Welcome back to another episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast with Spencer and co-host Jared Bauman, of 201 Creative.

This week they talk about the latest problems for Google, their side hustles, and some very strange niche sites. You won’t want to miss this one!

They kick off this episode by talking about how Google employees recently expressed their dissatisfaction with search results after the Reddit blackout.

In response, Google CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged the issue and introduced a new feature called "perspectives" to address it, a move that shows that Google is trying to balance AI-generated content with human perspectives. 

Jared and Spencer discussed how bloggers who provide unique human perspectives and hands-on experiences can benefit from this change, highlighting the importance of honesty, expertise, and authenticity in search results.

Spencer also shared his thoughts about Google’s plans with its search generative experience, as it's clear that people want well-researched human reviews in the search results. Also, the fact that the Reddit debacle has got Google’s attention is great news for content creators and bloggers.

Jared and Spencer then talked about more bad news for Google. 

Google is getting in hot water on YouTube and across the web as they haven’t been complying with the agreed characteristics of the ads they display on websites. This is relevant for content creators and niche site owners as they often have ads displayed through Ezoic, Mediavine, or AdThrive. 

Tons of companies, large and small, have been paying for video ads and Google has been charging them but hasn’t been complying with the agreed characteristics of the ads and hasn't been transparent or accurate in how the videos are being displayed.

The big question that Spencer and Jared ask is how this affects us as website owners and content creators. Listen in to hear more about their thoughts on this topic.

Then Spencer shared some reviews of the podcast on Apple Podcasts Reviews and asks people to leave a review and he will read your name and website on their next podcast episode.

In the Shiny Object Syndrome portion of the podcast, Spencer begins by talking about his new WordPress plugin, Rank Logic, which is now available. He talks about the challenges behind creating a plugin and preparing for the launch. Rank Logic offers users a better way to track their SEO performance.

Jared talked about his side hustle using the Amazon Influencer Program, of which he has officially been a member for 30 days. He was happy to report that he broke the $1000 mark in his first month, a trend that will likely continue even if he doesn’t keep uploading videos. He also talks about his daily earnings and the possibilities of growing his income even further.

In the Weird Niche Site portion, Jared goes first and talks about Hire Goats, a site that lets you rent goats and have them come and manicure your property.

The site was created in 2017 and has a DR of 26 although it’s only ranking for 260 keywords. The 7-page site does, however, rank number one for all keywords related to renting goats, and although it’s a very glitchy experience and it’s a directory website, it’s very possible that they’re earning some money from it.

When the hosts click around, they see that the goat landscaping website links to HireSheep.com. It’s a whole world of possibilities!

Then Spencer talks about his weird niche site, Random Word Generator which, as the name suggests, lets you generate random words, numbers, and phrases with certain characteristics. It’s monetized with ads and gets 1.3 million organic visitors per month from Google and potentially 3 of 4 million visitors per month in total. 

It has a DR of 72 and has really capitalized on all kinds of random generators, from dinner ideas to Bible verses, and could be earning at least $50k per month. As Jared and Spencer dig a little deeper, it looks like the creator has a whole network of successful sites.

This conversation and Spencer and Jared’s ideas are sure to get the creative juices flowing, so don’t miss this episode!

Be sure to get more content like this in the Niche Pursuits Newsletter Right Here: https://www.nichepursuits.com/newsletter

Want a Faster and Easier Way to Build Internal Links? Get $15 off Link Whisper with Discount Code "Podcast" on the Checkout Screen: https://www.nichepursuits.com/linkwhisper

Interested in 10x'ing your niche site profits?

Garrett Yamasaki joins the podcast today to share how he started a dog site in 2018 and grew it into a massive success thanks to his strategic use of Amazon FBA.

In the first three months, he wrote close to 100 articles targeting low-competition keywords before and after work.

He saw exponential traffic growth around months four through six and knew it could be a viable business long-term. So he started hiring others to scale the business and started putting money into it. By 2019, he had 10 writers, one editor, and one virtual assistant.

(He also lays out the simple yet effective workflow he uses to this day that any site operator should take note of.)

In 2020, the Amazon affiliate side was growing rapidly, and by 2021, they were earning around $10,000 per month. That's when Garrett realized they could create their own product and make more money.

He chose to go the private label route for a faster time to market.

He identified manufacturers and branded the products for their market. And chose middle-priced products on Amazon to avoid competition from affiliates and generate external traffic to sell their products.

To make it all work, he went with Amazon FBA for logistics, fulfillment, and storage and hired a VA to handle customer service.

