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Welcome back, Niche Pursuits News fans, to the latest episode of the podcast, where Spencer and Jared break down the most recent events in SEO, website development, and content creation into bite-size pieces.
Get ready for their insightful analysis and actionable tips and, as always, a good dose of inspiration for your businesses.
It’s another episode of the podcast and another opportunity to talk about Google completing, yet again, another of its updates. The November Reviews Update has officially concluded, after about 5 weeks.
Watch the Full Episode
Spencer and Jared talk about the extended duration of recent updates and what this might mean for sites impacted by the HCU.
Will these updates be baked into larger updates in the future? What should content creators who do a lot of product reviews do moving forward? And what happens to you in future updates if your site has been deemed “ unhelpful?” Check out the episode to hear their thoughts.
For a bit of good news, they then talk about how Google’s How-To rich results seem to be returning to Search. Check your Google Search Console to see if you’re getting any clicks and look for ways to optimize it.
Moving along, the next topic is parasite SEO and the fact that reviews are currently appearing on Harvard University’s official website. GoogleLiaison’s Danny Sullivan recently tweeted that Google is aware of this and taking appropriate measures, but still, this raises questions.
If Google previously positioned sites based on their link profile and pagerank, the algorithm no longer works when authoritative sites start publishing review content unrelated to their topical authority and ranking on page one, so how do they fix this? Spencer and Jared discuss a few ideas.
The next order of business is Google’s new AI Studio, a web-based tool for developers to allow them to create Gemini-based chatbots. Jared turns to ChatGPT to find out more about how it works, and they both brainstorm about how they might use it. Tune in for some clever ideas!
Moving on to the Side Hustle Shenanigans, Spencer and Jared both have exciting updates on their Amazon Influencer Program performance. Spencer reports that he’s published over 1000 videos and has already earned over $5.5k for the month.
When it’s Jared’s turn, he reveals that he’s earned over $6200 for the month so far, and shares some details about which video is bringing in the most commissions. They both talk about their ideas for strategies going forward, as well as the importance of just getting started.
When it comes to Weird Niche Sites, Spencer kicks things off with Keep The Score, a very professional-looking DR40 website that lets you keep score of any type of competition you have going on. Traffic could be between 28k (Ahrefs) and 195k (SimilarWeb) per month.
They talk about some of the site’s unique features, what keywords are driving the traffic, and how it’s earning money.
Jared reveals his site, Belt Checker, for Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioners. You can create a profile and then enter all of your information like competition history and belt promotions, you can track your injuries, and much more. This DR46 site ranks for over 10k keywords and has over 18k indexed pages, so it’s a pretty solid website.
How many users does it have? Was it affected by the HCU? Was the site built for SEO? And, perhaps most importantly, what can we learn from it?
You get all this and more when you listen to the latest episode of the Niche Pursuits News podcast, so don’t miss this one!
See you all next week when Spencer and Jared tackle new topics and offer even more ideas you can apply to your own projects.
Transcription
Spencer: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of This Week in Niche Pursuits News. Jared, how are you doing
Jared: today? Good. Good. We’re coming up to the tail end of 2023. So we’ve got some big news items to wrap up the year with.
Spencer: We are indeed. We’re just, um, gosh, about two weeks away from the end of the year.
And, uh, a lot of things still happening, you know, things haven’t slowed down for the holidays just yet. Um, you know, Google is, is still sort of tying up their updates and all that sort of thing. And so we’re going to talk about some Google updates. We’re going to talk about just other things happening, uh, in the SERPs content marketing world.
A couple of interesting things that have come out. Uh, and then I would call fairly big updates for our side hustles. Both of us have been working on the Amazon influencer program. We talked about it, I think the last two weeks already, we’re going to talk about it again because it is Christmas season and, uh, buying, there’s a lot of buying going on.
Amazon right now. And so we’re going to share numbers. Um, we’re not going to hold anything back, so it should be a lot of fun to talk about that. Uh, and then, uh, finally, of course, we’re going to bring it home with our weird niche sites. I will just say that I simply pulled up your site. Uh, I’ve got a tab open, but I spent less than 10 seconds looking at it.
I did kind of chuckle as soon as I read the name. Then when I visited the website, it’s a little bit different thing than I originally thought it was. Uh, but I like it. So we’ll, we’ll talk about that. We’ll leave that one there and let everyone interpret. We’ll leave it there. Yes, a little tease. So maybe I’ll say what a
Jared: lot of people listen, you might have this.
URL.
Spencer: As soon as you say the URL, I’m like, that’s a really, where are we
Jared: going with this exactly? You were, you were nervous, let’s put it that way.
Spencer: So if you want to be nervous when we say a domain name, stick around, uh, until the end. We’ll, we’ll share. Uh, but it’s, you know. I have no idea. Anyways, we’ll save it for the
Jared: game.
We’re already off track here. Come
Spencer: on. We’re already off track. So let’s bring it back in. Should we, should we get real serious with Google throwing down the hammer with their updates? You know, I mean, there’s no way to bring it back to reality better than to say, Oh man, Google. Just finished another update, uh, which they did.
So, um, let’s, uh, let’s share that. Um, the November, I guess it’s November, right? Google reviews update has just finished. Right? And so we’ve got an article here, Search Engine Land, basically just reporting that, hey, the Google November 2023 reviews update is now done, rolling out. Okay. And, uh, this supposedly is the last time that Google is going to confirm a reviews update, meaning that the in the future is just going to be part of core updates, right?
They’re going to kind of tweak their specific review algorithm if you will. But that is now complete. How long did it take? Does it say how long it took? Uh, to do that. Let’s see. It started November 8th. Uh, I believe is yeah, November 8th. So over a month, so a month and a week, um, a month and yeah, a month and a week, almost exactly to finish rolling out the Google reviews,
Jared: not that it’s not that it’s relevant, but.
The last two updates have completely broken from the typical two week average to balloon to well more than four weeks each. It’s, it’s, it’s interesting. I don’t know what that means or why. I don’t know if that means that Google is processing a lot more information than normal, or if it’s just, they’re doing more, uh, it’s just, it’s odd that it’s happened multiple times in a row now.
Yeah, it’s like,
Spencer: are they being more careful? Are they testing things before they release it right to make sure they get it? Right? I don’t know. But, um, you did find an interesting article here, um, on Q. S. Q. I. dot com, which, of course, is Glenn Gabe. Um. That had a little bit more in depth is sort of analyze the long term impact of Google, Google’s review updates and what this could mean for sites impacted by the helpful content update.
Um, I didn’t have a chance to go over the entire article other than to see that he’s shared quite quite a bit of data, graphs, charts, um, other things that are happening. Um, to, to websites that may have been impacted by this. Yeah,
Jared: he talked a lot about how this update seems to be very impactful, um, especially around sites that review products, you know, and it was almost, and I don’t want to paraphrase what he was saying.
