James Oliver knows a thing or two about building successful niche sites. And just because the rules of the game have changed, that doesn’t mean it’s not a lucrative business proposition anymore. 

In this interview, this entrepreneur talks about the successes he’s had, the SEO strategies he’s using at the moment, his experience with AI, and an iconic SEO tool that he recently acquired.

James starts by sharing a bit of his backstory and his initial successes, which were mainly in the mattress and sleep industry in the UK.

He shares what’s working at the moment for him, and talks about his experience using AI and smoothing over the text so it seems more human. He also shares the additional elements he adds to the text to enhance it.

James talks in depth about his use of statistics in posts, how and why he creates those articles, and how they help him with link building. 

He also talks about elements such as calculators and clickable maps, why they’re useful, and how to create your own quite easily. 

Then he shares his thoughts on the SEO strategies that work today.

He has experience using Medium and LinkedIn to boost his SEO, and he talks about the strategies he uses to get traffic from those platforms.

James shares his approach to entity stacking and then talks in detail about a public case study he did with a site he created in January using AI content. He shares the strategies he used to build out Observation Hobbies, how much it earned, and why his traffic tanked.

He also talks about the indexation challenges he’s faced and offers useful advice for people who might be struggling with something similar, and then he shares what his strategies are for diversifying his business in view of the current landscape.

He tells the story behind acquiring Answer Socrates, why he bought it, the changes he and his partner made to it, and his thoughts on buying a SaaS product.

James also shares the state of his business at the moment and his strategies for the future.

Links & Resources

Topics James Oliver Talks About

• How he got started
• Using AI
• Adding other elements
• Linkable assets
• Using statistics
• Using maps and calculators
• SEO strategies that work today
• Using Medium and LinkedIn
• Entity stacking
• Public case study
• Indexation
• Diversifying his business
• AnswerSocrates
• Productivity
• Future strategy

Transcript

Jared: We’re going to be kind of

James: ping

Jared: ponging around

James: the world of SEO. What’s working today? What you’re involved in? So mostly, I was in the sleep and mattress industry, but not in the USGO. Maybe, what were some of your first successes? The first real success was actually building a website on an expired domain.

to walk us through this site. So I started in January, spent maybe two weeks just doing the content. The peak month was month seven, which earned 1, 448. And overall, it earned just under 4k. You mentioned calculators and you mentioned interactive maps. So maybe on those two. Yeah, calculators doing really good.

Same with name

Jared: generators. You were sharing in our notes about a strategy you have with using Like Medium and other types of high domain websites. At the moment, like LinkedIn and Medium are just ranking like crazy for

James: pretty much everything.

Jared: Where did it earn most of its money? Was it an affiliate play or more of an

James: ad play or a different type of angle?

There’s mainly 50 50, but a lot of the content, I still go affiliate heavy. Talk about your diversification, maybe from a high level. So for me, I’ve been focusing a lot more on software businesses rather

Jared: than SEO. So what was it about AnswerSocrates that particularly caught your eye? AnswerSocrates. com.

That made the deal something you really wanted to pursue. So as soon as we see anything with a DR over

James: 50, it’s kind

Jared: of, you have to get it. For this site, or did you build on an niche domain? Like, what do you think it was that allowed this site to grow the way it did in the first seven or eight months?

Yeah, sure.

James: So I think the biggest thing is.

Jared: All right. Welcome back to the Niche Pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman. To date, we’re joined by James

James: Oliver. James, welcome on board. Hello, thanks for having me. I’ve been wanting to come jump on this podcast for a while, I enjoy it.

Jared: It’s good to hear you.

It’s good to have you. I mean, I feel like I’ve been hearing your name for years. We discovered before we hit record, we were just talking about where our worlds overlapped. And we were both in York at affiliate gathering this year and missed each other, didn’t connect. Like, so it’s really good to have you on and, and connect and hang out a bit.

Um, you know, we’re going to be diving. We’re going to be kind of ping ponging around the world of SEO. What’s working today, what you’re involved in. Uh, what you’re, what you’re kind of rolling your sleeves up and seeing success with, but before we do that, maybe give us a little backstory on who you are and catch us up to where things are right now.

James: Yeah, sure. So I have been doing SEO and affiliate marketing for seven years just for myself, building my own like niche websites, my own websites and building up a portfolio of sites. Uh, managed to get like 20 odd sites now, uh, been doing that for, well, for the seven years and got a few bigger sites. And obviously I managed to buy Oliver.

com as well, which was a quite nice acquisition, but that’s generally the history and what I’m, uh, mainly focused on.

Jared: Maybe what were some of your first successes? Because SEO world looked, What were some of the things in your early days that you kind of were able to get off the ground and get success and traction with?

James: Well, it was, it’s actually nuts. Even before the seven years, two years before that, I’d built my first blog. No idea what I was doing, just a random marketing blog. And he ended up earning like 2 and 17 cents from AdSense where I didn’t even have a clue. Uh, so back then it was, it was fairly nice to do the blogging game.

And the first real success was actually with building an expired domain, building a website, an expired domain, uh, ended up ranking really well. And that turned into my main site throughout the whole time. I’ve still got it now.

Jared: For you, as you’ve built these sites up, have you had a focus, you know, affiliate ads through maybe a premium ad network?

High ticket products, e commerce, SaaS, like where have you kind of ended up in? You got 20 sites, you played around a lot, probably dipped your toe in everything, but like where has, where have you ended up

James: landing for the most part? So mostly I was in the sleep and mattress industry, but not in the US geo.

So in like UK, Australia, all the geos, which was a lot less competitive and easier to rank for. So it was mainly the sleep and mattress and like when one side ranking, I’d build another site in the same geo and then build ones in different geos. So I already did the keyword research and all the hard work actually, uh, going around that niche.

So I thought I might as well expand. And then the other sites was just random acquisitions or just building in different niches to kind of just diversify.

Jared: Yeah, well, let’s kind of get into some of the topics we have on the table today. What are the big ones? That you and I settled on was talking about what is working today.

