How Jesse Cunningham Organizes AI Website Workflows

0:00The best opportunity right now in my opinion is to make money online still, right? I'd prefer to make money online than going out and having a regular job for sure. So, we're going to talk about a lot of different things. Three ways to make money online, right? Three basic ways, three ways to get paid. That is very, very, what is the word?

0:16Synergistic, right? So, if you do this concept, each one works with the other concept. Therefore, if you get good at one of them, you can add on one aspect and keep it rolling. So, three ways to get paid. We're going to get into it. If we haven't met, my name is Jesse Cunningham. I run the Rank Expand Academy. I make six figures a month using different AI strategies. And right here, check this out. The Microite SEO contest is going on right now. We're going to talk about micro sites in this video. Basically, a micro site is a website you rank online. And it's a rank

0:44and rent. It's AI rank and rent done a different way than what we used to do, but it's crazy. We're 7 days in. If we come down here, uh where are we? 7 days in. I don't even see my post. This is a very active community, but we're 7 days in and people are already coming up to page one on Google. We have over 50 applicants. There's two queries we're going after. Maybe that's getting too technical right now, but let's just keep it rolling. So, three ways to get paid right now if you want to make money online, right? So, path one is micro

1:13sites, path two is directories, and path three is you rank other people. This is all synergistic stuff. So, what is a micro site? It is one business, one city, and one service. So you'll see here I've done an example. I built a website with you. Custom pool builders Orlando. And then you have service pages under it. Pool construction, pool remodeling, custom spas, locations, and then call me. Cool part is when you build this website, you don't wait around waiting for a call. There's no way I'm going to wait for a call. Too busy. Not happening. And I want to scale

1:42to hundreds of these, right? So we have AI answer the phone 24/7. If we come over here to the classroom, the easiest and best way, let's see if I can find it. the Microite Empire right here. You click this and you come down here to the Microite blueprint for clawed code. My preference is clawed code to build and this is a zip file. So that zip file right there gives you this structure here. Most local businesses and you're going to see how this plays into the video later. They do not structure their websites well. That's like the number one thing why their rankings are no

2:12good. So if you can figure out how to rank well, uh you structure well, you can rank well. So four ways a single micro site pays you. So, here's how you can make money, and I think we're missing one. You can sell the leads per lead, flat rent, lease to own, and sell the asset. All these are viable, and the best in my opinion is if you are a local contractor, you can build these micro sites for yourself, and you can run the leads yourself, right? Why local is the fastest place to win. So, on this channel, you've probably seen me in the

2:41past, we've built niche websites, we've done this, we've done that. local is one of the last places that Google has not crushed. Just straight up, Google hasn't crushed local SEO. It has a lighter algorithm, right? Local results run on a smaller, less competitive index than say national or global queries. Brand equals the query. So, we do EMDs. Now, people say in the comments, EMDs don't work.

3:06What is a EMD? An EMD is an exact match domain. So, if I'm going after Plumbers Houston, I would try to get the domain plumbers houston.com, right? And coming back here to the community, how do I know they work? Well, I've built microites hundreds myself. And people in this competition, the ones who are winning right now, they have really strong EMDs. And then AI content is largely fine here. I've never experienced and I've never seen anyone else experience AI content in itself being something that holds you back on local SEO. Maybe that changes in the future, but that's my experience right

3:41now. Now, I want you to visualize what a micro site can look like. And you're going to see that the microite is just a term. In fact, it's just a coined term. It doesn't mean anything except for what we ascribe to it. Basically, a micro site can be the primary website for local business. It can be a rank and rent AI rank and rent website. It can be whatever you want. I mean, this is a solid website. Custom pool builders in Orlando, Florida. I built locally. I built on this channel with you. The point is this looks good enough. This is

4:09custom enough. This is better than most WordPress websites, if not all of them. This is funky, right? We tried to emulate something. You could you could you could and I do sell these to contractors that don't have websites. Why not? It costs How much does it cost to build a website like this? It costs, I don't know, less than 15 bucks, right?

4:29And how much would a local contractor be willing to pay for something this good? Well, hundreds if not thousands of dollars. I prefer, my preference, and we're getting into the money aspect. How do we make money? We make money by building websites on the cheap and selling them for a reasonable price, right? There's going to be a commoditization of websites. It's already happened. And people are not going to pay the tens of thousands of dollars anymore for a website, but they still will pay hundreds, right, a month.

