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Will Google’s new Search Generative Experience (SGE) help or harm site owners?
Spencer and Jared kick off the latest episode of Niche Pursuits News pondering this question with some interesting findings as they look at various examples of search queries.
They also reflect on a recent Twitter poll by Lily Ray and contemplate whether or not SGE seems to be an improvement over the existing Google search experience.
For instance, in the event it turns out to be a glorified featured snippet and not so much AI as it is displaying site content directly on the SERPs, will Google provide attribution to site owners?
They also consider how this GSE may work in YMYL niches.
But in hopeful news, Bing AI has added links to sources of information within their AI results which could help put pressure on Google to do the same.
The discussion then moves onto their shiny object shenanigans.
Spencer shares some recent troubles he’s run into with his faceless YouTube channel and what they’re doing to fix it.
Plus, he discusses how his upcoming plugin Rank Logic is coming along after beta testers finally got to use it.
Then Jared gets into how he decided to jump into the Amazon influencer program and how he and his 201 Creative business partner Kaitlin managed to create 100 videos within a few days reviewing items in their homes.
And as always, they close things out with some great niche site discoveries.
Jared starts with Snake Dreams, a site that focuses on interpreting dreams about snakes. And although it’s not doing so well these days, according to Ahrefs – back in 2017 it was receiving an average of 56,000 organic monthly visitors.
Then it’s onto Spencer’s site highlight, Dimensions.com.
This is a reference database for product dimensions founded by an architect that provides dimensions for various objects and people, including celebrities and fictional characters. The site is monetized via display ads and a subscription service that offers 2D and 3D downloads, no ads, easy download access, and support. And it appears the site is getting lots of traffic!
So, it makes you wonder what’s an problem or issue that people like have that could be turned into a helpful niche site!
Overall, it’s another helpful episode to wind down for the weekend, hope you enjoy.
Transcription
Spencer: Hey everyone. Spencer here and welcome back to another episode of This Week in Niche Pursuits News, and I’ve got my co-host here with me, Jared, how you doing?
Jared: Good, good to be here. Another exciting week. We get to talk about the news and continue our our deep dive and all things ai, Google search for, I mean, man, it expands every
Spencer: week.
It does, you know, there’s still lots to cover. There’s ongoing tweaks with Google and their AI search experience, and we’re gonna dive into that quite a bit in terms of news, because I know that’s on the top of my mind. I wanna know how is the search experience going to work? How is it gonna impact my sites?
What does it look like? Am I still gonna be getting traffic? So we’re gonna dive into that and chat about what other people are sharing and what we think as it relates to that. And then of course we’re gonna talk about our shiny object shenanigans. Couple of the side projects that we have going on that we’ll jump into.
It’s gonna be fun. You’ve got kind of a I’ll call a bigger, a update that I’m curious about just because you’ve, you’ve done a lot of work on one particular. Particular new area that you shared last week. So I want to hear more about that. And then finally, each of us do have one weird niche site that we’re gonna share.
And you’ve got a doozy. It, it’s, it’s, it is, it is odd. I will say that the mine is not quite as weird, but it’s a little bit off the beaten path, a little bit different. But maybe not in the humorous vein. Right? It’s, it’s just, it’s a little different. And so we’ll get into that here. They
Jared: say pressure makes diamonds right For, for this one, I really snuck in in the 11th hour.
I could not. Really find a good one. This one kind of I, I barely got this one in before we started recording
Spencer: here, so well, we’ll let people say whether it was a good one or not. I think it, it’s interesting, we’ll hear what you say about it cuz you’ve looked at it. And so we’ve got that for you.
So listeners stick around for that. But first, let’s jump into this week in Niche Pursuits news. So as mentioned, we are going to cover. Mostly the Google search generative experience. And so Jared, I know that you found an article here recently on Search Engine Land. They kind of went over a lot of results.
They did a lot of queries and they shared a lot of results. You know, what it looks like in the new ai, Google experience. And so I thought I’d kind of turn that over to you and let you kind of talk through some of these. I’m gonna share my screen so we can see that article. And then maybe I’ll let you jump into it, kind of what you’re seeing there.
Jared: So it was probably three weeks ago now, I think roughly three weeks ago or, or certainly at the, the beginning part of May that we got to all tune in and watch Google as they announced this new search generative experience. And, and we got to look at like, I think just three or four examples. That they showed us.
We looked at one about Bryce Canyon. We looked at one about Bluetooth speakers, right? And then we were all stuck kind of deducing what this experience was gonna be like as a result of these couple queries we had. We had Jeff Coyle on from Market Muse and our weekly news session, and we all theorized and spitballed and whatnot about what that experience was like.
Well, this week they opened it up for people to go and play around with. It might have actually been at the very end of last week. I can’t really remember. It was either end of last week or early this week. Right. And and so, you know, I, I, for those of you who did get in there and got started and played around with it you know, obviously we’d love to hear your thoughts and the comments, but this search engine land went through a bunch of different queries and I think this point, this is the news of the week and certainly what I would like to talk through, I did play around with it a little bit, not as extensively as a lot of other people did online.
I know a lot of people were frantically running their keywords through it to see, you know, maybe their top ranking keywords to see what it was doing. But I think at the outset, I will say this, it definitely seemed we theorized a lot that it might not make an impact on a lot of queries. It didn’t seem necessarily to be the right user experience for a lot of the queries.
I will say from the outset, it certainly was in a vast majority of the queries I ran right.
Spencer: And I agree. And so they went through you know, quite a few of these, right? Like here’s one where, where can I? Where can I learn about seo? And here’s what you get from Google, right? Is here in this screenshot.
So it’s got quite, quite a bit. Here’s places that you can learn about seo. You can also check about, you know, it’s got bullet points, other places that you can check about it. And you know, it, it still does have these, these links, right? It’s got, if I’m counting. Right. You know, it’s got the three links up here up top, which you can scroll through and get more.