And I’ll say in 2024, I mean, really we’re recording this at the end of 2024. So by the time this comes out, it’ll probably be early 2025. Most people listening, it’s going to be about what’s working in the new year. Uh, you know, so, but, but the framework is the same, like. The SEO world has changed in many ways, and in many ways it hasn’t changed.

And I think we wanted to spend some time talking about some of the things you’re doing in today’s environment that is, that is working really well. Um, and then drill deeper into each of those topics. Maybe let’s set the stage. Talk about what you’re focusing on right now. Talk about some of the things that you’re focusing on in terms of success.

What’s, what’s actually generating results. Then we’ll kind of deep dive some of them. Sure.

James: So, what’s working right now? Whoa. Personally, for me right now, because it’s coming up to Black Friday, I am just going through the whole portfolio and updating all the content. Uh, because updating content, it triggers the freshest algorithm, so that’s like my main, uh, thing I always do in Q4, so that’s a staple.

But now, with, obviously with AI content, it’s huge. And so it’s helped a lot of the budget. So it’s all AI content, a lot what I do, but it is, I always hire an editor or spend a lot of time editing content. So it’s speeding up the process of actually building multiple sites out rather than just a single asset.

So you can build more sites for a much lower cost, but you’d obviously have to have the steps in, uh, the steps set up. So it’s, you’ve got an editor and the content’s good. You can’t just publish AI content as it is. But for me, it’s just personally just scaling and building more sites out.

Jared: If we could, let’s touch on the AI content plus the editing.

Um, a lot of people. Probably listening or very experienced with AI content now at some point. And then there’s runs the gamut right on what you do with it. There’s AI content, creating tools and software that will do a pretty good job going further than say, just a, like a chat GPT. But what are the things you’re doing?

Are you using a software? What are you doing afterwards? What are the things your editor focuses on? Like from a high level, what do you do to the content to make it not just AI content?

James: We’ll first. It obviously depends what you’re using if you’re using ChachiBT you have to do a lot more editing But if you use like an AI writer, they generally have the prompts in place to make it less AI y content So like I generally use Koala for like best roundup reviews because you can chuck your amazon link in it Does a really good job and then Cuppa for like programmatic SEO Kind of keywords.

So you can do book keywords soon as you’ve done the keyword research. And then afterwards I’m actually using a lot of chat to T custom, uh, AI agent. So what I’ve built myself to redo the intros mainly, because the intro is like the start of the page and it’s like the 80, 20 principle of getting. Getting the biggest results for the least amount of work.

So I always make sure to make sure the intro is on point at the start of the article, uh, and just generally just checking if afterwards I run it for a prompt and just make sure it removes a lot of the, like in the realm of, and all those sort of things. Uh, phrases what AI

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Go ahead and use coupon code podcast at checkout in order to get your first month for just 1. Again, that’s coupon code podcast, go to community. nichepursuits. com today and see what it’s all about. And maybe I’ll see you on our call next week. Thanks a lot. Do you find

Jared: you’re adding very much additional content that like an AI software isn’t producing for you?

Um, a lot of people will talk about how important visual media is or adding charts or adding data points and things like that. You know to some degree AI can struggle with that But at the same time maybe you maybe you’re getting AI to help you to create those kind of things

James: Yeah, so I always make sure to try and win the featured snippet with a lot of the articles So information is generally just a quick summary and just straight to the point of the article Uh for roundup reviews, it’s generally just a bulleted list under a heading of like these are the best products So i’m always making sure I add tables chat tbt does really good with Uh, good job with tables and then use perplex AI for statistics.

So you can use it for statistic posts, but you can also use it for general content as well, and generally they get picked up and they’re what people link to, especially if it’s at the start of the article, it kind of grabs people’s attention. So adding like statistics in, always add like a unique image anyway.

AI actually does a really good job with images. So I’m making sure to do, depending on which website I’m doing, but it’s generally a digital art style, which kind of stands out, which is quite vibrant and surreal. That way it works really well for social media as well, because social, if you put, putting them on Pinterest, you can reuse those images and it helps get the clicks and traffic.

Also helps with, um, Yeah. Google image in that search engine. So it generally helps with ranking that and people are clicking on images. So make sure the image is on point and unique. And AI does a pretty good job at doing that.

Jared: You mentioned statistics. And I know that one of the things we had in our list to talk about today was creating linkable assets.

Maybe this is a good time to go into that. Or it sounds like you’re seeing success with linkable assets from a standpoint of getting backlinks, but also, you know, producing that content as it relates to the content that you put in your website.

James: I hate doing backlinks. I hate the outreach and hate having to pay a fortune to get backlinks.

And generally they are all on like guest posts kind of sites, which everyone else is using. If I can tell like these sites from guest posts, like so can Google. So generally linkable assets is what I try to aim for. So I’ve always done statistic posts even before AI, but now with perplexity, it makes it even easier.

And then to go like one step further with those, when they start ranking and getting traffic, you can go into Google search console, click on Or use a tool like Spindrift or my, uh, Jamie’s tool, ContentRaptor and check what key, uh, keywords are missing in the statistic pages and then just boost them up.

So for example, it might be, um, I don’t know, house statistics, and then people are maybe searching for like treehouse statistics for that same post and you’re getting traffic for, but you’ve not mentioned that at all. So you just add that in with a bunch of new perplexity statistics on that. And it boosts the content and makes it more relevant and helps you rank for multiple statistic pages as well.

Jared: Are you targeting specific, let’s say, statistic queries and then ranking those or are you adding statistics to other types of queries like informational queries, comparison versus queries, and then ranking inside of those and people are then linking to those assets? And I maybe have a follow up question or two based on that.

James: Yeah, I do both, but I’ve seen most success with general statistic pages because generally it’s journalists searching for that. That quote, and they want that to add into the article and then they’ll link back to you. So generally it’s statistic pages, which do perform the best and you do have to structure it quite neatly.

