Jared and guest host Thomas Smith are here this week to offer an overview of the main news affecting Google, small publishers, and SEOs. They also share some interesting side hustles and a few very weird niche sites.

They kick things off by discussing changes at Google Search, specifically how it has a new boss. Prabhakar Raghavan is officially stepping down as the Search chief and Nick Fox will take his place.

Do you agree that it’s an interesting time to make a change like this? What do you think of Thomas’ interpretation of events? Or do you think Jared’s reading of Google’s decision is more accurate?

Another interpretation comes from Ed Zitron. Do you agree that Google is doubling down on its failure? And do you also think that Search and AI should be split into 2 different parts?

Watch the Full Episode

Moving on, Jared and Thomas talk about the issue with site reputation abuse, where Forbes and other big brands publish affiliate-style content. They reference an article by Glenn Gabe about how Google is finally cracking down on those websites.

Danny Sullivan confirmed that the traffic drops for those sites are not algorithmic. Do you agree with Thomas that this is good and bad news? How are the companies probably responding to this news?

Are these changes going to be better for users in the long run?

The last news item they discuss is that SearchGPT is giving brands 4x more referrals compared with Complexity and Claude. 

Do you view this as good or bad news? Might it be that Complexity and Claude answer queries more thoroughly? Do demographics play into the statistics at all?

Tune in to hear what the hosts think!

Moving along in the Shiny Object Shenanigans portion of the podcast, Jared goes first with his public speaking side hustle.

He shares the events he’s been speaking at most recently and his long-term strategy. Do you agree that he’s met his goal of speaking at 4 events this year?

When it’s Thomas’ turn, he talks about a YouTube channel he’s been building, DIY Life Tech. He made an important realization when he saw which videos were the most viewed.

It’s got 310k views in the last 30 days, and millions of views over the last year, and Thomas shares a quick overview of his strategy for content creation. 

He shares his income for this channel, and the new channel he created: California Dad Reviews, and talks about the challenges of getting subscribers and monetizing.

Do you agree that he’s the master of stacking side hustles?

Moving onto their Weird Niche Sites, Jared shares Select Aquatics, a “disaster to use” with no menu, no about page, no internal links, but a decent amount of traffic. 

This DR18 site is ranking for 12k keywords and probably has a very small but loyal following, according to Jared. Do you agree with Thomas’ assessment of the page?

Thomas then shares Election Source, an election supply store. How is it doing? What did he discover about the site’s competitor?

And that brings us to the end of another episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast. 

Thank you for tuning in this week! We’ll see you next Friday!

transcription

Jared: All right. Welcome back to another week of this week in niche pursuits news. My name is Jared Bauman. Today. We’ve got some shakeups in Google search with some of its biggest players. And a shakeup in Google leadership as well. Both these stories really interesting, both as they relate to some of the big brands and their rankings, and how they rank in search.

We’ve been tracking these results over the last couple weeks, but also as it relates to Google’s leadership team, and kind of how that plays in with the DOJ case and the future of search. Finally, our third story is, um, there’s an AI that, uh, that’s very popular. That is sending way more traffic to publishers than any others.

It’s a, the AI search component of it at least. And so we’ll tell you all about that. I think that’s going to be intriguing. Um, we’ve got some, some data to share on that. Of course, second half of the podcast, all about side hustles and weird niches. And joining me for all of it today is Thomas Smith.

Thomas, welcome back. It’s great to be here. So you joined us two weeks ago as a co host, and we were just starting to talk about, uh, some of these big brands in search dropping off of a cliff. We’ve got a continuation of that today. It’s almost perfectly timed because you touched on it a couple weeks ago and now you’re back and here we are talking about it again, 

Thomas: the story keeps evolving.

The plot keeps thickening. Yeah. There’s a lot more to share. 

Jared: There is a lot more to share. I’m gonna go and share my screen. We’ll dive into the first, uh, the first topic here today. Um, and basically that is it. Google search has a new boss. Uh, so this is, this is not the first time we have talked about this and we’ve talked about, uh, the head of search basically.

So the head of search was featured in a big breakdown that we did a story on several months ago, titled the man who killed Google search, that person is none other than, uh, Prabhakar. And again, I apologize if I’m saying it wrong, uh, Thomas and I both watched some YouTube videos to try to make sure we were saying it right beforehand.

So that’s the kind of commitment we have. But anyways, he is transitioning out of the role, uh, that, that was heading up search. Uh, he led Google’s search ads assistant team. Commerce and payments. Now he’s moving to a new position. This position seems to report closely with the CEO. Um, and other leaders it’s, I guess, derived around, um, technical direction and culture of innovation.

Um, and in his place, we’ve got someone new, Nick Fox. So he went from like the hardest name for me to say ever. To probably the easiest name for me to say ever. So he was formerly on Raghavan’s team and he’s going to succeed him. He’ll oversee Google search ads, geo and commerce. So maybe some restructuring there, not quite as many roles there.

Um, you know, in these, so it’s interesting the timing of these changes because they’re coming, obviously, as Google is facing a lot of pressure with AI with the ongoing DOJ case. Interesting time to make a change like this, right? Um, let’s get, let, let me get your thoughts on the change and then I want to go back to that.

Absolutely incisive article that was written by Ed Zitron about the man who killed Google search and we’ll kind of go back because he has talked about this in recent days as well. 

Thomas: Yeah. You know, I think there, there had been a lot of, uh, criticism, um, around Raghavan and. I got to think that it has something to do with the antitrust case and the conclusion of sort of like the first round of that, um, because, you know, I think if, if your company is getting sued and, uh, you’re the opposing sides looking for kind of any crack, anything that they can, uh, find in the company that’s wrong.

And then you fire the guy in charge of the thing that they say is wrong, that could look really bad. The optics of that would be really bad. So, I think we see this a lot where companies kind of hold on to people in the hopes that, hey, this litigation will go well, you know, we just sort of quietly move them into another role down the line, everything will be alright, but if we kind of change right in the middle, that’s not going to look great.

And so, maybe they kept him on board. I mean, I’m not sure with total speculation, but. Maybe they kept them on board despite, you know, declining revenues, challenges with AI overviews, all the stuff we’ve called out before. And now that the first piece of that case has concluded, and you know, not super well so far, maybe they feel like, okay, now’s the moment where we can reasonably make this change that from a business standpoint, you know, maybe we needed to make all along.

The other, maybe more optimistic way to look at it would be, um, that Before you had Raghavan leading search and also leading a lot of the AI work with Gemini, you know, that might’ve made sense when AI was this little tiny piece of Google’s overall picture. But of course, you know, post Chat GPT and in the world that we’re living in now, AI is everything.

It’s this core function of the business. So I guess you could look at it in a more optimistic way and say, You know, Hey, they’re not really downgrading him. They’re apparently moving him. And apparently the sort of splitting the Gemini division off from the search division, which I had to dig a bit, dig around a bit to find that, like I read, I think a wall street journal article, it talked a bit about that.

I saw that article. Yeah. Now that’s going to be like the separate function and it probably should have been all along. So that would be maybe the more optimistic way, at least from Raghavan’s perspective. Maybe he’s kind of moving into that role. You know, we got Nick Fox taking over the search and they’re going to both, you know, really just be able to hone in on the pieces they’re good at.

Maybe that’s going to be good for everybody. Maybe they, those two roles really shouldn’t have been, you know, reporting to one person. 

