Google Adds Live Links in AI Search (SGE)! + Side Hustle Updates and 2 Weird Niche Sites
It’s Friday, so it’s time for another episode of Niche Pursuits News, with your hosts Spencer Haws and Jared Bauman. This week, as always, they bring us the latest in SEO and digital marketing news.
They kick things off with a big news item: Google has announced that it’s testing live links in the Search Generative Experience. The good news is that it looks like an expanded featured snippet that may drive more traffic to our individual websites. Spencer shares an example of what it looks like currently and he and Jared talk about how Google may be testing different formats to see what users prefer.
They also talk about Google’s announcement of “new” things you can do with generative AI in search, the fact that AI-powered overviews are faster, and Google’s focus on article publish dates.
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Spencer also shares a look at his SGE and he and Jared talk about whether or not the results they get are relevant and what the future might look like for SGE.
The next portion of the podcast is Shiny Object Shenanigans. Spencer begins by talking about his Amazon Influencer side hustle, which earned around $1800 over the last month. He talks about how he obtained approval into the program for a Facebook page he’s been building (and spoke about on a recent episode) and handed over the entire project to his oldest son.
Jared then shares an update on his Amazon Influencer program, which is up to 329 videos and brought in $2870 in July. He only started in May, so growth is quite impressive, and he has plans to continue to add more videos and take advantage of this massive opportunity.
The next topic is the Weird Niche Site they’ve both discovered. Jared goes first and talks about Marcas de Whiskey (Whiskey Brands, in Spanish), a whiskey review site that was started last year. It’s a DR 9 and ranks for over 50k keywords.
Although it started out in Spanish, it switched over to English and has seen its traffic triple over time, publishing over 1200 articles in a year. Jared talks about how well the author satisfies search intent and how this may be the main driver of traffic.
Spencer nails it this week by finding a site that’s both weird and very successful: Wheel of Names. This site, a DR 71, gets between 11 and 5 million visitors each month, according to Ahrefs and Similarweb, and traffic is growing. It’s ranking for all kinds of “wheel” related queries and is monetized with Google Adsense ads.
All in all, another great episode from Jared and Spencer with lots of interesting news, ideas, and advice. Tune in next week for more!
transcript
Spencer: Hey everyone, welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast. I’m Spencer Hawes here and I have Jared Bauman with me as my cohost. Jared, welcome back. How are you doing?
Jared: Oh, I’m doing great. I feel refreshed. I mean, I, I, I really took a couple of weeks off there and was barely connected at all. So I’m, but I’m back and I’m excited to be back, you know.
You leave for a little while, you get refreshed, but you also have that itch to get back and get back to things. I’m really excited to be back here as well, so.
Spencer: Yeah, I saw a couple of posts from you near look like how high mountain lakes, alpine lakes, somewhere in California, I think. So you probably weren’t too far, but looked absolutely beautiful, so I’m sure you enjoyed it.
Jared: It was great. It was great, and like I said, like for better or for worse, there was no cell coverage for the vast majority of the time. So you kind of just, it’s just you and nature, so.
Spencer: It’s great to disconnect for a little bit. So, but we are glad to have you back Jared. While you were gone and, and this week there’s been more news.
The news goes on, so we’re going to do like we always do every week. We’re going to cover the news and the digital marketing industry, the SEO industry. There are a couple of really interesting things, especially as it relates to AI and search that we are going to cover first. And then second, we’re going to jump into our shiny object shenanigans.
A couple of side projects that we’re both working on and give some updates there, should be fun. And then finally… We each have a weird niche site that we’re going to share. A niche site that’s either doing well or is kind of weird. And I think, personally, I’ve nailed both. It’s weird and it’s a site that’s doing extremely well.
So I’m excited to share my little gem of a find here at the end. So be sure to stick around to the end so people can check that out. So, with that, let’s jump into it.
Jared: I think this is going to be one of those, whenever we talk about SGE, it certainly perks a lot of ears up. And I think this is some of the bigger SGE news we’ve had in a couple months, maybe, or at least a month or so.
So I, this is gonna be a good one. It’s gonna be fun to talk this through.
Spencer: Yeah, absolutely. So Google has just recently released that they are testing live links directly in the search generative experience, right? So within those answers and there’s a screenshot here on the screen that not just.
The websites in the cards, they’ve had that sort of the three pack of cards off to the right for quite a while, but now directly within the answers you can see in these bullet points on. If I pull up that image, people can see it a little bit better that there’s live links directly within the answer. So this is, I will say something that I’ve been hoping for that I thought was something Google should be doing for a long time.
This should lead to more traffic to our website. So I am very happy to see this. Thanks.
Jared: I mean, this is well, first off, it’s so good, it’s so good, especially if we take a step back and look at this from a high level and understand that this is always going to be an iterative process. And so, you know, like, is this the way we want it to look in the end?
No, I still have a lot more I’d like them to do. And we’ll talk in the coming minutes about some of the tweaks they’re even making inside of these links. But from a high level, taking a step back, what a positive step. In the right direction, what the last six months of stress and you know, it’s good to get, I’ll say across the board, good news for web publishers.