So it’s gotta be bulleted, pointed with the list and like no real fluff, uh, with a lot of different additional headings and just clear cut to, to the point so they can just copy it and paste it into the article. I

Jared: think it’s not an old concept, but I think maybe perhaps in the day and age of SEO changing so much, a lot of people have maybe moved away from it.

Like, this is something that you’re seeing work really well today since a lot of the updates that have changed and a lot of the way the ranking works.

James: Yeah, definitely. Everyone, well, from all my sites and from what I’ve seen, it’s, it works really well. It gets a lot of links. It’s like, I know a Foria hacker just released a new course and been talking about it as well.

Their AI statistic page, it gets a ton of links just because it’s AI statistics and everyone’s linking to it. I think it’s got like 1, 500 referring domains or something ridiculous. Uh, a few things you can do as well, if, if it is a hard query like that, for example, you can actually run Google ads to this query, uh, cause generally no one’s either running ads for statistic quotes, cause who would do that?

It’s no, no real value for them. But if you run ads, it’s generally really cheap and you’re at the top of the page and journalists don’t care. They just click on the top result and use that as a reference. So you can generally skip the curve a little bit and run some ads, which works quite nicely. Well, that’s interesting.

Yeah, you’re

Jared: right. The ad, the amount you pay, I mean, if you, if you right now are currently putting like a budget towards your link building. And you think about the budget and what you get, like, that’s interesting to think about in, in relation to that, if you take that same ad budget, I wonder how many links you’d get instead.

And to your point, they wouldn’t look like a lot of the other links you might get spending it differently.

James: Yeah. Well, generally as well, the links are very high quality. It’s all journalists, the big papers as well. So it’s a cheap way if you want to allocate a link budget to that, instead of actually allocating it to.

Just spending it on, uh, Harrow or anything like that, for example.

Jared: You know, like you mentioned perplexity AI for statistics, but what are some other places people can go to kind of get these stats and, you know, like. We could use an example or not. I’m pretty sure everyone can fill in the blanks, but to some degree.

When you’re running up against a difficulty finding good stats, like, what are some other places people got to look for those? I

James: can’t remember the full name now. Uh, Statistics. Uh, Statistical or something like that. So I used to actually do this and just manually search and then just collect all the data and just do it from a load of different sites.

Uh, you can do that, which does work rather well, but it is time consuming. Like perplexity just grabs it all. So you just do a prompt, like, can I have data driven, uh, stats as well? Because you want stats with numbers and like quotable linkable quotes, basically. Uh, but just generally Google searches and just scanning the web and just compiling everything together.

Obviously that takes time, but that is another way to do it. You can also actually create these yourself by just doing quizzes or surveys. So you can actually do it. If you have traffic on your blog. You can just put up a quiz and just generate the statistics by yourself. Or you can do a quiz in a Facebook group or a Reddit group.

And then they generally get a lot of people and a lot of traction and a lot of, um, votes. They may vote like, oh, I do link building instead of content. And then you can just take the numbers and turn that into, Your own data or asset of a linkable stat. I was going to ask you, cause

Jared: you have, I was reading your, your blog post on this topic, uh, before we started recording and stats was only one of the things that you were doing when it comes to linkable assets, you’d, you’d kind of tease some of them there.

Surveys and quizzes, but you also mentioned calculators and interactive maps, which I think is funny because on the Friday edition of the podcast every week, we feature some weird niches, right? And we tend to find these calculators that are the most bizarre, obscure calculator, but they’re getting, oftentimes they’re getting tons of traffic and they’re really niched down.

Talk about some of those things that you had mentioned in your, in your blog posts there, which I’ll include a link in the show notes, by the way, if you’re listening, but you mentioned calculators and you mentioned, you know, you mentioned interactive maps. So maybe on those two, can you go into more depth on those two?

James: Yeah, sure. So there’s actually a site, which I love. I don’t know who created it, but it’s called authority astrology or astrology authority. com. And that site is a, basically a chat GPT. a custom AI agent and they’re doing a subscription model and the whole site’s built just calculated pages. It’s like satin calculator and they’ve got hundreds of different calculators and it’s getting a ton of traffic and then they’re leading all that traffic into a custom gbt subscription model.

So they’re creating their own product out of that and rather than doing affiliate marketing or ads, which is crazy. Well, calculators now are so easy to do with ChachiBT and even Claude now as well. So you can just ask it to create, you need the prompts. You can obviously read the post, but ask it for a pure HTML, uh, vanilla.

A javascript and css calculator on whatever you’re asking for and then you put that in jsfiddle so you can see how it looks and you just keep tweaking it and then you can just put that on your wordpress site and it’s you can do it within a day or a few hours if you if you get it right and yeah calculators doing really good so same with uh name generators because they’re generally quite easy and not too much like code or Not too much feeling, feeling about and they don’t cost anything on the back end.

It’s just pre programmed. Uh, so they’re doing really well, especially for links. And then you can promote them as well. And they’re generally easier to promote than an article. They tend to do a lot better when people link to them.

Jared: Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting to hear you talk about it. Cause like when we feature this stuff on the podcast, we aren’t looking at how many backlinks is generated.

We’re just looking at the traffic it gets right. And we’re going, Oh, if you throw ads on that, you can make a bunch of money from the traffic. There’s like so many ways to monetize. Or to get gain from these types of things, like a calculator, you’re going to get a bunch of backlinks because we’re going to link to it.

In theory, you could generate email addresses from it if you wanted, right? You could build a list from it if you want to say maybe your first one’s free or hey, if you want to get this result, I’ll email it to you. You could generate an email list. You could put ads on it. And make money off the traffic should it get end up getting a bunch of traffic.

So it’s just it’s really cool. Yeah, it’s really cool to hear you talk about it because we’ve been seeing a lot of that on in these kind of weird niche down topics and whatnot. Um, anything else on linkable assets before we move on to some other things that you’re seeing work right now?

James: Uh, well, the the map side of things.

So the map is a little bit more complicated. That’s why I didn’t go into it too much. But my friend, Sasha, Uh, he, he was big on maps and he’s created a matcheapest. com and nowbooks, which is basically just scraping the Google maps, getting the data off that, and then turn it into a map of, uh, like the relevant data and using that as a linkable asset, which works really well.

