How Much Can I Make? — Real Jobs. Real Stories. Career Insights

Digital Real Estate - Buying Websites For Cash Flow

33 min
Jan 5, 20265 months ago
Listen to Episode
Summary

Matt Radd discusses the digital real estate business model—buying established websites and blogs to generate passive income through advertising, affiliate marketing, and course sales. He shares case studies of clients earning $4,000–$8,000 monthly from portfolio websites purchased for $400–$50,000, emphasizing that success requires 6–12 months of learning and outsourced content management rather than technical expertise.

Insights
  • Website acquisition follows similar due diligence principles to physical real estate but with lower capital requirements and faster verification through Google Analytics and bank account audits
  • The most valuable websites are 'passion sites'—long-established niche blogs (10–15 years old) with genuine traffic but undermonetized by original owners who lack business acumen
  • AI has made content maintenance easier through outsourced writers and editing tools, but authentic, experience-based content (travel, food, lifestyle) remains more valuable than AI-generated alternatives
  • Beginners should start with sub-$1,000 website purchases to learn monetization mechanics (affiliate commissions, AdSense, course sales) before scaling to higher-value acquisitions
  • Portfolio diversification across multiple small sites ($3,000–$8,000 monthly per site) reduces risk compared to single large website dependency
Trends
Growing maturity of website broker marketplaces enabling fractional business ownership at sub-$1,000 entry pointsShift from e-commerce to content-monetization models (affiliate, advertising, digital products) as lower-risk acquisition targetsIntegration of social media platforms (Facebook groups, YouTube channels) as acquisition criteria and revenue multipliersAI-assisted content management reducing operational overhead for non-expert website owners managing niche sitesIncreased demand for authentic, experience-based content as AI-generated content saturates search resultsRise of 'laptop lifestyle' entrepreneurs using website portfolios to fund location-independent travel and workWebsite valuations stabilizing at 1–3x net annual profit multiple, creating predictable acquisition pricing modelsEmergence of specialized website brokers and due diligence tools reducing friction in digital asset transactions
Topics
Website acquisition and valuation multiplesPassive income monetization models (AdSense, affiliate marketing, course sales)Due diligence for digital assets (Google Analytics verification, bank account audits)Content outsourcing and management via UpworkSEO optimization and keyword researchWordPress website building and technical skillsNiche selection and market researchAI content generation and editingSocial media integration for website trafficPortfolio diversification across multiple websitesEscrow and payment structures for website purchasesWebsite broker platforms (Flipper.com)Traffic and profit metrics for viability assessmentSponsorship and affiliate deal negotiationRisk management and failure case studies
Companies
Flipper.com
World's largest website broker platform where beginners can purchase websites starting under $1,000
Upwork
Freelance marketplace used to hire writers and content creators for website maintenance and article production
Google Analytics
Free analytics tool used for due diligence to verify website traffic and revenue claims before acquisition
Amazon
Affiliate program used by website owners to earn commissions on product recommendations (e.g., lawn mowers)
Google
Search engine and advertising platform (AdSense) that drives traffic and revenue for acquired websites
WordPress
Website building platform used to create and manage websites without coding knowledge
Starlink
Satellite internet service enabling remote website management from caravans and travel locations
Facebook
Social media platform used to build communities and drive traffic for acquired websites
YouTube
Video platform referenced as comparison for monetization thresholds and audience growth strategies
People
Matt Radd
Guest discussing website acquisition strategy, case studies, and teaching methodology for digital asset investing
Liz Radd
Matt's wife and business partner who identified the opportunity to apply bricks-and-mortar business principles to onl...
Marav Ozeri
Podcast host interviewing Matt Radd about digital real estate business model and monetization strategies
Ashlene
Case study subject who built $8,000/month portfolio across crochet, car, sewing, and fishing websites in 12 months
Nathan
Former electrician who purchased gardening website for $400 and scaled it to $4,000–$6,000 monthly revenue
Alexa
Former customer service representative and Nathan's partner; co-manages gardening website portfolio
Annette
Case study subject who purchased Australian travel blog with 100,000-person Facebook group for $5,000; generates $4,0...
