Rank and Rent Academy Review: What Is Nick Wood’s Pre-Selling Approach?

Rank and Rent Academy Pros and Cons

Pros

• Nick actively takes part in weekly live Q&A sessions with members
• The pre-selling approach can generate cash flow before website ranking
• Over 300 members in the Skool community

Cons

• Pre-selling approach requires strong sales skills that many beginners lack
• Running paid ads is an expensive and risky strategy
• Lack of success from students of Rank and Rent Academy

Price: Rank and Rent Academy costs $49 a month.

Refund Policy: Rank and Rent Academy does not offer any refunds.

Origin: Rank and Rent Academy was founded in 2024.

What Is Rank and Rent Academy’s Pre-Selling Approach?

Nick Wood’s pre-selling approach flips the rank-and-rent process. This “rent first, rank later” strategy ensures you will get paid before you spend time ranking the lead generation site. It removes the risk of not finding any clients after investing a lot of time in ranking a website.

First, you offer leads to clients as a sample while proposing a monthly retainer. The initial leads are generated through paid Google Ads. The results are used to convince clients of your value and the lead generation potential in their market.

You then proceed to build and optimize the website once the monthly agreement is secured. The organic leads will remove the need to run ads. This increases your profit margins without damaging the lead flow. This approach is also attractive to renters who want results first before investing in monthly contracts.

Example Scenario Using the Pre-Selling Approach

You are targeting HVAC contractors in Phoenix. Instead of spending 6-12 months ranking a website first, you follow Nick’s process:

• Week 1-2: You create a simple landing page and run Google Ads for “emergency AC repair Phoenix.” You spend $300 on ads and generate 8 qualified leads.
• Week 3: You offer the leads as free samples to a local HVAC contractor. You propose a $1,200/month retainer for ongoing lead delivery.
• Week 4: The contractor agrees to the monthly contract after seeing the lead quality. You can now start ranking to generate organic leads.
• Months 2-6: Organic leads now replace your paid ads. You see an increase in profit margins.

How Stephanie Pranther Closed a $1,000 a Month Deal

Stephanie Prather signed her first $1,000 a month client using Nick’s pre-selling approach. She closed the deal 7 months after joining Nick’s program. She used Google Ads to generate the initial leads that she used to convince her client to sign up for a retainer. What Stephanie likes best about Nick’s program is his distinct pre-selling approach. This “microwave method” gets the side business going first before transitioning to organic traffic. She says this matches her impatient personality better than the traditional “crackpot” rank-and-rent approach. Stephanie says that the most challenging part was the focus on building relationships. She failed to close her first 2 deals because of poor communication and misunderstanding.

What Do You Get With Rank and Rent Academy?

• Over 15 mini-courses that cover all the basics. This includes niche research, client prospecting, and the pre-selling approach.
• Weekly Q&A sessions with Nick Wood. These are 60-to 90-minute sessions and include campaign reviews.
• Access to Skool community with dedicated channels for questions, networking, and client management discussions.
• Outreach scripts and retainer agreement templates. Client management frameworks for structuring agreements and strategies.
• Google Ads step-by-step course. Covers campaign setup., keyword selection, ad copy, and tracking.
• Landing page creation training using Weebly and Wordpress.
• Frameworks for structuring retainer agreements, pricing strategies, and maintaining long-term relationships.
• Ad campaign optimization training to minimize advertising costs.

What Are the Rank and Rent Academy’s Claims About the Pre-Selling Approach?

Nick Wood claims that pre-selling:

• Wastes less time, resources, and money because you’ll have a rental agreement before building and ranking.
• Leads to easier sales conversations. Giving sample leads makes it easier to convince the client to sign up for a monthly deal.
• Makes the client’s needs predictable and lets you price your rent accordingly.
• Gets higher success rates because it validates market demand before you invest time and resources into ranking sites.

Pre-Selling Approach VS Traditional Rank-and-Rent

• Pre-selling creates the pressure to perform without even knowing the market difficulty. Successful ad campaigns do not mean easy SEO competition. Traditional rank-and-rent builds performing sites first. This lets you negotiate with multiple potential clients with results and a stronger position.
• Pre-selling actually increases the financial risks since you initially run paid ads. There is no guarantee that the client will agree to the monthly retainer afterward. Traditional rank-and-rent lets you test multiple markets and niches without obligations and at a low cost.
• Clients may be skeptical of the transition to organic leads. The lead volume and quality might not be the same. Traditional rank-and-rent shows lead value through existing organic traffic. There are also no additional advertising costs or campaign management.
• Client requirements and budgets may change during the ranking process, and guaranteed retainers limit pricing flexibility based on actual results. Traditional rank-and-rent allows market-rate pricing adjustments based on lead volume and quality after sites prove their performance capabilities.
• Paid ads do not validate search demand or ranking difficulty in competitive markets. You risk failing once you move to organic leads. Traditional rank-and-rent validates real search volume, competition, and ranking potential. It ensures that sustainable organic traffic is realistic.

Who Is Nick Wood?

Nick Wood is a digital real estate entrepreneur from St. George, Utah. He went from $60,000 in debt to building a multimillion-dollar rent-and-rent business. After failed tech ventures including Mad Freight and Kholo Inc., Nick discovered Dan Klein’s rank-and-rent training in 2016 and developed his signature pre-selling approach. He founded Digital Landlords, which has trained over 800 students, and created the Rank and Rent Engine tool.

How I Make Over $52K a Month Without Ever Running Paid Ads

I make over $52K a month without ever paying for ads using the original rank-and-rent method. It is highly scalable because there is no time spent on ad campaigns and management. I invest my time and resources in market research and ranking sites. This means I can offer performing sites to multiple potential clients and price them according to the demand. A local lead generation site costs as little as $30 a month to maintain. You don’t risk much compared to running expensive paid ads.

One of my rank and rent websites is Long Beach Elite Hardwood Flooring, 4525 Atlantic Avenue, Long Beach, California 90805, 562-566-2835, https://www.longbeacheliteflooring.com/. Last month it generated 34 leads and my client closed $20,450 in new business. We have a 10% commission deal, so they paid me $2,045 for my leads.

I’ve used the same paid ads preselling strategy as Nick Wood, since we both learned it from Dan Klein’s Job Killing program. However, I’ve drifted away from that over the years and just set up rank and rent websites right away for a few reasons. First is that Google used to offer more coupons for free ads credits in the past, so I could often generate leads with paid ads without incurring much cost myself. It was essentially risk-free. While Google still gives some promo codes today, they scaled it back substantially so you’ll definitely need to risk your own capital like Mark Cuban from Shark Tank if you want to presell with paid ads. Second is that Nick makes it seem like preselling is somehow “less risky” because you get a client before you put up a website. Well, setting up a rank and rent website can cost less than $50 bucks and only a few hours of your time. You’ll likely need to spend at least a few hundred dollars to generate some leads with paid ads and there’s no guarantee those leads will convert and help you land a client.

If you want to learn rank and rent from the OG local lead generation course, check out Dan Klein and my local lead generation program. Why learn from Luke Skywalker when you can learn from Yoda?