Google SGE Now Summarizes Content + AHREFS Gets Roasted on Reddit + 2 Weird Niche Sites
Welcome back to another episode of the Niche Pursuits News podcast. This week’s show is hosted by Jared Bauman, from 201 Creative, and Jacky Chou, the digital asset investor entrepreneur behind Indexsy, Far & Away, and several other businesses.
The episode kicks off with the latest about SGE, which can now be used when browsing and also offers users the option of summarizing the article they’re reading. Jared shares a small experiment he did to see how well the summarization function works, comparing SGE with Claude and ChatGPT4, and they talk about the implications for content creators.
Will this reduce the time on page? Will it lower ad or affiliate revenue? How will it affect smaller sites vs. authority sites and article length? Is this good news for end users or site owners?
watch the episode
The conversation then shifts to how Tim Soulo, from Ahrefs, recently asked for feedback on Reddit. The company received a lot of backlash on the platform from unhappy users and Jared and Jacky talk about why they think that is and whether or not they believe it’s justified.
The next topic is a highly controversial tweet by Google’s John Mueller, who says “A page doesn’t have to be on a site that’s “related to the niche” in order to be useful and helpful. You don’t need to have a niche site in order to rank in Google, in fact, sometimes that’s a good way not to rank.”
His tweet really waded into a ton of topics and, perhaps most importantly, contradicts the concept of topical authority. Jared and Jacky talk about why Google may have said this, if they think it’s true or not, and whether or not users should pay attention to it or ignore it.
In the Shiny Object Shenanigans portion of the podcast, Jared begins by giving another update on this faceless YouTube channel which, sadly, still doesn’t have enough subscribers to qualify for monetization. He does share some interesting statistics about the videos embedded on his website, he and Jacky talk about different aspects to improve on his channel, and he discusses his future plans on YouTube.
Jacky then talks about parasite SEO and one of his side hustles where he’s spinning up sites on Outlook India and redirecting penalized domains to them, the goal being to earn through Amazon Affiliates. If you want to know how it goes, follow him on Twitter. He also talks about a cold outreach strategy he’s using at the moment and how it’s going.
As for their Weird Niche Sites, Jared shares The Hotdog which is, unsurprisingly, all about hot dogs. This DR31 site ranks for 12.8k keywords and has over 140 pages live. Although it doesn’t appear to be monetized, it does look like a brand play.
Jacky shares the site he found, Beaming Health, which helps users find specific therapists for their kids. He talks about how the autism services market is worth $7 billion and growing, and how search volume for these terms has been increasing by 50-60% each year. He shares a few business ideas related to this niche that he sees as potentially profitable.
Thanks for tuning into another great episode of the Niche Pursuits News podcast. We hope you’re feeling informed and inspired. See you next week!
transcription
Jared: All right, welcome back to another week in niche pursuits news. My name is Jared Bauman today. Spencer is out and we are joined by. Jackie Chow. Jackie, welcome.
Jacky: Happy to be here. Big shoes to fill, so just glad I’m involved
Jared: somehow. Hey, we love having guests come on this when Spencer and I can’t host it.
And I mean, I immediately thought that you’d be a great person to have on. I don’t even know if you actually know this. Your podcast interview we had with you, whatever it was, probably a year ago, it’s probably one of the top five most listened to interviews, at least in the come on board.
Jacky: Yeah, I did notice that. I get a lot of messages from it, and Yeah, that interview actually inspired me to do several other things, like Be more active on Twitter YouTube, so on and so forth, so Have you guys to thank.
Jared: Thank you, we get, we get, we get access to you again today You have a podcast as well that I listen to from time to time that’s very good, so You’re you’re no secret to these podcasts here.
Today we’re talking about news. We do this every week. We get on and we talk about the news. We got some big news items today. How about we go ahead and dive into our first news item? And again, if you’re watching on YouTube, we will share all these things with you on the screen. And if you’re listening, we’ll also just try to walk you through all of it.
Today I think the first topic has to be that Google Search Generative Experience now adds it while browsing and allows you, and probably more importantly, probably the bigger news, allows you to summarize or ask SGE to summarize the article that you’re on. And so this is meant. I mean, I didn’t say this, but this is meant basically to mimic what you can do with Bing Chat now and having that integrated into it.
Let me read you exactly what, what they said here. Google SGE can now be used while browsing Chrome desktop or Google app on iOS or Android. It’s not automated in that humans need to request that SGE summarize the page specifically. Otherwise, it won’t happen. So you kind of have to opt into it.
And then in the upper right, almost like a Chrome extension, you hit the Chrome button sorry, hit the Google button and then say, yes, please summarize this. And then it gives you. Now, Jackie, have you had a chance to play around with this at all yet?
Jacky: Only briefly. And I actually think they’re the reason why they have it like this.
Like you have to opt in is probably for people there. There was so much backlash on the internet with their launch of SG. And then I think a lot of brands were claiming copyright issues not giving consent, so on and so forth. But when people opt in, it’s kind of like. Hey, summarize this article for me.
So it’s, can’t say anything when, when it’s like that.
Jared: I mean, obviously like, so this is a lot of SGE that we’ve been talking about has been how it’s limiting our ability to get traffic from Google search, right? Because they’re taking our content and they’re, they’re, they’re putting it in their, the, the, the SGE results.
So people don’t have to go to our website anymore. This is living on. Our webpage, right? So this is like people have already gotten to our webpage. They’re on our webpage and then they can get a summary of it. So, I mean, early days, but I think, do you, obviously this will probably reduce time on site. Do you think it’ll reduce, say, ad revenue?
Do you think it’ll reduce affiliate revenue? Do you think it’ll reduce revenue in general for people?
Jacky: I think if it is the summarizer time on site will definitely go down. I think it might, this might affect affiliate revenue more than anything. Yeah, because it prompts people to probably just do more research on the top, I don’t know, X, Y, Z, for example the best VPN on the list or something like that.