Quotes
"What if you could buy a website the way you buy a house and have it make money for you while you were asleep?"
Marav Ozeri0:00–0:30
"We buy the website. And typically they're very simple sites. They're advertising sites. We like to buy what we call passion websites. Sites where people have a hobby or a passion and they've been blogging about it for many years."
Matt Radd2:30–3:15
"It's not a get rich quick thing. This takes quite a while to learn. It would take you six months to 12 months to learn."
Matt Radd12:00–12:30
"Making money online is a career for the future. There's no question in my mind."
Marav Ozeri15:45–16:00
"You've got to spend money to make money in business. If you can't afford $1,000, you should not be doing this."
Matt Radd18:30–19:00
Full Transcript
She bought a crochet site, she bought a car site for less than $1,000 and she bought a sewing site and a fishing website. And she now is making $8,000 a month of those and she just only works on them part time. Welcome back to How Much Can I Make? I'm Marav Ozeri and I'm very excited about today's guest, Matt Rad. Because we are going to talk about a marketplace you may not even know exists, the digital real estate. I never heard about it before, but imagine this, what if you could buy a website the way you buy a house and have it make money for you while you were asleep? Sounds great right? Well actually there is a way to do it. And Matt Rad is here to break it all down for us. So let's turn to Matt. Welcome. Welcome to the show. Let's dive right in and tell us what is digital real estate? What do you do in this space? We buy online businesses. When I say we, my wife and I, we're buying websites that other people have started, maybe run for many years, you know, they want to sell them. And Marav, what we don't buy though is e-commerce websites. So the reason we call it digital real estate is that you think of it as virtual online real estate. So you know how you've got a house and a street? Well the street is the web address. Of course. And the house is the website that sits on there, or the business that sits on that address. We just buy the website. And typically they're very simple sites. They're advertising sites. Normally we like to buy, we've got the set strategy that we follow because there's literally thousands of different kinds of online businesses you can buy. But we like to buy what we call passion websites. So sites where people have a hobby or a passion and they've been blogging about it for many years and maybe they're not making that much money off it so they get sick and tired of it so they sell it cheaply and we come along and renovate it just like we do with real estate, physical real real estate and then we keep it for the cash flow. I read about some samples of somebody buying a site from a student I think for $300 and sold it for $6000. Let's back up for a second because I know you and your wife used to be zoologists, correct? Yes, that's right. Please tell me how did you educate yourself going from being a zoologist to becoming in the digital space? What did you learn? What did you have to do for that? You know, it was a big journey. So it was that we've been in business for 30 years. So we've done things very differently. We've never had, like on your podcast, you know, you're interviewing people with traditional careers and things. Correct. Traditional career. So we met at uni, right? Studying zoology. And then what we did, we got into our first business, which was a manufacturing business and which is a small business here in Australia. And then we renovated that. We fixed it up. So we've always made, our career has been buying and fixing up businesses. And so we started with bricks and mortar businesses, very capital intensive businesses, unfortunately, we made a lot of mistakes. It was very, very hard with these bricks and mortar businesses. We went bankrupt a few times because all your money is tied up in physical inventory. Of course. You can't sell it or whatever. So we would buy these small businesses, fix them up and then sell them. Okay. That's how we started out. And we also did mergers and acquisitions or we became brokers. So we would help. We got so good at it that we'd help high net worths. So just literally like in the rich dad, poor dad, if any of you listeners have or if you haven't and you're interested in the side hustle, you should go and read rich dad, poor dad. It's a really, it's still to this day. It's a very good book. In there, he talks about investors, the people on the right hand quadrant where they're not swapping time for money anymore and they literally just invest in businesses. But they were lucky enough to work with people that did that as well for a living in a multi, multi-million dollar level. And it was just. But that was brick and mortar. Brick and mortar. Yeah. Yeah. So then. How did you switch? How did we switch? Because we started a family and we wanted the freedom to be able to work from