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Want to escape the 9 to 5 rat race but struggle to come up with good business ideas?
This episode is for you.
Peter Askew got into the internet business working for .com startups in the late 90s. Due to a series of bad experiences though, he was pretty much forced into entrepreneurship (his words). Thanks to this, over time, he developed an awesome ability to create opportunities by acquiring strategic aged domains.
This is what he dives into today which you don’t want to miss!
Watch The Interview
Peter’s strategy is really cool and the interview covers a lot of interesting stories and insights from his journey.
It all started when he acquired the domain duderanch.com, which became the cornerstone of his success.
And while growing it – he learned a lot of lessons about diving into a niche that have continued to help him in all sorts of ways. He talks about attending industry conferences and fostering relationships with ranch owners. And how these real-world relationships translate to online business growth.
Over time, Peter continued to grow his site’s directory-style business by improving rankings and revenue. And he discusses some key insights from various metrics, regarding his site’s design, imagery, and brand reputation.
It hasn’t been all successes though.
He also shares how important the niche is for success with this model – highlighting the expensive lessons he learned after acquiring ‘birthdayparties.com’.
Peter also discusses the growth of his job board in the ranching industry, and his DTC onion project.
These are projects that highlight his ability to compete with comparatively massive companies thanks to his domain strategy.
Overall his story is really inspirational. And one that highlights the sometimes overlooked techniques that can be used to grow nearly any business. And is an episode that is absolutely worth watching.
Topics Peter Askew Podcast Covers
- His background in .com businesses
- Being forced into entrepreneurship
- His unique strategy for buying aged domains
- Finding underserved niches
- Importance of talking with customers
- The business models he prefers
- Monetization techniques
- Finding low-hanging fruit
- Bringing business offline
- Competing with much bigger companies
- And lots more…
Links & Resources
transcription
Jared: All right. Welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman. Today we are joined by Peter Askew. Peter, welcome.
Peter: Thank you for having me.
Jared: You know, I think we already almost recorded an entire podcast before we started recording just by catching up and talking. Um, I, I finally had to stop our conversation.
Oh, let’s just press record. Cause this is too much good stuff. Um, I’ll intro you really quickly, cause I think it’s such a cool story. So for those of you who, Listen every week to the interview section. Obviously, we’ve been doing this for many, many years. Spencer for 10 years. And I’ve been the host for a couple of years of interviewing people who are succeeding at different projects online.
But we do have a Friday episode we do every week. Spencer and I talk about the latest news. And one of the segments is weird or inspiring niches. And your website. Came up unbeknownst to us that you owned it or anything. And someone reached out to you and said, Hey, Jared and Spencer are talking about this website.
You should listen. So we got connected and we’re here to talk about that website. We featured a couple months ago. Um, and whatnot. So it’s super exciting, but before we get into all that, why don’t you tell us a bit about your backstory? You’ve got a long history in this space and tell us a little bit about yourself and then we’ll, we’ll get into it.
Peter: Yeah, sure. I’ll tell you this answer changes almost every, it changes slightly, but yeah, no, I’m a, I’m an old, uh, like, or late nineties. com, uh, uh, like flame out. Essentially. I came into the. com world, uh, during the startup age in the Atlanta, Georgia area here in the USA. And, um, And got into that world, dipped my toe into the internet and became quickly hooked and, uh, pushed all my chips in this world.
Didn’t have a coding background, didn’t have an advertising background. I had a history degree from college, um, and my college had a lot of writers that came out of the college. So I enjoy, I’m not, I don’t classify myself as a writer. I like William Faulkner. He, he hung out at our school. I went to a school called Ole Miss.
And so we have a lot, a long string of writers at the school. So I like jotting things down, writing, um, from time to time, but I don’t mind writing content when I need to, but, uh, the web hooked me very quickly. So I had to start cobbling together all these weird, unique aspects of the web, like how the web works.
You know, how do you build a website? How do you hand code HTML? And I’m not a coder, but I taught myself some of the basics of coding. What is a database? What is graphic design? So, um, started going through that world. Uh, and over the years kept continually being laid off, uh, by companies, uh, by mismanagement, by corporate, uh, uh, red tape.
Out of no fault of my own, I had several instances. One of my first dot coms, I, I built a product that was generating extra millions for the company. And after I launched the product, uh, for the company, six months later, they lay me off and keep my assistant to continue running when I was building. And that, that continued over the years and it kept.
Uh, it kept bothering me severely, and, um, I realized that in some ways I needed to save myself. So at that point, I started really going into, um, some of the coding, how I need to learn all these aspects of paid search, SEO, analytics, what models on the web tend to generate any level of revenue. What type of projects can I build from scratch in order to save myself?
Um, so I started doing that over the years and I don’t want to go so far into a backstory, but started building projects and found I enjoyed using really interesting niche. com domain names as. Sort of inspiration buying a domain first without really an idea, identifying a domain, some typically through the expiration process, using the descriptive nature of the dot com domain as inspiration for the project and wedging in a business model into a domain name and use the domains, trust and authority sort of.
Um, to build projects around and I had some level of success, many more failures than success, but found some, to your point, yeah, weird niche projects that were not only fun to operate, found really interesting communities to serve. And over serve, uh, the one you were mentioning, dude, ranch. com was one that was oddly fascinating.
I had friends in college that worked at dude ranches. I was a counselor at a camp in the mountains of North Carolina. They were out in Colorado working at a dude ranch and we would mail each other letters, just bored, mail each other letters. And so I was very familiar with the dude ranch vacation industry.
Uh, the do ranch domain expired. We can go into this, but long story, short background, uh, dot com, burnout, a self taught coder and kept getting laid off. So I had to kind of save myself. So I just, uh, turned into an entrepreneur. Didn’t have dreams of being an entrepreneur. I was. Pretty much forced into this corner and found out I sort of liked it when I was here, um, that I wasn’t exposed to this risk of, um, uh, being exposed to mismanagement or poor business decisions.
Now it’s all on my shoulders. Now I gotta make the good decisions and make sure I take care of my customers. And I’ve found over the years, if I simply just focus on taking, taking care of my customers tend to be okay. Um, and kind of focus at it, at it from that standpoint, and I’ve been doing it. I don’t even know how long I’ve been doing it.
Uh, oh 4, 0 5 I started buying, uh, domains. So I’ve been doing it that aspect since oh 4 0 5. I mean, I got into the web in 98, 99. Very wordy,
Jared: wordy background. Yeah, I love it. I mean, uh, with a history 25 years long, you know, I think you did a pretty good job, a pretty good job condensing it to what you did.
