Liz Raad with Jason Barnard at Search Marketing Summit 2019 Liz Raad talks with Jason Barnard about buying, pimping and monetising websites. Liz Raad was at SMS Sydney to get some extra SEO knowledge – but she knows more than she lets on. She has a Norwegian name, is Australian… but is part Swiss (but she has never been to Switzerland). Liz and her husband (Matt) buy fully functional domains that they can monetise, or sell on – a bit like buying property, apparently. But the ROI on websites is incredibly high. MUCH higher than real estate. She suggests that the due diligence in their industry is simply an SEO audit – and it is mad that more SEOs aren’t doing it (how stupid are you Jason?) She encourages me to dip a toe in the water – I could buy a $500 website and get my start – I call it pimping websites, Liz calls it renovating. A lot of the work that needs to be done is simple SEO cleaning up and UX. Liz insists it is easy money if you work at it from a business point of view. Quick discussion about international expansion for manufacturing SMBs (Sarah Carroll gets a mention there). Then back to buying websites to monetise them… she doesn’t look for sites by topic, but rather income or profit. She has a site all about pigeon racing, so we have a lovely discussion about pigeon racing that goes from the Philippine to betting, to Little Voice, to Mike Tyson. Amazon affiliate sites are blue chip, AdSense sites are blue chip. And since Google AdSense delivers ads based on the search algorithm, we SEOs have a DOUBLE advantage.