Want to take your digital assets to the next level?

It’s pretty tough without a team and systems in place.

And that’s why today’s podcast episode is such a potential goldmine for site owners hoping to scale.

Forrest Webber got into the online world with minimal experience with online businesses.

But he used his talents in leadership to grow a team and portfolio of 20 websites that now generates up to $40,000 in revenue per month.

And his approach to growing online businesses is one that will surely interest a lot of listeners.

He shares great tips on:

• Finding the right people to delegate important work
• How to effectively lead people
• Website KPIs
• And more…

So if you’d like some advice on how to treat your websites like a scalable business, check it out!

Topics Forrest Webber Covers

• How he pivoted from real estate to websites
• Similarities and differences between real estate and digital assets
• How much gets published across his portfolio
• Succeeding with an investors mindset
• The unique way he’s building his SEO company
• Lots of great book recommendations
• How he’s scaled his portfolio
• Acquiring an eCommerce site vs content site
• Management strategies
• Full-time vs contract writers
• Importance of being diversified
• The network effect
• Tips for ambitious site owners
• And a whole lot more…

Links & Resources

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Sponsored by: Search Intelligence and NicheSites.com

Watch The Interview

Read The Transcription

Jared: Welcome back to the Niche Pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman, and today we’re joined by Forrest Webber with digitail.co, which is a SEO agency for blogs. Welcome Forrest

Forrest: Thank you. Thanks so much, Jared. 

Jared: Yeah, I was, we were talking at the outset about how this has been a long time coming.

We’ve been working on this interview and getting it, getting it here for several months now. I’m really excited for what we’re gonna go through. You you have multiple things you’re involved with. You run an agency for bloggers. You also build websites on your own. Why don’t you get us started? Give us some background.

Tell us about the evolution of 

Forrest: all this. Yeah, thanks for your patience. I had a injury for a couple of weeks, but we’re back now. We’re back. Yeah, so I started the website I think about five years ago, but it started for me when I was in college. I learned a little bit about how you could make money blogging and so I started one minute money.com, which was a total waste of time because I dumped it after 30 days because it didn’t take off like it should, right?

But I moved into finance and real estate, so undergrad and finance grad school was real estate and all of my co students went off to work in big cities. But I was in what Forbes considered the most undervalued real estate in the nation town, which is College Station, Texas, GIGO, Maggies, woo. 

Jared: Hey, you’re even an egg can tell what.

Forrest: Colors on us, right? . So there was a local broker who wanted to move into student housing development, which is exactly what I wanted to do. I kind of had the privilege of discovering really early that I love to learn, but I don’t love to work. So I knew by 30 I wanted to be retired. So I got into real estate and just wanted to find what is the quickest way to own the most rental properties you can.

So we did that together for two and a half years. I think I raised $3.5 million of private equity capital, and that gave me partnership interests and some student housing apartments. So the reason why this is important, It taught me how to create a business with the operations segmented from the actual growth work.

And I wanted to do the same thing on the website space. And fortunately the market kind of took off in college station. So when we sold the apartments, I cashed out, you know, close to a million dollars of cash, paid a bunch of taxes, , and then a one quick side note. But I got to bring that capital in to the website space with me.

Hmm. So it’s given me a huge accelerator and allowed me to skip some of the early technical stages that other people work through slowly, and that works out with pros and cons. But the quick side note, so 2015, I just closed out most of the real estate stuff I’d worked on, and my first daughter was born a little over three months early.

Hmm. While I was displaced in Seattle with my ex-wife. And that kind of brought everything home for me because, you know, there’s a lot of people that wanna work in the digital nomad community, but having to work from a hospital for 108 days really shows you what a privilege it is to get to do it. So that’s just a little side note from mm-hmm.

my background, so then I’ll move on real quick. I took that capital, came into the website space, started investigating brokers. I really didn’t know that there were online assets that could be treated just like rental properties. And that’s what I did before. But once it hit me that you could purchase.

Assets for two to three PE ratios like price to earnings ratios on historical documented earnings. And you know, I’d seen proforma income statements in the commercial real estate world for years and nobody’s truthful on ’em. And in the website space you almost have to be, cuz there’s so much publicly available data.

So when I started looking at that as a asset class, it really drew me in and I had huge visions of going all the way through this thing with just private equity groups and that kind of thing. And it turns out you can kind of do it just as a solopreneur and I prefer that. So that’s what I’ve done. 

Jared: So I, I just wanna bend your ear a bit on it before we get into the, the details of the interview, because, you know, when I explain what website building is to like a, somebody outside this community, I oftentimes will use real estate as an analogy, you know, and I’m like, it’s just kind of like real estate, but in a digital world.

And usually the light bulb kind of goes off for people. How accurate is that? Is that analogy that I give? And so many of us give, like, you’ve been heavily involved now in both real estate from a investment standpoint and now websites and, and we’ll call it from an investment standpoint, like how much similarity is there between the two?

Forrest: I think it’s a great analogy. I mean, it’s easier to think of something physical, so oftentimes, You know, link building is a practice that a lot of people stay arms length from, and I try to explain link building as building those infrastructural components like roads or sewage or water to your property.

And I think it works great. Yeah. 