He’s got hundreds of links from that. Great.

Jared: And again, like world change with AI, because before to come up with a lot of this stuff would have been. Not that it’s not something you have to work on now, but it just, it’s totally changed the game in terms of how you can use AI to help build out these types of things.

Uh, like you said, sometimes it only a couple of hours.

James: Yeah. And you can literally just reverse engineer what’s working and what newspapers are linking to as well. So you just do a Google search operator, like site NY post. com calculator, or your niche and calculator, something like that. And then you’ll see all the results in Google of specific calculators, which which you want to.

I create and replicate the results of what’s already working. And a lot of these journalists as well, because they’ve already wrote about it and already done it, they’re gonna, they’re gonna do a similar piece again. Yep, that’s great. That’s good. Okay,

Jared: let’s see. Let’s continue talking about what you’re seeing working here, um, you know, 2024, 2025.

What are the things are you working on that is helping you get traffic, backlinks, et cetera, SEO value basically in today’s

James: world? Uh, so it’s still the basics of keyword research, making sure you’re doing competitive analysis, uh, doing the content and backlinks. So it’s, it’s generally the same. It’s just a little bit trickier, uh, if Google likes the, the website or not, but it’s still my main focus is just keyword research and content mainly for Still 2024 and it will be for the 2025 as well.

Jared: As people look at a helpful content update, the types of sites that targeted the types of sites that it seems, you know, a lot of people will talk about a classifier getting put on, right? So like, no matter, there’s a feeling that no matter what you do, if you end up in that bucket at this stand, what do I do about it, what are you doing other with sites you’ve already had live or with sites you’re launching, like how do you kind of get around that?

Or how do you talk to people about the success you’re having? Outside of what people would consider as a HCU classifier of sorts.

James: Yeah, well, uh, I still wasn’t immune to it. So a lot of my sites did get hit and reduce traffic, but I think it was more of a traffic reallocation rather than a lot of the sites getting hit.

A lot of the traffic just went to Reddit and big newspapers like Forbes instead of your site. That was nothing to really do with you. And especially with my main mattress site, it was, uh, in a different geo, but all the sites ended up ranking in the SERPs was all US sites, and none of them were selling the mattresses in that geo specifically anyway.

So the SERPs was a complete mess. Yeah. So there was nothing I really could do. It was just mainly waiting it out and just, uh, just keep updating content and keep doing the freshness and adding new content to the websites.

Jared: You were sharing, uh, in our notes about a strategy you have with using like medium and other types of kind of high domain websites to add value to your site.

Maybe talk through how you’re using that. We’ve talked about medium, uh, on and off on the podcast in the last, uh, two weeks. You know, kind of four to six months. And I think, uh, we had Thomas Smith on to talk about how he’s using medium. And he was talking about just how wide ranging the benefits of, of a medium account and, and kind of publishing the medium are, how are you using that to help your SEO?

James: Yeah. So with. With, like, the Parasite SEO side, Medium, LinkedIn, Reddit, they’re, like, the three main free ones which you can use right now. And, actually, with Medium and LinkedIn, I generally just use ChatGPT content just because it’s cheap and just easy to do. And now there’s, uh, ChatGPT Canvas has just came out, so you can do the article, ask for it to be a bit longer because you want to round about a thousand words.

And then you can just ask it to rewrite it. So I generally post one article on LinkedIn, rewrite it just slightly and then post it on Medium again. So you kind of get in two assets in the SERP for, for that specific keyword. And at the moment, like LinkedIn and Medium are just ranking like crazy for pretty much everything.

So it’s worth trying to get as many assets ranking for a single keyword as possible. I generally did that before the update, trying to build like multiple sites in the same niche to. Get as much value as possible. And then if you do that as well, you can actually leverage. Leverage that because you’re getting the most traffic.

So you can just go to these affiliate programs and ask for a better commission. Uh, just cause you’ve got more assets and get more traffic and more sales on that specific product. So that’s generally what I’ve been doing a lot of the times. What helps

Jared: an article SERPs when you’re writing it for Medium, when you’re writing it for LinkedIn, are there any, are there any tips or strategies there?

And the reason I ask is cause like. I mean, we’ve done hundreds of podcasts on SEO tips to help your articles perform better on your own website, but when you’re working with a medium or a LinkedIn, first off, there’s a far less you can do with the article. And second off, kind of outside the reins of your typical traditional SEO for your own website, right?

You’re kind of working with this really large site that has a ton of content that stratifies a million different topics. What, what do you, want Like, what kind of tips can you share with how to make a LinkedIn post or sorry, a LinkedIn article and or a medium article perform well and get

James: into the top 10 results?

Yeah, sure. So you generally, it’s the same as just a normal blog post. The title has the most weight. So you always want to make sure the title’s optimized for what you’re trying to rank for. And, uh, The, because these sites are so authoritative and they’re ranking really well in Google, you want to try and do as many secondary keywords as possible.

Like if it’s on your own site, you might turn like extra parts into a new article, but on that you can kind of, kind of keyword stuff, but it’s not really, it’s just adding extra LSIs in there. So I, I just use like, uh, uh, Keyword Surfer, just the Chrome extension and just Add a bunch of extra keywords into the article afterwards.

And generally an issue sometimes is indexing. So I run that through an indexer, say like a mega indexer. There’s a ton of them out there, but generally I run it through an indexer straight away to try and get it. Uh, indexing Google. And then after that, it generally does its own thing and hits the first page usually within a few hours or a couple of days, which is nuts.

Jared: Yeah, boy. I mean, talk about those high, high DR, high domain authority websites right now. I mean, it’s what we’re all fighting against to get our own content to rank, but there are ways to, to work with that. Let’s see, I want to move on. We got, we’re already so much to cover and we’re already halfway into this.

Hey, you had mentioned on our agenda. I, man, I love this topic. I could do a whole podcast interview on this topic, but entity stacking, Owning the SERPs, owning the brand, uh, for your brand. Talk about what you’re doing with that as it relates to what’s working nowadays.

