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Want to learn about the new ChatGPT plugins and other new updates that could affect for site owners?
Don’t miss this week’s episode of Niche Pursuits News!
Spencer and Jared kick things off by discussing new ChatGPT plugins brainstorming the various ways they can help users automate everything from email to SEO. Plus, the new opportunities for entrepreneurs with plugin ideas.
They also discuss OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s hearing before Congress earlier this week concerning the possible risks and implications of AI. A four and a half hour testimony covering everything from the dangers of misinformation to political fallout, with one conclusion being that ‘AI is more dangerous than you think’.
But since Google Bard is now available to the public, the guys were able to test it out with some fun prompts including asking it to compare itself to ChatGPT with some surprising results.
They also unpack Google’s upcoming Core Web Vitals metric InP, which will offer insights into the ‘interaction to next paint’ rather than just ‘first input delay’, which could change the game in user experience metrics.
Then it’s onto the side hustles, where Spencer unveils his year in the making WordPress plugin, Rank Logic, a powerful tool for tracking keyword rankings and content performance which is now open for a limited number of beta testers.
Meanwhile, Jared introduces his new service on Weekend Growth that creates email newsletter funnels for niche websites and is already receiving orders and positive feedback!
And as always, they wind things down by looking at peculiar niche sites starting with Unnecessary Inventions. A site created by an inventive content creator who turned his unique thinking into a profitable business followed by millions of fans on YouTube and Instagram.
They also discuss Reality Steve, a site dedicated to spoiling the results of the dating reality show The Bachelor.
In both cases, the sites have sparked interesting careers for their creators but the guys ponder the various ways they could boost their monetization.
So, sit back and enjoy another episode of industry insights, personal projects, and peculiar niches to help you get ready for the weekend!
Watch the Episode
transcription
Spencer: Hey everyone. Welcome back to Niche Pursuits News. This week in Niche Pursuits News is a fun podcast format that Jared and I here do every week where we talk about the news in the industry. We talk about a couple of weird niche sites that we have going on, and then of course some fun side projects as well.
So, first of all, Jared, how you doing? Good.
Jared: Good. I’m excited to be here. I was saying before we started recording that I. Was looking at my calendar this morning and it’s been a busy week and I saw this on the calendar and was very excited. So good to be here. These are fun every week. So it’s kind of just our, our hour to talk shop and kind of rub elbows with what’s going on in the news every week.
Spencer: Yeah, absolutely. It is. It’s fun. It’s something that is on the calendar. Hopefully people have it on their calendar for Friday morning when these come out and enjoy these as well. You know, there was like such. I wanna almost say bombshell news last week, who, you know, with Google Generative ai now being in the search results that this week’s news, like I’m looking for that next big thing and there is big news, but we’ve got a series of four or five topics that will hit on that maybe aren’t quite as bombshell, but still are impacting the way that I think we as content creators are doing business.
Jared: This is one of those weeks where, you know, like some weeks you go out to dinner and you, you know, you get the feature entree right? And that that restaurant is known for the feature entree. Other times you go and you get like a, a small plate kind of experience like tapa style, right? This is, this is the tapa style news episode.
I, I feel like we got a lot of good topics to talk about. None of them are bombshell topics like last week.
Spencer: Yeah, I love it. So we got like the seven course meal going on here where we can dive into all these little topics. So I’m gonna start sharing my screen here. First up is open AI chat, G P t.
Made live their plugins. So chat, G p T now has plugins, and this has been in beta, so maybe if people had heard this, but they are actually live now. And so people can come in here. And there’s only, you know, about a dozen or so that are actually live from Expedia, Instacart, kayak open Table, and a few others.
But the wait list as a developer is open. And so, you know, this, in my mind, my business mind sort of goes wild with all the possibilities of, boy, I could create a plugin for chat, g p T. And so that’s really the, the big idea here is that if you have a little idea, there could be this whole other marketplace, you know?
Similar to the Shopify marketplace or the WordPress plugin repository or the Apple Store, right? We’ve got the chat G P t plugin Store now where maybe you could be out creating a plugin idea. So I know I’m showing a few here, but from what I’ve read a couple of fun things that you can do with like Zapier is you can use Zapier to tap into your Gmail and train OpenAI on your voice of how you write emails and respond to emails and so that you can quickly respond to emails or AI can respond to your emails for you on your behalf via Zapier and just save you a ton of time responding to emails.
So that’s kind of cool. There was another one with Zapier. As I look over at my notes oh Tweets. You can create tweets and sort of train it on how you write Twitter threads and open AI can create those. And with Zapier you can actually connect. Twitter to that, and it can produce tweets for you.
So kind of a cool way to automate some of that.
Jared: I mean, I, I, like you, I haven’t been able to dive in and play around with it, but this is to me clearly the, where we’re really starting to get into a chat. G p t being extremely functional, you know, I mean, I. Once you get the prompting down all that, like chat, g p t is really powerful, but there is a lot of back and forth.
You’re going over there, you’re moving stuff back over. You’re having to ask certain prompts, take the data, streamline it, get it over to where you need it to be, reformat it, go back, ask chat, g p t to format it properly, get it back over. And, and this is really the, the extension of not having to do all that in between, that messy in
Spencer: between.
Right, exactly. So you know, they have some examples, but maybe we’ll leave it there. It’s something really for people to keep their eye on because it, I could definitely see it impacting the SEO and content creation world as people get more innovative to come up with plugin ideas that People could start using, right?
So kind of keep your eye on the marketplace here either just to see what can help you in your business or if you wanna be at the top of the food chain, create your own plugin that other people can, can use and purchase and hopefully you can make money
from.
Jared: It’s interesting to see which categories they’ve picked to launch with, you know, and not to read too far into it, but to your point, like if you’re a developer or a someone who feels like they might be able to have an impact, like.
Looking at what they launched with the topics they launched with I’ve gotta imagine they have some data behind that and that it wasn’t by accident, they launched with these brands and these topics. And kind of helps me understand better how on a global scale, on a large scale open AI thinks people are gonna interact or engage with this platform.
You know, like they didn’t launch with a hundred of them. They launched with a few and they were probably pretty carefully selected
Spencer: in terms of topics. Yeah. Yep. Absolutely. So interesting space to watch for sure. So right along with Open ai, of course is more news. This week in news just a couple of days ago, I believe it was Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI, testified before Congress, which is always a big deal, you know, when congress wants to bring in a C E O or a business owner and sort of grill them on their business.