Jared: Yeah. It’s, it’s so true. It’s, so, I I, I, I want to hear about the operational things you’ve brought over from, from managing real estate projects, but we’ll, we’ll get into that. So, let’s see. That was, I mean, several years ago at this point that you made the transition. Yeah.

Maybe talk to us, actually give us a snapshot of where you’re at today with your websites, and then also let us know when you started your SEO agency as well. 

Forrest: Okay. Awesome. Yeah, let me pull up this data. So I have a portfolio of about 20 websites. That we’ve published as of a couple weeks ago before I got that black eye that prevented the former interview, Jared , we had published 13,298,000 words across these 20 blogs.

That’s about 8,000 articles with an average monthly word count on these 20 blogs between 9,000 a month and 30,000 words per month. Average article link is 2112, but that also varies depending on the blog too. And I have, let’s see here. Yeah, that’s, that’s the figures here. So that’s the portfolio. Most of these were acquired, but, but in the last year or two, we’ve been building from scratch, so some of ’em are newer.

Jared: Okay. Okay. So pretty good size portfolio. I mean, that’s enough to manage, you’re publishing that many words per month. That’s a good, that’s a good operational challenge to take on . Yeah. 

Forrest: Yeah, and to be honest, I mean, I’m not the expert at operations. I’ve always looked to, you know, hire someone that I can, I can grow alongside and, and grow in the knowledge side, but just direct.

And so the biggest victory for me so far has been hiring a, a really great director. Really? 

Jared: Yeah. Yeah. So you have somebody in place that basically directs the operations when it comes to all 20 of these websites? Yes. What is your role then on the, on the site? ? 

Forrest: So my role now, Essentially is, is to be like an investor, kind of like he pointed out earlier.

And I think to a degree that is one clarification. I am probably more of an investor in business-minded individual than someone who’s great at understanding off page technical SEO and that kind of thing. 

Jared: Yeah, yeah. Like what kind of revenue or or profit numbers are you comfortable sharing with? Yeah, I can share that portfolio of 20.

Yeah, there’s, I mean, it’s a good number of sites. 

Forrest: Yeah. Obviously it depends on if it’s quarter four or quarter one . Right. But we we average about 30,000 a month and display ad revenue between media, vine, and Zoic. That’s been as high as 40. You know, it’s in, in quarter one. The year before last, it was down to like 16,500, but that’s kind of our range.

And then we make around five to 12,000 a month from Amazon. and we have a few other affiliate programs we’re a part of, but we’ve never invested a ton of time into managing the affiliate commissions, the conversion rates. We just signed up for Aate with Monica Lint and she showed us how her platform works and we’re really excited to do that now.

Jared: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had her on, oh, I don’t know how far back now, maybe nine months ago, but she is great. She had some great tips to share. 

Forrest: Her software’s so powerful and it’s just, it’s beautifully designed too. Have you looked at it? 

Jared: I poked around and thought, oh, man, I should really do something with this and then haven’t done anything 

Forrest: since

Yeah, she, you can go through, I mean, dozens of iterations for a, a page revision based on the data and just review. You can look at all the data for what changed between last month and this month, and it. Wow. 

Jared: I will have to check that out again. I’ll have to check that out. So, okay. So before we dive in, when did the SEO agency come into play and why?

If you have this beast of a operational Yeah. 20 websites to manage it and to run and to grow. Yeah. Even if you’re not doing the operations, what’s the need? And when did the Seo o Agency come into play? 

Forrest: Yeah, great question. And it’s, it’s kind of personal for me because, you know, when I mentioned that at age 20, I knew I wanted to, you know, retire early and kind of get out of work.

There’s actually a couple books that inspire me. One’s called Work Less, live More by Rio Robert, client Work Less, live More. It’s about semi-retirement and then how to Retire Happy Walden Free by Ernie Zelensky. And I think I have kind of an old soul, so I, I just wanted to retire, enjoy Slow Life, you know, and that first company in the real estate industry.

We built a self-serving entity. The management that we took on that was third party was just to help us pay bills. This time I kind of did it in reverse. I wanted to build the operational team first, make sure we had services that could be relied on first off. But then it’s, it’s that shift from, you know, I’m not midlife yet, but the, the crisis of my daughter being born early really shifted me from pursuing my personal happiness at cost of all other things to a meaningful life.

There’s another book, I love books. My first acquisition is hooked to books.com. There’s a book called Swamp Lens of the. From Misery to Meaning at midlife and it’s by a union psychologist. And basically I just wanted to build something that could serve other bloggers. So the agency came about a little over a year ago.

Okay. And it’s, it’s like Rent My team. This is the team that built the portfolio that keeps operating it today. Just used the same resources. 

Jared: That’s awesome. There are so many similarities in crossover. I mean, I have an agency myself, . Yeah. Yeah. We do a lot of SEO work and we do website building as well.

When we got started, we kind of flipped the model a bit in reverse order of what you did. We started the agency and then realized, You know, we got all these people that are working on websites and really good at it and some months as an agency you’re slower in certain areas. Why not put that time and that effort towards our own website and our own portfolio?

So I understand what you’re talking about. We just did it in reverse order. . 

