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Welcome back to another episode of the Niche Pursuits News podcast, where Spencer and Jared break down the most recent news in SEO, AI, and content creation into smaller, digestible pieces.
Let’s get started!
Spencer first digs into Glen Allsopp’s recent report on almost 50 companies’ SEO performance, sharing some of his research for companies like NextDoor and Chegg, which are publishing massive amounts of AI-generated content and answering questions with AI, respectively, with a lot of success.
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On the flip side, they share how many large content sites are also seeing a decline in traffic following the updates, just like smaller sites are experiencing.
They talk about the lessons we can draw from who’s really winning in affiliate marketing these days, the Asia-focused version of websites that are killing it, and more, but you’ll have to tune in to hear what they think.
Moving on, they talk about how Google has offered advice to those people affected by the HCU.
What kinds of things are people doing to show Google they’re legit, and should they keep doing it? What does Danny Sullivan say? Were the penalties delivered really at page level or site level, and why do people think Google’s response to this was contradictory?
The next article they address is from Glen Gabe, featuring hundreds of websites that Wikipedia has deemed as reliable or not, and what we can take away from this information as website owners and content creators.
What popular sites did they find on the list and what was surprising about their standing? Listen to the episode to find out!
Moving along to their Shiney Object Shenanigans, first Spencer talks about growing his Facebook page, which currently has around 60k followers.
Is he able to achieve his goal, which is to drive traffic from the page to his website? He shares the stats, as well as a unique strategy he’s using that is starting to bear fruit, albeit just a little. He’s still in the weeds with this one, so stay tuned to hear how it evolves.
When it’s Jared’s turn, he talks about a new experiment to grow 2 TikTok channels, one in the fashion niche and the other in the travel niche.
How did they do? How did he promote them? And what can we learn from this? And what does it have to do with the Amazon Influencer program?
Moving into the Weird Niche Site portion of the podcast, Spencer goes first with 1920s Fashion and Music, which dives into the 1920s celebrity fashion industry.
What’s especially surprising about this site is that it got a traffic bump from the HCU and has been doing better ever since. Spencer shares the site’s very interesting and inspiring backstory. What can we learn from this?
When it’s Jared’s turn, he shares Box Cycle, a platform for buying and selling used boxes. It has a Craigslist-esque look to it, but is it ranking at all? How popular is it? And how is it performing? It’s a DR40 site with several number 1 rankings, but is this an actual niche? Listen to the full episode to find out!
This brings us to the end of another great episode full of information and inspiration. See you next Friday for more of the same!
transcription
Spencer: Hey everyone. Welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast today. We’re going to be talking about some of the SEO playbooks of the largest Goliaths in organic search. We’re going to talk about over 40 different in depth studies that was done by somebody. A lot of the results. How they’re implementing AI, how they’re seeing big traffic increases, even nowadays, uh, and then of course, a lot of big sites are not seeing traffic increases and we’re going to share some of those stories with you.
So that’s the big headline story that we’re going to jump into here in just a second. Uh, but we have a couple of other things. Uh, there’s been so much analysis done on the helpful content update and the Google search liaison, Danny Sullivan has chimed in once again. And so we’re going to share what he said for analyzing your site, if it’s been hit by the helpful content update.
And, uh, then some interesting, uh, resources. Wikipedia uses to kind of analyze reliable sources. And so we’ll talk about that a little bit as well. Uh, and then of course, I’ve got Jared with me as a co host. Jared, how are you doing today? Excellent.
Jared: Uh, we’re in the middle of, uh, uh, an ongoing Google core update, but until we await the final days of that update finishing, there’s a lot to talk about and some really fun studies to go through.
I’m really excited about these.
Spencer: Yeah, exactly. I mean, there’s, there’s so much sort of volatility and things happening in the SEO industry. But like you said, we’re right in the middle of it. And so maybe by next week in our next episode, we can sort of do a post mortem here’s what happened in the March, uh, core update when it’s finished rolling out.
Now, of course, we’re not going to leave you guys hanging. We are going to talk about. A couple of side hustle projects that we have going on. And then finally, we’re going to bring it home with two weird niche sites. Um, I’ll just tease that mine has a really interesting backstory that has led the site owner to a lot of success in his life.
And so it goes beyond just the weird niche site. Uh, and so we’ll talk about that a little bit. And then, uh, then of course, as, uh, you mentioned to me early earlier, it’s a little bit Craigslist. If you will, uh, in its design. Um, and so stick around for those weird niche sites. All right. So to kick off the news, uh, our friend of the podcast, Glenn also always does these extremely detailed, uh, analysis and studies, and I use detailed because his website is detailed.
com, but he has been doing a quarterly report on the Some of the largest sites, a lot of them publicly traded companies that are getting massive, massive amounts of organic traffic from Google. And so he did his, uh, quarter three analysis. And, uh, here’s the study here analyzing the SEO playbook of digital Goliaths in depth every quarter.
And. He’s got sort of what I call tidbits of information on something like over 40 different businesses, almost 50 businesses. And he goes way in depth to find these nuggets of information. So he is listening to earnings calls. He’s reading the financial reports of these companies and finding the little paragraphs or the, you know, sentences that the CEO speaks.
As it references SEO and organic search and AI and these traffic results. And so he’s pulling out all of this really interesting information. So I would highly encourage people to just go, go over and read it because we can’t cover everything here. It’s a detail. com slash Q3, uh, for quarter three, Q3. And, uh, so Jared and I have both picked out just a couple of the stories that we thought we would highlight.
And, uh, the number one here is, um, next door. So nextdoor. com recently in one of their earnings calls here, there’s a quote. It says. Uh, from, I believe it’s probably the CEO anyways on the earnings call, it says, and I also did mention that we saw almost 300, 000 pages create, created using gen AI to put out there from an SEO perspective, that’s a really good way to drive people back to next door to make sure we keep showing up as being highly relevant and so 300, 000 pages is what they published, uh, in that quarter using generative AI.
And you can see that it’s working really well. Uh, Glenn pulled up a, a H ref screenshot that just shows the traffic going to kind of this subdirectory of AI content. And it looks like that traffic is already generating something like a little over 200, 000 organic visitors per month. Uh, and so they’re going in mass.
So it’s, it’s, um, interesting to see. Uh, it doesn’t look like they’ve been hit by the March core update that AI content is working really well for. Nextdoor. com. Uh, did you have a comment on that?
Jared: Nextdoor is great as an analogy because they kind of cross that chasm a bit of, uh, UGC while not really necessarily being UGC content.
They’re not like a platform like Reddit, more like a, kind of like a TripAdvisor. I think Glenn even mentions like a TripAdvisor or Yelp. So they’re, they’re an interesting kind of use case because they’re not UGC, but they’re not kind of your standard content site. So this was, this was fun to see.
Spencer: Yeah, exactly.
