Mike Long, an Affiliate Marketer and co-founder of OMG Machines took the stage at Affiliate World Asia in Bangkok to share his knowledge on investing in web properties as a solo affiliate. In his interview with Benjamin Yong, he shared some of the golden nuggets on the subject.

This post, “Mike Long Drops Knowledge On Investing In Web Properties” first appeared on the AWC Facebook Page.

AWasia Interview with Mike Long, Co-Founder of OMG Machines

Introduction

Mike Long:
My name is Mike Long. I am an affiliate marketer, some of the earlier projects I’m best known for is launching the first million-dollar day in affiliate marketing in 2004. Product launch formula in 2005, then the 14 million dollar Stompernet launch in 2006.

Build Your Own Website

Benjamin Yong:
?️ Hey Mike, thanks for joining us today. It’s good to have you, again here.
Mike Long:
Good to be here.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Yeah, so like what I would like to know is that what types of properties are the most attractive to purchase, in your opinion and also, from where?
Mike Long:
Great question. So actually the best thing to do is to build your own websites. You can either start them from scratch in the ballpark, about $10 to register a domain. Sometimes it’s a little bit better if you want your money site sometimes you’ll go to auction and you might spend between $200 to $1,000 for a site that’s already seasoned.

It might be like, let’s say an old radio station website that might already have thousands of backlinks if you wanted to send ringtones or something like that in that marketplace but yeah, it would be anywhere between $10 which is about the usual amount but it can be all the way up to $200 to $1,000.

Websites With Room To Grow

Benjamin Yong:
?️ Okay, what types of properties are the most “Flippa”, you know, that you can actually flip it.
Mike Long:
Yeah, they’re very very sellable. So one of the things when you have a business that’s built on Facebook advertising, buyers know that Facebook ad rules can be flexible and can change. Yesterday, in fact, news came out from Facebook that they decided not to destroy ManyChat. So literally, what they are saying is, we were thinking about destroying all of ManyChat in one move by changing their permission settings.
When you have a website that’s then getting traffic for a year or longer, and it’s been making you constant, passive income, that’s literally what people on websites like Flippa are looking for so the kinds of sites that people want are for example, affiliate sites like let’s say you have a dating niche site and it’s been making $20,000 a month for the last two years, all of a sudden, people look at that and they say “wow this is amazing” and a little tip for you guys that a lot of people don’t know is that the more a website looks like it’s got room to grow, the more a purchaser will pay for it, and the more the bid price will go up. So it’s one of the best ways.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Sorry to interrupt, but how do we know that if this particular website has space or has room for growth?
Mike Long:
So one of the biggest things to do is to stick to the big three – health, wealth, and love. These are the three biggest categories that are wide open and by the way, in many cases, are very restricted and very difficult to run Facebook ads on because the bottom line, for example with health offers, you can’t have a before and after picture with a guy with a big belly and then another guy with a six-pack abs. So those categories are always ripe for a massive amount of growth.

Flipping Web Properties

Benjamin Yong:
?️ Right, so in that case, when you are striking the deals, how do you normally do it? Do you go direct or do you go to a third-party website or service?
Mike Long:
Yeah, Flippa is really great. Flippa is probably the easiest place to go to and then the other option would be a brokering service when it comes time to sell and the great news is these aren’t — again, with your passive money making, Google doesn’t change very much these days. So what that means is once you get a site up and ranked, it’s typically just going to keep ranking.

What that means is you’re the one with the negotiating power, when that site is simply making you money, instead of a site that might be costing you money in reality, there’s a lot of sites that’s costing people money or that are on their way down and it makes it much more difficult whereas with SEO, it’s very easy to either stay steady or to add some more pages to it and even have your traffic be building so your offer, like sometimes during an auction, you’ll literally be raising your price for like a buy-out or something like that because “oh crap, I added $2,000 a month for the passive traffic, well I ain’t going to sell it for $200,000 anymore, now I want $250,000”.

