I'm building 12 "rank and rent" sites

In my last email, I asked y’all what follow-along case study would interest you most.

The choices were a rank and rent portfolio, a faceless YouTube channel covering software reviews and tutorials, both, or something else.

“A rank and rent portfolio” won with 39% of the total vote:

However, there were still lots of votes for the YouTube channel and “both”, so…

I’ll do both!

I’m also squeezing in a faceless AI-generated YouTube shorts channel, as I’m really curious what the potential with that is. What better way than to try it myself!

Quick ad break.

Earlier today, I sent a list of 2,000+ high-quality available exact match domains to Gold-tier subscribers of my other newsletter, EMD Gold.

Included in that list were some of the best domains I’ve ever found:

first+last name EMDs for rather common names.

Such as ericarussell .com and loganmoreno .com (both available at the time of writing this).

The list also included exact match domains that are perfect for online tool sites, job boards, directories, and rank and rent sites.

While current Gold-tier subscribers have already had access to the list for a couple hours, there are still plenty of fantastic EMDs left for the taking if you sign up now.

And don’t worry, I’ll send another list later this month, and another on November 1st (2 lists every month).

Sign up for EMD Gold here and see the best available-to-hand-register EMDs on the planet (only available on the Gold plan).

Here’s what I’ve done so far…

Rank and rent portfolio (12 sites)

(If you’re unfamiliar with “rank and rent”, read more about it here).

I decided to start with 12 rank and rent sites.

That should give me an excellent chance at hitting the jackpot with at least 1 or 2 sites.

I chose a different city and industry for each site. That way, if one site performs much better than the rest, I can launch more sites in the same industry but in different cities. My goal is to quickly find winning industries and then double down on those.

Over the last few days, I spent dozens of hours narrowing down what cities + industries to start with.

I took a data driven approach for this. Here’s the gist:

1. Got a list of all US cities by population

2. Researched the best industries for rank and rent (ended up with 30+ to choose from)

3. Used Excel to combine industry + city (forming a target keyword, such as “plumbers chicago il”)

4. Did this for all industries and for all cities above a certain population (this varied depending on the industry)

5. Imported the resulting keywords into lowfruits to analyze the first page of the SERPs for each keyword

6. Sorted the lowfruits results by weakest SERPs (some keywords had incredibly weak competition; see the screenshot below)

7. Manually looked at the Google results for hundreds of the best keywords, because even if a tool says it’s an easy keyword, I like to judge it on my own as well using my years of keyword research experience

8. Narrowed it down to 12 industries, and then chose the best city for each industry in terms of traffic potential and competition level

9. Registered 12 city+service .com EMDs (exact match domains)

Next steps:

1. Build each site (using WordPress). In addition to the homepage which will target the main keyword, I plan to build location and service pages for the larger city sites and broader industries. Using the “chicago plumbers” example, I’d build pages for the near Chicago suburbs, targeting keywords like “evanston plumber”, “oak park plumber”, etc. I’d also build pages targeting different plumbing-related services, like “chicago drain cleaning”, “chicago faucet repair”, “evanston drain cleaning”, and so on.

2. Submit each site to Google Search Console when finished.

3. Build some easy foundational links to each site.

4. Once traffic starts trickling in, buy phone numbers and redirect them to companies I hope to onboard as renters.

As you can see, I’m taking a low-cost approach. I’m fully aware that buying ads to your site and sending those leads to potential renters is a much quicker way to get clients, but I’m not in a rush, so I’d rather wait till my sites organically rank.

I plan to share regular progress updates on all this. Hopefully this will be helpful for anyone joining along in this side hustle. 🙂 

Faceless YouTube AI shorts channel

I’m super curious to test this, as I’ve seen some wild claims from people supposedly making $100s/day from AI shorts.

When I researched it more, I saw tons of people complaining about having their channels demonetized due to the AI content.

So, my approach will be to target specific keywords people enter into YouTube search, and monetize my videos with affiliate links. That way, it doesn’t matter nearly as much if my channel is monetized with AdSense or not.

The niche I chose was “business book lists”.

I’m not sharing the channel yet, because I want to see how well it does without any outside influence, as if I had no audience and was starting completely from scratch. I do plan to share the channel in the future though.

I started the channel yesterday, and have published 3 videos so far.

Here are the analytics for each video:

5 views is not a terrible start! I also have 1 subscriber already lol.

How I make the videos

I’m using ShortsFaceless to generate the videos.

Out of all the AI shorts generators, ShortsFaceless has the best features for the price.

It’s just $9/mo for 30 videos. To get the $9/mo deal, click here, scroll down, and click “Special deal” in the footer.

To make a video, just click the Generate video button, follow all the steps, and when you’re done, click export video. Once it’s done exporting, you can click Publish. You’ll then be asked to link your YouTube account. Once linked, you can publish straight to YouTube without having to download the video to your computer.

There are some examples of the videos ShortsFaceless creates on the homepage.

Faceless YouTube software review/tutorial channel

(I talked a lot about this here, in case you missed it).

I haven’t done anything with this yet. All my attention has been on the rank and rent portfolio and the AI shorts channel.

With that said, I’m not without a plan.

I’ll make videos around software I use regularly, and target popular search terms instead of trying to go viral with sensational titles/thumbnails. This worked great in the past, and it works great in the present as well. Videos that get views mostly from YouTube search are far more evergreen than other types of videos.

This channel will be heavily monetized with affiliate links (placed in the video descriptions). Many software programs pay recurring 30% commissions, so this type of channel can make pretty good money from affiliate marketing alone. Of course, I’ll monetize it with ads too once it meets the minimum requirements.

So there you have it. I’m starting THREE new side hustles and sharing the steps I take and results as a live case study.

The timing isn’t great for me since I have a profoundly busy month ahead with personal things, but it’s always better to just start rather than wait until the mythical “perfect time”.

Thanks for reading!

Ian

P.S.

If you like my emails, I think you’d LOVE Brooks Conkle’s emails. I recently discovered his stuff and it’s amazing. All about side hustles, solopreneurship, and mindset.

He’s currently working on a few live case studies. AI tools, domain flipping, Amazon Influencer videos, growing a Facebook page, and AI music are his current things. He writes a detailed newsletter every week sharing a progress report (even revealing his businesses, stats, and income from each).

Subscribe here if that kinda thing interests you:

P.P.S.

In my recent email about faceless YouTube channels, I said:

“The other nice thing about YouTube is that you can enter just about ANY niche without worrying too much about the competition.”

This isn’t exactly true. I got an email from someone who owns several successful YouTube channels. Here’s what he said:

“Let me preface by saying that I really enjoy your newsletter... I only discovered how I got on it yesterday but the quality of your content has kept me from hitting the unfollow button.

I think you might be wrong about YouTube, though. I run 3 different channels (two of which are fairly successful), and I can't emphasize enough the importance of choosing a good niche before you start.

The channels I started in less saturated niches are absolutely flying, while the one that's in a VERY saturated niche (redacted) is growing unbelievably slowly. And trust me, I've put 100X more effort into the (redacted) one, it's NOT faceless, we're experts on the subject, AND I've got an excellent editor.  A few years back, even average videos in the (redacted) niche would take off, but competition is now fierce due to the low barrier of entry. All the good keywords are taken too.

So, yeah, YouTube IS still a good opportunity, but it ain't a golden goose like back in the day. Proper niche research is key.”

So, thank you Rupert for the clarification and insight!!

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