And so maybe, you know, as we cover all these, maybe you can just give people ideas or think about their business a little bit differently, whether they apply the exact strategies, but maybe there’s some, um, tactics that they might be able to apply, uh, to their business. And as you can see, I’m going to skip a lot of these, um, because there is a ton, um, and I may have missed the one, uh, number 10 here was check check.
com is, um, an educational platform where people go to. Do all sorts of things, learn about different subjects, get answers to different questions, and really kind of dive deep there. They’re an educational platform. So, um, on the Chegg’s Q4 of 23 earnings call, they announced they’re enhancing SEO with audio.
Automated answers, right? And so, uh, the line specifically here in the earnings call is additionally where a building sharing into our service to increase word of mouth, expanding our presence on Tik TOK and enhancing our SEO with increased questions from automated answers. And so they’re using these automated answers, this, some sort of, um, you know, AI information to generate all sorts of answers.
I’m sure they have that database of millions of questions that people ask as it relates to homework. Um, and so the subdirectory on Chegg is slash homework help. You go there and there’s all sorts of these automated answers that must be getting indexed. Uh, by Google and it’s driving a lot of, um, it’s a lot of traffic.
I don’t think he has a traffic graph here. Uh, but, uh,
Jared: solutions to students in January alone, the automated answers that is,
Spencer: there you go. Exactly. That’s the quote I wanted to get to. Yeah. You know, their
Jared: business model, your thunder. I thought that was the right place to drop that in.
Spencer: That’s perfect. That’s perfect.
I was looking for it. Um, you know, the, the CEO says for check that, uh, their business model benefits from students asking more questions. And then of course, as they index those answers that just drives even more people. And as you can see, um, Chegg automated answers delivered 2. 2 million solutions to students, which is three times the number of new questions asked and answered at the same time last year.
So they’re going big on this automated answer, um, sort of technology. Now, did you have an update on that or a thought on that? More
Jared: just a cheeky response. Where the heck was all this when I was a student?
Spencer: Yeah. Oh, seriously.
Jared: No, a couple of things, but yeah, that was the first thing that came to mind.
Spencer: Yeah.
Uh, times are a lot different. Um, uh, so, uh, one other one, well, I have two others that I’m going to mention that I’ll let you, you cover them. Um, and they’re both be short here is this headline 333 of the 522 content sites we track in similar website traffic decline in the past four months. So, uh, Glenn and his team have a database of over 3000.
Content websites that are a lot of the biggest brands on the internet. 333 of those saw a decline out of the 522 content sites. Sorry. Um, 522 content sites. Anyways, 189 saw an increase. So even a lot of these bigger sites. are in the same boat as a lot of smaller publishers that got hit either with a helpful content update or whatever update has come around.
Uh, since he last did this study, a lot of them have seen a big declines as well. So not as, um, upbeat, if you will, of, of, uh, update here, but, uh, a lot of these larger sites are also seeing big declines as well. Yeah. I mean,
Jared: it’s a good reminder. Like a lot of us have been talking and bantering about it, but content sites as a whole high DR, low DR, um, significant age, relatively new.
Like just kind of the whole model is I’ll say a bit under attack. Right. And this kind of underscores that like a significantly high, well, I would say higher than 50 percent of the sites are, are declining and he goes into details about how much of a decline they were. You know, in many ways it’s pretty dramatic, you know, it’s not in the single digits, so it’s something, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s across the board, uh, you know, outside of a few darling ones that we like to mention sometimes,
Spencer: which we probably will mention later, they’ll come up later.
Don’t worry. They’re already in the episode. They’re on the agenda, right? Can’t forget to mention a couple of these guys. So, um, one other interesting, um, Website that I’ll mention here is marketbeat. com. Now, Matt Paulson is the founder of MarketBeat and he’s been on the niche pursuits podcast a couple of times.
You’ll have to go back before Jared was hosting the show to listen to Matt’s uh, interviews, but Matt’s a great guy. Super. Smart and his business is very successful. Uh, but he shared publicly that, uh, his clicks, his organic search traffic, and it’s not a very big image here, but you can see as Google search console has been increasing since November of last year, it went from about 24, 000 daily clicks to closer to 60, 000 daily clicks.
And. That’s massive. I mean, it’s well over double, uh, that his traffic has increased since November. And so he’s doing something right there. So that’s just another website that you could look at and analyze and try and figure out, uh, what they’re doing. Um, I will simply say a couple of things just because Matt’s been on the podcast.
I know his story. He shared his story that, uh, this is not the majority of their traffic, right. Is not organic search. Um, and. It’s certainly not the majority of the revenue, right? Um, most they’re, they, I, I don’t want to misspeak, but they really look at themselves as an email company. Their, their sole goal is to grow their, their email subscriber list.
I don’t remember the numbers, but I think he’s, you know, approaching 3 million email subscribers, um, something like that. Um, And, uh, they just are continuing to grow. And so they, they pay for a lot of email subscribers. They’re getting a lot of advert, you know, they’re spending a lot of money to get email subscribers that grow that list.
And then they send out offers. They have a premium, you know, financial newsletter, et cetera. So they’re making a lot more money from their email list than their website. But still they’re doing a lot of interesting things with their website to grow the search traffic.
Jared: Maybe that’s why they’re doing so well with SEO.
They’re not focusing on SEO.
Spencer: Maybe, maybe so they have so many other things going on. So, um, so that’s a few of the things that I kind of pulled out of this report. Jared, I know you had a couple more that you wanted to mention. Yeah, I’ll
Jared: bounce up to number 13. Uh, the tagline by Glenn is affiliate revenue for women’s health.
And men’s health is growing in part because quote, we are so credible and trusted. Um, this is more of just a, a dig at what’s currently going on right now and the credibility question that’s being had across the board with like things like Parasite SE and all that. But it’s interesting to hear the, um, uh, who is this Sanderson?
Here’s the excerpt from, uh, The press Gazette, they were being quoted. Sanderson said affiliate revenue and women’s health is up 23 percent year on year. That’s huge. Uh, men’s health is performing particularly well in fitness e commerce. We’ve seen huge growth in that area because people do want to buy products endorsed by women’s health and men’s health because we are so credible and trusted and people know that we are experts in our field.
Spencer: So,
Jared: um, it’s nice that some people know why they’re succeeding in affiliate marketing these days.
Spencer: Uh, so, so far, so good for them anyways, right? Yeah.
Jared: So far, so good. Uh, number 17, I thought this was fascinating. Again, so many we could pick from there’s 40, 40 plus examples to go through, but yeah, this is really interesting.
Here’s another nerd wallet of Asia now generating tens of millions of dollars each quarter. So, um, in his last report, Q2, he talked about a money smart, a nerd. Wallet like resource with websites targeting people in Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines. This time he brings you money hero group, which, um, tech in Asia revealed is generating 35 million in Q4 of 2023.
So that’s over a hundred million dollars. Uh, in revenue, if you, you know, if you project that out, they are targeting, um, um, Singapore and other Asian markets. Uh, they have like moneyhero. com. hk money101. com. tw and a bunch of other ones. And so I, I agree like this idea that US markets make, as Glenn says, Western audiences make a good test case for what could be, uh, really well applied into other markets around the world.
