How To Make $1000+/Month Simply By Practicing Your SEO Skills & Using The Rank & Rent Method

Hello and Welcome to Rank & Rent!

Congratulations on the decision you made that led to you getting your hands on this guide!

There is a very high likelihood that your decision will be one of the most profitable ones you have ever made in your life. All you have to do is apply yourself for a few months, and you will see what I mean.

My name is Herc Magnus. There's a chance you've heard of me, and if you haven't then I hope that the value I'm about to give you in this guide will help you to become profitable in the next 3-6 weeks!

A bit about me…

I've been online marketing on and off for quite a long time. And in that time I've purchased a whole lot of SEO guides, courses and tools to try and get my sites ranking in Google! In the early days however, I kind of had the 'shiny toy' syndrome which led me to read a sales page, get really excited and buy the product or service. But unfortunately, I often did the same thing over and over. I read it, or watched the videos and never really put anything into action.

Well I eventually I did start to take action, but what really inspired me was the Success Stories Forum in a program called Bring The Fresh. It's basically an SEO info product by a guy name Kelly Felix and this time around I would NOT make the same mistake again.

I applied the information I learned. I became very active in the BTF forum, I asked tons of dumb questions that today when I go back and read them, it blows my mind. But hey, everyone starts somewhere right? Later on, I asked some pretty good questions as well ;)

Eventually with time and effort, I created my first profitable website. It was an exact match domain (EMD) that I ranked on the first page of Google very quickly and my traffic ballooned. I applied Adsense and a few affiliate links to the site and I started making a few bucks. Once that happened, I never looked back.

Fast forward to today, I've learned a heck of a lot more about internet marketing and have never stopped taking action. I learned about affiliate, CPA & Adsense marketing. I learned about SEO and getting clients to pay me to rank their sites. I learned about on page optimization and private blog networks. I never stopped learning. I'm still learning today!

And what did it all add up to? Check out this screen shot below:

And trust me, this isn't just a one time thing. My business has been growing every month for over 2 years now!

So here's where I want to help you. I still consider myself to be a lot more a beginner than an expert in SEO as that level of income that you just saw wasn't over night. I grew into it month by month over the last couple years. I strongly believe that I am as much a student as I am a teacher.

So I think I can really relate to a lot of the emotions you might be feeling right now with all the new information that is constantly spewed out every day! So you may be asking yourself…

Where do I even start? What do I do first?

Well really, I think we should start right here. One of the main reasons you downloaded this guide is because you want to make money right?

Maybe you already know how to do Affiliate Marketing or SEO. Maybe you own a business and you want to rank your site, or maybe signed up to change your life. Whatever the reason, I personally think that the bottom line was to make money.

So for that reason I wrote this guide for you so that you can have at least ONE strategy that I've personally used again and again to make money extremely fast! And when you combine what I'm showing you with some of the other lessons and strategies you'll learn here you are bound to be successful!

Here are some really awesome points about this method called Rank & Rent:

• You won't have to sell a promise of rankings; you'll show a result which will sell itself.
• You don't have a deadline to meet. You can take as long as you like to get to #1 in Google without anyone breathing down your neck to get results. NO PRESSURE!
• You can actually use this method to practice your SEO skills, and if you mess it up no one is going to get mad at you (except yourself). But if you get it right, it's going to pay you BIG TIME.
• It's one of the cheapest ways to build a website, because they are small and easy to rank, meaning you spend less money on content and links. But the value they posses once they arrive at #1 in Google can be worth anywhere from $6000 - $24,000 per year.
• It's fast! I've been ranking and renting these sites in less than 30 days! If you can build 3 sites in your first 30 days, you could be making $3000/month that fast.

So with all that said, I truly hope you enjoy this guide!

Herc Magnus

The No Pressure, High Paying Rank & Rent Method

The method we will use to practice our SEO, and eventually make money is called Rank & Rent.

Essentially, what you are going to do is pick a service in any city you wish. Then you'll register an exact match or EMD domain name and build the site. From there, it's easy to rank the site for its best keywords and finally rent it out for around $750 - $1500/month to a business who offers that service!

For example the keywords you'll be going after would look like this: “landscaping phoenix” or “pool cleaner fountain hills”. The domain you'll build and rank will be exact matches of your best keywords like www.landscapingphoenix.com or www.poolcleanerfountainhills.net.

Those keywords are very common phrases people use when looking for a business to perform a service that they need. They also usually have decent search volumes, and it's fairly easy to rank in the Top 3 spots in Google.

Once they are ranked on the first page of Google (especially in the Top 3 spots), it's really not that hard to find a buyer since they are already ranked and you are selling instant results. I'll even show you how to set it up to rent the sites without contacting a single business using a plugin called SEM Agent.

Think about saying this to a landscaping company in Phoenix:

You can easily approach landscapers with that, but if you don't like cold calling, or prospecting there's other options too, which I'll explain when we get to the section on how to rent out your site!

But the best part of all, is that you don't have feel any pressure to rank the site, because no one is paying you to rank it yet, so there's no expectations on you to succeed. Take as long as you want to rank it! If you get it penalized or mess something up and it tanks in Google, the only person who has to deal with the consequences of it is you!

