The Rising From the Ashes Story of Brand Builders + A Special Offer

Brand Builders has come a long way.

If you were familiar with Brand Builders 1 or 2 years ago, what you see today is drastically different.  Today, I want to talk about the evolution that Brand Builders has taken over the past 2 years and why it's become a very interesting business.

In full disclosure, I am now a part-owner of Brand Builders, but I'm not involved at all in the day to day operations (so don't send me a customer support email :)).  

I'll share the story of how I became a part-owner in Brand Builders and how they've truly risen from the ashes as a business.

In addition, I'll share exactly what all the services they offer now (hint: it's more than just pre-made affiliate websites now).  

And since I'll be highlighting Brand Builders this week, I also asked the team there to offer a special discount for this week only across all of their services. (It was an easy yes 🙂 ).

If you want to check out all that Brand Builders offers and how you can 15% off + free coaching calls, go here.  Be sure to use coupon code: NichePursuits15

Get 15% Off Brand Builders - This Week Only!

NichePursuits Rating

Brand Builders Special Discount:

• Content Services (includes Surfer SEO & Posting) – Get 15% BONUS content
• Guest Post Link Building – 15% off
• Premade Affiliates Sites – 15% off
• Premade Shopify Sites – 15% off
• Custom Affiliate or Shopify Site – 15% off and 10% Bonus Content

Use Coupon Code NichePursuits15!

The “Untold” History of Brand Builders

Brand Builders was founded several years ago by someone that is no longer involved in the business.  However, early in the business, Jon Gillham got involved and become a partner there.

The initial idea of Brand Builders was to help people skip the first steps of getting a site up and running.  In fact, Brand Builders would build sites from scratch with content, themes, plugins, affiliate links, and make it “live” on the internet.

These pre-made affiliate sites would then be sold when they were brand new.  This initial business model did really well – and in fact, I become one of the largest affiliates!

A couple of years ago, I did a few promotions for Brand Builders (referring a few people from Niche Pursuits) and the pre-made sites sold out quickly!

At some point along the way I thought, “you know, I could do this on my own and make even more money!” 

So, I did. 

I created 6 or 7 affiliate sites and sold them quickly to people that were wanting to get started right away.

I reached out to Jon Gillham and said, “Look, I can do this on my own, I think I'm going to just start a competing service.” 

Well, after a couple of calls with Jon and discussions with several other people, I decided that launching a service like this would be more than I would want to do on my own. Selling 6 or 7 sites is one thing, but selling hundreds and managing a huge team is another.

You can listen to the full interview (embedded above) to understand more of the reasons why I decided not to create a full Brand Builders competitor.

The existing partners at Brand Builders offered me a “sweetheart” deal to buy into the business.  So, I did!  I invested some money and became a part owner in the Brand builders business as of about 2 years ago.

A few months later, the original founder decided to leave the company and left a bit of a mess (he was also running the operations of the company).

Whoa!

When the partner that is basically running the entire business leaves a business, it's safe to say things were a dumpster fire for a bit.

Earnings plummeted.  The investment I had just made suddenly went from feeling like a “sweetheart deal” to a terrible deal.

Fortunately, the partners and I weren't willing to give up – the business and idea were still solid, we just needed someone to actually run it effectively for us.

Well, it wasn't easy to right the ship after that, but we have!  Brand Builders is stronger and better than it ever was before.

A big part of that is because we brought in Brady Cargle to help us manage the business.  (And for those paying attention, yes, Brady used to write articles for Niche Pursuits).

With Brady on board and some changes we made in our product offering earlier this year, Brand Builders is a COMPLETELY new company!

Brand Builders no longer ONLY sells Premade affiliate websites (although we still do that).  We've now become a much more broad provider of website building services.

Content Services

So, if Brand Builders does more than just pre-made affiliate content sites…what does it do?

Well, first is content services.  If you already have an existing site, Brand Builders will write articles for you.  These articles are well researched and starting this week – we now run all the articles through Surfer SEO to ensure that they are fully optimized to perform their best in Google.

Brand Builders also formats affiliate links, adds images, and posts the content to WordPress for you.  It's really a hands off content service.

So, if you are looking for some high quality article writers, get your 15% bonus content this week. Be sure to use coupon code: NichePursuits15

As a heads up, the first 10 buyers of content get a 1,000 word article for free.

Guest Post Link Building Services

Did you know that Brand Builders will also do link building for your existing sites?  All links are acquired through natural outreach guest posting.

For this week only, you can get 15% off Link Building services.  

The, first 10 Buyers Get an Extra Link for free

Pre-Made Affiliate sites

Yes, Brand Builders still does Pre-built affiliate sites.  In fact, there are just over a dozen affiliate sites ready to go right now.

As a reminder, these are new sites that have just been built.  So, they don't have traffic and earnings yet.  But they have premium content published and themes, plugins, and everything else in place for them to start ranking and earning money.

It's your job to put in the effort to either build links or market your site.  (Or of course you can hire Brand Builders to do that for you).

The first buyer of a pre-made affiliate site this week get a 3 month content plan and execution (12 free articles).

Pre-Made Shopify Sites

Want to sell on Shopify?  Well, Brand Builders has several Shopify stores already built and ready to go.  

Lots of people are turning to drop shipping as a way to make money online these days, and the pre-made Shopify sites will help you skip the first several steps in starting an ecommerce business.

For this week, Brand Builders is offering 15% off premade Shopify sites. 

Custom Affiliate or Shopify Site

Want Brand Builders to create a completely custom affiliate or Shopify site for you?  They can do that.

So, let's say you know you want to go into the ax throwing niche.  But you don't want to do all the keyword research, write all the articles, link building, etc to get the site up and running.  

Brand Builders will do all of that.

Or if you don't know what niche you want to go into, you can hop on a free coaching call and Brady will help you figure that out.