Jared: Well, as we’ll see here in a second, Ed Zitron would disagree with your optimistic take. Um, I’ll add a third one, a third one that I was thinking at least that, you know, to your points, like it could be either of those, a third point would be.

Now that Google has kind of officially gotten slapped on the wrist from the DOJ, this might be Google being able to make a PR statement like, Hey, we’re learning, like we’re, we’re, we’re getting rid of, we’re moving on from the people who got us into this mistake we made. We’re so sorry. Look at the changes we’ve already made, you know, and so maybe a bit of a PR move, maybe a third way to look at it either way, no matter which way you want to come at it.

I mean, it’s pretty clear that he’s been there during a time that saw Google’s stock price skyrocket and also like you talked about Google getting into hot water on so many number of fronts, not only with where they’re at with AI and Gemini AI overviews, these sorts of things, but also with obviously the DOJ trial and so many things that kind of happened under his watch.

Now. Again, we did talk on the podcast and I think a lot of us probably heard about this man Raghavan for the first time with Ed Zitron’s kind of scathing article about the man who killed Google search. And for anybody listening who’s gotten their site tanked in a recent Google update, they’re gonna, you know, raise their fist right now and go, yeah, that’s exactly how I feel.

Well, he has come out with a piece that addresses this change of leadership and it’s called the Requiem. Am I saying that right? The Requiem on Raghavan. That is a mouthful, um, and, but it’s, uh, another article by, by Ed Zitron. And, um, I mean, basically if I were to just kind of cut to the chase, he casts this as more of a demotion and a new role that has very little authority.

And again, that’s just kind of where he positions it as if you read this article, he really just outlines how this departure from leadership in search, um, is overlying symptom of Google’s decline. And. Maybe more indicative of what’s coming from the DOJ and more indicative of the massive problems that are coming again I’m just kind of relating the overall tone and sentiment that comes from from from Zitron’s Article and again his view is that Google is Google’s desperate pursuit of growth Led to degraded search results Positioning AI is its next big hope despite mixed results so far We’ve got the recent DOJ revelation revelations, um, and the broader potential for a government led breakup of Google’s monopoly.

So, you know, his, um, his takes a little bit different, definitely not as optimistic. I’m guessing you read this article. What were your thoughts on it from his point of view? 

Thomas: Yeah. I mean, I think the core argument here is basically like search was this kind of separate thing. Uh, it was treated almost like the.

You know, the news division of a, of a newspaper where you didn’t touch that. That was all going to be totally above board. You know, everything was gonna be organic. We weren’t going to let ads and money and all of these kinds of things get into it. And the argument here was that under Raghavan, especially those two functions became more and more connected together where maybe, you know, the, the decision to change up things in search were driven a bit more by the bottom line and getting more ads in there and.

I don’t know that there’s super strong evidence to support that, but I think that’s one of the things that’s starting to come out maybe through this litigation. That’s certainly the allegation here. Um, so I think that’s the, that’s the narrative there is basically search was this thing that was on its own.

It was kind of this thing you wouldn’t touch basically, uh, sacred cow. And then they combined it with the ads, they messed up search. And now I think his perspective is. This move is just doubling down on the, on that failure. You know, Nick Fox is even going to try to put more ads in and connect the two together more, and that’s going to just, you know, result in this downward spiral.

And I’m not sure that I a hundred percent believe that that’s going to be the outcome. But certainly we’ve seen more and more and more ads. We’ve seen decisions about search that seem to be driven by ads. But on the other hand, there’s so much happening. With AI overviews and other kinds of changes to the kind of content that’s out there on the internet.

I think it’s hard sometimes to separate the decline, which everybody’s observing in the quality of search results and the decline in revenues. With, you know, this one move to combine everything together. Is that what’s really happening? Or is the internet gotten worse or are they happening at the same time?

Are they responding to the lower quality content by saying, Oh, we’re not making as much, you know, dial up the ads, you know, user experience, we’re not going to worry about that for now. So I think it’s complicated. I get the argument. I’m not sure I share the same level of doom and gloom that he has got.

Jared: It’s never the result of one thing, right? makes a long winded case about why he really does think that this man and this regime was somewhat responsible. A couple quotables from the article, you know, he talks about how growth for Google has been 20 percent year, uh, quarter over quarter for a long, long time.

He goes on to say, yet growth is slowing and isn’t showing any signs of returning to the heady days where 17 percent year over year growth was considered a bad quarter. Um, The chart tells another story that this reckless and desperate move only worked for a little bit before growth began to slow again Recklessness and desperation begets only more recklessness and desperation Um, he goes, I like this If you’ll forgive the mixed metaphors google has essentially killed its golden goose search And is now in the process of pawning its eggs to buy decidedly non magical beans by which I mean data centers and gpus um And he talks about this, the expenditures rising and all that.

And then just to touch on what you just mentioned, Raghavan is being replaced by Nick Fox, um, uh, who in the emails that he had outlined and that he had gotten, uh, gotten access to, uh, Zitron says, I called attention to, in the man who killed Google search, his article. Uh, where he told an email Ben Gomes that making Google search more profitable was quote the new reality of their jobs to which Gomes responded by saying that he was quote concerned that growth was all that Google was thinking about.

So yeah, you know, there’s, um, there, there’s, there’s a lot to this story. Um, optimists will hope that with Raghavan gone, the man who killed Google search, maybe we have greener pastures ahead. Others will point to the fact that we’ve got someone who’s got a track record and has let been, uh, brought up under his leadership.

So. What’s going to change? I think at the end of the day, I like you highlighted, like, really, search has changed, uh, whether because of Raghavan or because of market conditions, A. I. Needs to get split out. Well, this is my opinion. A. I. Does need to get split out, so it gets the proper attention from kind of the components that right now are are in search and maybe that component, maybe splitting those.

Responsibilities apart will change the way Google approaches search going forward. You know, I think that might be the high level optimistic take that we could all look at. 

Thomas: Yeah. I mean, you could just as easily argue that the focus on AI and we have to somehow squeeze AI, you know, into the search process could be just as responsible as the ads for making search much worse.

Maybe those two functions should never have been combined. And maybe if you split them off, then the temptation to say, Hey, to keep up with the other companies that are getting this explosive growth, we’ve got to build, build this AI into everything, including search, including the core product. Maybe if those functions are split off, there’ll be somebody to push back and go, you know, no, don’t, don’t touch search, you know, we’re, we’re trying to figure it out, but we’re not gonna, you know, tell people to put glue on their pizza.

We’re going to try to take a different approach than that. So I think there’s a, yeah, there’s an optimistic approach here. I, I wish it was so simple, right? Like, it just, if you could replace one guy, And that fixed everything. Like, wouldn’t that be amazing? It’s just this, you know, this quote unquote, like, evil mastermind and you get rid of that person and it’s all back to normal.

I just, I can’t believe in my heart of hearts that that’s, it’s that simple. But, yeah, that would be, that would be great, you know. 

Jared: Well, from one complicated thing to solve to another one, we need to talk about this site reputation abuse story that we started to uncover and unravel two weeks ago. Um, and this is that story surrounding large domains like Forbes.

That was a center of our story two weeks ago, publishing affiliate style content in the vernacular of parasite SEO and ranking super high because they have a strong domain and the fact that the internet has gotten littered with this approach from not just Forbes, but so many other brands. And that’s really what two weeks ago was about was a story where someone Unraveled.

All the details of what was behind these types of organizations and how they set them up. Pretty shocking, I would say, when we get into some of the details and this extended well beyond, uh, Forbes. We talked about CNN Marketplace, a couple of other brands. Well, today we’re featuring a story from Glenn Gabe about how this has really started to unfold.

