🧠 Rank and Rent Websites

How to Make Money with Emails & What is Going on with Silicon Valley Bank

What’s up party people! We’re back with another side hustle idea!

Before we dive into today’s idea, let’s connect on Twitter!

And if you have any ideas for this newsletter, check out our suggestion box!

1. Business idea of the Week: Rank and Rent Websites

Imagine this.

You’re a homeowner with a huge yard. You decide you don’t want to deal with cutting your own grass, so you need to hire a landscaper.

You don’t know any landscapers in your area, so you need to find one.

What’s your first step?

That’s right. You go to google and search “Landscapers near me”.

And when the Google results pop up, you probably only look at the first 1 to 4 search results.

And that’s why it’s so important to be at the top of a google search if you’re a local service business.

The idea: Create “Rank and Rent” websites for local businesses.

You can think of this as owning “digital real estate”.

Build a website that ranks at the top of a Google search and “rent” it out to a business.

When you rent it out to a business, they receive all of the leads generated by the website.

How to get started: I won’t dive too deep into the details, but let’s walk through the biggest steps.

1. Select a Niche: This will be the service or industry you base your website around. The idea is to find a service with low competition and high search volume on Google. Examples: Tree Removal, Pool Maintenance, Pressure Washing, Landscaping, etc.

2. Select a Location: Selecting a good location is a crucial part of this business. Make sure the area you target has a large enough population for high demand, but not too much to where competition is high. It’s best to focus on towns with a 100K-250K population size. Examples: Waco, TX Pool Cleaning, Cary, NC Landscaping.

3. Build & Rank: This is where the work starts and the magic happens. You’ll need to learn how to create a website using WordPress with a hosting service like Namecheap.com. This will keep your expenses to roughly $20/year. Next, you’ll need to research how to rank for the keywords you want. This will likely require writing blogs with the name of your location and service. Here’s a full-length Youtube course to teach you all of the basics of SEO.

4. Rent: This is the part that’s just like renting real estate, but your tenant will be a local business that offers the service your website ranks for. The ideal business is one that is struggling to find leads and is showing up at the bottom of Google’s results. You can start out by charging per lead (ex: $50 per lead) or as a flat monthly fee (ex: $500 / month).

This is a side hustle that can be started for under $100, and end up generating monthly cash flow for years.

This article walks through 5 examples of people generating monthly cash flow with these websites and also gives a good guide on how to get started.

And that’s a wrap!

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2. How to Make Money with Emails

Email marketing allows you to generate massive paydays from behind a keyboard.

And if you’ve been looking for a fast and simple way to increase sales, gain more leverage, and grow your business, you’ve gotta check out this newsletter.

The Email Copywriter Newsletter gives you inside secrets on how to generate piles of cash with email marketing.

And if you sign up with this link, you’ll get a free copy of the “Make It Rain” email copywriting book.

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3. What is Going on with Silicon Valley Bank

If you’ve been on Twitter in the last 72 hours, there’s a 99% chance you’ve seen the letters “S-V-B”.

The failure of Silicon Valley Bank is being compared to the financial crisis of 2008, but we’re still waiting to see how it will end.

So what exactly happened?

To understand how a bank can fail, it’s important to understand how a bank works.

Banks make money by lending their customers money out to “debtors” in exchange for an interest yield. The interest yield is the profit that banks generate and use to operate.

At any given time, banks only hold about 10% of customers’ funds in cash and loan out the other 90%.

When you deposit your money in a bank account, you "technically” have access to it at all times because banks assume it’s highly unlikely that everyone asks for their money at the same time.

But if every customer actually asked for their money at the same time, it would create a “bank run”.

And a “bank run” is exactly what happened to SVB.

But there’s one big problem. SVB doesn’t have their customers’ cash for withdrawals.

Here’s the TLDR version:

• Most Tech and Startup companies have their money sitting in Silicon Valley Bank.

• In 2021, Silicon Valley Bank put $100 Billion of customer funds in US Gov Treasuries paying 1.8% because they believed interest rates would stay low for a long time.

• Now in 2023, with interest rates increasing, the tech companies using Silicon Valley Bank are making more withdrawals than expected, but they don’t have the cash for withdrawals.

• In order to cover withdrawals, the bank sold its bond portfolio at a $1.5 billion loss.

• As this news came out, companies using Silicon Valley Bank began to panic and withdraw their funds at a faster rate, which caused a “bank run”.

• On March 8th, the bank announced they were looking to sell 1/3 of the company in order to raise $2.5 billion, and cover withdrawal requests.

• On March 10th, the bank announced they were unsuccessful in raising the $2.5 billion, which let to regulators stepping in and shutting down the bank.

• The FDIC insures up to $250,000 of customers’ funds, but since Silicon Valley Bank is primarily used by businesses, the average account balance is roughly $4 million… which isn’t insured.

At the time of writing this, it is unclear how this story will end.

Many companies rely on the bank to make payroll and pay expenses.

Without the money they had in their bank account, it’s unclear how they’ll keep their doors open.

Some notable names include:

Roku holds $487 Million in SVB (26% of the company’s cash).

Roblox holds $150 Million in SVB (5% of the company’s cash).

How do you think this will end?