Dustin has had Deacon on his other show, Master Passive Income, where he talked about his real estate investing and how he paid off $52,000 in debt. This time, Deacon Hayes talks about being successfully unemployed and how the business he started in 2010 is still growing and thriving.
How Deacon Hayes Makes Money
Through his website, wellkeptwallet.com, and affiliate marketing is the primary way that Deacon generates revenue. Once he had a successful website, he thought it would be beneficial to duplicate the process and try to build and monetize it on other websites.
Deacon says that building a website from scratch was a one-time thing, and from there, he would only be buying existing websites and improve them. He says it is much like flipping a house.
After some of the sites are improved, he has sold them, but he has also kept some for passive income. Currently, Deacon has five websites and has subcontractors working with him on the websites, as he does not employ anyone, nor is he employed.
What Deacon Did Before Well Kept Wallet
Deacon was once a wood flooring salesman during the recession of 2008-2010. Because of the market condition, Deacon realized a lot of ordinary people were likely not buying wood flooring.
However, since the company was more of a luxury brand, Deacon supported himself and his wife by the income from large property flooring orders. He realized that he would instead take a shot at the finance niche.
He started Well Kept Wallet as a way to journal his family’s experience with paying off their debt. Being realistic, he didn’t think that the blog could support the family, so he thought about becoming a financial planner.
He got a job as a financial planner but kept the blog on the side. As he was working as a financial planner, he realized that the only people he was able to help were rich people or the people who could pay the money for a financial planner.
What mattered to Deacon was helping the average person with their finances, and there was no model for that available in his current position. So Deacon put more time into the blog and was determined to help people with it.
Deacon soon received an email from a producer on Fox News requesting he fly to New York and be on the Morning Show. It was humbling for Deacon because he didn’t think what he had done with his debt was extraordinary, but he told his wife about it and was excited.
Deacon was afraid of telling his boss since financial planners are regulated by the SEC, and he just wanted to run the idea by him first.
At that time, his bosses asked him if he would rather shut down his website to continue working for them or be fired and receive severance pay to do what he wants with the site.
Making The Decision
Deacon wanted to take the second option but was nervous since the website wasn’t making him enough money to live off. He is not the type of person to quit without having a plan in place.
Thankfully, Deacon and his wife had paid off their debt, they got out of some bad real estate, and their cash flow position was good with his wife’s full-time income.
Being a financial planner, Deacon and his wife also had three-six months of savings to use if needed. He has worked with people before who have asked his advice about quitting their jobs with thousands in debt and no emergency money.
He advised those people to not quit their job, but he could because of the situation that he and his wife created for themselves. Deacon thought giving it a try for the three-six months would an OK idea. If he needed to, he could go back to work somewhere.
Deacon felt that he had a greater calling, and he was bound and determined to figure it out.
While Deacon was working on Well Kept Wallet, he learned an important SEO technique (search engine optimization). Since the website wasn’t making money, he reached out to a friend who owns a sod business. He offered his SEO expertise for the business’s website.
Deacon created a package deal for them that equaled $200 a month for the SEO and $1200 a month for the website. He also had a friend who owned a business with two locations, so he charged him for the two location’s websites.
Deacon was building revenue streams while also working on Well Kept Wallet. He had built up the SEO company to where he sold it for six figures a couple of years later.
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Dustin thinks it is crucial for people who want to be successfully unemployed to have multiple income streams. He likes his river of income from real estate, but having the backups is essential.
How To Buy Websites
Deacon says to tread lightly because it can be challenging. However, he suggests following these parameters:
Step #1: Evaluate the Cash Flow
Look back on the previous 12 months of a site’s cash flow and find the monthly net profit. Usually, the multiple to offer for purchasing the site depends on whatever the net income is.
For websites, that multiple is between 18-36 times the monthly net income. For example, if the website nets $1,000 a month, a good offering is between $18,000-$36,000 to purchase.
Step #2: Determine the Domain’s Age
Deacon’s site has been around for ten years, while some sites have been around for two and try to sell it for more money than they are worth. He has some sites from the 90s as well as some more current ones.
Figuring out the domain age is important in determining site possibility and potential for growth.
Step #3: Consider Domain Authority
You want to know how authoritative the site is on the Internet. There is a scale of 1-100 from Moz (SEO company) that rates authority, one being the lowest and 100 being the highest.
You definitely want to know if a site has a low rating before purchasing it, Deacon advises.
Step #4: Determine Site Potential
You want to make sure that there is a good track record for the site or room for the site to be improved with your experience. With Deacon, he knows what works and what doesn’t so it is easy for him to determine the site’s potential.
Some places to find available sites are FE International, and Empire Flippers. What Deacon likes to do and has done for a couple of sites is he will personally reach out to the site owner and ask if they’re interested in selling.