Um, and, uh, I’m going to share my screen here. Uh, here we go. A nightmare on Affiliate Street. How Google is picking off sites one by one that are violating its site reputation abuse spam policy. Um, he goes through and talks about a number of sites that have seen this drop. And basically, Where I’m going to go is, you know, read the article.

I think Glenn has a ton of visuals. We quote him a lot on here with some of the stories he deep dives. But basically, um, I’m going to go through about eight or nine big brands. He’s, he’s highlighted here. Uh, and some of them are recent. Some of them are not, but I’m just going to go through a quick chronology.

So we have it on the table. Timestamped dropped initially during the March, 2024 core update AP news byline. Uh, dropped heavily on July 18th, 2024. Uh, now we get into some of this stuff recently, and this is where it’s really picked up. Pace. Forbes advisor started dropping significantly September 25th. CNN Underscored started dropping significantly on September 27th.

Uh, wall Street Journal buy side drop significantly September 27th. Our podcast, Thomas, that we recorded a couple weeks ago was on October 2nd in the middle of this story. October 11th, Ford, uh, fortune recommends drop by 67%. Um, and then the last one that, uh, Glenn Gabe talks about market watch guides. Um, initials decline started during the August core update with a further drop just last week, October 15th, 2024.

Now a little wrinkle of the story, um, in, in Glenn Gabe’s article, he’s thought that there was signs that it could be algorithmic and remember, if we go back in time, we can see that Google originally said, Hey, In March, they said when they launched the March Corrupt Date, we’re going to be algorithmically penalizing site reputation abuse.

We’re going to be starting that on May 5th, I think it was. May 5th came and went, nothing happened. And what we have seen, though, is kind of more manual actions. And Danny Sullivan has gone on record, I believe it was August or September, saying the only way we’re penalizing at this point is manual actions.

Gabe indicated that he thought this might be the first time we’re seeing algorithmic, but that was confirmed by Danny Sullivan just an hour or two ago that this is not algorithmic. And, um, it’s the only way that they’re doing that is with either manual actions or just the actual algorithm catching up to them.

And again, I would separate that by saying not algorithmically targeting site reputation abuse, but just the algorithm as it were. Being responsible for penalizing that thoughts, perspectives. I mean, shoot, we noodled into this for 15, 20 minutes a couple of weeks ago. 

Thomas: Yeah. I mean, I think the, the fact that it’s not algorithmic yet is probably good and bad news for site owners, because it means.

If it’s not algorithmic, we’re less likely as smaller sites in most cases to get caught up in it, right? Like that would be the thing I would be really concerned about if it came out that this was algorithmic is, are we somehow going to get dinged because they updated the algorithm? And if we maybe published a couple of sponsored posts, or even we worked with some outside freelancers, is that going to get us on their radar?

So if it’s manual at the moment, still, I think that’s reassuring that they’re probably going after these gigantic brands. And at least for the time being, you know, maybe we can just lay low and we’re not going to be on the radar. On the other hand, the scary thing about a manual action like this, or however they’re approaching it, is it is sort of that all or nothing thing, right?

A person goes in and literally says, all right, bad, you know. And it’s gone. And it doesn’t seem like they’re removing everything overnight. Like we saw happen right before some of the bigger changes last year. But we are seeing these big declines that happen as a result of a manual decision. So it is again a little reassuring, but also a little bit scary that.

You could somehow get on the radar and then they just decided to ding you. And then what, what can you really do at that point? You can’t tweak things, improve pages overall, better content quality, you know, wait for an update, it starts to rise again, as long as you got that manual penalty, it’s, it’s going to be hard to come back from it.

So I’m sure a lot of people at these bigger companies, if they haven’t been hit yet, are quaking in their boots, trying to quickly delete those directories. And I 

Jared: mean, that’s what you do. Do you just hope that you don’t get caught up in it? Because obviously there’s way more large brands doing this. I mean, almost.

Not almost every that’s been dramatic, but a lot of newspapers, a lot of paper, ask a lot of publications of that vernacular of that variety are doing this, right? This is just eight of them. I read off like there’s so many more doing this. I mean, it’s fascinating to hear. It would, it would be fascinating to hear the conversations happening inside the boardrooms at each of these companies.

Like, do we delete everything and just try to get ahead of it? Like, you know, and, and I think what we haven’t seen, and I didn’t do, you know, detailed research on this, but we haven’t seen this crossover and affect other areas of these sites, right? So it’s not like. Uh, Wall Street Journal, the domain is taking a hit, is just kind of the section that has this reputation abuse, Parasite SEO affiliate play that they’re kind of sourcing out to third party companies.

Like we underscored two weeks ago. Again, I’ll tease it. If you didn’t hear that underscore, you want to hear all the Just all the details behind this. Go back and listen to that section. But really, this is only isolated at parts of the business that are doing, um, that are doing this kind of, uh, uh, you know, action that Google doesn’t like.

And I will finally just note the thing that a lot of us site owners are thinking to ourselves is, why isn’t that nice that Google is only touching the part that is bad on these? Blasphemous websites, these, uh, Forbes advisor. Yes, Forbes advisor is bad, but why is the entire domain not hit? Because when we make a mistake on our website, when we do something that is far less serious in Google’s eyes, they take out our entire site as witnessed by all the HCU hits and subsequent things.

So it’s still a strong bias towards strong domains and big brands, even though they are finally maybe getting caught up for some of the things they’ve been doing that are clearly against Google’s terms of service and what they want. 

Thomas: Yeah. And I just, I worry that this is going to have some unintended consequences because they’re taking out a lot of this, you know, quote unquote, parasite SEO that’s targeting some pretty dangerous in some cases, keywords, some, some keywords where there’s a lot of bad actors.

And you know, probably these big media companies content, even if it’s written by a third party, it’s not going to be great, but they’re probably not going to be recommending stuff that’s dangerous, stuff that’s, you know, where they’re getting there, they have some kind of deal and they know that it’s bad and they’re going to keep pushing anyway, they’re probably at least trying to have, you know, reasonable recommendations, even if they’re not testing everything and, you know, doing the stuff that you really need to do.

So I kind of worry given how many. Bad actors. We know there are in some of these spaces and I’m not even going to say the names of them because even mentioning them on the podcast, I’d be afraid we’re going to get, you know, get somehow penalized, but you know, you know, I think everyone here knows the spaces that people are constantly trying to get you to link to them.

Um, and if you take away these big companies who probably wrongfully were ranking, does that really leave the good quality, good actors who really know what they’re talking about? Or does it just kind of open up the field? For those people who are maybe pushing some snake oil and they got pushed down by CNN and Forbes, and now they’re at the top.

And, uh, is that going to be better for the user in the long run? I’m not sure. 

Jared: Are they just going to shove Reddit back in there? 

Thomas: Yeah, it should be too. And is that, is that good for the user? I think we can uniformly say probably not. I think we can all agree. That’s not better for the 

Jared: user. It’s just better for the IPO pockets.

Um, yeah, a lot of things going on here, you know, it’s definitely something to to follow. It’s not done yet. It’s probably not going to be done for a while. We still are waiting for the algorithmic portion of this site reputation abuse with, which we have long talked about this podcast is a very difficult thing to solve.

Like kind of how do you get around that? So it makes sense that this is still being done on a manual penalty level. Yet I agree with Glenn from the standpoint of The charts he was showing don’t look like a manual penalty because a manual penalty looks like here to zero overnight. Since it wasn’t that, you have to assume it’s algorithmic.