So, but in many ways he was likening. Uh, in many examples, he saw like the helpful content update plus the review update was a very impactful series of events for kind of affiliate websites or product review types. This one, like we saw last time, I think this one extended well beyond just your classic product review to kind of all types of recommendation content, which he noted, we’ve seen that in the past where we talked, I think last product review update, or just review update now about, I mean, they’ve changed the name to review update.
It’s no longer a product review update. So this makes sense, but just continuing to see that. And then the fact that now it’s just ongoing, and I don’t really know if Google has said they’re not going to announce it anymore, or if it really is now baked into the algorithm, but, you know, he likened it to the effect of Panda, which was an update, a big update, and then just got eventually baked into the real time algorithm and stuff, but, you know, he was just basically at the end kind of concluding like, man, if you got hit by the helpful content update, and you got hit by, The reviews update the road to recovery is is going to be very long and very
Spencer: difficult.
Yeah. Um, and, uh, it is, it is interesting because it is, I mean, it’s, it’s fairly broad, right? They did broaden that definition of really, uh, the update impacts any site here. It says. With the purpose of providing a recommendation, giving an opinion or providing analysis also reviews can be about any topic and across any vertical.
So it’s, it’s fairly broad reaching, right? I mean, opinions and analysis, like that’s almost any website. You kind of do that. Yeah. So it’s pretty far reaching. Um, but he does, I mean, he shares. You can see these up and down arrows from these charts here of just like how dramatic some of the impact can be and that it’s just ongoing.
Um, and so it’s like Google, uh, it says, okay, imagine being a site owner with a trend like that. Good luck trying to plan for anything, right? I
Jared: have a site like that for the record. I don’t know. Yeah, I do. I can’t, I can’t figure out. I post screenshots of it time to time on Twitter. It’s always been that way.
And it’s just so bizarre. And it’s just like, he’s exactly right. It’s like, how do you come up with a plan for that? I mean, at least if I was getting a consistent trend line down or up, I could come up with a better plan, but he’s exactly right.
Spencer: Yeah. So I, I don’t know what the takeaway here is, uh, exactly.
Other than, um. You know, if, if you have a site that does a lot of product reviews or just reviews in general, you need to kind of maybe dial into what exactly is baked into this reviews update and maybe review some of that if you’re seeing a lot of, uh, volatility or downward trending, uh, for your site.
Jared: Yeah. I wonder if going forward, if Google has placed the, and you’re having it on the screen right now, a little bit of where Glenn goes into it. I’m going further than this, but, or further than he did, but, you know, do we start to get in a situation where once Google has. Classified your site as unhelpful, right?
That’s how they refer to it. If once you get into that, are you now more susceptible and other updates? Are you now more susceptible in core updates? Does that classifier extend through? I mean. Yeah, it’s just thinking out loud, but you know, certainly this helpful content update and the fact that it’s a site wide classifier could change the way things work for all the other updates, all these other updates going forward.
Spencer: Yeah. You know, I feel like we need some good news from Google, uh, is, is what we need with all these changes. It always feels like, Oh man, we got the helpful content update. We got the. Reviews update, you know, the just finished and actually that could be good depending. Some people agreed and perhaps did good, did well in the review update.
Um, I don’t know if this is good news, uh, per se, but Google, um, has said, or, or people have noticed now that, uh, the Google how to rich, uh, results are returning to search, uh, potentially, right. This is, um, we’ll hop over here to an article on se round table. Uh, Barry Schwartz, of course, uh, is writing about this.
Um, just seeing, um, providing actually, again, it’s from Glenn Gabe, who shared what he’s heavily
Jared: featured in this week’s podcast.
Spencer: Yes. Um, Glenn says that I’m seeing them return for a number of sites across both mobile and desktop. Although I can reproduce on desktop much easier than mobile. Right.
screenshots that appears. Right. Things dropped. I don’t know if I can see the dates on this. Okay. On like September 14th, right at the, the rich snippets dropped out of the results. And now it appears that they’ve come back sometime in early to mid, uh, November. So I don’t know if you have any more thoughts on this, Jared.
Well,
Jared: we’ve been seeing this happen across a number of different, uh, structured data types. I mean, I think it was announced in the summer. Uh, the FAQ snippets were, uh, pulled. Uh, the how to snippets were pulled. Can’t remember at this point if they were announced at the same time. Something tells me they were, but I, I don’t remember that for certain.
I remember we saw the FAQ snippets disappearing much more rapidly than the how to snippets, but then they were gone in mid September in this example. And they started reappearing. And it’s one thing for them to be reappearing in the SERPs, but, you know, these screenshots of Google Search Console reporting them reappearing mean that, Kind of Google’s communicating that to us.
Like, oh yeah, they’re here. That’s not just a new SERP feature that looks a lot like the how to snippets. They’re back. So yeah, there’s, um, there they are right there. You got your filter up in the upper left. Um, uh, that is the, uh, the how to search appearance, you know? And so that’s, that’s Google telling us that that’s the how to snippets right there.
Getting clicks to the website.
Spencer: Yeah, and, uh, for a reminder of people, uh, that don’t remember what that might look like, right? Um, here’s just another screenshot. Um, but yeah, I mean, it looks like some of those, I mean, clearly we’re, we’re seeing the Google search console results, the how to rich snippets are indeed coming back.
So take a look at that. Check your. Google search console. See if you’re getting any results from that and see if there’s any way that you can optimize for that a little bit better on your site. Man.
Jared: I’m glad I didn’t go back and rip all my how to and FAQ snippets out of, uh, off my web, off my site.
Spencer: Yeah.
Yeah. Actually, you’d have to just double down and do all the work over again. Right. Uh, um, so, uh, in more Google news. Uh, one of the, the hot topics that, I suppose we could have led with this subject, couldn’t we? I thought we might have, yeah. Yeah, you know, I was just kind of going in the order of my tabs here, but this maybe is A bigger, more controversial story, um, that we’ve talked a lot about in the past is parasite SEO.
Um, so a few days ago, uh, of course, always on Twitter, Danny Sullivan’s tweeting things out, um, or other, you know, official under the official Google search liaison basically has been responding to a lot of tweets about, um. About Parasite SEO and particularly Lily Ray tweeted out. I don’t know if you saw this one Jared, but that that Harvard dot edu the you know, anyways Harvard University the gold standard
Jared: in New York Times of universities
Spencer: of universities is is Um, now getting into product reviews, right?
They’re doing best VPN, um, blog posts. Um, no, it, Harvard officially is not doing this, but somebody is publishing articles on Harvard, uh, edu, you know, how to choose the best VPN. Right. It’s clearly a parasite SEO opportunity that I don’t know who, what students sold their access or who did what. Right. But it’s a problem because now.