Spencer: Yeah, I mean, it, it really feels like a expanded featured snippet, right? It’s, it, it’s a much
Jared: longer now because it didn’t use to give us these links and that’s exactly.
Spencer: There would be, you know, one link within a featured snippet, right? Maybe you’d get your answer and then there was the website. Now it’s like you look at this screenshot and there’s seven, eight links, right?
Opportunities for people to get clicks there. So. So I love it. So I think within this article, it shows a couple of different examples of how it might look right. And so as I scroll down and I was just going to see if there’s any examples that look like what I’m seeing this one here. So this is mostly what I’m seeing because I have the live SGE.
Is I’m seeing these quotes, right? And you have to click the quote and then you get the link. So it’s, it’s kind of an extra step. I don’t, I don’t love, I like the first example that, that I was showing there. But it, it, it looks like depending on either the question you ask or maybe they’re just testing across, you know, a bunch of different options that you may get, you know, the quotes, you may get the links directly, so we’ll see how it turns out.
Jared: For those listening and not seeing the screen there, these variations are, I would say fairly dramatic, right? Like one example that Spencer pulled up, it looks almost like a, like a like a citation, like a bibliography, if you will. Like it says the brand name, which I think is kind of interesting. We’ll maybe talk a little bit about how maybe if this is the future of SGE, how important your brand name is.
It’s not a hyperlink anymore, it’s not the page title, it’s actually the brand name it appears. Another example you showed is just quote boxes. I don’t like that as much. It looks almost and like you said, it’s a much more complicated process to click through. But I think overall, it, what it looks like to me, and I am extrapolating, but that’s what we do here.
It looks like Google is committed to testing what users find to be the best experience. And at the day, who cares what my opinion is, hopefully if they’re willing to test the process, we will get a SGE that actually gives web publishers some credit in the way that, that, that that, that searchers like it the best.
Spencer: Right. I mean, we’ve been talking all along the last few months about how Google has to kind of tiptoe this fine line of providing these great AI answers while still keeping all the publishers where they really got all these answers happy. Right? And so they’re doing a good job of kind of tiptoeing this line a little better.
They’re making us as SEOs a little bit happier, giving us some credit, giving us some, some references and some links hopefully some traffic to our website. Thank you. Okay, and here in a second we can look at a few examples but there was one other very related article, piece of news that came out as well that essentially is about the, the Google, you know, generative AI and search experience here that, and this is a blog post directly from Google, just announcing three new things that you can do with generative AI, and one of those is that You can get a better understanding through images and videos.
And so they gave an example here, which I don’t know that I can pull this up any bigger. Not really. Actually I can here. But basically they, they show, can you get stains out of marble? And it has a video pop up directly within the AI result. And so there’s more results showing images and video.
So. You know, more useful results, which again, I sort of, I always look at this and it’s like, well, the old Google already did that. So, cool, you know, Oh, you’re a
Jared: community YouTuber, so wow, thanks, Tony. Great.
Spencer: Yeah, you know, it’s the, the average user isn’t You’re gonna even know these are AI results, but for us nerds, like, cool, that’s great.
We can see that they’ve added that in the AI powered results. And then the second update is AI powered overviews are faster, it’s does it say like twice as fast? Yeah, yeah, yeah twice as fast. They’ve made it twice as fast, and I don’t know exactly when the these updates Came out. I think you were saying they’re a little bit old.
Yeah,
Jared: you know I got a little bone to pick here I mean, they’re announcing three new things They make it clear it’s new and then they literally linked to a tweet from June 8th.
Spencer: Oh, this This recently
Jared: made a major improvement that reduces the time it takes I thought That’s good news, that’s been a thing, and I go back and I look at the citation and it’s what they did in June 8th, which is two months old now.
There you
Spencer: go. So they’re now finally blogging about what they did two months ago. It’s
Jared: not that new, in the world of AI, that is
Spencer: old news. Right, their PR department’s a little bit behind, I guess. There we go, the different departments again,
Jared: you’re exactly right. Good,
Spencer: good, good detective work on that. And then the final update here is learn more when something catches your interest.
What’s this one all about here?
Jared: I think this is very interesting. I told you I wanted to talk about this a little bit. So, number three, the, the, the title, Learn More When Something Catches Your Interest, it does not at all describe what it goes on to talk about. SGE is designed to be a jumping off point to help you better understand how recent the information is from these web pages.
We recently added publish dates to links. And we’re going to continue to experiment. With this, and I think this is really important for us as publishers because we have known about the recency bias. We’ve known about the freshness factor, these certain things in SEO and in Google, where they do give preference and benefit to content that’s updated.
And often the sweet spot really is an older article that’s continuously updated because it’s had time to make its way into the SERPs, but then you’re updating the content frequently. And so it seems like recency, or what they call Published dates and an apparent preference toward recency is more and more important for SGE, perhaps, than it was even prior to SGE.