So the rank and rent method is an excellent way for you to practice your SEO without any pressure, but still get handsomely rewarded financially if you succeed.

• No pressure of any kind
• It's easy to rank
• You get paid HUGE when you become successful at ranking your sites

So let's get started!

Pick Your Service

When choosing what service you want to start with, make sure that the price a customer would pay to purchase the service is high enough. What's high enough?

Well if you are selling the site for $1000, it would take 4 sales at $250/sale for the client to break even. Even better, if the service costs $1000, then the business would only need to convert 1 customer per month to break even. So just think about that when choosing your service, you want the site to hit the breakeven point for your customer really fast; 4 sales or less.

So what kind of services are in high demand and also expensive enough to rent a site for $1000 per month? There's literally an endless supply, here's just a few.

• arborists
• pool cleaners
• landscapers
• final grading
• deck builders
• fence builders
• garage builders
• roofing
• siding
• real estate (think suburb of city for less competition)
• wedding planners
• air conditioning/heating/hvac
• carpet installers
• drywallers
• electricians
• plumbing
• it is ENDLESS

If you need more niche ideas, just thumb through the YellowPages to get ideas for services being offered out there. There are tons of them.

One great tip I also learned is that if you rank a site for an emergency related service such as emergency plumbing, heating or cooling, you'll get a lot more leads, because these people are motivated to get their problem fixed. Just something to think about.

Pick Your City

Many people like to start with the city they live in, and it does help! But if you live in a smaller town, you want to try to pick a city that has a larger population because that will increase the amount of searches the (city)(service) keyword gets. You don't want to go after “Flin Flon Mechanics”, because Flin Flon is such a small city and people probably know the mechanics just by thinking about it.

Go for bigger cities with at least 50,000 populations to get your search volumes up.

When you get into really big cities such as Phoenix, New York, Los Angeles, then you can even start targeting suburbs of that city and set up a small silo on your site.

• PhoenixPlumbers.com
• PhoenixPlumbers.com/scottsdale
• PhoenixPlumbers.com/tempe
• PhoenixPlumbers.com/mesa

This site is a HUGE site, and typically can be rented out for a lot more money since it will get more traffic. You can also rent out individual pages, and I'll show you how to do that with a simple WordPress plugin! But let's not get ahead of ourselves yet…let's just keep it simple for now! One city and one service is enough to make $1000/month.

So for example, let's say we're out driving around and you spot a guy cleaning someone's pool and you come up with the idea for “phoenix pool cleaners”. Well now we have to do a bit of research to see if it's worth going after.

Check Your Keyword Traffic Levels & Competition

What we use today in 2026

Everything I do by hand in this chapter is now one tool. I built KillerEMD to do exactly this: search, get volume and CPC together, see whether the exact match domain is actually available, and score the first page. What takes several pages below takes seconds now.

That last part is the Kill Score. Everything I work through further down this chapter, counting results, checking whether the phrase appears in any title or URL, spotting that a Yelp page holds the top spot, is my own read of a first page turned into a single number from 0 to 100. The judgement is identical. I just stopped doing it manually.

What I look for has changed in one important way. Back then I chased volume. Now CPC does the heavy lifting, because what advertisers are willing to bid tells you there is real money in the market, and volume only tells you how big the town is. The exact targets depend on whether you are renting the site to one business or running it for pay per lead, so those numbers get taught rather than written down as one rule.

Keyword planning and clustering for the build itself happens in Xagio afterwards. But the judgement below has not changed at all: real volume, a service worth real money, an available domain, and a weak first page.

Ok so we are starting with “phoenix pool cleaners”.

I don't really own a pool so I have no idea of the cost of a service, but I assume that once a pool cleaner is hired they come on a regular basis, which means the business sells a client once, but gets paid over and over, which is a decent situation. Plus this is just a starting point, and sometimes you don't end up where you started!

First, you should get an idea if that keyword has got any traffic. Just head to the Google Keyword Planner tool and pop it in. Here's what I get when I did the search.

You can see that “phoenix pool cleaner” and “pool cleaner phoenix” both only have 30 searches combined. That's not that great at all.

But we also see “phoenix pool builder” in the suggestions with 320 searches. This is very interesting.

A site ranked #1 with that many searches would get about 120-150 hits per month. And I'm sure building a pool isn't cheap, which makes that keyword a really decent one! So I'd dig a little deeper into that keyword and pop that back in to Google Keyword Tool. Here's what we get.

Ok so now we are starting to see some great volume keywords related to pool builders in Phoenix.