For this week only, you can get 15% off custom sites and get 10% bonus content.

Coaching Calls and SiteBuddy

As mentioned, Brady is now the manager of Brand Builders and has put a ton of time and effort into revitalizing the business.  

One thing that Brady is now able to offer (that the previous manager was unable to offer) is free coaching calls for customers.

So, if you decide to get any of the packages offered this week, Brady will hop on a consulting call with you to strategize your business and help you think through growth options.

Finally, as a way to “sweeten the pot”, Brand Builders is offering 1 month free access to SiteBuddy.io if you make a purchase this week.

Site Buddy is an Amazon affililiate link monitor that helps you find broken links, out of stock items, or amazon links that don't have your affiliate tag.

I just ran my OwnTheYard.com through Site Buddy and here's what I found:

I have no idea how much money I've lost because of these incorrect links, but I'm fixing them ASAP!

The Future?

So, where does Brand Builders go from here?

Now that Brady has joined the business and has put out the dumpster fire, we are now moving in the right direction.  As mentioned, Brand Builders has expanded it's services to include content creation, link building, and more.

The future looks bright.

Brady has been focusing on building more of a following on social channels, including Youtube which has gone from 0 to 1,800 subscribers in the last few months.  

Brady has also made himself much more available for coaching calls.  So, if you are wondering how Brand Builders might be able to help you grow your business, hoping on a call to discuss that with Brady is now an option.

As Brand Builders provides this more hands on experience for customers, they hope to continue to grow the business.

Watch the Full Interview and Read Transcript

Brady and I hopped on a zoom call recently and recorded the entire conversation.  You can watch the video or listen to the audio to get many more details to the story.

We covered quite a few details in the interview that I think you will find interesting, so I hope you enjoy it!

Read the full transcript below:

Spencer: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Niche Pursuits here. I’m doing a combined video and podcast at the same time. If you’re listening to the podcast, enjoy the audio. If you’re watching this, hey. It’s Spencer here. It’s good to see you again and I’ve got Brady Cargle with us. He is the manager and wears all the hats over at BrandBuilders right now. We’re going to dive into that. Brady, how are you doing today? 

Brady: Doing fine, Spencer. How about you? 

Spencer: I’m doing really good. I understand you were running down a mountain today in order to make our connection here, so I appreciate that. 

Brady: No problem. The glories of world travel mean that I’m always in a different time zone than somebody. When I realized our meeting was 30 minutes ago, I’m like, oh man, I got to book it. 

Spencer: It was my fault, but that’s all right. We got the connection. We’re good. Tell people where you’re at right now and why you’re there. 

Brady: Right now, I’m in Rio de Janeiro. Sounds a little crazy to be traveling during a global pandemic. I’m in the world’s second most infected country, but I left the most infected country to get here. I’m actually 50% safer in my mind. That’s what I told my mother. It’s natury, it’s got lots of mountains, it’s got beaches, and it’s a nice place. 

Spencer: It sounds like a nice place, not going to lie. Very good. Brady, for people that don’t know you, why don’t you just introduce yourself and what you’re currently doing at BrandBuilders? 

Brady: Absolutely. I got my start with BrandBuilders right after working on Niche Pursuits with you. I’m sure we’ll get into that story of how all of that started. My journey with BrandBuilders started in December of 2019. I think the business has just been neglected for a while. I came in as a manager. We’re able to […], help out some team members in figuring out what they should really be spending their time on. 

For a while, it was quite a few hats. Now, thank goodness, I’ve been able to take most of the hats off out of most customer service, out of most order fulfillment. At most my job is getting our product in front of the right people, convincing them that it’s the right product for them, and then making sure we deliver something just outstanding. 

Spencer: Absolutely. Let’s talk about our history just a little bit, you and I. I don’t know that we’ve really explained that too much. Maybe, people that are savvy and are paying attention, seeing your articles on Niche Pursuits, you’re in the Facebook Group, maybe know what’s going on. 

Long story short, Brady, you worked for me on Niche Pursuits as a writer. You are a freelance writer. I brought you on and maybe you can explain how we made the connection there. But you did some writing for me for a little while, right? 

Brady: Yeah, absolutely. My journey in entrepreneurship started in 2018–2019. I ran across an Authority Hacker article about the authority site model building authority sites. I tried it for two years, but it didn't really work out. I saw that you were doing Niche Site Project 4. I’ve been a reader for quite a while, on and off. I’ve realized I need someone to show me how this works. I was like, I’m just going to reach out to this guy.  

I have the email to this day because I was like, there’s no way he’s ever going to respond at this. I just said, “Hey, I will just do whatever you want for free.” You were kind enough to say yes and then you were kind enough to start paying me and then you were kind enough to bring me on full-time at Niche Pursuits. Did a lot of writing, helped find some advertisers, I think I […] a couple of affiliate deals, just whatever I could do to help. 

Spencer: Yeah. I think the timing just has to be right sometimes because I usually do not respond to all the requests that I get. I actually get a lot of different things, people that either want to help me out or they want something for me. Usually, I ignore most of those, but at the time I was looking for a writer and you just happen to be saying I’ll do it for free. 

There’s a lot to be said for how well emails can be written. They can come across as this is somebody crazy that doesn’t know anything to, I could tell you are right and had your head on straight after a couple of emails. Now, if I’m not mistaken, you actually started writing for Own The Yard first, and then I was like, this guy is awesome. Let’s bring him over to Niche Pursuits, actually write some more in-depth affiliate articles, product reviews, that sort of thing. 

Brady: Yeah, I did start with Niche Site Project 4. It’s just perfect timing. Going back to the email, I think this is one thing that a lot of people who were in my position back then get wrong, and I get this wrong for years. My goal is always to make more money when I think the way to make more money is to provide more value to the world.  