4:56And if that's the case, right, and you can build for $15, there's still a huge margin. So, I want you to get used to the idea of a micro site or an AI rank and rent website being solid. Like, this thing looks amazing, better than most websites online. Now, I like going through the comments of this channel. I think it kind of gives an insight into what the audience and you are thinking.

5:15So, I want to address some of them. So, Maxwell here said, "Rank and rent is no longer a thing, right? Google AI anti-PAM code has far surpassed what the rank and rent uh renter can do, and the map requires video confirmation." I think this one right here deserves some focus. The map requires video confirmation. What this means is if you want to get a Google business profile for your rank and rent websites, which was the old way of doing this, it's a pain in the butt. Google does not allow a lot of websites to get approved by Google business profile anymore. It's a

5:50pain. I agree 100%. That's why we don't use Google business profiles. Like, we haven't used them from the beginning. We've tested it. It's a pain. Why use it? We go after terms and industries that you do not need the map pack to crush. Right? And then someone was saying, are you saying the cost of the domain, but have you missed the cost of phone numbers for each website? So, right. So, if you want to have there's two ways to do the phone numbers, right?

6:14So, let's come back over here. Let's just keep it on. These are good questions. So, if you have a question, put it in the comments. Let's say, and this is a fake number up here. Let's say you have a phone number on your micro site, which you need a phone number. You need you need a phone number. And it can do one of two things. the phone number can it can go to an AI agent that answers the phone 24/7 and if that's the case then you need you need to have that whole setup which is going to cost you

6:37per month right or you could forward this phone number directly to a contractor right these are added costs no doubt and both have advantages on both scenarios we record we record the call right so if someone calls Orlando custom pool builders they're going to call and they're either going to be you know answered to an AI AI robot who's going to qualify the call or a person who's going to qualify the call. In both regards, we record it, we transcribe it to kind of have our our AI system learn where is the deficits, what can we do better? And if you want a really simple

7:11visualization, build, cook, rent, and repeat from micro sites. So, you're going to pick a niche and a city, we have a tool to do this, a free tool you've probably seen in other videos. You have an exact match domain at least closest possible. Think about it. In our competition, in the community, we have like 50 people going after the same term. It's crazy. The people who get the best EMDs have a huge advantage. You're going to build. It's 40 to 50 pages.

7:34With our micro site blueprint, it makes it easy. 40 to 50 pages back in the day was a pain to build. Now, it's like like that claw code, whatever. Can do it so easy. Link a few relevant ones. Cook, calls, rent, move on. Right? And here's the amplifier. We're going to talk about the second way to make money. I'm very excited about this. Directories, right?

7:53So, build a directory for the same vertical, right? So, let's say we had best of Texas pools or Florida pools and we have every real builder listed. This is amazing. This is amazing. Why is it amazing? Well, you can make so much money so many different ways. It really legitimizes your whole practice when you start to do this. Now, take a step back and imagine this, right? So, you have a directory and it has I mean, it looks good. You have a directory. It looks good. You built it with AI and it looks solid. you have the best of Texas pools

8:23or the best of Florida pools 2026 and you can outreach and you can say, "Hey, look, you made the best of Texas pool list. Here's your badge." And that's pretty much the whole email pitch. And guess what? They're going to put the badge potentially on their website and give you a backlink. Now we're cooking, right? So the badge is the link. And why they say yes in 2026 is because they heard and they know that GEO and SEO largely depends on these best of lists.

8:52So we're combining many different things right now. We're tapping into what is you know the zeitgeist what's in vogue right now in SEO which is becoming GEO right so we're going to say look we have this awesome directory they say yes they put the link on their website but then it opens up the door right that's what we want. So how the directory pays even as a side asset. So you could sell featured listings. So top of the city pages, more photos, a highlight, you can do that. That's interesting. A badge uh for a link. You can do free listing,

9:25free badge in exchange for the embed. That's the link routed leads. So then you can calls, you can sell the calls from the directory to your microite clients. And it's the door opener, which is perfect for path three. There's many ways to make money here, right? The bottom line, the people who make the most money are the ones who build relationships with other people. Period.

9:46You build trust. If you were to come to a local pool builder in Florida and say, "Look, I own the biggest pool directory in Florida, and on top of that, I own a bunch of micro sites in your area." Right? What is a micro site? Well, they they're pulling in leads every week. So what we could do is we could have you listed on the directory you know for your area and I could you know partner with you on these leads and you can partner in many different ways. So if you can rank rank your own website you can rank theirs and this is part number

10:15three. So three ways to make money right now online instead of doing a regular job right build micro sites build AI directories and then this right here if you can rank your own website you can rank theirs. So listen, everything I've shown you is viable for any local business owner because their website probably sucks and it would take you maybe an hour or two or three if you're very new to this, maybe a whole day.