home. And we also realized we started to see the internet. Remember, the internet was brand new back in the early 2000s. Right. And it was Liz, my wife, who figured it out. She said, Hey Matt, we can do on the internet what we've always done with bricks and mortar businesses. But it's he. Whoa, a light bulb. Yeah. It was a, it was very much a light bulb moment. And she was right because we were used to exporting. So we would export goods to America. The first website we bought, we're in America the next day, like, you know, literally the minute we bought it, there was no borders anymore. There's no barriers to entry whatsoever. We suddenly had a marketplace of 300 million people overnight and we literally made money while we sleep. What was it? We got what kind of website? It was an affiliate website. So it offered affiliate products and it was just in a hobby niche. I think it was in the crafting niche and literally we got $1,000 in the bank account overnight while we're asleep. How from what? How do you make money? You buy a website and then how do you make money? Because it has a following like traffic. Say in a crafting niche, it has a lot of traffic. So it crocheted. So we've got clients that like crochet sites. And you can offer affiliate products on there. Like you can sell patterns. You can put ads on there. So you know those ads when you land, let's say you're into crochet and you go to your favorite blog crochet site and there'll be ads on there. When people click on those ads, you as the website only get paid and that's how it's semi-passive. They were the main kind of sites that we bought. Sorry to cut you off, but if you buy it, you have to maintain it. You have to have people working there. So it's buying a business that takes a lot of your time. It's not really a side hustle, is it? No, no, no. It takes nowhere near. These are semi-passive. Oh, really? They don't take much time at all. No, no, no, no, no. Especially with AI now, you have to keep the content up. But you outsource that. We hired writers from day one. There's a website called Upwork. We get all our writers off Upwork.com. Of course you can use AI these days. You need to be careful how much AI you use for writing. But we just outsource it. All we get industry experts. You just pay other crochet. We bought websites that we know nothing about. We're not crocheters. I'm not. We just pay crocheters to write articles. So I'll give you a really good example of a recent... Yes, please. Okay, so there's two very powerful examples. We have a lovely couple here, Nathan and Alexa. They do this full-time. They're a young couple. Nathan used to be an electrician. Alexa was in customer service. They learned our system. And they literally... So one of the sites they bought, so they live off the laptop. So they make all their money on a laptop. They used to travel the world. They now have a family. So they can't travel anymore. They bought a gardening site. So they noticed they were looking around in the gardening niche online. And they saw this website here in Australia. You don't have to... Most of our sites are in America. They can be anywhere. But they just happened to see a website here in Australia that hadn't been posted on. It had been neglected. Like the owner obviously hadn't done anything with it for quite a while. So you know when you can look at a blog and you can see the dates that the articles are posting. Right. So they just sent him an email on his contact form and said, hey, we noticed you haven't done anything with your website. Would you be interested in selling it? And he said, sure, I was just going to close it down. So he sold it to them for $400. Oh my God. Yeah. But the site had no traffic, right? No, it had lots of traffic. It was just sitting there doing nothing. He didn't know how to monetize it. It had been around... It was 14 years old and it was very genuine. So in this day and age of AI, what we're looking for... This is where the strategy works really well. This is precisely the sorts of deals we're looking for because it's very, very genuine. And they tied it up. They did a renovation with... They do a makeover and they worked on what we call the SEO. They just tied it everything up because he wasn't a sophisticated website owner. That site in spring now gets 80,000 visitors a month and makes these guys $4,000 a month net in spring. Not in winter, but in spring. But the spring in America and then the spring in Southern Hemisphere. Southern Hemisphere. So they own a gardening site in America as well, which that's where they learned it. Their gardening site in America makes them around $2,000. Wow. And they're not gardeners at all. They're laptop lifestyles. They hire gardeners to write articles and to keep up with the content and everything. So I take from what you say that you have to have knowledge in technology rather than this. First thing you have to learn before you jump into this space. Well, that was our sticking point. When