• pool builders phoenix – 210 searches per month
• pool builders phoenix az – 110 searches per month
• phoenix pool builder – 50 searches per month
• pool builders in phoenix – 90 searches per month
• pool builder phoenix – 70 searches per month

Another thing I like to do at this point is enter a Keywords To Include filter into my results so that all keywords suggestions that get displayed contain the word “Phoenix”. I'm not interested in “pool builder” because it doesn't contain the geographical area. So on the left hand side of the keyword tool you'll see this box, and you simply enter “phoenix” or whatever keyword you want to include in your results:

Now all the keyword suggestions will have “phoenix” in them, and they are all highly relevant like this:

So we see a lot of keywords with decent volume, and we know that our keywords suggest a high paying service. You can confirm that by the CPC costs. Companies are paying up to $14.70 per click to show up for that keyword! They are already spending money on advertising, it would make more sense to have the #1 ranked site! Ok now it's time to check if the EMD domain is available for our keyword.

I popped it into my domain checker and .com, .net and .org are all gone. So in this case, I'd either change the location and move on, or just change the service. Let's take another look at our list.

I see two more directions we could take such as “pool resurfacing phoenix” and “phoenix pool repair” both with 260 searchers per month!

I bet both of those services cost a lot more than $250 per job! But I really like “pool resurfacing phoenix” because it's kind of an oddball job that most SEO's won't think about unless they dig for it, so it's likely not that competitive, so let's move in that direction now.

As a side note, I did check “phoenix pool repair” and all the domains were registered, so we would have moved on anyways.

First let's check if the EMD domain is available for “pool resurfacing phoenix”!

After checking, I see YES it is available in all 3 extensions. .com, .net and .org are available! This is looking really good now. But DO NOT register the domain at this point!

We still want to get an idea about the competition we have to go up against, so we want to analyze the first page of Google. Let's see how the top ten looks for that search.

So the very first couple of things that stand out at me are the fact that Google only has 28,000 results, which I have outlined in red. This number is EXTREMELY low which means overall competition is extremely low. But even so, maybe the first 10 pages have really strong SEO done to them. So let's check that by looking at the listings in the Top 10.

…NOPE…They aren't strong and the very next thing that stands out and screams at me “this is going to be so easy” is #1 listing which just happens to be a Yelp subpage. Any time a Yelp listing is coming up number 1, chances are they are there because Google doesn't have a better more optimized solution to put in the Top 10, or Top 1 for that matter!

One last thing I'd want to check would be if the exact phrase “pool resurfacing phoenix” appears in any of the titles, URL's or descriptions in the listings. This is basically checking the on page optimization of the sites in the Top 10. Ideally, you'd only want to see 1 or 2 listings that do have the keyword in the title or in the url. Sites that have both, are fully optimized.

In the Title: I don't see that exact phrase in any of these top 10 results. I see very close things like “Pool Resurfacing IN Phoenix”, which is a modifier, but not the exact phrase.

In the URL: I don't see the phrase either anywhere in the top 10! This is looking really really good.

In the Descriptions: there is only 1 instance where that phrase shows up! This is great.

Obviously you can go further into competition analysis, but I'm also giving you a free plugin called Project Supremacy that will help you with that!

We've found our $1000+/month domain! www.poolresurfacingphoenix.com

So once we have found it, it's time to register that domain name! I actually also registered this domain name, and I will be ranking it and giving updates on my blog at www.hercmagnus.com :)

So just to recap quickly why this domain qualifies for us:

Hosting Your WordPress Website

What we use today in 2026

I no longer send people off to shop for hosting. Hosting is built into Xagio: a new hosting account, with an optional WordPress install, spins up in under 60 seconds, in the same place you build the site. The whole chapter below, choosing a host, buying a plan, setting up cPanel, installing WordPress, collapses into one click. The NameCheap link is a 2015 affiliate link and the pricing is long out of date.

The footprint advice still holds though: do not stack a pile of related sites on one shared account.

So now that you have your domain name registered, I highly recommend you use a NameCheap Hosting package which costs $7.96/month. That link is an affiliate link, so I do make a few bucks if you register a site there, but I'm hoping you are finding so much value in this guide, that you don't mind :)

Here are a few reasons why I recommend NameCheap.

• I host a maximum of 3 domains on each account which makes it really cheap. You don't want to host too many sites on the same host if you are going to use similar links or PBNs to link to your money sites. That starts creating a foot print. 3 is the max I'd go.
• The plugins I use always work flawlessly with NameCheap, especially my new SEO Plugin called Project Supremacy v3.
• They have an exceptional uptime guarantee. Your sites will never go down.
• It's got exceptional hosting support. Any questions you may have with hosting, they have live chat support, phone and email and are always quick to answer.
• They use cPanel. cPanel is the back end control panel for your hosting account. It's got everything you need to make your hosting set ups very quick and simple.

So I'm not going to go over the technical aspects of how to set up your hosting account and install WordPress etc. There are tons of guides on YouTube that will teach you that, and I want to keep this guide about how to make $1000/month with a rank and rent site, not a technical manual.

Here's another short list of great hosting that will work really well with your set ups.

• Host Nine
• a2 Hosting
• Site Ground

The Handful of Plugins You'll Need

What we use today in 2026

Project Supremacy became PSv3, and PSv3 became Xagio. That one plugin now covers what this whole chapter lists: keyword planning, on-page optimization, schema, sitemaps and interlinking. WP Fresh Start is folded into it. Sitemaps are handled natively, so you no longer need a separate sitemap plugin.

