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Are you ready to tune into another exciting episode of Niche Pursuits News with Spencer and Jared Bauman, of 201 Collective?
This episode was actually recorded live on YouTube, so if you missed it, you can check out the replay below. In this episode, Spencer and Jared talk about a new bill in Canada, Twitter’s SEO fail, the new Threads platform, and how AI has run a known content agency out of business. They also share updates on their side hustles and discuss some weird niche sites.
Let’s jump in!
Watch the Full Episode
The first topic they discuss is a new bill in Canada that was passed where digital properties and media outlets are able to charge Google to display their news. In response, Google has said that it will remove their news links from its search results and will stop sending traffic to their websites. They talk about the possible repercussions and how Canada might be the first country to take this step, but it might not be the last one.
Spencer and Jared then move on to discuss Twitter’s massive SEO fail when Elon Musk tried to reduce the number of bots crawling it and accidentally limited Google’s access. This led to a massive drop in Twitter’s search visibility in Google, which Twitter then tried to reverse.
The next news item they discuss is Mark Zuckerberg’s launch of a Twitter rival called Threads. With 30 million people signing up after its launch, Spencer and Jared talk about the use of a .net domain and a mobile model for the new platform and their plans to use it.
Then they talk about niche-specific news, sharing how Niche Website Builders, which rebranded as Make Lemonade, has essentially filed for bankruptcy. The agency, which specialized in content creation for niche website owners, was overtaken by AI and run out of business. The key takeaway for Jared and Spencer is that content agencies must step up their game by offering unique strategies and top-notch content to stay ahead of the curve.
In the Shiny Object Shenanigans portion of the podcast, Jared talks about his YouTube project with his wife, copyright issues, and demonetization as that project moves forward. He also talks about the remarkable success story of the Weekend Growth newsletter, sponsorship opportunities, and his Amazon Influencer side hustle progress.
When it’s Spencer’s turn, he talks about his RankLogic launch and his recent Facebook Live on using AI content and tracking its performance.
In the last section of the podcast, Jared shares his weird niche site: Weird and Wild Pizza for Weirdoughs, which caters to people who like interesting pizzas. The pizza recipe site has a low DR but ranks for 4700 different keywords and a ton of images and has a solid social media presence.
Spencer shares the site he found, Know Your Meme, which is a huge database of all memes ever created on the internet. It has a DR of 85, ranks for 3.9 million keywords, and gets over 50 million page views per month. Jared chimes in with some very interesting details about the site as well and both he and Spencer talk about using a similar strategy to create a niche website.
Another episode filled with a wealth of advice and inspiration. Don’t miss this week’s Niche Pursuits News!
transcription
Spencer: Hey everyone, Spencer Haws here with NichePursuits. com and welcome to a very special episode of this week in Niche Pursuits News. We are actually doing this live on YouTube, so if you are seeing us… Right now on YouTube, this is live with Jared and I. If you’re listening to the recording, you know, welcome.
Hopefully this all goes well. I think it’s going to. But Jared and I decided, you know, let’s try this live and see what happens. We’ll have the chance to interact with people chatting. And so if you have questions or comments along the way, please add that. We’re going to try to talk about that as well.
But We’re going to do a normal episode ish, right? We’re going to try and go through and do everything that we normally do, but it is live. And so we may add some things depending on the feedback that we get. But Jared, welcome to this very special episode.
Jared: I’ve got a little bit of a nerves here, you know, live we, we, we, I feel we have a good cadence, a good system, but we are always pre recording.
And I have said when I’m hosting. Because right now, I kind of, you’re the host really, so, you’re the one managing the screens, you’re the one handling all that. When it’s, when it’s my turn to do that, it’s a lot to share screens and balance the agenda and, and stuff. And so, this is an added element, so bear with us I’m going to try to monitor some chat here, but that’s going to be a different screen.
I got a lot going on, you got a lot going on, but I think it’s going to be really fun. I think it’ll add a new component to it.
Spencer: I’ve got about 20 tabs open here. You know, I look over here to make sure we’re actually streaming, which we are, you know, we’ve got the chat. So it’s going to be a lot of fun, but let’s jump into it.
I mean, we’ve got our, our normal segments. We’ve got this week in niche pursuits news. We’ve got. A few really interesting news topics that have happened this week. And then of course, we’re going to talk about our shiny object shenanigans, a couple of side projects that we’ve been working on lately.
And then finally, we’re going to wrap it up with our one weird niche where each of us share a weird niche site. So first to the news. This week there’s been several interesting things. Let’s kick it off with something that happened with Google. There is a, a bill that has come out in Canada to basically that, that has basically said that Google shouldn’t be allowed to share Google News freely.
If, if I’m essentially saying that. Correct. So if I just share my screen here, you, we’ve got just this article of Google’s reaction to that bill that came out that basically you know, Canada is saying that, hey, they are going to charge people to share links, namely Google. Google’s going to be charged by journalists.
To basically share their news in their index in Google News products and in Google Discover. And basically Google is saying that, hey, if we’re going to be charged to basically display your news links, we’re not going to display your news links. And so we’re going to remove you know, all these news websites from the Google Index, and we’re not going to be sharing.
Sending traffic to their sites. Did I get that about right?
Jared: Yeah, you did. And Google has been the one in the headlines, but it’s actually labeled as digital news intermediaries, which means of note, Facebook’s also affected. So Facebook’s that has effect has said they’re removing Canadian news as well.
Spencer: Good point. Yeah. So basically any, you know, digital property that’s sharing news boy, that is just seems like if I was. a website, a news website, you know, that got a significant amount of traffic from, from, you know, Canadian news. I would be up in arms in, in terms of like, no, like, let’s not do this bill.