You can search for the site owner and if it’s public, it will show email and contact information for the owner. Deacon has made great deals and relationships this way.
Not All Websites Make Money
When considering buying a website, if it wasn’t making money, there is typically a reason. A lot of websites will make money from doing sponsored posts. They will get the links from companies and have them featured on their site.
The link will go directly to the sponsored site, and Deacon says that this can hurt your website or the potential website you want to buy. The time you would have to invest to fix the site would be too great.
Deacon has tried to revive two sites like this, and both were unsuccessful. He says it is all a learning experience and that it is like buying real estate. Deacon would instead buy something that has good bones versus something you have to completely redo.
To Buy Or Build A Site
According to Deacon, this would be answered on a case by case basis. If you are good at building and have the time to invest in what that takes, you should build.
If you want to step back and buy something that has already done the groundwork, buying is a better option for you. The idea of having to grind and do all of the groundwork is unappealing to Deacon because he has two small children.
The season of life you are in will likely play a significant role in your decision to build or buy a website.
How To Know If The Site Is Revivable
Deacon says that the website moz.com is where you can go to see a spam score. You can sign up for a free version to check up to ten domain names, but there is also a paid version for about $70 a month for unlimited checks.
The spam score will show you how many bad links are linking to a website. Additionally, you can do link crawls on the site to see the external links. There is a free tool called SEO Spider where you can crawl the site and see the links that don’t make sense. You can then go through the site and unlink the bad ones.
Typically a brokerage will have an escrow company that you will work with on the sales but what Deacon does is wire money to the vendor’s account.
He does not necessarily recommend this to start with because once the money gets wired, it is gone. Depending on your state, your email chains back and forth means the sale is legally binding.
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If you are just getting started, check out FE International and Empire Flipper for some reasonably priced websites. Deacon says to make sure you’re checking the site’s income and ensuring that you get real information. Some people have been known to make up numbers.
While scanning through the site, you can see what sort of traffic the site gets and use a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush to see how much traffic the site receives from Google and other engines.
With those, you can compare the traffic to the alleged income they have disclosed to decide if it is probable or not.
What To Do Next
Deacon says that the next thing you want to do is try to improve your conversion rate. You should have the traffic data at this point to know who is signing up for a service or opting in.
Next, you can do some testing by moving the service up two paragraphs or setting a separate box pop-up for it to see if that increases the conversions. Deacon says that over time with those changes and tweaks, you can decide if the rates increased or decreased.
That is what Deacon does now asks his team what they can do to improve the content so it’s a better user experience and that it converts to the affiliates better.
Deacon also says that once you go through the site audit and update older content, you add the up-to-date, more relevant content with your fresh, new content strategy. Ask yourself what new information is out there that is relevant and that people would want to read and then publish that content.
The goal is to get more traffic to the site and to be more relevant. Deacon says that people are not going to keep coming back to your site time and again to see the same old content.
Providing your audience with new content will not only increase their return to your site but it will also provide traffic from other sources. If your audience likes your content, they are going to pin it to Pinterest or share it on Facebook, and Google can crawl it and get you more traffic organically.
Deacon mentions that Google has a feature called Google Discover that you can add to your phone and you will see new posts from blogs related to your interests on your newsfeed.
Locking Down Affiliates
Deacon says that there are affiliate networks that are good to be a part of one. A few examples are cj.com, impact.com, and flexoffers.com. These networks have built relationships with thousands of brands such as Wal-Mart, REI, banks, and more.
You sign up for the network and you would have access to all of the different programs and then apply individually to them.
Deacon mentions that the longer you are a part of the network you will potentially be approved immediately but in the beginning, they will review your site, and ask some questions prior to approval.
He makes a point to say that you are not necessarily trying to sell the products, you are trying to educate your audience and have the links available for them if they choose.
Deacon knows people who are personally promoting products but for Well Kept Wallet, they want to leave the choice up to their readers after reading an article with options.
Every once and a while Deacon will do a call-out for a specific brand but most of the time they use an educational approach and provide an affiliate link.
Importance of Disclosures
Well Kept Wallet provides a disclosure statement on their pages because it is required by the FTC on every page that you have an affiliate link. They chose to have a disclosure on every post just in case there is an affiliate link to cover all of their bases.
Website Building Platforms
There are three major platforms, WordPress, Squarespace, and Weebly. Deacon loves WordPress because it gives you more flexibility unless you have an E-Commerce site such as Shopify where it might be different.
Dustin has many sites and uses WordPress for them all. He had learned that from Deacon who uses WordPress for his sites. Dustin has created each of his sites from scratch instead of purchasing older sites because that was what he knew how to do.
His thoughts were that in the future with his real estate, he could pass it down to his kids and have them work in the business. Dustin also wants to teach his kids how to purchase their own real estate, buy their own properties, and run their own business.