StatCounter is gone from my stack. For anything lead-gen I care about calls and forms, not pageviews, so tracking runs through RingRobin instead.

Here are the necessary plugins to use when setting up your WordPress site.

Project Supremacy v3

THE SEO plugin! I can research keywords, group them into pages, get competition data and then do all the on page optimization right there from one window. Inject schema, EXIF Geo tag images, order content, research affiliate products, import YouTube video's and interlink all from within this plugin. This is a HUGE time saver and also helps you to get your on page done right the first time, which helps your chances of ranking really well without any links.

Google XML Sitemaps

Sitemaps are pretty dang important to let Google know about all pages on your site and how they relate. This is a free plugin which is simple to use and gets the job done.

Contact Form 7

This is simply to create a simple contact form and page on your website.

That's it. With those three plugins, you can get your site properly set up and ranked, but here's a few more plugins that I personally use and really love.

Akismet

Eliminate all spam comments from your blogs.

Statcounter

This is a free stats analysis plugin from www.statcounter.com. I really like their graphical representations with stats, and I love looking at the recent keywords tab, which shows me the keywords people are using to find my site and the rank they were in when clicked.

WP Fresh Start

This is a HUGE time saving plugin. It allows me to do all the initial house work to a WordPress set up with one click. Erase all pages/posts/comments. Create About Me, Privacy, Contact pages as well as any other pages I like. This is all done with a single click. This used to take me about 30 mins to set up my WP blogs, and with this plugin it now takes 30 seconds.

WP Themes / Site Design

What we use today in 2026

I do not shop for premium themes for these builds anymore. There are 165 templates built in, in Gutenberg or Elementor, so you start from a finished local-business design instead of buying one and bending it into shape.

Or skip templates entirely: Xagio Studio designs every site custom, straight to HTML, with no page builder at all. Either route, a finished site takes less than an hour. The chapter below assumes days of design, theme shopping and writing.

The standard below is the part that matters and has not moved: it has to look like a real business, or nobody rents it.

As far as what theme & design to use, it really doesn't matter too much as long as it looks really nice!

Think about this when designing your site, no one is going to rent garbage looking sites and people won't submit their info if they think your site is a fraud. You have to make it look like a real business.

Now not all real businesses have nice looking sites, some are terrible in fact. But you are going to be better than them. Your site will be clean and professional!

The best way to get an idea of how to design your pages, is to just look at other pages for the same keyword search. Even if you change the city, that's ok, because you'll get the same type of service and you'll get more sites to get ideas from.

So there are tons of free WP themes you can use to achieve this. And personally, I use free themes 50% of the time. But when I really wanna WOW a site, I go for a premium theme.

Here is a list of some great premium themes that work flawlessly with our set ups.

Thrive Themes

An absolutely killer set of themes and plugins. It's a little more expensive, but it's really worth it if you are going to scale your business.

Avada

Amazing plugin with Fusion Builder let's you create stunning drag and drop websites. You're only limited to your creative imagination here.

Bee Themes

150 Local Business Theme Templates? How perfect is that?

Get Content On Your Pages

What we use today in 2026

iWriter and $30 articles are not how content gets written anymore. Xagio generates the content against the keyword plan for each page, and I edit from there.

The bigger change is what goes ON the page. Winning an AI Overview citation now matters as much as the blue link, and we do it with on-page elements only: question-headed sections that answer immediately, real cost data, calculators and proper schema. No citations, directories or Reddit posts needed.

Basically here are the pages that are necessary to have on your site.

Home Page

This is the landing page of your site. It should describe your service and have some benefits of why people should choose your service. The page should also be designed to look like a real business.

You'll also eventually want to display a phone number prominently on the first page, and possibly even in the Title of your page so it shows up in the Google listings. So just keep it in mind where you are going to want to put it. But get your content up, and rank the site first. Once it's ranked you can add the phone number.

In a later chapter on Call Tracking, I show you how to use call tracking to your complete advantage not only to get more leads, but to also help you sell the site for a really good price! Make sure to read the chapter on Call Tracking…it's a must!

So for our example www.poolresurfacingphoenix.com I'd have information about the negatives of having cracked or damaged pools, the advantages to resurfacing your pool, how the job would be completed etc. If you need ideas, just search the keyword and see what other businesses are using for content on the first page.

Have some before and after pictures if you can find them, but make sure not to just take the actual picture from Google. Import the picture, edit it and save it as a new file name that closely matches your keyword, but not 100% as well.

Contact Page

Obviously you need a contact page for people to contact you. This is where some of your leads will be generated. I use the plugin Contact Form 7 to do this. It's great because you can edit the contact form to include any information you want, and you can also have the emails forwarded to any address you choose.

What I like to do is have all the emails forwarded to my own email address so I can start a folder and collect all those leads. Once the site is sold, I add the clients email address so that we are both receiving a copy.

Another nice touch for the contact page is an embedded map of Phoenix on Google. Once you pick up a client, you can get their real business address and change the embedded map to their actual address.

