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NP News: Winners & Losers of Google’s March 2023 Update, AI Image & Content Creation Tips, A Titanic Niche Site, & More!

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NP News: Winners & Losers of Google's March 2023 Update, AI Image & Content Creation Tips, A Titanic Niche Site, & More!

Ready for another update, ‘This Week In Niche Pursuits News’?

Guest hosts Jared Bauman and Josh Blackburn join the podcast while I’m away this week to cover a wide range of topics related to AI, content creation, and dive into some fun niche site discoveries!

You’ll learn how to use Google Trends as a tool for researching and creating content around landmarks and historical events.

Also, in relation to my new faceless YouTube channel reaching the 1,000 subscriber milestone, the guys discuss the benefits of creating this style of channel, that focuses more on content rather than any personal branding.

Watch the Full Episode

And if you’re interested in improving your website’s SEO and user experience, there’s a deal for the Link Whisper WordPress plugin with a special coupon code offer for listeners you don’t want to miss.

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The use of AI in content creation is also discussed at length in this episode.

You’ll learn how Midjourney V.5 can create realistic photos and can replace the need for stock photos.

As well as discussing the AIPRM plugin, which provides expert prompts for generative AI tools. You’ll hear about its success in the market, including some speculation on the potential for there to be paid prompts in the future.

The winners and losers of Google’s March 2023 core update are also discussed with tips on highlighting the relatively new Experience element of E-E-A-T on your websites.

You’ll also hear about unique niche websites, including a Canadian candy store that freeze-dries candy and a website dedicated to the Titanic. And, of course, the guys discuss the potential for creating content and building businesses around these niches!

Overall, the episode provides useful insights and tips for creating successful websites and content using AI and other helpful tools.

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Hope you enjoy it!

This Episode is Sponsored by: Search-Intelligence.co.uk

read the transcription

Jared: All right. Welcome back to this week in Niche Pursuits News. My name is Jared Bowman, and I’m joined today by Josh Blackburn. Josh, 

Josh: Welcome. Hey, Jared. How’s it going? Thanks for having me. 

Jared: Good, good. Gonna be fun. Normally Spencer and I Spencer’s out this week. Mm-hmm. And you know, you can’t really pre-record these.

It’s all about the news for this week. So you’re here to join us. Why don’t you give us a little backstory so the audience knows who you are and and then we’ll get into this week’s topics. 

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Josh: Okay. Yeah. I guess start off I guess maybe going backwards, right? Is right now I, I work for Link Whisper. I work for Spencer handling the marketing.

That’s why I’m kind of filling in here. But I guess going back, I guess I started building sites around 2010. You know, just learning how to put all these pieces together soulless. Right before the pandemic nice pandemic hit. I had been working in the oil industry, you know, got laid off decided to transition into SEO full-time.

Went and worked at a local agency, then went and worked at a in-house at for a gambling affiliate. And then now we’re at Lin Whisper here. So that’s kind of the. The, the quick rundown of it, the 

Jared: quick down and dirty. Now, when you got brought on at Link Whisper, did Spencer tell you were gonna have to start going on podcast episodes?

Josh: No, because you know, this, this wasn’t this wasn’t a thing then, right? True. This, this was just kind of recently he started like, Hey, I’m thinking about doing this. What do you think? I’m like, Hey, it’s a great idea. You know, he’s like, you wanna come on? Like, oh, okay. Yeah. Well, that changes things, but yeah, bring me on.

You know? So here we are. 

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Jared: Yeah. And just to fill everybody in, you know, this is a new segment, I guess you’ll call it. Like, we’ve been doing this for three or four weeks now. Mm-hmm. We just sit down. It’s, it’s like a, i, I kind a joke. It’s like a fireside chat on this week’s topics in Google search, website building side hustle, like just kind of all topics that we know.

Our general audience has an interest in, so it’s very open-ended. We bring a number of topics to the table. And so I’m excited to see what you brought forward. Let’s kind of dive in. I’m new at sharing my screen, so I will, I will let the YouTube audience know that. We’ll ease into that. Spencer’s normally the one to, to handle screen sharing.

If you’re listening on the audio, by the way. Most of our interviews don’t have much going on on the screen, so, you know, but this, these episodes, these Friday episodes that are this weekend news, we do share screens a lot. So you would get a lot out of gum and, and watching on YouTube, just just putting that out there.