He sees each of the sites as assets that he can pass down to his kids or even continue to hire people to do the work that he is currently doing.
How to Scale The Site
The first thing Deacon did was hire a virtual assistant to answer emails and reply to comments that would arise. He wanted a virtual assistant to do tasks that he did not want to focus his time on.
Deacon wanted to focus on article topics and future post ideas and updating old content. He says it is a lot easier to hire someone to offload the tasks that eat up your time than doing it all yourself.
Dustin agrees that hiring someone is important to help with the admin tasks to free up his time and brain capacity. Even a task like answering an email can take up too much space and create too much worry about the task.
So, he would prefer that the tasks would be diverted to the virtual assistant before even getting to him, ideally. Dustin is also very frugal and has a hard time paying someone for the tasks but knows it is important for him to be able to focus on different tasks.
Deacon thinks that a good way to deal with frugality and needing to hire out is to simply look at your numbers. For example, you can hire someone for $300 a month to take over tasks that eat up too much of your time. Then you are free to use that time to focus on tasks that will generate more income.
Be Sure The Relationship Is Economical For Your Business
He says you have to make sure that it does make sense for you economically to where you are making more per month than you are paying for help. Once Deacon was working with a subcontractor for social media marketing.
They were only making $200 and were paying $600, so that relationship no longer made economic sense to continue.
For Dustin, he hires people in his business for two reasons, they make him money or they take away a pain that he has or solves a problem for him. It is important for him to map out what he is paying versus what he is making.
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There are only so many tasks that you can do that generate income on some sites. It is important to focus on those while allowing someone else to focus on the smaller, more time-intensive tasks.
Deacon says that he was once that frugal guy, but he was so overwhelmed that he had to unload the work on someone else. Additionally, he feels he is blessing someone else with work.
This gave him peace of mind, more time so he could spend with his family, and more time to focus on the things he needed to be doing. Deacon thinks it is about getting mentally prepared to spend the money but also to hand off tasks.
He also says you can and should re-evaluate at 30 or 60 days to make sure that it still makes sense to continue the relationship.
Having Ads On Your Site
Even though ads are a way to make revenue, it is not Deacon’s favorite way to make money. Dustin hates ads so much that he has a pop-up blocker on each of the browsers he uses.
Many of the pages with Well Kept Wallet have no ads, but if a page does, the ads are kept to a minimum and they just use affiliate links. There are some posts that are just not making money, so they will use an ad or two in those types.
For example, Well Kept Wallet has a post about free air for tires. Since you can’t make money off of free air, they have added a couple of ads to the post to generate some income.
Deacon thinks that affiliate links are a lot better use even though not every product or brand has an affiliate program. In a post, they may list and educate on 10 things with only four being an affiliate.
It is a chance that they take because they want their audience to make the decision based on the information from the post. If they happen to choose an affiliate link, then they will make money off of that.
Who Writes The Articles
Deacon doesn’t do all of the writing for the five sites that he has. He says there are people that are better at writing than he is so he hires that out. Deacon says that hiring writers is the biggest expense for his website.
Time Spent On Content
Currently, they are writing every day at an expense of about $8,000 a month. The cost and the time spent vary for what you want and Deacon says you get what you pay for. At one time he was paying $25 per article, once a week.
Now, they know how to create good content, how to get it out there, and they have quality writers. They are paying $200-$300 per article to their writers now. Beginning writers might charge $25-$50 per article but there will likely be a lot of editing needed. If that is the case then you have to pay an editor.
Deacon says it is better to get someone who can edit, proofread, and format properly the first time, thus being more expensive per article. Some of the big companies will pay $.30-$.40 per word of an article which could be up to $800 per article.
As an independent publisher, Deacon can’t pay that but says if you can find a job like that, then go for it.
Dustin and Deacon have a mutual friend, Ashley, who is a content manager for a couple of sites. She oversees the content, links, SEO, quality, and more. It is a huge job and to publish every day, Dustin wonders how Deacon does it.
Deacon Has People To Do A Lot Of The Day-to-Day Tasks
However, Deacon doesn’t do any of that. He has a blog manager that handles that whole process but they have many people who do different things.
For example, they have someone who checks outlines, and someone who edits and proofreads. Their writers are responsible for following the writer’s guidelines that are provided.
They have about five to six writers doing about three to four articles a month to manage. Deacon is responsible for the vision more than the day-to-day operations.
Who To Hire Next
Depending on what you want help with first, Deacon says you can either hire the virtual assistant or a writer first. For Deacon, it was the virtual assistant but then he hired a writer. After that, he suggests hiring an editor if you have multiple writers.
Dustin thinks that if you are going to write a good article, Google will do its job and get people to the page to view the article. He believes more traffic equals more money for Well Kept Wallet.