we first got online, it was very difficult for us because we're from farms and we'd never done the tech thing. And so we'd only ever bought and sold businesses. And so that's something to this day we're very passionate about. And the very first step we feel that you need to learn these days is how to build a website. I think that's the most important thing. So I'll share another story. We have one of our most recent success stories here is Ashlene. She is from the tech industry. She's made money out of crypto and she was just burnt out. So we have a lot of burnt out clients who come to us because they're earning lots of money and they want to escape the corporate rat race. So they hear about what we teach and that was Ashlene. And we taught her this strategy, exactly what I'm saying to you, buy these little simple passion sites. And she first learned by buying, she bought a crochet site. She bought a car site for less than $1,000. And she bought a sewing site and a fishing website. So about fishing. And so when people click on the, there's articles, she knows nothing about fishing. She knows nothing about sewing. She knows nothing about cars and she knows nothing about crochet. But she just outsourced there. This is just in the last year. And she now is making $8,000 a month off though. She's got about, she's got a portfolio of these sites and she just only works on them part time to work a few hours in the evening. So one of them she bought for $50,000 or $45,000, I think it was. It's the best one. It is a website that teaches people how to become a Thai massage expert person. Ashlene knows nothing about Thai massage at all. So it's got courses on it. This is the perfect asset to buy. Most people would look at that website and have no idea how much money it makes, right? I think it's been running for 15 years. It started by a lovely guy, an expat who lives in Bali. So he just moved to Bali and he teaches Thai massage. He started a website, started blogging about it 15 years ago and he puts courses on it. He's bored with it. For 15 years, it's made anywhere between $3,000 to $5,000 a month consistently. That's net profit. So while you live in Bali, that's a lot of money. And so Ashlene bought it for $45,000. That's way better than real estate that you can't get a return like that out of real estate. She's a young person. For her, that's life changing. So she doesn't have to go back to work now. How do you recognize a good buy? How do you find like those, the crochet, how do you find the gardening? How do you find this? What we teach, it's due diligence. So it's just, it's similar to due diligence that you would do on a bricks and mortar business, but there's just a bit more to it. There's a few things you need to learn. And what we recommend is, please, if you're listening to this, do not rush out there and buy the first website that you see. You will not know what you're doing and you will make mistakes. So when you start to learn this, we get people to buy websites like Ashlene under $1,000. So her sewing site and her car site were each under $1,000. And then the next one was $10,000 and then the next one was $20,000. So you can step it up like that. We get people to start very small. That's the, and Mira, this is not a get rich quick thing. This takes quite a while to learn this. Like it would take you six months to 12 months to learn. Took Ashlene about 12 months. So that's why we interviewed her on our podcast. So you can go and listen to it, the Digital Investors podcast. It took her about a year. Yeah, it's a brand new skill. And like you're asking it, you need to learn how to build a website. You need to know how, and that's like, it's a really good question to ask. Where do you start? Realistically, I reckon the smartest thing you can do is learn how to build a website and how to make money online. Like how do websites monetize? Because that in and of itself is an amazing skill for the future. And, you know, we're here talking different careers. I know this is a very bizarre career compared to all your other guests, but seriously, making money online is a career for the future. Oh, absolutely. There's no question in my mind. What would be a... What's the thing about here, isn't it? Oh my God, it's like mind-boggling. Who ever thought about buying... Why do people sell their website? Most of them just tired of it? Get bored, yeah. Or you'll find there's a lot of us who are professionals that do this a lot and we own a portfolio of websites. And we just constantly sell off the small ones and focus on the big ones. So I'm talking about today are quite small. They're all under 10, 20 grand, under 50 grand. There are websites in the hundreds of thousands, in the millions, you know? We own big websites. A small website takes the same amount of work as a big website. It's very leveraged. You still need the same team to work on them. So a lot of people, if they've got bigger websites, they'll sell off their small ones. Or