I think the first time I really got this right was in my email to you because the message was not like, hey, can you mentor me for free? It was, hey, I’ll do whatever it takes to provide an asymmetrical value for you. I’ll work for zero of your dollars. I know there’s a little time investment, but I was like hey, I promise this will pay off. I’ll do whatever it takes to make you happy. I think I even said the parts like, I’ll pay for your lunch. 

Spencer: You still need to pay me up on that, I guess. 

Brady: I guess I do. Now that I’m traveling all the time, I guess I can just come right for you and do that. 

Spencer: You should. 

Brady: I think that was so powerful. Maybe that’s part of what caught your attention; it’s value first. It’s not about me, it’s about you. How can I help you? That's the magic sauce for any entrepreneur in any stage of their journey. 

Spencer: I 100% agree. To bring people up to speed, you wrote for Niche Pursuits for a little while and you did a great job, but from an ROI perspective, I had to look at my business in certain things that I wasn’t investing in. Link Whisper was starting to take off and I needed to invest dollars there. We parted ways for a short period of time, but very quickly, it just so happened that BrandBuilders needed someone to come in and manage the business.  

I want to talk about how I got involved in BrandBuilders here in just a second. Jon Gillham, who is one of the co-founders, one of the partners there at BrandBuilders, said, “Hey, Spencer, do you know anybody that might be a good fit to help manage BrandBuilders?” Brady came to mind. I said, “You know what, Brady is a young dude. He’s smart. He’s a go-getter. He’d be a great fit. Let’s plug him into BrandBuilders and see what he can do.” 

Brady: He’ll bleed out his eyeballs to make you happy. 

Spencer: That’s right. He says he’ll pay for lunch, he hasn’t done it yet. But I’m sure he’s willing to. 

Brady: Love to. Anytime. What do you like to eat, Spencer? 

Spencer: I’m a simple guy. Actually, you’re in Brazil. I love a good burrito. If you can come up with some original Brazilian burrito, that’d be great. 

Brady: Brazilian food does surprise me. They put ketchup on everything. I was in the pizza the other night with friends and they handed me a packet of ketchup. They’re like, no, you can put it on your pizza. That’s the stupidest thing. You can’t do that. That’s not right. Yeah, Brazilian food really surprised me. A bunch of things I’ve never tried before. 

Spencer: Awesome. Maybe it’s time I actually tell my story about BrandBuilders. 

Brady: Yeah, how did you get started with BrandBuilders? 

Spencer: I don’t know that I’ve ever shared this publicly. I’ll share it here. I see no reason why I shouldn’t other than BrandBuilders is very passive for me and I should explain. I actually am a part-owner in BrandBuilders. I have been for a couple of years now. Going back. I don’t know the exact time frame. Let’s just call it three years ago. I saw the success the BrandBuilders was having, I promoted BrandBuilders to my list and I was selling out premade affiliate sites like that. We were talking 15, 20, maybe even 25 at one point within a 48 hour period, the sites were listed and gone. I was like, holy cow. My audience is a big fan of these pre-built affiliate sites that BrandBuilders is putting out there. 

I looked at the business and I said, you know what? Why can’t I just do this myself? I can build a bunch of affiliate sites. Instead of making a small commission, I can make 100% of the earnings when I do it myself. Not many people know this, but I did that. I built seven affiliate sites as a test. I offered them to my audience, and they sold very quickly. I made good money.  

This is when Jon Gillham—again, he was a partner in the business—reached out to me and said, “Hey, we’d like to do another affiliate promotion with you,” and I said, “Look, I’ll be honest. I just did a test. I can do what you guys are doing. I just built seven affiliate sites. I sold them out really quickly. I don’t know if I need you guys. I can make more money if I just do it myself.” That got Jon really scared. He very aggressively started to make me question my decision. Not question my decision, but make BrandBuilders look like the better choice. 

Brady: What did Jon do? Because that’s a steady guy. I’m curious how he handled that. 

Spencer: We’re pretty close. Jon and I have known each other for a long time. We’re just very upfront. We just talked to each other about everything. He just explained their entire operations team and he explained, “Look, sure, you could do this, but I know you probably don’t really want to. Do you really want to manage a whole team building all these sites?” When I looked at it I was like, “Yeah. I did it once. It was a lot of work. But do I want to be doing this day in and day out?” That was kind of a no. and then the other thing he said, “Look, we’re not looking to sell BrandBuilders or do anything like that, but we would allow you to become a partner in BrandBuilders and that would resolve all the issues there.” 

Long story short, I did have to buy into BrandBuilders, but he gave a massive deal on it based on revenues. I got in at a really sweetheart deal. I paid a little bit of money and said, fine. Rather than me doing a ton of work trying to build a BrandBuilders competitor, because that’s really not what I want to do in the first place, I’ll take the sweetheart deal. I’ll get in, it could be more passive, and I can promote BrandBuilders as an affiliate. 

I don’t remember the dates, but it’s been a couple of years since I’d been a partner in BrandBuilders. That is the story, in case people were unaware. Any follow-ups on that, Brady? 

Brady: I can say I’m pretty biased against you having a BrandBuilders competitor. From the BrandBuilders’ perspective, from the service industry, there’s a lot of customer support. Yeah, we do stuff like 10-foot-based, the stuff that’s more standardized. Some stuff is just custom.  

I think anytime someone’s in the service industry where you do build custom stuff or if you do build stuff that has some pretty good standard operating procedures behind it and you got to deal with people, there’s always that element of someone furiously emails you 2:00 in the morning and just insults your whole family lineage back to Adam and Eve. This can be a little difficult sometimes. I think if I were in your position, create my own or invest, I think I would have done the same thing as you did. 