I guess it is, but not specifically targeted at site reputation abuse, which would imply that maybe Google’s algorithm is getting better at picking out high domains with less, we’ll call it topical authority on it. Who knows? Lot to, lot to keep our eyes on with this one. Um, And it’s a very interesting continual development.

Um, well, I’m going to surprise everyone. We don’t have enough time today to go into all the WordPress drama. And so if you were wondering, um, we just, we’re going to have to take a break on that for a second. We’ll wait for all the drama to pile up and then probably tackle it again next week. Um, I thought this story was a little bit more interesting, a little bit more intriguing.

And I kind of teased it at the outset. I actually misspoke. It’s a, it’s a search engine. It’s not an AI, but it is a search engine tied to an AI. And that’s search GPT, which we talked about on the podcast. Not, I mean, it hasn’t been around that long. And, um, uh, so this is early data coming out of search GPT, but the, the, the headline story is that search GPT is giving brands four times more referrals than perplexity.

Now it is still in limited beta, um, but it’s starting to send more referral traffic to brands than some of these more established generative engines. That’s what I should have called them. That’s a great way to put it. Um, uh, some other stats to, to kind of chat about. SearchGPT’s growth rate is 150 percent month over month.

Uh, meanwhile, Perplexity and Claude grew only 22 percent in the same month. Uh, however, as we know, GPT’s market share as a search, mark as a search engine is Minuscule compared to Google and some of these other big ones. Um, OpenAI was clear when SearchGPT launched in July. Uh, so it is a couple months old now.

And so, to some degree it doesn’t surprise me. Like search, uh, chat GPT is still the dominant name. I think this was kind of that first to market, uh, syndrome, right. Where they, they were the first to come out with a, um, uh, you know, something that chat bot, uh, using generative AI that, that really, um, was the most.

Kind of ubiquitous. And as a result, probably is a lot of the reason why their growth rate is so much higher than perplexity and Claude. But I do think the most interesting thing out of this article, the most interesting thing that everybody will be interested in hearing is that it’s sending brands four times, the number of referrals.

Then the other ones. So if you’re a publisher, you kind of want search GPU to win right now, right? 

Thomas: Yeah. I mean, I think, is that relative to like for each user, the probability of they send somebody, or is it just, they’re growing quickly? It was a, it wasn’t a hundred percent clear to me, but I think, you know, it could be a very positive thing if they’re building that in and I think they have maybe less incentive than some of the others you got to assume in perplexity is starting to try to charge.

Not sure what Claude’s business model is, you know, maybe there’s going to be some ad supported element to this sometime down the line. Maybe we’re going to get some of those same problematic dynamics where ads and search get merged together. And I think with, you know, with OpenAI and, and SearchDpt, They’re probably just trying to build an experience that gets more people using the overall service.

You know, they just want more users. They’re not really competing with Perplexity on this. They’re competing with Gemini. They’re competing with Claude. I mean, uh, so they’re probably just trying to create the best user experience. And maybe that means You know, passing people along instead of trying to hold on to them and, you know, have them in your app or down the line, maybe you’re going to monetize with ads, you’re going to be more like a traditional search engine.

So to me, that’s, that’s probably a good development, um, that they’re trying to send people along. I guess you could also look at it and say it’s possible that perplexity just does a better job of answering the query and that, you know, search GPT, they’re still working on how do we answer the query in the actual generative engine or whatever they decide to call this.

And so maybe they’re not doing it quite as effectively. Some more people are clicking through. They might change that up over time. I’ve certainly tried perplexity out and it often answers the query pretty well right in the app. But if this holds up and I’ve started to see some chat GPT referrers in my own site traffic.

I have as well. That would be great. Yeah. New traffic source is always welcome. 

Jared: Always welcome, right? I mean, it is a, it was a short article to be fair. You’re exactly right. Like data nerds, like you and I, we’re like, okay, cool. How’s this data coming through? What’s it look? What’s it compared to all that? It didn’t say, if you’re wondering, that’s why we didn’t address it.

Yeah. Um, very brief article. Uh, and so I think it is, but I mean, again, this has been out since July. It’s October. Like, that’s pretty quick to get some data back. I’m excited to hear that people are adopting it. And that early days, it seems to have a publisher, uh, Publishers at least in mind in what it’s doing.

We know that, uh, the validity of AI and people questioning whether it’s hallucinating or not, Uh, has come up a lot in conversations, so. There’s clearly incentive to some degree for, uh, search GPT to, you know, cite their sources and stuff. Um, you know, the skeptics listening would say, well, wait a second, they’re answering the query.

Like the idea of people going to my website from a search GPT query are so much lower than the olden days. And to some degree that’s, that’s true. So we’re kind of working with, uh, If a generative search, uh, is happening, then four times the traffic is better than the alternative. 

Thomas: Yeah, and I think about it too, maybe the demographics play a role here because chat GPT is used by, in my experience, a much broader segment of the market.

And you’ve got particularly older people who may not be familiar with perplexity using chat GPT. So if it’s steering people, I think, you know, again, this is all anecdotal, but I’ve observed that people of that older demographic are much more. Interested in clicking through, they want to learn, they want to research, they don’t trust the platform in the same way that you see way more clicks through from Facebook than tick tock, where people are there to consume it, the content, they don’t necessarily feel they need to click through and sort of read and verify.

So I wonder if that’s actually going to be really positive in the long run, because chat is probably going to continue to reach that older demographic. Usually that’s a more valuable demographic for ad traffic. And maybe this is an early indication that that demographic is not satisfied with an AI result.

And they’re going to go do their homework and do the reading and make sure that the stuff they’re being presented with is actually accurate. And for publishers, that’s great news. 

Jared: Yeah, being is known for having an older demographic than Google. Um, you know, I mean, I’m not sure we’re entering Internet Explorer age brackets here, but you got to verify your ID at least being over 75 to use Internet Explorer these days, but, um, I’m kidding for the record.

Um, but yeah, to your point, like, you know, it, it, um, it, it’s, it’s not always just about the volume of traffic. It’s also about the quality of traffic and to your point, like RPMs and conversions and, um, interest levels and stuff like that. So lot to it. A lot to it, a lot to follow along with. Uh, I’m excited to see where this goes.

It’s um, you know, some positive news I’d say overall. Uh, like I said, four times the number of clicks is good. We’ll take that. We’ll take that. We’ll take that. Um, well that about takes us through the news this week. A couple articles we had to leave off. Like I said, we couldn’t even get in, get into the WordPress drama.

I still want to, I still want to hear your opinion on that stuff. But we just got to wait for the right week to time out with it. Uh, let’s move on to our, uh, our side hustles. I’ll start first. I’m going to give an update on something I said a long time ago on the podcast, probably about February or March now at this time, and it’s got a good tie in here, that’s why I picked this week to talk about it.

I’m wondering when I should circle back on talking about my public speaking goal. Now, I used to public speak quite a bit. Uh, a decade ago, I was on the road 150 to 175 nights a year speaking, uh, everywhere, all over the country. And thankfully I don’t do that anymore, but, um, I did want to get back into it.

And there were a couple of reasons why, um, none of them related to getting paid to do the speaking. Uh, a lot of people when they first hear like, Oh, you’re going out and speaking at a conference like that. Like, how’s that all work out in terms of how much money you make? And it’s really. It’s you can get paid as a speaker, but the benefits of public speaking I found are all the other things that it offers you.