Um, super interesting again, just gets your gears spinning, right? Gets you thinking about these things.
Spencer: Because, uh, like you said, a lot of times, especially us here in the West, we think a lot about the U S and the U S market, but, uh, there’s, yeah, why not take the same ideas that have worked here, apply them other places.
Uh, the world’s a big place. And if you can target a very specific country or, you know, people that speak a specific language, um, there’s a lot of opportunity. So this is a really good example for people. Yeah, people to see that playbook applied
Jared: many others, but I will pause there because uh, this is the type of article.
I know Spencer, you know, I can spend an hour on easily. Oh, easy.
Spencer: I mean, it took, uh, I, I read through, I’ll be honest. I read through well over half of these and I was like almost 45 minutes in. I was like, oh man. Like just to get through every single one of these. And it’s going to take you almost an hour just to read through it and look at all the data.
Um, so I can’t even imagine how long this took Glenn to put together. Um, so again, highly recommend that you go over to detail. com slash Q three and look at, um, Um, I’ll just a lot of the fascinating things that are happening in the world of content, search, SEO, um, and so, yeah, check that out. Maybe we’ll just kind of leave it at that for now.
Um, on to the next story is, um, well, Google. Has offered some advice for those that are affected by the H C U, the helpful content update. Now, uh, this is just one article on search engine journal that talked a lot about this, but essentially they’re just pulling out a lot of things that happened over on Twitter.
You know, Danny Sullivan got involved, started sharing things. Um, so I’ll share a couple of threads that I saw popping up, um, a couple of things that were happening. So, um, it kind of started. Uh, Lily Ray’s shared an update. She said over the past couple of, uh, weeks, she’s been sharing sites that have been hit.
Um, but Dogster and Catster, which we mentioned on this, uh, podcast are seeing big gains now. Um, a lot. Anyways, it goes on in the thread. She says also worth noting that the sites have an e commerce component. They do more than just content. So insinuating that, Hey, maybe this is why these sites are doing so well is that they do more than just content.
They have an e commerce component. And then somebody replied with, you know, add to cart for the win. And a lot of people kind of replied that, Hey, uh, that started a whole discussion of maybe we should just add carts, add a little shopping section to our website. We’ve surfaced
Jared: here in the podcast, not recommending, but we brought it up like, Hey, look at that.
I don’t know. Is that an idea? I don’t
Spencer: know. What do you think? Well, exactly. And I mean, it is an idea and you know, maybe there’s some legs to some of that as that’s one step, but maybe there’s, you know, 10 or 20 steps that need to be taken. I don’t know. Uh, but Danny Sullivan chimes in and says, I wouldn’t recommend people start adding carts because it shows Google in quotes any more than I would recommend anyone doing anything.
They think shows Google something you want to do things that make sense for your visitors because what shows Google you have a great site is to be a great site for your visitors not to add things you assume are just for Google now like business cards like business cards for example and we could go down and this is a very lengthy tweet yeah And thread, um, any kind of jumps in here, names, specific things that people are trying to do to show Google, like saying that your article is reviewed by an expert or have a weird table of contents up at the top, uh, have a page that is updated with, you know, every few days, um, the year thing, I think you addressed.
Yeah. The year thing, have an FAQ at the end. That’s
Jared: frequently asked questions. Yeah. You address that too.
Spencer: Um, barely being able to read through the main content of the page because I keep getting interrupted by things shoved in the middle of it, maybe ads or other things, right? Pop ups. Uh, exactly. And so he mentions all these things of like, Hey, don’t do these because you think Google is going to rank your site better, but because it’s for end users.
I’m almost getting sick of just reading Danny, you know, saying these things and then me repeating it. Uh, but. This is a lot of the thread that has kind of led to, you know, some of the tips for, hey, how can you actually analyze your site? I don’t know if you want to jump in here and share some of those things.
I know that Danny shared and this search engine journal article covered.
Jared: Yeah. I mean, I think it really comes in the back of Google saying that the helpful content update is no longer site wide. It’s page wide. Which brings questions up that are, that doesn’t make sense because if the classifier moved from site wide to page wide, then that would mean that the pages that were helpful would rise in rankings because no longer was the domain being suppressed, but no one has found any of that happening.
And so it calls into question this idea, what exactly is a helpful content update? Is it. Sitewide, is it PageWide or is it just punitive and never recoverable? And I think that in some ways is the basis of the article we’re looking at here, which is Danny’s comments on how to recover from the HCU and how to analyze it, which he said.
The, uh, what we would tell people how to recover from a core update. Frankly, go look at the pages that dropped. And figure out how to improve those pages. Those are the pages that were affected. Um, there was definitely a lot of discussion in this article from different people on Twitter talking about how, like, it almost seems contradictory in terms of the advice that’s being given.
And, uh, you know, I don’t know what you thought about this whole idea of HCU being site wide or now page wide and how that relates to the results. We’re all kind of seen online at this point.
Spencer: Yeah, I mean, I kind of agree with what you’re saying in terms of, uh, certainly Google initially. Made it clear that, Hey, this was a site wide sort of penalty, the helpful content update, uh, it seems like within the FAQ, the Danny references that, Hey, they’ve changed that to make it sound like, Hey, it’s not a site wide signal, but even within the FAQ, it does kind of suggest that.
It is. Um, so it is definitely contradictory. Uh, it feels like at least at this point, and we’re not done with the March core update. So maybe this will change in a week, but we have not seen any recovery yet from the March core update. And so it would make it feel like it is still some sort of site wide penalty.
Otherwise, uh, if it had turned into this page level, you. You would assume that all of these sites would have some percentage of pages that were deemed helpful and they would see traffic increase, at least to those pages, but exactly
Jared: from what we’ve seen, I mean, I guess you can’t say for certain, but the odds it’s like, did the moon landing actually happen?
Well, the amount of people that would have to, Fake it and not, you know, like we would see one example at this point, like the odds are tremendously in the favor of, Hey, if it changed from site wide to page wide, we’d see something move somewhere and no one can find anything that’s moved at all. Glenn gave us said every one of the what 500 plus sites he’s tracked that were negatively hit by the HCU.
Not one has moved positively. Right. So I think we’d see something. So. You know, I mean, to be fair, like, uh, I’m just trying, uh, hard, but like, I mean, we’ve talked long about how I, I have, I have wonder if Danny shows up on a Tuesday morning and he’s like, Oh, look at this, uh, I guess the helpful content update moved to be page level.
Okay. Well, I guess that’s, I guess that’s what we’re talking about now. You know, like, I don’t even, I don’t know. No, if the people who are making the algorithm really understand all the facets of the algorithm and whatnot. But, um, you know, so far this might be another example of where they’re hoping to get the helpful content update.
Maybe not where it is right now.
Spencer: Yeah. You know, maybe I’ll just read this specific, uh, FAQ quote. This is from Google’s, you know, frequently asked questions on the HCU. Um, basically says our systems work primarily at the page level to show the most helpful content we can and goes on. Um, This said, having relatively high amounts of unhelpful content might cause other content on the site to perform less well in search.
