AskPat 710 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 710 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

All right, now here's today's question from Glenn.

Glenn: Pat, love your site. I love the new design and I've been listening to your stuff for a long time now. I have a question for you and I'm just curious as to what you're doing and what your thoughts are on this, but have you ever considered doing a marketplace for people to buy and sell their websites that they develop on your site? What are your thoughts on this? Why have you not done this? Have you considered doing this? I'm just curious about that because a trusted name, a trusted marketplace would be a fantastic thing. I think it would be a great way for you to make money and help others make money. Thank you.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Glenn. Thank you so much for the question. I appreciate you following along and I love the fact that you're thinking about other things that we could do together here on SPI to better the community. I love that. In terms of a marketplace to buy and sell websites, I mean there are some that exist out there already. Flipa.com is one that I've had experience with. I've actually purchased a website from there before. I have never sold anything on there, but I know for a fact that the buying and selling of websites is a totally different kind of experience. It could be considered like selling property. There's a lot that goes into finding the right people, having people get to a point where they know that you have a property worth that amount of income. I mean, Flippa.com is more of an auction type of website, but you can potentially sell websites on your own in a private manner, and to have some sort of marketplace where people can go that's trusted would be great.

I would love to be able to provide that, however I feel like there's a few things that come to mind here. For one, in order to manage that, I'd need a whole ecosystem that would allow me to make sure that these websites are trusted and there's probably going to be some sort of application process to make sure that people did use the strategies, they're not doing anything bad. Where do I draw that line, all that kind of stuff. The money handling aspect of it just adds a whole layer of legal aspects and things to consider. It's just a lot of additional work that I feel wouldn't provide the ROI for what it actually is.

As much as I would love to provide that solution for people, because I know there are people out there who build websites who love to just build websites, and so they build and they sell and they build another thing and they sell. A lot of people have done that and a lot of people love to buy a site that's already built. That's why sites like Flippa.com do really well, because of those reasons, but for me to manage that, I mean it's a whole completely new business model. I would need an entire team I think of two to three people at least to be able to manage that to a point where I could feel confident that it would provide the value that I feel like it should.

That being said, the SPI community itself, especially the one on Facebook at smartpassiveincome.com/community, you can join that group right now if you want. It's a fantastic group where people just help each other out and so I've seen people, although I try to get people not to spam their own stuff all the time, if you truly have a website for example that you feel would be for sale and you could potentially try to sell it there, although I do have some amazing admins who try to decrease that, but you could start that conversation first. I wouldn't go into any forum and just start suddenly selling stuff or advertising things. I would get to know people first and then through conversation, then bring up the things that I have to potentially offer in a more organic manner. That's a place that you can go to meet a lot of the great community members too and just get a lot of help and offer help too.

I hope that answers your question, Glenn. That's pretty much the reason why I haven't decided to go down that route. There's a lot of other projects I have in the back of my mind that are happening as we speak, including a course that's currently running with a few students, founding members, who are going to be going and helping shape what that course becomes and actually provide feedback for what already exists in it. There's some physical products down the road too that I'm going to be venturing into, so there's a lot of things already on the plate. A marketplace like that would be pretty, pretty tough to handle to the top quality that I'd want related to everything else that I have going on too.

But that being said, I think the big lesson here is there are ways to provide services for your audience like this that could be really helpful, that could be a win for everybody. The one that comes to mind is the ProBlogger Job forums, which I know is a very highly respected job posting platform for bloggers specifically, so people looking for writing jobs. Go there. Look up Job Board ProBlogger run by Darren Rowse over at Problogger.net. It's an amazing job board where I know he makes money from that, but more than that he's able to have his community connect with each other in a way that everybody wins. Go ahead and check that out.

Glenn, thank you so much for the question. I appreciate it. I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thanks so much. I appreciate you. Here's a quote from blogger Lee Oden. He says, and I love this quote, he says, “A blog is only as interesting as the interest shown in others.” Take care and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.