Deacon says that they have an article currently blowing up called Card Games for Two People. People are Googling games to play with another person during the quarantine.
Deacon doesn’t think that article is making much money, but there is a lot of traffic going to it. They do have an Amazon link to a deck of cards but Deacon doesn’t think it makes money because people may already have a deck of cards.
Traffic Does Not Equal Higher Revenue
Essentially, Deacon says that the higher traffic doesn’t necessarily equate to higher revenue and that it is a lot of trial and error.
Deacon looks at his Pro Forma that he created for what he wants to make in the next five years. He looks at the yearly goal but also the monthly goal in order to stay on track with his plan.
Deacon will also include expenses in the plan which include paid ads. He mentions that he has been disappointed by that route because it can be risky. The return has been barely over the investment so far because the ad costs are higher than before. Lately, some of the affiliates have been dropping off as well.
One example is Airbnb who dropped their affiliate program recently and now they are out of that income stream.
The Future of Well Kept Wallet
Deacon enjoys the model and loves helping people transform their lives with their finances so he wants to keep growing it and keep moving it forward. He also has a number in his head that if someone called and offered, he would sell.
Deacon has many other visions in mind for the film industry but is leery of the risk involved. He also wants to continue building his sites, buying more sites to build up, and help more people in different industries.
Dustin believes that by being successfully unemployed, you need the mindset to help other people. With websites, you have the potential to scale and to reach a lot of people to serve them. He wants to be able to reach and serve as many people as possible.
Opportunities Along The Way
Deacon will receive opportunities to make money from promoting brands. Instead of being tempted by money, he will say no if the option doesn’t line up with their brand.
They will sometimes work with brands and receive a good payout because the site gets over 900,000 visitors a month. Deacon is looking to become a contributor for Forbes and is excited about the idea of working with them.
He even says that he has even had the opportunity to write a book at one point. Deacon says the more you work at being good at what you do, the more opportunities come your way.
Dustin has come across so many great opportunities that he has had to say no to. He says when he was hustling buying so many properties, and gaining more leverage, he was looking for opportunities. Now, the opportunities come to him and he has to choose which ones he does.
With Master Passive Income, Dustin has more of a personality model than that of Well Kept Wallet which is more educational. Dustin plays with the idea sometimes about affiliate marketing but is hesitant because of the model he has.
A similar model example would be Dave Ramsey who is the personality of the brand, but he has now hired numerous people to work with him. He realized he didn’t have to be the only one. So for Dustin, it is possible to scale his business with that approach.
Buying Domains
15 years ago, Dustin bought the site dustinheiner.com and doesn’t utilize it. Some day he thinks he will. Deacon owns the site deaconhayes.com which is also unused and just sits there.
Deacon says that he doesn’t want things tied to him, he wants to build the brand. He can be a part of it, but anyone else can also be a part of it like Well Kept Wallet.
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What Deacon Hayes Does to Give Back
During quarantine, Deacon decided to do business/blog coaching for 20 people. He initially had 32 signed up but had to cut it off because he says he has a hard time saying no. He enjoys coaching and says it’s fun for him.
Another thing Deacon does to give back is to help Hustle Phoenix which is a non-profit that helps inner-city entrepreneurs access the tools and resources they need to successfully start a business.
He teaches Personal Finance one to two times a year to help students get their personal finances in order. Once they do that, they can get their business finances right. Deacon also serves his family by being a good husband and a good father to his two kids.
A Piece of Advice From Deacon
Deacon says to be like yourself, first of all. If you want to start blogging, he says to start with a free site. Get in there and play around. Try to learn how to install a theme, or change graphics to make sure that you enjoy it. This will help ensure it is actually something you enjoy doing.
He says it would be unfortunate to pay money for a site and realize later you don’t like it. If you decide it is something you want to do, Deacon says go into it cautiously.
Deacon’s Advice To His Younger Self
Even though there are a lot of things Deacon would do differently, he would say to make sure that he is willing to try different things. Just because something doesn’t work out, you shouldn’t quit, you should try something else.
Lastly, he would say to try and tweak things as you go.
The Non-Fiction Book Deacon Recommends
A book that is geared to many things but one he used for business, is The One Thing by Gary Keller. It’s about the one thing you have to do to make other things easy.
That one principle changed Deacon’s life. He focused for 30 days and followed what the book said. It cleared and decluttered his mind, and he was focusing on things that mattered. 
The One Tool That Deacon Uses Daily
Deacon suggests using Ahrefs.com which is the SEO tool where he can see how his site and other sites are doing. Another tool he uses is Google Sheets where he stores his pro forma, affiliates, and more.
Where You Can Find Deacon
The best places to find Deacon Hayes are his YouTube channel youtube.com/wellkeptwallet and the website wellkeptwallet.com.