So there is very well encapsulated why it’s contradictory.
Jared: Now, I will say this to Danny’s credit, the stuff he was rattling off is very clear. It’s very clear that he has a very clear knowledge of what is going on inside this world. Like all the things he surfaced. Everybody who’s an SEO can be like, Oh yeah, either I do that or my competition does that.
Or that’s why they talked about, he even went on. I think I have a tweet somewhere in our agenda where he went on to reference, like somebody made a comment. He’s like, Oh yeah, I know your site. So, and so I’ve actually used that and sent that to the people. Like, it’s like, Whoa, geez. People went on to say like, do you know my site?
My goodness. So he’s in touch. Yes, people are talking about. I just don’t know if what he’s saying is in touch with what Google’s doing. That, I guess that’s more of the question. So to his credit, he’s very in touch with what everyone is, is venting about and discussing. I’m just not sure where we’re getting the answers that kind of line up with that.
Spencer: Yeah. And I, you know, I guess he’s doing his job the best he can and he is working as a liaison, right? He’s not an engineer, he’s not making any changes to the algorithm, but he’s very in the weeds. In the industry, like you said, he knows all the individual site owners. A lot of them, he’s seen the sites and he’s taking back that information to Google where they’ve got their whole bureaucracy and office politics and everything else going on that who knows what happens there.
But I did find it interesting, just a little side note that, uh, I think it was last week, maybe the week before, uh, I had watched a video on YouTube by Lily Ray, which was very good, all about the helpful content. That was a good video. Yeah. And when I had watched it, only a few thousand people, you know, I don’t remember four or 5, 000 people had watched it, um, which is a decent amount, but, uh, Danny Sullivan on Twitter mentioned her video, right?
And so even YouTube channels, he’s aware of, he’s watching those videos. Uh, probably not all of them, but, um,
Jared: he’s probably watching your Spencer.
Spencer: That’s kind of a scary thought. It’s kind of a scary thought. Well,
Jared: especially when you have a title, like Google has a Reddit problem and things like that. I bet he watched
Spencer: that one.
Yeah, maybe that’s why he doesn’t ever respond to my emails. Okay. Um, all right. Very good. I think, uh, that covers that particular news segment. Um, let’s, let’s, let’s go ahead with our sort of, we’ll make this a quicker hit. We’ll try to cover it in about five minutes. We’ve got one final sort of. News topic that I think is interesting.
Uh, and again, this is one that, uh, you surfaced, uh, Jared, but, uh, another Glenn, Glenn Gabe over at, uh, gsqI, uh, dot com G squared interactive. He has an article titled, is your site reliable? Meet Wikipedia’s reliable sources list. Another proxy for Google’s quality raters. Uh, and while I’m pulling this up on the screen, maybe you can give an overview of kind of what, uh, this article is all about.
Jared: Yeah, basically, Wikipedia has a public facing, um, uh, Raider guideline for how well they, uh, they, they trust different sites. Um, and, uh, you know, like, it’s just, it’s fascinating to see that with the quality Raider guidelines, we see what’s published about what quality Raiders are supposed to look for, but we don’t see, um.
Their actual scores on certain sites or pages, right? Well, this is a repository of, I don’t, I didn’t see, it might be mentioned how many sites there are, but I mean, it’s, it’s not only a repository, but it’s in sorted by alphabetical order. You can go poke around and see how Wikipedia rates every site for, um, a variety of factors.
Um, and really it’s. It’s, it’s really interesting because I mean, wow, Google and Wikipedia are not the same. They’re clearly trying to do the same thing. And so there’s so much, so many insights we can. Learn by analyzing this because we get tactical data in the, in the field websites and what a large content publisher that is widely trusted by Google thinks about each of these individual sites.
Spencer: Yeah, it’s fascinating. You can see it publicly and You know, Wikipedia, it’s a database of, I would say it’s hundreds of websites. I don’t think it was in the thousands, right? You know, but something like hundreds, um, of websites that they’ve gone in and sort of analyze and said, okay, this is a reliable source.
This one is questionable, right? Or this one is not reliable. And these are larger news publications typically, right? Like we’ve got ABC news, we’ve got the age, we’ve got. You know, some others, the global security. org Goodreads and, and many, many others, uh, that are on here. And, um, I’ll actually go directly over to Wikipedia, um, and kind of just scroll through, you know, it’s, I don’t know if, like I said, I don’t know if there’s a number, right.
But it’s, it’s hundreds. Yeah, it’s, it’s a lot. It’s a lot, certainly. So.
Jared: Um, and this is an article, by the way, that Glenn Gabe surfaced, um, and, uh, uh, obviously, if your site is on there or a site that you manage, then. This is gold. You need to know about this, but you can also look at other sites in your niche.
You can review sites that you just know well, so you can see them. And then you can, um, just check sites that make the list to see what Google, I sorry, what Wikipedia finds to be. Interesting enough to put in this list of repositories, right? Yeah.
Spencer: So here’s a, I just randomly came across this is dot dash.
So we’ve talked about dash dot dash media. It’s about. com, the balance life wire, the spruce. This has sort of the yellow warning, uh, where it says there’s no consensus. And, uh, let’s see. I was going to quickly try to read what that means, but I can read it if you want. Yeah, go ahead. I think you’ve got it.
Jared: Yes. So no consensus. Sorry. It’s very small. The source is marginally reliable, neither generally reliable nor generally unreliable, and maybe, um, usable content may be usable depending on context. Editors may not have been able to agree on whether the source is appropriate or may have agreed that is only reliable in certain circumstances.
And it kind of goes on with more analogies. Yeah.
Spencer: So it’s not like, uh, it doesn’t have a green light if, you know, if, if we consider these larger publications, right, they get sort of the, the warning stamp of like, okay, these may or may not be, uh, reliable. There’s no consensus now. Uh, did you
Jared: see that? Sorry, just to go back up there really quickly, cause they do give us some context that I think is interesting down at the bottom there on the right.
It says due to persistent abuse, very well, family. com very well, health. com and very well mind. com are on the Wikipedia spam blacklist.
Spencer: Oh, I did not see that. Look at that.
Jared: Yeah. So there’s some interesting data here
Spencer: and links must be whitelisted before they can be used. So they obviously were trying to get a ton of links from Wikipedia is what it sounds like they, they went through probably a, uh, spam period where they tried to spam Wikipedia and get tons of links.
Yeah. Uh, very interesting.
Jared: Uh, sorry. So go on, but I wanted to point that out.
Spencer: I, that’s a good, good thing to point out now. Okay. We had a fun one, Jared, you wanted to make sure that we, uh, mentioned this other one here. Uh, we
Jared: have, we can’t do a podcast that talk about
Spencer: Forbes. We’ve got Forbes on here not once but twice, uh, Wikipedia, uh, lists Forbes for two different things.