Spencer: Right. Yeah, and so that’s interesting, right? It just kind of doubles down on that Google loves freshness, so new, updated content, just another vote for, hey, keep your content updated or publish more frequently so you have lots of fresh content is a smart SEO strategy overall that maybe will get you more results, more links, more traffic.
from S. G. E. Right? And so kind of related to that, I thought I’d pull up my own sort of S. G. E. Because I was kind of playing around with different results. I wanted to see some things that were going on. And I started doing a search for like news topics. Right. So if I share my, my other screen, as you were talking about freshness and published dates and that sort of thing, I was like you know, what if I do a search for digital marketing news?
Right. First of all, I’m actually surprised that a SGE result pulls up for this. It seems like that’s a clear news search and I should be getting a list of news articles like I normally would. But instead I get all of this. Which I, if people read this as I read it, it’s like, well, this isn’t really helpful.
You know, the demand for skilled digital marketers will increase in the coming years. Like that’s the number one bullet, right? Is that news? And, and a lot of these that I’m have that same question is like, okay, is that. News? That’s not what somebody searching for news is really looking
Jared: for, right?
Here’s my favorite. Businesses can use smart tools to collect data and make in depth analysis of their target audience. That’s been happening for 20 years in digital marketing.
Spencer: I was gonna say, that’s, that’s 30 years old here, right?
Jared: The future of digital marketing is bright because there’s more market and consumer awareness.
Spencer: Yeah, it’s so, it’s really bad when I do the same thing for I did a few like SEO news, right? I would, I would think that Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land would have their most recent articles pop up or something, but no, SEO still exists. SEO is expected to still exist in five years, right?
And again, a lot of an age
Jared: old trope that’s been tossed around and debunked for
Spencer: 20 years. SEO is not dead. But this does show I’m getting a lot of these that have the links. Directly on the quotes, right? So this top one gives all the results that then have bullet points under them. So it’s kind of interesting.
Then the individual bullet points have the, you know, individual website where, where it came from. So so that’s kind of interesting. There was one other news one, but I think that gets the idea across of like, well, they haven’t quite figured out all search queries here and they’re definitely need to do a lot of tweaking for, for news and other.
Related queries,
Jared: it’s gonna be so interesting to see how this plays out. We’ve talked about it a number of times here on the podcast, and it’s starting to be a sentiment. I see shared elsewhere, Twitter you know, Facebook groups, these kind of things. Like what, what if people don’t like this experience in mass, you know, right?
You deliver, you only get one chance to make a first impression. In real estate, you talk about curb appeal and how important is like, how long do people have patients with queries like this when they’re like, sorry, but we talk about how people are satiated to affiliate marketing now and they, they know when they go to an article that’s just regurgitated content that hasn’t had personality, they don’t convert as well.
We know from what we do for a living that people aren’t dumb. How much do they do searches like this, SEO news to get real news and they get junk like this. Right. How long does this go on? And you know, I mean. I get that it’s a new process, but boy, this SGE is really bad sometimes and really slow other times.
And those are two things that people don’t like in bulk.
Spencer: Yeah, yeah. I’ll just say again that it is very slow, particularly on mobile. I, I find myself just scrolling through and, and getting the regular results all the time because I, I don’t want to wait the extra few seconds on mobile. Well,
Jared: why would you want to wait a couple extra seconds to get this?
You know, and to get this garbage, you know, I mean, maybe it’d be brilliant, but if you’re only getting something brilliant 50% of the time and it takes time, like how long do I wait for
Spencer: that? Mm hmm. Yeah. And anyways, we could go down a whole rabbit hole. I mean, I still think about like the whole coolness of like chat GPT and AI that really has sparked all this is that chat GPT was writing original content in terms of like, me an essay, write me a poem, write me.
Right. All these types of things. And that’s not really what Google’s doing. Google’s still just kind of giving you results quick answers based on web results that already exist. So we’ll see if this even exists in a year. May, you know, the, the CEO Sundar Pinchai last week, we talked about how they’re doubling down on this.
The, you know, he says it’s a clear quality win in many circumstances, but I tended to get. Disagree in many circumstances that either it’s going to drastically change or they may scrap it all together and go back to where, where they were before, which I thought was just fine
Jared: to that point. Can I, can I go off script here for a second?
Put you on the spot. Go to Google trends if you could. It’s going to just piggyback on your point that you’re making right now. And this has been something that’s been going around you know, type into Google Trends chat GPT and and you can kind of see like Google Trends is great because chat GPT feels like it’s all the rage, but if you look at the last yeah, it’s, I think go back to like six months.
That was the past
Spencer: day, yeah. Yeah, past day, past 12
Jared: months there. I mean, this is, this is data from the entire kind of universe using Google. And for those of you who are listening. It’s dropped by 70%
Spencer: in the last three or four months. Exactly. It’s about a third of where its peak was. The interest
Jared: is waning.
So, to your point, I don’t know if the rest of the world thinks that this is as great as the Google CEO does.
Spencer: Right. Exactly. And I, I, just to test this out, I went over to SGE and I, I tried to do some prompts to make it like write me original poetry. I did get it to spit out a couple of original poems that weren’t that great, but for the most part, it, it sort of just says AI results unavailable for this particular query.
