Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. With you, the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hi there, welcome back to Not that Hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, as usual, your host.

And today I'm going to talk about leapfrog rank and rent. Now, this is a new take on the rank and rent principle for website creation. That's been promoted by a guy called John Dykstra. I'm on his email list and it came up LeapFrog Rank and Rent and I thought what's this? I've heard of Rank and Rent, but what's LeapFrog Rank and Rent? So, just to take a step back, let's just cover what Rank and Rent means.

For those who might be unfamiliar with it, I did do an episode earlier this year about the whole rank and rent paradigm and essentially what it is is. It's the idea where, instead of creating a site where you sell your own services. What you do is you create a site to generate leads for local businesses generally or very specialist businesses. So, for example, you might make a site which essentially pretended to be a plumber's in a particular area in a particular city. So you would set up a site about plumbers in, say, london or New York or wherever plumbers in, say London or New York or wherever and you would try and capture people who were searching for plumbing services in that particular geographical area. And then you, once you start ranking, you've got some traffic. You then start selling the leads that you receive through that website to actual, real plumbers who will go and do the actual work. And in many cases, on these rank and rent models, the site owner, instead of selling individual leads one by one, will tend to sell all the leads for a geographical area per month to one business. So let's say it's a flat rate however many leads you get, you'll pay x amount per month, and some seem claim to be making quite good money out of doing this. So it's a bit like being an affiliate really. So with Broadbandcouk you know, we create content about broadband in the UK and then we would get traffic search traffic on people searching for broadband and then we would refer them to the broadband suppliers who would then pay us whenever anyone signed up. So it's a bit like that. It's more with rank current. You're more in a way, presenting as if you are the plumbing business yourself and then just shifting all the leads onto one plumber for a geographical area.

You might do a site that that targets more than one geographical area and then you might have different plumbers who will take leads off you for different areas. And of course it doesn't have to be just plumbers. You could do it for all sorts of all sorts of services. You have something you've done for cleaners, for concrete suppliers, for horse arenas there's a whole, the whole gamut of them. It's quite um, it's becoming quite common um now.

So that's rank and rent, and if you want to hear more about what my thoughts on rank and rent, then do go and search out that episode. I think it was back in January. It's just called rank and rent. So when I saw this term leapfrog rank and rent, that made me think well, what's the leapfrog part of it? So I read through John's email and it soon became quite apparent that it was just putting a slight twist on it and that is that instead of just relying on SEO traffic organic SEO traffic in John's model what you do with leapfrog is you also do PPC advertising. So you leapfrog to the top of the search engine result pages by getting some of those advertising spots at the top of the page.

That's quite an interesting idea. I mean, you know I'm surprised no one's come up with it before it's. Actually, if you think about it, it makes quite good sense because if you can arbitrage the pbc costs versus what you can get from people who will pay you for the leads on a monthly basis, then you could quite easily make that work. Obviously it's going to depend on competition in particular areas. So I can imagine it might be tricky in new york, it might be tricky in london in areas where maybe you've got you've got big sophisticated plumbing companies who've got their own social you knowPC and lead generation side of their business. But it might work quite well in smaller cities, smaller areas where the local service providers don't have that kind of level of sophistication when it comes to their marketing. So yeah, an interesting idea.

I can particularly see how using the PPC side would help you boost that initial slow period where you're trying to rank, which can you know? Like I spoke in just an earlier episode this week about how things can take time, there's no quick fixes. The fact if you use PPC, then you can obviously start generating traffic and leads for people much more quickly, which means that you can obviously hope to then sell those leads much more quickly and find someone to rent that sort of website off you, or at least the leads from that website off you, so you then get a quicker influx of cashflow which can help you then build the site out further, build out that organic SEO, spend the money on the resources that you need to be able to get ranking organically. So while you helps you sort of get the cart before the horse is actually, in this case you can you can get going much more quickly. So, yeah, it has intrigued me. I mean the whole rank and rent model itself has intrigued me. For a long time. I haven't actually other than a few little test sites that I put up just to see how they would rank on a couple of sort of query areas, which you know did quite well, quite simple to do. I haven't gone any more deep into it, obviously A because I'm very busy with keywords people use and other sites.

Um, but it's, it's attracted me because the affiliate side of me quite likes it, because it is so. It is so similar to affiliate marketing. But obviously that the trickier thing is the merchant side of it, because those merchants are harder to deal with because, say, with broadband, all the broadband suppliers are on the major affiliate networks. You can deal with them. All the tracking is done for you and it's quite easy to sort of get in there. The foot in the door has been done for you by the affiliate network, so you just have to send content to it, so send clicks to the affiliate network, who will then track them to the merchants and sales you get credited for. It's all streamlined, you don't really need to deal with anybody. It's all set up and ready to go, whereas here with RankinRent, you've got to build those relationships yourself. You've got to go out to places and find someone who's willing to buy those leads off you.

That's the tricky part. That's the really really tricky part with the RankinRent model is how do you build those relationships. The really really tricky part with the rank and rent model is how do you build those relationships? Now, obviously with hard work and time and a bit of chutzpah, then you know it can be done and people are doing it. But it is trickier and it is one of those things especially if you're not the kind of the most confident person in going out and speaking and cold selling to people and cold calling, then it's going to be difficult. So that's the real kicker with rank and rent how do you build those relationships?

But once you have those relationships built, if you can build those relationships and get it going, then the technology is out there to do all the tracking. Um, there's excellent call handling services which will literally give you you can have as many phone numbers as you want you can. You can record calls, you can track whether they're picked up, you can track who they've gone to. There's some incredible call tracking services out there for doing lead generation direct people and there's all the plugins you could ever need on wordpress for sort of building all this out. It's not actually a technically difficult thing to do. Um, yeah, it's just building those relationships. Obviously you have another option. If you have a skill, if there's something you can build and do, then you could potentially start up your own business doing stuff. I've seen people who do it with um cleaning, for example. There's people that set up their own clean businesses and go go mad on the clean, on the lead generation, and start basically do the leads themselves and then, once they've got going, then look to farm out leads to other people. I actually considered this one. I've considered myself.

We built um, a horse arena, a horse menage, at the farm here and I built that two, three years ago. And I remember when we first were looking at getting it done, we were getting quotes in and they were fifty thousand pounds plus to build this arena and I looked at it and thought it's just some digger work and then basic groundwork putting some basic drainage, laying a lot of stair and a lot of sand and some fencing work. This shouldn't need to cost £50,000. And I got some individual contractors in myself. I did some of the work myself on the digger um and, you know, found all source, all the supplies of the sand and the stone, all these things and to get them at sort of manufacturer cost prices rather than paying, you know, a mark upon anyone, and we built that arena for just under 30 000 pounds. So we saved a huge amount of money.

But there's obviously a lot of margin there to be made and on things like that, if it's big, big sort of products where there's huge amount of margin available, then it might, you know, it could be something to consider doing yourself. I have considered doing the men on this thing, but I haven't really got the time right now, at any stretch the imagination. But if I wanted to I could do it. So, yeah, in summary, yeah, this leapfrog idea, the idea of using PPC to jumpstart a rank and rent website, is not a bad one. I like it and it might be worth exploring to have a go at rank and rent or you may already be doing rank and rent. It might be something for you to think about. Anyway, until next time. I'll see you later.

Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at Keywords People Use that, you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeoplesusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up. Once again, that's keywords people usecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywords people usecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywords people usecom to get an instant hit of more seo tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick seo tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at Channel 5 on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.