But yeah, so let’s dive in here to this weekend news. Why don’t let’s see. Why don’t we hit, we’ll go ahead and hit my first. And it’s really kind of a, an overview of the winners and losers from Google’s March, 2023 core update that finished rolling out last week. And you know, just as I’m pulling the screen here, any quick takes from your side of things.

It sounds like you’re still building websites and have a vision into that on, on the update from from Google. 

Josh: Yeah. So I mean, I, I, I went over this right and kind of see what she said in you know, the notes you had. I mean the winners, right? Wikipedia, Amazon, eBay, you know, like, I mean, is anyone really surprised there?

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And then with the losers with like the dictionary sites, you know, I wonder how much of that is right? Is like certain features or you know, like a featured snippet is like, do you really need to click through the site to get a definition of the word? So I think you know it, you know, I, you know, I, without diving deeper, right, I don’t.

How much of a picture, I guess this would truly paint right? Without, you know, going through each one and seeing what really happened, you know? 

Jared: Yeah. So I have the article that Lil Ray published and she was a podcast guest a while back, probably about six months ago. We actually brought her on to talk about updates and I think it was very interesting to hear her perspective on updates.

So she published a really in depth report on, on it, and you’re right a lot of the winners were some of the big players. It’s funny cuz I hate talking about it because it is, it’s kind of niche site owners, right? Like we get frustrated. Updates come out and bigger sites win and smaller sites lose.

And that’s kind of what we saw here. Like big e-com sites like Amazon, they, they won big e-com sites like eBay, they won smaller E-com sites. Definitely took a bit of a hit. You talked about it a bit like one thing that stood out here is these dictionary sites and synonym sites and thesaurus sites.

That’s a mouthful. They, they definitely lost a little bit. One thing I thought I would highlight here is, Some of the product review sites that came out ahead and down. This wasn’t a product review update, it was a core update. But nonetheless, it’s always fun to see in core updates, which sites go up and down as it relates to some of the stuff that, that a lot of the audience is doing, right?

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So if you wanted, here’s a list like android police.com, felt magnet.com, my bartender. Don’t waste your money.com. That’s a common one. I also thought I’d point out, and I would love to get your take on this, let me scan down to it. Here’s some evidence that maybe this experience addition to E E A T is maybe making its way in.

Lilly surfaced some sites like pet helpful.com, that one, like six, almost a 600% increase. And they, wow. This is an example of a site where there’s a lot of evidence. That experience is in the writing style, the naming of the authors, the experts who write for the site, sufficient examples of real experience.

So that’s interesting cuz you know, that got introduced yeah. Just a couple months ago and it, it might be interesting to see how they, how they, you know, kind of put that into practice going forward. 

Josh: Yeah, I think so. Right. And then it’s, then it’s going back and looking at these and, and, and studying their writing style.

Right? And then how could you implement this on your site? Right. Is it, could you have your writer say, Hey, you know first person versus, you know, third person or whatever it might be. Right? I guess in the sense is like, could you kind of game this a little bit? Right? Can you pick up something here that you could say, Hey, you know what, like we could do a few little tweaks here and there on our affiliate sites and, and then see if, you know how that plays out for you.

I, 

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Jared: that, that’s ex exactly what I would recommend. Like if you’re wondering how to implement experie if you’re not sure about how that really looks like, is it important or not? Certainly a look at these five websites that Lilly surfaced would be a good use of time. See if you can find some commonalities and then, Maybe spark some ideas for how you might be able to apply that to your website.

You know, because a lot of times, I mean we do a lot of site audits over at my agency and a lot of times, you know, you’re working with people who are experts or are actually using the product or are actually writing about something they know about, but they’re not doing a very good job of showcasing it to Google, you know?

So sometimes you might pick up a hint where it’s like, oh, I could do that cause I’m already doing it. I’m just out actually visibly showing that on my website.

Let’s go over to your topic. I’ll go ahead and pull up what you brought up for this weekend news. And again, let me know if you can see Josh. Can you see Barry Adams tweet here on no. I still on 

Josh: common. I still, I still see Lilly’s article. 

Jared: Good. Let me switch it over then. Sorry guys, we’re just I’m learning to share the right screen here.

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There we go. Okay. Should be coming up right.

Josh: Yep. So I had saw Barry posted this, and I guess for those who don’t know, Barry Adams, he’s like one of the top Google News publishers, runs a Google News conference. Really smart s e o. But, so he pointed out that he saw publishers were blocking the CC bot and the robots txt files. Mm-hmm. And essentially what this is, is it’s common crawl data, and this is what Open AI is using to train G P T.

