The Entrepreneurs Library
A Preview of The Website Investor with Jeff Hunt
A summary of things you should know about The Website Investor according to Jeff Hunt:
Introduction
In this episode Jeff Hunt gives an in-depth summary of his book, The Website Investor, where he shares a guide to buying an online website business for passive income.
In his book Hunt provides a roadmap for finding highly profitable online businesses for sale and shows you how to get the most value out of them without having to start from scratch. The goal of the book is to help you estimate the value of a website, negotiate price with website sellers, differentiate between low and high effort web businesses, and hire the right virtual assistants to help grow your web business.
This book is perfect for serial entrepreneurs who are interested in owning profitable online businesses that have already developed a customer base without having to start fresh.
The Book’s Unique Quality (4:55)
A lot of people are interested in entrepreneurship and buying your own business and because of that a lot of books are coming out on the topic. But really there are no books about buying online businesses and that’s really a shame. My book teaches people exactly how to do that.
The Best Way To Engage (5:06)
A lot of people read through the whole book and then go back and use it as a reference. The important thing is that you take time to stop and ponder what it’s saying and how it applies to you and then take action on it.
The Reader’s Takeaway (13:07)
In any enterprise of any size there is always a buy vs build decision. The key principle in the book is that investing is better than inventing in almost every case. The action item associated with that principle is to get out there and start looking and educate yourself on what’s available.
A Deep Dive Into The Book (5:55)
The first thing you will notice about my book are the stories. I have a number of case studies that are essentially stories of acquisitions that I’ve made. Those stories are there because it is helpful for people to get an idea of what their website would look like, pricing, etc. if they were to purchase one.
The second thing the book is all about is process. The book is a comprehensive guide on how to do it and it really follows the same kind of processes you would use in making any kind of significant purchase and starts with where to buy, how to search website listings, and how to narrow down those listings to something you would be interested in. It starts at the beginning helping people find where those opportunities are, and then it moves into how to evaluate. After you’ve picked a few that you want to evaluate then you need to dig in and figure out how much they are worth. So the book has a really nice chapter on how to value and put a price tag on a website to give you an idea of what you should pay.
There are chapters on negotiation because many of website purchases are negotiated and don’t have a hard and fixed price. And then we go over how to transfer the website from the seller to the buyer and making sure everyone is taken care of and everything is protected.
The book also covers lots of other topics like buying international websites, organizing yourself as a business, and how to sell a website if you choose to. We discuss the topics of apps vs websites and whether you should buy one or not.
As you read through the book you will get the idea that buying in to a website business vs starting from scratch is just a whole lot easier.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 05:55
Notable Quotes From The Book (14:28)
“Be the nicest buyer.” – Jeff Hunt
The Credibility/Inspiration Of The Author (1:06)
I’ve worked for many years in middle management at IBM where we had achieved most of our career goals. We felt like we just wanted to give back some of the blessing we had received so my family and I sold everything we had and moved overseas to a western Asian country where we served for about seven years. Once the kids grew up we knew it was time to come home. When I got home I didn’t feel like I could return to the corporate world very easily with the seven year gap on my resume so with little cash I decided to start buying websites and since bought about 300 income generating websites. Along with the website investing I am also an advisor for an online business acquisition for a company called Cloud Income Properties.
I meet a lot of people who would be better off buying in rather than starting a business from scratch. I go to conferences and people are really attracted to the online business space because of the flexibility that it offers. What most people don’t realize is the online business failure rate is even higher than offline just because people don’t invest themselves into it as much. And so the inspiration for my book is introducing all these people who are interested in a business to this idea of buying a website. The other inspiration is to help myself because the more people who are aware of this possibility, the more websites come out of the wood work that are for sale that I can buy and add to my portfolio.
Other Books Recommended By The Author (18:03)
Managing by Harold Geneen
More Information About This Book and The Author
Buy The Website Investor by Jeff Hunt on Amazon today
Visit HeckYeah.org to learn more about Jeff and his book
More Information About This Episode
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
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Wade Danielson
Wade is a 4-time serial entrepreneur and is the Founder/Host of The Entrepreneurs Library. With a long time passion for reading books, Wade created an online resource and podcast for entrepreneurs who love to read personal and business development books. His long-term goal in life is to start an entrepreneurial home schooling program for children of business-minded families.