It’s got maps it’s got these other, so at least six links right here that you can click on results. So that’s a good sign I’m always looking for, is Google actually providing a way for people to click through to my website or to our websites. Right. If you go
Jared: back up a little bit too, there’s a good one to look at in terms of
You know, and yeah, right up there, but the
Spencer: pizza or
Jared: yeah, the pizza one works. Yeah. Was also one above it too for haircuts. Yes. That he was showing that haircut one. So I thought that, you know, to bring in the other side of things and we’ll probably talk about this too, Spencer. I’ll tease it, but I would love to get your opinion on it.
Like the local results look. Probably more close to what Google is, is, is looking like right now. I thought it was very, you know, a lot more similar to like a classic kind of map pack sort of look that didn’t deviate as much from a classic search experience as some of the other queries, like more informational queries.
But I guess I’ll just, I also want to tease it here and you know, when you, when you want to share your thoughts, we can talk about it, but. A lot of this starts to feel like just a very expanded, colorful, featured snippet box in, in many ways. Mm-hmm. You know, and, and how they’re gonna navigate ads in that, and how they’re gonna navigate links in that and all.
But part of me kind of kept feeling like, okay, how is this, you know, I, I know how it is. It’s ai, it’s not a featured snippet, but it does have a, a sense in many of these queries you’re looking at on screen of just an expanded, oversized, colorful, pretty featured snippet box too.
Spencer: Right. Yeah, I agree.
Certainly for the local search results, that’s, you know, it feels like very familiar. Mm-hmm. And then I, I do tend to agree that I think a lot of these queries, it’s just a very large featured snippet, is what I’m seeing, and is that, Good or bad. And I, I do have to wonder, I mean, is Google really going to roll this out for all queries?
Are they gonna just say, okay, this is the way that we do things? Because it does feel like it’s, it’s featured snippets on steroids in a way, you know, it’s kind of like, Hey, we just decided to throw up a few featured snippets. Right. You get, you know, a three pack that you can click on instead of just one.
And so I think that’s a little bit of a theme that at least I feel like is how much of a difference is there between Google search and their AI experience. Yeah. And es especially as we start to look at Bard, and maybe we’ll just jump into that. If, if that’s okay because Lily Ray, and I’m gonna share a tweet here that, that she had She basically says, for those that you’ve been playing around with the SG Sge search generative experience for a little bit, how much of an improvement or not do you think it is over just Google search?
And so that’s the big question that Google has to ask and that we all have to ask is, is this really much of a change or better? And Only 6.4% of people said it’s a significant improvement. 30% said it’s me, and 22% said it’s not an improvement. And then 41% people just wanted to see the answer, but You know, I kind of put the like it’s, that was my answer to you.
You know, I’m not seeing that its results are better. And from things that I’m actually seeing it’s still quoting websites at length, right? When they pull up this search generative experience, it’s still just quoting. The answer directly from other blogs and from other websites, and that’s been a little bit of a sticking point, is that people are requesting Google, Hey, if you’re gonna quote the website, please just make it a link.
You know, have a link in the, the result. And so is it truly AI generated here or are they just quoting websites? A lot of the time, and that’s part of the reason why I feel like is this really that much better? So we’ll see where Google goes. With all of this, it’s
Jared: You know, it’s very reminiscent in a much larger scale when featured snippets first got rolled out and there’s a lot of frustration over.
How and why are they putting my text from my website on a Google Results page? And yet there’s a link down there. But a lot of people, and you’ll still find people, and I’m not saying it’s wrong by the way, but you’ll still find a lot of people at, certainly at first, but even now, who won’t optimize for the snippet because they feel like they are doing their website and their traffic a disservice by optimizing for the snippet.
Now, I’ve found, and I know a lot of people have found that, hey, when I get the featured snippet, my traffic increases. Right, and so it, it’s interesting if we could just park there for a second. Google’s moving some of my content onto their results page, kind of unfair. But if we leave that aside for a bit, typically when they move some of my content, but give me premiere position with that link.
I get more traffic. And so when they, if, if we look at the search generative experience in that light, do we with links and with proper attribution, and if they go that route, do we actually see an increase in traffic If they actually give maybe three links? Now I’m exploring here, but you know, there has been Coach Doomsday.
Maybe there is a silver lining here. I don’t know. I don’t know by the way. I certainly don’t know. I don’t overall love a lot of the things that are happening, but it did cross my mind, right?
Spencer: Sure. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think that would make logical sense, right? Is maybe there’s three links there instead of one.
And maybe those get more clicks than, than we think. So it’s, it’s a guessing game, but it’s very possible that for certain queries this may. Result in an increase in traffic. And, and we know that not all search queries of course, are gonna pull up this generative experience. It’s still gonna just be this same old Google is gonna give you what we’re used to for.
I don’t know what percent of queries I, I, I really don’t know. But Glen, Gabe dove into this a little bit in terms of the ym Y l Yeah. Your money, your life. Because previously and in fact we had said this on the show Yeah, initially, that it didn’t look like Google was going to tap into that or that the, the AI was gonna dive into that very much.
They’re not. They’re gonna be a little bit safer about gen generating results that are related to YM and Y l. And so let me share Glen Gabe’s tweet
Jared: here. And I was gonna ask you about that too. I’m glad you brought it up because you already touched on it. Like, so Glen Gabe pointed out like, Hey, there’s so much more Y M Y L than we expected in the search generative experience.
So my question, and I didn’t deep dive it, I don’t know if you did, but is it AI that they’re surfacing? Are they just surfacing their results now from content that’s on the web? In a, in their new environment, you know, cuz that’s not necessarily ai. They could take their current SERP results mm-hmm. And kind of reform factor it into this layout.
Right. And then it wouldn’t actually be running Y M Y L content through the AI. But anyways, I hope I’m making sense.
Spencer: Yeah, you, you are making sense. And that is kind of the sticking point that, you know, I alluded to that a lot of people are kind of up in arms about, in terms of is, is this really an AI generated answer or is this just quoting word for word?