So I just thought this was really interesting. I mean, I mean, I guess, yeah, if you don’t want them training you know, AI off of your site, but at the same time, is this gonna benefit. You or them? I don’t really know. I don’t know how it plays out. I just thought it was kind of interesting that, you know, people are already thinking about this.

Me personally, I think AI is gonna get trained with or without, you know, one of our sites. I don’t know what your thoughts on it, Jared. Yeah. 

Jared: Boy, that is, you know, I mean, obviously people have been blocking like, like H Refs for a while, right? Mm-hmm. So that people, competitors can’t. Get their data and find that they you know, kind of, kind of see that they have different keywords they’re ranking for different back links they’re getting.

So that’s been around for a while and I’ve always kind of been like, wow, I kind of like seeing my site in age refs and getting my own data. So I’ll, I’ll deal with other people seeing my stuff with the exchange that I can see. Mm-hmm. Because I want that information about where my keywords are doing all that kind of stuff.

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This is interesting because unlike the ah refs example I just gave, like, you could. Common crawl and not necessarily really have any damaging effects to your own brand. So to some degree, my first take is why wouldn’t you? But I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it much. What, what would you do?

Josh: You know, right now? I don’t know. Right. I think like, I feel that like, either way, like if I block it on my site, either way they’re gonna find the information they need to train the ai. Yep. And then also too, I think it’s, it’s not interesting. Next up. Yeah. Right. And the two, I think it’s interesting is we’re gonna see more and more content created with chat G p T open ai.

So then if common crawlers crawling that, then it’s like the AI’s training, the ai, like I don’t, how does that even work? You know what I mean? I mean, and I guess. Yeah, there’s such a, maybe a small part of the internet right now that would be utilizing that. I guess over time it’s gonna grow more. I don’t know.

I just think it’d be, it’s, it’s interesting. I mean, one, I never thought about it and to see somebody else like, hey, like they’re act actively doing it. You know, I wasn’t even familiar with common Crawl data and how AI was getting trained. So it was just kind of eye-opening and I think it’s just something to kind of think about as this space continues to grow and develop so quickly.

I guess just to see how. You know, the world and, and the internet respond to it. 

Jared: Yeah. Yeah. It’s gonna be interesting. I mean, obviously if you go down that road, you’re gonna have to start thinking about blocking all the different ai softwares that are gonna be gonna be out there. Cuz chat, g p t is probably one of many that will, that will exist.

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So well, very good. Let’s move on to the next segment here. We now are able to move over to now that’s impress. I always feel like that’s a a nice catch line. This is where we talk about just different wins we saw online and and in the, the online world. I’m gonna go ahead and let you start off for this one.

We’ll kind of do a little swap here. And I know that let’s see here. You had a chat G p t story that you wanted to talk about as it relates to photos. 

Josh: Yeah, so I mean, it’s in the niche site world, right? It is. Like at Black Friday, everybody. Is running to Ab Sumo and loading up on stock photo credits, you know, to get ready for the new year.

I actually seen a tweet from this guy here, Adam. And that photo you’re looking at, it’s for, I guess for those not watching YouTube, it’s a woman running through a field wearing like a Nike running shirt. And I mean, she’s just running through a field. But this photo was created in mid Journey version five.

And to me, I mean, it looks like a pretty real photo. It looks really good. And so like is, is this the end of needing to get stock photos? And to create this, to get version five, I believe you have to be on a paid program, which I think starts at like $10 a month or $96 a year. And then also to be able to have commercial license.

So you could technically use it on your site for commercial use. But I just think it’s interesting, you know, Like, is this the end of stock photo sites, you know, like needing to go to Shutterstock or you know, all the other ones out there and, and spend hundreds of dollars a year, you know, is, you know, you pay a hundred bucks a year and teach a VA some different prompts and you know, now you’re cranking out original photos, somewhat original for your articles.

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Does that help your experience, you know, the site? I don’t know. I think it could be pretty interest. 

Jared: Man, I think it, it is fascinating, obviously. I mean, that image is just as good as a lot of the stock photos you’ll find on, you know, deposit photos and stuff like that. You hit the nail on the head. I wonder how it’s going to impact some of the more nuanced search requirements.

