Transcript
Welcome to the Blogger Fent Show!
What's up you guys? Famous Ashley Grant here and today I am bringing back a bloggy friend of mine, Kathy Dean. Kathy, welcome back to the show.
Thanks Ashley, so happy to be back.
So the last time that you were here we were talking all about the fact that you were a food blogger and since you were on the show back in, I think it was May of 2021, you have actually acquired another blog. Tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, we just bought a new website. Honestly, it just happened. It's happened in the last few weeks. It's very exciting. It's something my husband and I have wanted to do for a while now.
We've been wanting to expand our digital footprint. We've been talking about buying websites just to for more passive income. The end goal is to eventually retire him and bring him full time into the online world.
And so we're doing that by diversifying our online income and buying a website is one of those ways that we have chosen to do this.
Okay, so buying a website, that sounds like there's a lot that goes into it. So tell us a little bit about what was the process of actually purchasing a website. How did you choose what to buy? How did you choose who you were going to buy it from? What did that look like for you?
So the website we ended up buying, it actually probably worked out a lot easier than just going to a random website to buy. When we started looking at buying websites, I actually was in talks with a girl who had a home decor site.
And she was looking to sell and it was a fairly new website. It was barely monetized. And so I knew if the website wasn't to establish, we wouldn't have to spend quite as much money on it.
But after getting all the numbers and the reports and her analytics and traffic and monetization, types of monetization for the website, the more we looked into it, the more that we just didn't have a good feeling about that particular website.
It just didn't feel like a good fit for us. And so then fast forward like six months after that, and I have a good friend and mentor that I also do work with with her online business, her blogging business, and the website that they were very successful with, they just didn't have as much time to dedicate to that website because their newer website really was taking up the bulk of their bandwidth.
But they were hesitant to sign it because it was like their baby. This is their first big success. And so they didn't want to just sell it to anyone. And they also use it as teaching examples with their current business on the other website.
And so the things just kind of came together. They were looking to sell. I was looking to buy. And so I just kind of approached her and said, hey, you know, if you're serious about selling this website, I might be interested.
So now, are you willing to talk about what the website is and how it all played out?
Yeah. So the website is Avocado.com. It's Avocado with a U at the end. Avocado.com. It's a health and wellness site that focuses really on weight loss and fitness with a bigger focus on the yoga side of fitness.
And, you know, I had already done some work on this blog on the backside of things as a virtual assistant. And so I was very familiar with the website already.
And it also is in a space that I'm very comfortable with, with the health and wellness space. You know, my other website is a keto food blog. So it's focusing on the health side of things.
And so this is already a website that I felt very comfortable with the type of content that's in it and being able to connect with that audience already.
And so got into talks with the owners of this website. And it just, we both, honestly, I think they were relieved to be selling the website to someone they knew and trusted.
I was relieved because I was buying the website from somebody I knew and I trusted. And I know that's not always going to be the case where we buy websites in the future, but for like a first buying experience, it was honestly ideal for both parties.
It sounds like it was definitely like the best of both worlds. Like you said, the fact that you guys knew each other. She knew you, you knew her.
So what were some of the things that were kind of illuminating about the purchase experience? Like what did that look like? Did you ask for analytics information?
I mean, I know you said that you are already kind of familiar with what the website was, but how did it go, I guess, transactionally to actually pull the trigger and purchase the website?
So transactionally, yeah, I did get two years worth of historical data. The profit and loss statement, their traffic analytics or social media analytics. I had access to everything from the past two years.
So, you know, they priced it competitively for what they could get in the industry. And then as a matter of, okay, how do we transition the accounts, the website, what can transition to me? What do I need to open up new as far as accounts go?
Obviously, like their business bank accounts, I'm not taking those. That's theirs. So, and even like they have a course on Teachable. And so on Teachable, right then, everything was going into their bank account.
Their tax ID was tied to it. So it was really working on the back end to make sure that Teachable knew that this was under new ownership. And I needed to go any payments going to this new account. I needed any taxes being, you know, accredited to my tax ID, not the old tax ID.
And really, it was just kind of a one step at a time. You know, the previous owner, she gave me all the logins for all the accounts that were associated with the Avocado website.
You know, there was some domains that had to be transferred over both the main domains that the outside world sees, but then there are also some behind the scenes domains that were redirected.
So there's working with the hosting companies, working with the registrars for the domains. It was, it wasn't just clipping the switch. Like it was a full week long process of me working through the spreadsheet of things that had to be moved over to my name and my account and my tax information.
That definitely sounds like a lot.
It was, it was a lot.
It sounds like a lot. So now you mentioned spreadsheets. So in terms of the logins and all the information, did the person you purchased the website from, did they have all this stuff in a spreadsheet or did you know what needed to be in the spreadsheet or how did that go?
