Acquiring Domains to Boost Traffic: A Discussion with Brett Helling

Welcome to the Marketing Growth Podcast. I’m Shane Barker, your host for the show, and today, Brett Helling is back with us to discuss how he grew his website traffic and revenue by acquiring other domains. I was reading up on you a little bit, and this is the reason why I want to ask some of these questions about growing organic traffic from domain acquisitions, which is really interesting to me because I know that a lot of the sites you’ve built, and I can tell that you go after a certain niche and you’re able to crush it and drive traffic, and look at SEO and a number of different things. But I want to talk to you about your opinion on domain acquisitions. For the people in the audience that don’t know what domain acquisitions are, why don’t you give us a quick little definition?

So you get it. I got some questions here. How do you, if you can tell us this, awesome if you can—how do you find those sites? Is that something you go to expired domains on Google and then look to see if it has any page authority, and then check the backlink profiles? What’s your strategy there?

So, it’s funny—I do some of the same stuff with domain acquisition. Do you have a sweet spot? I mean, obviously you’re looking for someone who’s looking to get out of the business, and there’s a coffee website that’s mainly informational, with some backlinks, and you’re like, “This fits into your portfolio with your other four sites.” I’m just curious on that, because I have purchased some domains as well for different reasons, and I’m curious. Flip is one of the places I look, and obviously Empire Flippers and there are some others out there that will package them up. Is it like, do you, on the coffee website, go and say, “I’m going to spend 50 grand on whatever websites,” and then you found the websites and bought them together? I’m just curious there.

Awesome. So that’s the thing, and I’m with you. I just started reading a book on buying existing businesses because you talked about multiples and stuff like that, which is something I’m really getting into right now because I like buying businesses myself, and so you gotta look at the multiples, and you buy something at a two multiple, and what can you do to get it to a three or four or five multiple? So we might be touching base outside of this podcast, too. I can tell we’re gonna have some synergies. You never know. I might move to Omaha, or that might be that big of a thing. That’s what I’m talking about—that’s the kind of friendship we’re gonna have. My friend, I don’t go halfway. I go full in. I’m like, six months in Omaha, Brett and I hanging out buying domain names and buying domains and websites and businesses. So I love that.

So Brett, before we move on to the next question, please allow me to pause our conversation for a minute and tell our listeners about the services my team and I provide. Guys, if you listen to this and want to leverage digital marketing channels to grow your website traffic, targeted leads, and lead page conversions, we can help you do that effectively. You can visit my website, shanebarker.com, that’s S, H, A, N, E, B, A, R, K, E, R.com, to get more details about the services we provide.

And now let’s ask Brett, what’s the downside of doing domain acquisitions? I’m trying to think—what’s the downside to doing domain acquisitions, right, to go in and buy these businesses from Flippa or from other websites? What’s the upside? I mean, the upside, obviously, is backlinks, and what you look at is keywords and where’s the starting point? Are they indexing, and then what are some things that people want to start doing this? What are things they should watch out for?

Yeah, that’s… Go ahead.

And then for you. And when you say that you, you know, you buy, like, like, bought the five coffee sites, is that, and that’s all self funded. You don’t have loans out or anything. And this is all, you just pay cash for them, and then they’re yours?

Awesome, awesome, cool, cool, cool, yeah…

Yeah, gotcha. So you take some risk, but not a lot of risk here. I mean, you risk adverse, which, of course, we all want to be that, but that’s awesome. And I think that’s cool. It sounds like good things are happening there.

And then, what about what you’re implementing? What about any kind of growth hacking strategy when it comes to domain acquisition? So you talked about merging the sites. When you say merging sites, does that mean you have all four sites that are all informational about coffee, and then you’re like, if they go to this article, then you’re sending them to the main article, like a pillar piece of content on the main site? Or what do you mean by merging? By merging, do you mean those sites become one so that it’s 100,000 visitors? What was the plan there for your growth hacking strategy?

Gotcha. Gotcha. So what you did is, pretty much, you grab all the promo sites, strip down the content, put on the new thing, and then do a redirect to all of it, which makes sense. Really, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with that. You’re just taking content that was indexing, putting it on your main site, making that the mega site, and pushing everything over there. I think that’s brilliant. I can’t wait to see, and then you’re monetizing the coffee site by what is it? Just affiliate-based stuff. What are you doing there?

I love it. You’re reverse engineering it. You’re looking at it and saying, “Why go and make this XYZ type of coffee when I can just look at the data?” Everybody’s going after this, and this is what I should be doing. I love it—it’s data driven. That makes total sense to me. But what’s funny is, most people don’t look at that. Your brain works very differently than most. I’ve interviewed a lot of people and talked to a lot of people. You look at something, figure out what your goal is, and then reverse engineer what you’re going to have to do. I think it’s very, I’m going to say unorthodox, just because people don’t think that way. But that’s what makes it unique about what you’re doing. You say, “Okay, you want to retire,” which you don’t. You look great, though—you look young, bro, like Cody. I just turned 30. You’re 30, so you’re going to retire in—I mean, maybe you want to retire when you’re younger, but let’s say you retire when you’re 50, which is probably not going to be the case, unless you’re a crazy entrepreneur like me, and we’ll just keep going until we die, which is probably what’s going to happen. But yeah, that’s the goal. I’m gonna die trying to retire.

That’s what’s interesting to me: with the gold being the coffee thing, you bought that to invest, knowing that in four years, three years, two years—whatever that number is—that thing will be up and going. Now you can start doing an import-export because you already know you can drive traffic online, because it’s already happening. And then you can do a brick and mortar or handle distribution with the coffee. I love that. I think it’s a good way to go. You build the foundation first. Most people will go and start a coffee company, and then build a website, and then they have to go and try to get that going. You’re looking at this thing going. I can get the coffee, that’s not a problem. I can get a brick and mortar location, that’s not a problem. It’s the traffic online that I want to continuously have—that will make it so the traffic is there, then I can always have those sales, and then the brick and mortar, or anything else, or my distribution can be all done through there. I love that, man, that’s awesome.

No, yeah, it’s—I mean, you’re building the foundation. I did the same thing with speaking events that I would go to—I finally, we go and write a book. And the idea of writing the book isn’t for sales, it’s to show people, “Hey, I gotta get this guy on stage because you wrote a book.” So it’s that instant credibility. You’re gonna go in and negotiate a price, and they’re going to say if you were a brand new place and fresh to the game, you’re not going to get the best price. You’re going to say, “Listen, my website’s thriving. A million people a month. You absolutely need to be on my website.” This is probably to help your business. This is less about helping me, more about helping you. Because I have all these people coming in getting information about coffee. How would you like to be there? Give me the best price, and we can make it happen, or an affiliate, or whatever you want there.

So I love that you kind of reverse engineer things and show that the need is there, and then you go and negotiate the other side of it. I love that. I think that’s awesome, man. I love the way your brain works like that. I think that’s, once again, very different.

Thanks, Brett, it’s been great discussing how to acquire domains that are already doing well in terms of traffic and rankings and turning them into something big. I’m sure listeners would now consider doing things this way and buying domains or businesses to scale them. If you’re enjoying my conversation with Brett, stay tuned—you’ll join us for another episode to talk about downturn economies.