Well, I’ll, I’ll use requirements in air quotes. Like Google has said, we’re adding experience to our mm-hmm. Criteria of what we look for, experience and they say is a lot of it has to do with the photos you share. And so I wonder if I can. Mid journey to say like, show me a photo. Build me a photo of me unboxing a iPhone 14.

You know? And like, I, I don’t, I mean, how would it do with that? I mean, it’s one thing to, to get a very good looking, realistic photo of a woman running through a field at Sunset, and it’s like, man, that’s beautiful. Better picture than most people can take. But can it, yep. Can it bring out images that are experienced that check the experience box for Google, you know?

Josh: Yeah. I don’t know if it can yet. But I think it’s coming and I think it’s gonna come quick. You know, one thing I thought too, I, I didn’t think about it like you is the unboxing, but one thing I thought is, you know, say you have, you know, a site about, you know, basketball, basketball goals or whatever, right?

And it’s, hey, you got a guy, you know, or girl, whatever, playing basketball and it, they, they’re wearing a shirt with your brand on it, your website name. You know, I, I’ve heard people say that the text on, on the images is not as good yet, but what happens when it gets there? Right? And then now your whole site.

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A bunch of people using or doing the activity of the site wearing branded gear you know, what happens there? I, I don’t know. I think, man, I just think it’s gonna be so interesting the, the next, you know, year or two. Yeah. 

Jared: It’s, it’s, it’s fascinating because a lot of, like in our world as website builders and bloggers, like, we’re really focused on a lot of times like the chat G p T section, the Bard section of ai.

Right. But AI is, Last week, Spencer and I talked about Canva and AI as it relates to design Firefly, Adobe’s design related ai. This week we’re talking about images and how AI’s affecting images. What I, it was on one of my lists, but AI as it affects video, like we could have talked about, there was some video news this week in ai.

Yep. And how it affects vi we, I mean, we haven’t talked about it yet, but there’s also AI and voiceover. I sure you seen some of that. 

Josh: You see the, you see the one with Kanye. It, it was like a white guy and he was rapping and then it came back as. It’s 

Jared: just nuts. I mean, it’s, yeah. You know, I was joking my wife that like, I’m gonna start I’m gonna start sending her stuff in Morgan Freeman’s voice, you know?

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Yeah. It’s not hard to hear 

Josh: her voicemail. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 

Jared: exactly. It’s like, Hey, can you get some milk on the way out from the grocery store? But actually it’s Morgan Freeman’s telling her that. Yeah. You know, 

Josh: or, or, or then it’s eight, you know, you create a YouTube video and Morgan Freeman is, you know, he’s he’s repping your basketball site, you know which that’d probably be a lot of legal issues there, but I.

I don’t know. I think it’s it’s gonna be wild man, the next year or two. 

Jared: I agree. I agree. So. Well, it’s a good topic you brought up. I’m glad you were talking. I, I have a personal. Interest in the photo space, having been a professional photographer. Mm-hmm. And I, you know, I know a lot of friends still in that space.

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I have a lot of professional photographer friends who’ve kind of echoed like concerns about what does this mean for my business and mm-hmm. You know, so it’s, it’s very interesting to see and we’ll probably want to just leave it there. 

Josh: One last thing, Jim, before we jump on. I mean, like, what are they thinking?

Like, are they thinking like, Hey, how could we be proactive or what is it that we could do more personal? Like in, I mean of course this is more online, but I’m just curious about the offline world and cuz I guess my assumption is that a lot of the offline world isn’t too familiar with the ai, with the chat g p t as much as we are in the marketing world yet, you know, 

Jared: I mean, it’s definitely a big deal in the professional photographer community.

It’s not going unnoticed and it’s not flying under the radar. And I think, you know, it’s, we are talking more in the last year or two in the online world about creating brands instead of creating websites, you know, creating something that actually people return to, they visit. Right. Instead of just creating a niche website that, you know, is faceless and just so and so, but in the photo world, we’ve been talking about that topic for a decade plus now.

Right. Okay. And I’m not in the photography world anymore, but I still keep up on it, but, We almost went through something like this when we switched from film to digital where Okay. The ability to take really good pictures became a lot easier. Mm-hmm. Kind of like the ability to write pretty darn good content now just became a lot easier with chat G p T.

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Yeah. And so the people that continued to win as photographers are the people who did more than just take good pictures. It created a wonderful experience. So a lot of threads of similarity there. But I, I hear a lot of people in the photo space saying, Hey, we’ve kind of gone through this 10, 15, 20 years.