Forrest: Yeah, exactly. I think both ways work. You know, we did that in the real estate side. We started up front with third party and then moved to self-serving. Eventually fired all the clients cuz we didn’t like client work. Well, you know, for me, since I’m not the one at the helm of the operations, like director wise, I can’t exactly brag that I’m just so servant hearted and just want to talk to clients about problems all day long.

That’s not the case. But I do think the fact that my partner is located in the East, I think that if it’s, if it’s his own family or if it’s his. He has the most incredible service leadership at, at everything he does. And it’s not, it’s, it’s just obvious. He does it because he cares and it’s really special.

So we wanted to open that up to more people. And, yeah, just really quick, I noticed you, you put a tweet out or something saying you were looking for an acquisition, your agency, and I was like, that’s so cool, man, that y’all are bringing in assets while you do work for others too. So I appreciate 

Jared: that. Yeah, that’s great.

That’s great. Yeah. Well, we’ll see if definitely got some people interested, but it’s a, you know, it’s, it’s a good model. I, and I never have made the connection like you just did between property management in a real estate world versus managing on your own. So that is so cool. I think there’s a lot of people out that out here that are listening that I’ve interacted with over the years that have messaged me and talked about how.

You know, we, we talk on the podcast about whether to start building your own websites outta the gate. Go maybe work for an agency and cut your teeth, right? Or once you have that experience, maybe serve clients while building your websites to help with cash flow. So it’s, it’s really good to just talk through how, you know, another example of someone who is building websites, but also using the same processes and the same operational strengths to also serve clients.

It’s just, it’s cool. It gives people a lot of, you know, inspiration or at least thoughts to think about and consider . 

Forrest: Totally. Yeah. Have you ever heard the quote, never lift a hammer? No, I have not. If you picture like a construction site in real estate, if you’re general contracting and you walk up on site and there’s problems going on and you take over the process forever, they’ll look to you for it.

So for good or for bad, I’ve always employed that strategy. Never lift a hammer. Always work on. You know, what is the problem and how can I empower this person? You know this stuff, but there’s a a Harvard Business Review book called On Managing Yourself, and there’s a chapter called Who’s Got the Management Monkey, and it’s about how you can either give all your time away as the leader and manager, or you can confine those spaces.

And always make clear who’s back the monkey is on. So that’s how I try to handle operations is let someone else do them, but step in, you know, step into the office, analyze the problem, walk through it with them. 

Jared: Yeah. Well, you’ve scaled nicely. You’ve scaled nicely. Let’s transition and talk about how you scaled.

I wanna hear more details about it because, you know, we, we kind of left with you having this idea that you wanted to move into the website building world, and then we kind of arrived really quickly at the fact that 20 sites into millions and millions of words, . Now you did tease, you had some capital that you were able to go in with.

Talk us through, just from a very high level, the approach you took to getting in this world. And I’m a, I’m particularly interested in how you learned SEO o coming from a background that didn’t really have any of that in the real estate world. 

Forrest: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s a great question cuz it’s gonna point out so many flaws and mistakes and learning lessons that I made.

So the first acquisition I made was a $17,000 Empire Flippers website, September, 2017, 

Jared: back when they were still selling sites that low. 

Forrest: Yeah. Back when they would sell something at that price level and it was like $575 a month of revenue. And I was a spreadsheet guy from real estate and thought the management would be comparable.

It turns out it’s a lot more active and a lot more intensive. Requires way more knowledge than real estate management in certain ways. And I had a friend that was just a super. Ambitious individual and we decided, hey, you can just, you can just manage it. You can do everything. You’ll produce the words, do the link building, you’re the whole team.

And as it grows, you’ll get a split of the equity. Well, two months in and maybe four articles in, you know, he’s like, Hey, this is not really gonna work for me cuz I have a full-time job and my cuts $6 and 47 cents from last month. You know, and we we had to move toward, okay, well then we need to make a couple more acquisitions.

So I then made $109,000 acquisition on a website that was on the uptrend. And it had about 4,400 a month in Amazon affiliate commissions, but no display ads. And the next acquisition was about two weeks later. It was 127,000, plus 9,000 in accounts receivable. And so that jumped me up to above 10,000 a month in revenue.

So you are right there is kind of a fast four button for me. You know, I went from zero to 12, 500 in revenue in like two months. So then we started hiring just like anyone would that wants to build an internal team. We, we did five and Upwork and did quizzes and tests and interviews and I was just learning on page SEO at the time.

So I would edit the articles or have the other manager guy, he just, he kind of begun realizing he needed to pursue other opportunities at that point. So I would go in and edit the articles and publish ’em and it’s the slow learning curve of, of basic SEO upfront for me. So that went on for a few months and then I wanted to scale more content, so I hired content refined cuz John Gillum was a big inspiration for me early on too.

He’s the founder of Authority website Income. Motion Invest. He’s a co-founder of, he now has originality ai, which is brand new. Mm-hmm. . And I’m, I’m super interested to hear what you think about some of the new news, Jared, at some point too, but back to the question. Mm-hmm. scaling for me, the first six months was a really fast job cuz I had to outsource content links really quick.