Once again, you can add your call tracking number once you are ranked but the information about how to properly use the Call Tracking services, I cover in a later chapter. I cannot urge you enough to not skip the chapter on Call Tracking…it's the most important piece of the puzzle to sell your site!

Supporting Pages: Service Options / Models Etc.

I use this to basically make the site look more real, and target more keywords if they are available. With pool resurfacing, it might be nice to include a page (or silo if enough options exist) of all the different services that are offered. Maybe you also want to target repair and cleaning, since those were two keywords that showed some promise!

About Us

This is optional, but the more real you make your site look, the more leads it's going to generate for a client. So just consider adding a few words that tell people what your company is about. Once again, for ideas, just look at other pool resurfacing sites and model that.

Your menu and pages might look something like this.

If you are targeting a really big city and you are thinking of having multiple clients, what I would do there just create a page for each suburb you are targeting.

• http://www.poolresurfacingphoenix.com/tempe
• http://www.poolresurfacingphoenix.com/scottsdale
• http://www.poolresurfacingphoenix.com/mesa
• http://www.poolresurfacingphoenix.com/apache

So now your menu might look something like this:

And you don't have to create a ‘locations’ page or directory, that's useless. Just create a custom link in your menu builder, and link it back to the main domain. Once it's saved, you can erase the link part, and save again, and now you'll have a drop down menu, that is only clickable on the stuff under the main header! Just a quick little design tip.

For all my content, often I just write it myself. It's not hard to come up with 300-500 words about anything at all. But when I absolutely don't want to write my own content I usually use iWriter and get the 4star plus articles written. You get what you pay for over there, and spending even $30 on content is going to help you sell your site faster because it will read much more professionally.

Once you have all your site content & design finished, it's time to rank that baby!

How To Rank Your Site Using POWER PBN Links For Cheap

What we use today in 2026 — this chapter has changed the most

We rank more and more of these sites without links at all. The build does the work now: the right keyword target, correct on-page optimization, schema, and content structured so Google and AI systems can extract it. That is fast, not slow. As little as 24 hours, and my fastest #1 came 6 hours after I registered the domain.

Links are still built when they are needed, so this chapter is not dead. What changed is that links are now the exception rather than step one, and the Facebook link-marketplace groups listed below are a 2015 artifact rather than where I would go today.

For rank tracking, Pro Rank Tracker is replaced by the tracker built into Xagio.

PBN's are the bomb. They are still the most powerful way to rank a site really quickly as far as I know.

But this doesn't mean you necessarily have to go out and build a huge PBN before you can use my strategy. There's very cheap and fast ways to get this done without a PBN. Then once you are making some money from your rank and rents, you can focus on building a PBN because owning one is more cost effective!

Check the end of this chapter for a great power tip regarding PBN's!

The fastest way to PBN build links is to rent or buy them. There are tons of sellers on the PBN Groups on Facebook, and lots of people doing private selling!

But for the Facebook groups below, just post that you are looking to rent/buy some links for whatever niche your site is about, and you'll see that you get ample responses and choices!

• facebook.com/groups/PBNDomainMarketplace — 2160 members
• facebook.com/groups/325517947629108 — 3794 members
• facebook.com/groups/595138070592732 — 2731 members
• facebook.com/groups/1488102664764955 — 2074 members
• facebook.com/groups/TheDomainPBNMarketplace — 1199 members
• facebook.com/groups/bhdmarketplace — 11450 members

So it really should only take you 1-5 PBN links for you to see massive movement of your site. I've ranked some of my rank and rents in less competitive niches with only 2 links!

To track your rankings I highly recommend Pro Rank Tracker. That's what I use and I love it. I've tried SerpBook, AWRCloud, SerpFox and a few others. But the feature list of Pro Rank Tracker is awesome. Specifically, the 3 things I personally love and use the most are:

• Custom client reporting. I give all my clients their own link to see their rankings and keywords.
• Track YouTube video rankings in YouTube or Google
• Track Rankings in Google Maps listings.

Anyways, backlink your new rank and rent website once every 1 to 3 days for the first 5 links and see where it settles in your rank tracker.

Some people say there is a lag effect with PBN links now, but I haven't really seen too much of a lag in these lower competition style sites.

Expect to see results fairly quickly, even within the first week.

If you hit Page 1 great! That means you'll likely hit the #1 spot in Google with just a few more links. If you are anywhere in the Top 100 after 5 links, it's probably because you are in a competitive market and you'll need a few more links. I've never used more than 12 links to get to #1 spot for my markets.

If you don't rank at all than make sure the domain you registered wasn't previously registered and penalized (use archive.org to see the history of your domain). Also re-check your competition levels, you might be in too hard of competition.

Next I want to show you how to properly use Anchor Texts! Read the next chapter carefully.

Anchor Texts For Your Backlinks

What we use today in 2026

The anchor text discipline below still holds whenever you do build links. Over-optimization still gets sites penalized, so this chapter has aged well.

What I no longer do is track any of it by hand. LinkSheets tracks the backlinks, the anchor text profile across them, and the effect the links actually have. If I build links, that is where they get tracked.