Sites like Harvard, we’ve covered lots of other sites. These big sites are publishing articles on a very rich keywords, uh, that you can monetize really, really well. And of course the ranking well in Google and, uh, we call this Parasite SEO, right? And so Google has responded, um, and long story short, basically, here’s the tweet, maybe that matters basically just saying that we have a variety of systems to deal with things like this.
And yes, we’ve taken steps, right? Um, they, and he just kind of goes on to say, we have taken some steps. To kind of take care of this third party hosted content, this parasite SEO, but we plan to take further steps, um, to mitigate what’s going on here. And so it’s just very interesting to hear that this has been a very hot subject.
There’s lots of people tweeting about it. I won’t name names, but one person in particular tweets a lot about, Oh, how profitable it is to do parasite SEO. Google is essentially saying, we got you in our sites. We’re coming after you. We’re going to try and take some steps to. Yeah, mitigate the results of parasite SEO.
I
Jared: mean, yeah, I found one comment. I want to surface one comment on this, which it does dovetail into a related topic. We’re going to talk about, but it relates to this right here. Um, Danny responded, uh, on Twitter to one of the comments specifically, and it said, uh, I Think it pro it’s, it’s with, with Lily ray on it, so probably about this Harvard one.
Mm-Hmm. . And it says that particular situation seems unfortunately, more likely a case that the site is unaware, this content has been placed on it rather than a purposeful attempt to host the content. Hopefully they’ll attend to this. That said, we have taken steps, better deal with third party, blah, blah, blah.
So, um, man, I I, I feel like right there that, that kind of summarize, like I, I really do sympathize with the position they’re in. Um Right, because, but, but at the same time. It only validates and confirms the frustration so much of us have right now. Like basically, I mean, am I reading too much into it to correct me if I’m wrong, but basically Danny right there is saying that Google puts a massive priority on sites that have high authority and they can kind of do whatever they want.
And even when they don’t do what Google wants, they basically, it’s like, Oh, you didn’t mean to. So whatever. But, you know, if I do something wrong, if somebody hacks into my site and posts unwanted content, man, I get slapped around. And it’s just the power of having a DA, a DR91 site, and the fact that they just get so much, um, goodwill given to
Spencer: them.
You know, this is, this is such a Big deal. When you think about how Google was founded and the original algorithm was written, right? Um, the phrase PageRank came from Larry Page’s last name. It was called PageRank because of his last name. And essentially those sites that had more authoritative links like Harvard, right?
Everybody links to Harvard. Um, their site is powerful. It’s trusted, right? And so content or links coming from Harvard, get, get a green light, get a pass. And that’s worked really, really, really, really well. Made Google into this multi multi billion dollar company. And literally it’s all based on links. I mean, that was their original thesis.
They, they wrote at Stanford and it’s named after Larry page page rank, um, have all sorts of patents surrounding this, but now we’re getting at the very core of that algorithm saying. This doesn’t work right? Harvard that’s supposed to be trusted is being taken over by who knows who a student, somebody hacked, somebody did whatever.
And your Google is still ranking, giving preference to this type of content purely based on the domain name. So how do they fix that? Boy, that’s up for Google to figure out they’re going to have to
Jared: do something monumental, right? Yeah, I mean, so you could actually hold large sites accountable for content.
Uh, you know, VPNs are not within their, uh, topical authority, right? You could, I mean, we could really just go down the rabbit hole here, but I mean, you’re exactly right. Something has to be tweaked in terms of the priority they’re given to high powered websites because the very trust that they put in them is being taken advantage of.
Spencer: And, and I’ve said this for a long time that Google should, I mean, they’re, they’re not listening to me, but, but like you, like you mentioned, uh, Google should look at the niche of a website, right? What, what is this website and authority on what specific topics? Are they an expert on, right? So I have a website about, about running, you know, marathon running.
So if I write about marathon running, half marathons, five Ks training shoes, that’s great. That’s perfect. Google should give that site some sort of preference. When I write a review on the best marathon shoes. But if Harvard writes a review on the best marathon shoes, it shouldn’t be given preference. So
Jared: what if Harvard says, well, we have a running club and it’s an important topic for our students to, uh, to know and understand?
Spencer: Well, that, I mean, that gets a little more complicated. If they were to truly go about, like, if the coach of the Harvard running club wrote a bunch of articles and they started to establish themselves, Right. But if you got these one off like best VPN articles or one off best marathon shoes, like, no, no, Google should be smart enough to figure that out.
Um, and I know you’re trying to throw me a curveball here. I’m just trying to
Jared: throw you a curveball. You know how I feel about this.
Spencer: Yeah. But like, I believe strongly in the power of niches. And what’s funny is that I know Danny Sullivan and, and others, John Mew sort of said they hate. They niche websites, I think they’re going to end up eating their words.
They’re going to have my words. I think niche sites, like the power of like, you are an expert blogger on this particular food, this particular country, this particular hobby, this particular recreational activity, this particular product, like you can be an expert on a very small niche and that’s. Who should be ranking well for those topics?
Jared: I’m super curious to see how they actually solve this. Um, uh, because it seems like one of those, and maybe I, let’s be clear. I, I, I, I do more spitballing on this podcast and I do act from a position of authority. So, um, if I’m missing it, which I probably am, then, then tell us in the comments below, um, you know, brainstorm, but it feels like they’re going to have to all get in their big Google whiteboard room and put a bunch of ideas up and pick the least bad one.
Like I, I don’t. I can’t think of one that really accurately solves this problem while still maintaining a lot of the underpinnings of what they’ve used their algorithm for so far. But I mean, this stuff’s not going away. Last week, we had Sports Illustrated in the news for having completely fake authorship because Google doesn’t care and their algorithm doesn’t, isn’t bothered by it.
This week, we have Harvard recommending the best VPN because Google’s algorithm isn’t bothered by it. You know, like their algorithm is going to have to. Figure some of this stuff out longterm or else, man, people aren’t going to be too happy with fake authors on sports illustrated and bogus product reviews on harvard.
Spencer: edu. Yeah. Yeah. And man, we could go on and on about this subject. I mean, I created an entire video about how Google has a major Reddit problem and that’s the whole other wrinkle to this, right? As people are now starting gaming, starting to game Reddit for that very reason, Google trust Reddit. So now.
Affiliate marketers, I’ll create my own thread. I will be the moderator of this new subreddit on VPNs or whatever subject under the sun I want, and simply because it’s on Reddit, it does better. It’s the same. It’s the same thing. It’s this parasite SEO. You, you suck the life out of this authoritative domain and you, you make it your own.
You know, you, uh, do all this to make a little money and, uh, you know, kind of throw Google under the bus in the meantime. But, um, you know, this, this screenshot that I am sharing here is just another article from search engine round table. Um, basically saying that Google plans to rename Parasite SEO. They don’t like the name.
Um, probably for reasons like I just mentioned, you know, sort of sucking the life out of certain things. And anyways, all the connotations that go along with that, but apparently. Uh, you know, basically Danny Sullivan says, uh, we don’t. Oh, sorry. I clicked on something. We don’t use that term internally.
