Rent A Website™ How to Make Money Ranking and Renting Websites – Part I
One of my favorite passive income sources is ‘rank & rent’ websites. I created the Rent A Website™ brand in 2014 as a way to generate passive income for my family to allow for a flexible lifestyle. As I write this, we’re on the road in our 43′ 5th wheel camping about 100′ from the beach.
What are Rank and Rent Websites?
Rank and rent websites are just as they sound. They are websites that rank well in major search engines that generate leads. You then take that website (which you own) and rent it out for income. The rank and rent business model has incredibly low risk and a ton of upside potential. Best of all, you don’t have to be a website designer or search engine optimization expert to make money doing this!
Step 1. Pick a Niche
Picking an industry niche you know something about will help with your messaging. While it’s not required to be successful, I reccomend this because the information you end up presenting on your website will be precieved as authoritative and accurate.
Step 2. Pick a Hyper-Local Market
Ranking a website in Google can take sometime. That being said, the smaller the market, the easier and faster it is to rank a website. As a general rule of thumb I’d recommend starting with a market that is no smaller than 40,000 people and no larger than 100,000 people. This means if you’re going to launch a plumbing rental website, try a small market first. If you live in a smaller market already, even better.
Step 3: Keyword Research
Picking the right keywords will help both satisfy your advertisers as well as help you find the perfect domain name.
Step 5. Select a Domain Name
Exact match domain names help and I usually recommend always going with a .com when possible. If the .com isn’t available, .net’s are a good second choice. Next, never buy a domain name with a hyphen. They look cheesy and untrustworthy. CastleRockRoofers.com (Castle Rock Roofers) was one of my first rental websites. The domain name has no hyphens, it’s a.com and it contains the exact keywords I wanted for the search “Castle Rock+ Roofers.).
Step 6. Buying a Domain Name
Buying a domain name is super easy. There are a lot of choices when it comes to registering a domain name. I recommend using name.com. Name.com is super easy to use, they have fantastic customer service and the domain names are some of the best priced in the industry. As you grow your domain portfolio, pricing will also go down!
Interested in learning more? Stay tuned for Part 2!