lots of people, honestly, just get bored. They don't know how to make money out of them. They've had a Google update and the website might have been... You know, websites aren't always stable because of the way Google works in the search engine. So people get upset when their website gets hit in Google. So they get sick of it and go, I will sell it. It's like a bricks and mortar business. After about what we find is after about 14 or 15 years, people tend to get sick of their assets and they want to move on. And that's the goal. You've got to hunt around for those. But when you find those ones, they're the really, really good ones. So are there agencies or places that we can hunt for them? Or people contact you, you teach them? How does it work? No, no, no, no. We don't get involved in finding websites for people. We want people, we empower people to do that themselves. Really good question. There are brokers now, agencies. Best one to start when you're a beginner is flipper.com. So it's the world's biggest website broker. And the great thing about flipper is you can buy websites under $1,000. That's where Ashlene Stardes, where everyone starts. So you can... So there's no risk. And if it doesn't work, it's cost you $1,000. That's very cheap, by the way, for anyone listening. If you can't afford $1,000, you should not be doing this. Or you should not be buying a business. So I'm going to be blunt about it. But you need... You've got to spend money to make money in business. Yeah, if you buy a bricks and mortar business, we spend $5,000 just talking to a lawyer. We can buy a whole business here for under $5,000 to get started. It is really cool. But you've got to know what you're doing. And just so you know, Mirab, there's... I think I just recently posted an article on our website and we listed out 25 brokers or agencies where you can buy website online businesses. So if you want anyone listening, you just Google website brokers or you can look at our article. You want proof that this works. It's a very mature market now. Like, most brokers are selling websites in the millions now. What? That was never... So food blogs, millions of dollars. Travel blogs, millions of dollars. So you see all those travel blogs and food blogs that you go to online. People have no idea how much money they make. They're making their owners lots and lots of money. But for the blog you have... So you hire the writers, like you mentioned, right? And they maintain? Yeah, they maintain it. So often the blogs, like a travel blog, will start out with the person wanting to travel the world so they blog about it. So it's a passion site. Then they get sponsorship deals and that then turns into a full-on business. And that's a very easy business model. We've got lots of clients that have done that. So you have to know a little bit about marketing to go to advertisers. Well, we teach that. That's how you learn it by buying a small website. That's what Ashlene had no experience in that whatsoever. So that's why we got her to buy a small website. So she learned that over the 12 months. So when she found that Time Massage website, she now knows how to market it a lot better online. So you're right. Yes. I realized that she got good at marketing. That's one of the things she had to learn. So you've got to... So on a site like that, she's got to understand, I'm going to point, funnels. So lots of people visiting the website. It's got to have a sales letter that converts to an offer. And that's a... There's lots of YouTube videos about that as well. But we teach that too. But that's how you learn for listeners. That's why I want to reiterate, you start with a very small site. If you've never done this before, you start a very small site. That way it's very low risk and you can do it in the evenings part-time. Like a side hustle. Yeah, like a side hustle. That's how 90% of our clients approach it as a site. They start it as a side hustle. And then when it works, that's when they look at quitting their jobs and stuff like that. Amazing. So when you look at sites and what is the most important metric for you when in your research? Good question. There's two actually, profit and traffic. We live and breathe by that. So we need to verify that in due diligence. So if you go to any of these websites, let's say you go to Flipper and you look up these websites. So Flipper has websites for sale from $1,000 up into the tens of millions. And it's exactly the same process on every one that we look at buying. And remember, we're buying a specific kind of website, ones that make money off advertising or affiliate offers or selling courses or selling digital products. And the main metric that we're looking at, as you asked, is profit and traffic. And on Flipper, they quote the profit and traffic. And what we've got to do as due diligence is verify that it's correct. And now luckily these days, it's a lot easier. And the brokers help us as well because everything's tracked online. And