$90K from an Ugly Rank and Rent Site
This case study is from 2015-ish. Yes, that’s old, I’m aware thanks. No, I don’t care. It’s still worth sharing and publishing what I did for posterity and archival purposes. Take from it what you will. Here it is:
The first Rank and Rent deal I did started with a local services website I built from scratch.
I met the owner of a small pest control company in NYC. They were closing up and soon to be going out of business. Over the years, their revenue had dropped dramatically for various reasons. The business was technically still functional, but they were getting eady to close doors completely.
He asked me if I could generate leads for them and he would pay for each one. I had no experience in leadgen at that point (nor identifying when I’m shouldering all the risk in a deal), so I said ignorantly said yes and started plotting how to drive leads to them.
The niche and city were brutal. Pest control in NYC. One of the most competitive industries imaginable.
Now, I was raised Catholic, so maybe this was some form of subconscious self-punishment I was undertaking to embark on such a challenge. But he was a nice guy and I wanted new income streams so I could quit my job.
I’d have to compete with entrenched companies who had years of history and name recognition. And I wasn’t using paid ads because, well I was an SEO guy and didn’t have much experience running ads at that point. I just knew: build website and optimize!
Building the Rank and Rent Site
I built the site to be fully optimized and designed it to get their phone to ring with a big ass phone number to call in the header.
Since I was growing the site exclusively through SEO, I hit a pretty big mental block of “how the f*ck am I going to build links to a damn pest control site? Nobody would link to that!”
After some thinking and mental gymnastics, I thought about what niches are related to pest control that I could leverage instead of pest control itself.
I had no idea at the time but future marketing bros called this “shoulder niches”.
Shoulder Niches
Shoulder niches are niches that are related to your main niche in some way. There is market or demographic overlap and possibly new sandboxes for you to play in.
For pest control, I decided gardening was the best shoulder niche to go into. People are passionate about gardening, there is a tradition of content sharing and guess what? Gardeners deal with bugs all the time! Gardeners talk a lot about pests in their gardens and are always sharing tips and ways to get them out of the veggies. Boom boom boom.
So, after realizing this was the right sandbox to play in…I created an infographic: DIY Pest Control for Your Garden
I designed it myself and got prepped to promote it.
I launched a two-week outreach campaign targeting bloggers, publications, and other sites in the gardening niche.
With my pitch, I offered to write a custom intro to make it easy for them to feature it.
Within two weeks, I got some pretty damn good results.
I got high-quality backlinks from authoritative sites like Lifehacker…
Mother Earth News…
a regional news site in Maine and many others…
It got lots of social shares too. I would say it probably went as viral as an infographic about bugs could go.
After this campaign push, the site jumped to Page 1 for massively competitive keywords like ‘Pest Control NYC’ and ‘Exterminator NYC’ and phone calls to the client shot up.
Blowing the Client’s Mind
By this time, I was sending the client about 8 leads/day. These leads were entirely from my organic work, no paid ads. That’s one organic lead per business hour that I was generating.
The results were so dramatic that the client had to reopen the business and hire a whole new team just to handle the influx of calls I was sending.
A business that was on the brink of shutting down suddenly had to do a double take and rehire previously let go staff, all because of a rinky dink website I built and a viral infographic about bugs.
Problems with the Client
About a year in, things started to go sideways.
The original owner handed operations over to his partner, whom I had only met once on a road trip to Montreal.
Payments for my invoices started slipping, by days, weeks and even months. This is the beauty of a rank and rent site. You have the leverage.
They don’t pay? Find someone who will and pull the plug. You’re the boss, not the client.
Finding a New Client
After about 6 months of shaky payments with the new guy, I realized I couldn’t rely on them as a client anymore. So I started looking for a new client to take the calls.
Because I owned the site, I flipped the script: I was vetting the client instead of the client vetting me.
I visited other pest control companies in Brooklyn and showed them what I had, a live site generating live calls, with recordings of the calls and everything. They literally could not say shit because I was showing them live calls of people calling in with their bug problems.
After meeting with several companies, I decided on who I wanted to be the new client based on their existing reputation, size of operations and in-person fuzzies.
I went home and flipped the phone number from the guy who wasn’t paying to the new client I had chosen.
Once I did this, the existing guy had a freakout and blew up my phone. He laid on a thick guilt trip that he’d have to lay off staff and begged me to turn the leads back on. I said sorry and that I couldn’t do that anymore due to him becoming unreliable with payments.
I didn’t feel bad. I was living in a 200 sq foot illegal apartment with no sink in the bathroom for fuck’s sake. He stopped paying, so I stopped sending. It was nothing personal.
Selling the Rank and Rent Site
After about a year and a half of smooth operations with the new client, I asked him if he wanted to buy the site and a supplementary GMB I built in the latter months. I was billing him $45K/year for the calls I was generating.
We settled on a $90K sales price with $45K down and $45K paid out over 12 months as an ‘earn out’ as long as it maintained a certain level of performance.
On the closing day, I went to his office in Long Island, brought donuts, and he wrote me a check on the spot for $45,000.
The remaining 12 months (luckily) went as planned with $3,750 per month going straight to my bank.
The client now fully controlled the site as well as a GMB I whipped up in the latter months and made hundreds of thousands or even millions from that point forward. All thanks to a seven page ugly green website and viral infographic about bugs.
Lessons for Rank and Rent Bros
- Control the asset. You’re the boss, not the client. No pay? No leads.
- Leverage shoulder niches for link building if you dare.
- Leads are the ultimate proof. Nobody can question live calls.
- Have good tracking to always show people what you have if you need to fire a client.
Is Rank and Rent Worth Doing?
Once you’ve built one successful Rank and Rent site, you can replicate the process again and again. Multiple sites mean multiple income streams, and each one is a sellable digital property…but you should probably just hold onto them.
That being said, Rank and Rent requires patience, business savvy and not being an insecure hermit who’s afraid to talk to people and do deals.
Build it, optimize it for leads, and get someone to take the damn leads and get paid.
In this case, I took a dying NYC pest control business, generated a flood of leads with an ugly green site and infographic, fired a client who wasn’t paying, got a new client, and eventually sold the whole thing for $90,000.
All-in-all, I estimate I made over $200K by building and owning this site with very little maintenance after the initial build and marketing push other than sending invoices to the client.
Do it right, and you’re in control of the asset, the client, and the revenue.
Interested in rank and rent? Book a call with me for my personal help.