Right. So, so it doesn’t even do like what I would call the coolness factor of what chat GPT was. Yeah. They’re just giving you its search results. So, so we’ll see. We’re, we’re keeping everybody on top of it. That’s what we do. That’s why it’s news. We’ve got a couple of tweaks to it. It’s good to see that the links are showing up in the results.
So hopefully that will drive some traffic. But as things change, we’ll keep everybody posted on that. So, I don’t know. I think we’re good on that subject for today. So much more we
Jared: could talk about it and but, but we, we covered the most important thing. I mean, you know, if you’ve been in whatever way possible putting pressure on Google or, or voicing your opinion about, about links.
I know a lot of people have been voicing their opinion about not having links in there and… So whether or not it had an impact, it’s just great news. So overall, as far away as SGE is from the experience we want it to be, such good news to see Lynx making their way into it.
Spencer: Absolutely. So, before we jump into our next segment here, where we talk about our shiny object shenanigans, I do want to take a
Jared: quick…
This is where you’re going to comment on how we match, right?
Spencer: Yeah, you know, got the wardrobe matching here. So, you guys can vote for which shirt you like best in the comments. But no, I am going to do a review of the podcast. We’ve got a new review that came in, and you know, I share all…
Reviews. It is a five star review, but we’ll see how we feel about it after I read it. Colts slash Ravens loyal is the username here says he’s new to the show. Found the show a couple of months ago. Great info and topics. Love the weird niche suggestions at the end. Lately, been having to skip episodes though, because the same guests are appearing here that were on the Side Hustle show a couple of weeks earlier, hoping that doesn’t become the norm.
Well, I, you know, thank you for the five star review. First half was great, second half, you know, I, I, I… I don’t know. We’re going to have to talk to Nick Loper at Sight Hustle Show and coordinate our guests a little better, I suppose. I didn’t even know that was happening. Well,
Jared: you know, like I’m not gonna make an excuse, but it’s there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes between Spencer and I to try to make sure we get guests.
And I don’t think we’ve missed a Wednesday. I don’t know how long, you know, we try to always make sure we get a good guest on, you know, So You’re right, we don’t really check the rest of the industry’s podcast calendar at the same time.
Spencer: Exactly. We try to bring on great guests, you can listen to them twice.
I didn’t even know we had the same guests on. Colts, Ravens fan, stick, stick with us. I promise. We’re going to have great guests going forward. So, but thank you very much for the review. And if other people want to leave reviews, I may read it. And if you leave your website, I’ll read in your website.
You might get some visitors, get some exposure to that website. So let’s jump into our shiny object shenanigans. These again are not our main focus in our business, but a couple of things we’re working on on the side that might be, maybe are bringing in a little extra money. So I’ll go ahead and go first.
So I wasn’t planning to give a full update on my Amazon influencer business. But it is Amazon influencer related. So, so what’s going on is that As I’ve shared, I, you know, I am making some money. I guess I’ll give an update. It’s, it’s like I think 1, 800 over the last 30 days. Right. So I’ve kind of been in that 1500 to 2, 000 range taking a slight, you know, dip after prime day.
Oh, same here is kind of kind of what happened, but so it’s still still doing some there on my own. But what’s interesting is that I talked with my oldest oldest son. He’s a teenager. And I said, You know what? This would be a great business for you to get started in. It’s something that you don’t need a ton of, certainly Monetary investment or even time investment.
You just need to go around the house and record some videos, you know, when you have some, some extra time. And so I said, let’s, let’s get you set up, see if we can do it. And that reminded me that I had an old Facebook page that has. I wouldn’t call it old, but it’s one that I, is a side project again that has like 30, 000 followers.
You talked about that
Jared: one, I think a month or two ago. You’re
Spencer: right, you’re right, I did. So that is the page. And I said, you know what? Let’s see if we can get approved for Amazon Influencer Program with that page. And sure enough, got the instant approval. And I said, okay, that’s all I’m doing for ya. The rest is up to you.
So he’s got… Sign him up under his own name for his own Amazon Influencer account. And so he is set up. We just did that in the last few days. And so he now needs to record his first three videos. Get those officially approved. And and then we’ll see if he can make some money. So I may report in the future on his side hustle a little bit going forward.
Because I think it’s kind of fun having a son actually now following in my footsteps. And so we’ll, we’ll see what he does. He is a teenager that has lots of other interests, you know, starting school in the fall and different things going on, but I’m, I’m very hopeful. He’s showing interest that, that he’s going to do it.
So hopefully I’ll have updates to share in the future. I can’t think of a
Jared: better high school slash college job than the influencer program, because you can kind of record whenever you want. You can have a busy week and not record much. You can have a slow week and record a lot. You can hustle, you know, like I remember when I was that age, I was just a little hustler.
So it seems like a perfect
Spencer: fit. Work whenever you want. Exactly. It doesn’t take a ton of skills, just a little bit of practice in front of the camera. Right. And then you’re good. The other side benefit that could be cool for him is like, I’m starting to get emails every once in a while from manufacturers that say, Hey, I see you’re making videos.