Jared: The, I’m just trying to put myself in your shoes, owning, you know, several hundred thousand dollars worth of website. And, you know, probably not really knowing a lot about seo, admitting that, oh man, a website’s a little bit of a different beast than a than a duplex or, yeah, sure. You know, like when the water breaks you call a plumber, but boy, when the, when the website, it gets hit by an algorithm, you know, it’s like, who do you call, kind of thing.

So what, like maybe just for someone who, whether they’re in the same shoes or they’re struggling to fast track themselves to learn how to manage a website, and I know the route you took was maybe different than a lot of people, a lot of people would’ve put their head down and just learned s e o and you, you sought out to actually hire people to put in place there.

But how did you, how were you able to do that without sinking the ship with actually a, a growth mindset in 

Forrest: mind? It was even scarier than I’ve let on actually, after that third acquisition. I, I had not decided yet to only pursue content sites, so SEO is important to me, but really at that point I was, I was as basic as thinking, I wanna buy websites that make money.

So Empire Flippers had a listing for 294,000. There was a a women’s online, primarily Instagram run, e-commerce boutique, and I decided to buy it. Hmm. 

Jared: Good fit. Yeah. So, I mean, I don’t know much about you, but probably a little bit difficult to slide yourself right into the content production there. I 

Forrest: hired a marketing agency out of Austin, and they had a retainer that was like half the revenue.

The revenue was 10,500 a month at the time. And when I bought it, it was kind of on an upswing, just the short story, two weeks in. You know, I’m, I’m thinking what have I gotten myself into? Daily sales, I think had dropped from 1500 to about $75 a day. Oh boy. And I’m going, oh my gosh, this is a nightmare. I had, I still had a couple properties left from real estate, two duplexes near campus, so I sold one of them and cashed out like another 200,000 from that just to kind of cover my losses.

I fired that first agency. He was a close friend of mine. It was hard to do. And then I hired another agency and they were digging so deep into it, they started to think, Like maybe you got scammed. So I had to have a, a call with money Joe, the c e o of Empire Flippers just to go over it. So it was scary.

I mean, the, the short end of it is that it wasn’t, it wasn’t easy or fun and I doubted everything for like six months. We put five to six months of losses on the operational side in for that e-commerce boutique. And that’s when I started looking at the other blogs I had that were getting no attention and they’re still growing or holding steady and their rankings are being consistent.

And I’m like, okay, well then maybe I just need to do content site portfolios. And that’s how the transition happened 

Jared: for me. Interesting. Wow. That would be, that’d be very frightened. Where, where did that site, where’d that poor e-comm site end up? The capital loss on the taxes? a write off, you call it?

Yeah, just a write off. You know, I, I mean, it’s interesting to talk to you about because it does, there are so many parallels in real estate to website building, but, but I, but you’re very right, as someone who has some investment properties as well, the management of a website versus the management of properties are so vastly different because in real estate buying and identifying the property is really the, the secret.

And then running it, you can really get, there’s already well-built teams of people that if you want, you can get to help run, you know, an investment property, but much different in terms of the website space. That’s a, that’s a really interesting kind of coming to know that you had to go through the hard way.

Well, okay, so how’d this whole thing round out? I mean, I’m curious where you turned the corner on, on these websites and when things started getting profitable and what started making your operations profitable? 

Forrest: Yeah, so I mean, after that big flop, I decided to not buy more e-commerce sites. I’ve always still had.

A lingering interest in having a product that was scalable from a, you know, lifetime value of a customer calculation angle. To be able to determine like what’s the acquisition cost of a customer, what’s their lifetime value, and then to have that paid ad spend, like gas pedal you can just hit, which feels like you can print money.

But after the e-commerce website flopped, I didn’t even try anything in that realm for about a year and I spent all of my time then regrouping, kind of reforming the business plan. I had that manager who we had structured some deals together for his compensation and because of that big e-commerce flop, I think he was, Just starting to question things.

So we had a conversation, decided to part ways and I looked for a new director at that point. And when I found this director, I looked for actual background and marketing experience, someone who’d worked for a blog before. And so I found someone through some friends that run like a 2 million page view per month publication style website, really high editorial standards.

And so we started attacking it from that angle, like let’s have the best publishing standards out there. Really a content high end. And she was a great director for me for the time. She worked for me for about two years and we built a team of say, 10, mostly administrative VAs. And then we outsourced writing to either contract writers or to agencies.

And then we would edit them, publish ’em. Do our own interlinking, she and I, and that worked really well for us. It’s just kind of like the average team you would think of if someone has three or four or five websites and have maybe a partner plus a few contractors that write on the team. And we did that for a couple years and then she decided to go back to grad school and pursue something else that she was more passionate about.

And it worked well for us because I had just acquired a website from a gentleman by the name of Mohammed Kaiser, and he is a, he has a background in link building. He’s run an SEO agency for about 10 years and used to manage a staff of 185 and wow the uae so, You know, genuine managerial, operational background, leadership skills, very professional.

I noticed his professionalism and communication really early on in the transaction. And after he sold me the site, I said, would you like to work, you know, part-time on contract for me helping me run half of these sites? And he did. And he was unbelievable. I mean, our, our standards went up on every K P I we had.