They’ll just Google Nord VPN instead of clicking the link and going to Nord VPN, if that makes sense. But that, this is just all an hypothesis on user behavior. We’re not, we’re not sure. And Google probably knows more. I,
Jared: I tend to agree with you, like, it’s not good for websites. And again, I guess that the legality of it makes sense.
I’m not a lawyer for the record, but I mean, we are, there’s other ways to get summaries and stuff. But it isn’t taking our content as much as it is just summarizing it. I know ad wise, in terms of ads, like, by and large for those of us who are using like a Mediavine Raptive, even like an Azoic or any of these things, like, most of the money you earn from ad revenue is from like top of the page, right?
So it’s like, the, the, the ad in the header, the ad in the sidebar, the first ad in the content, that’s probably where most of our ad revenue is, so. Yeah, I tend to agree with you. I so here’s what I did. I can’t use SGE in screen sharing. I’m not cool like Spencer, for some reason it doesn’t work for me.
But what I did is this. I took this Search Engine Land article that we’re talking about, and again we’ll kind of include a link in the show notes if you want to read more about this. But I took it and I asked I asked Google or I asked SGE to summarize it. And then I went ahead and I also put it.
In a couple of other AI platforms and ask them to summarize the exact same article. So I’m, I want to share these results and I’m curious to see kind of what you think of it here. Let’s go ahead and make it larger. So what we have right here is the search engine land article and you can see on the right here.
I asked it to summarize. And the SGE summarized this article as, The article reports on new features for Google’s search generative experience, including the ability to summarize web pages while browsing. It does have a little area that looks to be a source, so like a quote or a a link. It says the feature is not available for paywalled content, and then it says Google is also adding definitions for certain words and using color coding to improve coding examples.
So basically it gave me three bullet points. It’s interesting. We know bullet points are great for users. It’s interesting to see them utilize that. So, next what I did is I went over to Cloud. And am I pronou… Do you know how to pronounce that, by the way? Cloud? What does it mean? Man, we got a lot of pushback a couple weeks ago because I think I was saying it wrong.
But I, I still think it’s Cloud, but it’s the French version. Anyways, so if you haven’t played around with Cloud. ai, that’s C L A U D E dot A I. I put it and said, please summarize this article for me. Almost the same thing. It gave me five bullet points back, a little bit more detailed. It went into how SGE is browsing, definition overlays, color coded syntax.
It talks about the summarizing, but it does go into a little more detail. It talks about definitions, it talks about coding updates, and then it does say at the very end which I’m wondering if Cloud, because they’re not owned by Google, chose to leave this in, and Google did, but it says these features bring SGE closer to Bing Chat’s capabilities and may help readers.
Understand content better. And then one more. I put it in the chat GPT four, and I asked it to summarize it. And it gave me a much more in depth summary, including the date it was published, the author, reading time, and then it gave me, how many, five? Five different points with multiple bullet points underneath them.
So I won’t read all that, but what do you think of the SGE in practice there?
Jacky: In practice I mean, it’s helpful for the user for sure. Nobody’s reading the long blog posts anymore especially not in the age of AI and adding onto that, like, I think the front page of Google is riddled with optimized content, which is probably two to 5k words per article, you know I don’t know about you.
I’ve never read an article over 2k. I’m skimming half the time. So, with that said, this is a great feature for the end user. Which I guess Google’s going for, and probably terrible for site owners. Because this is eyeballs away from the site, right? You’re turning your head to the right. Looking at the summer summary and time away from eyeballs away from the site means less money in the advertiser’s pocket, meaning less money in the site owner’s pocket.
So. I would say not great for site owners, great for the end user. So probably, this will probably be rolled out.
Jared: Do you here’s a question that I, I have, like, I mean, I, and again, we’re gonna have to, we’re speculating a lot here, but do we have to continue to write? Like, you know, I’ve been thinking long term, like couple, couple years down the road.
Are we gonna still be writing two, three thousand word articles? And then just knowing that they’re gonna get summarized? And the vast majority of users just want that summary, but we have to have it in there to hit things like the right types of keywords, the right types of sentiments, the right types of of, of word choices for the natural languaging processor.
Or, do you think we kind of end up writing much shorter form content down the road because it’s more of, like you said, what the user wants anyways?
Jacky: Yeah, I think it will most likely be shorter in the future. I think they’ll, they’ll put more trust in authority sites. We already see that on the front page of Google.
We’ll touch on that. Hence why the emergence of Parasite SEO. So I think they’ll put less weighting on number, total number of words and probably more weighting on how authoritative the site is.
Jared: Going back to a brand and links, but again, we, we, we digress. I am looking forward to some of these things we’re talking about later on you and I have a sneak peek at the agenda here.
Yeah, I mean, I’ll just say I will close with this. I’ll I’ve used AI for a whole lot of different things. Tried it out for a whole lot of different things. Tried to see how I could use it for a lot of different things. Summarizing stuff is one of my favorite ways to use it. So you’re right as a user.
It’s, it’s pains me to say as a user, it does make a ton of sense. And as content creators, it kind of sucks. Yeah. Yeah. Let us know in the comments if you’ve used it, what you think of it. And if you agree with some of our thoughts or not, I mean, we’re really very much just speculating. Okay. Shall we move on to topic number two here?
Sounds good. All right. Next up in the news is, ahrefs went on to Reddit Tim Sulu from Ahrefs I don’t actually know his official title. I think he’s in charge of marketing over there. Pretty well known, yeah, yeah, he’s a pretty well known figure in the SEO community. He’s been there for quite a while.
They went to Reddit to to ask for feedback. And interesting because they’ve been doing that for years. And as we know, Ahrefs has been going through a ton of changes in terms of how their platform works. Probably most importantly, how their subscription model works and how the access to their new features works.
I’m being as generic here as I can. And so anyways, he went to Reddit to get some feedback on this. Now, there’s been a lot of frustrations about Ahrefs, and it seemed to kind of spill over here. Let me turn it over to you, because you’re the one who brought this news item here. I had seen it, but I’m glad we’re talking about it, because Ahrefs is such a popular, you know, search or SEO tool, really.