It’s, you know, it’s, it’s gonna be about your brand and it’s gonna be about the experience you create in addition to taking great photos. So, yeah. Cool, cool. That, or I guess now we producing great photos. 

Josh: Yeah. I guess very similar. Right? And it’s just build the brand and, and which, which is what we all need to do, either online or offline, you know?

Right, 

Jared: yeah, exactly. Exactly. Like none of us have the the crystal ball on, on, on AI and how it’s gonna play out in our world. The more brand you create, the less AI will influence or impact some of the things you’re you’re doing. I think we can probably all 

Josh: agree on that. Absolutely. 

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Jared: Let’s jump over to my now that’s impressive.

This is, I saw on Twitter that the founder of ai, p r m Christoph, he shared, and this is probably a week or two old now, but he shared that they hit. TH 13 days in, they hit 6,000 paid users of this AI P r M software. It’s a, it, you know, I didn’t spend much time on it, but it looks like a chat G B T prompting.

Service and people can correct me if I’m wrong in the, in the chat here like I said, didn’t spend much time on it, but anytime you can launch a product, launch a service, launch a software, and 13 days in you’re getting 6,000 paid users. That’s impressive. And it’s also really interesting to just see all the new opportunities that are.

As people are utilizing AI and creating new products 

Josh: for it. So I just did the quick math because I, I, I checked it out and I know he had a tier at $20 a month. And just to make sure you know, no public math, right, it’s $120,000 a month in, in 13 days mmr. Like, that’s pretty wild, man. That’s, that’s, I mean, great for him, you know.

Congratulations. That’s that’s very impress. 

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Jared: That’s approaching a 3 million a year revenue you know, a 3 million a year business. It’s very impressive. I mean, I, like I said, I haven’t played around with it, but you know, expert, prompt engineers publish the best prompts for you right away. AI PRM is your AI prompt toolkit, everything you need to promote to prompt for generative AI tools, including chat, G P T.

So I might check it out. This isn’t an endorsement. I haven’t used it, but this is kind of our section to talk about some impressive things that we’ve seen. I would say that’s pretty impressive for, for 13 days in. 

Josh: So there is a free version it’s a Google Chrome plugin. You can add it and then when you go to chat g p t, you’ll see all the preset options, I guess, from the community.

Like, Hey, I need a YouTube script, or a blog or headline, art, whatever it might be. I did play with the free version, you know, weeks back. I just like, wasn’t too, too impressed with the, with the free version of the prompts. But I didn’t put a lot of time into it. I just said, click, gimme this, and I just didn’t like what it gave me.

I’d rather just kind of put in what I want to put in. Mm-hmm. What do you, 

Jared: What do you get with the paid version? Do, do you know, like the differences that you get free versus paid? 

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Josh: Yeah, so looking at it there, it said it was like 38 or 48 expert prompts. I don’t know what determines what’s an expert prompt and what’s not an expert prompt, you know?

I mean, I think it’s really interesting. Like, I feel like it is kind of, for me personally, right? I haven’t used a paid version, but like I’m paying $20 for chat G P t and then paying another $20 for this on top of it. I mean, it’s only 40 bucks, right? I mean, it’s not like it’s breaking the bank, but at the same time is do I really need that to help me create the prompts?

And I guess maybe. I guess it depends where, where they’re getting these expert prompts and how much, if, if this person’s using it, you know, 50 hours a week and I’m using it five hours a week, they probably found a lot more things than I have. So I could see, you know, where maybe it is beneficial. But I don’t know.

I, I, I think it’s really interesting and I think the fact that you’re, you know, over a hundred thousand dollars in a few days is very impressive, you know? But, Smart move. I 

Jared: think I might think I might treat it kind of like I did when I was just getting started in blogging and I couldn’t afford ah, refs mm-hmm.

On a monthly basis, you know, I just didn’t have enough revenue coming in from any of my websites yet. And so I’d sign up for like a month at a time and I do all my work. And then, you know, six months later, I’d, I’d come back as I needed it. Right? And so that, yeah. And so for, for me, I’ll probably opt into the paid version for you know, whatever a month or something and mm-hmm.