Would you record a video on this? Right? So I got an email just a couple days ago from a manufacturer of bar stools, and I was like, man, maybe I should just forward these on to my son and let him record videos. And then he gets a free set of bar stools, right? So if he moves out to his own apartment, he might start getting some furnishings and different things for free.
Jared: If he really wants to hustle, he could put that on offer up or, you know, whatever the Facebook marketplace is. And there you go, sell that on. And now you’re making a hundred bucks. Yeah, exactly. That’s not really been used
Spencer: at that point. So exactly. So anyways, that’s, that’s my update, you know, brief my own update.
Plus yeah, I got approved for a second one and my son’s going to take over and we’ll see how that goes.
Jared: Your son has come up many times. I feel like he came up on a podcast recently where he was out with you. I’m going to be at a couple marketing conferences and man, he’s really he’s dipping his toe in a lot of the the Haas family business here.
That’s
Spencer: right. I’m doing what I can. I’m doing what I can. And so yes, I’m sure he’ll come up again in the future. And you know, what would be really cool is we need to bring him on. I was about
Jared: to say. Next time you’re out, Spencer, maybe we should have him as the guest Yeah, you
Spencer: know, that would be one of the most fascinating episodes.
I will simply say because he’s actually got a good personality, as opposed, you know, to me. I’m just sort of this very laid back
Jared: guy. Well, we know what people think of your personality. That came up a couple times ago.
Spencer: He’s much more interesting. Let’s just put it that way. So… Alright,
Jared: well… I don’t know if he has the 20 plus years of in depth experience and knowledge that you have on, in this niche, but…
Spencer: But he has strong opinions about what I do. Oh, good. Well… So that could be
Jared: interesting. I’ll have to bring the expertise that week and we’ll get the comedic effect maybe from him.
Spencer: There you go. Yep. Alright, what you working on, Jared?
Jared: Well, I’ll tell ya. I was, I was mentioning to you before we started recording vacation kills the side hustle side of things hard to get side hustles in when you’re, you know, have 30 minutes from a Starbucks while the the family’s going to the bathroom and you’re trying to crank out a couple of emails or something hard to, hard to focus on the side hustle.
But the good thing about a lot of the side hustles we do is that they’re very. If semi passive in nature, right? We set ’em up and we kind of put ’em out there in the world. And whether it’s a website or an influencer account or a YouTube account or whatever we’re working on, they continue to work for you while you’re gone.
So the good news is Amazon influencers, I’ll talk about that today, kept working for us while we were gone. I haven’t published a video in weeks, so we’re at 329 videos. Nice. So, yeah, it did crank a bunch out before I left on, on vacation, but I left about mid July. So, hasn’t really been anything, well there hasn’t been, not really, there hasn’t been anything happening for over two weeks.
But, July’s, or the last 30 days earnings, so basically July’s earnings at the time of recording, 2, 870.
Spencer: 2, 870. Oh, that’s awesome. That’s so good. I
Jared: mean, that is basically a hundred dollars a day. Yeah. Basically hitting not quite to be fair. It’s like 96 or something like that, but it’s basically averaging a hundred dollars a day, which.
I don’t know why, but it’s like a milestone, right? Like 100 a day, 3, 000 a month, 36, 000 a year. And mind you, it’s the first week of August. I started this, the Memorial Day weekend, the last weekend, the last week of May. So, yeah, cool results, cool to see, you know it, it’s basically double, more than doubled what June was.
June was like 1200 and stuff, so it has flattened a bit, so I will say that since Prime Day, it has the number of clicks and the number of yeah, like sales per day and stuff has flattened. I don’t know if it’s a summer thing, I don’t, you know, we, I don’t know much about all that, but, you know, it’s still very encouraging.
Spencer: Yeah, I would say that’s very encouraging. That’s awesome. You know what? Like starting three months ago, something like that. And, and yeah, two and a half months ago and, and having almost 3, 000 in a month, that’s huge. I can’t think of that many other side hustles. That you could do that, right? Other than maybe, you know, doing arbitrage or, you know, flipping something and you can find a good opportunity to just buy and sell a bunch of stuff real quick or something.
That’s amazing. That’s I love it. And I
Jared: will tell you I talked two or three weeks ago about how I went over to my parents’ house and was out filming in my, my dad’s kind of workshop. And while I was gone, one of those massive products sold like a $3,500 product. Oh, really? It was like a 80 commission one day from that.
Spencer: Oh, that’s huge. Yeah, that’s good. You
Jared: know it, it does reinvigorate me once I get kind of caught back up from being gone and, and on the important things, you know, not the side hustle stuff, but the importance to stuff that pays the bills. I’m looking forward to, you know, getting back on that gravy train of, of, of finishing off recording all the videos I can record here at the house.
And then, you know, seeing that big sale kind of reinvigorated me to, to continue to go out to maybe. You know, finish off all the stuff my parents house because I only did a couple hours there and then who knows, maybe look at some other friends or family too, so yeah, opportunity there, you know,
Spencer: there is, there’s a ton of opportunity.