I mean, we use it every single week on the podcast to go look at sites. 10 minutes with my agency and it needs to be talked about. We got to talk about, you know, ah, stress from time to time. And this is probably a pretty big news item for the week.
Jacky: Yeah, I think for the record, I use Ahrefs. I’ve tried SEMrush in the past.
Always stuck to Ahrefs. But I do believe this this game is for them to lose. Not for them to win. And I don’t think when Tim went on Reddit to ask for feedback, he was expecting to get dunked on like a hundred times in an hour. It was pretty intense. And I think some of the comments Are not really justified.
They kind of went in pretty hard on him. And I think this, this feedback session was the result of them making certain business choices throughout the last, I think, two, two years, they do it every two years, I believe. And, like the friend of our friend from the pod Patrick Stocks, who’s like the nicest guy ever, who happens to jump in from time to time, giving their justifications on their changes gets dunked on even harder.
And I don’t think that’s justified at all, but I think if there’s complaints about, for example, usage, how they charge, how they bill for usage their crediting system, I mean, I can see the. Backlash from it, but I think everyone complains from a user point of view, but I think top line when they make these changes, they’re not stupid.
They’re like, I’m pretty sure they’re a hundred million dollar plus company. They’ve ran the numbers. So they’ve most likely calculated that the whales will always stay. And if we’re able to charge them on a crediting basis. That their top line will grow and I don’t know what their cap table is like so cap table meaning like how much rent venture capital They raised but they’re at the end end of the day the the board their main Duty is to return money to their shareholders, right?
And at the end of the day, it’s not charity. They don’t owe us anything by trying to you know Charge us 49 bucks a month and keep it there forever on Unadjusted for inflation So I think in their slight defense, I think people need to go easy on them because they’re a business at the end of the day and they have changes that I don’t agree with, but people tend to forget that, you know, they, they’re a private business.
They’re not like SEMrush that they can just swing that public capital market money, you know,
Jared: I couldn’t agree with you more. I’m super glad. I wish you should have been in that Reddit group. Or that reddit thread because it was, yeah, it was a lot of a lot of critique. I think you’re right in separating the business decisions from some of the issues that are very real and noticeable.
Because there are different issues, right? Like a company choosing to raise prices, a company choosing to target a different type of the market is all part and parcel with companies as they grow. I’ve done the same thing at my agency over the years. We’re a lot more expensive than we were when we started four years ago.
As we’ve learned who we want to work with, and who we want to serve, and who we do best with, we’ve changed our, who we target from a customer basis. So, there’s nothing wrong with that inherently. I think you summed it up really well. I think a lot of the frustrations are when that’s happening, and then there’s service outages, there’s reduced functionality in an area that you really like or enjoy, or you’re seeing something new get released, but you don’t have access to it, and so it kind of becomes like a mixed bag for people, like it’s hard to separate.
Hey, when I log into Ahrefs, and it doesn’t work, that’s frustrating. They’ve just doubled the price, and I don’t understand their credit system, and they don’t even like Me as a business anymore. Now I’m really angry. So there’s like a lot going on there right now.
Jacky: Yeah. And I guess to that, that’s the beauty of a free market, right?
You can just cancel your subscription, quit complaining and just go to SEMrush. They’re just certain functions just aren’t as good. And honestly, I think SEMrush, while maybe their data has caught, like caught up in the last couple of years, their user experience is still not there. It’s for me personally.
I. I used it for a month, but I always go back to Ahrefs. So it’s, that’s just, that’s just the type of thing, you know, if you’re a Mac user, you’re going to pay more for a Mac than a PC just because of the user experience. Well, that’s how I shop at least. So there’s always going to be the people who will stay with Ahrefs.
And I think people should just stop complaining. And if you want to complain, just vote with your money, then just cancel your subscription and stop complaining. That’s it. And then they’ll realize.
Jared: Right and and that’s the thing like it’s tough because there are a lot of other providers out there And I always I always wrestle it because I use Ahrefs and I’d like you played around with SEMrush There’s some cool things I like about SEMrush, but by and large I prefer Ahrefs data I prefer their filtering and I prefer their organization, and I just think I can get my job done better over there and You know, but I’m always wondering like, oh, is it because I’m used to Ahrefs, I grew up on Ahrefs, I feel like I’m indoctrinated with them, that I like it better?
Or you know, is it just because it actually does work a bit better for me? The challenge I think a lot of people listening will have too is that… You know, depending on where you are at in your journey, most people that I talk with only have enough budget earmarked for like one big SEO tool, right? So like you go to an agency they’re going to have like a subscription to SEMrush and Ahrefs and Majestic and Moz and like, you know, they can kind of do all these things.
But a lot of us just kind of side hustlers, site builders, like… It’s a big day when we have enough money to afford the lowest tier plan for HRFs. And so it’s not like we can be like, well, I’ll just do some HRFs and some SEMREFs. Like, you really almost have to pick at one point until you get to a pretty high level, really.
Jacky: Yeah, that’s true. And I mean, to that, I use probably HRFs for 90% of my SEO work. 90. Like, on most small sites, what else do you need, right? You have an agency,
Jared: so, you know. Yeah, it’s,
Jacky: it’s really not that, yeah, it’s great. I think I… I can’t really think of, if you, if I had to choose one tool, it’d still be Ahrefs.
I don’t, I don’t think I can choose another one. I don’t even think it comes close, actually, for me, personally, I don’t know. But you can get the job done with the cheaper tools out there. Yeah. Also, you, if you want to be scrappy, just buy some credits on keywords everywhere. And then you’ll be, you’ll be right on your way.
I think less competitor. What is it called? Less compare insights, but you can find that elsewhere too. You can find,
Jared: yeah, exactly. So, yeah, it reminds me and we can close out on the topic. You know I got an email a couple weeks ago from Evernote and they are doubling their yearly fee. And I was like, wow, doubling the yearly fee, that, you know, and it gets you kind of frustrated and flustered.