so the main tool that we use is Google Analytics. Anyone that owns a website will know what Google Analytics is. It's just a free thing that all websites on the planet pretty much have provided by Google that just tracks all the analytics. Imagine the data they've got out of that as well. And believable, I know. Under why they're the world's biggest company at the moment. But anyway, but it is very clever. The Google Analytics lets us, you can literally request off the website owner access to their Google Analytics. So they can't fake it because you can see it live. So if you know what you're looking for, that's very, very powerful. So it's a way easier way to do due diligence and bricks and mortar. And once you know also a bit about marketing and how the online space works, you can also do a lot of due diligence research on the marketplace. There's a lot of free tools. Mostly Google. Google gives us pretty much everything or AI. AI now is absolutely mind blowing for doing due diligence on websites. It's really, really quick. It's way quicker than what it used to be. But that brings me to the question. There is a lot of cheating using AI. So how do you know that they don't have the whole thing that generated the whole website analytics and everything in this? How do you know you're looking at the real thing? Yeah, that's part of your due diligence skill. It's actually pretty easy because it is hard to fake traffic and the brokers are verifying this stuff as well. They have very sophisticated tools. Now, not that you still need to do your own due diligence. It's pretty hard to fake the money going into a bank account. So you get live views of the bank account as well. Part of due diligence, particularly when you're buying bigger businesses, like once you're over $50,000, you always need to insist a live video walkthrough of the bank account. Oh! Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can just do it. That's how we've always done it. And it's heaps easier online. And the other thing you can do is you can do escrow. So you could own the business and just pay them like $5,000 a month for 12 months so that everything's verified. That's the other way you construct a deal. So in the trickier websites that are more complex to sell or they're asking for a higher price, often that's what you'll negotiate. There is no one standard way of doing things, but you're not gonna get it straight away. That's why there's people like us out there that teach you how to do this and you've got to go on that journey of learning how to, it's like learning how to buy a business. You're not gonna nail that straight away, although some of the gurus will tell you that, but it's not the case. There's a lot of moving parts to businesses and online businesses. And I think the main thing is you've just got to be prepared to study it and work at it like Ashlyn, like just put aside a year where you go, all right, this year in the evenings, I'm gonna work on figuring out how to make money with an online business. How much traffic a website has needs to have for it to be a viable investment? It's gotta be in the thousands, ideally in the tens of thousands. Per month. Per month, yeah. It's actually quite a tricky question to answer because every single niche is very, very different. The sorts of sites we're buying, we say as a very, very general rule, the magic happens once you hit around 3000 visitors a month and up. Oh, that's not the word. Because that's enough volume to make money, but it depends on the offer. So if it's an AdSense offer, you're only getting 50 cent clicks or 20 cent clicks. So that revolves around, every time someone clicks on the Ad, you get 20 cents or 10 cents or whatever. So obviously, we need volume. That's where we need lots and lots of volume. So it's like being on YouTube. You know, YouTubers don't make that much money until they get 100,000 views or whatever. If you have an affiliate offer, however. Explain to me the concept of affiliate offer. So someone, say on the gardening site that Nathan and Lexa have, they recommend a lawn mower. Okay. So someone clicks on their affiliate link and they're tracked and they go over it. So they write an article about how awesome this lawn mower is. Someone clicks on their referral link which sends the person over to Amazon to buy it. Nathan and Lexa don't have to sell the lawn mower themselves. They just send them to Amazon and they get a commission. Four or five percent. What? Yeah, they do nothing. That's amazing. They talk about how great a lawn mower is. And then someone clicks on it and then they're cookied. And if they buy that lawn mower off Amazon, Amazon have to fulfill it. Nathan and Lexa don't. Nathan and Lexa get five percent. Wow. So that can be, depending on the product, if it's a big product, it can be instead of a 20 cent click on an ad, now we're talking $20 or $200. It can go up 10 fold. So now we don't need as much traffic. That's why you only need 3000 visitors a