And like, like I said, I’m trying to, you know, get people I know to do it. I think there’s so much opportunity. If somebody really hustles and has some time, there’s nothing stopping you. So you’re, you’re good proof of that. Very good.
Jared: Yeah. So encouraging and hopefully more to come in and I’ll get, I’ll get caught up.
I’ll get back into more cycles of stuff and have more for you next week. Thank you.
Spencer: Yeah. No, that sounds great. Good update. For sure. So, I guess that leaves us with our final segment here of the show, where we talk about one weird niche. We’re going to talk about one weird niche site that each of us have found.
And kind of talk about how they’re doing, how we found them that sort of thing. You know, I, you just went, I guess, on your, your side hustle. But you’re listed on the, on the sheet to go next. Do you want to do yours first? Sure. Or you want me to jump first?
Jared: Let’s do it. I’m ready. Go for it. So I will say at the outset that in the world of weird niches, this is probably a little less on the weird side.
So just being fair, but I really did think it was a fun site to deep dive. I think the audience will get a lot out of it and I enjoyed it. There’s a couple of weird things about it too. So you know, it does qualify. I don’t even know how to say the site. I think it’s Marques, Marques, Marques, whiskey.
com. Marcus D. E. Whiskey, M. A. R. C. A. S. D. E. Whiskey. com.
Spencer: Your guess is as good as mine.
Jared: Plays into a bit of weirdness, which I’ll get into. It’s a whiskey site, right? It’s a whiskey review site. It’s probably about as classic of an affiliate content style website as we’ve reviewed here on these. A couple things to note about it is that, The site was only started last year, so it’s a year, a year and a half, two years old, something like that.
And it’s doing phenomenal, like it’s doing phenomenal. It’s getting it ranks for over 50, 000 keywords. In the last couple of, of months, and updates, it’s tripled in traffic. And, so the site is doing really, really well. The site started off in Spanish.
Spencer: Yeah, I noticed there was some Spanish text here.
Jared: Yeah, if you go into archive. org, the whole site was in Spanish last year, and needing to be translated into English. Now the site is in English, ranking for English keywords, and ranking very well for English keywords. And so… A couple of things, I have a couple of things I wanted to share, but from an outset, this is a great example of a site that is a DR9 ranking for 50, 000 keywords, a year old and doing really, really, really well.
And I think there’s some reasons for it. And along the way, it hasn’t been consistent. They’ve started in Spanish and moved to English.
Spencer: Yeah, really interesting. And so I’ve just got a trust pulled up. I was just looking at some of their top keywords, right? They’ve got 20, 000 listed here, but they rank for more keywords.
Of course, you know, a lot of the traditional, you know, best type keywords, brand keywords, this versus that type keywords, right? So a lot of sort of your standard, what I would call affiliate. Keyword formulas that a lot of people use and They’re clearly just cranking out the content writing great content, and it’s working
Jared: they have 1, 263 articles live in one year It does not scream AI content to me I I can’t say for certain but this guy has made it very clear on his about page that She says, I’m actually not even into whiskey anymore.
But you know, I own a bartend. I’m a bartender or something like that. So I get a lot of this stuff sent to me and I know how to pick out flavors. And so I won’t do it here on the podcast. But if, if you’re listening and you want to see. Go in and look at the articles that they’re ranking for like Spencer, you have it right up there.
Their best single barrel bourbon article ranks number one. Beats out Forbes. com. But you can kind of go in and look and just start to get a little flavor touche, a little flavor for why they rank higher than say a Forbes who wrote an article on the best single barrel bourbons and this one out ranks it.
And I think it has a lot to do with, if you read it, it just satisfies user intent so much better. He talks to someone who would be interested in this. He talks about brand, like, he gives you these single barrel bourbons you’ve probably never heard of, and he says, this is kind of similar to this mainstream brand.
It tastes like this. Just try this. Use an ice cube. Don’t, you know, wait 15 minutes after opening this one. Like, he gives you very practical things that I think Satisfy the search much better than the other articles. And so if you really want to look at just an example of a website that’s doing well, probably because of how well it satisfies search intent, this is a great one to dive into.
Spencer: Yeah, absolutely. And I was looking at the About page as well, right, kind of tells a little bit about him. And he’s probably just a really knowledgeable guy. And so he knows how to write about things or, I mean, he, at this point I’m sure he’s hired writers with 1, 200 articles, right? Right. Either he knows how to edit or he’s, he’s got a whole team or somebody has just created a persona and done a really good job of making it look like this is all real, but it’s, it seems like, you know, it’s a legit guy from all intents and purposes.
But yeah, ranking for, for all kinds of keywords, newer a good niche site. It’s, it’s clearly monetized with. Display ads here. I’m not sure if I saw the network Mediavine yeah, yeah mediavine there. He’s not mediavine
Jared: and you know a great segue. He’s not no affiliate No affiliate. Now, Alcohol is a little bit of an interesting one to be an affiliate.
No Amazon, to my knowledge, there. Right. You know, my agency, we worked with one of the larger affiliate beverage websites for a, for, did an evaluation for them and stuff. And so I know there are a bunch of non Amazon affiliate networks that this website could be taking advantage of.