Websites that already exist. Right? And if it’s just quoting these websites, shouldn’t it be making a more obvious way to get to that website, you know, an actual anchor text in, in the phrases that are copied word for word. So that’s. Maybe what Google is doing is, you know, none of this was AI generated.
Maybe it’s really just large chunks of text, you know, like a, like a featured snippet that is directly from somebody else’s website. So I don’t know, but here’s, you know, symptoms of a strep throat is what we’re showing that Google is using generative ai for that type of query. Before, you know, we didn’t necessarily think that that would be the case.
And I clicked on another, another image. That let’s see. Also ran some searches that lead oh, to his site. So he is looking at some other things there as well. But so interesting that maybe it is showing up for more your money, your life type content. Again, this is all conjecture, you know, we don’t know exactly what is going to happen.
But this, these are, you know, some of the things that we’re seeing. Right now.
Jared: I like. In a weird way again, alternate perspective. It’s, it’s nice from one side of things to see that one, even just weeks ago, we thought one thing wasn’t gonna happen or was gonna happen, and then it’s changed.
It, it it for me. I’m like, okay, this is an iterative process. Hopefully this will continue to evolve to a place where. Google’s experience increases, which is really what they’re trying to do. And we as publishers aren’t punished, maybe get rewarded in that process. Right. And hopefully the iterations are necessary to get there rather than it just being a static process out of the gate.
Spencer: Right. And so right in line with that is this other news article that just came out two days ago that Bing chat adds anchor text hyperlinks within answers. And so this is something that people are pushing Google to do. And so in a way it’s nice to see that Bing has added hyperlinks within the chat and.
And so I’m sharing on my screen here. Now, you know, when people search for best Pizza store reviews they get this and they actually add a hyperlink to the Taste of Home article or you know, this other link that I’d have to click on to see exactly where that goes. But there’s a couple of hyperlinks in the Being Chat, which is of course an AI chat.
And so that’s nice to see that being. Is adding that, you know, that way to get to our blogs? To get to our websites. I think this is
Jared: huge. I mean, I think it might be getting a bit swept under the rug. Like we know Google had to. Completely change their plans and move mountains to push up schedules for the generative content based on how chat G p t open AI and, and Microsoft being, we we’re kind of performing and putting pressure on them.
Man, I, I hope we, I hope we see the same with this. I hope this creates a pressure, an added pressure on Google to do things like this. This is great. You’re gonna pull content from publisher’s websites. Let’s cite that. Like we learned that in third grade photographies. You know, like this is kind of how the world works.
Like this is good. Thank you, Bing. Good job. Open ai, and let’s hope this puts more pressure on Google to do the same.
Spencer: Exactly. And you know, we never know how far up the chain it goes, but I have seen that on Twitter Google, you know, search liaison, Twitter handle is responding to some of these suggestions that, hey, add hyperlinks, you’re quoting the website.
Please just add a hyperlink. So they are at least aware of the complaints, and I think even more so. Now that they see the Bing is doing this with their ai chat, that then maybe they’ll go that route. And that, that could really lessen the blow, if you will, if there was to be a big blow to traffic.
Anytime there’s more links, more clicks come into our web website. That’s good news. That’s what we wanna see. So, fingers crossed this is what Google would implement something similar in their search, generative experience. And for the final news article I think that we wanted to share today is something a little bit unrelated, but it is very timely.
And Jared, I know, I think you saw quite a bit of chatter about this one. I’ve just shared it on my screen that Google Search console performance report was delayed. But Google will fix the issue. So what was going on here? So there’s
Jared: a you know, under the radar kind of. Back of the napkin math that says that oftentimes when GSC is delayed in their reporting and their reporting is normally four to eight hours, and it’ll show you when you go into your gsc, it says, last updated under your performance tab.
And it’s usually like four, eight hours, something like that. But right when it hits the thirties or the forties, oftentimes that’s indicative of Google. Preparing to launch an update. And we’ve seen that connected. I actually noticed this and tweeted about it. I believe in the March update where I was noticing that they were hit in the thirties and forties and I was waiting for a refresh I needed for a client report and I’m like, come on Google, let’s go.
Something’s cooking here. And then we got an update. So there’s kinda just, you know, there’s certainly no like, causal relationship here, but there have been connections to this. So a lot of theories that an update was happening. Google came out and said, Nope, it was a bug, whether it really was or not, because I don’t know.
Today’s been pretty tumultuous in the CRPS for a lot of reports, but that’s just, you know, kind of every day of the week these days. Some weeks though, right? Who knows? But there was a lot of chatter about are we leading into a May, June update And again, Google’s like come out and talked a lot about stuff recently.
You know, we talked last week on the podcast about how they announced like, Hey, topical authors a thing. We’ve been doing it for a while. We just thought we’d tell you. It’s like, excuse me, you’re just, you’re telling us stuff. Wow. So, you know, yeah. Kind of fall in that vein. Like they’re just telling us like, no, it’s actually a bug that’s kind of rare for them.
Or not normal, but apparently it’s a bug. Apparently it’s not indicative of an update, although, you know, you could, you could argue other way.
Spencer: Right. And there’s so many different departments within Google, you know, that who knows exactly what’s going on, but we’ve got, you know, had a, had a bug, a delay of 65 hours, which is a long time for the data to come in.
So a lot of people notice that. So I thought we’d share that and yeah, just be on the lookout if there is some sort of fluctuation in the crps. Is there an update coming down the road? You know, we haven’t seen it definitively or nothing has been announced, but we’ll see. I mean, it almost feels like, I mean, I hate to say it, but it almost feels like Google is due for another updated, mean it’s been at least a month.
It’s been a month. Right. It’s about that time. Yeah,
Jared: and they’ve released a lot of May updates over the years. We’ve, you know, a couple weeks ago you shared that beautiful. Was it Sim Rush Report, I think. And. Yeah, for the big one for in May. So, you know, I guess we’re outta May now. It’s June 2nd at time of release here Friday, June 2nd, so.