Expect you will see us assign a term to this type of activity in the near future, along with further guidance, right? And so, uh, there’s going to be an official Parasite SEO update or something along those lines. And we’ll have a name, uh, that we can, you know, share on the podcast and chat more about,
Jared: will we all use it or will we just stick with Parasite SEO?
Spencer: Probably just stick with Parasite. We’ll see how good of a name it is. It’ll be like,
Jared: it’ll be like Twitter next, where we have to just constantly say both from now on.
Spencer: Yeah, exactly. I think you’re probably right. Uh, on that. So that’s really the news surrounding Parasite SEO. Google’s aware of it. They’re gonna create a name, you know, for it.
Um, we’ll see what happens. I don’t know what’s gonna happen. Um. You know, if you’re involved in this sort of activity, like, I think the writings on the wall, like, probably don’t invest a lot of time and money into this type of activity. Um, like, Google’s onto it. And there’s so much outrage and so much commentary happening on Twitter that.
I think they have to take action and they probably will, but what will they do? But what will they do?
Jared: I’m, um, that’s what I, that’s what I want to get the popcorn for.
Spencer: Exactly. We’re going to be here for it, Jared. We’re going to be here
Jared: for it. I’m going to have to talk about
Spencer: it. And we’re going to be talking about it, you know, right along with everybody else.
So, uh, thank you everybody for, for letting us, you know, sort of ramble and, and add our two cents about something that, you know, we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen.
Jared: Fascinating.
Spencer: Fascinating stuff indeed. All right. Uh, we’ll bring it home with this last one. Last week we talked about, uh, the Google Gemini and Google Gemini Pro, basically the Google Bard, um, update that the model, the new large language model that they’re kind of putting behind all their AI.
Um, there’s this article on, on, uh, TechCrunch. You can read about it everywhere else probably, uh, as well. But, uh, AI studio with AI studio, Google launches an easy to use tool for developing apps and chatbots based on its Gemini model. All right, so Google now has this AI studio, um. It was previously known as maker suite, but they’re rebranding it, I guess, uh, to be called AI studio.
It’s a web based tool for developers. Um, that, uh, with the Gemini pro and Gemini ultra next year, you can quickly develop Gemini based chatbots, right? You can get API keys for your apps or other apps, right? Um, so I guess similar to kind of how open AI, like you can get an API key and you can implement it.
Yeah. Into tools. Um, but I haven’t read into this too much. I don’t know if they make it easier for you to actually build tools or it’s really just, Hey, you get your API key and that can power. Whatever skin you build for your own chat bot or your own little tool.
Jared: I took to chat GPT to ask it more about what I could do and give me some examples of what I could create with AI studio.
Uh, yes, I also went to Bard with it, but the better results. That I could understand better were from chat GPT, which is odd on a number of levels, but I’ll leave that there for right now and we’ll just stick to the agenda. Um, I think some of this is interesting though, um, all tongue in cheek aside, apps for personalized content recommendation, leveraging Gemini’s analysis of user preferences.
So imagine if you could create like a, a, a, an app on your website that could help cater a user’s journey when they arrived on your website. Um, chatbots for customer service using Gemini’s language understanding capabilities. And we see those out there, obviously, but perhaps this would allow you to leverage it a little bit better.
Um, uh, interactive educational apps that adapt to the user’s learning style and progress. So, um, you know, we have educational apps. My daughter uses them all the time, frankly, but. Ones that adapt and actually cater the way that they display information going forward based on the learning style, which is very important for, for people and how they learn, but also how, how they’re progressing, how fast they’re progressing and stuff like, so did open my mind to be thinking, and there’s so many other applications of it, but there’s some really interesting ways you can, you know, use this and it seems to be a very generous, uh, quota in terms of like the, even the free tier that you get access to has a very generous quota in terms of how many Calls you can make.
So it seems like a real playground for people
Spencer: with an interest in it. Yeah, that does seem interesting. And that does kind of spark an idea. I mean, maybe you can already do this, right? But I guess I didn’t think about it with the Google Gemini chat bot is creating a chat bot, you know, for your website, kind of how you mentioned to help guide the visitor journey, but essentially, uh, what if it could say, as soon as somebody lands on your page and they came from Google, it says, Hey, I saw that you.
Came, came to us today from Google searching for XYZ subject, right? Um, you could do a number of things at that point, right? You might also be interested in these articles, um, or you ask some questions like, I see you’re interested in this. Are you a, are you interested in B, right? And if they click yes, you go.
Here’s some articles or here’s some product recommendations, or here’s my affiliate link. You should go check this out, right? You could almost have your chat bot tailoring the affiliate recommendations to the visitor. That’s a little bit more granular than just their Google search was. So anyway, I’ve been thinking
Jared: I could upload my behavior graph from Google analytics, which knows that when people typically come to this page, they then end up going more than likely to this page.
But I could program my, my app or my bot to kind of say. Hey, when they get partway done, the article recommend this next article to them, because that’s where I know most of my users end up wanting to go or something. I mean, you know, I’m just thinking out loud here, but there’s some interesting ways to start to process through AI with data, with the capabilities we now have with the AI studio.
Spencer: Yeah, that would be really interesting to test out if it keeps visitors on your site longer,
Jared: which we know is so important to stuff like the helpful content update.
Spencer: Absolutely. If it leads to more conversions, if it leads to all these great user metrics, right, does it increase email subscriptions? Right.
You have your chat bot, like, Hey, I see you haven’t joined the email list. Like, do you want my 10 free ways to do X, Y, Z? Um, anyways, I haven’t built that. Uh, I don’t know if anybody’s built that exactly. Um, but I think there’s a nugget of an idea there. If somebody wants to build that, like. There’s a lot of website owners out there build a chat bot that people can add to their website that Increases all those things we just talked about and maybe you got a winner on your hands I
Jared: mean at the end of the day if you can increase time on page, that’s a massively positive signal to Google We know that time on page increases, you know The trust but also the conversions on all the different metrics typically speaking So and that’s just one use of this right like there’s so many uses it’s fascinating.
Yeah.
Spencer: Yeah I mean really your imagination is can go anywhere with this. So, uh, it, it is cool to see a sort of head to head competitor with open AI, right? That, that just means the products are going to probably get better and better.
Jared: So I asked Bard for some examples and it wasn’t quite as explicit for me.
Spencer: Yeah, it was too bad. I mean, we, we tried out Google Bard last week and it had a little bit of trouble. Yeah, I couldn’t quite find my YouTube video, I think, or something. That’s right. I could never confirm who, who owned that niche pursuits YouTube channel. I think, um, go figure. They got some work to do.
They got a little work to do, but maybe they’ll get there. Yeah. Um, like
Jared: you said, it’s good to have more than one, um, more than one horse in the race here, you know? Yeah,
Spencer: I think so. So, um, We have been doing, you and I both have been spending a lot of time or I don’t know if time is the right word, but I’ve been, um, sort of anticipating my daily results every time I get up in the morning.
