Vending Machine Course & Niche Site

In this week’s edition of Long Game Online:

• 💲 NerdWallet Released Quarterly Results: A Few Takeaways

• 🍫 Online Business Idea: Vending Machine Digital Course & Niche Site

• 📈 Brief Update On Long Game Online

💲 NerdWallet Released Q2 Results This Week

I’ll start by saying, this is not intended to be investment advice.

Rather, I like to track some of the biggest players in the online business space, and as a $700M+ publicly traded company, NerdWallet easily qualifies. Why do I track them? To see what I can learn and apply to my own online business.

In case you haven’t heard, NerdWallet runs a site that provides advice and reviews on all sorts of financial products and topics. They monetize with affiliate commissions and advertisements for credit cards, loans, and other products.

So, what did I find so interesting about their quarterly results? Well, for starters, they did just over $143M revenue in the quarter with 22 million monthly unique visitors. A truly impressive scale.

They also grew revenue by ~14% compared to last year. Decent growth given the current macro environment. Still, this isn’t exactly hyper growth.

The most interesting thing to me though, is that they weren’t profitable in the quarter. For that matter, they haven’t been profitable for the past couple years either.

Ok, So Why Should You Care About NerdWallet?

First off, this content site model can really scale.

Second, niche selection matters. If you want to go after a highly lucrative niche like personal finance, be ready for some serious competition. Even players with loads of expertise and resources have a challenging time generating profits in hyper competitive niches.

I’ll grant you, they probably could choose to run the business more profitably if desired. But, if they did, growth would be slower, and they aren’t exactly growing like a rocket to begin with.

🍫 Half Baked Online Business Idea: Vending Machines

Vending machines are one of those classic money making ideas that people love to write about. Vending businesses are inexpensive to start, they cash flow well, and they don’t take much time to manage. What’s not to love?

The funny thing is, most of the content that is produced on this topic is on sites or YouTube channels dedicated to passive income or side hustles.

So, if someone decided to go really deep on this niche instead, they might just dominate it.

📝 Content

This is a topic that lends itself really well to a niche site, since there are lots of long tail questions and topics to cover:

• How much can vending machine businesses make?

• How much time does it take to operate a vending route?

• What type of vending machine should I buy?

• Is ______ vending machine company a scam?

The vending business topic also lends itself super well to interviews and success stories. I would envision dozens of pieces of content interviewing successful vending operators of all different sizes, and digging into lessons learned, tips for success, and more.

💰 Monetization

There are a few different monetization models that would work well, and digital course, eBook, affiliate, and ads are at the top of the list.

👨‍🏫 A course, of course

The best monetization strategy for this niche is going to be offering a course. This can be an email course, a super long eBook or a video course. Generally speaking, video courses have the highest perceived value. So, that’s the one I would choose.

Within this course, there are loads of topics that you can cover in depth:

• Buying vending machines (what type of machine to buy, new vs. used)

• Buying vending machine routes (where to find deals, how to value them, what risks to avoid)

• How to repair machines (common issues, where to get parts)

• What to stock in your vending machines and where to buy inventory

• Where to locate machines (hotels, office buildings, etc.)

• Scripts that can be used with real estate / business owners to get them to allow you to place a machine at their location

• How to hire people to stock your machines (and how much to pay them)

• And much more

📕 eBook for growth and profit

A relatively low cost eBook can be a great companion to a high ticket course. I would make this a value-packed guide on How To Start A Vending Machine Business. Basically, this should help people to get up and running, and perhaps manage a handful of machines. The full course can go more into more depth, and teach people how to scale this into a large business.

The nice thing about charging $10-20 for an eBook like this is that it generates high margin revenue, and allows you to offset the cost of running ads to grow. It might even allow you to run ads profitably.

Assuming you’ve provided a lot of value in your eBook, you should have an audience that trusts you and is that much more likely to advance to your course after they have some initial success getting started with their vending business.

Round it out with affiliate and ads

Naturally, you can monetize your content with ads if desired, though this might have a negative impact on eBook and course sales.

There are almost certainly going to be opportunities to drive affiliate commissions in this space as well. You can direct users to brokerages that sell vending machines / routes, and to vendors of food and drinks to stock the machines, and even the machines themselves.

🚦 Traffic

Selling courses and eBooks gives you a good reason to build relationships with niche site owners, podcasters, YouTube creators, and newsletter operators that are focused on anything related to side hustles, passive income, or entrepreneurship. I would try to form affiliate relationships whereby you pay these other media operators a cut of the revenue from each eBook and course sale they are able to make.

It does take time to build relationships. But, ultimately, these relationships can drive a lot of traffic and revenue.

I would expect a site focused on vending machines to get a ton of traffic because it would have great topical authority. You would likely be able to make this into a real brand as well since you would be building relationships with others, and they would be promoting your products (and hopefully linking to your site).

This topic has good newsletter potential too, particularly the content highlighting success stories and interviewing successful vending machine operators.

You might even consider YouTube and Twitter (X?). Point being, there are plenty of viable traffic sources.

🏆 Authenticity wins the day

One last word on this vending machine idea. I strongly believe that the best way to pull off an idea like this is to actually become an expert.

The bad news is that in order to get this expertise, you’re going to have to get your hands dirty and start a vending machine business. So, this idea is not one that can be strictly done online (unless you happen to already be an expert on the topic or you want to partner with someone that has the right experience).

The good news is that operating the vending machine business itself should be profitable. So, you’re unlocking another source of revenue.

Plus, as you grow your vending machine business, you can provide updates to your audience, which makes for great content. People love to follow along and watch others build in public.

On that note…

Long Game Online Update

This week, I started scaling up my advertising on Twitter and it’s yielding good results. I had been planning on advertising on Facebook as well. But, since Twitter is working reasonably well, I’ll probably hold off for a few weeks.

My main focus at the moment is just on building an audience and offering valuable content. I hope you’re enjoying it.

Until next week…