Spencer: Yeah, yeah, from what I, you know, from what I can see, it’s mostly internal links pointing to other articles, getting more views.
I
Jared: couldn’t find an affiliate link. Granted, I did not look at all 1263 articles. But, you know, we’re pretty good at kind of figuring these things out from a couple pages, so.
Spencer: Yep. Yep, when you go to their, their articles that typically would be, you know, kind of monetized a review article, right? Like this one, and it’s all internal links primarily.
So awesome. So it’s not, you
Jared: know, in summary, it’s, it’s not a, it’s not a very, it’s not a weird niche topic for certain. I think, if anything, it’s really a great example of of the only weird thing about it is the, the Spanish to English translation that happened, and the rankings still did wonderful throughout the whole thing.
But in reality, this is probably just a good site for people to knuckle down on, dive into if you’re still new, and wanting to see examples of sites that are small, but winning in terms of age, and small in terms of age, and And DR you know, domain strength, but winning in the SERPs.
Spencer: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Good find. Good, good sight there. And yeah, was there anything else? I may have missed a couple of links that you had shared that we could have looked at. But I think it’s, it’s…
Jared: Oh, the only link I had in there is no, if you’re wondering, this was not an age domain. So… Okay. Yeah, that’s it. I’m just looking at the…
Okay, okay. Yeah, if you go back it’s just so interesting, like, I’m not very good with the language stuff. Like, I know, like… There’s a whole other side of ranking SERPs in foreign languages. It’s easier there’s getting your site translated in multiple languages and all that. But just as recently as last year, the title of the website was Whiskey Price Guide in Mexico.
Wow. You know, and so anyways, it’s, it’s interesting to look at how the site’s transitioned over the last year or so. And I mean, it done well.
Spencer: I almost wonder, it kind of feels like maybe this was a site started by the original guy. That’s on the about page and then somebody acquired this site and said, Oh, there’s so much opportunity.
Let’s make it English. Let’s expand the writing team. Kind of smells like maybe that’s a path that happened here. I felt like
Jared: that would be the case, but why would someone bother doing all that work and doing all that risk when it’s only a DR9? You know, it feels like that’s what you would do if, well, the, the site that I talked about when you interviewed me on the podcast, that was like a DR 60.
And I’m like, Oh, cool. We can take this. Old site where a guy didn’t really know much about affiliate style marketing and turn into one. But I wanted that one cause it was a DR 60. And I thought about that, but this is only a DR nine. So I thought all that up, but I agree. It has those threads going for
Spencer: it.
Right? Yeah. Yeah. So if anybody wants to do any more detective work and get to the bottom of it, certainly reach out and let us know. But Either way, a very cool site. Love seeing sites that, in, you know, the last 12 months, have grown tremendously, you know, or expanded. And just doing well on the SERPs, and this one is.
So, great find. So,
Jared: you have really touted your site here as being both weird and and successful. So, I’m very excited to
Spencer: see it. Yeah, so to build up the hype just a little bit more this particular site that I have found, according to Ahrefs, gets 5. 1 million visitors a month from search, from Google, right?
And then according to SimilarWeb, this site gets 11. 3 million. Total visitors from all sources per month. So this is a huge site with tons of traffic. So what kind of massive publication or, or site might be getting this type of traffic? Well, None other than wheelofnames. com. So wheelofnames. com is, is the niche site.
And, you know, if you’re looking at your screen, I’m sharing my screen. Basically it’s, it’s a big colorful wheel that people have seen. You can spin and, and it stops right. And, and you can. Do whatever you want. Win a prize, right? In the text box over here, you can input any names, right? So you can put Jared, Spencer, what are some other names?
Josh. Mike Tyson. Josh. Jordan. How did Mike Tyson come to be? I don’t know, I was just thinking of famous people. You know. Madonna, like, you know, and then you can spin it and I don’t know what category we’re trying to win here.
Jared: The name of the next Haas kid.
Spencer: The next Haas child shall be named Madonna, right?
Madonna Haas. And so, and so it’s, it does some confetti for you. We have a winner and that’s. I think pretty much all you do, right, on the site. There’s, there’s some ways it looks like you can customize it. You know, you can have the ticking sound or other sounds. Oh, drum roll, music. Right,
Jared: podcast. This is, this is kind of double dipping
Spencer: here.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you can have the volume higher or lower. Spin slowly to add intensity, I suppose. Right, spin time. You can do all sorts of things with this wheel, but why, why are 11 million people a month coming to this website? I have no idea. I never, I’ve never used this website myself, but apparently a lot of people are.
So let’s take a look at you know, some of these
Jared: results. I I’ve, I’ve, I’ve scrambling my, on my own right now to roll over to Ahrefs to see what in the heck are they ranking for? Yep. I can’t think of a query where I’m like sitting here one day. I’m like, you know, I got about 10 names and. I just wish I had a big wheel here, alright?
I could spin them to figure out which one wins.