So I hired him full-time and he’s the. . 

Jared: Wow. And so today you’re running 20 sites and you know, publishing odd lot of content. Maybe give us, give us some insights that you’ve learned in the journey. And again, I’m thinking about that person who wants to start to remove themselves from some of the day-to-day, wants to bring on a team or has a team at this point.

Yes. And knows that they need to make some iterations and some changes. 

Forrest: Absolutely. Great question too. So I, whenever I think about scaling with, with people like managerial scaling, there’s a couple of books I mentioned I wanna mention again, on Managing Yourself. The Harvard Business Review book. That one’s really great.

There’s a book called the ETH Revisited. Yep. By Michael Gerber. I really appreciate that one. He breaks down three personalities inside every business person. Three business personalities, the technician, the manager, and the entrepreneur, and the technicians. The one handling the technical details of the work.

Maybe it’s the writer writing and performing on page seo. The manager’s the one measuring the results. I think forget the, the quote author of this one, but it says what’s measured and proves. You might know that one. What’s measured and proves. So I, when I started working on a managerial aspects of my business, I had two major reports that are due every month.

So one of them is the KPI report, key Performance Indicators. So we’ll look. How did our published articles do? How are our rankings doing on each blog top to bottom? But in the beginning it was also just how many articles were published at all. Like, did we get the number of articles we wanted to get done this month?

Done? And it wasn’t always easy to do that. Mm-hmm. . So a K P I report every month. And then I have another process that a consultant taught me called Start, stop, continue. Because for me, I mean, one of the things I love about the website space is that there’s an infinite amount of things to learn. And I considered that an advantage.

I thought I, I mean now I’ve learned over time I’m not nearly as smart as I thought I was compared to others. You know, I, I think when I first thought about the website space as an investment, I thought, oh my gosh, if I just buy these and use my brain, everything’s gonna explode. The ceiling is. Through the roof.

You know, you gotta 

Jared: try hosting this podcast, man. You just feel dumb every week with some of the people we have on here. , . 

Forrest: Well, you start to realize it’s not true. But back to the point, there’s an endless amount of stuff to learn and there’s an endless amount of shiny object syndrome and what can we try that might work to really be a flywheel opportunity for us?

And I had to come up with a system to contain myself because hiring a director, then you feel like, oh, I can just tell them to do all these things. J, try this thing, try this thing, try this thing. And then they get nothing real done. So K P I report and then start, stop, continue report, which is what new ideas, do we want to start this next month?

Do we think are opportunities worth pursuing? Which things are we gonna stop that we tried out last month that aren’t working? And what are we gonna continue? Cuz it actually worked and you have the two reports to look at it together, you know, this data with these efforts. Yep. And then, you know, software systems to scale your organization and management.

The, that side of it I’ve, I, I can do well at for a little while, but one of the reasons I hired a director and always insisted on having a manager is cuz I’m not super organized personally. I’m good as a solo person organizing my own thoughts and details, but a whole team, I really struggle with it. So I’ve gone through base camp, click up, Asana, Trello, all those.

And I would say those are huge. If you’re good at that. If you’re not good at that, I would suggest finding someone that’s a compliment to yourself who’s really organized and let them pick how they want to do it and just manage them. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. . So you’ve obviously achieved scale on the back, we’ll say on the back of, you know, operational efficiencies hiring, scaling, managing that today.

What does your website process look like? What does an average website look like for you guys, and how are you actively building those today, right, with your team? 

Forrest: Good question. Well, just on the content side, this is the side that I am not the one directing this part, but it typically looks like, you know, if we’re gonna, if we’re dealing with a, either an acquisition or a preexisting, you know, content based site that, that a client wants us to operate for them, then we go in and do a full scale audit on the SEO side, look at the link profile, do a content audit, and get our minds wrapped around where it’s at now presently.

And then we just look at for the future, you know, what are the goals we have on that k p report for the client or for ourselves. And then if we do need more in-house resources from a human capital standpoint than we do interviews locally. I used to have riders all over the world, and I still have some, we, we have about half of our riders displaced, but then half of them are now consolidated into our branch office, which has been huge for us.

Not just, not just from the oversight angle, but also the buy-in of the riders. If they’re full-time for us than they do a lot better job and they can actually watch their performance and care about it too. But whenever you’re talking about forests myself, what does it look like for me? We have a stateside senior designer.

And my primary ghost writer lives in Greece. And those three, me, the writer and the designer, work together a lot on creative projects. So we’re the creative team. If there’s something like trying to scale from a content site to also offer email marketing and products in communities, that’s gonna be our creative team.

We do 

Jared: that stuff. And do you guys have targets for these websites? Is it like a a build or buy and then hold? Are you trying to be selling websites every year along with acquiring websites? Just curious about the model for what you’re 

Forrest: building. Yeah, I, I, whenever I did the real estate thing, it was the same, same question.

I got a lot. Cuz I don’t, I don’t sell a whole lot. I usually just try to keep it and grow everything. And I know that’s different than some people, but for the most part, yeah, we’re aiming to grow them indefinitely. Now I know that’s a little silly cuz it’s not gonna happen. We are gonna sell. Pretty much every website we build or buy, but we don’t think of it like we’re gonna exit in two years or three years, except on the seedling sites that I’m doing in my own portfolio now.

