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Ramon Van Meer: A Millionaire by Flipping Websites And Pet Products

Type the search keywords: ”Ramon Van Meer”in Google and YouTube and you would instantly realize how popular Ramon Van Meer is in the American online world in terms of being a successful online entrepreneur.

He has been successfully ”flipping” or buying and selling websites online. Currently, his biggest moneymaker is his pet products e-commerce business of which earns him just under a million dollars in 2022.

What makes him interesting is that he’s not like your average millennial digital content and e-commerce entrepreneur. Normally, digital content producers or e-commerce entrepreneur start out young with a comfortable supporting family to back them up.

He actually had a lot of business failures and personal obstacles that a lot of aspiring entrepreneur can relate to. He also doesn’t actually have a business degree and is even a high school dropout.

Varying amounts of information can be found on him online. If you’re really interested in knowing how he became a millionaire from his start as a high school dropout, I suggest you do additional research on your own.

He’s originally from Holland and dropped out of high school at 15. He drifted for sometime and ultimately started different small businesses like a construction building company to a party promotion company which according to his own words were not successes.

From here, we can already discern that he wants to be his own man and not have to work for someone else. He ultimately immigrated to America. It is unknown as to whether he became an MMA (mixed martial arts fighter) before or after he arrived in America.

He started learning about entreprenuership and online businesses by watching YouTube videos and by participating in online forums. He is a perfect example of how YouTube is one of the best online site for learning.

In fact, I didn’t know about him previously until a Codie Sanchez YouTube video featuring him titled: "Buy an $800 Website to Millions in Revenue?" was recommended by YouTube. I recommend you study Codie Sanchez. She knows a lot about small businesses.

He started flipping websites and has been doing it for 20 years already. So, this makes him a real expert when it comes to flipping websites and other digital properties like blogs and e-commerce sites.

He first bought a travel blog together with his partner. He became responsible for the blog’s marketing activities. This highlights the importance of developing connections with people both on and off business. This is especially true if you are in the marketing business.

He didn’t specify if their travel blog was successful, but he actually studied Flippa and bought another website just to learn about marketing. He stated the importance of studying Flippa if you wanted to build an online business.

This is because you can learn a lot from Flippa as to which online websites like blogs and e-commerce sites are doing. You can learn how much some forms of website businesses are doing in terms of monetization.

Through Flippa, you would also get an idea of which specific online subject niches are popular. As you can see from Flippa, you don’t even need to start a website from scratch, you can just buy it and “flip it”.

If you’re wondering how successful Ramon is at flipping websites just look at what he has publicly divulged regarding his website flipping income:

He bought a credit loans website for $500 and then later resold it for $35,000. This means that his ROI or return on investment was 70 times his initial investment. Who knew a credit loans website can be this profitable!

Next he bought a website devoted to WWE (World Wresting Entertainment) which is the top wresting entertainment company in the world. He bought the website for $20,000 and then resold or flipped it for $250,000 for a clean profit of $230,000 for a single website.

He then saw a soap opera business but couldn’t afford its price tag of $100,000. So he built one himself and then later resold it for $9,000,000. According to him, this is his so far greatest achievement in terms of website flipping.

He further stated that he has no passion for the websites he bought and sold. He bought them because to him they were “interesting”. I think what he means by interesting is that they were financially viable as websites that can be flipped.

This is Ramon’s current top online business venture. He bought the business in 2019 or just three years ago (if you’re reading this blog post in October, 2022) and so far, he’s been able to grow the business 26 times in terms of sales. A very impressive figure right?

Here are the details: he bought the business in late 2019. The original business owner’s sales were already an impressive $700,000 annually. Ramon managed to exponentially increase this figure by the second year to $7.5 million and finally to $18,000,000 by the third year.

What’s his secret? To be specific, his successful marketing strategy was utilizing Facebook Ads, paid acquisitions, e-mail retention and by migrating the site to Shopify. As you can see, he’s really good with online business marketing and strategies.

I almost forgot to tell you in case you haven’t visited the website: it’s a pet products e-commerce site complete with blogs and other things about dogs and cats. In case you don’t know yet, the pet product industry is worth more than $200 billion in 2021.

The industry is expected to grow at a CAGR between 5% to 6% until 2028. This means that pet products are much bigger than other more capital intensive industries like industrial machines which are also harder to sell and has a much more limited customer base.

At first he sold only dog ramps but later he realized that he could make more money by upselling other products besides his dog ramp product. He sells dog food (including human grade dog cookies), supplements, pee pads and so on.

According to him, his marketing efforts averages him about 20,000 unit sales on a monthly basis. This is the reason why he’s confident that he can earn an 8 figure income by 2023. Don’t forget that he’s still flipping websites beside this e-commerce business.

He states that his most profitable products are his pet specialty food and supplements. This just shows you how devoted are many pet owners to their pet that they are willing to spend good money on them.

Add to this he also sells custom pet cushions, paintings, canvasses, t-shirt, socks, pillows and so on. Basically, he is selling almost any product where you can attach an image of a pet in it. I don’t know if he’s also expanded to mugs which I think would also be a good seller.

It is worth noting that Ramon uses dropshipping. This means that his company only does the online marketing like setting up a blog or an e-commerce site and his company assigns the manufacture and shipping of his products to others.

He didn’t particularly specify who or where his partner manufacturers are but he does mention that his human grade dog cookies are baked and packed by a bakery in the US. As you can see, Ramon has really no manufacturing facilities.

He must have developed this strategy back when he was still a construction contractor. Someone advised him that he cannot be a master of everything and what he should do in order to succeed is to delegate tasks he cannot or are unable to handle by himself.

This business strategy has also saved him money by not having to raise and spend capital on manufacturing facilities, machines, tools and so on. This has allowed him to concentrate to do what he does best: online marketing and running an e-commerce site.

As a verifiably successful entrepreneur and not just someone who teaches entreprenuership but does not have concrete experiences or credentials of being one, he can teach us a lot about entreprenuership. He is a living example of what is one.

He states that being an entrepreneur is not a process of reading many books on the subject and being able to teach it on an educational level. These people are not entrepreneurs but just teachers.

To him, it’s about actually doing it in real life and to learn to ”roll with the punches”. To roll with the punches means to be able to survive something that happens to you unexpectedly. Of course, this happens a lot in many facets of life including a career or business endeavour.

He also thanked his training as an MMA fighter for according to him, this has given him the attitude not to give up and just face whatever that’s coming to you. Who knows, he might just return to being a professional MMA fighter one day!

There is so much to learn about Ramon and his online business. If you are planning to start an online business like a blog or an e-commerce site or whatever, it is worth studying him and his online business. He’s also fairly active in social media as well.

As can be seen, a high school dropout and struggling immigrant before finally succeeded in business after a long line of business failures. This just shows you that success can be had by anyone if they really worked hard for it.

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