Spencer: Yup. Looking back, I absolutely made the right choice. It would have been a difficult hill to climb if I were to start an entire BrandBuilders competitor on my own. It was a good choice. It comes down to I tend to put my hands in a lot of pies. Now I’m doing more software, I got Link Whisper that’s going well. I’m glad that I don’t have to run BrandBuilders or a BrandBuilders’ competitor. You’re right. Dealing with customers and just custom builds of websites is difficult. Really got to be all hands on deck to do that sort of thing. 

Brady: Yeah. I love people. I love communicating with people, but sometimes there are 3% of customers—you have to fire sometimes—who are just really difficult to deal with. I think 97% of people are amazing, but there is that small minority that sometimes makes me question why I’m in the service industry. 

Spencer: Yup. I know exactly what you’re talking about. I have had difficult customers. I know how it goes. It can be frustrating. I think we copped people up on the timeline of how you and I are connected, how I’m involved in BrandBuilders, how you’re involved in BrandBuilders.  

Let’s just mention very quickly for people listening in, the week that you listen or watch to this interview, we actually are going to be offering a special deal on any BrandBuilders’ sites or any package I should say, and you can find out exactly what those are by going to nichepursuits.com/brandbuilders. I’m going to have a whole page up there and Brady’s going to have a whole page up there. It’s basically either 15% off or 15% bonus content if you order a content package. Did I pretty much get that right, Brady? 

Brady: Yeah. We’ve got deals across the whole site. Content, guest post, and […], got Shopify sites, we got some premade, do some custom for you, and then we can get premade affiliate sites, bringing those to the customer as well. One thing that’s cool is that the first 10 buyers of any of those things get extra. If you’re saying, I can’t think; I would like some content, you’re one of the first 10, we’ll give you extra content. You want links and you’re one of the first 10, we’ll give you extra links and so on. It’s like that for all the products. We’ll detail that on the landing page. The whole site’s discounted and the first buyers of any product get some extra cool stuff. 

Spencer: Awesome. We’re going to run that all this week for you guys. In case you’re interested in getting content links, premade affiliate sites, custom affiliate sites, just so people are aware of that.  

Now, maybe you can explain what exactly BrandBuilders does. I know we just listed everything. Maybe let’s go a little bit more in-depth of what those things are because it’s actually evolved a bit from the last couple of years. 

When I first got involved, it was essentially pre made affiliate websites. I’ll explain what premade affiliates are. I’ll let you explain the rest. Essentially, it’s an affiliate website that has maybe 15,000 or 20,000 words of content already written, it’s on a specific topic, the domain is purchased. It might be on kitchen gadgets, it might be on yard tools or whatever.  

A niche is already picked, the content is written, it’s all formatted, optimized, affiliate links in place, the website is active, it’s working, it’s ready to go. It’s just brand spanking new; it’s just out of the box. It doesn’t have any traffic yet or earnings, or anything like that, but it’s ready to start getting traffic, it starts to get earnings. You skipped all what I call the first few steps of building a site, which can be the most difficult for a lot of people. You skip the first few months—if it’s the first time you ever did this—of picking keywords, niche research, getting your themes, getting your plugins, designing.  

It is a lot of work. For somebody like me, I can do it pretty quickly. For people building the first or second site, you skip a lot of the steps with a pretty made affiliate site, then it becomes your responsibility once you buy it, to then either build links, get traffic, do anything you can to add more content or optimize, that sort of thing. 

That is essentially what BrandBuilders did initially (and they still do that), but they do a whole lot more as well. Brady, why don’t you fill us in what BrandBuilders is doing these days? 

Brady: We very much evolved the way from just building these premade affiliate sites, getting people over the analysis paralysis. Now it’s very much more helping people build the online business of their dreams. For a lot of people, that means starting from day zero to beginner level of how do I pick a niche, and then take it to a place where this replaces at least part of my job income. That means that we can help them with that process.  

For other people, that means, hey, I’ve got this business that’s already succeeding, like I’ve already done an entry search, got the site going, maybe already even earning, and I need either really systematized content that I can just invest in, plug-and-play, and then it’s done for me. I need link building, I need strategizing, I need email marketing, I need to move into dropshipping in my own products, whatever that may be. It’s very much moved away from just an affiliate provider and more what’s your end goal, let’s build the steps to go there.  

I think all online businesses should move towards their own product. If that is how you plan to retire, you should probably have your own product because that gets the maximum control. You’re not depending on affiliate networks, you can buy ads for that, really get out of the control of these big giants. We like to say if this is your end goal, to have this incredible business, got to move towards your own product, what are the stairsteps? Usually, it starts with an affiliate, then moves to ads and diversifies affiliate programs, and then moves to your own product. 

We just help people out of that entire process whether that’s getting started or scaling the business that’s already there. 

Spencer: Yeah. That’s a lot. There’s a lot that can go into that. Let’s talk about some specifics. Let’s say somebody does have an existing affiliate site, it’s making a couple of hundred bucks a month, they’ve written some great content already, but they know they need some links, for example. Can they come to you guys and say, hey, I just need some links. What are some link building packages? 

Brady: That depends from site to site. All the links we do are guest post links. That gives us a little bit more control than something like Shotgun Skyscraper. We have a little bit more of a say of what your anchor text is going to be, the context around that. In my opinion, they’re more powerful links, going to go ahead, go out on a limb and say that. That’s what we do. Just depending on what links you’re looking for, we can find a package that works.  

Spencer: Are these monthly link building packages, are they one time off? How does that work? 

Brady: We’re super flexible. One thing that we like is to have deliverables that are very standardized. If you say I want X, we can adapt our resolve to doing that. That means I have […] those client emails at 2:00 in the morning. If you want something that’s hyper-specific, like I want X links this month and then Y links the next month, and then I want to start adding content and links, that’s fine. We’re super flexible with our plans. We have cookie-cutter stuff. You say, hey, I want 10 links, no problem. But if you have something that’s very specific, we’re really flexible. 