One gets a green pass of, hey, it’s reliable. The other one gets the red, generally unreliable. So what’s this all about?
Jared: Really interesting. I didn’t know, by the way, Spencer, I was just looking out. This was actually called out by Glenn in his article, this idea of, Each site getting multiple classifications.
I had observed this because I immediately when I saw this, I’m like, of course, whatever SEO right now wants to do, let’s go check out what they think of Forbes. Yep. And it’s interesting because Forbes gets the green light for articles written by their staff and Wikipedia segments. Articles written by contributors and gives them an unreliable score.
Most content on forbes. com written by contributives contributors or senior contributors with minimal editorial oversight is generally unreliable. That is so interesting.
Spencer: It’s very interesting that they actually are able to designate that and see that, Hey, if it’s written by the staff, there’s a lot of editorial oversight, you know, it’s generally reliable information.
Contributed contributors, much. Uh, more free reign to write whatever, whatever they want. Apparently they
Jared: even tell you in the contributor section, check the byline to determine whether an article is written, but you’re moving on me, but it’s written by, there we go. A Forbes staff member contributor, senior contributor, or subscriber.
And basically they trust when it says Forbes staff member, but they don’t trust the other classifications. And it says previously it was in a print issue of
Spencer: Forbes. Hmm. Interesting. Uh, it says, uh, just one last line here previously Forbes. com contributor articles could have been identified by their URL beginning.
In Forbes. com slash sites, the URL no longer distinguishes them as Forbes staff articles have also been moved under the slash sites. So they got to do a little bit more digging to figure out if it’s, uh, they can’t just rely on the URL structure anymore. Now I
Jared: want Glenn to go through, cause there’s a lot of examples where they do this contributor thing in there.
Glenn referenced a different one from a different site in his article. It was USA today, same classification USA today. Uh, versus the contributors for USA Today. Like, man, I’d love to see studies on the volatility, the increase or decrease in SERP rankings and, uh, you know, keywords and these sorts of things and traffic as it relates to the different, uh, uh, uh, segments here.
Right.
Spencer: Yeah. So it’s, it’s super fascinating. People should check it out. See what, uh, see how Wikipedia views reliable sources and maybe see if there’s anything they can glean perhaps from their, uh, for their own websites to make their own websites a little bit more, uh, reliable. So I 100 percent agree. Um, All right, we’ll wrap up.
That will be the last, uh, sort of new story that we share here today. Um, let’s try to try to get through our side hustles, our weird niche sites. We’ve got to have time to talk about both. So I’ll make my side hustle relatively quick here. Uh, it’s been a while since I’ve talked about my Facebook page. I grew a Facebook page and a niche website to go along with that Facebook page.
Uh, the page is. Right around 60, 000 followers, good sized. I’m super happy with that. Um, I’ve tried, uh, publishing a lot of content directly on the Facebook page that links to my website with the sole goal of getting visitors from my page to my website. So I can make money from ads at this point and pretty much all the traffic as I’ll show you here in a second is coming from Facebook.
So, uh, I think it’s been a couple of months since I’ve shared an update. And so let me go ahead and share my screen. I’ll share exactly. Um, let’s see if I’m going to share the right one.
Jared: Always the question that I have.
Spencer: Yeah. Okay. Well, well, that’s not the one I wanted to start with, but yeah. Well, let’s, let’s go to another one.
I will share that one. So, uh, but let’s go with this one. This just gives my Facebook page stats overall. Um, basically. You can see the number of new followers, page likes, etc. Um, this is the last 28 days. The number that is most important for me is link clicks. So you can see it’s about six, uh, 7, 600 link clicks, which is, you know, not that great.
335,
Jared: kind of like 335 a day or something like that.
Spencer: 350 a day? Mm hm. On average, uh, something like that. Uh, it, I think last time I showed the stats, I may have been getting more clicks. It just, it fluctuates month to month so much. Um, but I feel like sometimes we always share success stories. Today is my, like, I’m still in the weeds figuring this stuff out.
Uh, but I am still actively working on it. Um, and to show my analytics. I’ve got my Google Analytics 4 screenshot here that shows the last 30 days. In total, there’s been 11, 000 page views approximately. Obviously, most of that is from Facebook. But if I break it down by source, which I do here, um, this shows, you know, about 9, 000 sessions total.
Most of it’s obviously Facebook. The top three, but there’s a couple of interesting ones in here. I’ve got Reddit is starting to send some referrals. Uh, and then a little bit of Google organic search, which that’s cool. But 13 visitors from Google in the last 30 days, not really what I’ve been trying to do.
They’re not SEO focused articles, but it’s nice to see. I’ll take it. But I guess the interesting thing that I’ll share is that recently, only in the last week or so, uh, we’ve been trying to get more traffic from Reddit. Uh, now I have somebody helping me, basically an author that writes all the articles, she shares everything on Facebook.
She’s really the one doing all the work. Let’s be honest. Um, but, uh, she recently had in the past, we’ve tried to post things on Reddit. It usually gets, you know, flagged as, you know, they, they don’t let us post a link or something like that. Uh, but we went ahead and created our own new subreddit. And so, you know, hey, we’re the moderators of that.
We have started to post articles about things happening in our industry, and those are getting indexed very quickly in Google, and even ranking in Google for things. Uh, and so Of course, as they do in that Reddit, uh, powerful domain. And so it’s not a lot, but, uh, like I showed on my previous screenshot, Hey, it was, uh, what was it like close to 20?
There, there was two different 10 and 27. So almost 40 visitors from Reddit. Really just in the last week or so. Uh, and so we’re going to keep going after this strategy. Why not? It, if Reddit lets us create our own subreddit and Google wants to index that stuff, have, let’s, let’s have at it. Let’s do it.
Welcome to
Jared: 2024 Spencer. That’s where we’re at. So, um, in your subreddit, just a question, how much. Content of yours. Are you publishing versus other content or is it just all yours and you control it
Spencer: right now? It’s just all ours and we control it, right? Um, there aren’t a lot of followers. We’ve only gotten a couple, I don’t know, two or three, like actual people have joined the subreddit so far, but we’re just posting our own content right now and letting Google index it.
And apparently, you know, search traffic to Reddit, to our website.
Jared: So who kicks you out of regular reddit posts that isn’t kicking you out of subreddits?
Spencer: Well, it’s the moderators of those other Okay, so it’s
Jared: the person in control of the subreddit that’s kicking you out of the other ones you’re posting, but because you control this, you’re fine.
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying, by the way. I figured I’d just ask you the question.
Spencer: Yeah, I don’t think there’s really any oversight, right? You created the subreddit. You kind of do whatever you want there.
Jared: Wild Wild West. That’s fascinating. I don’t know if you know this, but you are a mere 500 ish visitors away from qualifying for Mediavine now.
Spencer: I, yes, very much. So, um, with the
Jared: new requirements, if you missed that podcast episode a couple of weeks ago, they moved it down to 10, 000 sessions. I think there were some parameters around that, but nonetheless, from a high level, you’re, you’re getting
Spencer: close. We’re getting close. And so, uh, that would be the goal.