Spencer: So, yeah, I don’t know if it’s elementary school teachers or, you know, somebody that’s picking names out of a hat all the time. But it’s a DR71. 5. 1 million visitors a month in traffic. And generally it’s been increasing, like, since creation. It, it appears.
And then organic keywords. So some of the top keywords. SpinTheWheel is the number one search query. WheelOfNames, SpinWheel, right? Any variation of that type query is what people are searching for. So this is truly a niche I never even would have thought of. And then if we look at SimilarWeb, here just, just to show that according to SimilarWeb, it’s getting 11.
3 million total visitors, and they kind of break down the traffic as let’s see here, I know it breaks it down by source, yeah, they say, It’s almost 50 50 of, of direct traffic versus search, right? So people, once you find this, you just go direct, like, like me. Yeah. Once I, now that I know about this, you know, I’ll be here, you know, every couple of times a week, probably like doing it all the time.
Jared: Sites only been around since 2018. It’s not that old. I’m looking at at
Spencer: ICANN. Yeah. Yeah. Not, not that old, but you know, they’re monetized. If I go back to the website here.
Jared: I mean, who are they with? Is it? I mean, with that traffic, they could be with almost anybody.
Spencer: Yeah, I, it just looks like Google AdSense ads.
I, it could, it could be, you know, some other ad management company, of course. But that, that’s all I see. Here’s
Jared: something interesting. If you go back to Ahrefs, on the left hand side, click on Top Pages.
Spencer: Okay, let’s I’ll share that. Top Pages. So they’ve
Jared: got this homepage translated in almost every language I can see there.
And it’s ranking pretty much number one in every language.
Spencer: Yes, it is. So, TH I don’t know what language that is exactly. Thailand,
Jared: maybe? No, that’s a that’s like an Arab country. Just looking by the top
Spencer: here. Yeah, it looks like it. Yeah. But ID, different, different languages. Yeah,
Jared: PL, there’s France, FR.
Netherlands. Yep.
Spencer: Yeah. And then user reviews and tutorials is also a huge wow. Look at all these videos. See how others are using Will of Names and what others have to say about it. Right? Ten games and activities with Will of Names. Digital spinner tutorial and 10 spinner ideas. So this must be something that a lot of people use.
I, I mean, I can think of lots of reasons why you would pick either names or maybe you know, ideas or all sorts of pickers, right? And this is a sort of a, we’ve done random word generators as niche sites in the past. This is similar idea in terms of, Hey, let’s put a list of names. What are we going to name our next child?
And, you know, let, let the let the wheel of destiny pick for us. So, man, and
Jared: again, like, like speaking of 30 years ago and something that looks like it was built 30 years ago, I’ve got to be honest, if you’re listening to the podcast and thinking that this is some sophisticated user experience, it is rudimentary at best.
I mean, the simplicity of this tool, it probably took. A coder an afternoon to build, and that’s with a long coffee break and an early exit that day.
Spencer: Mm hmm. That’s about it. And so people can bust out their calculators and go wild with, okay, 11 million visitors a month, you know, RPMs, late… This guy’s you know, on, on some beach, right?
Like, this is, this is his full time gig, right? That’s, that’s all he does, make sure the website’s up and running. So, I thought it was kind of a cool one. I don’t know, did it live up to all the hype Jared, on that one?
Jared: I was skeptical, but the 11 million visitors… What amounts to a single page? It, yeah, I think so.
Spencer: Good, good. That’s what we like to do is live up to the hype here on the podcast. You know, it does harken back a little bit to last week. Both Josh and I shared kind of a tool website, and this is in that same vein. Like just, if you can find one little widget, one little tool that a lot of people use, like.
You really just need a one or two page website that people can use and come back to again and again and again. And, like I said last week, I would love to find an idea like this of some just little game or tool or something that, once you build it once, like it’s done, and yeah, it just kind of earns money, hopefully perpetually at that point.
So, a fun niche site, hopefully gives people some ideas, something to think about. Maybe you don’t copy the wheel name, the, the wheel of names idea exactly, but maybe the, it sparks an idea of something else people can do out there. Love it.
Jared: I mean, again, it, hopefully at the end of the day, the weird niche this is my favorite segment, obviously, I think it’s yours as well, but.
It’s fun, but usually we always learn something, or we always figure something out like, oh, I hadn’t thought about that, or wow, that’s working, or you know, so, you know, hopefully some of the, the, the stuff today gives people an idea both in the tools side of things, or how to start a website, you know, I don’t, I did stick with the whiskey or the alcohol theme today, but I, I don’t think mine is quite as good as my Thai guy.
Spencer: That’s hard to beat, Mai Tai guy, so memorable look like he’s, you know, living a great life, so absolutely. Well, very good, Jared we got it, good episode we’ve covered the news, we’ve covered our side hustles, we’ve covered the weird niche. And hopefully everybody listening in either learned something or enjoyed the podcast.
So again, if you would like to leave a review, go over to Apple podcasts, leave that review or anywhere else that you listen to your podcast. Give us a five star review if you think it’s great. And we may read in your comment during the next episode with that. I hope everybody has a great weekend.