Like my livelihood is based on Google and Facebook and, you know, all the free traffic that they send me. Well, it’s, it’s
Jared: so odd. I mean, it feels like one of these situations where no one’s winning because as a user, like, you know, it’s disrupting my patterns of getting news as I think I’ll reference Dr.
Marie Haines, who we’ve talked about quite a bit on the podcast. I believe she is Canadian, to be honest. And she, you know, she talked about how vague the rule is. But I liked her point. She basically said, while it would be nice for Google to pay for news I can’t imagine the complexities of making and maintaining agreements with every Canadian news organization in the index.
And it’s likely just easier for Google to simply get rid of links to Canadian news than to tend to navigate those complexities. If this goes forward, what happens to Canadian journalism? I don’t want to be too blunt, but I think it is going forward. I think it’s gone forward.
Spencer: Yeah, yeah, it’s it’s, it’s gotta be rough, you know, for and, and where do they draw the line?
Right. In terms of determining, okay, even if your site wasn’t a news website, sometimes you might’ve been getting traffic from Google news, or I know it mentions Google discover, right. And, and other places. And so we’ve got a. A live comment here. She knows SEO, which I think is Nina Clapperton.
Okay. Yeah. She says it sucks for us Canadians. Yeah. And so it. That’s, yeah, it’s no fun for Canadians that they’ve got to deal with this. So something to keep your eye on very closely, not just for Canadians, but worldwide, because this could be the first domino of many countries that decide to do something like this.
So, this is news, this is, you know, we’ll see what happens, but that’s where we’re at right now.
Jared: And not to draw too many conclusions, but Canada and Italy were the ones that were strongly opposing ChatGPT, OpenAI, AI as it is, we’ve got this now, this isn’t AI, this is different, but Canada versus kind of Google and these kind of things, like where does this go, where does this go as, as, so anyways, yeah, so much to, to see it unravel in other, in other countries as, as we go here.
Yeah.
Spencer: So, so here we go. Let’s let’s try to move on to our next subject. We’ve got several, so I’m trying to hit them pretty quick here. So next up, you know, Twitter has made a lot of changes quickly now that Elon Musk has taken over several months ago and one of those changes is he was trying to limit it Try to limit the number of bots and other people that were crawling Twitter for, you know, wrong purposes.
To try and use it for, for their own purposes. And so in limiting that, he actually made a mistake and he limited, he limited Google. And so Twitter, this is a, a tweet from Glenn Gabe that basically shows that hey, there was a massive drop in the visibility index for Twitter. In Google, and I know there’s been other graphs that basically show that, hey, it went from, I don’t remember how many millions of URLs that were indexed in Google to, you know, drastically reduced.
And so their search visibility dropped significantly within a couple of days, within the first day, but within a couple of days, Twitter. Made the decision. Hey, this was a really bad idea. Let’s reverse that. We actually do want to be indexed in Google. And so sort of just a very public display of a big SEO fail made by Twitter.
Jared: It’s just, I mean, I, I’m going to record this for future clients when we talk about. When you’re redirecting sites, when you’re migrating sites, how things can go terribly wrong with one press of a button without realizing it. And again, there have been situations in the past where brands have purposely made changes and Google is no longer able to crawl.
This isn’t one of those. Twitter made a mistake. They’ve kind of, to your point, right, they acknowledged it and they’ve actually reversed it. It’s just going to take a little while for the reversal to happen.
Spencer: Right. Exactly. And so. So, I guess that’s what happens when you make a lot of changes quickly in a business.
I don’t know what their internal SEO team looks like but this seems like one that, you know, should have been avoided. But they, they quickly you know, made that change and that, that turnaround to get it indexed back in Google. That’s, that’s kind of important.
Related to Twitter, I think it’s you know, perfect timing to move into, boy, we’ve got a new Twitter competitor and by none other but then Mark Zuckerberg which is, is kind of hilarious because not only are they talking about publicly fighting each other in a cage match, you know, Elon Musk versus Mark Zuckerberg, but now They’ve got a, a product going head to head, if, if, as though Facebook wasn’t already head to head enough with Twitter, now they have something called Threads.
And those that use Twitter a lot know that Twitter Threads are a thing. You make Twitter Threads. And so the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is calling his Twitter competitor Threads Is, is kind of funny, isn’t it? It’s
Jared: just, I mean, this is the stuff we all show up for right here.
Spencer: It really is. I, I have not gotten my username just yet, but I can see that a lot of people have already signed up.
I think it was like 30 million users in the first day. And so that’s what happens when you have this huge reach that Instagram and Facebook and, you know, the meta company have, of course. And so, I, I don’t have any commentary on, on what it’s like, what the user experience is like. I don’t know if you do Jared.
Jared: No, I just, I’m not even sure. I think I have my, my Threads account synced up. It says I’m number 27, 482, 015 to join Threads. You were a little slow. Yeah, I was a little behind the eight ball, but I wasn’t the 30th million. I mean, I think this is all so good. Like, let me just quickly walk through this.
So, Twitter threads are a thing. And that was a way that people would kind of growth hack Twitter or, you know, work around the parameters of their character limitations by making long form threads. Then, one of Elon Musk’s moves was to actually open it up and remove the character count for a lot of people.
So threads were like, not as much of a thing anymore. But Threads, and then there’s these, you know people, you know, there’s this counterculture to Threads. It’s a whole Thread thing in Twitter. And then, I mean, why not go grab Threads? Now, you made a comment that I love, and I want you to get the credit for saying it.
So, of course Zuckerberg is launching Threads. We all know this is such a big name that he chose. And what did he choose for the domain
Spencer: name? It was threads. net. Have you heard a dot net
Jared: in the last 20 years get dropped by a major corporation?