So the portfolio and numbers I shared earlier, that’s just mine. My personally owned 20 sites. And then we have our client side too, and all their websites that we operate and manage, though some of them have agendas and they wanna sell in a certain time period. But some of ’em are business owners who have had us create passive, turnkey, monetized blogs just like you and I think about all the time.

But they can turn into lead generation models for their businesses too. Mm-hmm. . So the exit is converted into a lead gen model for their business. . 

Jared: That’s smart. That’s smart. All right. Share with us some operational tidbits that we probably don’t know because we’re not, you know, running sites at scale like you, or we’re not sit, we haven’t removed ourselves operationally from the day-to-day process.

There’s gotta be some insights you get to get because instead of being the technician, instead of being the manager, you kind of get to look at things from a high level. What are, you know, what are big mistakes operationally you see website builders making these days? 

Forrest: I’ll, I’ll give you the most honest answer.

I, I think that most of the, most of the people I know that are operating niche websites or content sites are doing the right things. They’re following the right advice. They might spend more time kind of not, not confident. They might not know if it’s gonna work. I mean, if they’re one of the leaders, like that’s.

Already kind of made it, that’s not necessarily true. But if people are between zero and 2,500 a month on a site and it’s just one site they have, they don’t have two yet, then it seems like it’s gonna fail. Or maybe something might go wrong or a core algorithm update might mess with their site. And those are all true.

But the, the difference from my side is that I’m diversified and I think that that’s the way I suggest people go too, to start spreading across multiple sites, even if it was joining a team and forming like a small network or alliance where you have 10 sites that you’re all working on together in some shared way.

Yeah. This is not an operational technical insight like you want, but this is just what’s coming up for me. There’s a concept called the network effect that’s on Wikipedia, and it talks about the value added to. System when there’s a new member that joins, not from economies to scale or cost reduction, but from the value of the, the added member, like the telephone.

Mm-hmm. , you know, whenever the telephone was invented. Each traditional telephone makes the telephone in general more valuable for everybody. Right. And I, I personally think especially with the rise of ai, that smaller, newer content site operators should think about the network effect. I’m not saying you have to go join a little team and put all your shared equity in the pot, and then no one knows whose group project it really is.

But I do think if you’re a young content site operator, you can’t really think yet like an entrepreneur unless you’re 

Jared: a part of a. So I’m hearing you say is that there’s a ton of value you know, in having multiple websites that you manage. And, you know, if you’re not at a point where you can get to those operational efficiencies, you know, even consider trying to find a way to mimic those operational efficiencies.

Forrest: Yeah. Which sounds a little crazy, but that’s what’s coming up for me right now. I think in the early stages, the only other technical advice I could give would be kind of like Michael Gerber suggests and the EIF revisited to map out the, the hierarchy of your whole organizational system of what you want five years from now.

So if it has the chief executives and the board of directors and then managers, subordinates and all that, map it all out and write role descriptions for every single. Role and then write a contract for every single role and sign every contract yourself. Or if you have a partner, each of of you sign on the roles you’re gonna take on.

But to treat those three distinct personalities inside yourself, the technician, manager, entrepreneur, as already there from day one. And to think of it like you’re already there. So start moving into the state of consciousness that you want to be in in the future now, and then work as though you’re already there.

So treat the subordinate forest like, Hey, why didn’t you get that article done today? You know, it’s time or whatever you, whatever you need to do in your own mental playground, do that because thinking toward the future and then creating it with your energy, I think is the name of the. 

Jared: Split personalities all over the place.

Right? Oh 

Forrest: my gosh. Yeah. I , . 

Jared: Let me let me take it from a really high level question and now get into a nitty gritty question. How do you decide operationally where to put time across the 20 websites that you have and the projects that you’re going after? I mean, you’re monetizing through both, you know, ad revenue through affiliate revenue.

How do you assign your, your team out in terms of a website? And, and, and, and how do you like, prioritize what content gets written and, and the comp complex? Cuz it gets complex, right? Like each website is complex and then when you have 20 of them, I’m curious how you make those decisions on a, on a micro level.

Yeah. 

Forrest: Great question. We have shifted a couple of times even in the past 12 months, but again, I’ll shoot you straight. Those decisions were initiated by the director. Brought to me, we conversed, we analyzed, and then we made a decision. But it’s, it was still, you know, his idea and his follow through too, so full credit given him.

But one of the things we shifted was we sort of had a model where we treated my portfolio as though it was a client, or each website was a client. So they need those two cylinders of content and link building, and then they need someone somewhat overseeing, you know, the manager, the managerial SEO director, needs to look over everything every now and then and make sure everything’s tightened and things like that.

But what we found is that on some of the websites that needed higher quality links, in particular, our link building strategies needed, Another tier up. So we regrouped and formed small teams for each blog now. So every blog has kind of like a director of its own, and those people get training in multiple departments instead of just one.

So each director of a blog is trained in how to do harrow links, how to reach out themselves and things like that. And that so far not only gets better results for us, like we get more links built, but they generally have a lower cost too. That’s one shift we made. And honestly, I wish I could tell you guys more.