I check my Amazon influencer have thought? Uh, who would have thought? You know, I’m checking that almost before all my other stats at this point. It really is. I,
Jared: before November, I checked it once a week. Yeah. And now I check it like you’re, I hate to say it, I check it by my bed when I wake up in the morning.
It’s just like.
Spencer: The alarm goes off, you know, before you put your slippers on, you know it’s your Amazon influencer. I’m sorry.
Jared: I mean, it’s uh, it’s that time of year I
Spencer: guess. It is that time of year. I mean, we, we’d been talking about this a couple of weeks. Of course, um, we talked about black Friday results and those were, those were good, but my results, and I’ll just start with my results have just gotten better and better and better throughout December here.
Um, it’s been fascinating to watch because I can see what people are buying as well. And I can see that, yeah, they’re definitely buying a Christmas gifts. Right. And I can see a couple in particular that. Okay. I could see why that would do really well around Christmas time. Um, and so just to lay it out there, um, I am now for the last 30 days, I’m just over 5, 500 in earnings, which is huge.
I think last time I shared my earnings. Did I share it last week? I can’t even remember.
Jared: I think we shared like specific black Friday daily earnings, I think, but nothing about like a 30 day average. If I
Spencer: remember correctly, it was, it was a lot less, right? So boy for December, like I, I see no reason why it won’t crack 6, 000 in earnings.
Like I think that’s very doable. Um, my last two days have been over 500 per day. That’s crazy. Yeah, yesterday was like five hundred and forty dollars and I was like, holy cow Where’d that come from wake up this morning? It was five hundred and sixty six dollars in earnings I’m like, oh my goodness. Is this going to continue?
So we will see I think it is going to continue at least for a few more days Until tell people aren’t able to buy stuff that will arrive on their doorstep by christmas, right? So That’s the next few days. I think it’s going to start to sort of Peter down. I did a
Jared: YouTube live last week with Thomas who, uh, came on a podcast back in June about the Amazon influencer program.
And he came on, I had him on to really analyze, which I want to talk to you about, um, my black Friday sales. And he kind of was really highlighting like, yeah, you could have done better if you had done more videos throughout the course of the year that were on gift type items rather than household type items.
And that was a big. Coming to know, I didn’t think about, but he kind of outlined, but he also said a very infamous line just kind of off the cuff and he’s like, yeah, but don’t worry, your earnings will continue to go up until December 23rd. And I was like, well, no, they won’t black Friday’s over. I didn’t say it.
I was just thinking like, well, that’s not how it’s going to work. Boy, was he right? Because I have what he’s talking about. I have seen black Friday. I’ve seen black Friday earnings and higher in the last week or so. And you’re exactly right. Like the clicks are continuing to go up. And so it’s fascinating because.
They’re, now I’m all in. I believe that it will continue to go up, up, up until we get to that day, exactly like you said, where they’ll no longer be able to arrive by Christmas, and then I think we’ll probably drop off a cliff at that point.
Spencer: Yeah, and, um, I have other, I guess, big news that, uh, I didn’t even, uh, I wanted to mention, I hit the 1, 000, uh, video mark.
Oh, hey, welcome to the club! I’m now at like, 1, 039, I was just trying to get my number, it’s I’m not finding it, but it’s, it’s a little bit over like a thousand 30 ish. Um, and, uh, so I hit the number. Yeah. Thank you. Hit, hit that before the end of the year, which I’m really happy about. That was kind of like the goal is to be able to do that and to be able to see the earnings just increasing, like kind of makes it all worth it, obviously.
I’m going to make up like a ton of the revenue in December, like wait, biggest month by far that I’ve had all year.
Jared: Can I ask you, you mentioned, um. You know, it’s gift type products that are selling. Is there like, are there any trends like average price point bill above, you know, below 20 bucks, above 20 bucks, above 50 bucks, like below
Spencer: a hundred bucks.
This particular product is around 150. My top selling. So
Jared: you’ve got a particular product that’s standing out.
Spencer: Yes. So do I. One in particular is just passionate.
Jared: So do I. That’s so do I. Yeah, I just, I mean, I feel like I’m the guy, I’m the man when it comes to this product right now because I mean, , same.
Spencer: It’s so many sold.
And I checked, yeah, I checked where my video ranks. It’s the first influencer video. Right. And um, there’s a few different varieties of this. I mean, it’s really like you can buy different sizes, basically. Yeah, yeah. Right. And so there’s a few different skews and when I add all those up, it’s like. It’s like 150 a day or something, you know, and everything else combined is, you know, makes up the rest or something.
So, um, yeah, yeah, this one in particular, and then a couple others that are not as high priced, uh, products, they’re probably 40 to 50 range that can make up the other 150. That’s a good gift. It is a good gift. Yeah.
Jared: You’ve got some high class individuals who are buying from you.
Spencer: Yeah, that’s right. That’s the way I do it, right?
Sweet. I go high end. No kidding. Um, I’ll, I’ll share, you know, if you want to know, I’ll share, I’ll share the product with you afterwards. Okay. It’s a good gift idea. Definitely. Well,
Jared: um, uh, in many ways I have some numbers that will beat you and in many ways I have some numbers that fall behind you. Okay. So it’s interesting.
Alright. Um, I too couldn’t find how many videos I have. I don’t know. Did that get removed or
Spencer: something? ? I, I, I’m wondering if it did like just
Jared: today, 10 minutes before the podcast, I’m like, I’m not to mention this. Lemme look it up. And I’m like, uh, I can’t find it. . Yep. So that’s not much as, I’m somewhere in that range too.
I think I was at like 1,025 or something. Nice. Somewhere around that. They must have caught wind that you and I were in a race to a thousand. Let’s make it really difficult.
Spencer: Just laughing. So
Jared: I have not hit a 500 day. As a matter of fact, I still haven’t cracked a 400 day mark. I’m at like 390, 380, 370, stuff like that, but a little more consistent than you.
So my 30 day average as of this morning is 6, 250. Dude, it’s
Spencer: awesome. Oh, I mean, could you have imagined that when you started this in like may That in december you’d be making 6200 bucks. You’ll make more than you’ll make like seven grand I don’t know where you’re gonna end up. I I
Jared: mean, I just am glad that we’re even having conversations about the seven thousand dollar So cool So, um, yeah, so I I would love to have a 500 day, but i’m absolutely loving that my 30 day average is 62 50 So it’s it’s all positive for both parties.
I like you Noticed that out of the blue, and this is so interesting. I wanted to share this. Um, I don’t know what it means, but I just thought I’d, I’d share. Cause it’s interesting. Um, out of the blue, I’m just like the man when it comes to a specific coffee product, like you, that’s just what I’m selling.
