Oct 24, 2017
Today’s guest is Chris Yates. Chris is an entrepreneur who acquires and manages portfolios of websites. He is the founder of Rhodium Weekend an event for investing in online businesses, and he runs several online businesses including Centurica, Buying and Selling Websites, and Vision Group Management.
Chris started his online entrepreneurial journey in 2009, while running a digital marketing agency. He felt client work wasn't scalable, and he had an urge to build his own assets. He also got a call from a former partner/mentor who wanted to partner with Chris buying online businesses. They bought 10 or 12 websites that year, and Chris thought it was so much fun that he sold his marketing agency and started acquiring web businesses full time.
We talk about Chris's online journey and the benefits of being able to build an income online. We also talk about how isolating it can be and how Chris and his partner decided to start Rhodium Weekend and how passionate Chris is about getting like-minded people together to talk about what matters most for their businesses. We talk about all of this and more on today's show.
Episode Highlights:
- Chris shares how Rhodium Weekend is his passion.
- A couple years ago, Chris bought Centurica and has been building out the company. It's been fun helping people find the right businesses to buy.
- How there can be ups and downs with online business. Especially, the penguin algorithm update.
- How when you buy a business, you buy what the person did to the business previous. How money making hacks are not sustainable.
- Changing a model from organic traffic to paid search.
- How Centurica can do SEO analysis for a website and risk analysis.
- How opportunities can be flipped around. Heavily relying on Google organic traffic. This could be a potential risk.
- They try to be an objective third party, so that the buyer can know what they are buying.
- People who work with Centurica are people wanting a risk and valuation. They analyze data from broker listings for a starting point. Risk assessment and analysis.
- They also verify that seller claims are accurate. The importance of trust but verify.
- Start with the profit and loss statement when looking at a potential business to buy. Understand the trends and seasonality and what the capital requirements are.
- Google analytics is great because revenue is usually driven by traffic.
- Ahrefs backlink tool is one of the simplest tools to find backlinks. Look for quality links and bad links that look artificially generated or look like spam.
- SEMrush can help find rankings and traffic numbers.
- FBA businesses and third party sellers. Every business model has specific due diligence.
- Diversity of skews is better than relying on one product. It's important to look at seller metrics. Are they selling directly or third party fulfillment. Look at refund rate to judge product quality.
- Look at both the positive and negative product reviews in relationship to other competitors.
- Take a deep dive into the notifications look for complaints or policy violations.
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