Spencer: I have not. And so threads. com is an active website.
It’s just so many questions. Why did they pick the dot net? They probably tried to get the dot com, I have to imagine, but whoever owned it was like, nope, sorry and maybe the price they named wasn’t enough. I, you know, I, I don’t know what happened. Exactly. And so, yeah, if you go to threads. com Yep.
It’s you know, it’s, it’s another application. That’s totally unrelated to any of this. It says threads is a slack replacement design for makers. That’s their business. So I just have to imagine their, their direct traffic, their traffic overall is skyrocketing because they own the dot com. So it’s, it’s just kind of funny that yeah, Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t lock down the.
com. So it’s threads. net. But really it’s an app. So maybe they’re not too worried about the website. You know, if you just. You know, do threads in your app store, you’re going to get the app. And, and so there, there is not a desktop version of it yet. And who knows if there ever will be I don’t know.
He’s just going for the app first model here, the mobile model of threads.
Jared: So I think what we ought to do, and maybe we’ll translate is I think both of us ought to post a thread by next week and talk about how it did next week. We’ll have to. See if it’s worth pursuing, you know,
Spencer: there you go. I think I think that’s what we should do.
So we’ll, we’ll leave it at that just because it’s so new. We, we don’t know what else is going on there. But in other news, now this is talk about very niche specific news, right? This is like only news sort of within our industry, but it is Kind of, kind of sad, you know, to see but also perhaps tells a story more broadly and I’d, I’d like to touch on that story just a little bit.
So just yesterday is when I found out and maybe this is when it happened, but Niche Website Builders rebranded to makelemonade. agency. That happened just very recently but they have just yesterday. gone under what’s called administration they are a UK based organization and going under administration.
Maybe I’ll let you explain what that is, but essentially the business is going under and there are administrators involved in helping work out all the issues. And so let me maybe just share my screen here so people can see this. And this has now been shared publicly by, by the founders of this organization.
Basically, if you go to Make Lemonade, you can see this important notice on their website that you know, it’s gone under. There’s joint administrators. That are going to take the business and affairs of the company are now being managed by the joint administrators, yada, yada, yada. So basically a third party administration has taken over operations of the company and essentially the company is no more.
I will jump into that just a little bit more, but, but Jared, I know you did a little bit of research on, on what that means exactly for a company to be under administration.
Jared: Yeah, it’s a UK thing. So being based in the U S I was a little fuzzy on it. And you know, when you read about. It you’re like a little bit like the commentary is very much like they’re going away.
They’re gone. But when you read about it, it’s like, is it, is it not? So I reached out to a couple of people. I talked to Sammy, Sammy, Ellard King, who. Is owns a finance website based out of the UK upthegains. co. uk and I asked Sammy about it. So Sammy did give me a nice response and I thought I’d read out loud just in case you don’t understand exactly what it means.
So according to Sammy, it’s essentially when the business goes bankrupt and runs out of money, but still has financial obligations to pay. or outstanding debts of a considerable sum. This forces a business to have administrators appointed to handle the sale of assets, or the entire business, in order to fund that debt.
They also make sure the essential debt, like tax and government debt, is paid back. During this time, if the company raises enough money, they can come out of the administration, but they can’t trade, whatever that means. You’ll also be protected from legal action by other people or organizations who are owed money, i.
e. creditors. Nobody can apply to wind up your company during administration. And administration can mean your company doesn’t have to pay all of its debts in full, but your company can still be wound up. It sounds a bit like different types of bankruptcy here in the United States, and it typically, for small businesses, ends with the company going under.
But there is apparently some opportunity for that to not happen if a couple things line up.
Spencer: Yeah, exactly. That’s that’s what it sounded like to me. So essentially the, the company has a lot of financial debt obligations whatever that is, you know that they, they have. They’ve been unable to pay that and yeah, there’s just a whole, it’s a financial mess.
It’s basically, you know, the, the, the company has not Done well. And so the, the founders of the company, Adam Smith and Mark Mars they have shared now publicly kind of what has happened a little bit, and this is the broader story overall of the industry. So they are a content agency primarily, right?
That’s, that’s a lot of what they do is they are producing content for niche websites. Builders, you know, people that want to build niche websites, that was their target market. They would you would hire them as an agency to write the content. They did other things like link building and pre made niche websites.
And I think a couple other things, but a lot of it was surrounding content. And what Adam shared is essentially that AI and chat GPT four came in and over time, slowly. Well, he didn’t say slowly, he actually says, he says quickly overtook their business and they were taken by surprise at how much their business dropped.
And so they have well over a hundred employees. And so, you know, they have salary obligations and I don’t know what other financial obligations they have, but clearly. There’s a lot of debt involved or else the company would not go into administration. They would just scale down their team. So there’s a lot of financial obligations going on, but they no longer had revenue because AI has taken over.
So this is a case of AI basically crushing an agency. So people are starting to use artificial intelligence to write their content. Instead of, you know. Make lemonade the company. And so, you know, I have to sort of think in my view that there’s different levels and different types of content agencies, right?
There there’s quality levels, their service levels, you know, what do they do? What sort of content do they provide? And I just have to think that, Hey, if you’re kind of at this lower level. Tier of content quality, right? Like cheaper content, like AI is now as good or better than this really cheap content that the, that you used to be able to get.
And so that that’s kind of where niche website builders make lemonade resided was this lower tier content. And so unfortunately, like that’s kind of what is happening broadly in the industry is like, if you live there, like. AI can write as good as, as, you know, your agency could previously. So not fun for them to go through.
But I, I thought it was worth sharing here because I’ve mentioned them, you know, I use them years ago on niche website, niche site project for, I use them a little bit. You know, so it’s, it’s been three or four years since I’ve used them, but I have used them and mentioned them in the past. So I thought it was worth mentioning what happened here.