And so I stated that I had this goal of speaking at four places this year. I didn’t really define it super well. So I’ll give an update and we’ll kind of, maybe you can tell me what you think counts and what you think doesn’t count. I spoke at the affiliate gathering in May and then, um, I spoke at a conference this week, Thomas DMLA, digital media licensing association, and, uh, I happened to go to this conference and you were there as well.

Thomas: Yes. Yeah. We finally got to get together in real life. Sadly, it was not at the Buttonwillow McDonald’s as we’ve, uh, threatened to do many times bring the podcast on the road, but, uh, it was, yeah, fantastic to get to meet up, uh, in real life. 

Jared: I didn’t get the picture handy. I should have had it. I posted it on Twitter.

If you want to see, just go to my Twitter feed. You can see the first time Thomas and I have ever met each other in person. That now means you and I have met in person equally as many times as Spencer and I have met in person. There you go. 

Thomas: I feel honored. 

Jared: If we happen to meet up one more time, you and I will have met more than Spencer and I have.

And I’ve done this podcast with him in spurts for, for almost four years now. Um, And so this is a conference that really was in my wheelhouse in terms of the fact that I’m not a, um, visual media business, but my ability to speak to visual media owners and executives was really complimentary. And so I came in and spoke about SEO to this group of people at the conference.

Um, I will say there were several people from Google search team there, Google’s executive search team. A little off put, I don’t know, kind of gave me a little butterflies speaking on SEO and there’s three or four people from Google’s search team sitting in the audience. So that was weird, I’ll just say, uh, not cause they made it weird just cause the concept is weird, but it went really well.

And just to give an update on this little side hustle push, um, I’ve spoken to affiliate gathering in May. I’ve spoken to DMLA now here in October. I had a speaking gig lined up with TBX, the travel blogger conference in July. I’m Puerto Rico. We couldn’t get our schedules to line up though. We just could never get it to work.

So I had to back out of that. I do have an opportunity to speak at one of their events next year, though, to replace that. And then I’ve spoken at many online events, so several online conferences. Uh, and I’ve given several presentations for different groups. Um, like if you’re in the niche pursuits community, I give a presentation there.

Uh, I’ve given presentations to other groups that grew up out of New Zealand. Uh, that was interesting with the time change and stuff, trying to figure that out. I’ve got one coming up with another group on Amazon influencers. So I don’t know what you think that I hit my four or did I not in person? I’ve only done two and I think I’ll close out the year at only two out of my four.

But if you count all the, uh, If you count the offline stuff, sorry, all the online stuff, then, you know, I, I definitely passed the four goal that I had. 

Thomas: I think you can count it. Yeah. I mean, as someone who has organized a virtual conference before, I can tell you, like, it’s more work than organizing one in person, honestly.

So if you get to go there and speak to a group, I think that that totally counts. And yeah, you did a fantastic job. It was really great to, to hear the presentation. And I think. Having that background in visual media, being a former photographer, you know, bringing that to the table, plus the experience with the last year of dealing with AI and dealing with all the changes in search, it was very fascinating.

I got a lot of people saying, you know, great presentation. Um, so yeah, I think you can count it. Definitely. 

Jared: Well, I appreciate you saying so. And I mean, just, you know, again, to kind of go into like, normally when we’re on the side hustle section, right, we’re like featuring like two weeks or three weeks ago.

I was talking about this is how much I’ve earned on Amazon influencer this month. Here’s the dollar amount for my September earnings the next, next week, I’m talking about here’s a website where I earned this much from driving Pinterest traffic. Like. The speaking thing is a much more, much more esoteric way to evaluate it.

Like the KPIs on it are very hard to pin down, but I can tell you, it’ll be interesting. I’m going to try to track it this time. Cause I didn’t track it from May’s in person conference I spoke at, but I’m going to track it better this time and give a report many months down the road about who I met, the relationships that are going to come from that, the conversations, a very interesting conversations I got to have with people this conference, and then the business.

That comes as a result of that. And what’s even more interesting I found is when you don’t just look at the business that comes from it, but the business that comes from the business that comes from it. 

And 

Jared: if I meet person a, by speaking at this conference, not only do I have the potential to work with person a, but I also have the person, uh, the opportunity to work with people they know.

And that’s where it starts to get really interesting. And so speaking at events, it’s really more about the long play. Unlike a lot of the other side hustles that we talk about where it’s like, I do X and this is the benefit from it that I get. And it’s why so anyways, uh, an esoteric overview of an esoteric side hustle, but nonetheless, here we are creeping towards the end of the year and I guess.

I’ve met my goal, but I guess the jury’s out. Now, if you disagree, please let us know in the comments. If you’re watching on YouTube, I’m happy to hear all sides of this. Do I check the box as this was a success in 2024 or not? Uh, Thomas, let’s turn it over to you and, uh, let’s talk about your side hustle.

Thomas: Yeah. So, you know, I can’t remember if I, I did it. I may have mentioned this when I came and spoke about the Amazon influencers program a million years ago on the podcast, my first appearance. Um, but I have been for a long time building a YouTube channel and this is actually one of the first things that I did with content online.

So my background, like you, uh, as a, as a photographer and starting photography agency, we’ve learned a lot about that, talked about a lot, a lot about that over the last couple of days, you know, being together at a. photography industry conference, essentially. Um, but that was sort of the first thing. And then I started to look into, okay, what can I do to have some other kind of content channel?

So around 2015, I started this YouTube channel, DIY Life Tech. It was called DIY Home Automation at the time. And I talked about home automation products and basically made these review videos. And, you know, if you go back and watch my original ones, they’re terrible. Like everybody’s first YouTube videos, it’s like a mumbling and the lighting is awful and you know, it’s on an ancient phone and it’s just, yeah, it’s kind of painful, but I just kept at it and I kept making these tutorials and then I started to realize, Hey, as I’m doing this, the stuff that’s really getting traffic, isn’t the kind of in depth reviews of these super high tech products, it’s really more of these super simple videos.

So. Types of things where you would never think that somebody would need a video to learn how to do that, but there’s so many people who have that particular need and there’s nobody making videos because everybody assumes, oh, that’s too simple. And so there’s a big opportunity. I’ll give you an example.

So, you know, I made a video about, um, how to fix your Swiffer wet jet if it stops working, how to change the batteries in your Swiffer wet jet. I made a whole series about the Swiffer wet jet, and I’ll share that the traffic that. Some of those got in a second, but, um, started to see traction on that.

Started to build that channel up. Um, today, fast forward to today, I have 2, 566 videos on my YouTube channel. They get about, uh, right into the last 30 to 30 days. This is not the high time of the year. I got about 310, 000 views across those. And in the last 365 days. I got 4. 2 million views on this channel.

Wow. Super simple. No scripting, no editing. I just pick up the phone. I find something that I either research, I do a little keyword research, literally like Google autocomplete kind of stuff. Or, um, I just noticed something that’s a problem in day to day life, and I make a little video about it, upload it to the channel, and, um, that’s, yeah, uh, done very well.

The Fix A Swiffer wet jet that won’t spray, that one has had 169, 000 views in the last 365 days, so it’s, uh, quite substantial traffic you can get. When you take into account that the RPMs on these things turn out to be a lot higher than you might think. For a lot of niches. Cause you might say, okay, you know, 4.