It’s about a, I don’t know, 75 coffee product. Um, uh, you know, and, and, and coffee is a niche that people first off they. You know, a lot of people have it every day and then there’s a subset of those people that really, you know, are really interested in really good coffee and, you know, really specialty types of coffee and this kind of stuff.
So I kind of makes sense. Um, but get this, remember how, uh, I was up in Lake Tahoe just last month in November and I. I shared that I filmed a couple of videos while I was up at the cabin there. Yeah. It’s one of those
Spencer: videos. Is that right? Yes. It’s one of your recent videos.
Jared: It is a video that is less than a month old on a product that I don’t own and I used all week at the cabin and then filmed a video about it on the last day.
Spencer: Wow. That is so cool. That’s gratuitous.
Jared: That’s crazy. Man, thank goodness. I did. Yeah. So it’s, um, yeah, it’s, uh, obviously it’s really fun to talk about this time of year. Cause boy, we’ve had a lot of podcasts where, again, I’ll just remind people like where we were definitely not excited about the way things were going.
Spencer: That is a good point. There was a couple of months there where it’s like, where did all my clicks go? They’re now like a third of where they were for over a month or something, September, October. And so, yeah, it’s not. Smooth sailing, right? Like we’ve been pretty open, like we’re going to have a really good month this month, but in a couple of months we may be like, why did we ever do this?
I have no idea, but it’s fun while it lasts. Got to take
Jared: the long view on it. I think, but you know, hopefully also, um, I know I’ve been getting a lot of messages from people who, as it turns out, signed up and you know, whatever number they’re getting, it feels like. I don’t hear a lot of people this time of year who are on the influencer program, really that bummed out, right?
Like everyone’s pretty happy with what they’re doing. Like I. I’m making a thousand dollars a month right now. And even that’s good. I mean, I’m, I did 200 videos, I’m making a thousand dollars a month. Like I feel pretty happy about that side income. And so, you know, I, I’ve just been hearing a lot of excited people talking about, you know, um, Hey, I got on and, you know, it’s, it’s, I have some side earnings from it.
Spencer: Yeah, exactly. So, uh, quick update here live. Uh, so I figured out how many videos I have. I have 1042. Uh, and, uh, the reason I couldn’t, uh, see how many videos is because I wasn’t logged into my account. Uh, so I logged in and, you know, you look at your anyways, look at your page and then it shows how many videos you have.
So I don’t know if you did the same thing.
Jared: All right, hold on. Let me, let me see here. I’ll, I’ll try to, uh, This in the moment too.
Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. In the moment. And, and while you’re doing that, I’m, I’m just looking at, you know, other products that are selling well, um, well, I should look at total commission. I can see there’s, there’s another product I’m selling a ton of, but I’ve only made like 20 bucks in the last 30 days.
So I’m making like, it must be cheap. Yeah, it’s, uh, yeah, I mean, it’s like, you know, 15 bucks or something for the product. So, um, once you start getting those higher priced products, that’s really where it starts. Starts to come in. Um,
Jared: I have to wait a little bit for me here. I’m in my wife’s Amazon account right now.
So that’s not, well, see,
Spencer: that’s, that’s probably your problem. Well, you know, we can, we can post it in the show notes. There you go. Yeah. Put it in the show note. If you, if you don’t find it in
Jared: time. My wife currently has zero influencer videos in her account’s, so I can, I can It’s bummer. Actively report on that’s
Spencer: need to get her after that.
Yeah. But, uh, yeah, my, my second highest selling revenue or commission product is also like $150 product, so Wow. It really is the higher priced products that are, that are making up the bulk of my commissions. Yeah. Uh, anyway, so
Jared: yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, obviously, uh. I’ve mentioned this before and I think it’s similar for you.
You and I were going back and forth probably over the weekend, a little bit on messenger about, um, uh, like just how unstrategic we’ve been with which videos we’ve gone after. And there’s a whole nother side of this game that’s very strategic about buying products and making videos and stuff. So if you’re listening, not that it’s, you know, not that you should take my word for it, but like, this is.
These are the results Spencer and I are getting with about the least strategic approach you can take. I’m sure our earnings would be way higher if you and I had put any effort towards picking, you know, strategic products to, to
Spencer: review. You know, I think there’s two lessons there with what you just said.
One is, yes, you could be more strategic and you would probably do better than us. I a hundred percent agree. But number two. We just got started and we didn’t come up with a master plan. We just took this shotgun approach and that’s way better than not getting started because you don’t have the perfect master plan in place.
Right. And we talk about this all the time. Like, like just taking action is better than no action. Yes. Strategic action is better than just action. Maybe it’s baby steps. You got to get there. Eventually MVP,
Jared: minimally viable product, get it out there, see if it’s going to work and if it works, then do the strategy on it.
Spencer: A hundred percent, a hundred percent. I agree. Should we, should we bring it home with our weird niche sites?
Jared: I think so. I don’t think I’ll be able to figure out how many videos I have. So we’ll just have to trust you. I’ll um, you know what, Spencer, I’ll give it to you. I think you are. I think you’re ahead of me.
I think my back of the napkin math says you’re ahead of me.
Spencer: Yeah, I have posted a lot, um, this week. I had a big backlog that, uh, finally just got them out. I think I’m going to slow down again. I do it in chunks, you know, upload a hundred videos and then do nothing for a few weeks.
Jared: We were like 250 last time.
It was some obscene number.
Spencer: Yeah, yeah. So it happens. So, whatever. It works for me. Um, okay, let’s get to our weird niche sites. These are gonna be fun. These are gonna be a lot of fun. Um, I’m excited to talk about yours. I haven’t
Jared: seen yours at all. I just am going to the agenda right now for the first time.
Yeah.
Spencer: Well, without further ado, you know, maybe we’ll just bring mine up. Oh. You know, have, have you ever tried to keep score with like, Oh, I don’t know, an online competition or e gaming right where you can be streaming and, and you know, you’re probably playing, I don’t know, what’s the latest game that you could be playing?
Um, you know, you’re keeping score and, uh, you want a scoreboard. Well, that’s what, that’s the problem that this website solves is that you can keep the score with any sort of, uh, challenge or, or. You know, uh, competition that you might have going on. And, uh, so it is keep the score. com score keeping made simple.
You can track points for competition, sports and events, share the live results via link. You can try it out. You can get a free trial. Right? And they give, um, they give some examples, right? You can have an overlay on whatever you’re streaming, whether that’s a live event. I mean, they have a picture of a soccer game, right?
But it could be video games. It could be other sports. It could be any type of event, works on any device, works in classrooms. Um, look at this, you know, it’s the, the website’s very well done. We have covered a lot of weird niche sites and most of them are not professionally done because they fit into that weird category, but like, I would love to have one of my websites look at this, uh, right?