How did you, because, and we’re gonna talk about dude ranch.com is certainly what got us into the interview here, and we’re gonna go into detail, but I guess from a high level, before we dive into that site. You do have a history of picking very interesting niches. You kind of commented on it. You do have a history of kind of niching down, like what prompted that approach because it’s worked for you.
We’ve seen it historically work over time in this space, but like what initially caused you to focus on those things and kind of zero in on some, some of the more interesting, almost sub niches of the world.
Peter: Yeah, uh, I am really a, a product of the expired domain name market. Um, I got oddly addicted to this process of monitoring expired domain names every single day.
So roughly every day, 50 to a hundred thousand dot com, or just domain names in general are expiring and going up for auction. All the domain registrars will put them up for auction before they re release them out for public registration. And there is an odd sub niche of business people or entrepreneurs that, uh, that is, and that’s all they do is buy and typically sell.
They try to buy low, just like real world real estate, but they’re treating it domain names from an investment standpoint. And I oddly got hooked on that in the early days, not with an intention to build, just fascinated with the industry. Like, how does this work? How can I buy? Can I buy, maybe flip a name, buy it for a hundred, maybe flip it for 250 bucks.
I tried that. I wasn’t very good at it. And I found it sort of boring. I tried to buy and you can do what they call parking. You can buy it and see if there’s any existing traffic and put up a. Park page that’s plugged into AdSense and get a percentage of the click revenue coming from any of the traffic that’s coming from that specific name.
I did that kind of found it boring and wasn’t very good at it, but then I had enough of a development background where I thought, well, let’s just see. Maybe I just try to wait. And be very patient and see if an interesting domain pops up at auction. And you’d be surprised at the quality of good. com. So if you’re simply patient and just watch patiently, watch, I took me a year and a half waiting for dude ranch.
You sit and watch and monitor the I prefer. com. com everything. I, uh, focus on, uh, just the expiring, uh, world and. And you essentially go to the, uh, different marketplaces. There are different marketplaces you can go to, to monitor, uh, the inventory coming up for auction. If you just simply wait, I love that old movie called crouching tiger, hidden dragon, where you’re simply just sitting there and waiting and just monitoring and then running through you’re essentially a mini VC.
You’re looking at each domain that’s coming through and you’re trying to run many business models for each name that’s coming through is the word. Uh, is it too wordy? Is it my dude ranch? Well, I don’t want the, my, I want dude ranch. com or is it, uh, you know, another word that’s too wordy or has a dash, maybe has a physical number in it.
And. Or if it is a good name, okay, what is the background of that name or that industry? Is it a large ticket item? Is a lot of money maybe changing hands? Is there a way for me to serve that industry in a unique way and serve the audience and the business owner at the same time? And, uh, at some point I made a shift to that focus.
Let me just sit and wait. I was still working nine to five. So I was working nine to five. Um, at we were at a small, uh, product startup. We were building stuff for the paid search marketplace for, we still had overture in those days. So it was overture AdWords, find what they were still around. We’re building a software platform for that.
I’d go home in the evening and even during my lunch breaks, I was looking at expired domain names. Um, and then dude ranch. com it expired. Um, and it’s, I was familiar with it. My friend worked at one. And then I started digging into the industry. Average ticket price for a family of four vacation. You typically stay a week at a dude ranch, 10 to 20, 000.
It’s a large ticket and it’s a vacation category. I, I, I love the vacation category cause I can turn my business into a vacation. I love the American West. I love any excuse to go out to Jackson hole or Denver or Aspen or, uh, Dubois, Wyoming, uh, Anywhere out there. I love going out and getting exposed to that culture as well.
And once I run, ran some of the rough numbers, I’d determined, okay, this could work and I could build a, I could be another resource where, uh, vacationing public could utilize my directory. I could capture all the dude ranch vacations, get kind of nitty gritty information and create a low level, just a directory to help push people in the right direction.
If they’ve been exposed to a dude ranch vacation, but they simply just don’t know where to go. And maybe I can help point them in the right direction and be another service for the dude ranchers to utilize and cross my fingers, see if I can charge the dude ranchers a yearly fee to be included, or maybe have a premium listing on my site, or maybe a banner that runs across the entire website.
If it’s say a dude ranch in Idaho, um, where most folks default to Montana, Wyoming, Colorado for a dude ranch, but there’s some beautiful dude ranches in Idaho. So an Idaho ranch is like, dog gone it. Nobody is thinking about a dude ranch in Idaho. So I give them the opportunity to have a banner ad on the homepage saying, Hey, we have some beautiful do ranches in Idaho.
Consider it. Maybe it’s a little bit less expensive. Maybe you’re driving from Seattle and it’s a less, it’s a shorter drive versus driving all the way down to Colorado or to Jackson hole or even to Montana. Just give them other opportunities. And so I had, at that point I had enough graphic design experience.
I could just create their own banner. They didn’t even have to lean on, uh, Uh, you know, some fancy agency to make a fancy banner. I could just, they’re the photographs they have from all the dude rangers is so beautiful. I can just take a photograph from a dude ranch, get their logo with a transparent background, and maybe add city state to the, to the, uh, to the banner and create their own banners for them if they came on board with me.
Yeah. So that the expired domain name market, uh, was, and, and still continues to be. I monitor the names prior to our call today. I was just. It’s almost like my morning or daily paper whenever I have five or ten minutes, I just open up and start scrolling through the list. And oftentimes on my little Twitter feed, if I find an interesting one, like I can’t develop them all.
So if I find a really interesting one, I’ll just share it on Twitter. Say, here’s an interesting domain, like domain development idea project. If you’re looking for something like I found one rockinghorses. com recently, it was either plural or singular. I can’t remember. I think it was. Uh, plural, but I was like, what a cool, but what another interesting niche?
Uh, you could either make the rocking horses or find some boutique artists or craftsmen who’s making like authentic wooden rocking horses. And you could maybe be their, uh, e commerce wing. They could focus on making them and you could focus on selling them. And maybe you get a cut of the sale to help bring their business online, possibly.
Um, Different models to run through your head, but the exploration market is fascinating to, to run through. And it can give you ideas because I didn’t have ideas for any of these projects. And so it started inspiring me to consider industries that were never on my radar. Dude Ranch was never, I’d never even considered jumping into that industry.
Similar to some of my other projects. I’ve, I found that. Lightly absurd aspect of it. Very refreshing and that I enjoyed swimming in those waters, um, and being able to acquire, you know, a premium. com name was wonderful as I’m solo, or I have a few contractors that I work with, but being able to buy a. com and.
Coming in with that muscle on an industry where I don’t necessarily need permission to come into an industry. If I own the name of an industry, I, in some ways have enough clout and, uh, authority just because I own the. com name of the industry to be able to come in. And, uh, And I don’t want to say represent them, but, um, represent the industry in a, in a positive light.