Spencer: Okay. Beyond link building, content. I’ve talked about different content providers in the past. Are you saying I could go to BrandBuilders and just ask for new content on Own The Yard? 

Brady: I’m saying you’d be crazy not to. All of our writers, they’re native English speakers. We send all of our content through two rounds of editing. We’re about to start sending all of our content through Surfer SEO to figure out what exactly do we need to rank here. It’s a lot more than just writing content. It’s very much full service, very much hands-off for you. We find the affiliate products, whether you’re using Amazon, ClickBank, CJ, whoever. We link to those, we add images, we get the on-page SEO stuff right, whether you’re using Yoast, SEOPress, whatever, and we upload that for you. 

You can have as much hands-on or hands-off as you want. Most people say, I want to do it for a month and try it out, and then I want a bunch of you guys to run it for me. 

Spencer: You will upload it to WordPress for me formatted, with images, affiliate links in place? 

Brady: That’s it, yup. 

Spencer: Did you say you’re currently doing Surfer SEO? Or you’re about to start doing that? 

Brady: We’re starting next week. 

Spencer: Let’s say you’re doing it. By the time people see this, you will be doing Surfer SEO. 

Brady: Yeah. We are doing it. 

Spencer: Perfect. Why am I not doing this for Own The Yard? Come on, Brady. 

Brady: I have no idea. I want to cut you a deal, how much […] do you want? 

Spencer: Ten thousand words to start. What do we do? 

Brady: Yeah, we’ll get that. 

Spencer: What’s the cost of a content package? Typically, content is priced on a per word basis that people compare. If you’re adding to WordPress, you’re going to Surfer SEO and a lot of these other things. I would expect there would be more. Honestly, I haven’t looked at the price for different tiers currently on BrandBuilders. Why don’t you tell us? 

Brady: Yeah, that’s fine. I’m hesitant to give too solid of a number here in case it ever changes in the future. As of today, it’s 7¢ a word. 

Spencer: Wow. 

Brady: And then if you do it monthly, we take 10% off or give you 10% more content, whichever you want. 

Spencer: Again, this might be slightly different. If somebody comes and says, I need 100,000 words of content. You’re going to cut me a deal? 

Brady: I can. I’m a little hesitant to. 

Spencer: I don’t mean me. But anyone that comes. 

Brady: Then no. I’m just kidding. There have been cases where someone ordered half a million words last month and they said, “I don’t want to pay 7¢ a word.” Okay, half a million words, have a little wiggle room. $10,000, probably not so much. 

Spencer: Got you. Now, that’s fair enough. I don’t want to compare directly against somebody else, but I did just talk about another service that is a high-end, premium content provider and they are more expensive than BrandBuilders is. I don’t think they’re doing this Surfer SEO, I don’t think they’re adding to WordPress, finding images, and just doing all that. It’s actually a pretty good deal for everything that’s involved. 

Brady: I don’t think that we sacrifice quality on that. I think the thing that keeps us pretty low price among all our competitors and pretty all of our products, is that we did have killer systems. You mentioned Jon Gillham a few times, former engineer, he is a master of spreadsheets, and he just has this incredible skill of getting a team together and organizing everyone in such a way that you just get maximum output per hour of work put in. 

What that leads to is we just have high-quality products. One thing that’s cool is all of our products come with free consulting. Whether someone pays $100 or $100,000, it’s all the same to us. You can access (most of the time it’s) me. We’ll share Skype, we’ll hop on Zoom, and we’ll talk about how to make sure this is successful for you. I don’t like to compete on price either like […] lower, but I don’t think we’re sacrificing quality. I would just bet that our systems are probably better than theirs are. We just got really good accountability in our team. 

Spencer: I agree. Having those systems in place makes a huge difference for people. I want to highlight a couple of things. You mentioned that everybody gets a consulting call. Is that really just anybody? Like if they want it, open-door policy, come chat with Brady. 

Brady: Yeah, they do. We’ve done those for free in the past and had mixed results. This week, for your promotion, if anyone orders, they do get one for free. 

Spencer: Awesome. 

Brady: […] $100, $100,000, it doesn’t matter. The more you spend, the more you get, but as long as someone starts angrily messaging me at 2:00 in the morning, we have a pretty open-door policy. Most people get my Skype, when you do things, just let me know. 

Spencer: Schedule a call with you would be preferred, get your calendar, schedule a call, hop on, talk strategy, talk business with Brady. I think that’s huge. That’s a big differentiator for people out there as well. And then the last couple of products that you touched on already are custom affiliate sites or just any sites including Shopify now, right? 

Brady: Yeah. With the custom site, you say your end goal. Your end goal is to have your own course and whatever. We build you a strategy of what’s the most effective way to get that. If your end goal is to sell Brazilian Jiu Jitsu equipment, then okay, it makes sense that probably start as an affiliate and then work your way up. If your end goal is to sell zero equipment and sell Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu courses, okay, that’s a little bit of a different step.  

If you’re not a big fan of the affiliate model, not a big fan of the ad model, and you just want to start your course, that’s a very different site than someone whose end goal is to sell whatever the Brazilian […], I don’t know what they’re called. Very different site path there. We use part of that conversation of what you are looking for and what’s the most effective way to get you there. 

Spencer: Right. It really has become brand builders. You guys are in the business of helping people build their brands and that can be as narrow or as flexible as people might like that to be. 

Brady: Most of what I learned actually came from you. I don’t want to say it’s like they’re working with you, but it’s like they’re working with your people. 

Spencer: Yeah. I guess that’s true. If people like that, that’s a good thing, I suppose. Very cool. Can you share a little bit about the success of BrandBuilders? We’ve now walked through the journey of it a little bit, what’s offered. Just whatever you’re willing to share. Is business going well? 