2 million, uh, views per year. But if you’re getting like typical two, 3 RPM, that’s not going to amount to much. Turns out for some reason, I’m not exactly sure why, but this space is very valuable. And the RPMs a lot higher. Yeah. So I’m actually making about 1, 700 to 3, 000 a month. Just from the AdSense earnings on these videos.

And that doesn’t even take into account other things like affiliate commissions, because I’m talking about products, sponsorships that I’ve done, you know, sponsored videos or a brand reaches out just the AdSense. I have gotten, yeah, up to earning pretty consistently now about 1700 to 3000. A month from this channel.

Jared: I’m looking, I’ve got it up right here. I pulled it up on my phone and I mean, your number one video, how to install or change batteries on Swiffer wet jet has almost 500, 000 views. Yes. 

Thomas: Yeah. And you know, you got to figure these big brands, they make this product, millions of people are buying it. If there’s something that’s not totally intuitive that people struggle with as they set this thing up, a certain number of those millions of people are going to have this problem, or, you know, it runs out of battery and they’ve got to put new ones in.

I noticed it was a little tricky, so I made a video about it. And sure enough, hundreds of thousands of people had that same problem. What do people do when they have a problem when they’re trying to do something? Yeah. They’re not learning information. They got to learn how to do something. They go to YouTube because they’re going to find a video like one of mine.

That’s going to walk them through exactly what they have to do. So, yeah, that’s, um, been a really interesting strategy and been successful. 

Jared: I mean, I, as an Amazon influencer, I’m looking through these and they, they aren’t Amazon influencer videos, meaning they’re not reviews of products, but they almost feel like, You’re like, cool.

I’m going to review this coffee mug for Amazon influencer. And then I’m going to show you how to turn this on and post that on my YouTube channel. And like, it feels like almost part and parcel with an Amazon influencer approach. Like I’m looking, most of your videos seem to be a couple minutes long, like maybe a couple or more than three or four minutes, but most of them are one to two minutes.

That’s very Amazon influencer. It seems like a perfect pairing. If you’re doing influencer, and of course you are, you were the ones who came on and showed us how to do all that a year and a half, almost two years ago now. 

Thomas: Yeah, so that kind of leads into my current thinking on the channel. So I started just because I found it fun to make these super simple videos.

Um, some of the dynamics of the channel are really interesting. The top day is Christmas, believe it or not. Oh, I’ll 

Jared: get stuff in the mix. 

Thomas: They don’t know how to do it. Exactly. So it’s just massive math. It’s like, you know, you’re the one person 

Jared: who gets traffic on Christmas. Everything dies. 

Thomas: Yeah.

Influencers. It’s like, you may earn 4 cause nothing’s shipping 

Jared: negative. That’s when you get negative 

Thomas: here. It’s like just skyrocket. So it’s fun to watch that. Um, I made a whole bunch of videos about how to change the clock on, you know, various things. Um, and, you know, two times a year, those get massive, massive growth on the days when, uh, when there’s, you know, time change, daylight savings.

So it’s fun to watch that. Um, but yeah, so I, I had started to, I just started with those kinds of videos. Then I started to make the review videos and that led into the whole influencer thing. And I was reposting, that’s how I shared this channel. Originally when I would post a influencer video on Amazon, I would then repost it on the YouTube channel.

Yeah, those have done okay. You know, they make it a couple thousand views. They do sometimes drive some affiliate commission. But it always just felt like this isn’t really what, uh, the audience here is looking for what it’s made for. So I have started another channel. It’s called California dad reviews.

Um, I’m a California dad, so I felt like, you know, that’s an interesting niche to go into. You can’t move now, 

Jared: Thomas. You can’t move now. Exactly. Well, 

Thomas: yeah, I was a California dad, but I’m not leaving California is the bottom line. Anyway. So I started putting, um, Putting those review videos on this channel, keeping the more kind of how to videos on DIY Life Tech.

And that’s, that’s my goal going forward is kind of grow this as a separate channel and get it monetized. Now the problem, the thing that makes these things challenging is, this is the toaster problem that you mentioned in a, in a previous episode. That nobody finds their go to authority for toasters, right?

Like this is very transactional traffic where people come to the video. I solve their problem. They don’t care all about me in most cases. And then they leave. So getting subscribers on a channel like this is so hard. And so as a result, like 4. 2 million views a year, it’s been around since 2015, you would think, oh, he’s got to have a hundred thousand, 200, 000 subscribers on the original channel.

No 14, 000. I was going to mention that time. Yeah. Tiny, tiny, tiny following, but who cares? Yeah. But that’s the thing is getting to that point to monetize. You need the thousand followers. You need the watch hours. You would think, Oh my gosh, that’s not going to be so hard. It’s really hard to get there with a channel like this.

I’m at 755 subscribers on the California dad reviews channel. I will definitely get there, especially when I’m putting more content on there. I’m at 1836 watch hours. So little less than halfway. To where I need to be. When did you start? 

Jared: When did you start that? 

Thomas: I started, I started the channel a little while ago.

Um, it was literally, I probably, when I started to have kids, um, didn’t do anything with it for a while. So it’s not brand new. It’s something where I’m kind of repurposing, I guess I would say. 

Jared: One question for you that’s been burning my mind. And this would go back to DIY life tech. I would imagine the affiliate commissions are not that high because it looks like for every product that you’re making a video on, the person probably watching already owns it.

So unless you find some way to like upsell them, some add on or something like it, it feels like you probably don’t make much on affiliate, but am I wrong? Do you track that? It’s not great for affiliate. Yeah. So you get 

Thomas: some, um, nowhere near what you would get with Amazon influencers. Um, On the review content, it can do a little bit better, but yeah, it’s not the, the affiliate is not as high as, you know, what I’m earning from the, from the ads and certainly by any stretch, sponsored posts, sponsored videos, charge a little bit for it, um, that can do well.

If I had the time to manage that, you know, this is like such a side hustle. Um, so, you know, unrelated to my core business. Uh, so I just can’t justify building out a, A framework to sell more sponsored videos, but every once in a while, someone will come along and for a video that I shoot, you know, it takes me 30 seconds to a minute.

I might charge a hundred bucks or something like that. Again, not huge in the, in the big scheme of branded sponsor videos, but, you know, if I did that, if I made a, you know, um, 20 of those a month or something like that. It could be a nice additional revenue source. 

Jared: Date night covered in 30 seconds. 

Thomas: There you go.

Jared: Well, hey, I, I mean, Thomas, I’ve told you this before, like, and I know other people feel this way too, because I’ve heard them say the same thing. But like, I feel like every time I turn the corner, you have some new random side hustle that isn’t new, by the way, you’ve been doing for like a decade. And you’re like, Oh yeah, I’ve been doing that for a decade.

And I make a bunch of money on it. Like, it’s just fascinating to see all the side hustles that Here we are trying to come up with new ones and testing new things. And you’re like, Hey, here’s another one. I’m going to share with you that I’ve been doing for 10 years. And you know, I get 4. 2 million views to my random video channel, my random YouTube channel.

Congratulations. That’s um, you’re the, you’re the, you’re the master of stacking side hustles. 

Thomas: Well, thank you. Yeah. And you know, I think. What I told you when we, when we got together in New York was, uh, it’s good, but it’s an affliction. I think a lot of us in this space have, it’s like you grow something and, uh, it’s fun and it’s good.

And the core business is obviously the most important thing. You shouldn’t get distracted. I know, you know, you shared that in your medium article recently. I thought it was great. Don’t get distracted. I know that it’s a side hustle, but it’s just so fun that, you know, those early days of getting them going and trying a new thing You know, having the section on where we bring in hosts and they talk about their cool side.