I’m going to keep trying some different things. I’ll, I’ll keep everybody posted. We’re always kind of tweaking the strategies, you know, we’ve had months of 50, 000 visitors. We’ve had months, like this is probably one of the most. the lowest months in the last few months, but Hey, I thought I’d share an update anyway.
So it fluctuates all over the place, really trying to get it closer to like a hundred thousand visitors a month consistently, that that would be the goal. So,
Jared: well, I ventured into the wild, wild world of tick tock the last couple of weeks, um,
Spencer: Ooh, showing off some dance moves or something, huh? You
Jared: know, let’s talk through it here.
So, okay. Less for any of my kind of, you know, my own content sites more for continuing to evaluate it as a market for clients, um, going in with a kind of a theory, trying to see if we can what we can do in there. But I know tiktoks talked about a lot. Um, and I know also TikTok’s talked about a lot in terms of qualifying for the Amazon influencer programs.
I talked to you about TikTok in different facets, right? Like I’m making a go of TikTok so I can qualify for the Amazon influencer program, or I’m making a go of TikTok so I can be on their affiliate platform, or I’m making a go of TikTok so I can send traffic to my content website or as a part of an overall marketing strategy for me.
Can I use TikTok to help some of the brands that I work with? Some of the businesses we do work with explode. So I wanted to look at it from a whole different variety of angles. So I started two TikTok accounts and I just thought I’d go through where they’re at two weeks in, I wanted to get. Here’s some of your thoughts about it.
So I don’t have a lot of Tik TOK experience. I don’t use Tik TOK on a personal level, just for, for business stuff. So one account we started is in the fashion niche. Now, if you remember, we have some experience in this niche, actually my search engine land article from a couple of years ago, uh, Was all about a fashion brand that we helped turn around by deleting content.
So we have some experience in this niche. We made an account for that. We added six videos in total. Um, some of the things about these videos is we uploaded videos that already had music on them. And so we weren’t taking advantage of Tik Toks, like trending sounds that they give you the opportunity to, um, and then we placed polls on the videos.
So it was like, Hey, what do you think of this outfit? Yes. No. Hey, what do you think of this combo? Yes. No. Loved, hate that kind of stuff. Um, and, uh, in total, 14 days later, six videos later, uh, 3053 video views, 23 video likes and two followers. Okay. So definitely that’s a crash and burn, I would say,
Spencer: well, Hey, that’s something right.
It is 3000 views. That’s you’re on the board. We spent
Jared: 5 on some of TikTok’s promotion stuff in there as well to drive some of those video views. Now I say crash and burn because the second account did way better. Let me give you those results. Okay. So the second one we did was around travel. Okay. And we are only 10 days in on that one.
Um, we have 12 videos live, so double the number of videos. In this case, we use music that was found inside of the Tik TOK app. And we picked music that was on the trending or viral list. Um, these videos were good in that they seem not quality in that they were high quality. They’re both shot the same kind of way with the same type of audio and video equipment.
They’re good in that they seem to better match search intent. So they’re really mirroring other very successful stuff on TikTok. Whereas the first one was really more about just a concept. This one results on this again, 10 days, 12 videos in 12, 022 video views. So every video is averaging about a thousand views.
Uh, 1, 084 video likes where the last account was only two likes. Uh, no, sorry. It was 23 likes. And then this one has 206 followers. Two followers. Um, we spent roughly 20 across a variety of different places to promote it. We did use some of TikTok’s promotion options. We also use some external options. So I won’t go into detail there.
Just think like mechanical Turks type type stuff. Um, now that what I would call a pretty, a decent success, right? Like what if I had a thousand dollar budget? Now I’m not saying that these numbers track as you extrapolate them. But if, if I took those similar numbers with just a mere thousand dollar budget, right, think in terms of a brand or think in terms of.
Someone trying to do something with a TikTok account. Does that mean I could get over 500, 000 video views? Um, almost 50, 000 video likes and almost 10, 000 followers. That’s a big market reach you have with only a thousand dollars in that case. Yeah.
Spencer: And I mean, I would say that’s certainly possible, right?
Um, my part of the question is it gained
Jared: more and more
Spencer: momentum, right? That’s true. Right. More content, broader reach. Um, my follow up question is how was the distribution of views? Did, was one video out of those 12 that, that kind of got all the views or did all of them do? Okay. Yeah.
Jared: Two of the videos got three or 4, 000 views.
Another video got a thousand views. And then there were some videos that got like. 100
Spencer: views. Yeah. And I would say that’s probably typical. Yeah. You know, kind of like
Jared: going back to your Facebook. I think you talked about last time you shared a couple of weeks or a month ago about how some do really well and most don’t go very
Spencer: far.
Right. Yeah. And so it’s a kind of figuring out, okay, what did we do well with those two videos? And can we just, you know, go from a 20 percent success rate to 25 or 30%, right. And maybe just do better.
Jared: And I mean, I don’t know if, um, I don’t know, like even going back to the question about qualifying for influencers, you know, that changes that those goalposts move constantly.
But, um, I will tell you that. In terms of different channels I’ve used over the years to try to qualify, I’ve always historically gone back to YouTube. And this has been, this is a far faster path. It would seem to get traction that you would need to get into influencer. So, yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I, I early days, but I, I think that that’s interesting.
And that kind of matches up with some of the things that different people say. So, yeah.
Spencer: Yep. Yeah. I’ve heard of somebody that got, uh, their Tik TOK account approved on Amazon influencer with like a hundred followers or something, um, which is crazy. So it’s like, maybe just this little experiment you did would be enough, uh, to get an Amazon influencer account approved.
It’s
Jared: been fun since doing the Amazon influencer presentation last week for the niche pursuits community. Seeing some people talk about, Hey, here’s a, I’m going to go after it this way. And I’m gonna go after it that way. And some people picking Facebook and YouTube and, uh, you know, so it’s, it’s just interesting to see, but, um, you know, again, um, I just, I don’t expect to be reporting back on this a whole lot.
I just want to make sure that I dabble in these kinds of things, uh, every so often. So I’m familiar with them as a marketer. Yep. Um, and that’s the benefit of the podcast. We talk about this kind of stuff.
Spencer: Absolutely. It gives you a good excuse to go try something new. Uh, so, uh, very good, fascinating results.
Um, I agree. And just to follow up with your comment on Amazon influencer in the niche pursuits community, um, The community manager is Colin and he was on the call, uh, that you did with us, Jared. And, uh, for whatever reason, after your call, he felt very inspired to go try, get into the Amazon influencer program.
And, uh, so he dusted off, I don’t remember if it was a YouTube account or a Facebook page. Um, but he dusted off one of those and applied and it got approved. Hey, you know, the automated approval that the next day he went and he recorded, His first three videos submitted those and just this morning He got his first three videos approved after only three and a half days.