James: Yeah, sure. So it comes back to EAT.

And it’s, it’s just getting your brand or your personal name out there on as many different assets as possible, because generally it’s all external factors, so you want it on whatever you’re trying to rank, if it’s your brand or if it’s a piece of content, you want it on you meet lead, uh, medium LinkedIn and all the different assets, or you want to try and get the knowledge panel, get in the AI overviews and get into LLNs as well.

So you want to be coming up in open API and Claude and everything like that. And generally if say you’re trying to rank in the SEO space, I just Google other influencers and then you can see what’s getting pulled into the serp. Same with a IO reviews, and you can try and reverse engineer replicate that.

For example, like Julian Goldie, he was getting the knowledge panel and Udemy was appearing for his, uh, searches a lot of the time. So having a Udemy profile or a little mini free course helping get the knowledge panel and get the online reputation management that way. I know Craig Campbell as well. He uses IDMB, the, the, um, actor page that works really well.

It’s different for different niches, but it’s generally these high authoritative, uh, profile websites, which is just getting your brand or your personal page out there.

Jared: Yeah. I’ve heard of the, uh, uh, I’ve heard of a variety of different ways to go about that, you know, are you doing anything additionally beyond just trying to get your brand or get your personal name mentioned on a lot of these places?

Is it really about trying to get. As many high profile websites to have a profile or a mention of viewers, there’s additional things beyond that to try to connect the dots or try to go further.

James: Yeah. A lot of times it’s just that you can internally link some of them to help like, um, so Google can crawl different websites and prove it doesn’t have to crawl and do different separate searches that generally helps.

Uh, but it is literally just getting yourself out on all these top authoritative sites. Like if you’re a business like clutch. com and like all the different sites like Um, and you can generally just reverse engineer whatever’s in your niche, just Googling different sites, checking the AI overviews and knowledge panels to see what works well for you.

Jared: Perfect. Um, I want to pause on that topic cause we got a bunch of other topics we have that we want to talk about, and we started by. When we put together what we were talking about today on this agenda, just so everybody knows, we kind of started with like, Hey, what’s working nowadays, right? Like, kind of how I entered it, like, A lot of stuff has been going on, but you’re getting a lot of success.

Let’s talk about what’s working. I asked you if you had any specific case studies or sites or examples you could go into that are a little bit more specific. You talked about this website. That you started as interesting. It’s done really well. It’s also had some mistakes along the way. Maybe let’s transition into talking about this singular site that you started.

And, uh, I think it’s pretty interesting. So maybe just walk us through this site and when it started, what you started it with, and we can kind of get into the growth pattern of it.

James: Sure. So, uh, with a lot of these, I don’t like obviously revealing my site, like a lot of website owners, just because you don’t know what’s going to happen online.

So I decided to build a website with no, no ties to anything else and just do it as a public case study. Uh, so I started in January, January, spent maybe two weeks, if that, just doing the content. And it was all AI content. It cost, I think, 467 or something around that mark, just for AI content. I think it was around about 500 pages.

Uh, and then I literally just left it. No link builder or anything like that. It was all just nicely done internally linked and keyword research and everything. Uh, and it, it did quite well. It’s like the peak month was month seven, which, and 1, 448. And overall it earned just under 4k. Uh, and then in month eight, I accidentally ruined it as I was just playing around with it and testing different things, which I shouldn’t have done because it was literally flying up.

Um, but I wanted it to obviously, I use different domains to test and then you can kind of work it together. Find out what’s working and what isn’t. Uh, and unfortunately, I, uh, changed too many URLs and de-indexed a lot of pages.

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Was it the content? You said it was mostly or all AI. Was it the navigational structure, the internal linking? Was it? What’s the backlinks? Did you build backlinks for this site or did you build on an age domain? Like, what do you think it was that allowed this site to grow the way it did in the first seven or eight months?

James: Yeah, sure. So I think the biggest thing is competitor analysis and keyword research. So it’s literally just searching and getting a list of every single competitor in a Google sheet, and then pulling in everyone’s keywords, uh, on every site, removing the duplicates, and then just filtering keyword difficulties.

So you want the low. Easy to target keywords, which are still the best articles. You still want the affiliate terms. So generally go for affiliate terms, which are low keyword difficulty after searching every competitor and point it to a list, because generally you’ll find a lot of hidden gems there from like big sites to like new sites.

There’s generally a few, a few good target keywords, and that generally helps rank in for the extra pages. And then you do the same with informational content. And then I like to internally link everything together. So I do like a pillar page. So for example, best mattresses, and then a lot of best X for Y terms.

So best mattress for back pain. And then that, uh, page would internally link up to the best mattress page and then that link down to the reverse silo structure. And I kind of just built the entire site out like that. When

Jared: you talk about building the content, finding the keywords, internally linking everything, how much informational content do you go for?

How much monetized content do you go for? Was this site where you earned most of its money? Was it an affiliate play or more of an ad play or a different type of angle? It

James: was, it was mainly 50 50 to be honest with you. I got into Mediavine as well because it hit the traffic threshold. So that gave it a nice boost.

Boost of ad revenue, but it’s mainly 50 50, but a lot of the content I do go, I still go affiliate heavy for a lot of the content. Uh, so I generally do 70, 30 percent uh, affiliate to informational content still.

Jared: Was this a new domain, a fresh domain? Was it an age domain? Like what was the domain that you started building on?

James: Yeah, completely fresh. So completely fresh, no backlinks. And then it’s in the hobby niche, so I can reveal the domain anyway. So it was observationhobbies. com. So it was more of an authority place. So it was a big site with multiple hobbies in it with each hobby, obviously having multiple pages and sub niches.

So it was a fairly big site to, to build, but doing that as well, finding, finding like what domain or what niche to kind of go into, I just literally looked at Wikipedia and just found a list of hobbies and then. Found that there and then just jumped into it that way. Generally like the unsexy, random, boring niches do really well.