Now I’m like, Oh, I got to do a Kindle KDP book. And I got, there’s so many exciting ideas, but I think like you’ve said before, it keeps the creative juices flowing, it’s important to keep it going. And then you learn stuff, you apply back to your own business. 

Jared: I do agree with that. It does help as long as you do keep it inside hustle territory.

It can really help your energy, your excitement, your, uh, and what you can learn and then bring back to your own core business. So, well, well done. Hey, we’ve got some weird niches to get through here. Okay. Now we both have some pretty doggone weird niches and for very different reasons. Um, I will say that you nailed the seasonality component.

We’ll call it, or it’s really not even seasonality. It’s like the every four year component. No, we’re not talking about the Olympics. I’ll save yours for a second. Let’s get into mine. Uh, guy, how would you characterize mine? Just a really, really bad website that That is working. The website was shared with me by a listener.

Thank you so much They shared it with me a while back. It took me a while to get to it It is select aquatics. com That’s select then if you don’t know how to spell aquatics because I sure don’t it’s a q u a t i c s select aquatics. com Now apparently this site was built in 2008 If this site was built in 2008, it was already a decade out of style You When it was built, because this site looks like it was built in 1998.

It looks exactly like a type of site. I would go visit after the computer finished connecting via dial up. Uh, it has three columns. It doesn’t look, it doesn’t look, it, it’s not dynamic. I don’t even know how this would, I did not open this up on, on Mobile. Thomas, maybe you want to pull it up on mobile. I, yeah.

Oh my goodness. I don’t even, I shudder to think anyways, but this website, um, I, it’s so big. The homepage is so long and so big. I chucked the whole thing into search, into chat GPT and asked it. It says that Search Aquatics is a website that sells rare and endangered tropical fish to hobbyists and researchers.

It aims to help preserve species that are hard to find or disappearing from the wild. By encouraging fish keeping enthusiasts to breed and maintain these species. Um, I will tell you that this website is just a hotbed of random links. I mean, there must be over 150 outbound links coming off this homepage.

Um, it is a disaster to use, but here’s, and by the way, you can buy all sorts of kits and all sorts of stuff for your weird fish here on this website. There’s testimonials. Um, uh, there’s no menu options that I found. There’s no menu, there’s no about page, there’s no anything. It’s just a ton of links.

However, the site has a decent amount of, uh, of traffic. I would say, um, I got ahrefs pulled up. I mean, this thing’s a DR 18. Um, it is ranking for 1200 keywords. Uh, a little dip of late and again, I know 1200 keywords isn’t much, but you look at this site. It’s a shocker. It ranks for any keywords. Um, getting traffic, organic traffic of 636, uh, organic visits per month.

If I look at the keywords, look at this. There are all these, um, extra pages here. Um, that we didn’t see, and it has a lot of number one rankings. Um, here we have an article, Do Plecos Lay Eggs? Plecos? Plecos? Uh, and if I pull that up, it’s interesting because you’ll see that the website changes quite a bit.

Um, and, Not quite a bit, but the website changes a bit. Now we have some pictures and we have an article. Uh, it’s a very long form article. 

Thomas: Um, it’s like you may have lost the feed here of the, uh, the site. Yeah, 

Jared: it’s let me, yep. I still says it’s sharing, so let me stop sharing and then reshare for you. Sorry.

Thank you for that. We’ve been having this problem for a couple of weeks. It’s not our fault folks. It is the software we use. Here we go. Uh, Nope. That’s the homepage. There we go. Sorry. They aren’t labeled very well. You got it now. 

Thomas: Yeah, I see it now. Yep. 

Jared: Okay. All right. So here’s the article I was referencing.

You can see it looks different than the homepage. But I mean, talk about the most un SEO way to do things. Zero internal links. Spencer, if you’re listening, might want to reach out to them about Link Whisper. They would really get some use out of it. Um, uh, just big, long, chunky paragraphs. Uh, poorly optimized headers.

Some pictures from, uh, 1967. Um, uh, a picture of a can of green beans that you can feed your fish. Um, but again, going back to it, like I’ve got to imagine, and then Thomas, I’ll turn it over to you for your reaction. Like, I’ve got to imagine that this site has a very small, but very loyal following. And I imagine it’s the go to resource or one of those for this small, but passionate group of like endangered fish owners.

And. That’s got to be why it ranks, even though it looks like it was built in 1998. 

Thomas: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, when you set aside everything else about the site, particularly the design, the color choices, the layout, um, it, there’s a lot going for it in terms of the information, right? Like when you go to the homepage.

It’s, it’s totally unoptimized, but you’ve got email addresses for the owners all over the place. You’ve got obvious products you can buy. It’s, you know, I think like a PayPal checkout that’s been randomly embedded in different parts around there, but you can buy a product, right? So we’re checking those boxes.

It talks about they’ve been around since 2008. At one 

Jared: point, I saw an image, he’s like, You can buy it, but if you’re in Canada, email me first, because I’ve got to send you the right thing. I was like, oh my gosh. 

Thomas: You know, it says at the bottom, like, they’re a licensed wildlife care facility in Colorado. So, it’s just swimming, to, to, sorry to, to use that word, but swimming.

Um, And, uh, in EIT, despite the horrible design, I mean, it’s, if you’re not seeing on the screen, it’s so much beige, so many boxes, it doesn’t fill the screen on your, on your desktop. And I think the reason is that it does on mobile. So somebody decided, Hey, we’re not going to make this responsive. We’ll just set the width to the maximum on mobile.

And if it’s all the way over on the left on desktop. So be it. Um, but you know, take, 

Jared: take 

Thomas: away the, the, um, glaring problems with the design and all the stuff Google’s been looking for is kind of present there. So I can see why it has done okay. Uh, it’s not gonna, yeah, it’s just the topic. They’re not going to get a ton of traffic, but relative to how bad everything else is.

The fact that they’ve got that traffic. I got to think it’s because they’re, you know, hitting all those boxes that Google has been looking for. 

Jared: I mean, the SEO in me is like, Oh my gosh, if we just put a menu, a navigational menu in the navigational menu, link to like the top, you know, the cornerstone articles and just do an internal link audit with Link Whisper.

Like, Oh my gosh, I feel like the site would quadruple in. Keywords almost overnight, you know, cause it’s, I don’t even know how these pages are getting traffic given that they feel like somebody that must be orphan pages, you know, 

Thomas: everything. Yeah. Everything is like, and the layout changes when you go over to, but you know, also it’s probably, I didn’t put it in site speed, but I bet it’s fast because there’s no code running on this thing.

Jared: They’re not 

Thomas: plugins. There’s, you know, The PayPal button is the 

Jared: only thing it’s got to load outside of the, uh, the, the main, the, the content. 

Thomas: So I think it’s, yeah, it’s like, it’s funny. It’s like an exercise in what would happen if you took away everything, except the stuff that Google has been saying is important over the last year.

What do you get? I can’t say this is the best user experience, but I guess this is what Google wants the internet to look like. Tons of EAT, lots of mentions of authority, products to buy, you know, probably a strong brand, good branded traffic, fast site speed. If you don’t look at it, then, yeah, you know, on paper, it’s, uh, it’s like, oh, wow, they must be doing something right.

Jared: Well, see, they’re just adopting the way that Google has chosen to approach search. Make it so hard to use that just naturally increases time on site. 