Come on, and so he is in that
Jared: is That’s all what a great vote of confidence for the community. I mean look at that That’s a life change right there within
Spencer: one week Within one week. And it’s just funny because of course I did a call on Amazon influencer. My call did not inspire him, but your call, for whatever reason, he’s like, you know what, I need to just do this.
And
Jared: it’s just, it’s just hearing the message multiple times, Spencer, you kind of, you grease the wheels. And then I came in and sealed the
Spencer: deal. You close the deal. Yeah, no. So, um, we’re having a lot of fun inside the community. Uh, we just had Tony Hill by Morgan,
Jared: Morgan overhauled, had the same response.
She’s in the community as well. She messaged me and said, it’s something about, uh, you and Spencer talking about me realize I have this account. Let me go. I’ve never bothered trying to apply with this account. And so she went and did, and now she’s in. Yeah, I don’t know if she’s got her videos yet, but same kind of story there.
Like we’ve heard many stories of that within the last
Spencer: week. Yep, exactly. We’ve definitely heard a few people that are taking a lot of action there in the community. Um, and I was just saying that we had Tony Hill, um, on the niche pursuits community call. Yesterday, and we talked about Google discover, we’re gonna kind of spend about a month talking about this alternative traffic source to SEO.
It’s Google discover. And Tony is very successful with his website. He’s been on the podcast and is very knowledgeable when it comes to Google discover. And so that recording is, is on. Uh, in the community, if people want to listen to that, they can just go to community. niche pursuits. com. You do need to join the community, but then you get access to my call.
Jared’s call, Tony’s call, all future calls and, uh, everything else that’s in the community. So,
Jared: and they’re recorded. So you can go back and listen to them if you miss them live, which is typically what I do. I actually thought. I know Tony’s was yesterday. I did. Um, it crossed my mind like, Oh, Tony’s is going right now, but I couldn’t find the link really in the moment.
And so I went to look for it and then, you know, guess what happens? I got distracted and moved on to something else. I got to go back and watch it.
Spencer: It happens. The recording’s already up so people can go watch that now. Um, so very good. Uh, we’re gonna close up with our weird niche sites. Uh, my favorite segment of the show.
It’s always a lot of work to go and find those, uh, niche sites, but I’ve got. Not for well, uh, a lot of work for listeners, right? They, they did a lot of work for me and I do, I have a database of several weeks go
Jared: by that thread on Twitter gets further and further removed. I just need to go hijack some of these before I can’t find
Spencer: it anymore.
Well, that’s the thing is you’re, you know, they’re on my spreadsheet now. I took them from the thread, put them on my spreadsheet, but if you, if you steal them, like you’d be really
Jared: mean if you deleted that tweet now, just to spite me. That’s
Spencer: a good idea. I would never do that. I would never do that. Um, so my weird niche site, and let me just share the screen here is, um, it’s got an interesting URL, but it’s 1920s fashion end.
com. Dash music. So 1920s, fashion and music. com all with dashes in between the words, you know, maybe not the best URL, but, uh, after reading the about page, I think this was created back in the exact match domain era when it was all about getting that keyword in the domain name.
Jared: Be honest, Spencer, you’ve had worse domain names than that.
Spencer: Oh, 100% . I’ve had way worse domain interest than that . Um, most of them created over 10 years ago. Um, but this website is just as it sounds, it’s all about 1920s fashion, music, lifestyle. It’s got pictures of weddings, it’s got pictures of parties, it’s got, you know, all sorts of, um, yeah, just celebrities, music, movies, just.
Anything that was happening sort of in the celebrity fashion industry, uh, in the 20s is covered on this website. Uh, and so it’s, um, it’s, it’s
Jared: just a, it’s an, an, an, uh, an era unknown, right? They’re called the roaring 20s. And Yes, the flapper, isn’t this the flapper genera, uh, time and, uh, the great gadsby time of, uh, of everything, right?
Yep.
Spencer: Yep. Yeah. So if you want to Yeah. The flappers, yeah, the, the 1920s gangsters. Oh, here we go. Right? Um, who, who, who do we have as the gangsters here? We’ve got the gangster cul culture with Al Capone and his son at a Chicago Cubs game. They got a picture of that. Um, anyways, so all sorts of content. We’ve got ads on the website.
Um, kind of a fun website. Now, when you read the about page here, let me, let me actually share some of the traffic and things like that. So if you go over to, uh, Ahrefs, what makes this interesting is that the traffic has been increasing, uh, over the last, uh, few months. And in fact, the helpful content update.
Is when it saw a big increase in traffic, right? So it’s not a ton of traffic, but it more than doubled. Uh, it went from around 5, 000 ish visitors a month to, okay, almost double about 10, 000 visitors a month, about double, uh, during the helpful content update and appears to be doing just fine here during the March core update.
Um, and some of the keywords that it’s ranking for, as you might expect, are all these 1920s fashion, sports in the 1920s, music in the 1920s, Rory’s 20s, fashion, and on and on.
Jared: And it’s up against some pretty heavy hitters when it comes, like some of those keywords, 1920s fashion. To your point, 27, 000 monthly search.
That’s no, um, that’s no, uh, that’s no small, small amount of traffic there. Yeah.
Spencer: Yep, not. So it does very well. Um, the about page was a fascinating read. So, uh, Jesse Boland, uh, created this website and I won’t go through his whole story, but it’s, I mean, it’s an in depth sort of, um, story about his professional career.
He was a firefighter, uh, and then he decided to start something on the side. Landed on this idea because he loved 1920s. And so he started this website kind of as a niche website back in, um, 2007, a very long time ago. Um, and then he explains, okay, the website, he got it up to making close to about a thousand dollars a month.
He shares whenever he updated this about page, it’s still making a few hundred dollars per month. So it’s not a huge moneymaker, but. After he started, when he created this, he had tons of family, friends, coworkers, ask him about this website. What are you doing with this online thing? You know, so much about getting traffic and that led to consulting gigs that led to other opportunities for him to help businesses grow there.
Uh, traffic and eventually led him to joining up as an early member of you caring dot com, which is kind of like a, um, uh, now I can’t remember the other websites that it’s just like, uh, like crowdfunding type website is what it is like, go fund me. Um, he went from you caring. com to go fund me to lead the marketing there.
Now he works in Silicon Valley, but he keeps this website up because it Reminds him of his roots. This is where it all started with this website, taught him about digital marketing, taught him, you know, kind of how to make his first dollar online. And now he appears to be doing very well in Silicon Valley, working professionally, uh, in, in marketing.
So kind of a cool story. And, and we’ve got the whole website here.
Jared: We need to get him on the podcast. What a cool story. What a
Spencer: great story. Yep, and so I’m sure there’s a way to contact him here. He’s got a contact. You know,
Jared: it’s funny Spencer You definitely didn’t know this but every year I go to a great Gatsby 1920s themed party Do you really our next door neighbor throws a great Gatsby themed party?