Like I, I wish there was a video I could, I could send you from MQ on how he did that cuz the technical super nitty gritty things, I don’t know the answer, so 

Jared: Fair enough. The, the, the, the true answer from being the entrepreneur of the business, right? , 

Forrest: just like I look at the reports and I do, you know, if we need to have a conversation.

And I need to analyze it with him. We do, but it is largely driven by him. Now 

Jared: you, you’ve mentioned the word or the, the acronym, K P I or key performance indicator many times, and it sounds like you have gotten accomplished it really managing from a dashboard, if you will, and really understanding what’s important to the business and trying to stay in your lane in the management role.

What are your KPIs today? Are they still the same two KPIs you referenced earlier and why did you pick the KPIs that you have? 

Forrest: Yeah, so in the reports, I just look at number of words, published, number of articles, published revenue from which categories. And then sometimes we make, you know, investments into building links to certain cornerstone articles or newer important silos.

So I’ll, I’ll review KPIs that, that have to look at like those high level things. And then if there’s a special report that’s just the last page, like here’s a special report when we do new things, like we just started producing video for YouTube last January. That’s kind of a new process. So I’ll step in more and build a new report for that.

But you know, for new stuff also, I’ll just sometimes go in and click around and find it myself, cuz I don’t want the app to spend too much time on it. But yeah, I look at RPMs for each site over time, mapped out on a X YIs over time. I do sometimes go in and look at the fine details of which individual pages have higher RPMs than others, and toy around with experiments with paid ads.

One time I had like a Facebook ad to a DIY gardening blog that somehow was costing me like less than a penny and a half per click, and the RPM was at 28 or 30, so I thought, oh my gosh, I can just send traffic here and retire, you know? But it only lasted for like a month. 

Jared: Must have been a good month. . 

Forrest: It was a small, small.

Jared: I, we, I just got done interviewing an individual who’s talked about Facebook ads for bloggers. So that episode will either have already gone live by the time this one does, or be going live very soon. A little tease there. Nice. Very interesting insights. You might wanna tune into that one. 

I 

Forrest: will. I mean, if you can build more value per visit, you know, not just like the display ad, but if it’s a high value page, I can totally see how you could scale 

Jared: that.

Yeah, it’s it was very fascinating. Opened my eyes and certainly got my, got my wheels turning. Okay. So those are the KPIs you look at. Talk to, I, I really would like to learn from you as we start to wind this down a bit because I think. Our industry, all industries are, are like this. But you know, we get back into technician mode very easily where a lot of us do website building because we have a passion for it, because we enjoy it, because we actually enjoy all the technical side of things and it’s very easy.

E even if you’ve made the decision to step back and hire people to help you, it’s very easy to get back into it. And this might not necessarily be hiring an SEO director or an operations director. It could even be getting in the business of the writers that we hire. It could be, you know, getting too deep into maybe link building with someone you’ve hired or et cetera, et cetera.

Right? Like, what can you share that’s helped you? Truly stay out of other people’s business and empower them as leaders rather than kind of getting in the way of what they’re doing because, you know, you wanna get back involved. 

Forrest: Yeah, man. Great question. And it’s not, it’s not easy for me all the time, but I do think one advantage I have as being extraordinarily lazy in a certain way, like for real, I think the fact that I have had this clarity, like I don’t really want to be doing a whole lot of technical work in my life.

I love learning, but it’s this weird thing for me where as soon as I mentally master something, my energy just plummets. It’s like I can’t lift a finger to do something in that world. So, you know, embrace your inner lazy a little bit. That’s one small reference, but I think when you said earlier, you know, staying in your lane, I don’t think that language a lot, but that’s a great way to say it.

It’s like, you know, respect, respect them, respect that they’re gonna have a learning process that generally might be slower than yours. It might, they might learn at half the pace that you learn at, and that’s totally okay. In fact, they might end up being more of an enduring worker than you because of that.

So the last thing is that, I don’t know about you, Jared, but for me, the times I’m tempted to jump back in to technical components of the business are usually insecure moments. Not insecure in myself, but I’m insecure in something. It’s like this, this area seems like I’m, I’m having less confidence that it’s gonna succeed.

So therefore I need to. Take it over. No, I need, I need to be the one that thinks about it really the hardest, and I’ll probably care about it the most, but it doesn’t mean I need to do something, you know? 

Jared: So it’s much easier to stay outta the way when something’s going really well, . 

Forrest: Exactly, yeah. It’s like got your reports, all the lines are pointing up.

But when they point down, and maybe if I had a stressor earlier that day or earlier that week, those things impact me the most on that exact topic. Like, that’s totally been a journey for me that you’re talking about. So yeah, I just notice it first, like, oh, I’m feeling insecure about this. Is this really, is there a due cause that this person is not capable of handling that?

And usually the answer is no. They are. They may have had a bad day too. . 

Jared: Mm-hmm. . Mm, that’s good. Where, so where are things where are things going with with, with, with, with your portfolio you looking to grow it? Are we gonna see 40 sites next year and 60 the year after? You know, like what, what’s, what are the plans?

What, what, what is the five year goal you referenced right down five years from now, what’s the five year goal? 