Thomas: Exactly. Yeah. You got to wander around. It’s like a journey to find your way to the, to the information you’re looking for and just got to embrace that. And yeah, 10 minutes later you found what you were looking for and Google has seen a bunch of great positive user signals.

Jared: I was telling you before we hit record, it kind of reminds me a little bit of the chicken feed website you shared. Yeah. A little bit, right? Except for that website was like a DR 75 and getting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages a month. And this is a DR 18 getting maybe a thousand pages a month, but kind of has that similarity to where if you are a fit, an endangered fish owner, I didn’t even know that was a thing until today.

But if you are an endangered trop, I’m sorry, I was too, um, I was too general, an endangered tropical fish owner. Then this is where you hang out apparently. So there you go. Well, um, that’s my weird niche. I’ll pull yours up and why don’t you start talking us through what you have for us? 

Thomas: Yeah. So this is election source.

com again, kind of a timely, uh, one that I’m choosing here, and we’re definitely not going to be getting into politics here. Cause don’t worry. This is. Not a news site or anything like that. This is where, just imagine if you wanted to run your own election and you wanted all the stuff required to do that, then this is where you would go to buy all of that stuff.

So if you want like turnstiles, ballot boxes, that kind of, that kind of lawn signs, you know. They’ve got it in spades, but the way that I found this is if you have ever been wondering those little stickers you get when you go and vote, um, let’s say I voted and you get to, you know, take a selfie with that and post it on your social media and feel good about yourself.

Where do those come from? The answer is this is where they come from. So they have a whole section and they show up as, as we’ll see if we take a look at that. The hrefs in a sec for all these queries about stickers. And this appears to be the place that you go if you are a municipality running an election and you want all kinds of different options for I voted, I voted early, you know, I voted in multiple languages, stickers, um, and apparently, you know, that is a surprisingly good business.

So, yeah, we’re looking at the hrefs. They’re number one for I voted sticker voting sticker. Yeah, all these votes, sticker, all these kinds of keywords related. Look at that. That’s 

Jared: decent search volume too. 

Thomas: So we’re getting a good amount of traffic. It’s almost all sticker related. I know they seem to have other stuff on the site.

Number three, 

Jared: vote booth. 

Thomas: Yeah, vote booth. And I mean, again, all this stuff, if you want to run your own election at home, then this is, this is the place to go. Um, and you know, I looked into it a little bit to try to get a ballpark of, okay, they’re not, you know, they’re doing pretty well. They didn’t have like a ton of organic traffic in the big scheme of things, but they seem to be doing decently.

How, you know, how much could they be, be making from this? And I found an old news article that talked about how one of their competitors, um, sells 30 million stickers each election cycle. Oh my 

Jared: goodness. 

Thomas: So when you think about that and the volume that you can do here, and I don’t know if that’s, you know, uh, boxes of stickers or the actual stickers themselves.

But even, you know, I read a statistic. Some of these stickers will go for up to 15 cents each. Um, some of these are cheaper, but, you know, the bigger ones and more graphical ones, you’re talking substantial money that’s coming in on election stickers. So if they have kind of cornered the market there, And this competitor, this is back in 2014.

You know, we know people are even more focused on the elections now than they probably were at that time. Then the business of election stickers could certainly be booming. 

Jared: Well, here I am. And, uh, uh, I’ve got a product page pulled up. Let me double check. Okay, good. It is sharing. Uh, this is the, I voted sticker PS dash one 10, 5 and 50 cents.

And if I’m reading this right, you get a thousand of them. 

Thomas: Yeah. So that means they’re a half cents. 

Jared: They’re a half cent each. 

Thomas: Yeah. So that’s on the lower end, but there’s ones that are more expensive. There’s different, different things. And again, I don’t know from that article, it wasn’t clear to me, is this a unit?

Like does a unit count as one of those, the 550 does a unit count as, as, uh, you know, one sticker. But I got to think that there’s some that are more expensive that people are buying because, um, I read that one of the areas around here where I live in the, in the South Bay and San Francisco actually spent 90, 000 on their stickers in the last election.

I read that because they decided not to offer stickers, uh, in one election because of the cost. So I am, it’s a little hard to figure out exactly how they’re, how much they’re making from this, but it’s gotta be pretty substantial. Like you said earlier, this is the ultimate. In seasonality, right? Like we talk about maybe you have a site that’s in the Halloween niche and you’re going to get traffic once a year.

Well, they’re getting traffic like once every four years when there’s an election year. Basically, I’ve got to imagine. So right. It’s the final countdown is the thing on the homepage. They’re going to probably be, you know, all hands on deck until the election happens, and then they’re going to sleep for the next year and a half.

Jared: So here’s one thing I find interesting about this. Like you said it yourself, when we were looking at AH refs and what they ranked for, it was like predominantly the main keywords they rank for our sticker related, right? But as I’m sitting again, this is the SEO on me coming out, right? Like this is what I do for 11 folks.

You got to, you got an e commerce site like this. This is what we do at my agency, but I look at my first thought is you rank so well for stickers. You probably make a lot of your money on stickers, but look, there’s no mention of stickers here. In terms of the, uh, you know, you have to go into precinct supplies and it’s like a sub of a sub and you get into stickers.

As a matter of fact, if you go down to the footer and you look at like, you know, services, they don’t have stickers listed. Um, you have to go to, you know, halfway down the page under the featured items. And then that’s where they have the stickers. And then that’s where you can kind of navigate into like, again, I just feel like.

If stickers are what you sell, let’s get this front and center. Let’s get this listed as one of the popular products and let’s get this above the fold so people can get what they want right away. 

Thomas: You know, I got to think that even though the stickers are clearly where they’re getting the traffic, it must not be a product that earns them a lot.

A loss even if it’s like. Yeah, even if it’s like one cent per sticker or, you know, even if it’s five or 15 cents was the number I read and 30 million, it’s good money, but it’s, you know, it’s not, uh, it’s not probably as much as they’re making from these higher ticket items. So I got to think they’re trying to push the high ticket item.

Maybe the stickers are almost like a loss leader, get people over there and, you know, they search their stickers and then they end up going for the voting booth. That’s, A hundred bucks or something. Your margins. No, it’s $3. 

Jared: Yeah, that’s what I was gonna say when I said good. They ranked number one for sticker whatever.

I voted sticker. But like ranking number three for the booth, if that thing’s cost three 50 bucks now that is a high value keyword right there. That’s not bad. 

Thomas: So I’m thinking yeah, they’ve gotta be using their, their success in the sticker world. That’s a good point to get out and, you know, diversify. I like it into these other spaces.

Jared: Well, uh, not to over tease, but Thomas, this is not the first or last time, I’m sorry, this is not the last time we’re going to be talking about the election, uh, in terms of on the Niche Pursuits podcast. And to your point, not talking the politics of it, we have an interview coming up with someone who runs a very, very popular election website.

And, uh, I’ve already done the interview, it’s a fantastic interview, it’s so interesting. It’s going to be coming out soon. You could probably imagine pretty soon given the timing we have in the upcoming us election. So, um, good find, good find. Well done. I like it. Uh, and that brings us to a wrap. I cannot believe an hour flew by Thomas.

I feel like I’ve been spending a lot more time than normal with you. Not only to be host this week together, but I just got back from spending a couple of days with you. So it was good to see you in New York. It’s good to see you here in the podcast. Thank you again to everyone who has listened. We hope you enjoyed it.

Leave us a comment. If you can, let us know what you thought of this. We do read all the comments and we appreciate them. And of course, have a great weekend. We’ll see you again next week.