Brady: Yeah. When I got here in December, the business had been neglected for a while. A manager had left and it just got pushed in the back burner. I think all of 2019, just very low revenue profit numbers for the vast majority of the year. When I got here, we were able to implement some easy changes, kicked that up. Q1, we did really well. I’ll give some generalized numbers in a second. Coronavirus hit us pretty good in Q2, but Q3 is off to a pretty sweet start. Since I have started, we haven’t had a revenue month under $20,000. Some have gotten in the $45,000–$50,000 range. 

Spencer: That’s awesome. That’s (of course) what I’d like to hear, but I want to share with people that this is a successful business. There’s a lot to be learned from the standard operating procedures in the background, and the strategies that you and Jon (in particular) have implemented in BrandBuilders that perhaps people listening can apply to their own business as well. Take some of the tips that we’re talking about and maybe apply that to their own business. 

Brady: Yeah. A lot of the stuff that I learned that we use in BrandBuilders I learned from guys like you and Jon. All of the time, I get to chat with really cool people. Miles Beckler, Richard […], Kevin Peterson run in software businesses. I’m in a unique position. I’m able to distill knowledge from just a lot of different areas and really impressive people. 

Spencer: Yeah, that’s what I think is great. You’ve had an interesting journey that we’ve heard a little bit about. Maybe you can share a little bit more of your personal journey in terms of failures and mistakes, or funny stories that you had along the way that maybe you wish you could change or something. Maybe share a failure story that helped you learn as an entrepreneur. 

Brady: I have a list of these. Any young 18-, 19-year-old wanting to be wealthy, I had my fair share of stupid entrepreneurial moves. For sure got involved in network marketing at least twice, almost three times. That didn’t end up working well. One time, I tried to sell a membership course, I was 18 or 19. Way too young to be talking about how to maximize your return on investment in the stock market. I could probably start investing three months ago. And here I was trying to tell people how to be better investors. I launched this membership course using ClickFunnels. Have you had a mic dealer? 

Spencer: Yeah, I have. 

Brady: It’s $1500 on a course of this. To learn how to set all this up. I end up setting it up. […] taking a full paid hour to be three weeks. I set this up and put a lot of “work” into it—which means a lot of procrastinating—then I started buying Facebook Ads. Didn’t have anyone buy it. Spent $1500 in a course, a couple of hundred bucks in ClickFunnels at this point because I’d been procrastinating for so long.  

Then the only person who’s buying is a friend of mine who ends up canceling after the first month because she was smart. Tried the authority site model after that, before I got hooked up with you. Didn’t end up working out. I’ve got my own list of things that didn’t work at all. 

Spencer: Yeah. It probably doesn’t feel good if nobody buys your course and the one person that does cancel after the first month. 

Brady: Yeah. That was embarrassing. I shared it on Facebook. I was like, oh, everyone knows my failure. They just know. 

Spencer: I think it’s important for entrepreneurs to go through those struggles. I’ve got tons of stories of just failures that I had and little ideas I tried out that never worked. I think it’s important for people to go through that to understand who they are as an entrepreneur. It’s not really until you do something and go through the act that you understand that maybe it wasn’t a good idea. You probably learned that if you’re going to sell a course, you probably should have a lot of experience in that area. It makes sense. 

But you’re not the only one to do that. It’s not like other people aren’t making the same mistake. It’s just sometimes, you have to experience things yourself. That’s true certainly with building websites. I built so many sites that never did anything. If I didn’t work on them myself, go through the struggles of learning how to set up WordPress, and do some basic coding, there was just so much that I learned by making all those mistakes. It’s okay. 

Brady: I think every entrepreneurial failure is a tragedy, but I think sometimes they’re super helpful to learn what actually does work. Take my multi-level marketing “scam” as an example. What I realized is when you’re saying I recruit people, but I don’t sell anything, and they don’t sell anything, it’s like, how does this actually make money? And then the exact same thing with my course. I don’t have enough value to provide that someone is willing to pay me for it yet. 

One thing that could save tons of entrepreneurs tons of hours of failures, is to get out of this mindset of how I make more money and get into the mindset of how do I provide more value to the world that no one else can provide. This is the basic foundation of how we get paid for anything, is how many other people can do your job, how many other people can provide value the same way you can. The fewer people can do that, the more valuable you are, the more you get paid. Entrepreneurship is just the perfect way to scale this. Learn a skill, talent, or something that you can sell. Use the Internet to sell it to scale. That’s the path to wealth. 

Spencer: 100% agree. That’s really smart advice. Let’s get off the failure and on to the successes here. In particular, strategies that have made BrandBuilders or anything else that you’ve worked on successful. Maybe you can just share one or two strategies that have made the business successful for us. 

Brady: Two things have been really helpful to us so far, to the life of the business even before I was here. First, amazing systems in place. I know it sounds like I’ve harped on this. It’s super important to know exactly what it costs you to produce something, to have excellent standard operating procedures, to show how to produce something, great training for your team, and so on. What that allows you to do is be fast. Once you have mastered the production of these certain things, like premade slides, for example, we can pop one up in less than a day. It really doesn’t take much time at all. Once you’ve mastered that, it gives you speed to try new things. 

If you say, sales are flying in this one regard. Our content is just not selling like it’s used to, our links are not selling like it used to, we got these down, we got these mastered. We have mental space and we have financial ability to try new things. One thing […] like to have a premade site […] like they used to, I think there’s just a lot more information out there. A lot of people realize how to do this on their own now, awesome. […] Shopify sites. 

Getting these systems in place gives you enough speed to try new products at super low expense. We can pop up a new product, pop up a new Shopify site tomorrow for very little expense relative to our income. Really, it doesn’t cost us that much. In the grand scheme of things, of course, it costs us some, but it’s not detrimental if these things fail. Which means that we can try out more and more, more things. Even if they fail, it’s going to be okay because we’ve still got these other processes mastered. 