And, and, uh, yeah, utilize that. com from a good business perspective and kind of represent the industry from a good perspective as well.
Jared: I mean, do ranch. com like you, you kind of called out my next question. It’s, it’s an iconic domain because it, it almost. Dash is no additional words. No additional phrases.
Dot com TLD. I mean, you got a, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, industry cementing domain. Looking back on that, like when you find these types of domains, rocking shares, dude, ranch, like. Are these typically very expensive or are you trying to find them where they’re both anchoring to an industry and, um, quote unquote, a good deal?
You know, like maybe take us back through dude, ranch. com or other ones you’ve found.
Peter: Um, yeah. So here’s the interesting thing on domains. They can get expensive. I knew dude ranch was going to be quite expensive, but I had saved up and I, honestly, I put most of it on a credit card, but I had saved, I was still working my nine to five, so as the worst case scenario, I’ll just pay it off with my salary.
Um, it sold. Uh, for, uh, almost 18, 000 bucks, 17, 949 is what it sold for at auction. And it’s a live auction within your browser. You’re clicking a button on your, you know, on your mouse to raise the bid. And in that case, in most auctions these days, they get extended five minutes. So it can be as long as an hour, an extra two hours, because they keep getting extended as you run, uh, the bids up.
Um, But the neat thing, so these are really wholesale prices. So I, in that case, I was big bidding against domain investors who simply wanted to buy it and try to flip it to someone else for maybe double, triple, 10 X, whatever they wanted to sell it for. I wanted to buy and build and develop. So I had a different number that I could potentially achieve versus they want to just, they wanted to buy it for 15 sold for 30 to 50 to a hundred.
Essentially. So I wanted to buy it and maybe after my first year, if I could make 25 grand and then maybe the third year, make 50 grand. And now I have something generating 25 to 50 for me every single year. Um, And so that’s how I was doing some of the rough math. I sort of did backwards math. If I can get 10 ranches paying me 300 bucks a year, um, then I can have this generating for me per year.
How long would it take me to pay this domain name off? I can build the whole site myself. So I built the first version all by myself, all on WordPress, nothing fancy. Um, And built it myself, did all the SEO, did some paid search, had analytics on the site, started attending conferences, dude ranch conferences.
Uh, one of the first was in Tucson, Arizona, and then bought a booth and had a tablecloth with big, massive dude ranch. com on the tablecloth. Some of those photos are in my Twitter feed somewhere. Um, And then just started trying to my gut feel was that industry is more of a handshake and I was right. It’s more of a handshake face to face.
I was like, okay, I need to start showing up. I need to start being there. So they know Peter is dude ranch dot com do ranch dot com is Peter. We trust him. He’s at the conference every single year and then lay it on top of that. He owns the name of the industry. Um, and then I wanted to make sure to yeah.
You know, I took care of those ranchers. If they, if they had a hard ship, like we had a ranch in New Mexico that had a big fire. Um, and so I’ve run them for free for an entire year. Like, I’m not going to pull them down because they had to shut down the ranch because they had a big fire coming through. So they already fixed the ranch, but they’re They haven’t saved up enough money from a marketing perspective.
So I was like, whatever, I’ll run you for free. I, that’s no skin off my back. Uh, but looking out for the ranchers, not much to try to wedge myself into that family, so to speak, um, and, and look out for them. But, um, I’ve seen, it’s fun to see. I had, uh, a rough understanding, uh, how much of an impact a good. com domain might have, but it’s, um, it’s interesting to see Um, you know, down in the weeds and, and be able to see the impact, uh, when I was at that conference, we were at a ranch called tank of Verde and Tucson, Arizona, and I had my booth and there’s a legacy dude ranch called Elkhorn ranch.
Um, and one of the owners, Mary Miller came up to my booth and saw my site, shook her hand, I told her more about the site and she signed up. Uh, on the spot for a banner and a listing. And it was, it was at that point, I was like, holy, I was like, holy moly, man. I was like, oh my gosh, this, this could actually work.
Um, cause Elkhorn is an old one, an old school ranch, and it didn’t take much for her to see it. She’s like, okay, the domain. Good looking website. Good enough. Uh, and, uh, and then the banner is only charges a few hundred bucks more for the banner. And then she bit and I was like, okay, sweet. Okay. Let’s keep going.
Let’s now, now it’s on me. I need to drive traffic to the site that is driven to her. So it converts into a booking for her. So I got to make sure I take care of her and, um, and drive leads. Yeah. Her way from that perspective. Did I dovetail way too much off your question? I love it. I
Jared: just want to give you a question and let you talk about it.
It’s great. Yeah. Um, Um, I do want to ask the, like, I want to get into a little bit more about how you built A trend I’ve noticed where you’re good at building directory style websites, which I classify dude ranch. com as a directory style website, although not your typical, it’s just beautiful. It’s well built.
It’s great imagery, all that. So, uh, we’ll get into that, but maybe if you could, before we dive into the details, anything you’re comfortable sharing, like it does very well in search, but as a brand, like, Um, anything you can share about, about what this brand does now, whether it’s from traffic or revenue or a number of, um, of ranches you work with, just any of the high level numbers.
And then I want to ask you about how you built some of the
Peter: details. Yeah. So the crazy thing, uh, and it pushed me back on the course. So I’ll, so. I built dude ranch from scratch, built it over, over several years, gosh, maybe eight or nine years. And then I became friends who ran guest ranches. com and at the time I needed some cash for another project.
So I sold him dude ranch. com. The old version, not the current site because I rebuilt it recently, uh, to, to raise money essentially for this new project that I thought was a slam dunk. I was just going to light it up in this new project. It’s just, it was, the writing was on the wall and it was birthdayparties.
com. I bought it. This is 2019. So I bought birthday dolls, all chips in on birthdayparties. com and I was going to build similar. Directory on the birthday party industry. If you have a kid who’s six years old and where do you take a kid for a six year old birthday party in the Atlanta, Georgia area? What are some interesting spots?
Um, much different market, much different experience than COVID hit. And it impacted that business. Um, and I found a really wasn’t solid spot. I wasn’t solving any problem. It didn’t, I didn’t seem, and the industry wasn’t as receptive as the dude ranchers were. The dude ranchers really did adopt me in and pull, there’s been an interesting dynamic.
I build some of these sites and sometimes I build and there has to be another side where, uh, the industry sort of adopts me or pulls me. And there has to be some sort of relationship there. So I built the birthday parties and the, uh, yeah. There wasn’t that type of, I don’t want to call it a marriage, but there has to be that sort of relationship for it to work really, really well.
Cause I want to make sure I’m serving them and I’m not going to force someone down a business down their throat. If it’s simply not converting and birthday parties never hit that. Not to say that it couldn’t, I think it still could, maybe I’m not the right person for that type of model for that type of industry.