And so I’ve had to figure out how to cobble together some 1920s outfits over the years And so is my wife and so this is a funny I’m gonna text this to them as soon as we get off the call here
Spencer: You should do that. And what would be even better is if you have a nice photograph of yourself in 1920s garb that we could put on the thumbnail for this, uh,
Jared: Okay, let me find it.
I got to find it. I do have several of these. Uh, I’ll find one and send it over to you. How’s that? That’s great,
Spencer: man. I knew this was inspired. This was meant to be, to cover this, uh, weird niche site. And then
Jared: the entire YouTube commentary can be all about how good I wore it or didn’t wear it. So I like it.
Spencer: Which
Jared: You don’t need to please. I really don’t need to hear about it. But
Spencer: anyways. So, um, yeah, people can check it out. That’s a cool site. It’s a cool site and, and doing well in Google. So that’s just like the cherry on top. You can, I like how this
Jared: site manages to stratify. And if you look at the keywords, it does it well between fashion and history.
And I think that’s really interesting. Like when fashion played a role in history and when different things like, cause you can kind of go, it’s not just a straight history site. It’s not a straight fashion site. Both have their own. Really competitive challenges. It’s again, we talk about this all the time, like combining niches or niching down or shouldering niches together or creating niches out of topics that are related, right?
Like this is a fashion history site. How interesting is that?
Spencer: Yeah, no, it’s great. It’s, it’s a cool site. So, well,
Jared: mine is far less interesting.
Spencer: Boring niche
Jared: site. It’s a boring niche site. It is a very boring niche site, and it will feel even more boring after that cool site that you brought to the table. My site is boxcycle.
com and the concept Boxcycle. com Yeah, you can, is a platform for buying and selling used boxes. Um, the underlying goal is to make the better the world better. It’s the recycling motif. It’s be part of the cycle. Um, and it’s this idea that, and I can see it, like how many boxes do we all get? With delivery nowadays, how many boxes are used around the world just to deliver goods to your grocery store, go out behind your local grocery store and look at the boxes piled up waiting to be taken away.
Well, this is a place where you can sell your used boxes and where you can buy your used boxes. Now, if this makes you think of like Craigslist, well, you wouldn’t be far off because the website makes me think of Craigslist. It
Spencer: looks a little bit like a spreadsheet. It’s
Jared: not elegant. It’s not easy. Um, Spencer, I see you’re working through some of it.
I find the navigation to be clunky at best. I entered my zip code, and it told me that it had boxes, but it didn’t tell me where. It said it had him 11 miles from my location, but pulled up a map of Silicon Valley in, in, uh, in Google. And I’m like, Oh, did it get it wrong? Or is the closest box 500 miles from me?
Turns out, no, the closest box is about 11 miles from me. And I found out where it was through a couple of clicks, but it was not easier, you know, clear to read. So there’s definitely some user, some UX issues here, but, um, suffice to say, you can go in and, you know, I think I would all sort it out by the size of the box.
You can buy them. You don’t have to pay until you pick up the box. I don’t know how they manage that. It’s really, uh, I don’t know. It’s kind of fascinating. What do you think?
Spencer: I think it is interesting. I just, I wonder how big this market is. I don’t think it’s big at
Jared: all, but I could be totally wrong. This could be one of those.
Sub niches. I know nothing about, I mean, maybe there’s some company doing, you know, 10 grand a month by selling their used boxes online. I don’t
Spencer: know. Maybe I have no idea. I’m just thinking of when I need boxes. If I don’t have any, I ask friends and family or neighbors if they’ve got boxes. Right, exactly.
Uh, and then I might go behind Walmart and get some boxes outta the dumpster or, you know,
Jared: involved on that, or, you know, people sells them for a buck if you’re really in a pinch, you know, or if you’re in,
Spencer: yeah. So
Jared: now judging by the search volume of terms they rank for, I think we’re probably more correct than not.
Um, they do rank, by the way, this, I guess, I mean, would you call us kind of a. Marketplace, I suppose. Um, they do rank. What did I say they were here? DR40. They rank for 929 keywords with an estimated organic traffic of under a thousand. Um, but they have some first page rankings. They rank number one for sell cardboard boxes.
If you’re wondering that gets 60 searches a month. Um, sell used moving boxes. They rank number one for, um, speaking of near me. How about this near me query? Spencer, this might be something you would type in back to your example. Used moving boxes near me. They rank number five for. Um, and, uh, so, you know, they have some first page rankings, but, um, I don’t think they’re doing, oh my goodness, Spencer.
This is like a whole niche used carbara boxes. com is another one.
Spencer: Oh, well, look at that. I’ll be darned. Maybe you should pull that up. You know, maybe there’s a listener that knows that this is a huge market and knows a millionaire. Like, oh my goodness,
Jared: Spencer, you gotta, you gotta pull up used carbara boxes.
com. Now this is, you know, Far more legit of a business. Maybe this is a thing, I don’t
Spencer: know. Well, let’s pull it up here. Uh, let’s share this tab. Okay. This, uh, site looks a little more, more, you know, user friendly.
Jared: This is this subscription model starting at 49.95 or you just buy a package of
Spencer: them. Oh, interesting.
Um, earth friendly moving kits.
Jared: Interesting. Order by 2:00 PM and receive it.
Spencer: Wow. Cindy Shipping. So this, I mean, this sounds like. They’re selling their own maybe recycled boxes, I guess. I don’t know,
Jared: they must be recycled in some way, or they’re gathering them and then they’re pulling them together into packages.
Yeah, that’s what it’s 6, 005 star reviews. They say, wow, they do. They have 10, 139 customer reviews. They’re pulling in.
Spencer: Wow. Maybe this is a thing. I mean, this looks more like a e commerce site. Like this is not a marketplace. No,
Jared: you’re right. The difference is, uh, uh, e commerce versus marketplace.
Spencer: Yeah. Yeah.
So I, I can see this, I, you know, being able to sell a lot of boxes. I
Jared: mean, this would argue that there is a market for it. And our first analogy. Is just our first site is just kind of riding the coattails of a market that has not enough players in it.
Spencer: Maybe so, maybe so. And
Jared: by the way, our first example, BoxCycle, had the whole Recycle play going really strong, you know, so that would appeal to a certain market, you know,
Spencer: yeah um That’s interesting.
It’s been around since 2008. It looks like according to the copyright Has been updated to this year Went with the first design just stuck with it.
Jared: Hey, why why roll why change a good thing?
Spencer: If it ain’t broke, you know?
Jared: Uh, anyways, I thought it was a fascinating concept. Yeah. Very weird niche.
Spencer: It is indeed a weird niche.
It’s uh, not one I’m sure I had thought about before, but why not? Um, everybody needs boxes. Everybody needs boxes. So, uh, well, very good. Maybe we’ll end it there. Uh, another great episode here, Jared, thanks for sticking around, sharing your thoughts on the news, your side hustles, we talked about the weird niche sites.
Thank you everybody so much for listening in. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to the podcast. If you want to follow along with niche pursuits, you can always join the newsletter at nichepursuits. com slash newsletter. Thank you.
Jared: See you guys next week.