For your anchor texts, never use the exact anchor of your domain name if it's an EMD at first. You can work towards it, but never start off with it as that will look completely suspicious to Google.

For instance, with our new site, you'd want to stay away from using “pool resurfacing phoenix” as your first anchor text. Instead start with these 6 and watch to see where that gets you.

• “pool resurfacing”
• “resurface pools”
• “pool repair company”
• “phoenix pool resurface company”
• “pool resurfacing companies”
• “resurface pools in phoenix”

If you get onto Page 1, but you don't have the #1 spot after that, then you would be ok to get a really powerful PBN and use your exact match anchor text and that will help to push you to #1.

NEVER GO OVER 10% DENSITY WITH YOUR EXACT MATCH ANCHOR TEXT

The point above is super important. What it means is that for every 10 links you build, you can only use your exact match anchor text one time…never more. If you do, it will likely trigger an over optimization penalty.

So the safe way to get it done is to dance all around your EMD keyword, but never say it straight up. This will help you stay safe against over optimizing your anchor texts.

Also, use the Google keyword tool to find the high search volume keywords that do not contain the “phoenix” part in the keyword. These keywords are excellent to use as anchors because there is a relationship between keywords that have a lot of searches and your anchor texts. Google expects high search volume keywords to be used as anchor text far more than low search volume ones. This is an advanced linking strategy I learned from Kotton Grammer.

At the point your website hits the first page for your main keyword, you can start prospecting for people to rent your site out. I have a section on how to sell your site just after this one, so make sure to check there for some great ideas.

Keep building PBN links to your site until you are ranked on Page 1. This shouldn't take too many links and it shouldn't take that long! I've done it in less than 30 days with only 2 PBN links.

My most recent site covered every suburb of Vancouver (population of over 5 million), and it took 45 days and 10 PBN links to hit page 1 for my main keyword, at that point I rented the site out for $1000/month with an agreement if things were really good to move up to $1500/month since it targeted so many suburbs. It took an additional 10 days and 3 PBN links to hit #1 for my main keyword.

If you are having trouble ranking, then you can contact any of the RJ's or myself and ask me to take a look at your site and your backlinks to see if there's something going wrong.

That's one of the great parts of being in RJ. You'll always have people there to support and give you a helping hand when you need it. All you have to do is show that you've taken action and hit a stumbling block. People will be willing to help if they know you are working hard at something.

If you do hit page one, don't wait around to start another site. If you build and rank only 5 of these, you could be making between $5k - $7500/month in no time at all!

This is a NO BRAINER easy way to make money.

Next I'll give you some of the best methods to start selling your site without any real pressure.

Sign Up For Call Tracking

What we use today in 2026

The advice in this chapter is the part of the guide that aged best, and I would put it even more strongly today: call tracking is not optional. I built my own for it, RingRobin, which is what I use in place of CallRail and DialHawk. It tracks calls, texts and form fills, records the conversations, and watches live traffic on the site alongside them.

The part the 2015 chapter never anticipated: it turns all of that into a shareable client report. When a renter can open a link and see exactly what their money bought, the rent conversation stops being a negotiation and you stop looking like a guy with a spreadsheet.

Google+ Business Listings no longer exist. That is Google Business Profile now, and I do not build lead gen assets on it. Organic can outrank the map pack, and an AI Overview sits above both, so a site that earns its ranking is not waiting on a profile to be approved.

As soon as you hit Page 1 for your main keyword, I highly recommend that you sign up for and apply call tracking to your website. The later part of this chapter explains why.

I have had rank and rent sites with and without call tracking and the difference was the sites with call tracking received way more leads than those with just email submits. So don't skip this step. They aren't expensive so don't worry. I'll also explain how having call tracking can really help you to sell the site later on!

If you don't know what call tracking is, it's simply a service where the call tracking company supplies you with a phone number that you can pop on your website. Then in your account admin area, you simply tell them where to forward that phone call too.

So when a person Googles “pool resurfacing phoenix” and lands on your site, they'll see your call tracking number and call it. But the phone that actually rings is the business that you rented the site out to, because you forwarded your call tracking number to your new client.

There are tons of advantages to having a call tracking number.

More leads!

This is the biggest benefit to having call tracking. You are just going to get more leads with a phone number associated to your site than not having one.

The calls can be timed and recorded.

This becomes useful if you want to sell leads instead of selling the entire site for one price. So in a leads situation, you'd negotiate a cost per lead and specify what call length is necessary to qualify a lead. For instance, any calls over 60 seconds in length, will be a qualified lead with a price of $50.

You can use your call tracking number in Google+ Business Listings.

This means YOU own the phone number, and that number stays put on a Google+ business listing. You can always change where that number forwards to, but it never changes on the profile. So when you build citations, that number stays.

Call Reporting

Both you and your rental clients can get access to detailed reporting on the number and length of calls that are coming in. This will also help both you and your rental client value your service in case of re-negotiations.

I would honestly say that call tracking is 100% necessary for these types of sites.

Why Should I Sign Up For Call Tracking Early?