And so at that point, um, my, I was still friends with the, uh, uh, the owner who bought dude ranch from me. So I was, I was in gosh, man, I wish I still had that site back. I should, I should probably buy that bike from him. So I started peppering him with the question. Hey, you want to buy and sell dude ranch?
Don’t come back to me. I’ll give you the X. Twice as much as I sold it for you for, um, and so he, he, uh, he just turned 70. He’s my partner here in guest ranch. He was like, Hey, I think I might just want to sell the whole thing. You want to buy that? I was like, uh, yeah, I’ll, I’ll figure out how to buy the whole thing.
So he had been running guest ranches since 1998 and he already had a book of business. So I was like, okay, I can buy both. Sites back, rebuild both by the book of business, which is very, it’s a challenging business, but it still works. Um, but traffic wise. So I bought both. I rebuilt both over the past year, all on WordPress.
Um, I roughly spent around 200 grand for the entire acquisition. Um, Let’s see, then rebuilt everything. Uh, traffic wise, it’s been doing much better since I rebuilt it. Thank, thank goodness. So I’m getting right now, we have a spike in the dude ranch industry. Uh, in January, everyone starts planning their summer vacations.
So it’s crazy every year spike January. And then June is usually when the season begins, then it starts tapering off right now. I’m getting around 10, 000 visits a month on dude ranch guest ranches is getting about six to 8, 000 visits a month. Uh, so that’s just traffic wise. Um, I’m still trying to see how much this project makes.
We think it makes currently maybe like 50 grand a year, something like that. It isn’t tremendous, but I might be able to grow it. The wonderful thing on it, there isn’t much overhead. It’s just only this heavy investment that I’ve made just to try to get it paid off. Um, so I’m trying to, I’m, I, for the first year, I’m, I’m honestly letting the dust settle to see where I am, who is renewing, who can I get back?
Um, uh, and I had one ranch that had, Previously canceled, but my rebuild, uh, has generated enough traffic where at the, at our most recent conference, we were in Fort Worth, Texas. Um, I saw one of my ranchers there in, uh, in Montana and they walked up and this quote out of their mind, out of their mouth, Peter, I don’t know what you did, but about about six months ago, the traffic from your site, all of a sudden went back up.
I was like, well, thank, thank the Lord. It’s like, well, you know, Ron, uh, I rebuilt the site. So I’m so glad you’re seeing some traffic. I see it on my side. I can see outbound clicks that are hopefully leading to you guys and converting, I’m hoping, hopefully they’re converting. Um, and so he wound up re signing back up.
I was like, okay, one at a time. This is not a spray and pray. This is, it’s a fascinating business. Cause it’s very much relationship driven. And I know most of the do ranchers on a first name basis. I’ve been in it well over 12 years now. Um, and now it is. Uh, and, and they’ll let me know if I’m not doing my job, they would do.
Ranchers are very blunt. I love that. They will tell me if I am not doing my job. And so I like the, it’s such a different model than, uh, some of my other projects, which are sometimes transactional, but they come back every year and where I might have a physical product that I box up and ship out, or, you know, I run a job board for the ranching industry.
So I also serve the ranchers from an employment perspective. Aspect as well. Um, but yeah, that’s rough traffic, rough, uh, revenue that revenue can go up and down pretty quickly. But this one’s similar to my Vidalia project. It’s just something I’ve I’ve kind of gotten into. I really adore the industry. I love exposing folks to this industry because it’s such a great vacation to take yourself or significant other or family members on to get kids Unplugged and get them away from a screen and they can go play in a creek or they go shoot a gun or ride a horse or, uh, go fly fish in a pond at the ranch or go look at the grand Teton mountains.
It’s just, it’s, it’s a fascinating industry.
Jared: I have to say, you’ve got me while we’re talking, just poking around. I’ve got a young family, myself took him to Yellowstone national park two years ago. Beautiful. Got me, got me looking at all these Montana and Wyoming dude ranches here.
Peter: Yeah. Moosehead good.
Check out Moosehead. They’re right in Jackson hole there. They have private property within grand Teton national park. The background on that ranch is fascinating, but the views of the Tetons are just beautiful. In your face. It’s it’s it’s a neat one. There’s so many neat ones. It’s tough to cherry pick
Jared: Oh, it’s so good.
It’s uh, it’s uh, it’s so interesting I think you’ve done a good job with the site capturing the beauty that Most of these kind of embody, um, now let’s talk, let me ask you about that monetization you’re talking about. Um, I mean, in essence, the site structure is a directory. It’s a directory of a lot of different dude ranches.
You have a very interactive map on the homepage. You have filtering. You have, you know, uh, price ranges, you know, kind of like what you would imagine, almost like a, I don’t want to insult you, but almost like a Travelocity of dude ranches, right? Like you really make it easy for someone to segment, sift, find the location they want to be at, find the price range they want to be at.
And you have individual pages for a lot of these dude ranches. So is the pricing model straight advertising where they just pay a yearly fee? Do you get a kickback on any of the bookings? Is that trackable? Is there any other monetization besides just an ad rate?
Peter: Ad rate. Uh, and mainly I stuck with that cause it’s nice and simple.
It’s really what the dude ranch has told me they wanted. It is, uh, a few dude ranches operate on, you know, they’ll deal with travel agents, not a lot, a very small percentage do. Uh, the overwhelming response that they told me on how to charge essentially, which is charges. They don’t want to, you know, they’re dude ranchers.
They don’t want to dig through their log files or look at their analytics to understand how many clicks, how many calls. Okay. Did Joe and Susie convert or not? Now, where did that conversion come from? Did it come from Google maps or did it come from Peter or did it come from the association or what you’ll find when you’re traveling?
I do the same thing. When I. You know, when I research for travel, I’m a fruit fly. I’m going all over the place. Now, where are you going to attribute that conversion from? I’ve been to 10 different websites, which website gets attribution. Like no one’s going to know. I want to be arguing with them. No, I’m the one who drove late.
I was like, I don’t want to do that. I just want to charge them because the branding is worth a lot in my perspective. And that’s what I try to, it’s the branding, the click and the call. And hey, if somebody sees you listed on my site and then goes maybe to the association, they also see you, then they visit your Google page and they see you have a 4.
9 rating. Okay, that’s probably enough background and exposure to your site to initiate a phone call. Now, it helped that you were listed on all sites. Now, whether they clicked on your listing through my site, visited your website, and saw your phone number and called, that probably occurs as well. But it’s mainly just making sure you’re there.