So everything was in the spreadsheet. They used what's called LastPass, which is an online tool for, for keeping your logins organized. And so she basically exported everything to a spreadsheet. So she didn't naturally keep it on a spreadsheet.
She exported all the information for me. And there were a few things that came up along the way that I was like, oh, hey, what about this log in that was on the spreadsheet?
There's a few things that maybe she figured out or thought about after the fact. So there was a lot of kind of going back and forth as both of us kind of thought of things. And there, even after the transition is complete now, you know, I could foresee, you know, the coming months, maybe there's something else that comes up.
They're like, like an affiliate sale for a product that they linked five years ago and they haven't had a sale in years and suddenly a sale comes up and they're like, oh yeah, we linked this affiliate product and totally forgot about it.
So there, there will be some of that, but I'll also be going through all the articles and scraping all the articles and checking all the links in the articles. So I'm sure there's still going to be things that come up that both of us haven't thought of.
Girl, it sounds like you've got your work cut out for you. So I guess my question is for someone who is considering like maybe they want to start a blog, but then they are like, you know what, maybe instead of starting it myself, I'm going to buy it from someone who has already established it. What advice would you give to them?
My advice, first of all, is to make sure if it is an established blog, that there is enough profit for you to not only, because, you know, depending on the size of the website, the age of the website, depending on how much money you spent on the website, you may find yourself paying back a loan.
And so the current profits couldn't be eaten up by that loan. So you want to make sure, I guess you have enough money to pay off the loan plus money left over that you're going to be investing back into the website.
But the other thing to look at is as you're scrutinizing the expenses, especially if you already have other online businesses, are there any of these expenses that can be combined?
Like, does your hosting plan allow for multiple websites without an additional cost? And that was my case. I was able to move this website over to my hosting plan at no additional cost because my hosting plan allows for multiple websites.
That makes sense.
So now I know that and only because you and I have been talking like outside of this podcast, we've been talking about the fact that there were a lot of surprises that came up for you in the purchase process. There were things that you didn't even think of that you were going to need.
Like, you know, one of the things that you had mentioned was, was it a proof of sale?
Yeah, along with the website, I also acquired all the assets, which includes your online courses, but also their physical inventory. I have a probiotic that I sell now through this company called Gut13.
And so it's a physical inventory and it's housed in an e-fulfillment center several states away from where I live.
And so I went to them and I was changing the contact information. I needed to change the billing and the tax ID. And they came to me and they're like, well, if it's changing corporations, this is inventory. We need basically a proof of sale.
In other words, they don't want anybody coming in and suddenly claiming that they own this inventory without proof. And so that was just something I said, this was their first sale, my first buy. It wasn't something that we had thought of.
But luckily, I mean, we had all the proof of sale, the contract signed, and so I had everything I needed. It was just a few extra steps in that process of acquiring the inventory under my name that was unexpected.
So we've talked a little bit about, I guess, paperwork. So contracts and seller agreements and things like that. So how exactly did the contract go about? Did you guys work with an attorney? Did you use a template? How did that go?
So we actually, it's kind of funny because the previous seller, she was looking at an attorney first. But I think that she said the attorney was going to, the starting cost was, I think, $250 an hour.
And they figured it was going to end up being close to $1,200 with all the expected back and forth that would need to go with the contract.
And she made a joke and she goes, friends don't let friends spend $250 on lawyers. So she actually, she went and did some digging and she went to a government website and she found a contract template that she could use and she filled out everything.
And actually, funny enough, there was, as I was reading through the contract, there was one part, there was an acronym or something that was a default and she forgot to change the acronym.
So I did, I did find one thing that I had to go back to her, handing this fix first before I signed the contract. So we had, and again, part of the reason of doing that is because we already had the trust relationship because we knew each other.
If I was buying a website from a total stranger, I would 100% use a lawyer. I would not risk just trusting somebody to go find a government template. But so it was a little bit of a different situation.
So in all of the things that happened, would you do it again? And if you would do it again, how would you do things differently?
I would, I would absolutely do it again. This is, it was very scary. Even though I knew the, you know, who I was buying the website from. It was, my husband actually had asked me several times during that week of transition if I was okay because my anxiety was through the roof.
It was just, it was an unknown. I'd never done it before. But now that I've done it, and even though it was with a friend this time and it will be probably with a stranger next time, I'm going to have so much more confidence going into it.
And so, yeah, there are things, I think just, you know, all their, all their assets, you know, what, what is, where are their assets from? What is required for the different assets?
You know, what accounts can be moved? Like there, there was a PayPal account and dedicated directly to the website. And so I didn't know that you could even move a PayPal account from one person to another.
You know, because like a credit card, you can't just assign to a different person. I wasn't sure PayPal was going to be the same way. And it was a bit of a headache.