So first, let’s, um, let’s look at a couple of things. One, let’s look at, uh, how much traffic potentially this site is getting. So we’re using third party tools here, so we don’t know the exact amount. But similar web says that, uh, they are getting. Uh, where did it show the monthly i 195,000, uh, visitors per month.
So pretty solid website. Um, and most of that, or 50% of that roughly is coming from organic search. And the other 44%, uh, is direct and about 5%, uh, is social. Right. Uh, and then according to AA trusts, which I don’t have pulled up, they’ve got a DR of 40 and. They have, um, according to AAHRFs, about 28, 000 organic searches.
I actually should pull that up so I’ve got it right here. If you want, yeah, just maybe, what are some of the, um, like top keywords that are ranking for, like, where are they getting their organic traffic from? That that’s what I would be curious, um, to kind of see.
Jared: Yeah. So they have 6, 866 keywords in the United States.
They’re number one for scorekeeper number three for scoreboard number two for online scoreboard. They’ve got branded search queries. Another more, uh, once, once you’re outside the homepage, they’re number one for their basketball scorecard online query. And that’s a basketball scorecard page. Specifically same baseball scorecard, the number six.
So they’ve got a lot of rankings, not just the homepage, but to a lot of other pages on their site.
Spencer: Oh, I like it. So they rank for the general term of like, uh, uh, online scorekeeping or online scoreboards, but then they’ve got these very niche verticals, baseball, football, basketball, all these sports. Oh, that’s very interesting.
Probably so many content opportunities you could probably do. I don’t know what the, again, I’m out of my expertise here, but e gaming is huge. I know. And I apologize to all my listeners that watch the live e gaming events. You know, I’m not one of them, but that’s huge. I’m sure. Uh, whatever it is, League of Legends or, you know, uh, Minecraft.
You just gotta stop while you’re
Jared: ahead, Spencer. You gotta stop while you’re ahead. I
Spencer: know, I’m, I’m digging my hole, uh, here. You’re digging it. Uh, you know, I’m gonna get the comments. Yeah, come on, Jared. Before you step in and tell us, uh, what you do after you, you know, hang up the, the podcasting microphone as you pick up the, the gaming controller and stream live.
I
Jared: do watch soccer. I could have
Spencer: helped you there with that soccer. That would have been good, but I think people get where I’m going. There’s all these verticals, these niches, these games, all these content opportunities that they could be writing, uh, about. And, um, so there were a couple of examples. Let’s see.
Yeah, I was looking, I wanted to show, maybe I just go to see examples. I can’t remember. In
Jared: the footer, you can get, um, some really good ones too.
Spencer: Okay, yeah. Pickleball. Let’s check this out. Um
Jared: Speaking of a sport more for our age, Spencer.
Spencer: Oh, there you go. Yeah. You know, I’ve played, I’ve played, uh, pickleball a couple times.
So,
Jared: I was looking at that right there, what you have on the screen, ironically. So, it can overlay on top of OBS. Like, how fascinating is that? You can stream your own event through OBS and overlay this
Spencer: on top of it. Yeah, no, it’s very cool. And there was, I want to get to the right screen. I was looking at this, uh, before.
Let’s see. Um, there was a free package or maybe where there’s a way somewhere where you can, uh, create a scoreboard. Oh, for free. Mm hmm. Um, and basically the pages have ads all over them. So you can do this for free if it’s ad based. Um, And now I can’t find it because we’re live. Of course. Um, I just wanted to see.
Yeah, you’re
Jared: right. You can get, it says there on compare plans. It says there’s a free plan where you get two boards with ads. You don’t get to customize the colors or applied upload images or logos, but you can get two boards for free.
Spencer: Yeah. Um, I’m not seeing it the exact page that I was on, but basically, you know, you can have.
Uh, you’re, it can be a URL, like you send people to, to this website, right? Um, and it, it, you check the scores on this URL, keep the score. com slash whatever, and, uh, there’s ads all over the website. So that’s how they’re making some of their money as well. If you don’t pay for the plan, you get the ad based plan, you know, you create your scoreboard for free.
Keep the score. It still makes money based on views. There
Jared: you go. Yeah. I noticed they had, they have 50, it looks like 53 blog posts and these blog posts are ranking pretty well too. Um, you know, like how to do basketball scoring, you know, and, um, uh, We would say in the world of SEO blogging, that they’re not very well optimized.
Um, I know I’d have a field day at my agency. Like they’re missing so many opportunities. I’m looking at their basketball scoring blog posts, which is an article about how to. Keep scoring basketball, but man, we want them to link back to that basketball scoring page and they’re not Uh the internal linking they could use link whisperer spencer.
That’s kind of my point. That’s right
Spencer: A lot of things that they could do um Yeah, I’m just not going to find the particular page that I was looking for, but, uh, I, I thought it was fascinating kind of a, a very unique, uh, niche business niche, uh, website that, uh, I don’t know how much money they’re making, but they might be doing pretty well with that amount of traffic.
200, 000 visitors a month. Boy, if you get even a half a percent of people actually paying for a plan. I mean, that’s solid.
Jared: It’s a subscription service. It’s a SaaS as Yep. It’s, it’s as SaaS as you get. Right. And the standard, which they say is the most popular, of course, you know, we’re in marketing so we know that goes, but at 25 bucks a month, I mean, you know, that’s, you could, you could have a fairly sizable business recurring Yeah.
Uh, with that kind of
Spencer: traffic. Yep. Absolutely. So. Alright, Jared, I’m excited to see what’s going on. With your weird niche site, um, built up the whole domain name. Um, you know, so how do we introduce this? Well,
Jared: probably best to just come right out of the gate and, and, and hit you with it. Um, uh, the, uh, the, the website is, and of course it’s, it’s, it’s, uh, it’s painfully slow for me to load right now.
I hope we don’t have the same problems we had. Where it crashed the podcast. Many, uh, many, uh, it is
Spencer: slow, but I do have it pulled up in a couple of tabs
Jared: already. Oh, okay. Good. Cause I, I have not been able to get it to Paul. I’m going to pull it up here. My laptop. That’s where we’re at. But, uh, I, I, I digress.
The website is belt checker. com. Um, and, uh, yeah, before you make any. Premature judgments. We’ll go ahead and get into what the website is about here. But, uh, okay, you have it on the screen.
Spencer: I have it up on the screen. And yeah, I’m like, I don’t know what that means. Like, I guess I have belts. I need them checked.
I, I don’t know.
Jared: The site was shared with me by a niche pursuits listener who, um, uh, Oh, I will pull up the head. A great, uh, comment about the podcast, Spencer. So let me pull that up while we’re sitting here, but yeah. So belt checker is the site for BJJ practitioners. Uh, now if you’re like me, you’re like, okay, what is that?
Well, that’s Brazilian jujitsu. So we’re talking about. The world of Jiu Jitsu and, um, basically it’s a site you can create a profile and comment and rate on each other’s legitimacy about, um, basically you can enter your belt promotions, your competition history, you can even track your injuries. And so, um, it’s, it’s like, at first I’m like, well, You know, okay.