And then you’re like, well. I mean, I’ve got 20, 000 nodes in Evernote, and I, I, I use it a lot, and, you know I still like it enough, and it’s just one of those things that’s kind of part and parcel, and just, it’s a good chance to reevaluate, perhaps, and make sure it’s the right tool for you, but you know, at some point and a lot of people agree that it’s, still has a, so much great functionality, so.
That’s been a, a, a news item that’s come up and come down over the years, so I’m glad we kind of touched on it. Let’s move into the last one. This one, you, man, Jack, you just joined us on a, a little bit of a controversial week here. So we, we had a, I guess it’s, it’s, I guess it’s news. That’s probably the best way to put it.
It’s hard to find a way to sh, to say exactly what kind of news it is. But what I’ve got up in front here is a tweet from John Mueller. with Google and he talks basically says in this and it’s, it’s in as part of a larger thread, which we might or might not get into, but he says, and I quote, a page doesn’t have to be on a site that’s related to the niche in order to be useful and helpful, quote, you don’t need to have a niche site in order to rank in Google.
In fact, sometimes that’s a good way not to rank. And and we can get into it. This sir ruffled a ton of feathers. And ended up with a lot of comments from people that we know and love and and a lot of sharing, a lot of discussion around it. I have thoughts, but, but let’s, let’s kind of wade into this idea of, cause I think this is what it’s really touching on is niche sites versus large brand sites topical authority.
And if we get benefit from niching down or not niching down, like it, it really waded into a ton of topics here.
Jacky: Yeah, first off, I’m not sure. If john Mueller knows exactly what’s going on behind the scenes of like a search, like a Google algorithm, or if he’s just saying that because it’s part of their playbook or what they’re trying to achieve, if that makes sense, like they want the most helpful and useful content on the front page of Google.
But I mean, Jared, you and I know that’s not the case. Like I would say 10. So with that said We have to understand the reasoning why he said, like, you know, niche sites maybe aren’t the best way to rank for a certain topic, like a dog, a pet site might not be the best site to be on the front page of I don’t know, best dog food.
And that’s, their argument is for, I don’t know, a more authoritative site. But, yeah, I think this touches on, this contradicts Pretty much topical authority, right?
Jared: Which they also came out a couple weeks ago saying that topical authority is and has been a thing. Yeah, so
Jacky: it’s quite contradicting and I think their lack of transparency often confuses SEOs or people who own media sites.
And I think at this point in time and at our point where we’re at in our, you know, career, we know to take everything Google says with a grain of salt. So, with that said, I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen what Jamie IF said, he pretty much dunked on John Mueller. What a
Jared: tweet, I wish I had that in front of me, but yeah, Jamie IF was probably the most thorough and thought out answer for sure.
It was very long, and very well thought out, and I mean, really dove into the topic from a niche site standpoint for sure.
Jacky: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what’s the best way to approach this topic. But to perhaps like try to take their point of view on it, but the thing I struggle I struggle Maybe I’m too biased at this point But I struggle to find a reason for Google to rank sites like Outlook India Like Forbes like all the parasites sites out there above Someone who dedicated their life to talking about dogs, you know, I mean I struggle.
I don’t know Can you think of any? Arguments in their point of view, because I mean, we can dunk on them all we want, but I think it’d be interesting to take their point of view on
Jared: this argument. From a high level, I think you’re saying a lot of the same things I’ve always said, like a lot of people look at the quality radar guidelines as keys to their algorithm.
And I almost look at it like, no, this is almost like the manifesto that’s on the wall. As you walk into the building at Google, it’s what they want to be. It’s not necessarily what they are, you know, it’s, it’s. It’s like being married. It’s like, hey, I’m trying to be this person for you, for my spouse every day.
But we all know that, you know, that never happens. Like, only once in a while does it happen. And so, this sounds a lot like that to me. This sounds a lot like a long, long standing effort of Google trying to say like, hey, what we want Google to look like is that we’re going to serve the best page. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve written 20 articles on it.
It doesn’t matter if you have topical authority. It doesn’t matter if it’s the only topic. If it’s the best, We’ll surface it, yet we know that the only way that Google can determine it’s the best is at this point, through things like links, through things like other, you know, building topical authority through clustering, internal linking the semantical referencing of of entities throughout your website, and it works so far because links are like votes, and talking about a topic in depth, both breadth and depth, means that The algorithm can understand that, and it would be very difficult for Google to understand what a page is without having all that going for it.
And it’s hard to see them say this when Outlook India is ranking for so many terms, which we’ll get into in the next part of our of our, of our, of our podcast here. But, yeah, to me it’s a big, big statement of what we’re trying to be versus what we really are. Yeah, I
Jacky: agree.
Jared: What do we do with it though?
Do we pay attention to it or do we just ignore it? You know, like I think that’s to some degree you read something like that and I got a little frustrated a lot of the commentary I saw there You know, and let’s be clear There was definitely I would say I will say that John Mueller was a little rude to people who consider themselves niche website builders That’s a bit of an aside.
And so there’s definitely a stereotype there. So do we ignore what he’s saying here? Or do we try to read in and kind of glean something from it? Since we’re not outlook India, we’re not Forbes and we don’t have DR 80 sites at our disposal.
Jacky: Yeah, I think, I mean, to his defense, I think English is his second language, and he’s Swiss, so I think he might not be rude.
He might just not be Oh, totally. Like I said, I felt that way. Yeah, yeah. I definitely felt it, too.
Jared: I felt it, too. You know, I don’t know if he, I’m not, to your point, not even really sure that he understands what a niche website looks like today. Compared to the stereotype of what it was 10 years ago or five years ago, right?
Like there’s a stereotype around it that a lot of people in SEO will toss around. And I think he was more lean into that stereotype than he was, what we actually are trying to accomplish right now, to be fair to him.
Jacky: Yeah, yeah, I think to answer your question, I think we do need to listen to that because that is their end goal, right?