And so they asked. Sam Altman, all kinds of questions about ai, the risks of ai the potential harm to the economy, what’s gonna happen to jobs because of ai and, and lots of questions that that came out of this. It was like a four and a half hour interview that I did not listen to. I did listen to a couple of clips but fortunately and I’m gonna share this here, is somebody summarized sort of all the main points on Twitter that I’m, I’m showing here, I think now on my screen.
Mm-hmm. You know, and basically some of the points that were interesting. That Sam Altman made was misinformation risk. Companies do have the risk that the AI is not gonna provide accurate information, right? And this could become widespread. And I think further down here somewhere, it talks about political risk, right?
In particular in a political cycle, right? There can be a lot of misinformation and if people are using AI to get that information or to produce that information, it can spread very quickly and have consequences political consequences. Right. Okay. Here it is. Election mis misinformation. Right? AI could, could impact that as well.
And so then he talked about ways to regulate ai, creating new agencies and licenses as a way to regulate AI models. How well that’s gonna work, I don’t know. But creating safety standards for AI models, et cetera. So, Maybe I won’t dive too much deeper into this other than to say Congress is now paying attention very much to open AI to AI models.
Anytime the government is starting to step in and potentially regulate, you know, it’s a big deal.
Jared: We’ve done a good job, Spencer, so far not having to be very speculative on what we comment on with the news, right. We’ve, we’ve we’ve definitely voiced some comments over the, over the episodes here about different things.
I’ll say this A couple years ago, and maybe you’ll remember the actual year, I remember it was summertime, but it was only a couple years ago where some of the big tech companies went before Congress to talk about I think it was more on the antitrust side of things, right? We had Google’s ceo, we had Amazon, we had Facebook Meta Zuckerberg was there.
And I just remember watching some of the video and the recap from that. And the questions were, I mean, I don’t know any other way to sugarcoat it. They were painfully basic and yes, showed how distant the lawmakers were from what’s really happening inside of these environments. Looking over the article and looking over the comments and looking over a few of the videos that you have shared.
There definitely seems to be a little bit more connection from the government to what’s happening here. And so I think that’s encouraging. Like the more that we can at least all be on the same page about this, the better. And that was encouraging because that, that whole episode, like I, I. I always talk about how I, there’s no wonder that there isn’t a lot of regulation when it comes to stuff Google does and how they, you know, the IP concerns with our content that we produce and all these things, because just go watch that.
Like they have no clue what’s really happening. But this seemed to be a little bit less you know, tone deaf about the situation here.
Spencer: Yeah. You know, that is a good point. Even though AI is extremely complicated and so Congress is gonna be kind of as clueless as they were about how Google operates, right.
As we, you know, sort of painfully watch they can see that there is going to be an impact on jobs. And so that is something where I feel like, okay. Congress should be aware of this. Government should be right, at least be thinking about this, which clearly they are now. Right? Is AI gonna replace 50{57b8cc37fd24bce1cf64c8b05d9407ce9171516056c1f5e762677747187a0de4} of all the jobs in the future?
They need to be thinking about this, how that’s gonna impact the economy and the livelihoods of, of citizens here. So,
Jared: By the way, on a completely separate note, if you are looking for a great way to write a tweet, that is it right there.
Spencer: Yes. Here you go. You can have some a model.
Jared: Yeah. Watching on YouTube can, can see how, how on the screen.
But yeah, what a great way to captivate an audience and get looks like what, 2 million views. Recapping what’s Yeah. O of open AI said.
Spencer: Right. And this was just written yesterday, less than 24 hours ago. Right. And it’s got, you know, anyways, I, I agree. The other, the last thing that I will say about this whole interview is that one of the questions that Sam Altman was asked is essentially, how much do you own of open ai?
And it came out that he owns 0{57b8cc37fd24bce1cf64c8b05d9407ce9171516056c1f5e762677747187a0de4}. He has 0{57b8cc37fd24bce1cf64c8b05d9407ce9171516056c1f5e762677747187a0de4} equity. In the company. And this shocked me, and I don’t know if he’s dancing around the question, I didn’t dive into it in terms of he personally doesn’t own any, but maybe he owns a comp part of a company that owns some of open ai. Right. Like maybe there’s some but from, from everything I’ve read, it sounds like, and I did listen to the clip that.
He actually did not take any equity stake when they raised when they kind of opened it up two investments. He, he didn’t take an equity stake, so he is just the CEO and board member which is just interesting.
Jared: Interesting. Very interesting. Just interest. Interesting, you know that is, is is rare for a CEO of a large corporation to not have any equity in the company at all.
Spencer: Yeah. So that’s just something that people can can ponder there and think about. So let’s see. Let’s move on to our next topic here. So Google Bard I’m gonna share my screen here if Google Bard is now open to everyone. Google. Bard’s been around for a little while, kind of in beta. There was a wait list.
But now it’s open to everyone and it’s gotten quite good. I was trying it yesterday. And maybe if we can come up with a prompt right, right here on the fly. Maybe we’ll do it. If you can think of anything. But Google Bard has gotten very fast at writing articles. It, it spits out content much faster than open AI does.
Right.
Jared: Let’s talk about let’s talk about seven course meals with bars. What do you think? There you go with the theme. You know, what, what can bar do with seven course meals?
Spencer: Okay. By the way, suggest a few seven. Course. We don’t plan this advance. No, we don’t. We really don’t. And so maybe this is a really bad prompt, but There you go.
It so it, it takes a few seconds and then it, it, you know, spits it all out. I have no idea if this is good or not. I’m not a seven coarse meal connoisseur. Myself. Right. Oh no. It
Jared: pretty good right before lunchtime. And we’re recording this looks pretty good to me.
Spencer: It does. I could use some Nazi sticks, tomato soup, Greek salad chicken Parmesan, right?
Yeah, this is great. Some truffles. Sounds delicious. But that’s what I found the difference with Open AI and I we’re getting spoiled here, is that I had to wait two, three minutes to get my, you know, you can see it typing, Google bar, just, it’s, it’s there.