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See if it dramatically changes the way I’m able to use. Chat, g p T, and if at the end of the month I go, ah, eh, not that much different. I didn’t use it that much. Maybe I’ll drop it. But if I get a lot of value out of it, maybe I’ll stick around or maybe I just need to do it, get a couple good ideas and then, you know, move on from it or something like that.

Yeah, 

Josh: that’s what I was thinking, right. Maybe you get in, you say, Hey, I found these prompts, or I’m gonna build on these prompts and then I’m good. Or, you know, then again Right. It’s, you know, he is 20 bucks a month and it’s like, hey, like right, this, this saves me an hour a month. That’s, that’s well worth 20 bucks.

Right. 

Jared: At some point, it’s just like, how much time did it save me? It saved me time. Cool. 20 bucks worth it, you know? So. 

Josh: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I think one more thing too is interesting, but you know, he, he he has another tool I, it’s something to do with backlinks or something. It’s been around for, he’s been around 

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Jared: a while.

Yeah. Spencer talking Spencer about this with him last week, and, and he he, he knows Christoff. He’s like, oh yeah, he’s, he’s made this tool and that tool, and he kind of rattled off something. So, 

Josh: yeah. So he’d been around the industry for a long time, I think. But I guess what I’m, what I was gonna say is that you see so many of these, Hey, you know, people are using chat G P T this way, but I have the best 50 prompts for you.

Retweet this and I’m gonna DM you. Right. So I think it’s just so much overload right now of everybody with so many prompts and so many that are free. I just think it’s really interesting that it’s become a paid tool. And there’s a market. Yeah. I guess how long does it last? You 

Jared: know what I mean? There’s a market for it at this point, man.

Yeah, 

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Josh: exactly right. I just, yeah, very interesting. You know, and yeah, props to him though for coming up with it in, in, in testing the free version and then getting the paid version out quickly. You know, you bring 

Jared: up a great point actually, that we should underscore like market or No market. He tested it.

Mm-hmm. And he got a lot of people using a free version. And again, Why not launch a paid version and see if there’s a market for it? Right. And you know, like there’s a very, I was actually talk, I had lunch a couple weeks ago with someone who was in town in seo and, and he was like, I don’t think I should charge this much for this because I just don’t think it’s worth that much.

And I’m like, I don’t really care how much. I think it’s worth or you think it’s worth it? Let the market dictate what it’s worth. Yeah. Maybe it isn’t worth that, but maybe it is worth that. And I prompts him for putting it out there and just seeing yeah. What the market dictated. And clearly there’s, there’s some value there given his, his impressive launch.

Yeah, 

Josh: and I would be curious too, now that we talk about it, is how many free users did he have and how many converted to paid? You know, if he had 6,000 paid users, I can imagine his, his free users are massive. 

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Jared: Well, homepage said 80,000 people use it, so Okay. 80,000. 

Josh: Okay. Wow. So less than 10% converted to paid, but that’s still, that’s, that’s great.

Right. And you know what, even if you, you probably already had the already built with the free version. You’d had to add a few more features or a few more things to put it behind a paywall. And if now you’re making $3 million a year, like, that’s awesome. You know? 

Jared: Well, we’re just speculating on, on what he did and whatnot.

But again, just circling back to giving everybody who’s listening to that idea of you know, what an impressive launch, but on the back of a tool that he created quickly because chat g PT has not been around that long and then continued to explore monetization props to him for doing that. And, you know, we’ll see how it, we’ll see how it turns out.

Ah, okay. Let’s let’s move on to our next segment. I gotta pull up my notes here, man, I tell you Spencer was like, he seamlessly changes the screens. And Mo he’s man, he’s he’s, he’s good at this. I’m, I’m, I’m like between two screens right now, trying to manage all this. Anyways, let’s move on to shiny object shenanigans.

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And let’s see. So this is a segment where we talk about our distractions, our shiny object little. Pet projects, whatever you wanna call. So, I’m, I, we, Spencer, have been kind of talking about the same one each week. Now I’ll, I’m gonna first highlight Spencer’s because I have an update on behalf of Spencer, even though he is gone this week.

He’s been talking about the faceless YouTube project and he got, last week we pretty much assumed that by this time, this week he would be at the magic 1000 subscriber. Which that combined with watch time allowed him to start to monetize his YouTube channel with AdSense and ad revenue basic coming in.

And so he did announce in email, I think earlier this week on Wednesday. Mm-hmm. Yep. That it’s hit that thousand subscriber marks. So we’ll have to get the update from him next week on, on where it’s going, but he has hit that mark. Good reminder, if you’re not on the new you can go to niche pursuits.com/newsletter and get signed up for that.