month or 5000 visitors a month on an affiliate site. And for Ashlene's Thai massage site, stop and think about this. She sells a course, $400. That's net profit because it's all electronically delivered. It's a series of recorded lessons. So $400, you only need 10 of them a month and that's four grand a month. So are most of the sites that you buy are ones that have been flipped already or just the original owner? Ideally the original owner ones are the best though. They're the long established ones. Right. So you're Australian and you work out of Australia. You buy only English website, correct? No, over the years we have bought Spanish ones. It's really good. You can buy them in any language. It's just a little bit harder in a different language if you're not a native speaker to do the research. We call it keyword research. So when we're doing the marketing research, we're looking at all the keywords that people use and also the marketplace, what people are buying and understanding. So it is a little bit trickier if you don't speak the language fluently. It is a lot easier now with AI translate and Google translate, but in general, we buy, most of the sites we buy are based in America. Not in Australia? No, it's pretty rare we buy an Australian one. So the websites we buy, the vast majority would be dot coms. So based in America. But you can buy them anywhere. They can be based in the UK, in Europe, in ideally in a first world country where people are spending, where money, where people are spending money. So you also teach people to build websites. How long does it take to learn to build a website? You have to learn coding? No, no, no, just with WordPress. It's just, it's the same skill set that we teach in when you buy websites. Just learning how, that's what I'm saying, learning, I think in this day and age, learning how to build a website is a huge money making skill in and of itself. To prove it, we get total beginners doing this and then we get them to build websites for local plumbers and electricians and things and they sell them for anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000. Not bad money while you're learning. So, but again, this is not a get rich thing. There's things you gotta learn. It typically takes someone six to 12 months. And that's what I want to know. Did you buy a flop? Lots, yeah, yeah, we've made some mistakes. Yeah, yeah. What was the biggest flop? Oh, there's been multiple ones. We've had six-figure ones go. Whoa! We've owned a lot of sites over the years. We're buying and selling. So we're not buying and selling as much now, but you can turn them around. Probably the biggest one was about $80,000. That was one that didn't work so well. Close it down. You actually buy a website with employees that maintain the site, that it's not just a digital asset. It's also some people assets anyway. It depends on the deal. Some sites come with the team, but typically we have our own teams. Oh, you just hire writers and your IT guy, and you're good to go. IT guys, yep, and good to go, yeah. And that's what you're building up over time. So remember, we built this up over 15 years. So we started out buying small sites and went into bigger sites. And these days, our preference is to buy small sites again, because there's just no risk. Well, I won't say there's no risk. I need to be very careful if you're listening. I'm not giving financial advice. There is definitely riskier. But buying compared to what we used to do with bricks and mortar, we're now just buying websites under 50 grand. I think that's a sweet spot. It's pretty easy. So how do you know if a site is undervalued and it's a good deal or it's just not going to happen? That's part of the due diligence. You've got to learn that. That's valuations. So most sites are valued on what's called a three times multiple. So three times the net profit. Okay. So if it makes $100,000 a year, then it's probably worth around $300,000. And that's the same as a bricks and mortar business, like from a cafe to a wholesale import business. Most businesses are sold on a one to three times multiple. So that's part of the art of learning this. And it comes from reps, reps, reps, reps, doing lots of practice due diligence. You got to work at this. So there's no, every niche is different. Every website's different. Every website is the same as a business. Some businesses and websites have a higher risk profile. So we're not going to pay as much. We might only pay one times. Every business is different. So Ashlene's one, the one that she bought for $45,000. What's that? If you divide that by three, that means it was making $3,000 a month. So she got, I'll just do the maths here. Okay. 3,000 times 12 equals $36,000. So she just paid a little bit over a one times multiple on it. Are there still good deals in website marketplace? Okay. To give you an idea, Mirav. Yes. Do you know how many websites there are on the planet? I don't know, close to a billion probably. Over