So they may not be there right now, but they’ll, they’re aiming for that. So don’t, you know, don’t progress because they’re like trillion dollar company, I think. So they’ll eventually get there. So maybe if we start there, work towards, maybe start working backwards. It could be a good, good good way to approach it.
But I think maybe just closing out, I think taking their side of the argument with the emergence of AI, you can reach topical authority with a click of a button, right? That’s exactly. So if we want to argue that it’s tough, cause it’s getting so good right now. Perhaps going after authority, like ranking authoritative sites is the only way for them to keep the front page of Google spam free.
Otherwise, people like me will just roll up hundreds of these spammy sites, right?
Jared: To their point, they’d probably rather have a Forbes or a, you know, SFGate up there than, you know, who knows what you’re gonna crank
Jacky: out, right? Yeah, than Jackie’s fourth, like, fortieth dog site, you know? Exactly. I think that’s the only argument I can think of.
That’s a good point. And I think, yeah, it’s probably the best. This is their best, this, like best, I don’t know, path right now, so they can’t, they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, so.
Jared: It I agree 100%. You gotta pay attention to this stuff because, you know, whether or not it makes sense to us Individuals whether or not we think it all connects or not It’s where things are going that matters and they hold the keys of the kingdom with that.
So hmm good topics there in the news I yeah, I that one’s that was I mean we hit three really interesting topics there. So this is normally the phase where Spencer will read out a recent comment or review. I don’t have access to that, man. I might have been hosting a podcast for a couple years, but I don’t even know how to log into the Niche Pursuit account.
So I, I’m not gonna do that, but… I’m pretty sure Spencer’s back next week, so if you do leave a comment, whether it’s on Apple Podcasts, or, you know, somewhere else, and leave a review we, we always like to, to pick one to read out loud and we appreciate the reviews, we have never really asked for them, and and it’s good, speaking of algorithms, it helps, so, leave us a review if you do kind of enjoy what we do here.
It’s time now for shiny object shenanigans. This is the, the section where we talk about shiny object projects that we have going on. And Jackie, I, I know you well enough to know that you probably have no shortage of shiny objects. So,
Jacky: I, yeah, I need help, man. I need to seek some, I don’t know, need to see somebody about
Jared: this.
This hasn’t, this podcast weekly hasn’t been helpful for me because I’ve always had a few, but then I can… But now I’m like, well, I got to have something to talk about this next week. So I should lean into it. So we’re both talking a little bit. I got to go to my notes here. We’re both talking a little bit about about a couple of different things that we have here.
I’ll touch, I’ll start and just touch on a couple of things that I have going on. I know people will be kind of interested in a little bit of an update. Last week, I talked about a faceless YouTube channel that I had. Started a year ago for a website and forgotten about, just completely forgot, like hadn’t logged in in 10 months, didn’t even know what it was like.
And I was reminded and I checked and I was about 65 subscribers away and had checked all the other boxes from being able to monetize this account. So yeah. And so, so anyways, I shared about kind of the things I was gonna be doing last week. I am sad to report that. I’m at 481 subscribers at time of recording.
So given that But
Jacky: you got the, sorry, you got the viewer
Jared: hours or whatever? Yep, it’s had the, what is it, 3, 000 watch hours in the last year or so? And what are the other qualifiers? Three videos in the last three months or something? So yeah, it, it, it got like 6, 000 watch hours in the last year since I started it.
But it’s only at 400 and I think it was 436 or 437 subscribers. So, it only gets about like 35 subscribers a month organically. So, I was gonna try a couple things to get new subscribers. I, we emailed the list we have for that website. We created a bunch of shorts and published a couple videos that we had that made sense from Amazon Influencer videos we’d done.
And so it did get a bunch more views. It did get almost 50 subscribers, but we’re still about 19 short. So, maybe next week I can report that we’re monetized. It was interesting though, one thing to share is… I did a bit of a deep dive based on someone’s question. ’cause we had embedded these videos on all of our articles on this website.
And I went and looked at the data from YouTube because they will report how much I they will report how many videos got viewed from di from embed, from embed, mm-hmm. . So assuming that nobody else embedded this and I didn’t know how to check for that, and I’m the only one who embedded it. Basically About 2.
7% of people that visited an article last year ended up watching a video that was embedded. I thought it was a really interesting stat. I didn’t know what to expect. But it basically, and these, these videos are at the bottom of the blog post. And so about 3%, roughly speaking, of all page views ended up watching a video.
Which, you know, given how high bounce rates are and average time on page, all that, like, I think that’s pretty compelling. So anyways, I don’t know. Have you explored any faceless YouTube stuff? Yeah,
Jacky: yeah, for sure. I’ve made good money from it. Yeah, I, I typically try more black hat techniques like hearing you being 19 subscribers away.
I would have just bought that. I was thinking about it. Yeah, just, just
Jared: do it, man. You can just, you can just, can you run like an ad for a subscriber campaign?
Jacky: You could, or you could buy 19 subscribers for 19. It’ll be like five cents or something like that. It would be something stupid. If, especially if it’s like for a threshold, it won’t hurt.
It’s so little. Yeah. And plus you’re focused on views anyways, right? You don’t make money from subscribers. But yeah yeah, we’ve done it before. I think we did celebrity homes did pretty well. I think it still makes like 30 bucks a month, but can’t be can’t be bothered to work on that. That makes sense.
Yeah, I get, I get no, yeah, it’s just doesn’t make money, but I see why people make money from it. It’s, it’s like not, it’s a me thing. It’s not a industry thing. I think it’s a great. Niche to be in, but yeah, I think I spoke to Jake Thomas. He has a faceless YouTube video and he says he’s crushing it. And how good are your thumbnails and titles?
I would, I would just start there.
Jared: Yeah, they’re not good. They were like the free Canva, you know, like the first thing in Canva, just plug it in and no optimization, no. Trying to come up with, you know, a catchy, I think it’s just the title of the like blog or the video, right? Instead of like a captivating title with, you know, clickbait and that kind of stuff.