Jared: And that’s what I was gonna comment on, is how fast that result came back.
Whereas over on chat, G P T, that would that would’ve taken a while.
Spencer: Yeah. The, the other maybe pro that I would say that I’m seeing is that it’s easier to get current events, current results, like live results. Like if you search for, you know, who won the NBA game or what’s the current score of the, the baseball game.
Google Bard knows it taps into current information. OpenAI does not. I know they have the Connect live to the internet in beta on OpenAI, but I haven’t seen that working on my end quite yet. So it, it just appears that Bard is, is further along in the connection to the internet piece.
Jared: And that was always where.
You know, you would have to give Google the nod. Certainly we talked last week a lot about how Google is a master at understanding intent, where, you know, Microsoft Chat, G B T, these things might not be quite as far along in their machine learning, but also the ability to tap into a much deeper repository of current events, you know?
So I’m not surprised necessarily to see that. I think, I don’t know, you feel this way, Spencer, but I think a lot of people. It’s kind of that first mover syndrome, right? Like a lot of people still go to chat g p t, at least in our industry, whereas I don’t play around with Bard quite as much as I have played a little bit with it, but not nearly as much as I I am with chat
Spencer: G P T.
Yeah. Yeah. And I just started playing around with it this week, and of course I just asked Google Bard. Is Google Bard better than chat g p t? Right? They both got strengths and weaknesses, but it, you know, popped out a table here of you know, the breaks down data features, access to the internet, yes and no, right?
Accuracy. Google BART is more accurate. Che p t is less accurate creativity. Google BART is less creative. Che p t is more creative. So maybe, maybe it is. Unbiased. I don’t know. Engagement Google Bard is less engaging. Chat. G p T is more engaging. I don’t know how they judge that. Overall. Google Bard is better for generating comprehensive in infor informative responses, whereas chat G P T is better for generating creative and engaging companies.
Man,
Jared: it feels so much like the positioning that Google has taken up, which is. Chat. G P T is a conversation and Bard is more of a search function. Yeah. I’m being overly sum summarizing when I say that, but it feels very much the positioning that Google has tried to take up when it positions chat, g p T and Bard.
Yeah.
Spencer: And the other overall that I’m seeing is like, okay, if you wanna write a flowery essay or poem, go to chat G b t If you want a factual database. Summary or article, go to Google Bard. That’s kind of how they’re positioning, right? We should, it’s accurate. It’s less creative, right? Maybe we should
Jared: get the initial from Bard and then take it over to chat g PT and have it make it a little bit more interesting.
Yeah,
Spencer: there you go. They, maybe there’s gonna be kind of a one-two punch that people can use with all these these models that we have. There’s your, there’s your plugin idea. There it is. Right there. Do it all, all in one. So people, you know, I’d encourage people to play with, with all the different AI tools, Google, Bard.
Like I said, it’s it’s been pretty decent for me f from the little tests that I’ve done. So it’s now open and available to everyone. You don’t need to wait, go use it. And it is free. So that’s the other pro. You don’t have to pay 20 bucks a month. Yeah, like chat, G b t. So let’s see where I’m at.
Okay. Jared, I know you got something about core web vitals here. So let’s go ahead and talk about that, which it may take me a second to find my screen. Here we go. Introducing I N P to core web vitals.
Jared: Yeah, so this is it’s big. It’s not big. It’s big in that core web vitals, in, in, in my opinion, and a lot of other people’s opinion.
Like it’s, it’s important and it’s big. Certainly as people who focus on ranking websites, core vitals is a part of what Google wants us to focus on. I don’t, we, we can save the, is site speed a ranking factor or not? We can save that topic for a different day, but Core of Vitals has done a good job of taking a lot of site speed metrics and boiling them down into three metrics that we can pay attention to, and it’s trying to do more than just speed, but overall experience.
Right? So with that, On the table, one of those metrics was f i d or first input delay that’s gone. That was always the squirrels of them. If talking to a guy who who we do site speed optimizations and repairs for clients every day, F I D’s, always the squirrels in that if you get a a, a a bad f i d sometimes it’s an easy fix and sometimes you’re kind of throwing your hands up going like, I, I don’t really know what to do.
So, I think Google’s been pretty clear. They know it’s DIS scores and they’ve now replaced it with what is called I n P. And that now stands for instead of first input delay, we’re now talking interaction to next paint. I like it for the record because I think looking at things from a paint perspective is far better than from a delay perspective because it’s much more inclusive.
So yeah. I have a couple of things to, to kind of deep dive a bit, but what are your take initially on this announcement?
Spencer: Yeah. So it’s interesting, right? They’re, they’re trying to dial in a little more to, to get what really makes your, your site have core web vitals. And this is just one of those metrics that they’re going to add to Google Search Console.
And so when you go in and you log into your Google search console, you can start seeing this. Although can we see it now in Google Search
Jared: Console? I. I, I can’t yet. No. Okay. It looks
Spencer: like it’s coming. Okay. Yeah, it, it, it’s coming soon. And it sounds like, you know, they’ve spent over a year, right? Yep.
Sort of testing this, oh, here’s the timeline. Of course, in the big graphic right. May, 2022, it’s been about a year that they’ve been testing. It says in another year it’ll be, be stable as a core web vital metric. So it’s, it’s interesting. Yeah, for sure.
Jared: Let me read off what the, kind of, the, the differences are for, it’ll be a little bit of a mouthful, but I’ll read it off just so people who are listening can, can hear it.
So f i d was a huge step forward. Well, I’m reading, by the way, from Google, so this is not my opinion. F i d was a huge step forward and we introduced it as a core of vital. In 2020, it offered away. To measure responsiveness as rail users experience it. F i d wasn’t without limitations, though.
The name actually gives away two limitations. Again, reading from Google first, input and delay. F i d only reports the responsiveness of the first time a user interacts with a page. Even though first impressions are important, it is not necessarily representative of all the interactions throughout the life of a page.
Enter I n p rather than only measuring the first inter interaction. I n p takes all interactions into account reporting one of the slowest over the entire lifeline, time of the page blah, blah, blah. So it’s more of a paint type of thing that rather than just a first input type of thing. I, we’ll see how it plays out.