Jared: I mean, I’ve been through this before. I watched the industry that I used to be a part of the photography industry go through some of this with the onset of the digital camera, and you’re right, and this is what’s going to happen here is it’s kind of got the lower end of the market. You know, if you were a photographer that just showed up every day and you were better than bad, I’m not saying that’s what niche website builders was, by the way, but Again, looking at price points, looking at content as a, as a delivery vehicle without all the other things on top of it is, is a, is a, like you said, a lower end product in this broad niche that we live in.
And it’s harder to compete now when you have other things to compete against that. And you know, I mean, I run an agency full, full disclosure. And and so we don’t, we’re not, we don’t consider ourselves to be a content agency, but we write content, we build links, we do a lot of these things. And, you know, to your point.
The approach we’ve always taken, and thankfully it’s, it’s, it’s maintained well through the first early stages of AI, is the strategy is the most important thing we deliver, and whether you want to write your content or have us write it is secondary to the overarching strategy, and that’s what we typically will get hired for, and I think that that Is different.
Like you talked about, like there’s levels and stuff. And so the strategy is, is right now, at least still very vital. But if you’re just hiring someone to write an article, you’re going to have to find a way as that agency to differentiate yourself in this ever increasing AI world and this ever increasing world where it’s, it’s, it’s a bit of a race at
Spencer: the bottom.
So maybe we’ll leave it at that, but wanted to bring it up and let everybody know what we’re seeing in the news, you know, just, just yesterday with their company. So if you’re wondering what happened to them, it looks like, that that’s the story. That’s what’s happened and that’s why things change there.
So, all right. So I think that’s it for the news. At this point, we’re going to move into our shiny object shenanigans. But before we do we are actually going to talk about podcast reviews. So last week I gave a shout out, said, Hey, if you could go to over to Apple podcasts and leave a review for the niche.
Pursuits podcast. Maybe I’ll read that on the show. We got several reviews. And so I am excited to, I’m going to read a couple, because there was actually two that were, were really good and I think are worth reading. So, I will just preface. This again by saying that, Hey, if you leave a review, whatever you’re doing right now, pull up your phone, go over to Apple podcasts, cause that’s where I’m going to be checking the reviews is actually go ahead and not just give it a star rating, but actually write a review.
And if you drop your website in there. I’ll read it potentially here on the show and read in your website, read in your name. So I’m going to do that now. So the first one here from Paul Burkhart, he says, so informative, five star review. I never miss any of their podcasts. Not only do they give you the most up to date.
Information on what’s going on in the search engine world, but they say it and present it in a very easy to understand way. Unlike some other more technical podcasts, I’ve been building my website freewateradvice. com for four years now, and I’m sure it wouldn’t be doing as well as it. is without the help of Niche Pursuits.
So again, freewateradvice. com if you want to check that out. My newest
Jared: client at the agency is a beverage service, is a water service. Ah,
Spencer: very cool. So thank you Paul Burkhart for the review. Thank you for the kind words, really appreciate that. And I will do one more. Let me make sure I got the right one
Jared: here.
We’re a little biased here. I’m going to guess you haven’t actually said it, but you’re probably only going to read five star reviews, right? So if you want to leave a three star review, don’t think you’re getting read on
Spencer: it. Yeah, yeah, don’t even, you know, act like you’re, you’re going to be getting that one.
Maybe this is the one. I think this is the one. There was a few, and I I think this is the one that I clicked on. So another five star review. No surprise there. But, I don’t, I don’t know if he spells out his name. I just got his username. Hands masked. My favorite podcast. I listen to a bunch of podcasts around the genre, SEO, online businesses, marketing, etc.
And Niche Pursuits is by far my favorite. It’s set to auto download episodes and add to top of my current playlist. I’ve received so much inspiration and value from hearing from the well interviewed guest. Here’s my favorite part. Please mention my niche site. coffee credible. So hundreds of people do a brand search on Google to boost my SEO.
Thanks. So again, that’s coffee credible. Go ahead and do that brand search for coffee
Jared: credible. He does not want you to search. com because that’s direct. He wants the brand search. He
Spencer: wants the brand search. And here’s his caveat in parentheses. Please don’t steal my keywords. Hey, it’s open
Jared: forum at that point.
Spencer: So don’t steal his keywords, but go search coffee. Credible. Thank you for the review so much. And, and we did receive a few others. So if you’re listening right now, pull up your app, go over to Apple podcasts, leave a five star review. If you think it’s five stars and write out a note there, and potentially I will read in your website on the next
Jared: episode.
I just realized I did an interview this week. For our Wednesday interview sessions, right? Every Wednesday we release an interview with an expert. And we did one this week. And I forgot to mention the reviewing, so. Dang it.
Spencer: That, that’s okay. You know, it’s a new habit for me. Maybe, maybe we’ll get it so it’s every week.
But, let’s see if we can teach an old dog a new trick here. That’s right. Shiny object shenanigans. And Jared, I’m going to let you go first. To kind of share what you’ve been working on. And then I’ll jump in here a second. Alright, well, let’s
Jared: just give a recap. I’m back from vacation for a couple weeks.
So my my efforts in the ShinyObject shenanigan world have been a bit muted. So I thought I’d give a kind of a roll up about the different things I’ve touched on since we started this this Friday ShinyObject shenanigan share. That’s a lot of S’s there, I just realized. A couple things. So first, I haven’t talked for a couple weeks about the summer YouTube project I’m doing with my wife.
A couple things here. I actually wanted to ask you a question, and since it’s just us, Spencer, I figured I’d ask you right here. But so we have uncovered that there, it’s super, it’s a super gray area when it comes to reading books aloud as it relates to copyright. And you can reach out to the author, and if you get permission, you’re totally clear.