10:40Let's say it takes you eight hours to build their website. You come into the rank expand academy, you learn how to do it. I've seen people do this. It takes you eight hours the first time. So what? You can sell it to them for hundreds of dollars per month, right? Say it's free. You just pay me like a lease fee every month, right? And then you have cash flow. So, you're going to build or rebuild their website. You're going to do local SEO, profile, citations, all these things. You can get give them the best of listed on your directory and you

11:05can give them the overflow of leads from your micro site. So, the pitch writes itself when you own the assets. So, you're going to say, "Hey, you made the best of Texas pool list. Here's your badge and your listing. Thanks. What is this site?" And then you're going to say, "We run a directory and a full a few pool sites around Austin. One of them gets 40 calls a month. You want to see the numbers?" Yes. Can you do that to our site? Same structure, same process, setup fee plus a monthly retainer, feature listed included, send you a proposal. You have people's ears,

11:35right? When when you bring leads to the table and you're not just like blowing smoke, right? You bring leads like the lifeblood of any business, then people listen to. Now, I like these two comments here. We're going to keep going, but I I I kind of like bouncing to the comments. It's kind of fun. So, someone said, let's see if I can get it centered. saying WordPress is an absolute pain in the butt is going to trigger so many old school SEOs, but he's right. Programmatic AI coded stacks are leaving traditional themes in the dust. Now, okay, this is not WordPress.

12:04This what I just showed you, right? Orlando custom pools. And the reason it's not WordPress is because the custom builds are just faster. I think there's an advantage to using WordPress, especially if you have a client who likes to log in and tinker, but that can be the worst, too. But I really do think WordPress is on its way out. If you don't have a reason for using WordPress outside of, you know, it's it's just easier to use for you because you're accustomed to it, I don't I don't see why you're using it, right? If you have no experience, don't start with

12:32WordPress nowadays. And then someone else said, "This is super dumb talking about micro sites. Google will easily detect this and penalize you. Plus, you will need hundreds of different brandings and company names and Google business profiles. How can you consolidate all this and build a reputation for your company?" I mean, I get it. I can I can see the knee-jerk reaction of someone saying this will never work because you don't have the vision. It's like the four-minute mile, right? The four-minute mile was only obtainable once other people realized it was obtainable. So, if you're not around people, if you're not around people

13:01doing it and you don't see these websites rank and you don't see a bunch of different examples, I can understand why you don't think it works. But come into the community, the Rank Expand Academy. There's a 7-day free trial right now and you can see for yourself. Now, meat and potato stuff. Three offers, one process. Let's keep it rolling. So, how to make money nowadays?

13:19If you don't want a regular job going out there doing something you don't want to do, you have opportunity to build on the side. What can you do? Right? You can build and rank. So, you can do a site rebuild on the blueprint, right? Local SEO, best of listings. So, you can build and rank their website. You can have a paid per lead. You can rent the site. You can have featured listings.

13:39All of these are very, very viable. And here's the flywheel. This is what gets me excited. So when we created the rank expand academy the community I'm like man what is the best way to have synergy right and we're figuring this out so we're in the process of building out the AI directory thing right now the micro site is fully built out so if you want to build micro sites it's fully built out right now so you build a micro site you build out the directory you get clients you get cash all of these work in tandem is where it is at so a 90-day

14:08plan from nothing you're going to pick one high ticket vertical in one metro and That's really key, right? If you can figure out and when you begin, I'll I'll talk to you how how you should begin different than this, but when you figure out one vertical like one niche, like let's say plumbing is your niche, you do it in one location. Why? Because this really works. A directory works when it's hyperfocused. If you go after like a global or national directory, it's not going to work as well. But when you're starting off, right, you don't know what niches are going to do well. If a

14:41website link costs, say $12, less than $12 to build and test on Google, I recommend you testing a few of them and seeing what ranks because Google will give you free data. You can hook GSC, Google Search Console, and figure out, ooh, this niche is is way less competitive than I thought, right? And then you can register two exact match domains. Da da da. Day 15 to 30, you're going to scrape, clean, and enrich every business in the vertical for your state.