Yeah,
Jacky: try I found that Fiverr, a 5 thumbnail is better than me doing it myself on Canva. So maybe check, check that out. Click through rates, you’re, you should be expecting like 5 to 10%. I noticed some of my
Jared: 1. 2%
Jacky: I checked. Yeah, yeah. So when, one time, one, one thing I’ve done is I swapped out a thumbnail before and it just ran, it was like pumped.
Yeah. So try, try that out.
Jared: I’ve been seeing a little bit on Twitter that you’ve been experimenting with thumbnails for some of your, man, you did a killer video on AI AI writers. Highly recommend that. And weren’t you playing around with the the thumbnail on that? Yeah.
Jacky: The winner actually was a 5.
Fiverr. No way. Contractor. Yeah. And versus me spending like three hours on Canva. So. Nope. It’s not my, it’s not my thing. It’s not my thing. I I’ll be the first to admit it.
Jared: Well, it, the, all the YouTube news of the week, last week got me a little bit reinvigorated to publish some videos on my weekend growth YouTube channel.
So I did release. A Amazon influencer month to update, which I know Jackie, you’re a bit skeptical of this whole influencer thing. No, I’m kidding. I’m giving you a hard time. But you can go check that out on the weekend growth, YouTube channel and I’m going to be putting more time into this as a side hustle.
I did a lot of weekend growth stuff in the first part of the year, and then took a break from it. And this just kind of reminded me there’s, there’s so many good things about YouTube, and I have a great potential channel there to grow, and I should focus on. So I published a video, and I recorded two more this week.
So they’ll be published over the coming weeks as well. And it’s kind of, you know, this this faceless YouTube channel, like even at 500 subscribers and the number of views it gets, it’s not going to make a lot of money. I think I was sharing last week, I’m hoping for like a hundred bucks a month. So that’s all well and good, but it did reinvigorate me for YouTube.
So onwards and upwards of that. Yeah.
Jacky: I think you should focus on the weekend growth channel, man. Some of the numbers for like, for example, the AI writer video made me so much money. So did the backlinks one try it out, try it out. Yeah, I think it would
Jared: crush. I think I need to put actual effort.
Like a lot of what I’ve been doing is, is taking like an email that I wrote and I was like, Oh, that email did really well. Let me just make a video out of it. Right. And that’s. That’s, that’s not really the best way to approach it, you know? And so I feel like after this week thinking more about it, like I need to actually take a little bit more of a YouTube approach to YouTube rather than a content writing approach to YouTube.
Jacky: Yeah. Yeah. People love case studies. That goes bonkers. You should try it out.
Jared: What’s going on in your world? Which of the many side hustles do you have going on that you want to talk about today?
Jacky: Yeah, so I have two things on the list. First is Parasite SEO because if you can’t beat them, you got to join them.
So I spun out, spun up a bunch of sites on Outlook India at 300 bucks a pop and They just went live today and I’ve redirected three or four penalized domains to it Choose it up and I’ll report back on Definitely on Twitter to see what happens and this is just a simple Amazon affiliate play. I’m not gonna, it’s nothing too crazy here.
So it’s just like a best, best recliners type of article because I figured if they can rank for best test boosters on the front page of Google, then recliners should be a walk in the park with some backlinks, right? So that was my hypothesis.
Jared: You’ve got 300 bucks. You’re not doing one. You’re doing a bunch
Jacky: Yeah, because I mean it’s gotta go big or go home.
So yeah, and also on other news i’ve recently got one of my Parasite’s taken down because it was getting too much traffic. So I think the site’s like no, no, no good. They took it down. It was one of my VPN affiliate sites, so I’m quite upset about that. It was on the front page top five for like a best VPN keyword and that was making a couple grand a month.
So I’m pretty upset about that. But you know, we’re gonna, we’re gonna spin that up again, try to dodge, dodge on the tech admin from now on. And yeah, it’s, these things are more of like. Tests to see if it’ll work and if they do work, for example, if I have a client who does, who sells protein powder, then guess what I’m going to go out and try to rank for it’s going to be best protein powder.
It might not be on their site, but I can show, Hey, Hey client that has been with me for three months look at first place and then they click through and it’s them. Everyone’s happy. They get a, you know, they get a uplift in commissions. You just have a happy client for 300 bucks.
Jared: Give people who don’t understand the nuance of a Parasite SEO like a 30 second overview.
I mean, basically the idea is you’re building a site and you’re a DR 25. And so for competitive terms, you go, you look at the SERPs for your, your, your, your competitive term, and it’s dominated by high DR sites, highly authoritative sites that don’t have any business ranking for it, but are ranking for it because they wrote an article on it and they have a DR 85.
And so Parasite SEO is. In like 30 seconds, maybe tell us what it is.
Jacky: Yeah just think a guest post on someone else’s blog, but instead of the goal being to get backlinks, you’re trying to get traffic onto that page, pushing your own offers. So, for example, I would post, I would try to, if I want to push NordVPN.
I would post best VPN UK onto their site and try to rank for it. And because their site is like DR frigging like 80 something they have a higher chance of ranking than, you know, Jackie’s VPN. com, you know so yeah, DR and all I have to do is build a couple of backlinks there and they’re more resilient to dirty backlinks as well.
So you just, so
Jared: you can throw all your old age domains at it. Exactly.
Jacky: So we’ll report back what happens,
Jared: but I am hopeful. Parasite SEO has been increasing in its chatter these days, right? Like it’s becoming more and more relevant as it’s harder and harder to break into the top 10 with good content, right?
Jacky: Yeah. And I think yeah. We’ll report back. I think people shouldn’t jump on this just because it’s the hype, but if people are curious, people should Google NorCal. Marketing and look at the columns they have. And I actually use them for keyword research. Now if you Google NorCal marketing, you’ll see, they’ll have a column in Dallas news, Miami Herald, Outlook India, you know, all these local news sites for some reason, and they’re all pushing best protein powder, best testosterone booster, all these pharma keywords.
And they’re all, and they’re all interlinked. So it’s like a. Weird. It’s
Jared: a parasite.
