This week, Flippa CEO Blake Hutchison sat down with Matt Raad as part of our Influencer Series to discuss buying online businesses.
Matt is the CEO and Co Founder of eBusiness Institute and with wife Liz, they have been recognised as Australian experts in buying online businesses. Their courses help students to look for businesses that they can buy and build and their platform of choice is Flippa.
In this video interview (see below) he reveals some key insights. In referring to their live events Matt remarked about the ease of using Flippa. “When we run a live event, we love getting onto Flippa and we do it unscripted. We are pretty much guaranteed to find a good deal” (2m:34s).
What are your favourite types of businesses?
“We like sites that sell advertising and the next level (up from here) would be affiliate sites, so sites where we promote a product and then (earn money) get a commission if someone buys it.” (3m.40s). Matt also discusses Ad Sense websites and the success he’s had with those. “It’s where we started and we have made a lot of money. What we are seeing now is that where those Ad Sense sites are in good niches, there is a lot of opportunity.” (3m:15s).
Should you be interested in the subject matter?
“It’s nice to start out in your passion but the reality is you don’t need to once you know how the system works” (5m.00s).
When it comes to website audiences Matt mentions that he loves finding sites that he can drive traffic towards. “On Flippa if we can find someone that’s owned a website for years and they were really passionate about it (but couldn’t figure out how to make money out of it) and they have a bit of an audience following, that’s gold. That is what we want” (4m:28s).
Blake and Matt spoke a little about Amazon and the various business models.
Matt remarks that he’s less familiar with ecommerce but that doesn’t detract from his ability to make money from Amazon. He likes affiliate businesses. Matt gives the example of a dog products reviews website. He notes that an Amazon affiliate revenue stream, in this example, is where reviews of a particular product might convert to an interested customer. In this case, interested customers click off and buy. Where they do buy, the website owner is paid a commission. “A reviewer might do a review of a dog bed and (on that basis) say to customers, ‘BTW if you are interested in this dog bed here is where you can buy it on Amazon’” (9m.38s).” If the customer then clicks this link it is tracked and Matt is paid a commission on the sale of between 4-8%.
For more information around how Matt buys websites on Flippa and monetizes them, watch the full interview below.
Matt Raad is the CEO and Co Founder of EBusiness Institute Australia, a digital training organisation and is passionate about helping others to buy online businesses. Check Matt’s website to learn more or you can connect directly with him via Linkedin.