Whether or not you should or shouldn’t without that direct permission is grey. Now, my understanding from talking to you is that if you get any sort of copyright issues, it’s just an unmonetized sort of situation on YouTube. And I remember you had that copyright issue. Is that your understanding of it?
Because if that’s the case, we’re pretty sure we’re going to move forward with the project and try to work with publishers directly. But if in the odd situation where we don’t, and the video just ends up being unmonetized, it’s not, you know, it’s not the end of the world, that just
Spencer: happens. Yeah, that is my understanding, and I’ve had that happen on two different channels, where there have been, has been copyrighted material you know, music or, or other clips, and it, the video stays up you still, you know, people can still watch it but it is demonetized.
Just either the entire video, or sometimes just… You can clip out a segment if it’s, you know. If it’s just like 10 seconds, you can clip that out and you’ll be fine. But yeah, it, they just demonetize the video. So in
Jared: general, the idea is that there’s so many other benefits that come from being on YouTube and there are so many benefits.
If you do work directly with the publisher, there’s obviously the full benefits of YouTube and the monetization stuff. So you know, pretty sure we’re going to be moving forward with it, but it did go it, we did have to look into that, right? Like that’s just something you got to look into and our due diligence and research that came up, I’ve mentioned it a couple of weeks ago, so.
We spent a little time deep diving it, but that should that should start happening. We should, now that we’re back from our trip, we should start being able to record some videos. So I’ll update on that. Weekend Growth, which was kind of my first shiny object. I, I think that was what we started with here when we first started this segment.
I wanted to get to a thousand subscribers on a newsletter. Within three months did that and since haven’t really talked much about it. Well, that has carried on and in June, I kind of almost accidentally in many ways. So in June, would you believe, guess how much money the Weekend Growth brand earned during the month of June?
Spencer: You’re asking me how much did I’ve been
Jared: talking a lot about influencers, how much we’ve been earning the first 30 days. I mean, any guesses?
Spencer: 1,
Jared: 000? It’s in our show notes. You could look if you wanted. The answer’s right there. Proof you don’t read some of the agenda items. So in June, it broke 3, 000 in revenue.
Holy
Spencer: cow. Look at you. That’s a
Jared: variety of things. No one thing stood out. But again, like I just thought, I’m not going to recount all the things that I’ve done. On that, on that newsletter, if you want to go back and listen to previous episodes and kind of see the steps I was taking, but I mean, we’re four or five months in on that project and now it’s making 3, 000 a month with very little, you know you know, planning and effort to it.
There is a weekly email that goes out and the things associated with that, but 3, 000 a
Spencer: month. That is impressive. And yeah, I should have read the show notes ahead of time, but you know, that’s, that’s a lot of sponsorships, right? I think primarily coming through newsletter sponsorships which is great, you know, the sponsorship market is fascinating to me, there is just so many opportunities that are often left on the table, especially with niche website.
People, right. That often we just think about display ads, affiliate revenue, but you can have sponsorships directly on your website and if you have an email list, which you should be building an email list, even if it’s small it’s okay, 500 people, right? You, people will pay a sponsorship. And so, yeah.
And I, I shared,
Jared: I shared how we do that with the case study website that we talked about when you interviewed me on the podcast a couple months ago. And it’s the exact same strategy playing itself out. You know, right here with weekend growth all over again. So anyways, again, if you’re thinking about starting a newsletter for your niche site or for even an environment you don’t have a website for yet, and you’re thinking about the ways to monetize that, hopefully that’s some encouragement for you.
I just started that this year in 2023 and it made 3, 000 in June. And now let’s just finish off on my side with an Amazon influencer update. So last week we had broken 30 days, broken 1, 000, the first 30 days was 1, 000, here it is, 1, 025. Now, a week later, so I did get to upload some videos this week, so I’m up to 270 videos.
I want to hear the number you’re at. Let’s see if I, you and I are always neck and neck. And then it’s averaging now for the past 30 days, one week later, 1, 607 in the last 30 days.
Spencer: Wow. That is amazing.
Jared: It’s continuing to go up like we predicted it would last week. And then, you know, finally, I’d love to get your take on it.
The buzz on the street is that Amazon Prime Day should really help kick sales up and that’s launching next week. I think Tuesday, Wednesday. So we’ll have to see. But by next Friday, I should have some results for how Amazon Prime did for Amazon Influencer programs.
Spencer: Yeah, no, I’m excited for Prime. That definitely should be a bigger day.
I assume also, yeah, for the Amazon Influencer Program. Should be big, so, should be fun. I’m I’m stuck here at 261 videos. So, I think I have a bunch in the queue that just need to be uploaded. Because I got you by nine videos this week. You’ve got me. And I’m at, I’m really close to 1, 200 and 30, 30 days rolling.
And so you’re, you’re, yours, your videos are earning more per video a little bit. Yeah,
Jared: a little bit. I’d love to hear it cause we did launch a podcast this week on the Amazon Influencer program. We interviewed Matt Donnelly. Next week we have another video. So I don’t know if anybody’s watching right now.
Enjoyed Wednesday’s episode of Amaze, taking the plunge, dove in, signed up, and like that. Love to see in the comments. I see we have Ken Savage here saying hi. Josh is in there commenting, but anyways, if you share some of your shiny objects shenanigans with us, since we are live for the first time ever.
Yeah.
Spencer: And I know that I have heard some people both in my Facebook group and on Twitter that basically said, Hey, they started doing the Amazon influencer program after you and I started talking about it because they hadn’t heard about it. They, they signed up, they’ve joined and, and now they’re doing it.