I don’t know if it’s better for site owners, if it’s better for user experience. Certainly. I can see it being better and I do like the overall approach of going after a paint perspective rather than just a first input. So, but we’ll see how it
Spencer: plays out. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And is there a place that site owners can go right now and, and test out their I N P.
Jared: Let, let’s, I don’t think so. No, I don’t think that’s a good question. I I don’t know of one. I’ll put it that way. Okay. I, I did see that it’s not gonna be baked in until next year. 2024, I think I saw. So, yeah, I do think it, it’s still just news, but if, if, if we’re wrong on that, please throw a comment up in the YouTube comments there.
And and we’ll get that, that might be your place to find a link if there is one. Okay.
Spencer: All right. Well that will be something for people to keep their eye on. Google’s sort of updating their core web vitals and what they’ll be measuring at least. So we will watch that for sure. Boy. So we hit on like four or five different news topics.
I think that that covers the news topics that we wanted to cover for the day. So maybe let’s move on to our shiny objects shenanigans things we’ve been working on the side. Not necessarily our main focus in our business, but things that are fun little side projects or just something that, yeah, maybe not everybody is aware.
And so I’ve been sharing over the last few weeks, you know, my either faceless YouTube channel or my Amazon influencer program videos, those are still going. I’ll talk about. More of those in future weeks. But something that I’ve actually been working on now for over a year is something called Rank Logic.
Rank Logic is a brand new WordPress plugin that will do several things and I’m just about to start beta testing, so that’s why I’m, I guess I’m announcing it. Is that maybe even later? Today I just need to make a couple of tweaks. I may ask for some beta testers and so have you. Publicly shared the name yet.
I don’t know that I have, so this may be it. This may be the very first time that I am sharing the name. And
Jared: again, we need that, that, that, that music, like that trumpet announcement music. Yes. Talk about doing these so on in the moment. Like we, we just don’t have time to edit and add these in. But this is an announcement.
Spencer: It is, it is an announcement of sorts. Right. So I’m sharing the ho just the homepage, right? It’s pretty simple now. But the idea is that you can track your keyword rankings and so you will be able to do that. It is a rank tracker, right within WordPress. But it also will allow you to track the performance of your content in a variety of ways.
You can group articles together by author. You could group them together by anything you want. So let’s say you have a group of articles that are all created via ai, and you could group those together and see how they perform versus articles that are not produced via ai, right? And get a graph specific to whatever group keywords author.
However you want to group slice and dice the content of your site, you can see how that strategy is working, right? And then the final thing, which is I think kind of a big deal is you can discover content changes that are actually producing results. The, the plugin will kind of re record events or changes that you make on your content.
So if you change the title of your article or if you add new Paragraphs to your content, or if you add internal links to your articles or make any changes, rank Logic will track those changes. And then you can see after you’ve made those changes, do your rankings go up? Do they go down? What happens to the traffic?
That sort of thing. So that’s the plugin idea in a nutshell. I’m honestly, I’m not really trying to, to pitch it here. I’m not even necessarily. Asking people to go to Rank Logic and become a beta tester, because I think I can only accept, you know, maybe 20 or so. So I’m gonna probably pu publish on social media and just ask for some people there.
And I’m sure I’ll get 20 or 30 people to, to test it out for me. But it’s been a, a side project for sure, but it’s something that’s been in development for over a year. I’m almost embarrassed to say that it’s taken that long, not because it’s so complex, but. Because my developer has been so busy with Li Whisper our main focus, right.
This has been a side project, you know, back burner project that as he’s had time, he’s put some development hours into. And so here it is. I’m excited to get some beta testers. We’ll test it probably for a month or so and then maybe be launching it publicly. So,
Jared: so did this spin out of, I remember.
Tweet email, something that you shared where you were tracking in Google Analytics, how your various authors performed. You know, it’s probably on the back of your content push for niche pursuits, which I think started in 2022. Yes. But it feels like this might be on the back of that.
Spencer: I do believe that, that that fed into this idea.
Absolutely. I loved being able to group the types of content. What I was doing is every article that was published, you know, in 2022, I had a specific graph in Google Analytics for that. Yeah, I loved that. It’s kind of cumbersome to set up in Google Analytics and I don’t even know if Google Analytics four does this.
And so Yes. Part of that idea was. I loved that. I wanted to be able to do that. And then just adding the sort of content or content testing, content update testing feature here was again, another thing I had done a ton on niche pursuits is constantly updating content, but do you really know if those updates helped?
This should give you some insight into whether that those updates worked.
Jared: So can’t wait. I’ll I’ll have to apply to be a beta tester.
Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I’ll
Jared: let you in. So, I was gonna say, I got the inside track here cuz we’re recording before anybody else knows about this. That’s, that’s true. Right?
But the being first in line doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get approved. Right.
Spencer: You know, I, I don’t know what what, what I’m gonna use. You know, what criteria I’m gonna use to pick. So, so we’ll see if we make, you’ve got, you’ve got a day to think about it. Yeah, exactly. So so that’s, that’s what I got going on.
Jared, what about you? What have you been working on recently? Well, you
Jared: know, I’m feeling I’m feeling like I need a new shiny object just to keep up with all of your shiny objects because you know, I keep reporting on the same shiny object every week, although it’s different iterations of it, I will say that it’s usually something different.
We’re trying something new, but. This week we so going back to the weekend growth kind of brand, I guess as you were, as you would call it, right. Started with a newsletter idea sending out. A newsletter every week. And so last week all the conversation around Google’s io announcement and that really got a website content creators thinking about, man, I’ve got to diversify my traffic sources and I’ve got to own my own brand.
Right? And I just kept talking to different people about that. And I mean, it’s interesting because talk about pivoting quickly. I sat down with my business partner, Caitlin, and I mean, we, we set up email and create funnels for clients at our agency all the time. That’s part of, you know, a strategy we use and we’re constantly helping businesses do that.
So we just basically took that service model and spun it up on weekend growth. And, you know, we kind of launched our first service on weekend growth, if you will. And had it put together in a couple days and launched it on Tuesday, I think it was. And so now on weekend growth.com. It’s on the screen right there.
I, I see. You can have us set up your email newsletter funnel auto-responder funnel for your niche website. And you can either have us just get it going so that you have the basic set up, you’re collecting email addresses with a lead magnet. You can have us kind of optimize the whole thing and really build it out so you’re, you’re really optimized for conversion and you can even have a.