Jacky: PBN. Yeah, pretty much. And they’re all interlinked and I don’t know how they interlink is so nicely because I don’t know which site that means the page that went live first gets no links. I don’t know, or I don’t, or the last one that goes live doesn’t guess no links.
It’s interesting to look into.
Jared: Okay. I wrote it down. I’m going to go look at this.
Jacky: Yeah. Yeah. You should try to get the guy from NorCal marketing as a guest. We weren’t able to, but I’m sure with your, with your charm, you’ll be able to get them to spill some spill the beans.
Jared: It’s just about the lighting.
That’s all that it was. It’s just the blue lights, the blue shirt, you know, hopefully he likes blue.
Jacky: Amazing.
Jared: Well, we want to hear back about this. That’s
Jacky: for sure. We’ll do, we’ll do. And then besides that, I’ve been dabbling into cold outreach. So what that means is scraping emails. So it’s, you know, in the SEO space, instead of trying to buy backlinks from these site owners, you’re trying to pitch them services.
But instead of site owners, I’m pitching new AI companies to sponsor a marketing letter which is my newsletter. Yeah, and it’s been going well. It’s I’m day two. I got eight people responding, asking for pricing two meetings booked. And a lot of emails sent. And this is like a whole industry in itself.
There’s so many nuances that I didn’t know about. For example, you have to warm up an email for three weeks before sending. You have to verify emails to make sure they don’t bounce. What
Jared: else? When we’ve done this for clients in the past, we’ve, I’ve also believed, used Mechanical Turk for verifying and responding to emails, right?
So you want to warm up your account. But and the concept here is like, you can’t just go sending thousands of emails out right away without any history. It’s a lot like building a ton of backlinks to a brand new website, right? Like that, that’s a good way to end up in the sandbox for a long time. Same stuff kind of exists when you’re emailing from a domain.
And so you know, like replies help the inbox send good signals. And so we’ve had people like, you know, reply, like Mechanical Turk. We’ve hired people to reply to emails we send in the first couple of weeks. Yeah.
Jacky: And this is just another, I would say marketing or sales channel for your brand. And instead of buying one impression on Twitter, you’re buying one impression via these automation tools.
But so. What’s more important is the direct response copywriting. So what that means is, you know, when you get those cold emails in your inbox and you’re like, that’s a terrible subject line, why did I just open this? But it’s always like quick question, Jared, but I don’t know, for some reason that gets the highest click through rates.
I’ve tested like 50 at this point and that’s still the highest. And yeah, gotta, gotta keep testing, but it’s all. It’s not so much as I used to think cold outreach was a sales thing, but it’s definitely more of like a testing thing. It feels like an AB, like a constant AB test, which is fascinating to me.
So I’m, I’m going to definitely dive deeper into this cause this is relevant in all B2B spaces,
Jared: Right now. It’s also relevant for everybody listening. I think I posted on Twitter probably about a year ago now, where I did that for one of my, my niche sites and I direct outreach to companies in that niche.
Offering for them to purchase a banner ad or a spot, a sponsorship in our, in our tiny little email newsletter. And I think I, I don’t remember how many I sent like 87 emails in one day and I got a couple of responses and one person bought and they bought a 2, 000 kind of little package there. It took like 45 minutes, you know?
And so like, you know, even if you run like Mediavine ads, like you can still place banner ads and sell those. And you know, if you have an email list and it’s. It’s very targeted. It’s probably not the size of, of your, of your, of your marketing newsletter, but even a small but highly relevant and targeted newsletter, you know, you can sell ad placement in that.
So it’s relevant even if you’re not trying to grow a huge newsletter, but just trying to get some extra money for a website you already have. Yeah,
Jacky: exactly. And I urge SEOs to give it a try, especially it’s a, why not? You can use that cold email outreach skill anywhere. Yeah. So good point. I think it’s a good time to start that right now.
Jared: All right. Well, very good. Let’s move on to our final topic of the day, which is usually depend on what we come up with. Arguably Spencer and I’s favorite, and that is the weird niche. Segment where we share one weird niche. We each bring a, a niche to the table. Now, weird can be defined by a number of different things.
Obviously it could just be flat out weird, which you’ve had a lot of ’em over the, over the weeks and weeks. But weird could also just be, Hey, it’s earning money in a very weird way, or it’s monetized, or it’s growing, or it’s getting traffic in a, in a very weird way. So weird’s kind of open-ended. I’ll go ahead and go first.
I’m gonna go ahead and share my screen here. I’m doing much better today on the screen sharing. Normally in Spencer’s absence, I kind of fall apart when we start sharing screens, but I. I think this is the first time it’s come up today. I haven’t blown it yet. So, my weird niche today is thehotdog. org. And as you can imagine, it is a site dedicated entirely to hot dogs.
Now, that is a good site to talk about right now, given that it’s summertime. And I don’t eat many hot dogs. I don’t really eat many hot dogs in general. But my kids do like hot dogs quite a bit in the summer. Put them on the barbecue. I mean, I am shocked that there is a website that is dedicated…
Entirely to hot dogs and it’s not just a one off one page website there are so many articles if you’re watching on screen I am just scrolling endlessly through hot dogs And through hot dog articles and stuff Pop it over to ah refs and it is a dr. 31 It’s it’s got ranks for twelve thousand eight hundred keywords estimated traffic is twenty two thousand 800.
If I pop over and I look, it’s got 141 pages live. That’s a pretty topically authoritative website on on hot dogs here. And I, I think I’ll, I’ll just leave it at this. As I click into an article, I don’t think that the site is monetized. I, yeah, I scroll through. And there, that might be an ad right there.
No, that’s a direct link to Epicurious. I’m looking. I’m scrolling through like a recipe right now, and there’s no ads. I’m looking at the sidebar, and there’s no ads. Let me go over to an article here. Are hot dogs gluten free? And as I scroll down, I mean… By all accounts, they’re doing a great job.
They’re embedding the YouTube video and it looks like it’s from their account, the hot dog, 424 subscribers. They’re using headers and formatting bullet points, but no ads. All I see is down the bottom right is an Amazon link to buy something that cooks two hot dogs and two buns at the same time.