And I got a lot of different answers even from PayPal and whether or not it could be done.
But I was able to do it. And so now next time if I'm acquiring somebody else's PayPal account, I can actually go in with confidence in that.
But yeah, I think just making sure you have all the logins, making sure you know for sure what all the assets are, making sure that if they're selling the website, that their assets are coming with it.
In this case, there was inventory that they had already paid for this inventory and now they're not going to realize the profit for this inventory.
Now, of course, some of that was figured into the sale price, obviously, but they could have easily said, hey, yeah, you can have the website, you can have the online course, but we're keeping the physical product for ourselves to sell.
So it's just a lot of that stuff. You just need to make sure you know exactly which parts of the business, if it is only part of the business you're buying or if you're actually getting everything that encompasses that business.
Okay, so one of the things that is coming to mind is, you know, you and I, again, we were talking about this before we even started recording.
And one of the things that you had said is that you intend to keep everything separate from the website that you already owned.
Like you already owned Healthy Ambitions and you now own Avocado.
But one of the things that you were telling me is that you were planning on keeping everything completely separate. Tell me why.
Oh, absolutely, because, you know, I don't know what my future looks like in the blogging world. Maybe someday I want to sell Healthy Ambitions or maybe, you know, five, 10 years from now I decide to resell Avocado at some point.
And one thing I do know is if everything is separate, because even like Avocado has a different Amazon affiliate account than Healthy Ambitions.
And that's something if you have them intertwined together and you can't move that affiliate account. And honestly, I thought I was going to have to, I didn't think I was getting the Amazon affiliate account at first.
I thought I was going to have to change out 5,000 plus Amazon links in the website, which was also causing some anxiety.
And that was actually a relief when I found out that the Amazon account was coming with it.
Doesn't mean I don't need to go and check the links to make sure they're still good.
But yeah, the more separate you can keep separate PayPal accounts, separate affiliate accounts, even though there are certain products that I might can that can possibly promote on both websites as an affiliate.
I'm still going to apply and be enrolled as a separate affiliate for each website, because if you ever do decide to sell, it honestly is just going to make everything so much easier and go so much smoother.
A lot of these things are things that I never would have thought about because I've been in the blogging space since 2009.
And the idea of selling any of my websites, it never even occurred to me because it's all so intertwined and so interlaced that I wouldn't even know how to unpack it.
But you can bet your patootie that I am now like starting to see how I can break it up and kind of break it out so that if any of it ever is going to be possibly acquired by somebody else, it won't be nearly as much of a nightmare as it sounds like it would be right now.
So regarding the website that you purchased, I know you already mentioned that you plan on scraping the content to see if there's anything that you can do with it in terms of like if there's affiliate links, you do need to update even though you probably won't need to
because you do have that point of contact that you can still get in touch with.
What are you planning to do with Avocado? Like what are your plans for its growth?
For its growth right now, the website has primarily relied on Pinterest for all of its traffic.
And so my big plan for growing and of course for anybody that's in the blogging sphere right now, most of us know the headaches that Pinterest is causing all bloggers right now.
They've changed your business model and it's not the free flowing traffic that it used to be.
And so my number one plan right now is to diversify the traffic for Avocado.
First and foremost, I'm going to be going through articles and beefing up the SEO so I can start getting more Google search traffic.
And then I'm also getting more content out on Facebook and Instagram.
And it does have a YouTube channel. There's not any videos. There's a couple of testimonial videos, but the YouTube channel already has like a thousand subscribers.
They're probably cold subscribers. And you know, I'm thinking about what I can do with that YouTube channel.
And then of course any videos that I can repurpose into like TikTok or IG Reels.
I think there's just there's so much potential for growth across multiple platforms with this website.
It's going to be a lot of work, but there's a lot of potential outside of Pinterest for this website.
And then of course, I'm going to also start getting some more content written and start producing more content for the website.
OK, so we got to address the elephant in the room. You basically already alluded to it. It is going to be a lot of work.
You also still have a website that you've been working on, the Healthy Ambitions. You've been doing a lot of stuff with it.
Now you have this new website that you're bringing on board into your digital portfolio, if you will.
So how is it going to look in terms of what you're doing in terms of like content production, content creation?
How is that workflow going to go? And how do you foresee it going?
So I thought a lot about that because there's a lot of pieces to manage with any website.
And so I know I do know I don't want to be constantly pivoting back and forth between the two websites
because any time you pivot, you lose so much concentration, so much focus.
So I've been putting a lot of thought into this. And initially I thought, well, maybe I'll focus one day at a time on each website and just go back and forth each day.
Even that, I think, is going to be way too distracting.
And so my plan right now is for each month to focus an entire week.
So like Healthy Ambitions will get one week dedicated to Healthy Ambitions,
which I will create all the content for a month's worth of content and schedule that out.