Build out an entire email funnel for you that’ll actually, you know, sell some of your affiliate products or things like that. So you know, it’s kind of fun to just almost in contrast, Spencer, to your plug, your your, your tool you just said, like, where it’s taken a long time, like, man, this one came from an idea on a Friday to launch live, sending out to the email list on a
Spencer: Tuesday.
I, I will say that the way you’re doing it is the way you’re supposed to do it. You’re supposed to come up with the idea and quickly launch sort of an v mvp. And so I love this. I, it’s, it’s, you know, an v mvp, right? It’s mvp, I’ll tell you that much. It’s v mvp. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You, you, you had the idea, you put it up quickly.
Sales page, you know, very quickly just, Hey, let’s type out, here’s what we do, you know, if you want it, sign up. So my question is, why only the three providers here and I lost that list. It’s mail or light Convert kit and beehive, I think. Yeah. Is that, that you only accept? Why not just do it for anybody?
So we’ll do it
Jared: for anybody. Okay. The out-of-the-box service in this pricing model is only for those a couple reasons. Try so first off, we did a big review about a month ago. Where again, Caitlin who is my business partner and our, our coo and like the operational mind, tons of email experience certified on many large platforms for for these sorts of things.
She did a big review and basically rated mailer, light, beehive, and convert kit as the top three options for. Are in our space, right? And, and they fit different buckets. So it’s a, it’s cool because it’s not like, Hey, here’s three and this one’s the best, but it’s like, this is the best for this, this is the best for that.
And so the reason we only do these three is cuz honestly, it would be very rare for you to be a content creator in like this space that we’re in, in these kind of websites we build. It’d be rare for you to opt for something outside of one of those three.
Spencer: Yeah. Yep. Those are kind of the the hot providers I guess if you will.
Although there’s a ton out there. Oh, yeah. I mean,
Jared: man, we, it’s, it’s crazy. We’re in at least 10 different ones with clients as we speak from part up by Salesforce, HubSpot. We’re in HubSpot a ton. HubSpot’s awesome. Love HubSpot, but wouldn’t recommend it for someone who’s building like you know, like a a, a food blog or a.
You know, something like
Spencer: that. So, so, I know you touched on this a little bit, but what was your decision making process like to decide, hey, let’s launch this as a service? Like Yeah. Talking with your partner, why did you decide to launch it and make it happen?
Jared: Yeah, so great question. First thing is, we already do this.
Like, so it, it wasn’t really about how do we, you know, it wasn’t really launching a new service. It was packaging a service that we already offer on the agency side of thing. Right. So really there wasn’t like a lot of internal operations that needed to get developed. There were really no processes that needed to be built out.
I started by messaging Caitlin. I was like, Hey, if If I told you that we had to set up a an email autoresponder sequence for, and I referenced a friend of ours our, their niche website, like, how long would that take us to do? And, and she kind of came back and I was like, oh, that’s okay. And I’m like, do we have processes for that?
And she’s like, well, yeah, you know, Gabe does this and you know, Arlene would do that and you know, blah, blah. I’m like, oh. Okay, so it was already basically built out and then it was like kind of validating, like, is this interesting? And I just paid attention to the people, you know, in our community. And it was, and at that point it was like, well, let’s just put the two together.
Spencer: So, yeah, no, I love that decision making process. So how, how’s it been received? Like you know, feedback or, you know, people, people seem to think it’s a good idea. Full
Jared: transparency. It is the most clicked email we’ve ever sent at weekend growth. Wow. And and we’ve had a couple of orders. Yeah. So I would say I, I’m, I’m curious.
I, I don’t know if it’s one of those things that it sounds exciting, but maybe people are reticent. If the price point is like, I want that, but do I wanna spend 500 bucks or a thousand? Like how much do I want that? Right. Is there a lot of trepidation in our industry? Is it one of those things that, and we’ve seen this with services we’ve launched at our agency, where like, it, it, it takes a while to build steam.
Like the launch won’t necessarily be huge in terms of numbers. But then over time, like we start selling one or two of these a week and we definitely have certain products and services we sell the agency. They like that. So I would say certainly buzzworthy given that it’s the most clicked email by a wide margin we’ve ever sent out.
Yeah. Yeah. And that’s good
Spencer: flow. Yeah. No, that, that’s good. And you know, I think a lot of these things, they do take a little bit of time to, it’s like a slow burn. I think they say, you know, people need to hear about products eight times before they make a purchase. Right. On average. So part of it is that maybe there’s a lot of interest and you know, you mention it again and in a couple of weeks or a month and it’s like, oh, you know, may maybe I will do that.
The other thing is, I, I know you’ve been sharing your numbers. I mean, you just hit like a thousand subscribers a week or two weeks ago. Yeah, right. You’re still building up that email list as well, and so is that as that grows right, you double or triple it, you’re gonna get double or triple the orders probably.
This is
Jared: one thing to point out. I, I’m just, I’ll share it cuz I’ve been sharing pretty much everything along the way here is of the people that have ordered the people that ordered commented that the bonuses were important to them. Hmm. And so we did do a couple of promotional bonuses that expire this week and you know, so it’s a good reminder like and they might just be saying that, right?
But you know that at, you know, the way you launch is probably as important as what you launch.
Spencer: Yes. Yes indeed. So if people wanna check that out, yeah, it’s weekend growth.com. I’m sure they can find it in the menu, but otherwise you can go to slash email dash newsletter, dash setup. Can check that out.
Cool. I love it. I love coming up with an idea, launching it quick, and just making it happen. I think that’s the way that entrepreneurs should operate. Come up with that idea. Get it out the door. Don’t take the year long route like me if you can avoid it, but sometimes you can’t avoid it. Oh,
Jared: that’s how.
I mean, and, and again, I think it’s about knowing the time and place to do that, right? Like my mentor always taught me my a business vendor said, jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down. And I do love that, but there’s a time and place for that, right? So, yes, this was that, this was that time and place though, so,
Spencer: Very good.
All right, let’s move on to our final segment of the show. One weird niche. We’re gonna talk about a couple of weird niche sites that we’ve come across, things that are maybe just not your traditional blog, not your traditional, Hey, let’s find a keyword and write an article about it. These are different and I, these are two of my favorite.