Jacky: Hmm.
Interesting. So I did find on the footer, it says owned by the Gilardi group. Which funny enough, they also, they own franchises of restaurants. Do they, isn’t that odd? Yeah. They own like the Wiener schnitzel they own hamburger stand. Yeah. Crazy.
Jared: Interesting. You know, I can’t tell me times we have dug into some website here on the podcast and then gone and gone in and seen that they’re owned by like a larger company or a media company or something like that.
I mean, I don’t see any references to their brands here. I mean, they’re doing a great job with internal linking. Let me see if maybe this here’s a best hotdog brands. They talk about Applegate farms. Maybe they own some of these brands or something, but again, they don’t even link to them. There’s like no affiliate links here.
It’s so fascinating. There’s wiener schnitzel and they do link to wiener schnitzel. Aha. Jackie, I think you figured it out. I think it’s just a, it just must just be a, a brand play. Yeah. Oh, here it is. The company has recently promoted president J. R. Gilardi to president. Interesting. Okay. So it is like a brand play.
Well, that makes a lot of sense. The Glar Group incorporated. I wonder if he started this on his spare time. Yeah, that’s,
Jacky: and I think this might be AI content, but do you, don’t, don’t quote me on this could be an easy pitch. You should be like, you should reach out to them, their con their, their group of restaurants and say, Hey I found your site.
The hotdog, the hotdog dog org. You should monetize better and we’ll help you do that. It should be an easy
Jared: agency pitch. It should be an agency pitch, you’re right. Gotta, gotta be,
Jacky: always be
Jared: closing. ABC, my friend, ABC, always be closing. By the way, final comment on this one. What, what, what about a hot dog necessitates a
org? Nothing. I mean, I know you can buy anything you want, but it’s just so funny. It’s like, why do you think org, you’re not an organization.
Jacky: Yeah, I think it was short and sweet at the, at the time. Yeah, you’re right. Dot com not available. Your, your weird niche is very weird. Mine was more, I thought of it more like, interesting, fast growing industry. I like it. So that was my, my take on it. So, to give everyone insights on our background my, my girlfriend actually works with kids with autism.
So I was doing keyword research for her site and her keyword is ABA therapy. And I found this site, Beaming Health. And so I dug a bit deeper into it. I was like, I checked the Ahrefs trends on ABA therapy. It’s like exponential growth on the search volumes around autism. And I think beaming health stands to profit largely from this growth in people getting people getting like confirmed that they have autism.
And I wanted to look up some stats for beaming or the. Autism service market and it is approximately seven billion dollars annually and their search volume has been growing like 50 60 percent year on year like Keywords such as like am I like autism test, etc, etc and one fun fact that I didn’t know about Autism services in the u.
s. Is the average person spends about sixty thousand dollars a year Jeez, really on aba therapy
Jared: And that is the average diagnosed or is that like across all of us?
Jacky: No, that’s just someone who’s diagnosed because it’s covered by health insurance. And then I went even deeper into this industry because of how I am.
But on Twitter, there’s people in the SMB space. SMB being like small to medium sized businesses, like local businesses, and they mentioned ABA therapy clinics that do, I think, four to five million dollars a year with three or four staff, and super high margins, they just have multiple locations around town.
And all they’re doing is just billing these insurance companies. So I think people… I didn’t want to release this because my girlfriend’s in this niche, but she… We’re in Canada, so it’s a bit different up here, but if you’re listening… listeners are into directories, I think starting an ABA focused directory would be a good play right now because it’s growing so quickly.
So being the Yelp. For, like, Beaming Health is pretty much trying to be the Yelp for everything behavioral services. But if you niche down to like ABA therapy, I think there’s something there. And you will be growing into an industry that is experiencing exponential growth. And yeah, that’s my weird niche.
It’s more like interesting to me, but That’s just a fun fact that I think most people didn’t know about.
Jared: This content is really well done. You know just looking at it from a high level, right, like obviously you’re in the health space, and so your content has to be pretty darn good, but it checks all the boxes about, you know, having a PhD, reviewing it love at the top here, how it says highlights, and it, that looks like the SGE summarize that we had at the very beginning of this, does it not?
Yeah, it does. And then, you know, obviously we’ve got this beautiful, big infographic. That is is really easy to kind of engage with, like, you know, like this is complicated stuff. I mean, your girlfriend does it for a living. So, you know, she obviously understands at a different level and, and you probably as well, just from from also being with her, but this is complicated stuff and does a really good job breaking it all down.
And to your point, like this website goes super wide in terms of all the different types of stuff it covers. And it’s absolutely doing great. I 30 something. It’s doing really well. So,
Jacky: yep. Well, they raised about 2 million in venture capital end of last year, 2022. So December. So I’m sure that has a lot to do with how great the website is because they’re able to, you know, hire doctors, et cetera, et cetera.
But yeah, I think this is a space to watch out for.
Jared: Well, Jackie, where can people follow along with you? You know, sure. I know you’ve got, you’ve got an agency, you’ve got a podcast. You’re a great follow on Twitter. You’re always sharing very fascinating things like a breakdown of how much you earn from a YouTube video that I need to be doing more of stuff like that.
But yeah, where can people follow along with you?
Jacky: Yeah. Just follow me on Twitter twitter. com slash indexy. I N D X S Y. I’m sure you’ll include in the show notes as well as sign up for my newsletter, marketing letter. com.
Jared: Perfect. That’s the plug. And you know, we’re here every week guys. So if this is your first news episode.
Leave us a comment, let us know what you think of it. We release these every Friday if you want to get up to speed on the different podcast interviews we do every week and a bunch of those stuff that the Niche Pursuits email shares. I think it emails three times a week and you can get signed up at nichepursuits.
com slash newsletter. I’m pretty sure that’s the link. With that, thanks so much for coming, Jackie. We’ll have you on again soon and we want to hear more about some of those side hustles you’re working on next time.
Jacky: Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