So we have influenced several people to join the program itself. And we don’t get anything from this. I just think it’s really cool. You know, you are the original
Jared: one. I will, I will fully claim that I did not know about it and I. I was, when you first shared about it, I was like, what is this, but I just couldn’t help take the bait after a couple weeks of it.
Yeah,
Spencer: it just trying to, trying to feed my own curiosity is really why I jumped into it, saw other people doing it. It’s like, man, what is this thing? Let’s see if I can make any money. And yeah, here we are, both of us over a thousand dollars a month. We’ve got
Jared: Haley Gordon saying that she’s going to start up with it soon, so.
Spencer: Good, good to have people live in the chat here as well. So
Jared: we’re 30 minutes in, I think we haven’t imploded yet. So
Spencer: I, as far as I can tell, you know, people are still commenting. I think the stream is still going. So, so far so good. I feel like you had one other thing you wanted to mention, or was that it?
That’s it. That’s
Jared: it. I already took up enough time. So there were updates on the YouTube project, Weekend Growth and Amazon Influencer. And according to our agenda, it’s now over to you for RankLogic. I just can’t help dig a little bit there. Perfect,
Spencer: yes. Let’s, let’s stick to that agenda that we all review carefully.
RankLogic. Yes I launched RankLogic just over a week ago. Actually, I think it was the day we recorded,
Jared: if I recall. It was the day we recorded, right? Yeah. You basically press launch, and then we start a
Spencer: recording. Exactly, and so here we are just over a week later. It’s doing really well. Okay.
You know, I, I won’t share the exact numbers, but it is doing very well. I’m very pleased with the results so far. I, I actually did a YouTube live, my very first YouTube live just a couple days ago, which is… What gave me confidence to do it here today? But that was that was actually kind of fun I I shared a youtube live on how i’m using ai content In my business and now then how i’m analyzing that content using rank logic, of course, right using rank logic to kind of group just my ai articles together to see how they’re performing In google and then how I use rank logic to dive into Additional keywords that those articles might be ranking for to either optimize the article better or maybe, hey, there’s a new article idea based on that data.
So I launched the product. It’s done very well. That gives me confidence to continue reinvesting in the project to have new features coming out. And we have several new features in the pipeline that will be coming out very soon. That we’re going to be working on. And so I will just say that because this is live, you do have time to get in on the launch price.
I had a discounted price running. I have a discounted price running right now. It’s like 30 off the regular price. So people want to lock that in, you know, the pricing does in tonight at midnight. It will be the lowest price that I ever offer rank logic at. So if you want to check it out. It’s ranklogic.
com. You can go over there and you know, check it out.
Jared: Can I ask a question I had that somebody actually asked me? I didn’t know the answer. The, is it lifetime or is it a yearly like Link Whisper is?
Spencer: It is an annual subscription. So you know, it’s a yearly renewing subscription. And so if you go in now and get that discounted price, you’re locked in at that lower subscription for as long as you have an active subscription.
Jared: And that’s what I was going to bring up. So it, I mean, you’re kind of locking in that price for, But, but yeah, you’re not going to get that on Black Friday or something.
Spencer: Exactly. You’re not going to get that any other time. It’s really just the launch period. And of course there’s whole strategies behind that.
You know why I do that. It’s just it’s all very true. This is really what I’m doing. But it does give people that extra little edge that push to like, if they’re on the fence, they’re like, yeah, I’ll do it. Because if this, you know, it. It’s going to be the lowest price I ever pay. And so it gives that extra little reason to help somebody make a decision.
Early adopters.
Jared: You got to make sure to take care of them.
Spencer: Yep, absolutely. Good! Congratulations! Thank you. So, so that’s what I’ve been working
Jared: on. YouTube Live? I’m guessing it was recorded and it’s on the Niche Pursuits channel. Because I wanna, I wanna see how you’re using AI, frankly. I didn’t know that’s what, that’s part of what you’re
Spencer: talking about.
Yep. It is on the niche pursuits channel. And I’m still learning about the live because I think if you go to my channel, it actually may not show up directly under the videos page. But it is getting, does it? Yeah, it does. It
Jared: did well. Look at that. You got a lot of people
Spencer: there. Yeah, yeah, it’s had some close to 3, 000 views or something like that.
So. Oh, no,
Jared: you’re right. It doesn’t show up in the video section. It shows up on your homepage. Interesting. Yeah.
Spencer: Okay. So. You’re right. Yeah. But yeah, it’s, it’s getting recommended to people. So yeah, people want to check out that. I did this live training. It’s, it’s an almost an hour long training of how I’m using AI in my business.
Go over to the YouTube channel and you can find that. Oh.
Jared: You’re doing YouTube shorts for Niche Pursuits too, I see.
Spencer: I did a couple of shorts. Yeah, I
Jared: try to go to our page once in a while and
Spencer: that’s right. None of us are paying attention to what’s going on in the business.
Jared: I’ll ask you about shorts later.
Sorry. I don’t want to derail you.
Spencer: That’s all good. So let’s go ahead and move on to our next segment here. And since I think it’s your turn, we’ll rotate. I just went. And so we’ll let you go first. I’m going to pull up your site here now. And I’ll let you jump into it. What do you got for us? It’s always a good
Jared: sign when you chuckle as you’re clicking on the link.
So we’re in the one weird niche section. This is the section where both Spencer and I bring a weird niche to the table. Now, it could be weird just in how weird the concept is. It could also just be a weird way to make money, right? Like, it’s not a weird idea, but it’s weird that it’s making so much money or getting so much traffic.
But in this case, the weird niche that I’m bringing to the table is Weird Wild Pizza. And the URL there is weirdandwildpizza. com And as the tagline says, this is pizza for weirdos. It is a website dedicated to featuring all sorts of weird pizza concoctions. They have a Loaded Nacho Pizza.