Garrett explains how Amazon FBA offers you 30-40% profit margins, compared to the 2-4% commissions as an affiliate. Plus, with Amazon's Brand Referral Bonus, you get 10% back for external traffic to their site, making it more profitable than going with a Shopify store.

He also shares what the most effective type of Amazon ads are for generating sales and bestseller status.

Plus, he discusses how adding FBA to his business has helped build a brand and traffic source outside of SEO. A much more profitable alternative to say, focusing on social media for brand building.

It hasn't always been easy though, and expanding this business requires some experience.

He discusses how going from one to now eight products have benefited from hiring a mentor and outsourcing to agencies to help with PPC and listings.

Inventory management has also been difficult due to unpredictable sales curves. But he mentions that ordering a lot can help prevent stockouts.

As such, Garrett keeps inventory in his garage in case of emergencies, as selling out affects his bestseller rating on Amazon.

Overall what started out as a dog site has become a full-blown business. And although he's already making great money, he's still in growth mode. He reinvests much of the 20% profit margin he could be taking home back into the eCommerce side of things.

And on top of all of this, his website generates at least $500,000 a year in passive income from ad revenue.

This is a really great success story. Garrett shares tons of valuable tips, strategies, and things to consider adding to your own business to make way more money!

Be sure to get more content like this in the Niche Pursuits Newsletter Right Here: https://www.nichepursuits.com/newsletter

Want a Faster and Easier Way to Build Internal Links? Get $15 off Link Whisper with Discount Code "Podcast" on the Checkout Screen: https://www.nichepursuits.com/linkwhisper

Get ready for an exciting new episode of our podcast, where Spencer and co-host Jared Bauman of 201 Creative dive deep into the fascinating world of AI, SEO, and website building!  

First up on their agenda is Google's policy on AI-generated content and EEAT. At the moment, Google does not distinguish between AI and human-generated content and is not requiring creators to label their content. The hosts talk about why this may be and about how Google has also shifted its position on this topic and will probably continue to do so.

They also discuss EEAT and AI, as artificial intelligence-generated content can’t claim any kind of experience. As this is a topic that is constantly evolving, they agree to discuss it as changes arise.

The next topic Jared and Spencer talk about is OpenAI’s potential plans to open an AppStore for ChatGPT. This could include customized AI chatbots, which several companies are already selling.

The hosts then briefly talk about how the INP report has now been added to Google Search Console and is now a part of the Core Web Vitals report.

GA4 comes up when Jared asks Spencer about his thoughts on the new analytics, and the hosts talk about their experience using it.

In the Shiny Object Shenanigans portion of the episode, Spencer talks about his new side project, the WordPress plugin Rank Logic, which helps users track their SEO performance. It’s a real game-changer that enables content creators to understand what’s working and what’s not and tracks changes they make as well as content and author performance. He’s even considering incorporating GA4 into the app to make it the data user-friendly. The launch is imminent, so stay tuned!

Jared talks about his new side hustle using the Amazon Influencer Program, reporting that in his first month, he will have made around $1000 from 229 videos. He talks about how daily earnings from the program fluctuate a lot and how inspiring it is to be able to build such a lucrative income stream in just one month.  

As for Weird Niche Sites, Jared goes first and talks about the site People of Walmart, which features user-generated photos of the people that shop at Walmart. He talks about how a site like this could be created for any number of stores, although he and Spencer point out how normally it’s very risky to use the name of a company as part of your domain name.

Spencer shares his site, which is Psychic High School, a humorous site. It’s updated actively but is a low-traffic site that’s ranking for very few keywords. The hosts talked about why the site might have been created and they have a good laugh about the content.

You won’t want to miss this episode, where the hosts share insight, opinions, and a few surprises along the way!

Want the step-by-step strategy a link-building expert uses to exponentially grow the traffic of sites?

Alan Silvestri of Growth Gorilla joins the Niche Pursuits podcast to share some of his awesome growth tips.

He got into SEO and affiliate marketing in 2013 after searching for ways to make money online. He started with affiliate websites and was eventually hired to help the same course creator Alan followed to learn SEO...

From there, he found his passion for link-building and started Growth Gorilla. He now works with 10-15 clients in the B2B, SaaS space and has ranking content down to a science.

In his interview, he breaks down his holistic approach.

Alan describes the 3 main reasons pages may end up in the "content graveyard" (bottom of page 1, page 2, etc.):

• Not having backlinks
• Targeting the wrong keywords
• Not matching search intent or content type with the top 10 ranking results.

And he stresses that content quality is important and should be optimized before building backlinks.

To fix all these issues, he describes his content promotion roadmap. It's a quarterly process that helps prioritize target pages to build links to over the next 3 months.