I’m not, I’m not gonna lie. You know, I, I, I thought of mine and I was like, Ooh, this is a good one. And always brings a smile to my face. And then when you came up with yours and I saw yours listed, I was like, oh, I’ve known about this one for a while. This is a great one to talk about. So let’s jump into both of these.
So. I don’t even know how to introduce it other than to just, I’m gonna share my screen. I first came across this on Reddit actually over the last, I don’t know, one or two years I’ve seen this guy posting on Reddit. And it is unnecessary inventions.com. This guy he goes around and he creates real products.
For unnecessary reasons. Or I think he has a better tagline than that. But basically it’s solving problems that you don’t really have. And they’re just very funny products, right? Like most of these I don’t even know what, you know, I’m sharing my screen here. It’s like an attachment you add to the end here.
My thumb always gets tired trying to get more pressure from my hose. So let’s invent a better solution. I up a brand new hose so I can get my exact how he does all these things. And he, so he started, from what I understand, he started on Instagram, right? And you know, he is got these products that, you know, here is, I don’t even know what this one is.
He’s wearing a hat on his head and putting. Putting items in food items in it that you can rotate as you watch the game, and it makes it really easy. So he is got these very unnecessary inventions that, that we’ve, you know, got here people I, I’ve spent Probably too much time looking at all of his very unnecessary inventions that he has.
But I started thinking about this site and wondering how is he making any money? Yeah. Different, right? So if you go to his site he doesn’t right on the site, like I don’t And I don’t, I, I neglected to share the Instagram that I was actually on when I was talking about the Instagram, which I’m sharing it now.
But if you go to his site, like there’s no ads, you can’t really buy anything other than I think a sweater or something. But from doing some research, he has a very large Instagram following and a very large YouTube following. Right. And So if you go to his YouTube channel here, he has 3.73 million subscribers.
Yeah. And I think this is a huge source of his re revenue, right? Yeah. He does have ads before all of his videos and he makes probably quite a bit of money there. And if I share. If you go to Social Blade a fun social analytics tool you can see that his channel, you know, it tells you how many views he’s getting, right?
It’s does it show. Daily 127 million views in the last 30 days is what it estimates, and it estimates that he makes anywhere from 31,000 to $508,000 a month from his videos. I don’t know where he is in that range, but I, I’m guessing it’s more than 31,000, right? I think he’s probably pulling in close to six figures a month just from his YouTube display ads.
And the final thing in doing my research that I read about is he does a lot of brand deals. So yeah, he will actually implement brands within his inventions or within his videos, and they pay him a, you know, a brand fee to do that. So a very unique, weird niche for sure.
Jared: Man, I have so many things to say about this niche.
First off, It’s so cool. I will say that much the inventions he has and the well, okay. So it’s so cool. That’s, that’s the first, lemme start there. Yeah. Second off, video quality is amazing. Like, that’s gotta be a component of why it’s so successful is because they’re simple videos, but they’re super well produced.
They’re super well edited. The the, the, the content in the video is very captivating and very interesting. It’s very real. It’s a very unique perspective. Right. And you’re playing ’em on the screen. I,
Spencer: I am just playing random ones. It’s, and they’re hilarious. I mean, he, you know, he’s, He’s he’s got a unique skillset because he’s like a comedian.
He’s got a great sense of humor. I don’t think he ever speaks in his videos. But he’s also a very skilled, like mechanical engineer. Like he builds all of these himself. Like he has, I don’t know, 50 3D printers and a and a team now. Right? He builds these unique products and.
Jared: I, let’s, let’s, since that’s what we tend to do here, I just feel like he is leaving so much money on the table.
So I did a little bit of research. He does have a sh I got excited cuz he has a shop on his website. It links from his website to a different domain, Shopify store. Mm. Which I don’t love that. Wish we could keep it in the same domain, but I’ll take the webmaster hat off for a second. And all he sells is a sweatshirt.
Yeah, that’s it. Yeah, these would be fantastic Gag gifts, party favors, white elephant gifts. And by the way, I know for a fact cause we’ve worked on a site for this a brand for this in, at my agency, they sell like crazy, especially around the holidays and during seasonal times. Like the everything apron I’m looking at, which is like seven down on his homepage.
Dude, that would be a fantastic party gift and gag gift and a fun thing to give to your dad on Father’s Day, and you know, he’d never wear it, but. You’d be right. Yeah. He’d, he’d love it. It’d be a kick. It’d be a laugh. I’d give that to my dad and you charge 25 bucks for that. I don’t know. I feel like you’re reading someone to ring the table.
Spencer: I, I agree. And I seem to recall when I was checking ’em out a year ago that he was selling some of his products. You know that Yeah. They’re gag gifts. So I, I wonder why he stopped or why he doesn’t sell them anymore. And to your
Jared: point, this doesn’t feel like my Thai guy from last week who maybe. The feeling is he just doesn’t get it.
You know? And I don’t mean that in a, in a negative way. I just mean like he’s just out drinking my ties and he doesn’t know about the world of possibilities. This feels like, like you said, like a guy who’s made a conscious choice. For some reason not to sell
Spencer: these. Yeah. Cuz I, like I said, if memory serves correct, at one point he was selling some of his products.
I wonder if just his, his YouTube channel and brand deals are doing so well. Yeah. That oh, here’s one of my favorite. The the burrito bumper, you know, you eat a burrito, gets a little messy. But luckily you got a funnel there and it catches it right inside a taco shell. Right. So nothing goes to waste, you know, it is just, I need one of those videos.
Jared: Kids. Yeah. They could have that with every meal they eat.
Spencer: Oh, seriously? Yeah. Don’t even get me started, man. I had to. Just this morning I had to change my nine year old son’s shirt because his breakfast was all over his shirt before he went to school. Yep. So two shirts before, you know, 8:00 AM
Jared: anyways, I mean, but I, I think to your point, like there is a, I will say I.
It’s our job to kind of poke around these webs. That’s not our job. That’s what we do for fun. I was gonna say, let’s be, let’s be perfectly clear. There’s no job description for that, but what we do here is kind of poke around and try to discover website’s, potentials when it comes to this. But there is something to be said for staying in your lane.