And then the next week I'll do the same for Avocado.
And any extra time I have left over in the month, I'll work on special projects or other things that I may want to start venturing into.
Well, speaking of special projects, do you have any special projects that are in the works right now that you want to talk about?
Well, I do. I do. So we haven't mentioned it yet, but I actually have a third website and it's a self-branded website.
It's thecathedean.com. I went with thecathedean because Cathy Dean was already taken.
That sounds familiar. I went with famous Ashley Grant and Ashley Grant.
And the the makes me sound more important, right? It's not any Cathy Dean. It's the Cathy Dean.
So it makes me sound more important than I really am.
Same, because famous Ashley Grant, I'm the famous one.
You are. You are.
So I've started this self-branded website, kind of a bit of a portfolio website, but also just kind of a place to share what I've learned since I've entered into this online world.
I started out just blogging, but it has grown into so many other aspects, whether it's in video and influencer marketing and different things.
And it's gone places I couldn't even imagine.
And so I kind of want an outlet to share with others what I've learned.
And the tools that I've used and with this new website, it was brought to my attention that there's a new thing called Google Web Stories.
It's not what's not new. It's new to a lot of bloggers. Bloggers are just really starting to figure out what this Google Web Stories is.
The problem is there's not a lot of information on the web to teach you how to do this.
So with the support and suggestion and rah rah re of other people in my realm, I'm actually creating a course that's going to be a full comprehensive course on Google Web Stories.
Now, I'm not sure when this episode is going to drop, but it could be the course could be live or it might not be.
Either way, we will leave all the links in the show notes below.
We'll we'll share whether it's live or not. And if nothing else, there is a free download that you can get on the Cathy Dean about Google Web Stories.
It's a checklist, I believe.
It's a checklist on what you need to do to publish your Google Web Stories.
Yes. So it's a fantastic resource.
And so we'll definitely drop that in. If nothing else, you guys will be able to get onto the waitlist.
Well, Cathy, it sounds like we've shared a lot.
Is there anything that I didn't ask you about that you kind of want to talk about before we wrap it up?
Not that I can think of.
Well, how's TikTok going?
How's TikTok going? You know, sadly, with everything else going on between creating a course and buying a website all at the same time, I don't recommend that to anyone.
TikTok sadly has fallen by the wayside.
It has been the sacrificial lamb.
It's not got any attention.
And I miss it. I actually I really miss TikTok.
I miss my community on TikTok.
I'm looking forward to getting back on TikTok.
Can we expect some new videos?
Some new videos? You know, I got to get this course done first.
So my original goal was March 1st, which is today.
We're recording this and that's not going to happen.
Right now, mid-March is what I'm shooting for.
Hopefully not the end of March.
But so I should be back on TikTok by the end of March.
That's the plan.
That's the plan.
All right. Well, so OK.
So you're going to have the TikTok.
You're going to have the websites.
When are you going to sleep?
Who needs sleep?
I'll schedule it into my schedule.
I'll have to block it off.
And in fact, that's actually a really good point.
I'm obsessed with batching.
I love batching.
So I like the fact that you said that you were going to be doing like one week for each website so you're not context switching.
And so a lot of batching.
Is there any other advice that you want to give to bloggers who are considering purchasing a website?
I would just say do your research.
Like I said, you know, have a good understanding of the profit margin.
You know, have an understanding the money that you're going to invest back into it, whether it's paying back a loan or if you're needing to hire freelancers to help some of the work.
Because it could be you could be buying a website and a niche that you're not 100 percent familiar with.
And so you might need help with the research and the writing.
And so you just you need to you don't want to go in and be upside down for month one from month one.
You want it at the very least paying for itself.
Yeah. So yeah, you don't want to go in and you're going to have debt if you're paying off a loan.
But you don't want to go in and the red every single month and unable to cover the loan and the expenses.
Well, that all sounds like a lot of sound advice to me and bloggy friends.
I hope that you glean some interesting insights from this this episode.
It's it's a little bit different than some of the stuff that we've shared in the past, but I think it also speaks to just how diverse a blogging can be.
Because you don't have to just be a blogger with just one website.
You can start building an actual actual digital portfolio with a whole bunch of digital real estate.
And I can't wait to see what comes next for for your websites and your growth, Kathy.
And thank you so much for being on the show. Oh, thank you.
It's always a pleasure. And I'll come back on once the course is completed.
Right. Yeah, we'll talk about it.
We'll talk about all the things. Well, yeah, we'll definitely leave a bunch of resources in the show notes, like I said, and they are all going to be available at bloggy friends dot com.
And if you have any questions about anything that you heard today, go ahead and tweet Kathy at the Kathy Dean or myself.
And Ashley is famous. And until next time, may your page views be high and your bounce rate below.
Thank you.