So, incredible systems in place. But also, great connections with incredible people. You’re a great example of that. Say, we didn’t know each other at all, had never met, I could reach out to you, say how can I provide value to you. And in exchange, maybe we can get an affiliate promo. All of a sudden we get access to—I don’t know how big your list is—large, high five figures. Those are new people who we can get access to. 

Having amazing systems in place, then being connected with just incredible people, providing value for these incredible people to help us get the word out about our really cool service. 

Spencer: Absolutely. Partnered with those SOPs is that once you’ve gone through SOP and figured out how to do something like building a Shopify site, for example, you can replicate it quickly. Not only the SOP, but you now have a team in place. It doesn’t become a single bottleneck of Brady actually trying to build all these things. You can take those spreadsheets or whatever and say, all right, here are the steps you need to follow to build this. Being able to document and then get the right team in place is really smart as well.  

Brady: Yeah, and amazing value to your customers. I think we’re probably going to chat with this more in a bit. I think this is a key to success as well, is making sure that the product you deliver is actually amazing. This is part of the reason that we offer free consulting to just a ton of our customers, is because the big win for us is if you buy a site from us and you do so well, then in a year you come back and you say, hey, I want to buy another one, or I want to buy three, I want to buy five.  

Repeat customers in helping people succeed are really the path to success for us. That’s something that’s been tremendous for us as well, is whenever someone buys, we have some really cool resources. We have one of this traffic acquisition guide that’s going to show you our next steps for what you would do to really start taking the site to the next level. Free consulting, glad to share with you any of our standard operating procedures, any of our systems for producing content. We got templates for hiring writers on Upwork, hiring VAs, whatever that is. Really making sure that customers succeed has been a […] for us. 

Spencer: Who would you say that BrandBuilders is the best fit for? What kind of customer, what kind of audience are you most trying to attract? 

Brady: Someone who either wants to get started an online business or who wants to take their business to the next level. I don’t have a fancy answer for that one. That’s really it. 

Spencer: Cut and dry. Nothing wrong with that. We’ve talked quite a bit about BrandBuilders, but let’s talk just briefly, what are the plans? Where does BrandBuilders hope to go in the future? Discuss any growth areas that you guys are planning out and what you plan to do there. 

Brady: To do that, I probably need to talk a little bit about our weaknesses in the past as well. We’ve excelled in the systems and at the relationships. We have failed at providing free value to people who don’t know about us yet. At the heart, this is what our SEO strategy is and this is what our YouTube and now our podcast strategy is, is how do we equip more people. In doing so, helping become aware of us. One thing in our docket is we want to start to outproduce our competition. 

The other thing that we want to do is continue to build amazing connections with amazing people. Getting really cool people like you, like Matthew Woodward, like the guys at Authority Hacker, get them on our podcast, on our YouTube channel so that we can just get this incredible information to our audience, and then build a relationship with people who are really influential. Our future plans, we want to outproduce our competition, and then we want to get to know people. 

Spencer: Absolutely. I think that’s smart. I think people can do the same thing in pretty much any industry that they’re in, can do a similar path as well. The last question that I just wanted to ask you here is what final tips or advice do you have for anybody that’s wanting to achieve online success in their business, whatever that maybe? 

Brady: Number one for me, got to provide value to the world. Learn a skill, learn to do something that a lot of other people can’t do, and then start selling that. I think, for me, that’s really what it all comes down to. What would you say about that? 

Spencer: I agree with that. One thing is to not try and follow the crowd. I think too many people get caught up with here’s what I see so many other people online doing. It looks like you read blogs or whatever and just, oh man, everybody is doing this, they’re selling an online course on investing or whatever. That’s just an example. Whatever space you go, oh man, everybody is doing it this way, I’ve got to do it that way. That’s never really done the case for me. I’ve usually done my own thing and thought of my own unique ideas. There is nobody better than yourself that understands you and who you are, and what’s going to work for you. 

That’s my advice, is to really plan strategically for yourself and take a moment to think, okay, what’s going to work for me, I don’t care what the crowd’s doing, I believe I’ve got a good idea or a good strategy, and I’m going to execute on that strategy even though nobody else is doing that. That’s done really well for me across the whole variety of my businesses. 

Brady: Yeah. You’ve been at the forefront of quite a few things. I wasn’t big on Internet marketing, but you’re impactful and one of the first ones that started doing income reports, some case studies, am I wrong? 

Spencer: You’re not wrong. Income reports and case studies have probably been a long-term thing, but I certainly was on the early front of building a niche site from scratch, publicly available to see what the income was. You could go to the site, check it out. Certainly have been pretty early on. I was just looking at the years, it’s been 10 years doing that, which is dinosaur age in Internet years. 

Brady: You’ve managed to survive. What’s your secret in never aging, Spencer? 

Spencer: Business strategies never age. You can actually look back, I was just watching a video by Jeff Bezos that he recorded in 1999. A lot of what he was saying with the early days of the Internet still apply now. He looked at his business as not really an Internet player. Even though amazon.com is clearly an Internet player or at least it was, but now he’s proving out that entire strategy 20 years later that they don’t care where the customers are or where they come from, if they’re on the Internet, off the Internet. All of us get packages on our door every day. There are Amazon physical stores. There are so many things. 

Long story short is that if you get some really key business fundamentals, those things don’t change over time. You don’t need to be chasing the latest and the greatest thing that’s out there all the time. 

Brady: Where would you recommend that someone getting started learns business fundamentals? 

Spencer: That’s a good question. I went to business school. I did learn a lot of fundamentals there, but you can certainly learn a lot online, or YouTube, and just the blogosphere in general have a lot of great resources. I’m just trying to think of any specific channel or something like that that I would recommend because there are so many out there.  