Although you don't have to sign up for a call tracking service until your site is ranked and ready to sell, there is a HUGE HUGE benefit to doing so.

Later on when you are ready to sell the site, you'll already have a massive informational advantage when you approach a potential buyer, which will bode well in negotiations and your confidence in your asking price.

If you know how many hits your site gets, and how many calls it gets as a result of the traffic, you can speculate the value of the site. If you know the site is averaging 30 calls per month, and you can speculate that each booked job nets $750 in revenue, then just do some simple math to get an approximation of the sites value at current traffic levels.

30 calls × 10% sales conversion × $750 net revenue per job = $2250/month total revenue.

Of course things never work out as perfectly as math does, but it gives you a very confident feeling with your initial asking price going into a negotiation. And you can back up your claims with actual DATA if needed. I think you get the point.

The two call tracking services I recommend you start with are CallRail.com or DialHawk. They are both excellent and feature loaded.

DialHawk will give you 3 tracking numbers for $19/month but you have to integrate with Twilio phone numbers which are $1/month each for a total cost of $22/month. However, it's a much more simple interface with DialHawk. This is my real recommendation here!

CallRail will give you 10 tracking numbers for $45/month and is fully integrated. It's a very nice platform, but can get a little more expensive as you scale huge.

How To Sell / Rent Your Site For Maximum Profits

What we use today in 2026

Renting to a local business is still one of two ways to get paid, and the email below still works as written. What eleven years changed is what happens after they reply. It is now a three phase white glove process: get the yes on a free trial, framed as sending them referrals so nobody feels sold to. Build trust while the trial runs, with a white-labelled report showing exactly what is landing. Then negotiate on proven numbers rather than a promise.

The trial is the piece the 2015 chapter is missing. It removes their risk, and the onboarding call quietly tells you their other locations, their other services, and what they are really worth, before you ever name a price. My rule in that conversation: if you do not make money, I cannot make money. Keep the renter profitable and the deal keeps renewing.

The second way to get paid is pay per lead: keep the site, forward its calls to a buyer network, get paid per qualified call. No selling, no client to manage. It existed back then, but I was not doing it and had no experience with it, which is why there is nothing about it in the original.

The SEM Agent overlay trick has a real successor in SitePane. Google still ranks your site; SitePane serves a different page on top of it to the human who lands, so you can A/B test the page that converts without touching the one that ranks. Calls flow straight back into RingRobin, so you know which version actually made the phone ring.

Ok so once you have back linked your site enough to hit the Top 10, you can now start prospecting to find renters for your site! You could wait until you hit #1 for a really powerful statement, but I've found just being on the first page is enough to get started in certain situations.

Now I know a lot of people don't like cold calling or prospecting, so I'm going to lay out two options for you.

The first one is a very low pressure, results oriented way of contacting the right type of clients who might be interested in your site, but won't mind you contacting them at all. The second method is basically hanging a FOR RENT sign out on your websites front porch.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both, which I'll explain.

Method 1 – Contacting Businesses With A Tricky Little Email

Here's a few ideas of really great places to find potential renters that you can reach out to with my simple email, which I include below.

Google Search

Just search your exact keyword and any site that is appearing lower than yours is a good candidate to rent your site. Why have just 1 spot on Google when in the next 5 mins they can have a better spot plus their original spot! Sites on Page 2 and 3 are even better because of the huge improvement in rankings you can offer to them.

Yellow Pages

Just go look online in the Yellow pages in your area for that type of business. You'll see there are a lot of businesses already spending money to purchase ads and show up in the Yellow Pages, so you could easily sell them a guaranteed result with a simple budget switch. In particular the businesses with listings that are placed on the top and right side bar and premium advertisers, who are likely not happy with YP results because honestly, they suck.

Adsense Sites

Simply search for your main keyword and see if there are any businesses with Adsense ads showing up! You can contact these people because they are already spending money to show their sites in Adsense so you know they are also spending advertising dollars. Show them your results, and many will be interested.

Facebook

Search Facebook for local businesses who either have a Facebook page, or are advertising their business on Facebook. Once again, they may be super interested!

Here's an example email that you could send to them if you are ranked #1, but can easily be modified to contact businesses on Page 2 if you are on Page 1.

That simple email is so effective for a few reasons.

First your subject line lightly implies that you are inquiring about their service so it will at least get opened and read.

Next the first thing you do is tell them how you found them, on a Google search. If the business owner is serious about their business, they will know that their site is not ranked #1, so you don't even need to say what position you found them in. They already know. But this frames them perfectly for what you are about to say next.

Finally you tell them that you own the #1 ranked site, or a Page 1 ranked site, and ask if they would be interested in taking it over. Notice you aren't saying it's for sale, or for rent. You are saying it's available to take over, which increases curiosity. You don't need to give a reason and you don't need to give a price of why it's available, leave that to their imagination and let them stew on it. You are only gauging interest with this question.

This approach is so powerful because if they are even the slightest bit interested, they will go look on Google and see your site right there where you said it would be. And of course because you did such a good job making it into a beautiful site, they may now be even more interested especially if their site sucks, which you can target ugly sites on Page 2 as a really good trick!

