
Mindy Marzec
Okay, so you had it for maybe about five years. Yes, yeah. Total. And then you sold it for almost six figures. That’s incredible.
Jake Lang
It turned out really well and that was nice. And that you know, sold it to a really good guy that I got connected with who really kind of same thing as really cares about dogs because that’s my big worry about selling this website is again, I was doing a disservice to my community because I ran out of time to work on this website. And I wasn’t doing anything new launching anything new or scaling it so connected with a guy that was really interested in getting an online business. And he’s a dog lover like me and was interested in taking over the website. So we got connected through Empire flippers.com which is how I connected with potential buyers and got to interview them and found a guy that I really wanted to take over and we landed on a multiple and now he’s got the website and he’s doing great things with it and really taking care of it and I’m still helping them out kind of like a advisory role in the background, but it was a lot of fun to get it there. Now he’s got to take it to the next level where I didn’t have the time to take you there.
Mindy Marzec
Oh my gosh, incredible. And we didn’t mention this earlier, but you actually have your first baby on the way so that chunk of change certainly helps.
Jake Lang
was one of the reasons is no full time entrepreneur and I’m managing at that time was four websites. I was like, okay, one of these has to go I’m just I just don’t have the time what the baby on the way is like Okay, let’s take the cache and that’ll be nice. That’ll sit in the background in case anything goes wrong. And now I can focus on Isabella, it was going to be here in July.
Mindy Marzec
That’s so sweet. I love I love all of this. Okay, so everyone out there listening I hope that this just inspired you to start that niche niche niche niche website idea or niche down right now. I’m talking to all you lifestyle bloggers out there. I know my blog was a lifestyle blog for the longest time and now that I’ve started to really focus on just Disney stuff. I’m seeing my Google rankings climb higher and higher. So niche down, get started, look for those little tiny opportunities that people aren’t taking advantage of. And especially write about something that you’re passionate about because it will just make it that much more fun.
Jake Lang
Yeah, and I love your niche with Disney and your focus on Disney weddings to like the answer I’m talking about just get something specific. And you can own that niche and your market becomes three times the size because there’s less competition and more people for you to help because there’s there’s nobody else there to help them.
Mindy Marzec
Absolutely. Absolutely. I’m learning a lot from you, Jake. I don’t know if I mentioned this already. But Jake and I are in a mastermind a Business Mastermind together and gosh, I’ve just learned so much from you. This has been such an inspiring story. Thank you so much for coming on. Please tell everybody where they can find you online.
Jake Lang
Yeah, sure. So there’s two places that you can check out what I’m working on. First one is my book. Step one, you can find that at step one. book.com Which where I talk all about how to find niche online business ideas. And also my website where I’m kind of tracking and detailing these businesses that are managing what’s working, what’s not, that’s over at the entrepreneur, right along.com So that’s why I’m hanging out.
Mindy Marzec
Awesome, awesome. So, again, thank you so much, Jake. This was all really wonderful information. I appreciate you coming on the show.
Jake Lang
Yeah, this was fun. Thanks for having me.
Mindy Marzec
All right. I hope that you were paying attention to all of the amazing advice that Jake gave out on this podcast episode, and I hope that it inspires you to take action. I know that a lot of people who are listening to this podcast, they’re building their business on social media, like Instagram, Facebook, tick tock, and there’s nothing wrong with using those platforms for your marketing efforts. But I strongly believe that everyone should have their own website that they own and they control and Jake building these niche I’m gonna say niche now, at least for this episode, but Jake building these niche sites just proves how valuable they can be any only spent a few hours per week on on this site and ended up selling it for almost six figures. That’s incredible. I’m so inspired. Now I’m going to be racking my brain for other niche niche, niche website ideas, aside from my Disney stuff that I could possibly start up. So thank you so much, Jake, for coming on the show everyone, be sure to visit Jake at the entrepreneur ride along.com and see how else that he can help you out and inspire you to create your next website. So that’s it for this episode. Again, thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for the reviews on Apple podcast app. I really appreciate it. Go ahead and reach out to me on Instagram. Anytime you have a influencer marketing question at joy of content and I’m on tick tock now at joy of content so you can come say hi to me over there. Remember to always use your influence for good and I will see you on the next episode. Thank you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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