First, there's the backlink analysis of competitors. He recommends analyzing two competitors, one realistically beatable and the other a North Star competitor that can represent an authority in the niche.

This backlink data will help show the difference in percentages of backlinks pointing to the homepage versus internal pages. If competitors are being more proactive with content promotion, they'll likely have more links to their internal pages. But if a website is not ranking, it could also be the site has a lower domain rating (DR), which can be improved by building more backlinks to the homepage.

From this data, he describes how you can put together a link analysis report. He uses a three-step process for this, including identifying the link gap, identifying the type of backlinks, and identifying the topical relevance of those backlinks.

One tip is to prioritize both page relevancy and domain relevancy for backlinks, but if you can't get both, prioritize page-level relevancy.

Plus, he shares that while no follow links may not have a direct impact on rankings, they can bring in a trust signal that is important for a website to have. Building nofollow links can help dilute the backlink profile and build trust for the site. Good places to get nofollow links include directories, social media links, forums, and Q&A sites like Quora.

He also shares how to spot and avoid bad links from link farms by looking at content quality, links that the content has, and the main business model of the site.

And he also has some great tips on anchor text which can be classified into four main buckets: exact match, partial match, URL, and generic. To improve anchor text, export the backlinks of the top 10 ranking pages for target keywords and classify them into the four buckets to determine the ideal distribution.

Throughout the episode, Alan has a lot of great tips and tactics to share and isn't afraid to get into the nitty-gritty details.

So be sure to check out the full episode below!

Be sure to get more content like this in the Niche Pursuits Newsletter Right Here: https://www.nichepursuits.com/newsletter

Want a Faster and Easier Way to Build Internal Links? Get $15 off Link Whisper with Discount Code "Podcast" on the Checkout Screen: https://www.nichepursuits.com/linkwhisper

And as always, this podcast episode is hosted by Jared Bauman, co-owner of 201 Creative SEO Agency - https://www.nichepursuits.com/201creative

Interested in setting up a YouTube channel?

Spencer and co-host Jared Bauman of 201 Creative explore some exciting updates for content creators today on Niche Pursuits News.

First up is a new announcement from YouTube that they're lowering the threshold for channel monetization!

While content creators used to need 1000 subscribers and 4000 long-form watch hours, now you need just 500 subscribers and 3000 long-form watch hours in the last 12 months to start earning money on the platform.

Jared and Spencer talk about why they think YouTube changed the rules, and they also discuss other ways to monetize using the platform, such as channel memberships.

Then they move on to talk about how Time magazine announced its plans to remove its digital paywall and give everyone their content for free. Their plan is to monetize with display ads, using the same model many bloggers and content creators are using. 

The hosts move on to discuss data in a SEMRush report that revealed interesting statistics about search engine users, like the percentage who change their keywords before clicking and how very few searches led to clicks on the first result in the SERPs in 2022. It’s clear that user patterns of search are changing. What does this mean for us?

Jared and Spencer also discuss a recent article in Search Engine Journal about Google making its feedback form more robust. According to Twitter, this move will set the stage for more negative SEO, and the hosts share their thoughts on the implications. Will the positives outweigh the negatives with this new move from Google?

In the Shiney Object Shenanigans portion of the podcast, Spencer talks about recent developments with his faceless YouTube channel. 

Although the channel was making $80 to $90 a day, a copyright claim has almost eliminated all of his earnings. His appeal was ultimately denied, and he talks about his plans for moving forward, as well as other ideas for faceless YouTube channels.

Jared finally reveals more details about his YouTube project, which will revolve around read-alouds for social-emotional learning by his wife, a seasoned school counselor. She'll be working on this project all summer and Jared will report back on their progress.

In the last section of the podcast, Spencer talks about a weird niche site he found years ago based on a scene from Star Wars where Darth Vadar screams. The site was getting around 30k visitors per month back in 2015. 

Although the original website no longer exists, there's a copycat site now, but it only gets a few thousand visitors per month.

Jared talks about the site he found called Awkward Family Photos, created with user-generated content. He talks about how the site is monetized using ads and how it’s ranking for 20k keywords even though it's just a photo site. 

As it turns out, Spencer and his family play the Awkward Family Photo board game all the time. This example certainly makes you think about creative monetization opportunities you might not have thought about before!

Once again, Niche Pursuits News is coming at you with a thought-provoking episode on YouTube, legacy publisher strategies, changes in Google, unique side hustle ideas, and creative monetization techniques.

Don't miss out! Tune in and listen now!