I just want to tell the dude ranchers, like, it’s, it’s, you know, this is a branding exercise to make sure you’re there. And you’re at every small touch point. And I try to make our rates reasonable. It’s usually 500 to a thousand bucks a year to be listed. And then you can stair step up. We have some ranches spending two, three, 4, 000 bucks a year to have multiple listings throughout the site.
Uh, but the base is around five, 600 bucks just to be listed on the site.
Jared: What else have you done to the site besides a redesign? Uh, all the things we talked about, a directory that features, you know, different, is there, is there any other content, any other things that you’ve done from a high level to, to, to grow the site?
Peter: Uh, well, I don’t know if this qualifies, but I, when I visit ranches, I, in the early days, I had it on my iPhone. Now I bought a 360 degree camera, so I’ll go take 360 degree photographs. If you go, it may be on the top menu, 360 degree photographs. So choose a ranch. I upload all the photos to Google maps. So you can drop a pin.
You can see like I visited Barley’s EJ in Colorado and, and I took a 360 near their pool. I was like, that might be something interesting. A family might want to look at is what does her pool look like? So I took one near their pool. They have a zip line across the Colorado river. Which is amazing. So I took a, I took one near their three 60 zip line right at the top and you can see the, the line go down across as the only zip line across the Colorado river, which I didn’t realize they were.
So, yeah, so I’ve, I’ve been doing this so long. I’ve been capturing those. So I have them for a good 15. I don’t know how much traffic has driven me. I think it’s another small feather in our cap just to show folks, Hey, this is, this is a legit, somebody’s, Somebody’s doting on this site, and I want to be the person doting on the site, doing small little tweaks, like who else would a competitor do that?
Unlikely, that’d be kind of expensive for them to fly out and visit all those ranches, versus me, I usually, at least once or twice a year, I’ll fly out to a location, And spend four or five days just driving around to do ranches. Like this year I may go to Jackson Hole. Last year I went to the Denver area and did a big circle around Denver.
Visited Bar Lazy J, C Lazy U, a whole bunch of other ones. Um, And then just like I mentioned, it’s kind of a relationship business. So just make sure I meet with my partners, um, and try to get feedback from them. What am I doing? Right? What am I doing wrong? Is there anything I need to tweak? Um, or what are your pain points?
Maybe there’s something I can shift on the site to address a pain points you’re having, uh, and try to get some feedback and they’re just great people. They’re fun to meet and. Uh, and hang out with, and a lot of times I’ve never been to their ranch. So it always just helps to come see them in their home turf.
And then it’s so much nicer to see them at the conference. Now I know where they’re from. I know what their branch is like and what their focus is. If they’re more equestrian focused or more working cattle focused, or if they’re just a luxury ranch, like Arthur Blank of all people, the owner of the Falcons owns a dude ranch in Montana.
And it’s high end luxury has a spot rivals any relay and Chateau or, you know, five star, uh, I don’t think Conde Nastia Hansen hotel I’ve ever been to has hot tubs, pools, spa, um, and like high end food, all neat stuff. But there are those types of branches as well. So it’s fun to go visit and get a feel of, uh, So I can either pass that along through the site or over the phone if we need, if folks are looking for like a boutique recommendation, we provide a little bit of that.
I have an old friend, an old ex dude rancher that helps out. He does a little concierge call. Like if somebody wants a cherry picked recommendation, they can lean on his wisdom. Um, he’s a two time. Well, excuse me. He’s been a. He’s been the president of the dude ranchers association. And he was the president of the Colorado dude ranch association.
So he’s visited virtually every dude ranch out there. And he knows the nitty like nitty bitty that’s different between every single ranch. I visited about 51 or 52 dude ranches. Wow. He’s visited, I think well over the a hundred and they’re only about a hundred, 125, I believe in existence. There may be a few more that I’m not counting out East.
Uh, But he’s been to a lot and he knows really, really well. So, and he was nice enough to kind of volunteer while he gets paid. He charges a small amount. I think he charges 40 bucks for essentially unlimited time. He says it’s a 30 minute or an hour call, but he he’ll donate as much time as you need to pick a vacation.
So those are, those are some small ways that we try to differentiate and drive extra traffic to the site of those three sixties. Talk about how you’ve
Jared: parlayed dude, ranch. com and you’ve kind of teased a little bit, so you’ve already gone into it, but you’ve, I know on our agenda, we’ve talked about dude, ranch.
com into ranch, work. com into ranch jobs. com. You’ve gone beyond just this website. Um, what are the other projects associated with it? Like talk about ranch jobs. com. Uh, last I could see you did an update on it in 2020. It’s pretty new at that point. Like what’s going on with, with that now? And is it a similar setup just in a slightly.
Shoulder
Peter: niche. Yeah. Shoulder niche. Um, it, uh, and I could bore you to tears with some of these projects. Uh, it was owned by the owner of guest ranches. com. So he and I started working together and then I asked him, I was like, what other projects do you have? This was right before my Vidalia project. I was like, David, what are you, what other domains?
He already bought guest ranches. He hand registered it. I was like, what other interesting names do you have? So he just let me look at his whole portfolio. And in 98, he tried to build. Oh, he did build a job board focused on the just ranching industry, do ranching, cattle ranching, just outdoors employment essentially.
And I have this, if you go to the, uh, if you go to ranch work. com, ranch jobs. com redirects into, uh, into ranch work. If you go to, I think it’s the about us page. I have some early photos of the early, uh, it’s like classic early, you know, excuse me, late nineties, uh, design. Uh, And so he had that, but he had, uh, he had focused most of his time on guest ranches.
So it was, the site site was old and stale, hadn’t been updated. And I was like, this has possibilities. I had a friend in Atlanta that ran a nursing job board and did quite well with it. And I thought, well, my friend Shane did okay on his nursing job board. Maybe I already know a lot of dude ranchers. I can probably help fill them jobs.
I don’t know any cattle ranchers, but. Screw it. Let’s try it. I don’t need much to start this on. Let’s give it a shot. So I talked to David. We did a rev share. I was going to give him, I gave him 25 percent of the revenue. I kept 75%, but I was going to do all the development. He didn’t have to lift a finger.
He kept the domain. I do all the development. He just has to point the name servers to me. I’ll do all the work. As we tried it and the dang thing and instantly started getting traffic. And then I started trying to focus from an SEO perspective, just making sure it was fast and easy to navigate. Um, uh, this was at that time, it was an off the shelf job board theme.
I wanted to make sure it was mobile, uh, responsive. Um, And started taking just one off payment. So it wasn’t, uh, I invoiced most of my dude ranchers. This was plugged into Stripe. So they wanted a job listing. I think at the time I was charging at the start, maybe 25, bucks for a job listing, but also I had free.