Jared: I think it’s fascinating. Thank you for sharing the domain. That’s really cool. People can go look at it. I think it’s fascinating to just hear the specific kind of URL and then how you incite like that. When we talk about the monetization, the biggest month, what was you, you talked in the earnings were split like almost 50 50 in terms of a media vine.

Sorry. And, um, and affiliates, like what type of affiliate. And networks where you want, is this like an Amazon thing or was it more specific to certain, you know, specific affiliate programs?

James: Yeah, so usually I always go specific. I don’t like doing Amazon at all. But this was just purely Amazon. Just because I didn’t want to spend any time going through and just updating stuff.

So it was pure Amazon. Just because it like, with Koala AI you can just literally just chuck your Amazon link in and it’ll generate the content and add all the links in for you. So it was just a quick website. So it was all pure Amazon, but I usually don’t like. Going down that road.

Jared: Amazon’s easy and their conversion rate is off the charts.

So there’s a couple of things going for it, even though their commissions are extremely low and it’s

James: a pretty volatile program. Yeah, that’s it. I’ve been, I’ve been banned for no reason before. So it’s like, it’s one of those where I don’t really like sending traffic to Amazon, but it does come through like crazy and people add extra products in.

So it’s definitely worth considering and still doing.

Jared: What happened when you talk about the site tanking a bit? Like what, what did you end up, like, what are the, some of the specifics behind what, what, what happened and what caused it to lose all the traffic?

James: So I was messing around with the silo structure of the actual URL.

So I was trying to optimize that more. I just, I was like, Oh, screw it. I’m just going to do it and see what happens and did it. And then it just deep Googled the index, the site. So it was kind of my problems. You can literally just go check the site and see when it actually happened. It’s just fell off a cliff just when I did it, but I’m just.

Trying to get now as a case study to actually get it back into Google search and get it ranking again. So it’s going to be interesting just to play around with it a bit more trying to get it indexing, but trying to do it manually without backlinks, but it’s not working as of yet. I’m going to keep trying.

And then if not, I’m going to push a bunch of backlinks to it. Because generally the more backlinks you have to a site, the higher crawl budget you have, because you’ve got all those additional links. So it helps crawl the additional pages. So it definitely helps with indexing.

Jared: So it wasn’t so much that the site got, say, hit by an algorithm update, or it lost traffic because it fell out of favor with Google.

It was just like an indexation issue. You change all your URL structures and basically they had to re index and they weren’t indexing.

James: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You can check it out if you go through and have a little look, deep dive into it. But yeah, this is exactly what happened, which isn’t a good idea when you do it as a public case study, but screw it.

Jared: Well, you’ve mentioned indexation a couple of times now throughout the interview. Like it’s, it’s been talked about. And I know from my work in SEO right now, like getting indexed is significantly harder right now than it ever used to be. There’s been lots of studies that have come out this year in 2024 about How Google is indexing far less content.

There’s a lot of theories as to why, obviously with so much AI content hitting Google has to, you know, index differently, like talk about how, you know, going into it a little bit more in depth, cause we’ve mentioned it a couple of times, like what are the challenges around indexation and, you know, any tips you can share with people who are specifically struggling with getting pages or maybe the bulk of their site indexed.

James: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s been a massive pain for a lot of my sites, uh, just falling out of index or coming back in. You can always check it and generally updating contents. One of the biggest ones that generally helps index and adding a lot of internal links. So making sure. The, the float, like the crawl bot, the Google crawl bot can go through the entire site and find the pages easily.

So no authoring pages by itself, uh, make sure everything’s internally linked. And if you need to add supporting articles to the content, like now I don’t like adding a lot of like people also ask kind of questions content. I don’t think those perform very well. Well, if it is specific and part of like the topical map, you do want to have as much content to, to like build that cluster as possible, which does help with indexing too.

Jared: It’s fascinating right now. I mean, when you think about AI, when you think about indexation. So again, we could probably do a whole podcast on that, but it’s a, I hope you get that site recovered. Um, mainly, well, mainly because I want you to earn that income back, but also I’m just fascinated to see what comes of your indexation efforts and whatnot, so.

Hey, uh, with the remaining time, and this was a really cool thing that you and I talked about as we were building up to today, like building the agenda for the day, and that’s this, you know, You’re having all this success with SEO and with using a lot of the, uh, tried and true tactics. You talked about it at one point, you’re like, hey, it’s still the basics, it’s just doing them in a way that works in today’s environment.

Like, you’re having success there, and yet, you really have started, or maybe you’ve been doing that, but this year you’ve spent a lot of time on diversifying those efforts. Making your SEO gains, your SEO wins, the wins you get with that, and diversifying into other areas. Let’s talk about that because I think that’s something that a lot of people are interested in right now.

Certainly with what’s come of a lot of the changes in SEO, it’s made a lot of people realize and even if they are still succeeding. Like, Hey, I just want to not put all my eggs in this one basket. Like talk about your diversification, maybe from a high level, and then we’ll get into the, I know one thing that you did this year that, that is super interesting that we’ll get into.

James: Yeah, sure. So with diversification, it’s mainly just looking at it from a ROI standpoint of your time. Like with niche sites, they’re still selling, but the multiples have dropped like three to kind of two X. What it used to be like 30 or 20, 20 X, depending on how you, how you look at it. Well, what I’ve been doing now is focusing a lot more on SAS, just because you generally earn a similar sort of cashflow, but the multiple for an exit is two X or sometimes three X of what a niche website is now.

So for me, I’ve been focusing a lot more on software businesses rather than SEO, but trying to build them up obviously with SEO at the same time. You acquired AnswerSocrates.

Jared: Is a, I mean, if you’ve been around a while, you know that that’s a tool that’s been around for quite some time. Talk through the story of how you ended up getting a very, I’ll say a very well known keyword research tool.

Um, and I know it does other things, but I mean, like,

James: what’s the story behind it? Well, it was, it was actually quite lucky. So like, as you know, you go to different conferences, like SEO conferences and stuff like that. So it was actually through mutual connections and through a network. It was, wasn’t like privately listed or anything like that.