If you do something well and it’s working well, there’s something to be said for staying in, in, in your lane. Agree. We’re not gonna get through anything if you
Spencer: keep putting these videos up. Silence loud eaters with the, the munch muffler. One of my daughters would love this if, if, if I would wear this. So she always complains about my eating.
It’s, anyways, people can go check out unnecessary inventions dot com. It’s, it’s awesome. Like, he’s clearly probably doing very well just with YouTube ads and, and brand sponsorships. But yeah, maybe there’s even more fun stuff he could be doing. So there you go. If somebody’s creative, maybe, maybe that sparked some ideas for them.
So. Should we move on to your your final weird niche site here? Mine is
Jared: not nearly as fun, although I, I know, I know. Mine has a personal touch for you, Spencer, which will ah, let’s not get
Spencer: carried. You are the one that came up with it. Let’s be, yeah,
Jared: I am. I am, to be fair. So my, my, my personal my, my weird niche, sorry.
Is reality steve.com and you might kind of like me wonder what the heck that is all about. Reality. Steve is such an interesting. Genesis, but it’s a website that basically is a bachelor TV show, gossip site. And by the way, might I comment an extremely popular one. So full disclosure, I don’t watch The Bachelor.
I don’t, I don’t I’ve never watched even a minute
Spencer: of it, but, oh, Jared, let’s, you can be honest with us. You’re a huge fan. We know.
Jared: Well, you know, if I do admit a lot of things here, but I don’t, I don’t watch the, the Bachelor, but my business partner, Caitlin, who I’ve referenced a lot here is, as far as I know, religious about it, like very much into it.
And I was talking to her about weird niches and she said, you oughta talk about this one. And I dove in and thought, yes, we should talk about this one. So first off, interesting backstory. This guy like, Basically was a, he called into a radio show every, all the time, every week, all the time, and was like a featured caller for a talk radio show.
And he kind of got known for having good takes or being funny or something. I, I don’t know the whole backstory. I was just reading about. And that led to this and that and the other thing. And he basically got shared an insider tip on one of the results before it came out. He shared it and bam, that was that.
Now he, it went viral. He went viral and basically, I mean, this guy is featured everywhere. He has his own podcast and he’s basically known inside of this very large circle as being the person who breaks news about the show before it actually
Spencer: happens. Right. Yeah. And to be clear, like he people that don’t watch The Bachelor, and unfortunately I have seen some episodes of The Bachelor.
Okay. My wife, you spot, you know, I, you know, if I, I gotta come clean, but my wife is a fan of this, so every once in a while, I get roped into the viewing of this. So I’m, I’m familiar with this world and she follows reality, Steve. So that’s why I know about this and it kind of made me chuckle is, you know, the way the Bachelor works or a lot of these shows is, you know, there’s sort of a winner or, you know, a couple at the end that make it right.
Reality, Steve reveals who the final choice is, like sometimes before the season even starts. Like so you know, you know the spoiler, like, who’s gonna get second, who’s gonna get third? Who’s gonna get four? Like reality, Steve knows all. He’s got a crystal ball. He reveals it before the, the show’s air. And so that’s why a lot of people follow him is for this inside scoop type, type information.
Jared: And, and I mean, he’s right a lot, right? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Pretty
Spencer: much always, right? He’s pretty much always got it, from what I understand.
Jared: I, you know, I mean, I, again, what we do talk for the record, some of the, some of the, the niche, like it’s a DR 55, the guy’s been featured everywhere. That you could be featured.
And, and so, you know, in terms of, boy, look at that graph though. That is an up and down graph.
Spencer: Yeah. Yeah, very much. And this is just organic traffic, but sometimes probably when bachelor’s on right for a few months, it goes nuts. And then when it’s off season, it’s not so much so does, oh,
Jared: here’s a, here’s an interesting question.
Does, does Hres take into consideration the seasonality of the query? Because to me that looks like a very up and down graph of rankings that looks like Google cannot figure out if this guy is legit or not.
Spencer: That’s a good question. You know, I never, I don’t know, like if you if you’re looking up gardening topics right now in spring is, does the search volume show really high?
And then when you search it, you know, in winter, is it really low? That’s a good question.
Jared: I believe a refs that’s what we’re looking at, age res, mm-hmm. For those who are listening, we’re looking at this chart of what is that performance? They call it average organic traffic. So that’s their estimation of traffic.
And it really goes up and down quite a bit and. I don’t, yeah, I, I’m not gonna, I don’t wanna get quoted. I feel like, I thought, I always thought they took it like an yearly average for the qu the keyword volume, which obviously is a big impact on how they estimate organic traffic. Right. But that’s a good point.
I’m
Spencer: not sure. Yeah, exactly. I mean, this, this graph, we know why it’s spiky, right? It’s not necessarily Google ranking and the not ranking. It’s just sometimes people are searching for bachelor spoilers and sometimes they aren’t. Right. When a new season’s about to come, come out, everybody’s gonna be searching for these keywords, right.
In reality, Steve is gonna be number one like he always is. Right? So, so it’s interesting, but then I also, not to, you know, I know you got more to say about this, but I also wanted to share SimilarWeb. There you go. Just to show the total visits, right. Aats only shows organic. Right. Which is a smaller portion of his traffic.
Right. But it’s showing about 191,000 visitors a month. Oh, you know, last month. Right. And a lot of that, I think as biggest source is social traffic, if I recall. Yeah. Social media networks are his largest source. Right.
Jared: So I actually, my next thing was gonna be a question for you. Okay. I mean, this one’s a bit, this is a bit of a tough one, right?
Like, how, how would you better monetize. What he’s doing. It’s, it’s a tough one, right?
Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. So let’s see here. So if we go to his website, he does have display ads, right? So he is doing that. He’s capturing the display ad revenue. He has a podcast. I have to assume that he’s got podcast sponsors.
So he’s probably got that monetized. Boy, that is a good question
Jared: because again, and this is a consideration that we’ve talked about on the podcast with people before, like The Bachelor is a trademarked product, so you can’t like sell bachelor swag or it, it’s difficult to monetize a trademarked product, right?
So that is, it’s buzzworthy and you have a built-in audience, thanks to a large brand building it for you in many ways, but you also. Can’t monetize it directly, right?
Spencer: Yeah, I don’t think so. But I mean, you kind of just have to give the guy kudos and pat him on the back for like, man, you’ve built a whole career off of just like breaking news on this one particular show.