They could go submit a job. I would personally curate. I still personally curate every single listing that’s coming through on the site. Um, and so it just started working, thankfully, and it’s generating 90 to 100, 000 visits a month now. Um, usually 300 to 500, 000 impressions per month, and I go up head to head against, yeah, Indeed, Simply Hired, Monster.
Um, and I continue, cross my fingers, just to carve out, it’s a slow carve out, just to slowly bring all the ranchers, but it, Crosses all demands on the ranching side, which I enjoy, I can still serve my dude ranching community, but I also go out heavy into the cattle ranching, equestrian, private ranches, um, and sometimes just recreational ranches that are in someone’s family and they need a ranch manager to stay there until the family comes out.
Uh, to do recreational things on the, on the ranch. So I can fill all those types of jobs, caretakers, um, all those types of jobs. And then I rebuilt it. I bought the site, uh, from him in 2017. I think I rebuilt it in 2013, 2014, if my numbers are correct. Um, But then it was doing well enough. I was like, I need to bring this thing in house.
David, David needed some cash. I was like, perfect. I’ll buy this thing from you and I’ll keep rolling. Give you some cash. I’ll buy this and bring this in house. Um, and then right after that Vidalia, um, expired, uh, the Vidalia onions. com domain expired because I look at that list every single day. I accidentally bought it.
I thought the, I thought the auction was going to go to around five grand. And I threw in a bid around 200 bucks and I thought I was going to be immediately outbid and, and nobody, uh, nobody raised the bid. And so I wanted, yeah, yeah, plural Vidaliaonions. com. And I was like, Oh man, I was like, God, do not have this free money right now.
I do not have it. I’ll dump it on a credit card and figure out. How to pay for it later. And it’s been one of the rare ones that was needling me constantly, needling me saying, you should think about maybe building this out. I was like, what is it? I get what I can’t do a directory. It’s not under really farmers.
And I was like, yeah, I’ll buy those, I’ll buy those pairs from Harry and David every year. Who’s doing that for Vidalia? Who does that really well? Uh, whose ships Vidalia’s farm to door. And I was in the Atlanta at the time. And so it was only a three and a half hour, uh, ride car ride from me. It’s like, shoot, I’ll just drive down there.
Let me see what happens. Let me see if there are any farmers who might be interested in trying this project. And I got introduced to the Vidalia onion business committee and they got it immediately. They’re, yeah, with their, they instantly said, yeah, mail order. We need help with mail, or the entire industry needs help with mail order.
We’ll introduce you to three farmers. So they introduced me to three farmers got became friends with the third farmer I met and he and I gave it a shot. This is 10 years ago. Uh, and we started shipping and it’s the only physical product and it is. And it’s direct to consumer, physical product, and not even just physical.
It’s, it’s seasonal perishable. So if you want to even like multi nation to multi multi nation, yeah, um, but it works, uh, and, and, and some of those, uh, challenges are, are actually advantages. Um, Because it’s very, you can only grow Vidalia’s within the state of Georgia. It’s a very boutique crop. Um, you use a lot of terroir.
You, you can only grow this onion in Georgia and call it a Vidalia. You can take the seed to Texas and grow it if you want, but you can’t call it a Vidalia. We have a unique soil down in South Georgia. That’s very loamy, low sulfur. So it creates this onion. That’s. Uh, uh, doesn’t have as much sulfur and as much pungency as a typical onion.
A lot of my customers eat them like apples, if you can believe it. Uh, and so they’re very easy to cook with. And so we, we started shipping farm to door. And then over the years we had, I think we shipped 80, 000 pounds two years ago. Our crop got hit a little last year. I think we were down to 60, 000 pounds ship last year.
Um, so those tend to be my three projects right now. It’s, yeah, it’s, uh, dude ranch, uh, ranch work, Vidalia. Um, and, but I, I also always do have some just piddle project. I always enjoy just starting something from scratch and, and honestly, it’s almost a, uh, like a re education. Cause SEO, and even paid search analytics, they change so often.
So rather than me reading a book about maybe what’s changed, I’d rather just launch a new project and see, okay, what’s working these days. Uh, do I need to focus on maybe less inbound links, maybe more social stuff or better content? Or a faster site or, um, this type of design element might help from a ranking or what’s a better way to capture new customers always seem to be piddling.
And one of those is savannahwedding. com, which is just a simple wedding directory for the city of Savannah has a lot of weddings down here. So I thought it’d be fun. So I acquired that domain for like a thousand bucks and. it out recently, just as a nice, clean, simple way. If somebody is in South Georgia somewhere, and maybe they’re an hour away, they don’t live in Savannah, but they’re trying to plan.
They just want to know who are folks that I can consider that are somewhat trustworthy, that have been kind of curated, cherry picked and listed on this site. And I can just get an early, uh, like to do list of folks to consider. Some slowly begging it’s a marathon. I’ll just hold that one for probably, I don’t know if I’ll even sell it.
It’ll just be a fun one to have, uh, to build and play with. Um, yeah, as on the side on the side, but the primary three are the really ones that I focus on and my time kind of shifts across them throughout the year. Vidalia season will start in late April, early May. So I’ll be focused on a fair amount, maybe 60, 70 percent of my time.
And then I’ll have a little bit, 10, 20 percent for dude ranch, 10, 20 percent for ranch work. Dude ranch in the summers, late summers, typically goes a little bit more dude ranch when I go visit some of the ranches, but there’ll be times when I’m at a dude ranch fulfilling Vidalia orders and curating ranch jobs at the same time.
It’s weird. Uh, and then, you know, and then I sit back like, what am I doing with my life? Well, I was like, this is
Jared: great. Almost all the projects I’ve heard you talk about are kind of directory based, but to your point, Vidalia onions is not like, you know, you thought about how to create a directory out of it.
I’m with you. I can’t think of a great way. So you went a different direction. How has that been? What’s been different about basically a non directory brand? I mean, this is a true, uh, well, you tell me what it is actually. Cause I have, I have some thoughts about it, but like, What’s different about this and what’s led to it being successful.
What did you have to learn about the differences there to make the Vidalia onion project successful?
Peter: Um, I got lucky in it that the, the foundation of that industry had already been established before I came in. So I was essentially riding the coattails. of a very, very strong brand. Um, the Vidalia industry is considered the caviar of sweet onions.
So chefs around the world just built their praise for this onion. If you watch YouTube videos, they’ll always talk when Vidalia season starts and they’ll say, okay, get a sweet onion. If you can get your hands on a Vidalia, get your hands, if you can’t, another sweet onion will be just fine. So their truck, their authority in the, in the market is very, very established and it’s just an excellent.
Onion to prepare with and to eat just super low sulfur. They’re, they don’t make you cry when you cut them open. They’re this, they’re so low sulfur. Um, and I was already familiar with them. Just, I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have heavy consumer, uh, of them, but I was very familiar with them just being born and raised in Georgia.