Right. We escaped May without a major update it looks like, but maybe June has one on the horizon here. Could, could be
Spencer: short shortly to follow. So, so there you go. That is the news this week that we wanted to cover in digital marketing. You know, mostly the, the search, the, the search generative experience.
There’s all kinds of AI news, lots of things happening all the time, but that’s a nice snippet of some of the high level things that are going on. And so. Now we wanted to jump into our shiny object shenanigans. These are side projects, of course, that we are working on things that aren’t our main focus, but that we are spending time on and that we’re excited about.
You know, I have a tendency to follow some shiny objects, and those shiny objects have have turned into over the years, some, some great businesses. So I enjoy doing it. I’ve got a couple of things that I wanted to give an update on. One. Is I wanted to give an update on my faceless YouTube channel.
Hmm. I’ve shared that a number of times here on the podcast, and generally my previous weeks things have been going well. And if I were to share just the earnings, I could say they were going well. So I’ll, I’ll share my screen here. This is, I tweeted this out, but basically it’s a screenshot here showing that in the last 28 days I have earned $1,832, which.
Is amazing, which is way beyond what we expected. For this month. I, I don’t even think we expected to earn a hundred dollars this month. So it’s, it’s great. We’re way beyond our projections. However, if you do see this image, you can see that the last few days the earnings look like it’s basically zero, but it’s like a dollar $52 a day.
Instead of the you know, 70 or $80 a day that we had been getting previously. The reason for that is because we did get a copyright claim on one of our videos, and it just so happens that that video accounts for like 98% of all the views. And all the earnings. We’ve essentially had one video that has gone viral or semi vial, right?
Getting all the views, and of course that’s all the earnings. And we got a copyright claim. And so they immediately will demonetize that video until you you, you submit a, a, you know, a claim on that or submit a Well, what’s the word I’m looking for here? To dispute the claim. Yeah. Dispute. Yeah.
Jared: Gotta kind of prove that, that you’re either not in the wrong or give them evidence or something like that. Right.
Spencer: Exactly. And so I have a partner on this particular YouTube channel and he has already submitted the dispute to the claim. And so the silver lining here is that we actually have gotten copyright claims on other videos.
Right. I remember that. That, that we were able to get reversed. And so the hope is that it’ll just be the same thing here is that we’ve submitted our claim. It can take a week. It can take a couple of weeks. That’s what
Jared: I was gonna ask. How long did the last ones take?
Spencer: Yeah. They, they varied. Yeah. And, and actually, I don’t know on some of them, I think it’s generally been a few days.
Mm-hmm. But some of them I don’t know because my partner’s been submitting them and he typically doesn’t mention it to me. He’s like it was a video that was, was earning, like, you know, 10 cents a day. Right. And, but this one matters. And so this one is the one that was earning all the money. And so we’ve submitted our you know, sort of our, our dispute of the claim.
And so we’re waiting to hear. So hopefully it’s good news, but I just wanted to share that, you know, not all. Side projects go well, there’s bumps along the way. It’s not always a straight line, you know, up into the left with the graph and the earnings. But that’s what’s going on with the faceless YouTube channel right now.
So hopefully we get things reversed rolling, monetized, and we’ll just keep growing from there. So,
Jared: copyright problem aside, I mean, if you had, if you hadn’t had those four or five days off, I mean, you’d be approaching. Upwards of a million views in the last 28 days. And if we, mm-hmm. If we look at more like, I, I’m just kind of fudging a bit here to get you to it, but if we look at more of like a 30 day window, which is what a lot of people kind of look at 30 day windows like I, I mean you, this is amazing.
You’re almost a million views on this faceless YouTube channel. That’s not more than what, 3, 4, 5 months old. It’s phenomenal.
Spencer: Right. It is, it, it is phenomenal. You know, I will say that most of it is from that one video, so let’s not get too, you know, excited in terms of like, we haven’t replicated the one, the, the, the video that’s had all this success.
We haven’t been able to replicate it. The other videos are still, many of them are getting, you know, thousands of views. You know, within the first 30 days but that, you know, that only earns a dollar $52 a day. Right. It’d be nice if we had a few more hit that were bigger, but generally, like it is awesome.
The, you know, almost $2,000 in, in 30 days which is, is great for how old this channel is. So I do have one other shiny object that I wanted to share that I’ve been working on for a long time that I know I mentioned briefly. But I will share again that I have gotten lots of beta testers for Rank Logic, so I’m sharing on my screen.
Rank logic.com is, My new WordPress plugin. So it is a plugin that will allow you to track your keyword rankings. It can allow you to group content together to track author performance or just content in general based on date or. Type of content, however you wanna customize in group content, you can see how that basket of content is performing.
And then also you can see when you make changes to that content, if you do a content update, the, the plugin will kind of track that for you automatically and it’ll designate, Hey, there was an event on this day. You updated your content, and here you can see afterwards your rankings when opera went down.
And you can look at that event to say, oh, adding content or changing the title, or adding internal links. If that helps, or that doesn’t help. Right. So it’s almost like an internal ab tester in a way. That, that just tracks all those changes for you. So what’s cool is that I got like 40 beta testers for this.
They’ve been testing it out now for almost two weeks. We’ve had a lot of feedback, a lot of updates that we’ve come out with. Just to beta testers. And so I’m getting closer to actually launching this to the public. And I need to develop the actual sales page here, but I’ll, I’ll make this available for people that they can go and, and check out.
But this is something that I’ve been working on for a long time, over a year. It’s nice to see beta testers come in, get the feedback, most of it positive, but they found some bugs and some things that we can update and a couple little feature requests that we’re gonna add as well.
Jared: I love it. I have to say that I, I apologize.
I haven’t dug in to test it yet, but I, it’s on my shortlist, but it’s so exciting. I mean, I can’t wait for this thing to come out.
Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. It’s it is exciting. I mean, it’s, it’s a lot of work to develop software and, and to get it out the door, especially when you know you’re gonna be charging people for it.
It’s not something, yeah. It’s not like just a website with ads on it that, hey, if there’s mistakes or problems, it’s not a big deal. Right. But you really want to make this, this great for everybody. So Yeah, I just, that, that’s where I’m at. You know, we’re getting closer, but it right now it’s, it’s a side project, but hopefully it grows into something that’s a little more significant once it’s actually launched.
I’m
Jared: particularly interested in, in using it to, to kind of track writers like I talked about on our interview a couple weeks ago about that website that we bought and how, you know, basically we use our agency to kind of, when writers are slower, we’ll ramp up content on our own websites, but, Yeah, it does mean that, call it a drawback.
Call it whatever you want. We have good SOPs, but we do usually end up with a number of different writers on one account. And I, I ne I don’t really ever track how individual writers perform over the course of a website, and I should, so I’m really kind of excited about that, that singular feature, at the very least.
Spencer: Yeah. Yep. And that’s as easy as really checking a box. You, because it’s in WordPress and lives in WordPress, it already knows who your authors are. And so there’s a dropdown menu. You click Jared or whoever you know the author is, and boom, that’s it. Simple as that. Mm. So, all
right,
Jared: I’ll get in there. I’ll get in there, I
Spencer: promise.
That’s right. Now you’ve been, you’ve been busy, you’ve done lots of good interviews with guests and a lot of other things going on. So that, that is just fine. But I do wanna hear about your side project because you made quite a bit of progress. So why don’t you tell us what’s going on? So last week
Jared: I kind of said that I’m we’re gonna kind of sunset talking week on, week out, week, weekend, week out, about week the weekend growth email newsletter.
Still going. Well, I did, I did sit down with my cup of coffee, like I said, so I have plans for the future for that. It’ll stay around at least for the summer. I don’t have any plans on Sunset, and I’ve actually already mapped out the content for June and for July already produced some of it. So Good. Good news.
Actually, right before I got the interview, we secured our first sponsor for the newsletter. Congrats and thank you. Yeah, it I think they secured four, four slots, not just one. So, hey, you know, if you’re gonna start, start with a bang. But so that’s exciting news, but that’ll continue to go on. I’ll just give periodic updates from here on out when something maybe major happens or something.
But Spencer, you are an inspirational figure and I couldn’t, I just, we, I couldn’t stop myself. So I dove into Amazon Influencer, and I’ll admit mostly at the, at the back of talking to you about it, week in, week out here. Mm-hmm. For me, and I’ll just explain 30 seconds on it. I really thought it was something unique that I wanted to tribe just because myself and my business partner, Caitlin, we have a background in media and so we, we have this kind of, I don’t wanna say competitive advantage, but I have a background in photo, video, audio, these sorts of things.
And it looked like a good medium where you’re producing videos to potentially put that to, to work. So it has been now seven days since we got our first, so we got approved for the influencer program on a Friday. Two weeks ago, got our first three videos in on Monday, four days later, got approved for those videos on Thursday, so eight days ago from the day this podcast releases.
And then we cranked out a hundred videos all accepted and approved and live as of yesterday, day seven.
Spencer: That’s insane. How did you manage to do a hundred videos?
Jared: Well, I, I, I, I do, I’m sharing about it on Twitter, and so if you’re, if you’re not following along, you wanna follow along and kind of hear all the updates on it feel free to, that’s, that’s kinda where I’m sharing all the little things.
The first three videos took me over four hours. I, you know, it was just mistakes and framing and all this, and, you know, you wanna make the first three good because that’s, they’re manually reviewed. But after that, I mean, these videos are 1, 2, 3 minutes long and I, I, I feel comfortable on camera. That probably helps.
I’m, I’m doing this with people all, you know, certainly every week. And so I just I, I. I got, I knuckled down and made a list of everything in the house that we, I knew we bought on Amazon, and I just started rifling through it, following a, an exact process with every single one. So I, I, and I will say I did about 50, and then Caitlin, my business partner, she did about 50.
So we decided to joint tackle the first a hundred and that was our goal. And so, yeah in the end, I mean, I was doing them in the last few were taking, the last batch was taking well under 10 minutes each.
Spencer: Wow, that’s impressive. And 10 minutes is, is sort of all in. Yeah. Because it takes you, like you said, I mean, once you pick up the product and hit record, it’s maybe two minutes to actually record it.
Right. Do it all in one take. I assume. Yep. You know and then is there any editing and or is it just basically you upload it and that’s it? There was a,
Jared: a, a small batch of them that did require some editing. We added in what, what you would call B-roll. So it was like you know, I’d be holding the product and talking about it and then we’d add in some B-roll towards the end or the beginning of kind of more the product in use.
You know, that sort of thing. Mm-hmm. About, mm-hmm. I don’t know how many, a small percentage of them had that. And so that required me to go over to iMovie or whatever your editing choice, software choice. It didn’t take long, but you still have to import, set it up, it takes a minute or two, and then export the rest of them.
Phone, I just, you know, you can use the Amazon app and you upload right from your phone. Ah, take it right there. Yeah. You can tag the product. I was sharing on Twitter, what I, what I found myself doing is I’d upload it and then it’d just sit there as a draft and I’d just keep uploading ’em as I would shoot them.
And then I’d go back to my desktop when I had like 20 of them and I’d pound through tagging them and titling them all in one go would be done in three or four minutes and hit up, you know, hit publish or whatever the button is.
Spencer: So how long would you say, if you were to guess how many hours did you spend making about the 50 videos?
Jared: Oh, I, hold on, I got that for you. If you want, just gimme you got that number. Yeah, I have that number. I, I kept track of my time. I need to know if my shiny objects stuff here is, is killing my, my efficiency.
Spencer: Yeah. By the end, you know, your videos were taken about 10 minutes. Of course. The beginning, they were longer, like you said.
Here we go. Now that you’ve got a process, now I got a process. You’re cranking it out.