They have pictures of a Coffee Rubbed Beef Pizza. A Buffalo Cauliflower, which I feel like I’ve had before, by the way. Spicy Mustard and Broccoli Shrimp Cocktail. And they just actually share recipes on this, so you can make these weird pizzas. Some of the facts on it, since I know we always like to talk about that.
Let me get over to my… My notes are, it’s a DR6, so it’s not, you know, a very authoritative website, but it ranks for 4700 keywords. Nice. It ranks, on the first page, for a ton of keywords. It ranks for a lot of images. And so, we haven’t had a website, at least that I can think of, that we’ve featured here in a while.
that does really well for image search. And so a lot of the images, I didn’t dive into if they’re tagging them well, naming them well, using good alt text, but they rank for a ton of images. Cheeto pizza, falafel pizza, pizza chicken nuggets chicken and waffles pizza, cacciatore pizza, corn on the cob pizza.
These are all number one rankings that they have here. And so it doesn’t seem monetized. I don’t know if it was just on my end. They have all these advertisement spots on the right. Oh, maybe it is showing up on your side. It wasn’t showing up on my side. Maybe. Yeah. They’ve been at the top here. Okay.
Yeah. It looks like I wasn’t getting the display ads, but they have display ads spots. They also have merch they’re selling. So, anyways sorry, I’ll stop. First take here on weirdandwildpizza. com.
Spencer: I’m still trying to figure out exactly what what the website is all about. Because I just clicked on their more magic tab, pizza magic.
So they’ve got, I guess… Pizza jokes, hypnotic pizza, time lapse pizza. I don’t know exactly what’s going on here. But it’s, it’s a weird niche site, that is for sure. But I think primarily that somebody is behind this actually making the recipes, taking pictures. His name is Papa Za. Papa
Jared: Za. That’s apparently who is behind this website.
Spencer: Because this does look like original pictures and it does look like right. So this is a recipe website. It’s a pizza recipe website, but they’ve got a lot of other stuff like the magic. And he’s on
Jared: Instagram. He has a Patreon page. Oh my goodness. Spencer. 2798 followers on Instagram. Whoa. Oh, we got a YouTube channel here.
Hold on. Let’s dive into YouTube. Hopefully it won’t start playing. Oh man, this is a built out YouTube channel. One 1250 subscribers and 312
Spencer: videos. Wow. And the merch you see on the screen there. Yeah, I saw some, some videos and so looks like they are creating the videos themselves. Become an official weirdo.
Jared: Location is Canada. So we’ve got a lot of Canadians making the the waves this
Spencer: week. I love it. I think it’s cool. Weird and wild pizza. And you said how much traffic were they getting from, from SEO? Oh yeah, let
Jared: me look here. I said the number of keywords. Yeah. I got logged out, of course.
I’ll, I’ll pop it up here in a second. One thing I wanted to, to, to, to mention though is just man oh man. Again, it, as we see so often, it just feels like, Under monetized, you know it feels like there’s so much that they could be doing with monetization that they aren’t doing. You know, and, and leaving on the table.
But but again, this is an example where they are making the attempts. They do have display ads, they do have merch. And so, you know, even when making the attempts, it still does feel like, from afar, like they’re actually leaving a lot of money on the table. So, traffic estimation, 4, 100 a month.
Organic. I didn’t go to similar web, though, to see if they’re getting any social traffic.
Spencer: Right, exactly. That that was my thought, is that, yeah, maybe they could dial in the monetization a little bit, but then just scale. I mean, I don’t know how you scale this further, but there’s gotta be a lot of search traffic for pizza and different pizza things, so.
Well said. Just need to dial in their SEO optimization a little bit better. Steph
Jared: Morgan just commented that she’s actually making pizza dough right now. As we speak, or she whipped up some dough for pizza tomorrow. So apropos, and if maybe this will get people thinking about the weekend and what they want to cook this
Spencer: weekend.
You know, that’s it. That’s a good idea. We’ve got I’m watching my brother’s kids this weekend, and so maybe we’ll do some fun pizza. Maybe we’ll pick a wild I don’t know about this pepperoni stack that I’m looking at. But maybe we’ll find something fun for kids that we can make, so there you go.
Weirdandwildpizza. com kind of fun. I think that I mean, there’s certainly a market here, you know. Like I said, if they can dial in the keywords they’re ranking for and scale maybe they could be making a lot more money. But cool concept, for sure.
Jared: Alright, what you got for us today?
Spencer: Alright, so my weird niche site…
Okay, here we go. The site was down when we hit record, and now it’s finally up. So, thank goodness. So this one is quite well known, I think. But I don’t visit it a lot. It is Know Your Meme. And so Know Your Meme is basically a, a meme wiki that anybody can add their meme and describe what it is.
It’s sort of this huge database of just every meme ever on the internet. And so it’s just a fun, I, I have no idea what we’re gonna see when I, you know, pull this up. It’s just every meme that exists on the internet. But it’s fascinating to see how much traffic they are getting here. So if I share the Aare f screenshot for Know Your meme dot com, you can see that they’re, they are a DR of 85.
They rank for 3.9 million keywords and they have organic traffic of about 8.2 million. So almost 10 million visitors a month coming from, from organic sources. Overall, right there. They’re probably getting, you know, double or triple that, you know, call it 20 to 30 million visitors a month. So this is a huge, huge website.
And let’s see the type of keywords that they’re ranking for. GigaChad, LegoPiece32557, Let’sGoBrandon, Floppa, you know, all of these. Every meme that you could think of, you know, they are potentially ranking for. And so if we just kind of scroll around their website a lot, you can see it’s plastered with display ads.