Uh, the guys who did own it just messaged in a, in a Bali, uh, SaaS group saying, I’m looking to sell this domain, you know, anyone who might be interested. Uh, my friend messaged me and we ended up getting a conversation and talking about it and realized it was still getting, uh, like over a hundred K page views a month, which was pretty crazy.

It seemed so like it needs, it’s needed a bit of work. It had like a bit of downtime, but it’s still get still like a lot of people use it. Uh, and it has the brand that, like, everyone kind of knows that. So, as soon as we found it, it was like, it took a few months to get the deal sorted, but we ended up getting it and we wanted it straight away, so, felt very happy with that.

What

Jared: was the particular draw of AnswerSocrates? And again, I’m trying to ask these questions for the person listening who’s like, you know what? You’re compelling, you’re making compelling arguments at the multiples that SaaS has, the longevity that SaaS has, the different types of SaaS has. Like, so what was it about AnswerSocrates that particularly caught your eye that made the deal something you really wanted to pursue?

James: Yeah, so it was mainly that it was still getting traffic for just a people also asked tool, which wasn’t like fully set up. We knew we could add a lot more features to it to To expand it and it was also a very well known brand with a high domain authority as well. I think it’s 54DR. So it’s got a ton of backlinks from a lot of different sites, which was great.

So that was kind of. Over the edge, because obviously we, we’re SEOs. As soon as we see anything, anything with a DR over 50, it’s kind of, you have to get it. Um, but it was, we, we kind of just wanted to improve it and add extra features, like just improve the just little things like the cursor positions to get additional keywords, uh, we want it to add recursive searches, which.

Not too, well, no SEO tool does that at the moment. I know Steve Toff has talked about it in one of his notes before. Um, and I’d like keyword intent and keyword clustering and a lot of different stuff, which makes it a hell of a lot easier now with. Since

Jared: the acquisition, what are some of the big things you’ve done?

How’s it been going since you bought, um, since you bought the, uh, the SAS product?

James: Yeah. So we’ve hired a full time dev, so that’s a little bit of a hiring process. Like devs are usually a bit of a pain to work with. I’ve had the learning curve of going through that before, but we found someone who’s really good and we’ve got.

Most of the stuff up and running and it will be pretty well, depending on when this is out, a lot of the features will be added within the next few weeks. So hopefully there’ll be added time. If you check it out.

Jared: I know that I saw that you guys had a lot of success with even just a simple change, which is to ask people.

To create an account, sign up, these sorts of things. What was the low hanging fruit there? Like when you bought this site, did you know that there was, there was, there was that opportunity? Or is that something that kind of landed in your lap after you guys bought it?

James: Yeah, that’s the thing I didn’t actually touch on.

So it was the email marketing and it can be used that customers are very. They fit in very well with the market of SEO and what we do anyway. So that can be like, it’s very, like, tendential to us towards our Mining Jamies companies. So we thought just adding a simple, just enter your email to use the tool for free.

And so far it’s got, well, I don’t even know what it is recently, but over 3000, um, email subs and we’ve not had it on for long, maybe a week or so. So it’s, it’s working so far and it’s a very low hanging fruit just to add a authentication, to add email in. And as you know, yourself, email marketing and those, those people are valuable in the niche.

So it’s, it works out really well and easy to monetize that list if we need to.

Jared: One of the cool things about buying a SaaS or starting it, frankly, but buying one like you guys did. Is that this one’s interesting because it’s in SAS in the SEO space. But a lot of times if you look at SASSes that are maybe outside of the SEO space, they will have a killer product, but they won’t have done any SEO to help it rank well.

And so it’s interesting to think about as a case of buying any business. Um, you know, bringing your, your skill sets to bear and putting those, uh, you know, buying a SaaS that has all sorts of low hanging fruit when it comes to the things a lot of us are experts at, SEO, online marketing, website building, content creation, um, and so it sounds like you guys just took advantage of a gap, whether you, you know, saw it in advance or whether it was just something that you had in your list to try out, I mean, there’s got to be so many different wins people can take to different SaaS’s they want to buy.

James: Yeah, well, with the content side of things, it doesn’t have any additional pages. It’s just the main page of the main page of the tool. So there’s no additional blog posts like alternative posts or versus posts or anything like that, low hanging fruit, which you will rank really well for because of the high DR and.

The traffic and the authority, well, the, the just well known brand of the domain. So we’re looking forward to actually pumping out a lot of content and helping turn that into customers of the tool.

Jared: Maybe as we start to wrap up from a high level, you know, get your hands on a lot of things. You’ve got a lot of your own projects.

You’ve got some SaaS now you’ve got all sorts of different things you’re doing. I know I’m on your email list and I enjoy your emails when you send them out. I’d like. You’re just, you’re doing a lot. How, you know, from a high level, do you manage all that? Do you have some sort of structure that you follow?

How do you get so much done in a day? Like it seems you’re doing.

James: Yeah. So I have a small team. So a few VAs, which help out with general maintenance of the websites and everything like that. Uh, but generally with SEO, it is a very slow process and a long time, maybe six months, whatever, for a site to rank.

To a few months to see results of what you actually do. So for me, it’s quite easy to manage multiple domains because you don’t have to be on the ball constantly with a single domain. You can have that break in between and work on different projects at the same time. So for me, just a small team of, um, of people who kind of know what they’re doing and then just me coming in and doing the research and, uh, pointing out what to do, it works quite well.

Jared: From a high level and with whatever metrics, you know, you feel kind of comfortable talking about, but like. What, what kind of traction are you getting right now? Whether it’s revenue or, or, you know, profit or traffic or, you know, just to give people perspective on what a team, your size, and then with all the different things you have your hands in, like what kind of, what kind of traction are you getting?

James: Yeah. So I never really focused too much on traffic cause I tried to go for affiliate terms and a lot of those don’t. Get a lot of traffic compared to a lot of the informational content. So for me, it’s always profit, which I kind of look at rather than anything else. So trying to maximize the traffic you do get and turn it into, uh, as much money as you can, which is with monetization, it’s literally affiliate programs asking for more money when you do that.