Jared: First three videos took me four hours and 19 minutes remaining. 46 videos took me a total of 784 minutes. That 17 minutes each. The last 13 videos that I did yesterday took a total, including naming up, upload everything of 58 minutes, which is an average of four minutes and 28 seconds.
Wow, that’s flying. I have to say.
Spencer: That is flying. So Are, are you about to run out of products or you got a bunch more to do?
Jared: I’m about halfway through what I know of in my house. Yeah. Yeah. And and I mean, what you can review stuff that you didn’t buy on Amazon just so long as it’s actually sold on Amazon.
I haven’t dove into that. Right. You know, I just kind of went down, like I opened up, I was actually, I think we buy everything on my wife’s account, so I just opened my wife’s account and I’m just like, okay, we’ll just start the top roll on down. You know, And I did run into a couple snafus. Initially, I, I did a video and then tried to upload it, and the video or the the, it was no longer available.
The product was no longer available, so, oops, that was dumb. So, you know, check to make sure before you hit record that the product was still available. That’s a, a good thing I learned. But yeah. Yeah, so the next step would be, you know, finishing finishing the, all the stuff we already own. And then from there kind of.
Maybe looking into some of the things you are doing or, or other, you know, other strategies. I know my parents live nearby. My, my dad’s retired. He loves to buy stuff on Amazon. He’s got so many hobbies, you know, so maybe heading over there for an afternoon or something. But yeah, couple ideas in the
Spencer: future.
That’s good. And I know of course, earnings, you, they’ve only been up there, right? And so it takes, it takes two or three days at least. May, maybe longer, right? Actually, that I’ve, I’ve found it can take a couple of weeks before they really kind of get up to their position on Amazon. But you’d earn like $9.
Last I saw you posted on, on Twitter, but you know, I don’t know if you earned anymore yesterday or today, but.
Jared: It’s, let’s see, what did I say? It was, it’s, it, it’s basically, I mean, bin monetized like it’s gotten clicks in the reporting dashboard and earnings in the reporting dashboard for three days. So $9 and 6 cents.
Yeah. You know, unfortunately, like a lot of the stuff that’s getting clicks is lower priced stuff. I don’t, you know, I haven’t dove into the world of competition and all that. As it relates to this, I’m sure you could really, you know, we could get out our SEO hats and really deep dive into which products have lower competition and higher price, and all these nuances.
I haven’t done that yet, but, you know I, I’m sure that if you sell some higher price things, you’ll earn a lot more.
Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. And I think I think you’re gonna see your earnings climb quite a bit. So be exciting to hear how it’s going in a month or two. You’re gonna pass me up. Have I
Jared: caught you yet?
Yeah. How many are
Spencer: you at? You were at 30. You, you have not cut. I have like 160 something. I got some, I got some,
Jared: I
Spencer: got some work to do then. Yeah. But boy, at this rate, you are gonna catch and pass me. So nice job. Cool. What else you working on? I think you had some other things you wanted to chat about.
Jared: Just, you know, I’ll, I’ll tease a little bit that it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s cool because my wife has a project that she and I were talking about, and she’s really fired up about it. It’s, it’s a bit of a passion project, but as I was listening to her talk about it, I was like, Man, this is a good YouTube play.
Let me look into this a little more. And so I dove into it a little bit and it’s a very good YouTube play in terms of potential. So I’m just gonna tease that it looks like, you know, that’s gonna be a summer project that we’re both gonna try to commit to. I’m gonna help her out a little bit with the YouTube side of things and you know, she’ll kind of spend some time on, on that passion project and.
Hopefully we’ll have that maybe fleshed out a little bit. You know, it’s a busy time right now as kids are getting ready to head into summer and stuff, but, you know, we’ll, we’ll carve out a few hours and hopefully I’ll be able to share some more updates about that. And maybe that’ll be along with the influencer program, some of the kind of upcoming couple months worth of shiny object Shen I share.
Spencer: Yeah, no, that sounds like fun. So it sounds like she would be more of the personality Yes. Of the channel and you would be helping her out. You know, of course you’re can help her do the video and, and. You know, a analyze everything and maybe help her title and, and you know, pick right topics and thumbnails, things like that.
Right,
Jared: exactly. Thumb, let her, kinda let her stay in her sweet spot and then get her, get a leg up because, you know, we have some background in YouTube and so I can help her with all those things you, you mentioned and you know, give it a shot.
Spencer: Cool. Oh, that’s fun. Well, I’ll look forward to hearing more about that.
I always love YouTube and everything that’s, that, that you can do there. Yeah. So much potential. So very good. So, having said that, if I’m not mistaken, now it’s time to move on to. One weird niche where we share one weird niche site. And so let’s jump into a couple of weird niche sites that we have.
I’m gonna let you go first on this one. This one? Yeah. Maybe, maybe it was a last minute find that you had here, but It’s definitely weird.
Jared: So it’s for those of you listening, we’ll, we’ll pull it up on the screen for these of you watch it. But for those of you listening, the URL is snake dreams.org.
No this isn’t some U R L or domain that’s all about, you know, snake lovers. It’s not like a play on like, Hey, you know, let’s come learn about owning a snake. Nope, not about pet snakes like you might think it is about having bad dreams about snakes and what it means.
Spencer: A whole website dedicated to snake dreams,
Jared: snakes in dreams, symbolize things.
And, and this website, albeit not very well. You know, or at least not very robustly no tackles this topic of snake dreams and what it means and kind of helping you unravel the specifics behind Snake Dreams, cuz I mean, it wouldn’t be just one snake dream, right? It actually talks about specific types of snake dreams.
Some of the details, you know, before we get into it it is a Dr nine. Now, this site, back in its heyday in 2017, according to age reps was getting. Average monthly traffic of 56,000 organic page views. Wow. I, and I don’t know if it’s a penalty, I don’t know if it’s just not publishing content. That was obviously six years ago now, so now it’s only averaging up poultry 1200.