So this is kind of cute little niche site that, you know, but, um, they have just thousands of people that are taking part in this and that have uploaded their situation, um, wherever they’re at. So a couple of the stats on it. Um, it is a D R 46, so fairly substantial. It is, uh, ranks for over 10, 000 keywords, uh, gets around 3, 000 organic traffic.
Um, it has over 18. Thousand index pages. I mean, my goodness, it is, uh, it is pretty phenomenal. So, um, you’re on the backend there where you can see, and it just would love to hear your thoughts about all the different sorting and sifting you can do. And then I have a couple of thoughts about how this relates to some of the things we’ve talked about with the HCU of late.
Spencer: Wow. So registered profiles by date, right? You can see that they’re starting to approach, uh, they’re just over 30, 000 registered profiles, right? So that many users, they’ve got them ranked, right? Um, okay. Most viewed profiles. These are people with the most experience, or I don’t know exactly what it means.
We’ve got verifications, um, Okay. So number of matches, you can input what matches you’ve been involved with. I assume if you won or lost and maybe some of the stats surrounding that, um, really fascinating. And so you can slice and dice all the user profile data. And then I guess, do you reach out to them?
Is there a private forum? Is that the idea is you kind of, you kind of like, Hey, give me a tip. You’re a black belt. I’m, you know. I’m a white belt. What do I do here?
Jared: I didn’t register for the forum and I apologize. I can’t get the site to load on my web, on my, on my,
Spencer: on my side. Yeah, it’s so, it’s super slow.
So I don’t know that I’m going to be able to get to any other pages there. I finally clicked over to, uh, I had clicked on matches so we can sleeve them. Total matches in the system is 19, 494. People with the most matches. Okay. Academies. I mean, I have some, I have some notes that
Jared: I wrote down, so I’ll just read those off because I can’t total registered users, 30, 943, um, total voting points given.
So I guess once I’m a registered user, I can vote on who’s got the best, this and the best 11 million. 10, 500. Um, uh, total votes cast 162, 000. So, um, you know, I mean, it’s not a good looking site. It’s obviously not a very usable site considering you’re struggling with it. And I can’t even get to load while we’re talking about it.
It’s a little slow, but if you go look at its traffic chart and age refs, it’s up and to the right for the most part, it’s growing, certainly has skated right through the HCU. And, you know, we look at. Some of the things they want us to pay attention to now, right? Like, and I don’t want to delve too deep into it, but they, they, they do want us to pay attention to user metrics for the record, but they also want us to have stuff like community engagement and user involvement.
And they want us to, um, to, to, to, to increase engaging. They want us to build sites that aren’t for SEO. And, um, certainly, um, This is a site that is not built for SEO.
Spencer: Probably do a little bit better if it was partially built for SEO. It’s site speed was a little better. You know, navigation was a little easier.
I agree that the community aspects and other things that are built clearly for the human involvement of the community. It’s probably what’s helped it quite a bit.
Jared: So very interesting site. And again, we talked about this either last week or the week before last week was a weird celebrity site. So probably the week before, but, um, just, you know, finding a very passionate group of people and building a community around them, you know, um, I don’t see much in the way of monetization here.
Uh, Perhaps it’s there and I missed it. I didn’t register for a profile and it seems like a lot of stuff gets unlocked to you once you have a profile. Um, so maybe there’s some stuff behind the curtain there, but I didn’t see much in the way of monetization, but certainly a very passionate group of people who are very active on this website.
Spencer: Yeah, I was just, um, I, I didn’t see a way to make money. I was seeing, they have instructional videos, which it probably won’t pull up. Um, but maybe that’s like a member only feature. Maybe there’s a premium. I mean, you could.
Jared: You could think of a lot of different ways they could affiliate for different instructors, for different courses, they could, um, obviously, you know, play a part in a lot of the different competitions.
And I mean. Whether they have monetization or not, we’re not sure about, but the path to monetize a passionate community like this seems fairly clear.
Spencer: Yeah, I think so. I mean, they could do like local classifieds or something, right? If you’re looking for a Brazilian jujitsu gym near you, right? Oh, yeah.
Directory. Have somebody pay for the directory. That’s what I was looking for, yeah. Um, we, we had an interview with, um, who was it, Tim Stoddart? Tim Stoddart. That was a good one. That, that was a good one. So people should listen to that. Tim Stoddart podcast interview that Jared did, um, about how he’s, he’s done really well with local directories.
And again, just to close off
Jared: on this, Spencer, since I guess you, without even telling us, you kind of sunsetted the comments section of the, uh. Of the podcast here. We used to read off. Uh, uh user feedback that went away. I noticed. Uh, but anyways,
Spencer: I will yeah Maybe not intentionally. I just
Jared: yeah happenstance, but just happened this site came to us from felix And he said I hope it’s he kind of gave me a bunch of backstory on it, but he said hope it’s useful And a way for me to repay a tiny portion of the intellectual debt I feel from the podcast.
I’m working on getting traffic to my website through SEO right now. And the niche pursuits podcast has been extremely useful to me. Thank you so much.
Spencer: Thank you, Felix. Yeah, that’s, uh, that’s, that’s very nice. And you know, maybe, maybe that’s a great way to sort of end this podcast is like, Hey man, if you guys enjoy.
So if you’re listening to what we’re sharing here, do, do leave a comment for us, wherever you want to do that. It doesn’t matter. But if you want to leave a review on like Apple or Spotify or anywhere else, you listen to the podcast that always helps other people find it. So we’d love it if you gave it a rating and a review and maybe just maybe someday we’ll read that comment.
Um, you know, we, we kind of stopped doing that for the last couple of months here and maybe we’ll get back into it. Um, too much influencer stuff to talk about. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Too much influence. We don’t, we don’t want to toot our own horn too much about, oh, we have all these glowing reviews.
Um, you know, so, no, I just have forgotten to do it actually. But, uh, very good. I love it. Belt checker, uh, belt checkered dot com. Right? And if the, the jujitsu doesn’t work out, they can, I don’t know, sell some sort of device that Measures if you got the right belt. I thought that’s what a belt was. I don’t know.
I got no ideas. Beltchecker. com Love it. So I think we got through it all. We got our weird niche sites. We got our shiny hustles, shiny hustles, shiny object Shenanigans, our bright shiny side
Jared: hustles. Side hustles, shiny objects. They’re becoming one in the same these days.
Spencer: There’s there’s one word for that for sure And then the news of course, so hopefully you guys have enjoyed it Uh, it’s not quite Christmas yet.
We’re going to do one more episode, uh, before Christmas, but hopefully you guys are gearing up for a great holiday season and, uh, Jared, as always. Thank you for doing this today. It’s been a pleasure.
Jared: Have a great holiday weekend. Enjoy.
Spencer: Thank you.
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