Right? And so what, what’s interesting is that. Nobody really knows his source. No. Like nobody. It’s, everybody always wonders, like who is feeding reality, Steve? All this inside information nobody knows. And it’s been going on now for like, however old the show is, I don’t know, 15, 15
Jared: years. So let me ask you this.
I don’t know how avid of a fan maybe your wife is. I wish, I wish I had Caitlin in the room. I’d ask her, but how much would you pay to be a part of a community? Or how much would your wife pay to be a part of a community where she found out a month before he revealed it to the public?
Spencer: I don’t think she would pay anything.
Okay. Okay. I don’t think she’s that die
Jared: hard. Do you think there is a community for that?
Spencer: I don’t know. Yeah. I don’t know. But you never know, right? Like all you need is 1{57b8cc37fd24bce1cf64c8b05d9407ce9171516056c1f5e762677747187a0de4} of a community. And if you can charge, you know, hey,
Jared: I, I don’t know how like, Ravenous the community is obviously, but you know, I think the best, the only play I can think of to take this to the next level would be a community type of play.
Yeah. A community and trying to find and test different monetization opportunities inside of that community.
Spencer: Yeah, I agree. And maybe he’s already doing it. I, but I, I don’t see it. All I see is like he’s covering the whole bachelor, you know, series. Yeah. Or if you moved to other shows, right? You’ve got Survivor, you’ve got Amazing Race, you’ve got other reality shows, right?
He’s the reality guy. So maybe he’s doing that. But I, I don’t know. I feel like he’s got an
Jared: account there. Look at that. You can log into my account. Hmm.
Spencer: So maybe he’s doing something. Yeah, he
Jared: might be. I just saw him, I dunno, register. What does it say there?
Spencer: I don’t know. It makes it look like it’s free.
I can just set up an account. But I was gonna say, you know, he needs to get the inside scoop on all these other reality shows. Yeah. And be writing more content on all of these shows. But maybe, maybe he needs to follow the more traditional niche site model of like, okay, I, I’ve got this great, you know Fan base, I’ve got great authority.
Let’s just write more content on reality shows and hopefully I can get some connections and start, you know, doing spoilers for all these other shows as well, maybe that, you know, would double or triple his traffic here. So. Well, and to
Jared: your point, he nailed the, the, the, the brand, the domain name, right?
Like it’s, he didn’t call himself bachelor, Steve. He’s perfectly expandable into all reality type of stuff in general.
Spencer: Yeah. So that would maybe be my way to go. I, you know, maybe there’s some other ways he could, could monetize, but I would just, yeah, double down on what’s working to expand other shows a little bit.
So that’s a fun one. As we say,
Jared: every week there’s a niche
Spencer: for everything. There is a niche for everything. And, you know, kind of the whole idea is to inspire others for ideas that they might have. Right. Maybe this will. Will, you know, trigger something in somebody out there listening. Maybe it’s not reality shows, but maybe it’s X, Y, Z or maybe it’s weird products for this niche, you know, unnecessary products for this niche.
Or, you know, just something. Hopefully by sharing these weird niche sites, just sparks an idea that, hey, I could do things a little bit differently and maybe start making some money with my website. Many of the
Jared: ones we’ve looked at they, they almost tend to go two different ways, right? Like we look at just some that are, you know, that are out there, but not necessarily performing at any you know, remarkable level.
And then we also feature some that are just like, Really tapped into something brilliant. But a lot of these are really interesting and good studies in branding, you know, in in, in finding something unique and making sure you drive that uniqueness home in how you share about it, what you talk about, you know, certainly some of the ones we’ve looked at in the past, but I think of the invention unnecessary inventions.
Like, you know exactly what you’re getting before you even go there. Yeah. And it’s really, it’s a really good lesson in
Spencer: branding. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I just thought of something, Jared, should we be asking the, the, the people that own these weird niche sites, should we ask them to come on the podcast?
I mean, should we try to interview reality Steve and the unnecessary invention guy? I
Jared: think so. I think actually that could be really it could, yes. I like the idea actually quite a bit. It’s an interesting way to, way to go about it. Some of these people, I, we, I mean we, we, we are speculating on everything that goes into these, which is fun, but I mean, how cool would it be to actually hear some of the.
Thoughts, strategies and tactics behind some of the things that people are
Spencer: actually putting into this. Yeah, that could be interesting because a lot of these are sort of outside the scope of the traditional interviews that we’ve been doing. You know, we, we typically are interviewing the affiliate marketer that has the.
More standard blog niche site, but these are, it, it, it’s such a similar vein of online business. It’s just a little weird. That yeah, maybe, maybe we should be reaching out to these guys. Anyways, just an idea that I had viewers and listeners, if you like that idea, if we should be trying to reach out to these weird niche site owners, let us know in the comments.
Maybe we’ll start doing that. First one I
Jared: want to interview is cat text.
Spencer: Yeah. Cat, cat text send, send cat text messages. Cat facts. That’s cat facts. Yeah. Send cat Facts. Need, need to find that guy or, or a lady. We,
Jared: we, you know, by the way, whenever, like we, I don’t know how many of this, we probably done, what, six or seven of these now, and we, we seem to have found a good rhythm.
This is. All joking aside, this is the Niche Pursuits podcast side hustle. Yes. Connecting to dots there, full circle, but our little podcast side hustle of doing the news every week. If this continues to go on, we’re gonna have a fascinating repository of weird niche sites after about a year or so. Yeah.
Spencer: Got a whole database, you know, and maybe that can be a lead magnet at some point. 291 weird niche sites that you know, will inspire you. So, alright,
Jared: we could have we could have readers and listeners vote on the, the, their favorites. And we could actually have a poll there. And have awards.
Spencer: Have awards, weird niche site awards every year.
Jared: And I think if you post that on the internet with your domain authority Spencer, you could probably rank have a nice statistics post and generate more back.
Spencer: Mitch pursuits.com. I like it. Oh, always ideas. I love it. This is good. This is why we do the podcast.
Always new ideas, so. All right. Thank you everybody for listening. Hopefully you got something out of this. Enjoyed the show Jared, it’s been great chatting with you. You too. Have a great weekend
Jared: everyone.