Sorry. Traffic is, is much below. That’s at 1 39, 1 50, but I mean, you know, in terms of domains that could be resurrected, this is one that at one point was getting 56,000, and we know it’s probably higher than that. It might be in the, you know, a hundred thousand mark. In terms of what they’re covering, like, you know dreaming about snakes in the water that’s their most popular post getting chased by a snake specifically a black snake snakes under your bed.
These are the topics that this site is covering. So I pulled up their most popular article, which is Dreaming about Snakes in Water, and then you can tell it was popular, 122 comments. Hundred and is that right? Yeah, I mean man. So you know, I mean there were people just wow, talking a lot about the bottom there.
Spencer: Some, I can just imagine, you know, people are very concerned. They’ve just had this. You know, scary vivid dream about snakes and snakes and water in particular. I mean, people, and they wanna go and discuss
Jared: it. They are discussing it too. They are speaking of vivid, I mean, people are recounting their dream.
I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever been able to remember that much about a dream I’ve ever had, let alone one about a snake. And so a couple things on the monetization side of things. They do have ads in the site. I didn’t see who it was. Yeah, I can see they got, I can see the ads all over. Yep, yep. Ads are everywhere.
Top above the fold. Sidebar, bottom, you know, we got ads on the left and the right. They are an affiliate for mindvalley.com and classes on like mental, you know, power and, and, and that sort of thing. So if you have spiritual energy and manifesting and, and that sort of thing, and. I don’t know how that performed.
Certainly back when they were getting, you know, a hundred thousand pages a month, they, you know, you could argue they probably did some decent affiliate plays here.
Spencer: Right? Yeah, it’s interesting. And I was just clicking on their, their ads down here at the bottom. You can see that it is a free star. Is is how they’re monetized.
So they’re, they’re using when you click on the little symbol next to the ads, you can see that they’re using the network Freestar. So,
Jared: There you go. We haven’t talked about Freestar in quite a while. I don’t know if we ever have here, so
Spencer: yeah, I don’t know if we specifically have, but anyways, it’s a fast growing ad
Jared: network, so I mean, it’s just another example of.
Taking some of the most bizarre topics that might seem too niche down. And at one point they were generating a significant amount of traffic.
Spencer: Yeah. And you know, it’s hard to know exactly how much traffic they’re still getting. Maybe it’s not much organic traffic, but maybe they’re still showing up other places and you’re still still making a little bit of money.
Probably. That’s a good point. But But yeah, just off the beaten path, man, that, I mean it, I always just love like how much you can funnel down the niche idea, right? It’s, it’s, you can either start with snakes or you can start with dreams. I don’t know which funnel you start with, but Right. You start with dreams that, yeah, I can see a huge website all about dreams and interpretation of dreams, but animals and dreams.
You know, no, we’re gonna just snakes just snakes and dreams and we’re gonna have an entire website dedicated to it. So. Good
Jared: find. Yeah. It’s it’s, it’s interesting. It, it’s certainly like watching the way you walked through that can certainly help people think about how to maybe create a, a, a very focused niche, if that’s kind of what you want to go down, right?
Like but, you know like you got snakes, you got dreams, and yeah, why not? Let’s talk about ’em. You know,
Spencer: let’s marry the two together. Why not? You know, there there’s gotta be a good origin story behind this website. I mean, it had to, its start of a very frightening dream with a snake. I, I
Jared: also love it’s a.org as though it’s some sort of organization or something.
Spencer: the.com was taken. Yeah. So they got the.org. Very good. So, all right. I’ve got my weird niche site. It’s, it’s, I will say it’s more professional. Okay. You know, it’s not quite as weird, but It’s, it’s interesting. So this one is dimensions.com and so dimensions.com is, it has, I don’t know how many categories and different types of products.
I mean any, everything from gates to couches to mirrors. To cricket balls, to faucets, to floor lamps, to chairs, to serving dishes, to IMAX screens, you name it, right? Everything that has a dimension. dimensions.com has an image of that product and has drawn out the dimensions. You know, how big is this individual?
This driveway Gate Athena split, right? It shows how tall it is, how long it is in centimeters and in inches. So I guess that you can plan, hmm. You know, when you’re going to, at a gate or when you’re gonna buy a new sofa does this really fit? You can get the exact dimensions. And I looked at the about page cuz I, I, I was just curious about this website and basically it says they’re a comprehensive reference database that provides drawings and models, you know, to standardize measurements.
But it also says let’s see, where was that? Okay. dimensions.com is an ongoing public research project founded by architect Brian Maddock, and continues to be developed through the architecture practice. Fantastic offense. So it’s, it’s more of a public project. Mm-hmm. Almost like a nonprofit, although it doesn’t say specifically, Hey, this is a nonprofit.
Because it does go on to say that it does allow advertising. And if you were If you noticed on the previous page there was a display ad that did show up. So they do have it monetized a little bit, but it’s more of like, almost like a Wikipedia like Goodwill project that they are doing this for the better good of society so that everyone everywhere can have the dimensions that you need.
So I just, now I’m seeing this pop culture tab. I didn’t look at this before. Oh my goodness. So this is actually people, wow. People dimensions, right? You got Charles prince of Wales. You can get his exact dimensions. He’s five 10. By the way, in case you’re wondering, and we’ve got action heroes.
Let’s, let’s try one. No, let’s try a CEO or an entrepreneur. Let’s see who we find here. How do they have this categorized bill Simmons, bill Gates. So let’s look at Bob Iger. He’s the CEO of Disney. He’s six one. And they even have, you know, these drawings of him. Does it have,
Jared: Birthday on the right there?
They have some other stuff on the right there. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Not much. Not much. You know clearly feeling a programmatic play here.
Spencer: Yes, absolutely. You know, what does he do? I’m surprised it doesn’t have like waste measurements, right? Arm more dimension measurements, what’s
Jared: seem same dimensions of a person.