15:05And then you're going to publish the best of directory. Days 30. So this is month two. Send the badge email to every listing. Collect embeds. Now you're rolling. Now you're building your AI directory up. It's direct. It's domain rating in is increasing. Right? And then days 60 to 90, the first micro site starts ringing. Sometimes it's sooner, sometimes it's later. You're going to route calls to the client or rent the site out. Right? So three kinds of income. Two of them you own. And this is what's great. If you've ever been an agency owner, if you've ever been an SEO, you know that working for other

15:38people eventually comes to an end because you get them to a point and they're like, "Thank you for your work. Our business has never been better, but we don't need you anymore." That's just a natural progression. I saw Alex from talking about that to an SEO in one of his things. And like it was a light bulb moment. I'm like, "Yeah, that's true."

15:53Like our jobs as SEOs is to get them to a point where they don't need us anymore. It's kind of like a self-defeating thing. But if you have different assets that you own such as micro sites, such as directories, well, you own them now and forever. Of course, you can sell them as sellable assets. But if you combined all these things, so retainers and per lead deals is fastest cash. You're trading your time, right?

16:16Micro sites is monthly. You keep the asset. And directories is kind of like a a force multiplier. It's small, steady, and very strategic. Now, to be more specific, why do you pick one vertical? Because a good vertical looks like this. So make sure it hits these criteria. It's hard to find them. And when you find them, protect them with your life, right? A good vertical looks like jobs worth 500 or more. Ideally a,000 2,000 plus. Don't go after a niche that's small $100 onesie twoosies. It's not going to cut it because there has to be enough meat on the bone for you to

16:49charge a fee to the contractor. Right? People call in when they have a need. So it's urgent or one time. So, you should be thinking about potential niches right now. Home services with local intent and a phone number. Cities with 10,000 to 20,000 plus people within 20 miles. We really dominate on the the suburbia of big cities. We don't go after the Dallas's, you know, the Baltimore of of of websites. We go after the Annapapolis, which is still a big city type of things, right? Blue organic leaks on page one, not a wall of map packs. So if you can combine all of

17:26these different things, then you're going to be doing pretty darn good. You're going to have a leg up. So the stack is cheap. The process is the product. So EMDs. So one site.com typically.com although I'm seeing a net in the competition crushing pretty much everyone because it's a EMD. It's the closest EMD. So netnetss can work too. This whole competition we're doing in the community is teaching us a lot. We're just testing. We're experimenting. We're getting data. Uh Google Maps data. We're going to scrape, clean, and enrich for the directories. We're going to get a number. We're going to get a number that

17:58answers. We're going to track the calls. We're going to vet. So, we're qualifying, and we're going to route them. Uh the badge generator, that's very easy for the directory that takes two seconds. We build in plain HTML nowadays. Some people like WordPress still, some people like both. They test. We're going to use AI for drafts. We're going to stack prompts. Um and then we're going to use real details per page. We don't template our websites in the sense of the copy in each page is the same. Every page needs unique copy.

18:26That's really important. Um, and then you can have search console and a keyword tool or go kind of just without, which is what we do because we don't want a footprint. And then a simple proposal, right, for the people if you go the cash flow route. If you want to make as much money as possible, don't forget it's all about relationships. The whole idea here is to get your foot in the door to help other people, right?

18:47And here's five ways people break this. So if you're going to link to your sites, your sites to each other, right? So basically what what this is describing is if you have say five micro sites and you start linking them horizontally, that's a PBN. Very easy to detect nowadays. Probably don't do that. Uh fake reviews and fake people, probably a bad idea. Low ticket niches, probably a bad idea. Five verticals at once, probably a bad idea unless you are starting out. Selling before anything ranks can be a bad idea, but you can also sell these if you're good and you

19:20know they will do well or if you have you know uh risk-free guarantee you can sell before it ranks and the fix for all eyes is one vertical one metro honest sites your proof then sell in that order. So this is the exact um system we run in the academy, right? So builder path one is micro sites. Um builder path two is AI directories. And then on top of that, one of the one of the coolest things to me is when people come into the community and they have some experience or maybe no experience and they do one of the modules. I can

19:49probably show you here. Let's let's come back over here. So we have micro sites, we have AI directories, but then we also have this the Upwork playbook, 90 days to freedom. This is probably my favorite. It's the fastest way to make money online in my opinion. We've seen people come in with little experience and this year they've made $60,000 alone. Like 60,000. I tell people in the community all the time. One client can change your life. All it takes is one client. So if you're looking to do this yourself, come into the academy. We have a 7-day free trial. Pretty simple,

20:21right? It's a community of people helping each other and we focus on how to build the most effective thing with the highest ROI possible.