They also don't know the real deal because you haven't really told them anything other than it's available to take over. All they know at this point is that you are ranked where you said you are, and they can have it. So to get any more information, they need to get back to you to get the rest of the story.

When they do contact you, you now have the opportunity and open set of ears to give them your real pitch and benefit bullets, which is also quite simple. You could say something like this:

Then just stay quiet and see what questions he has and be prepared to answer them. But the business owner will likely want to know how much is the rental, to which you can reply:

Unless they are brain dead that's a fair offer. You want a fraction of the new business that they generate. So if they say yes they'll likely ask again how much it would cost. But if you did things right, you know exactly how much the site is worth, and you can back it up.

You could offer a price at that point of $1000 and justify it by saying something like this:

But feel confident in your price when you give it. You've done your homework, you know the value of the site, and whoever you are talking to is NOT going to be the only interested person.

At this point the business owner has a full understanding of what's happening and can make an informed decision or an offer. They may want to start at $500/month and it's up to you to decide if you want to take it or not. They are opening a negotiation…congratulations!!!

I've even ran deals with clients where I said I'll allow you to test the site for 3 months at $1000/month but then the price has to go up if your call volume reaches a certain point. There's plenty ways to negotiate at this point, but a negotiation is a good thing! It means the interest in your site is high and you can close the deal. You know what you paid to get it ranked and what its worth to a business. So don't be afraid to ask what it's really worth and explain it to people or even show them your data.

Method 2 – Hang A For Rent Sign On Your Site

Well this is for those of you who do not wish to contact, speak with or negotiate a deal. But I hope you at least try that method. There's many advantages to gaining confidence in face to face negotiations.

But if you prefer not to, with this method you simply set a price and offer your site up for rent.

There's an excellent plugin called SEM Agent that places a snippet of code on all pages of your site, letting the visitor know that it's for rent. There's even a 5 or 10 minutes trial purchase for free, that allows the potential buyer to try it out to see what happens.

What would happen once they started the trial, is that they enter their website URL, and their website gets overlaid on yours. So your Google listing and ranking stays intact, which keeps the traffic intact, but any visitor will see the new clients website instead! Pretty sneaky.

If the potential renter likes seeing their website there, they can simply hit the Paypal button and immediately rent the site out for whatever price you put on it. You get paid with no contact at all.

It's that simple. It's a plugin install and some settings.

The only thing I don't like about this method is the lack of interaction with the potential buyer. This takes away the negotiation aspect which could likely net you more sales. It also takes the personal touch out of it, which has honestly become very profitable for me. I've had clients so happy with my service, they recommend me to other clients. That won't happen with the SEM Agent plugin.

Super Fast Scaling By Leveraging Referrals

If you want to really grow fast, than you can actually leverage your successfully rented sites by offering the renter a referral deal.

Let him know that if he is happy with this rank and rent deal, and he can refer a new client to you, that you will reduce his bill by 10% of the new clients rental price! He'll jump at the offer to save money simply for telling one of his associates about how happy he is with your service!

I've did this with my very first rank and rent client, and he's since referred 3 new clients to me in the same service, but different cities.

In certain trades/businesses, a lot of the owners with similar business in different cities know each other and it's the easiest way in the world to get new clients!

When my client referred a new customer to me, I simply told him I'll build and rank the site, and then you can start paying for it once it rented. Doing so removed any time pressure from me and it removed any unnecessary spending from the client. It also lowered the monthly rental fee for my referring client!

WIN-WIN-WIN! If you do this with every rank and rent client you get, you'll scale to astronomical amounts of income in no time.

Final Words

Well that's it! That's the entire rank and rent method and it's extremely powerful! The sites only take a few hours to build, and then only take a few weeks to rank. From there it's your choice on how you wish to sell it.

There's no reason that you can't be building 2 of these sites a week and ramping up your income to 5 figures per month within just a few months time!

With this method, over time, you are building up your SEO experience, knowledge and expertise but not only that, you are also building a portfolio of successful clients that you can show off at actual client acquisition meetings. You'll have the results and confidence to close a deal where you will have the pressure to rank the client, because he will be paying you right away to do so.

I personally believe this is the best starting method for SEO!

Over the time I've spent learning all methods of generating income online, I've found this to be the easiest way to rank sites for the most amount of money. So take my lessons learned and start there.

If you have any questions at all, please add me on Facebook. Just search for Herc Magnus, there aren't many of us. I'm the musician!

Oh and for the website example I outlined in this guide, www.poolresurfacingphoenix.com keep checking the website because I'm actually going to build and rank that and I'll keep you updated about it on my blog at http://www.hercmagnus.com/

I'd say good luck, but it's not about luck. It's about ACTION!

Sincerely,
Herc Magnus

PS. One more thing. I wrote this entire 35 page guide for no other reason than to give you what I think is the best advantage you can have. If you found this guide helpful in any way at all, would you mind please sending me a message or posting on my wall to let me know! I truly want to help you just as I have been helped by others. But if you don't tell me I've helped you, I'll never know! Thanks so much.