But there was a very, very loyal following. Um, so I wasn’t trying to over complicate things. So it is simply trying to find a community that was already lined up at a door and waiting to place an order, but just nobody had opened the door and simply accepted their, their money yet. So when I was reaching, researching that industry, I was like, who, who is serving?
I assume. Customers are looking for Vidalia’s online and I can see that within, you know, any of the search tools who’s searching just for the broad term Vidalia onions. Okay. Is anybody searching for buy Vidalia purchase Vidalia and that search volumes there? I was like, wow. Okay. Some people are trying to buy them.
Who are they buying them from? So I’d search, I’d find some of my existing competitors, one competitor, I think still this day, they have this, they have a PDF sheet and you can go and hit print and you print the sheet. And you write your order on the, on the, on the eight by eight and a half by 11 piece of paper.
You write your credit card number on the piece of paper and you snail mail it to them. And then whenever they get it and they feel like it, they’ll, they’ll ship you some Vidalia. I was like, man, I, I know how to make that easier. I can have a WordPress site as my homepage, and then I can just plug it into Shopify on the back end.
Take the orders and they get instant tracking through my UPS implementation. I can send them updates all along the way. If they place an order on a Sunday, we can ship Monday. And if they’re in the Southeast, they’ll have the box by Tuesday. And so we’re trying to somewhat mimic the Amazon experience. If we can do it West coast, it gets there to four to five days.
We can ship on a Monday and get it there by Friday direct from our farm to someone’s front door. But I was fortunate, but I, that one has taught me where I’m, I try my best. Um, not to overcomplicate some of these, I don’t need a. I don’t need an Uber idea. I don’t need, there are so many small, low hanging fruit projects out there that still aren’t being focused on.
If somebody is trying to build something from scratch, I just happen to be stuck on really good. com domain names. I like starting with that unfair advantage. Um, and I see them as these really strong unfair advantages that give me the ability as a small builder to go up head to head with companies that are.
I mean, 50 times my size, 100, 100 employees versus me and one great domain name. I’ll take those odds every day of the week. You can’t have your junk domain. Give me the name of the industry. I’ll go head to head and use SEO paid search analytics and over serve that customer. And I’m pretty confident I’ll beat them.
And not just now, it’s not to say we can’t both coexist in an industry. Um, but I can wedge myself in and do, I think an even better job than a company, a whole lot bigger, a whole lot bigger than me. Did I answer your question? You did.
Jared: I I’m fascinated by literally, you said it like almost trying to be the Amazon of Vidalia onions.
You know, that’s such a different online experience and so many people listening are going to be used to. I mean, we can get our mind wrapped around directories. A lot of us aren’t doing directories, but. We’ve had a couple of people on to talk about those. Tim Stoddart was a great interview from last year who really went into those depths.
So I can get my mind around that, but hearing how you, how you talk about Vidalia onions as such a different experience, but again, something that probably a lot of people are not willing to do with an online project, you know, you get an age domain and someone’s not willing to rub their sleeves and actually go fly out to meet a dude ranch to meet a Vidalia onion association.
So I think it’s really interesting to hear you kind of walk through it.
Peter: Yeah, well, thank you. Yeah. Um, I sort of noticed that as well. Um, and I’m not to say I’m great at doing it. I just simply tried it. Uh, I wrote an article on how I acquired that dude ranch dot com domain. And there was a, the first conference that I went to, it was some heavy imposter syndrome.
And I just, I didn’t feel like I was like, what am I doing here? I was like, I did. I felt like a fraud. I mean, all the classic traits, but I was like, just whatever. I have the name. Yeah. I have the name of the industry. So if anything, and so I walked up this first dude rancher, and this is in this little essay that I wrote, but from a ranch up, um, near whitefish, Montana called bar W.
Um, and I had my, I had my name tag, Peter, ask you to ranch. com and. And I was like, these dude ranchers are going to understand what I’m doing, but I’ll still understand a rough idea of a directory. And so this dude rancher looked at my name tag and I was like, and Peter asked you and it stopped me. It was like, and he said, how in the hell did you get that domain name?
And I was like, Oh my gosh, somebody gets it. Yep. And I was like, Oh, it’s like, Dave, it’s a long story. I’ll bore you, but it’s a long story. And I was like, okay, okay. They’re that. And I was like, okay, I sort of feel welcome. I, I can do this. Uh, I just need to go and just, uh, yeah, get out of my comfort shell. It can get, you can get in that world, you know, sitting where we are just nice and comfy at home and, and not trying to push myself.
And I oddly do like to push myself into corners where I don’t necessarily belong, but finding a way to serve a specific audience and do, and Videlia is quite different because, you know, Um, a lot of times we speak to some, it’s an older clientele sometimes. And a lot of those customers like to order by phone.
So we have a phone order line if they want to order by phone. And I manned it for nine years. I have my friend finally helping me this year, just with talking to, and they’ll talk to you for 20, 30 minutes, but it’s perfectly fine. I know I’ll, I mean, I was on a call. I did an early call just this season and it was like a 20 or 30 minute call.
And I was like, man, I made like a dollar. And that could, I actually accounted for my time. I was like, whatever that customer is going to come back next year. So I’ll make the money next year. It’s just all fine. And I was like, I’m actually supporting myself with these projects. It doesn’t matter. Um, nobody can tell me yes or no.
Get off the phone with that customer, get back to work. It was like, it just feels right to me. It feels right to talk to them. A lot of these customers don’t like using the computer. Sometimes their vision is impaired in some way. So they just prefer speaking or some people just, uh, Prefer talking to a human being, especially with Vidalia, because they always want to make sure that they’re buying an authentic, a real Vidalia.
A lot of people try to pass off another sweet onion as a Vidalia. They’re that prized. So people try to sell fakes. So they always want to make sure, am I selling the real thing? Are you guys legit? And so oftentimes they’ll try to call and run me through the ringer, ask me questions, where are you? Where are your fields?
I’m like, well, they’re in Tombs County. And we grow them right down. And we have about two, three fields when you harvest. Okay. We harvest these dates and then we are packing shed. We also have a packing shed and our packing sheds here. And now I have a YouTube channel. So now I can just forward them. I saw that.
If you want to watch us, like grow an entire cycle of Videlius, go to our YouTube channel, subscribe. I’ve been. And then you can watch us grow from seed to transplant, to stalk, to harvest, to pack and shed, and you’ll see them going into the box that we ship out. And so we’re still, I haven’t finished that yet.
We’ve been doing that for the entire 2024 crop and it’s been fun. It’s a lot of work, just filming and editing. But I know it’s somewhat evergreen content, which I like, I’ll be able to show and point people that way. If you want to see a peek behind the, behind the scenes, you can see not only the growing, but we have a, a packing shed, not a lot of idea.