You can, even if you’re ranking for like. Whatever term it is, you can ask to do SEO for these brands as well, or sell placements on the website. So it’s just leveraging the traffic and the connections where you get to, to earn more money. Revenue and stuff like that has gone down, obviously, since the helpful content update.

It’s a shame since looking back back at the. Pass through, uh, Black Fridays compared to what it is now. But it’s still, it’s still like a good number. It’s still over 20K roughly just because the portfolio is so diversified and in too many different assets. So it’s, uh, kind of helped shield a lot of the loss which could have happened.

Jared: A lot of people prior to the multiples going down on, on websites and kind of just online assets in general, a lot of people would build something and then sell it and then move on to the next project, build something and then sell it. Are you building to sell? Are you building some of these websites to sell going forward?

Are you changing that approach and changing that strategy? Because even though multiples have gone down, like there is still people buying these, there are still marketplaces that are, that are succeeding with them. Like, what’s your strategy like going forward? I’m curious to hear what, from someone like you, who’s very much in the trenches, if very much still building, what’s the long term focus as you build out these projects?

James: Yeah, there’s still loads of money in it. Like, I still love doing affiliate websites and niche websites. I will still do it just for the lifestyle and the time value of what you get doing the projects. But before, I never actually really sold a website. So I always held onto them and just kept it for the long term.

Because you’re always going to earn your money back if you just hold it generally. Which has been the case for most of the assets I’ve bought, but I did sell a site recently, uh, which was on Flippa for 75 grand, which was quite nice. And I think going forward, I will be selling a lot more sites, so building to sell, just to, to reduce the risk of the portfolio and building.

So it will be more build and sell after obviously six months to a kind of year on a website and see what happens. But generally I like holding onto websites and acquiring a website. If I see there’s a, there’s a value to monetize higher, whether that being adding digital products or monetizing better and the affiliate program, asking for more money from the affiliates, which generally does work as well.

A lot of the sites when I have acquired, I’ve literally just spoke to the, uh, affiliate partners and said, I’ve just acquired this. Can you give me a higher percentage? And we’re going to try and refer more traffic to you. And generally that’s like an instant win, which earns you a few extra percent off every sale, which is nice.

Jared: Yeah, that’s great. I mean, I think you bring up some really interesting points. I’ve always been more bullish on holding onto websites as well than to sell them. I was just, um, looking, uh, uh, last week, I started my first site ever in 2017. Aside from logging in and updating the plugins, I haven’t published a new piece of content since early 2021.

Still earns 300 to 600 a month in Mediavine earnings and, uh, and Amazon affiliate sales. Again, I should put time towards it, but it just never reaches the top of my priority list. But, you know, a lot of these assets, to your point, you kind of can spend some time, create them, build them up, and they can, they can last a long time and still earn you, uh, Money on an ongoing basis, even if you choose

James: not to sell them.

It sounds exactly like me. That’s exactly what I do. And I always feel guilty. Like I should be working on them and trying to update and actually do it. Cause it is an asset, which has been valuable for a long time. But the end of the day, it’s still 300 a month or 500 a month to doing nothing, which is the dream.

It is. And to your point, like

Jared: I do feel bad too, by the way, don’t, don’t get me wrong. I constantly am like, Oh, I should really be working on that. And I should be, but there’s only so many hours in the day. We could probably do a whole podcast on like prioritization and going after You know what has maximum value and the projects that actually bring have more value on the table, right?

And if that’s what you’re focusing on then it’s not a bad use of time and to your point like these can continue to earn And it’s gone through all the different updates and yeah, it hasn’t done great through all the updates But it still has enough traffic sources and enough enough traffic that that it does convert and stuff And it’s one of those evergreen niches.

So it’s to your point. I decided to bring it up I got one of those two actually got a couple of them And, uh, it’s not a, it’s not necessarily a terrible approach. Well, Hey, James, you and I originally connected cause I’m on your, your email list, so I’ll just, I’ll share, I love your email, um, your emails you send out.

They’re super helpful. They’re super in depth, but aside from that, like where can people follow along with what you have going on and get connected with what you’re doing? Hear more about some of the projects you’re working on.

James: Cool. Uh, so Twitter is generally which I use most. Uh, I’ve also got YouTube as well.

I think it’s Oliver, like. The two hyphens at the bottom, dot com, uh, com. Well, the links will probably be down in the description, so you can find me on Twitter and YouTube mainly. I’ve also got Gumroad, which I’ve been publishing and just putting out free, free products for people to use. So I’ve got an AI, um, DO affiliate blue, um, ebook, which is basically goes over that case study in more detail, all the stats and screenshots and everything like that, and there’s one on YouTube as well, because I’ve been doing a lot more.

YouTube with, um, affiliate sites. So there’s a YouTube book to check out too.

Jared: We’ll get all that in the show notes. Uh, James, thanks so much for coming on board. I know we really navigated a lot of different topics today, but you have your hands in so many different areas, so many different projects. It seemed to make sense that we go into all that your successes with SEO, your projects you’re working on, what you’re seeing working specifically, and then obviously your diversification into SaaS probably could’ve done a podcast.

On each of those individual topics, but thanks for joining and talking from a high level about what you’re focusing on and everything. It’s really been a treat.

James: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. And I actually almost forgot. You can find us at Conversion Collective, which is a little community me and Jamie put together.

There’s a free version, a paid version. So we always chat about, uh, chatting there and share knowledge as well. Thanks for having me and, uh, speak to you soon.

Spencer: You got it. James, until next time, be well, we’ll see you soon. Hey everyone, thank you so much for listening to the Niche Pursuits podcast. I just wanted to remind you that if you are ready to start building smarter, faster, and easier internal links, you should check out Link Whisper.

You can get 15 off Link Whisper when you use the coupon code PODCAST at checkout. Head over to linkwhisper. com and use the code PODCAST in order to save 15. Thanks again for listening.