Spencer: So that’s why I was curious what they have. But they’ve, they basically got the height, but they’ve got some drawings and then some other biographical information. And then you can get pro, let’s see what this
Jared: is. I was just gonna ask about that, that that’s what I just pulled up on was this pro and this subscription and, I mean, what do you get with the subscription?
It, I thought it was a free
Spencer: project. Well, it’s $16 a month or $90 a year. You get 2D downloads you 3D downloads free, no advertisements. Easy download, access and support. You know, there’s gotta be a lot of categories where this. Comes in really handy. Yeah. Maybe it’s like home furnishing, maybe construction companies Right.
Are really concerned about the layout of furniture or fixtures. You know, so maybe there’s some professional organizations or companies Yeah. That this type of data becomes very important for, I think for individuals at least, I can’t think of where this is like super critical, right? Like, Yeah, I’m
thinking
Jared: like a furniture, a design, like a designer, sorry, for a room and they’re using the mm-hmm.
The layout software and, and maybe it does or it doesn’t have dimensions and you pull this data in, or you have it at your disposal as you’re designing things. I mean, there’s a lot of designers in the world. There’s a lot of people who, who you write construction companies. So certainly there’s a professional play there if that’s kind of what it ends up being.
Spencer: Yeah. And I mean, there’s, there’s a lot. I mean, we’ve only clicked, clicked on a couple of the categories. They have many, many categories, but, you know, we’re looking at things like sliding doors stair types, tiles and pavers, window latches, window handles, window curtains, and so. They really provide a lot of data.
Yeah. So the, and here’s just an example of a display ad. They do have some ads on something. They’re minimal. Yeah, they’re pretty minimal. Yeah. It’s, it’s in good taste, right? Just some of the sidebar, some middle of the content. As you scroll down you see a bit more. But I was actually impressed with how much traffic this site was getting, so I just pulled up.
A trs, right? They’re getting 306,000 organic searches a month, right? And so as, as we know, the total traffic is probably much more than that. And so I did go ahead and pull up total traffic. Maybe before I do, we can just look at a TRS to see what types of keywords they are ranking for, just to give us an idea of, you know, where is this organic traffic coming from?
So some of their top positions. Tyler, one hat height badminton court, iPhone three 13. Screen size. Yeah, so, so some I iPhone lot of looks like a lot of their top five pages are iPhone dimensions, so that is interesting. But as you can imagine, it’s. You know, blank, fill in the blank size or fill in the blank.
Dimensions are the types of keywords that they’re gonna be ranking for. And then finally I will share on similarweb.com. You can see that they’re getting about a million visitors a month. Mm. And so, you know, it shows for March and April. April, roughly a million visitors a month. And of course it gives all kinds of breakdown here.
I was gonna see if it okay, so organic search is, says is about 66% of their traffic. 28% is direct. And then, you know other, other sources as well, so, Kind of a cool site, kind of a weird site. One that, you know, I wouldn’t have thought of building. But clearly with a million visitors a month, there’s a need, a lot of people searching for this stuff, and they’ve built a huge resource that I’m sure is quite valuable to a lot of people.
That’s
Jared: wonderful. I mean you know, not a fancy layout. Not you know, not gonna win any design awards from a, from a UI standpoint, but most of the ones we review on here don’t. But man, talk about what looks to be a massive database of probably pretty helpful facts when you’re in that specific position of needing that dimension for that exact product.
Spencer: Right. And so, you know, maybe there’s a play here for listeners out there. You know, maybe, maybe you don’t take all dimensions, but maybe there’s a niche site, you know, dimensions for X, Y, z, you know, niche, right? Maybe there’s enough people searching for it. I mean, clearly iPhones or phones, maybe phone dimensions is a toll, you know, if you really optimized for the phone category and market, cuz that actually does become pretty important when you’re looking at.
Phone cases or does this really fit in my pocket? Is this bigger than the last phone I had and how’s it gonna feel? So may, maybe there’s a play there or other categories, right? Yeah. That people could, can almost niche down because dimensions.com, I mean, that is so broad. This case, you may actually wanna niche down a little bit more.
I mean,
Jared: I remember we were trying to find a piece of furniture for like, A weird spot in our master bedroom and like, you know, we were looking to, we wanted it to be an armed wall, but it was, it had to be both narrow, but it couldn’t be too wide. And there were, we had to measure it and then everything we were looking at were like, check the width and check the, no, that doesn’t work and that doesn’t work.
And so, you know, I was a unique circumstance that normally we’re not having to make decisions like that. But, but man, I would’ve killed for something like this if I could have like gone and found a list of different products or different things that fit my dimensions. So I can see there being a lot of niche plays if you kind of drill down a bit.
Right? And then think about what you could also sell, like if you’re going more the DIY route, maybe plans or construction things, if you’re going more the design route, maybe. Design software. Design services. I mean, I, there’s a lot of interesting
Spencer: angles there. Yep. I think when it comes down to it, people need to think about what’s the problem that you’re trying to solve.
You know, Jared laid out a perfect example. People having problems of fitting furniture in particular spaces. But, you know, what’s a problem you can solve with your niche site? And maybe that’ll help you create a new site that you hadn’t thought of before. What’s a little problem that you had in your own life or that you see family members or friends having, and is there an itch site surrounding that specific problem that you can solve for them?
So, and if you can’t think
Jared: of a problem to solve, Just go ahead and make crocodile dreams.org.
Spencer: That’s right. There’s gotta be certainly some search volume for that. Undoubtedly, that would be a creepy dream though. So maybe we’ll leave it at that. I think we covered it. We got the news, we got our shiny objects.
We got our weird niche sites all wrapped up here in this week in Niche Pursuits News. So thank you everybody for listening to the podcast. Once again, it’s been a pleasure being here with you, Jared, of course. And for people that want to follow along and get more information, digital marketing news, they can go to niche pursuits.com/newsletter where I share my ongoing tips, strategies, and.
Ongoing news as well. So Jared, thank you so much for recording and thank you everybody for listening.
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