Be sure to get more content like this in the Niche Pursuits Newsletter Right Here: https://www.nichepursuits.com/newsletter

Want a Faster and Easier Way to Build Internal Links? Get $15 off Link Whisper with Discount Code "Podcast" on the Checkout Screen: https://www.nichepursuits.com/linkwhisper

How do you balance your focus between driving traffic and conversions?

If you ever struggle to find a happy medium for your SEO and CRO efforts, you'll want to check out this great convo with Shaun Els.

Shaun has been building online businesses and helping others with web design since he was 18.

Over the years, he's tried all sorts of marketing tactics. But as an agency and niche site owner, he's found SEO and content creation to be the key foundation for success.

And because of his background in design, he takes an interesting design-first approach.

He recommends building a pyramid structure for a website, with the homepage at the top, followed by money pages, and then supporting content. The supporting content adds tons of design and content value by building internal links and what he calls 'themed content', which helps create a useful resource for users and increase your site's authority in Google's eyes.

Shaun discusses how many people are hesitant to engage with marketing content that is too sales-focused. And so blogging can be a solution to this problem, as it provides valuable information to potential clients. By creating blog posts that address common problems or questions in your industry, you attract search traffic and more.

He also shares a framework for getting the most out of this content by repurposing it into smaller pieces for easy sharing. These include posting counter-arguments, summaries, and bulleted lists. The process of repurposing content for social media takes about half an hour and can be done using tools like ChatGPT. And he mentions how it's important to intersperse blog post links with other types of content on social media to avoid penalties.

Shaun uses this content structure to funnel visitors to money pages with great lead magnets to grow mailing lists.

He uses email marketing to stay in touch with potential clients and nurture relationships. He argues that emails should be informational and include quick resources to help readers achieve their goals. And the ultimate goal of email marketing is to build trust with potential clients.

So while his strategy is grounded in SEO, he understands that marketing requires several touch points before earning a conversion.

But by building a content ecosystem that includes search engine optimization, social media, and email marketing, you can create a flywheel of lead generation.

Don't miss the full interview to get his tips on how to turn this strategy into a reality!

Be sure to get more content like this in the Niche Pursuits Newsletter Right Here: https://www.nichepursuits.com/newsletter

Want a Faster and Easier Way to Build Internal Links? Get $15 off Link Whisper with Discount Code "Podcast" on the Checkout Screen: https://www.nichepursuits.com/linkwhisper

Want to hear about the latest developments in AI and the potential impact on website owners?

Don’t miss the latest episode of Niche Pursuits News!

Once again, Jared and Spencer team up for an engaging and informative discussion that covers a range of exciting topics.

They start by talking about how the WordPress Jetpack plugin incorporates an AI assistant directly into the editor. This feature will allow users to generate text directly in WordPress and also correct spelling and grammar, generate titles, and uses several different prompts for tone, all for $10 a month.

Then they discuss a report on the Search Generative Experience, the “new featured snippets,” and how quotes may be pulled directly from websites without any attribution or backlinks. This would cause quite a stir among SEOs and publishers, and Jared and Spencer discuss the implications and concerns surrounding this development.

On a potentially positive note for some, they share a recent tweet by Cyrus Shepard, who crawled millions of URLs to compile a list of 7 categories of searches that are unlikely to trigger AI results in the SERPs.

Google Bard is also a topic of conversation in this episode. Jared and Spencer discuss the new location settings, which have been added to help localize queries, and new developments in exporting tables to Google Sheets, which is now easier than ever.

The discussion then shifts to Spencer and Jared’s side hustle projects.

Spencer talks about his idea for a YouTube series, where he acts as a mentor and host in a competition between two or three people.

Their challenge?

To start a small online business in just 30 days, with the winner taking home a monetary prize. The journey would be documented in a single, well-edited, and inspirational video.

Speaking of inspirational, Jared and Spencer share their experience being part of the Amazon Influencer program. Both believe this is a great program for quick financial wins, and they talk about content ideas as they continue to upload videos to see where this side hustle leads.

Jared briefly shares his other side projects, including a YouTube channel he’s working on at the moment. In subsequent episodes, he expects to give listeners a better status update.

In the final segment of this episode, Jared and Spencer talk about some of the weird niche sites they’ve discovered.

Jared reviews a website called Best Love Text Messages. It was likely originally created as a source of messages for loved ones but eventually expanded into a wider variety of messages, quotes, and captions.

The website used to get 300,000 organic page views until a Google update, and although it still boasts a substantial number of keywords and page views and could be easily replicated with AI nowadays, there are also areas for improvement.

Spencer shares a website with several web-based games he used around 2010: QWOP. It’s a video game that was extremely popular back in the day and still manages to attract almost 50,000 organic visitors per month. With a DR of 64 and a substantial Twitter following, Jared and Spencer discuss the potential of supporting it through a Patreon-like platform.