Forrest: My five year goal, I’d love to have one of my, the blogs, I’m, you know, I’ve started from scratch. That’s more of a passion interest type website. I’d still love to build a couple, you know, product ladders that offer real value to a community that I align with and care about.

I still really want to do that. We’re focusing the creative teams energies on the agencies right now. So it’s still pretty new. It’s a year old, but we, you know, we started serving clients and one thing that occurred to me is in my business background with real estate, I did try a couple. Side gigs after Felicity.

My first daughter was born early. I mentioned I tried some consulting and I tried buying a small business locally, and I didn’t really enjoy either too much, so I moved into this. But I’ve never actually built a business with clients. I’ve never grown apart from utilizing capital or capital relationships and then just doing the American leverage thing where it’s like, oh, well, weighted average cost of capital is six and a half percent when I average the debt and the equity and the return on investment for websites is 30% per a year, so I’ll just retire now.

I really actually want to have the challenge to like, okay, I had this. Person I met and that created a relationship that’s really valuable for them and built the business by $25,000 of value. That’s awesome. And that’s felt rewarding in all new ways for me. So the next five years probably look mostly like, you know, the portfolio is the engine for everything we do online.

Yep. I would love it if this next year, in the first six months, we grow the agencies to the point where they’re larger than my portfolio. Hopefully some of those owners own portfolios of their own, and each one is, you know, planting new seedling sites all the time. But I want to diversify the mediums that constantly produce.

So more YouTube videos, higher quality pages, and that kind of, I want to do the product ladder on some of my personal blogs. And I think the next goal, you know, maybe three or four years out, although everything seems to happen slower than I anticipate would be some software sales or some tech like, I think that a WordPress plugin develop for portfolio owners that shows those KPIs we’re talking about.

And even more granular details, like how is each writer performing? Can we give them a score based on how their articles ranked? And just like a dashboard inside WordPress, or if that makes it too heavy, take it outside. But developing something for portfolio owners like me would be a. 

Jared: I could use that plugin if you ever get around to it.

Wouldn’t that be cool? That would be cool. That would be good. Especially if it had some pre-baked KPIs that would help, you know, management. Wow. Forest Tower has gone by in a hurry. I really appreciate Yeah, I know. I really appreciate you coming on. It’s, it’s we’ve had some different website operators who do it at scale on over the last couple of years, and I’m always fascinated by how different each of the conversations ends up going, because you guys all have a different angle that, that you seem to take on it.

Your angle is fascinating to do this interview because it’s so operationally focused and so leadership focused and I really enjoyed hearing a lot of the insights you shared about, you know, kind of some best practices for leadership, for managing, for scaling, for operations. So it’s really been a treat having yawn.

Thank you for coming and, and, and spending this hour with us. 

Forrest: Gosh, thank you man. I hope it’s helpful to 

Jared: somebody. And again, your, your, so your agency, which is set up for bloggers, is dig.co. That’s d i g i t a i l.co. Did I get that right? 

Forrest: Yep, that’s right. And then if you add a back slash affiliate, then there’s a page there for people too.

Jared: Okay, good. Well, we’ll get that in the show notes. Anywhere else that that you’re active that people can follow along with y on? 

Forrest: Yeah, we, we launched Force weber.com two Rs and four two B’s and Weber in June. and , that’s gonna be, you’ve said that before . I know, I always have to say that, but we’re gonna put a lot of energy and focus into that site to help both the new blogger and the new blogger who wants to become a portfolio owner.

So check that out too. Sign up for the emails and I’ll be in touch there. Okay. 

Jared: Very good. Well force, thank you so much. Look forward to catching up with you in a year or two and seeing where that where that portfolio is in, in the meantime all the best. Thanks. 

Forrest: Thanks man. 

Jared: Thank you. Introducing niche sites.com.

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Again, it’s niche sites, plural Niche sites.com/trial. Go claim your free content today. I wanted to let you know that today’s episode is sponsored by Search Intelligence. Here’s a short clip of Ferry from Search Intelligence showing you how their agency built digital PR links to a client’s. In 

Forrest: this video, I will show you how we landed a placement on B BBC and dozens of links in massive regional online publications such as Words Online, daily Posts, and many more.

This PR campaign was about the easiest place to pass your driving test for the first time in the uk.

Jared: This is how we’ve 

Forrest: done it. We simply went to D Value website, found the latest car driving test data by test center, and downloaded the data in a CSB format. Once we had the data, all we had to do is to look at the number of total tests per test center, then look at the number of first time passes to calculate the percentage of people who passed their test for the first time.

Once we had the percentage. We created a press release with our findings. Then we went to Rox Hill and found journalists who talk about driving tests and also looked for journalists who write in regional publications in the uk. In total, we have found about 1,800 journalists and sent them our press release by email within less than a day.

Our story got picked up by PBC Cornwell, life Wells online, and dozens of other publications in the UK providing our client a tsunami of back links. Perfectly relevant to the audience of the client who is a specialist in learner driver car insurance. I hope this video is helpful and it shows you how you can also build links with freely available data from official sources.

Jared: If you want similar link building PR campaigns for your website, head to search-intelligence.co.uk and get in touch with them now.