I was going to try and find, oh, different sections. Boy, they’ve got forums, images, videos. What are the episodes?
Jared: Spencer, I actually have some information for you from the source on number of unique users and page views per month. Ooh, let’s do it. What do you got? Yeah, I’ll explain how I got this to you in a little bit, but since you referenced it it actually gets over…
50 million page views a month.
Spencer: Whoa, huge. That’s amazing. Million page views a month. 50 million. So people do the math you know, you can start to figure out, okay, if they’re getting an RPM, even if it’s pretty low at 5 RPM, right. 50 million. Huge.
Jared: So I actually, I can give you even more stats when we don’t normally get this access as kind of data.
Again, I will share how I got it, but I’m going to tease you for a bit on it. This is, this is real data, so I’m not making this up. Let me share a couple more things with you. Actually, can I do this? Can I, how do I share? How do I share the link? How do I share the URL with you?
Spencer: You can let me put it in the chat on the chat.
How’s that? Oh, well, you could share it with everybody. Yeah, I’ll just share with everybody.
Jared: Okay, let’s do it. Hopefully this works. All right. Well, I just did
Spencer: it. So get some more details on know your meme.
Jared: So this is a brand that actually owns it. Literally media is the brand that owns it and they actually share stats because it’s good for advertisers.
And so a couple of interesting stats here are that it’s 77{57b8cc37fd24bce1cf64c8b05d9407ce9171516056c1f5e762677747187a0de4} male traffic 50{57b8cc37fd24bce1cf64c8b05d9407ce9171516056c1f5e762677747187a0de4} from the United States their average the, the, the biggest demographic of age group is 25 to 34 year olds not the 18 to 24 range, which I thought would be higher, so 48{57b8cc37fd24bce1cf64c8b05d9407ce9171516056c1f5e762677747187a0de4} of their traffic is from the 25 to 34 year olds, and only 32{57b8cc37fd24bce1cf64c8b05d9407ce9171516056c1f5e762677747187a0de4} from 18 to 24 year olds.
And so there’s a couple fun stats there. There’s, there’s more if you want to know more, but the brand that owns it is and we see this a lot every week. We look at some of these really cool websites and see that they’re owned by these big media brands. And it’s just very interesting.
Spencer: Yeah.
Now, now what’s that link that you shared? I’m not seeing it on my end on the chat. Maybe it, maybe it showed up and I, for whatever reason, I’m not seeing it. I hope it’s there. I might not have shared it. I just wanted to, to check that out and see, see the source. Here,
Jared: I think I can put it right here for you.
Spencer: Put it in our our own chat? Our little
Jared: chat there, yeah, go ahead and see if you can pull that up there. There we go. Sorry folks, we’re still learning this live thing, so we’re kind of making it up as we go.
Spencer: Here, I’ll, I’ll see if I can post it on the chat. There we go. Oh, I see it. Okay. I see yours.
Yeah, literally media. Let me share this. Okay. Wow. Okay. So yes, this is another conglomerate that has tons of brands. No, your meme 50 million page views, all these stats. So cool. And so some of the other brands. Yeah, oh, the cheeseburger brand, E Bombs World, correct. So so there you go, fascinating.
You know, what I like about these brands, not only that they’re huge, but that often means there’s a lot of subcategories that could be tapped in and perhaps dominated by smaller players. So maybe you could go to knowyourmeme. com and find one segment of memes that you just dominate. Right. That you just become very well optimized for whether, you know, cat memes or whatever memes, whatever category that is.
And if you’re a whole site is really the authority on that one segment, maybe you could outrank them and do a little bit better for that one sub niche. So that’s one strategy that people could maybe take away from this is find a sub niche on this, see if you can tap into that and shave off some of that traffic, you know.
Get yourself a million visitors instead of 50 million.
Jared: Another thing that this is what made me think of is like, we all have our websites and they all have their categories. Right? And then what if you could just add a meme? Kind of category or topical silos that relates to your niches, so you don’t start a niche on memes But you added I mean clearly there’s so much search traffic around memes and in your specific niche Making a section or a category on memes to get traffic you could use that on social drive a social brand Use that to increase a social social accounts and and these kinds of things
Spencer: yeah, absolutely there’s Always a good idea to look at who’s successful out there, see if you could implement anything that they’re doing.
And so there we go. I think we got through all our segments of the show, Jared. And so far everything is still working. We haven’t broken the process here. So apparently
Jared: I’m not allowed to chat besides that. I think everything worked perfectly. Yeah,
Spencer: exactly. So thank you everybody who joined us live here.
Thank you everybody who’s listening to it recorded This has been another Exciting week here in this week in niche pursuits news. We covered a lot of subjects a lot of ground There’s always things that are changing in the SEO and digital marketing landscape So we’re happy to be here and share, you know, what what’s going on What we’re up to and what’s working out in the niche website world.
Again, if you would if you enjoy the show and would like to leave a review, go over and do that on Apple podcasts. We’d appreciate that very much. Or if you would like to follow along with a niche pursuits, you can go to niche pursuits. com slash newsletter. You can get on the email list and I’ll be sure to send you what’s happening in the niche pursuits world.
as well. So Jared, thanks for joining me again today. Any closing thoughts from you? I mean,
Jared: you know, perhaps lost in the fact that you and I were kind of winging it without this whole live thing is that they’re like you mentioned, there were a lot of really big news items this week. So it was a busy week in the news.
Now, whether we go live again, I don’t know. We’re going to have to talk about that. We’ll have to see what people think. But yeah, it was fun. But we’ll be back again next week for the news. And if, if until then
Spencer: have a great weekend. Yes. Thank you everybody for listening. And like Jared said, have a great weekend.