at five billion. Whoa. They say apparently there's one and a half billion active websites. So there's got to be good opportunity there. Any one time on Flipper, there's around 300 websites for sale. And our clients are on there all the time and no one bid on the website that Ashlene just bought. Not a single person. So we are in the age of AI. How does it help or hurt your business? AI is a double-edged sword. It has had a big impact on a bunch of the sorts of websites that we buy. You need to be very careful with the sorts of sites you buy. It's definitely not as easy as what it used to be. Like 10 years ago, it was very, very easy. No one listened to us back then. We were saying, this is so easy. People didn't believe it. And now people believe it, but it is a little bit more difficult because AI is affecting the search engines quite dramatically. And that's a scary time for a lot of website owners. But for certain websites, it's actually good because people want real. They don't want the AI generated stuff. They want real experience. And if you can get those, like what Ashlene bought with the Thai massage site or real experiences where people can learn off real people, they're hugely valuable. So again, you've got to learn the different ways of how you can make money online. I think that's why some of the food blogs and also travel influencer blogs, even though there's a lot of AI content on those, but at the end of the day, people want the real experiences. So if you're going to travel somewhere, you want to know that someone actually visited it and they know where to park the caravan or whatever and what's it like? What was it like to back that caravan up? So we've got a few travel influencers that own caravanning sites or RV sites. Those sorts of experiences are really, really important. I don't think AI can give that. And the actual photos of say the campsite, here's where you go when you visit. This is what we did. And this is the equipment that we used. And normally that's your sponsor and stuff like that. And that can grow just like an octopus because then there's social media for the website that you are in your renovation, you can hook it up. Social media is a big part of the renovation strategy now, particularly with AI. So we're looking to buy websites that come with social media platform. So already in place. There's a big Facebook following. So Annette, she's another one of our clients. She bought a travel site of a private Facebook group. So someone said they're retiring. They've been traveling around Australia. It's a big, big thing here in Australia, travel around Australia. And this person had been doing it for like 10 years and they retired from it. And they said, oh, our blog that we've been blogging about it for the last decade, does anyone want it? And so Annette bought it for five grand and it's got 10 years history, but it had 100,000 people on a Facebook live grant. That site makes her about $4,000 a month. So she's retired too. And she just blogs whenever they pull up. She just writes a blog article. She does all the content herself with AI. She just writes it, gets AI to edit it, posts it. And that's what they do in the campsite at night. We're Starlink now, you know, Starlink the internet. Yes, of course. They've got internet anywhere in Australia. So it's connected up on their caravan. And she just works in the evenings, like a couple of nights a week and uses AI to do everything. They've got sponsorship deals of, you know, full drive equipment and things like that. Making around four grand a month while they travel around. That's net profit. That is a very good side hustle, I have to say. Well, for listeners that want to find you and get into this amazing side hustle, where can they find you? Yep. So ebusinessinstitute.com.au Okay. And we've got a free masterclass on there that people can just go and check out to learn about how we buy and renovate websites. So that's probably the easiest way. Or they can listen to our Digital Investors podcast. On there, we feature all our successful students. We try and record a story every couple of weeks of a student that's making money online. All right, listeners, now you know where to go if you want to get into that digital real estate world. Fantastic. Matt, I can't thank you enough. This was so mind-boggling and mind-opening. I mean, I'm going to look into some website for a side hustle. Yeah, it's a great idea. Well, thank you so much for having me on here, Mirav. It's awesome to see your excitement about it. I know, it's crazy. I take this stuff for granted. It's cool that you didn't realize it even existed. So hopefully your listeners are excited as well. Me and none of my friends, now they're going to learn. Well, thank you so much. Take care. That's a wrap for today. Thanks to Matt Radd for breaking down the world of digital real estate for us. Don't forget to follow the show for more surprising stories of how people make money. See you next time.