I would recommend just finding somebody that you want to emulate. If you want to start a SaaS business, find somebody that’s done really well with the SaaS business, and subscribe to their YouTube channel. Or if you really want to be an affiliate marketer, find somebody that has done that and try to learn business through them. You can probably accumulate a few really good business fundamental resources as you do that. 

Brady: That was going to be similar to my answer as well. Find someone who is doing what you want to do or has done what you want to do, and use their resources to mentor yourself. It can be difficult to find a truly decent business coach unless you’re willing to bleed out your eyeballs, pay for lunch, and work for free. This is one thing we try to solve in BrandBuilders is how do we make sure people win. That’s the whole point behind our free consulting goals. 

You’d be amazed at how many people end up buying something from us and never end up booking our call. We’ll send an email, say, “Hey, please don’t forget,” and they still don’t do it. I think that’s a tragedy. Find someone who is doing what you want to do, has done what you want to do, read their resources, follow them, figure out what they did to get where they are and if possible, get on a one-on-one conversation with them. I think that just shortens the learning curve. In my case, literally through the years. 

Spencer: Great advice for sure. Let’s go ahead and start to wrap this up here. Just to remind people again, there’s a special deal going on over at BrandBuilders (if you’re watching this) during the first week. If you’re not, hopefully the last hour of our conversation was useful to you anyway. But if you want to check out what’s available through Niche Pursuits, you can go to nichepursuits.com/brandbuilders. Again, that is going to be 15% off. A lot of the packages that are available, prebuilt sites, custom Shopify sites, link building services, or a 50% bonus content if you order a content package plus some great freebies if you’re one of the first 10 people to order in any one of those things. First 10 to order content, first 10 to order link building, that sort of thing. 

Brady: All of our services are at a discount. Whatever you get, if you either get a discount or get more of it. Every single order for this week is going to get a free (at least) 30-minute consulting call, probably with me personally, and you get a free month of a new SaaS tool called Site Buddy, which is going to make sure that all of your Amazon links are working, you got all your affiliate disclaimers on your pages, and you’re not linking products that are out of stock. You get that for free. Really cool stuff going for this week. 

Spencer: Absolutely. I will just say that I was running Site Buddy yesterday on Own The Yard and another one of my sites, and boy, I’ve got a lot of clean up to do. The thing that I thought maybe was happening and now that I can see, there’s a few of my Amazon products that don’t have my affiliate tag, they just don’t have any tag, there are some of my links that have somebody else’s tag. Not very many of them, but there are a few that probably writers just being lazy, they did some research and they accidentally copied somebody else’s affiliate link. But that’s free money. 

Site Buddy, as I said, I just used it. I’m going to have a VA help me go through and clean up my site here probably this week. 

Brady: You’re the second person who’s told me that you have some affiliate links that are not just wrong, but there’s someone else’s. That’s never something that I would ever see. I never would have guessed that. But apparently, that's a pretty common thing when you use outside writers. 

One thing that’s cool about Site Buddy—not to harp on it too much and then we got to go—but as you talked about just getting that free money, we guarantee, with every order of Site Buddy—we have a cool free version that’s pretty awesome—if you do pay, and you don’t make more money as a result to the changes we suggest, it’s free. The whole thing is free. We actually have a guarantee that if you don’t make more money, we give the thing to you. Just a huge value about any affiliate site. 

Spencer: Yup. To reiterate that, anybody that orders any of these packages is getting Site Buddy for free? 

Brady: That’s it. A month for free. 

Spencer: Perfect. That’s enough time to go in, do an audit, and get some value. Awesome, Brady. Thanks for letting me chat with you. We chat, of course, but to do it publicly and to share your story, to share more of my story, honestly, that I have not shared about my involvement with BrandBuilders in the past, I think it was good. I appreciate it. 

Brady: Yeah. Let me know if you want an interview that’s all about you. Really. We’ll just chat about you, your story, and what you got going on this time. 

Spencer: Yeah. That’d probably be good. I’m sure there are some hidden gems that you can take out of me, stories that I haven’t told. 

Brady: In Internet years, you’re like 150. 

Spencer: That’s true. We’ll see if I can remember that far back. Very good. Thank you, Brady. Thank you everybody for listening to either the Niche Pursuits Podcast or if you’re just watching here on YouTube. Thank you, guys. Appreciate your time and hope you all have a great day. 

Brady: Bye-bye. 

Get 15% Off Brand Builders - This Week Only!

NichePursuits Rating

Brand Builders Special Discount:

• Content Services (includes Surfer SEO & Posting) – Get 15% BONUS content
• Guest Post Link Building – 15% off
• Premade Affiliates Sites – 15% off
• Premade Shopify Sites – 15% off
• Custom Affiliate or Shopify Site – 15% off and 10% Bonus Content

Use Coupon Code NichePursuits15!

1
standard
building-niche-sites
1
1
Use Coupon Code: NichePursuits15
https://www.nichepursuits.com/brandbuilders
1
option_2
Get 15% Off Brand Builders – This Week Only!
5
18708

Brand Builders Special Discount:

• Content Services (includes Surfer SEO & Posting) – Get 15% BONUS content
• Guest Post Link Building – 15% off
• Premade Affiliates Sites – 15% off
• Premade Shopify Sites – 15% off
• Custom Affiliate or Shopify Site – 15% off and 10% Bonus Content

Related Posts

I Enjoyed a Multiple 7-Figure Exit After Starting This Community!

Google CEO Reveals the Future of Search + Google Bard Now Creates AI Images

How I Grew My AI Site to $21k+ Per Month In Under 12 Months

Are Google AI Results (SGE) Going Away? Getting Traffic from Facebook + 2 Weird Niche Sites

I Make $10k to $30k Per Month Working Part Time On My Sweet Food Blog