Spencer emails, what, three times a week? I think. All sorts of stuff related to what we’re talking about here, so, yeah. But yeah. What do you think of that faceless YouTube project that he’s talked about? You know, 

Josh: I, I, I think it’s great, right? Like I, I have looked at the idea of these for a few.

So I’m glad to see like he just is going for it and tested it. And like, I see so many channels on YouTube like, Hey, I tried YouTube automation for 30 days, 60 days. I, and I think it’s, I think it’s great, right? Like me personally, I watched more YouTube than I do tv. And I, I, I heard something recently too that families are now watching more time on YouTube than they are on Netflix.

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So I just think, again, like YouTube is just growing and I, you know, whether you’re working and you put it on in the background or whether you’re on the couch now with smart TVs and you can turn it on you know, I think it, I think it’s great and it’s passive, right? There’s nothing and, and one thing too, like I like to say is, when’s the last time you heard about a Google update hitting?

Right. Right. You know what I mean? So it’s like, hey, yeah. They’re not worried about the core update. You know what I mean? If you get a channel big enough, right. And then if you can monetize with ads affiliate or if, is this something, he could build a site around that just to send people to the site and now Google’s like, not even the, the, the Google traffic is not even in your mind.

You’re just getting referral traffic from YouTube, getting emails selling a product or whatever. You know, we don’t know what his niche is. Right. And, and selling something to them. Right. It’s like, how much bigger can you get it, you. Well, 

Jared: I don’t want to over promote, but the podcast, we’ve been talking about that a lot in our interviews.

Steve CHUs interview this week that went live a couple days ago. He talked a lot about YouTube. I already have recorded another episode that’ll be hitting soon with a very well known person in the online world and we spend most of the time talking about his approach to. Tons of great information in that upcoming podcast.

So we’re definitely talking about it a lot. Obviously this is a unique twist on it with this faceless approach. A lot of bloggers are nervous about putting their face in front of the camera. They don’t want to do what I do all day, which is sit here and, and, and chat about this stuff with a camera on.

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And so it’s an interesting project. But anyways, we’ll get an update from Spencer next week. I just wanted to hear your take on it. Let me I’ll share my update on mine. I’ve been, About starting an email list for people in this space and trying to share some different tips and tricks. And so not a lot of crazy updates.

We sent another email out this week. I’ve committed to sending one email a week for three months to test it out, so got another one out. Continue to get good feedback. Continue to get high open rates. The, the subscriber list is growing. I think we’re approaching like 800 people on the list. Last week I shared.

Last week I shared that I’m gonna try to take some of these emails that I’m creating and put ’em into video format as well. And so good, like, good progress. I, I did hire a couple of different people to test for video editing because just me recording. Talking about the email, it just felt so boring, you know?

Yep. And it, so, so I’m getting someone to come in and edit and kind of clean it up and put some visuals in and, and, and make it a little bit more exciting. So I’ve got a couple of the tests back and they’re looking pretty good. I’m gonna have to figure out which person to kind of go with for the rest of the videos, but hopefully by this time next week we’ll have that first video live on some YouTube channel that I have to create, hasn’t been created yet, so.

Nice. 

Josh: Nice. Yeah. I’m on your list here. Yeah, your, your emails are great, right? And like, it’s so much information in there. Like how, how long has it taken you to put one email together? 

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Jared: Yeah, that’s a really good que So there’s a couple workflow things I’m dealing with, so I, mm-hmm. I’m first off, they take a while.

Yeah, they don’t, I don’t think they’re gonna take a while cause I’m like, I know the subject I’m talking about really? Well, that’s why I wanna talk about it. And then the nuances of getting it ready, you know. Even just like spell checking and organizing and making sure I have the right, you know, screen shares.

Like last one, I think I shared 14 screenshots and stuff and haven’t getting that all done. So they take a while and then I realize that like I wanna send ’em on a Tuesday, but in order to send ’em on a Tuesday, I have to have ’em over to someone on our team who kind of builds ’em out in mailer light by Monday.

Mm-hmm. And that means I kind of have to have it written by Monday, which really means I have to have it written by Friday the week before. Yeah. 

Josh: And 

Jared: so I’m like, oh man. So this week’s went out on Wednesday because full disclosure, I didn’t get my act together until about Monday afternoon. And I was like, oh my gosh.