Farmers have a packing shed as well. So full pack, we have a, we have a thing called a palletizer, a big robot arm that’ll pick up, you know, 40, 50 pound boxes and stack them up. Then we shrink wrap them. Um, or individual boxes around, but that one is quite different from a customer support standpoint. Very, very different.
Um, slightly similar to dude ranch. Um, but, uh, it is a lot of, uh, a lot of empathy and a lot of listening and making sure those folks are taken care of and making sure those boxes land on their front door and making sure they’re being taken care of.
Jared: There’s a couple of things I want to kind of call out as we come to a conclusion here and, uh, I wish we had like another hour, maybe we’ll do a part two, super fun.
I mean, you, you, you have typically gone into niches where, and I might be overstepping a bit, but from hearing you talk about it for the last 45 minutes or so, you’ve typically stepped in a niches where technology. Is not a big player yet. And you brought that. And so perhaps that’s also helped your projects take hold.
Like I think about the Vidalia onion industry, the dude ranch industry, like you brought a technological solution in a tip, an industry that maybe is more typically, you know, sending over credit card forms and making phone calls. And, and that’s interesting for, as people think about. Buying an age domain and diving into a project.
You seem to have a knack for finding industries that are very underserved in this type of world.
Peter: I would agree with you. Um, that wasn’t done on purpose is more. I backed into those, those wound up happening. Like I mentioned earlier, I’m, I’m simply sharing the highlights. I have so many crashed and burned projects that are.
Uh, in, uh, yeah, that I I’ve shut down over the years. These are simply the ones that worked. Um, and I mean, birthday parties being one, I’ve probably spent 50 on it just to build it up and it went absolutely nowhere. Um, but, uh, it is, yeah, um, I do farming and ranching. Uh, oddly, I, I, a lot of times when folks sometimes ask, you know, what I do for the world, I sometimes just come off.
I just, I, where I’m in the onion, I I’m in the onion business typically. And then if they ask more, maybe I’ll dovetail into some of the web stuff that I work on. If they ask more, I’m ranching, really ranching and agriculture. I’ll start there. Maybe dovetail into some web stuff. Um, yeah, uh, it is. And I think there’s even more opportunity just for other types of Style of farmers that might be selling maybe beef online or maybe other boutique, you know, mushrooms, truffles are fascinating.
That industry has fascinated me, finding an interesting truffle farmer and maybe trying to give them some, um, some muscle online. Yeah. But I’m, I’m such a, I’m spoiled baby. I want my good. com. So I’d want like truffle. com, but, uh, he’s
Jared: got a dash. You’re not going to buy
Peter: it. I’m not going to buy that. I don’t like, I don’t want that instant headwind.
I want, I want the name of the industry. I mean, we had a couple of years after we were in Vidalia, um, I acquired onions. com. So we acquired it from, and just use some of the profit from that year and bought onions. com. And we just have it lightly built out as really a landing page to point people to Vidalia.
We also own organic onions. com, which we just acquired a couple of months ago. Um, But it primarily is it’s primary uses for my farmer, for his email, he uses his first name at onions. com and man, he loves it. And that could be its entire purpose. Just serving as his email address. Cause he gets such a kick out of it.
When he goes to a conference and somebody asks for his email, his name’s Aries and he goes areas at onions. com. And then the farmers are like. Hang on now. How, how did you get that name? He was like, I got a, I think he calls me web guy. He’s like, I got a web guy. He gets all that. You’ll see him in the, he’s in the, uh, in the YouTube videos.
That’s Ares. Oh, that’s great. Well, I love, I love being behind the scenes with him and giving him the muscle that he deserves because he’s so focused on his operation. A man The amount of responsibilities on his shoulders just trumps, whatever these small little knickknack issues that I might run against.
I mean, he’s running a pack and shed of 50 to a hundred people running a, you know, a farm, uh, where it could be impacted by mother nature at a moment’s notice. So some of what I run into is small, but I love being able to work behind the scenes and give him the muscle that he deserves.
Jared: Well, I love what you’re doing.
I’m going to just make a final call out. Just, um, uh, Uh, for the listeners, not to start saying, but obviously a lot of people have heard recently, uh, you know, this will date itself nicely, but a lot of the Google updated their SEO starter guide and made reference to maybe people should start handing out business cars more than they should focused on search results.
And obviously the SEO industry had a field day with that. But if you come out of an hour with this interview with Peter, I think you’ll know a little bit about what Google’s talking about right here. Yep. There we go. I had a feeling. Yeah. You business and it’s doing well because the business is a viable, well searched out, well sought after business and you’re on the ground.
So maybe there’s a little bit of truth to exactly what that was. But Peter, I, this is, I tell you, man, I’m inspired. I, I, I really enjoyed this interview a lot. Thank you for coming on. Where can people follow along with what you’re doing? I know I follow you on Twitter, but where, you know, where do you want to direct people?
Peter: Uh, yeah, Twitter is pretty much where I hang out. Uh, I’m at search bound. I see it’s an old reference to search world. So search bound, uh, S E A R C H B O U N D. Um, yeah, I’ll share domains that expire domains. I try to find, well, I don’t try to share junk. If I find a really good solid domain, that’s currently up for auction.
I actively post those and then I’ll give my two cents. Maybe it could be built as this or that. So I’ll post those or post onion photos. If you want to see if photos from the onion field or dude ranch photos, I’ll share dude ranch photos that I’m sharing, or if I’m rebuilding some of the sites. I try to share behind the scenes just cause I’ve, I watched other people and that inspired me to see what other people were building or, or dead ends they’re reaching or certain aspects that were working on their site.
So I’ve just tried to share as much as I can, um, to give other folks, maybe a small, maybe just take, they take one nugget from what I’m working with, or maybe multiple nuggets for multiple people and try their own project. Cause it, I did not intend to be. An entrepreneur. I did not intend to go down this path.
I was sort of forced down this path and then realized it was where I wanted to be. Um, so I sort of try to inspire that type of person who didn’t quite maybe expect to be here, but maybe to give them a nudge to let him, you know, Give a, maybe a side project to shot. Maybe it’s always just a side project, but maybe it helps pay for your kids college.
Maybe it helps pay for your yearly vacation. That’s wonderful. If you have a great nine to five job that you enjoy, dude, knock that out and have a cool little side project that pays for vacations. That’s wonderful. Mm
Jared: hmm. Hmm. That’s great. Well, Peter, thank you for joining us. We’ll link to the sites we talked about in the show notes, along with your Twitter handle.
And, um, I hope to catch up with you again soon. Thanks
Peter: so much. No, Jared. Thank you, man. I appreciate you having me.