As always, this is another episode filled with thought-provoking discussions, innovative ideas, and actionable tips.

Don't miss out on the opportunity to learn and be inspired by this episode of Niche Pursuits News.

Be sure to get more content like this in the Niche Pursuits Newsletter Right Here: https://www.nichepursuits.com/newsletter

Want a Faster and Easier Way to Build Internal Links? Get $15 off Link Whisper with Discount Code "Podcast" on the Checkout Screen: https://www.nichepursuits.com/linkwhisper

Is Google at war with affiliate marketers?

Head of SEO Branding at Wix and SEO Consultant for Semrush, Mordy Oberstein, joins the podcast today to share his high-level perspective and valuable insights to help you mitigate risk and save your rankings.

In the last 12 months, there have been core updates, review updates, and spam updates. And he believes it's important to look to data for patterns to better understand the SEO ecosystem.

In his roles, he has access to huge swathes of data, and to help site owners succeed, he has a vested interest in unpacking what Google seems to value in the content it rewards.

Here are just a few examples of important recommendations he shares in the interview:

• Read the content of competitors who outrank you after an update to understand what replaced you.
• Use the brand sniff test to determine if your content is of high quality.
• Use internal linking and semantic understanding to build topical authority.
• Hire a content marketing agency if needed to help translate your expertise into digestible content because readability is important for user experience.

He also discusses the continuing rise of AI-written content that is largely generic using similar language structures. And how adding real human experiences is key to providing unique insights and quality content.

He even offers a great example people can use in product reviews to accomplish this.

But Mordy says quality is a domain-level analysis, not just at the page level. And so, to improve domain-level quality scores, it is important to focus on technical health, content, and user experience.

Predicting and understanding user needs is crucial.

He believes quality content means targeting the audience and offering the right amount of nuance to predict their needs.

And while links are a secondary signal, they may become less important as Google gets better at understanding content, with relevance and domain quality playing a more significant role in ranking in a scenario where content is generic across the web.

He does believe that leveraging AI can help automate tasks that were not possible before though.

AI can be used for research, understanding topics, organizing information, rewriting content, and automating tasks like writing headers and product descriptions. However, users have become more skeptical of web content due to issues such as data privacy and fake reviews. As a result, the bar for acceptable content has risen, and web content creators need to up their game.

So if you're a site owner or online content creator, you'll definitely want to check out the full interview and take lots of notes!

Be sure to get more content like this in the Niche Pursuits Newsletter Right Here: https://www.nichepursuits.com/newsletter

Want a Faster and Easier Way to Build Internal Links? Get $15 off Link Whisper with Discount Code "Podcast" on the Checkout Screen: https://www.nichepursuits.com/linkwhisper

Will Google's new Search Generative Experience (SGE) help or harm site owners?

Spencer and Jared kick off the latest episode of Niche Pursuits News pondering this question with some interesting findings as they look at various examples of search queries.

They also reflect on a recent Twitter poll by Lily Ray and contemplate whether or not SGE seems to be an improvement over the existing Google search experience.

For instance, in the event it turns out to be a glorified featured snippet and not so much AI as it is displaying site content directly on the SERPs, will Google provide attribution to site owners?

They also consider how this GSE may work in YMYL niches.

But in hopeful news, Bing AI has added links to sources of information within their AI results which could help put pressure on Google to do the same.

The discussion then moves onto their shiny object shenanigans.

Spencer shares some recent troubles he's run into with his faceless YouTube channel and what they're doing to fix it.

Plus, he discusses how his upcoming plugin Rank Logic is coming along after beta testers finally got to use it.

Then Jared gets into how he decided to jump into the Amazon influencer program and how he and his 201 Creative business partner Kaitlin managed to create 100 videos within a few days reviewing items in their homes.

And as always, they close things out with some great niche site discoveries.

Jared starts with Snake Dreams, a site that focuses on interpreting dreams about snakes. And although it's not doing so well these days, according to Ahrefs - back in 2017 it was receiving an average of 56,000 organic monthly visitors.

Then it's onto Spencer's site highlight, Dimensions.com.

This is a reference database for product dimensions founded by an architect that provides dimensions for various objects and people, including celebrities and fictional characters. The site is monetized via display ads and a subscription service that offers 2D and 3D downloads, no ads, easy download access, and support. And it appears the site is getting lots of traffic!

So, it makes you wonder what's an problem or issue that people like have that could be turned into a helpful niche site!

Overall, it's another helpful episode to wind down for the weekend, hope you enjoy.