Expired Domains

Benjamin Yong:
?️ Okay, so getting expired domains with quality back-links. Is it good or bad?
Mike Long:
Okay, so expired domains have jumped the sharks. Right around 18 months ago they started going down. What you want instead, if you want sites that already have links, of course, you can go out to people who already have sites, that’s much harder. The better thing to do is to go to a site like RegisterCompass.com and get a site that’s out for auction so that site has not yet expired but it’s in an auction phase.

It may expire or it may be somebody who’s just auctioning off their site but one way or the other, you want to buy the site in auction where the hosting doesn’t expire, the registration doesn’t expire, that creates a blueprint or a footprint that Google is now tracking and by the way, it used to be wildly successful so really two or three years ago —

Benjamin Yong:
?️ You mean they’re actually tracking this down?
Mike Long:
Yeah, it’s not nearly as good. It can work but you’re going to get much more inconsistent results where you’d be much better off either building a fresh new website and building those links or going to auction.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Okay, that’s good to know.

Best Domain Extensions

Benjamin Yong:
?️ Which domain extension, the TLD, is the best to rank?
Mike Long:
The TLD, yeah, the best to rank. Okay. So it’s going to be .com, .net, or .org.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Is there any particular reason why?
Mike Long:
It’s just, remember, Google is an algorithm, and the maker of the algorithm sets the parameters of the algorithm right. Now, the one side point of that is if you’re trying to rank for local keywords let’s say in the UK, then the .uk can be great, the way to determine – but it may not – the way to determine is simply search for the keyword you’re looking for and see what other sites are ranking in that category. Sometimes on tech sites, to get a little bit nerdy, if you have some of this tech, sometimes the .io will work but typically your .com, .net, and .org are just going to get you so much further ahead.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ So this is also applicable for link building?
Mike Long:
It is.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Okay, that’s good to know.

Ranking For Competitive Keywords

Benjamin Yong:
?️ So next question, how to rank for competitive keywords where many established websites have built tons of back-links?
Mike Long:
The answer is to stay the hell away from that. Okay so, for example, one of the things that we show is “buy gold” like I’ve made millions and millions of dollars in sales of gold both directly as an affiliate and by being a kind of super affiliate and bringing affiliates together but at some point, it was probably around 2015, the door started to close on that category and I began to exit, selling off my sites, and letting those properties go. The reason why is, and you’ll see this in the training that we created for you at OMGmachines.com/awa is that there are certain keywords that are a red ocean on Google and “buy gold” is one of them.

Don’t be in that market because there are so many blue ocean ones out there that are wide open for you like I said dating niche is a tremendous, tremendous example where you’re really going to be dealing with websites with much lower authority. You might be dealing with a cosmopolitan.com, which is nowhere near what it is like dealing with NBC.com, NBC will have something like 250,000 links coming into their websites. 250,000 different domains coming in, while Cosmopolitan might be number one and they have like 30,000 links, which is ten times less and then you might even have several websites that you see that have almost no authority at all that might only have 7 backlinks coming in and you’re like, “Woah this is wide open to me”.

You come in there and then what you do is it’s not so much that you’re going to try and rank for best dating site right. It might be much more like best Taiwanese —

Benjamin Yong:
?️ Long-tail keyword?
Mike Long:
The long-tails. You will rank for that “buy gold” oh sorry, that best dating site, yes you’ll rank for that but the best part is that same website is going to rank for thousands of other keywords with inner pages, each of those inner pages. So remember what I talked about in my speech, or for those of you who watched my speech, what I said, so if you’ve got – so, dating tips in the URL of your website, like datingtipssecrets.com then if you have “/Taiwan” all of a sudden, dating tips Taiwan is like wide open for you.

So that’s what you want to do, because there’s so much in these blue ocean keywords, there’s so much of a market place that you can just clobber it and that makes your website – to go back to these guys asking these great questions about selling your website – that’s how you really blow it up and really make a big, big sale, it’s a website that ranks for a lot of keywords.

Benjamin Yong:
?️ Right, okay that’s good to know. Thank you so much for your time today.