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I still have to create the email that’s gonna send, and I, I, my, my time slot for teasing. So they take a while. I haven’t timed myself, I’m almost afraid to time myself. They do take a. 

Josh: Yeah, I mean, cuz man, they’re super detailed, right? And like you said, all the screenshots and, and maybe it’s moved to Thursday, you know, that way it’s like, hey, you got a little bit of a buffer at the start of the week.

Jared: It almost, that’s not a bad idea. Maybe I should just tell myself Tuesday, what am I doing to myself? Let’s just do Thursday. Yeah, 

Josh: right. That way it’s, hey, you get a little maybe more relaxed, you know? And since it’s a side project, right? It’s like, hey, that way it’s not as much pressure to, to run and gun and get it out and, and, and to maintain the quality, you know?

Jared: It’s, it’s a good point. I, you know, in a perfect world, it is a great thing to be doing. As I’m winding down on a Friday afternoon, you know, you’re kind of winding into the weekend. I do take weekends off. So Friday afternoon, Friday, you know, three, four o’clock is kind of finishing closing up shop. And so it is nice to kind of ease in the weekend with this kind of side project.

But you’re right, if I don’t get it done by Friday, then it kind of becomes a, a, it’s become a little bit of a stress point early on in the week. 

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Josh: So, yeah. Yeah. 

Jared: Anyways. Well, let’s hear about your shiny object. Okay. You’re working 

Josh: on, so yeah, this was tough. I’m like, Hey, like, which 20 do I pick here?

You know you’re a good company. Yeah. All right. It’s trying to focus, right? Trying to I have, I’ve cold some you know, at the end of last year and, and now even this year, coaling Moore. But one thing we did is it, it’s a, we’re rebranding. My son had a YouTube channel. He started like in 2020.

Okay. He’s 10 now. So then he was like seven. Wow. 

Jared: I have a seven year old. That’s crazy to think 

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Josh: of. Yeah. Right. And so it was a lot of like going to like we’re outside of Houston the Houston Zoo, really a great zoo. He would go there and film animals and, you know, put ’em up. Shorts. I think it just came out around this time.

And he put up one of a tiger and like I woke up, it was like Black Friday, I woke up. It had like 10,000 views overnight. And it was just wild. So he has like snakes and different lizards and all kinds of stuff on their elephants. But so he got, he got up to 165 subscribers and 68,000 views wow.

With just his random stuff. And then of course, like I mentioned, like the family’s watching YouTube. He watches a lot of YouTube. So now like the family, we all watch different families on YouTube and it’s like, Hey, you know what? Like what if we just rebrand this channel? And we make it a family channel and we just start putting videos out.

So we just did that the other day. We we just did the first one. Him and I did a 10 piece chicken nugget McDonald’s eating challenge. And we raced to see who could eat it the fastest, you know? We didn’t go viral. So, you know, bummer there, but you know, we had a good time doing it. Yeah.

You know, and then I think last weekend we filmed another one it’s called a cake flip. Okay. Where you set up some cameras and you go buy cakes and you throw it up and then you try to catch it. And of course it’s pretty hard to catch it and it turned out to be a mess. So we gotta get that one edited and get it out.

So it’s just something like, just to have fun. He loves it. For me it’s a way to get him kind of in the online world. Kind of like we’ve been talking about here already. Like, I think video is, video is already big, but I think it’s still gonna get even bigger. Right? I think for, for niche site builder, To stand out in an AI world where everybody can go create the same AI content and put up a thousand articles in a month.

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I think getting comfortable on camera and and putting this stuff out there is only gonna set you further up and, and to help you to build the brand. So it’s, I think there’s a lot of, a lot of different things. I’m, I’m trying to get out of it, but at the main thing is just have fun and, and then get the family involved.

Jared: I was gonna say, I mean, you’ve found a way to combine the world we live in mm-hmm. With spending time with your. Doing fun things with your son and teaching him about a world that he’s going to be entering as an adult. I mean, by the time he is an adult, video might, we don’t even doing video anymore, but you know what I mean?

Like, he’s gonna be entering this world. You’ll find a great way to do that with him and who knows where it’ll go. I mean, maybe the cake flip turns into a hundred thousand views when you wake up the next morning, you know, 

Josh: hopefully. Right. And that’s, well, that’s some of these channels, like we watch you know, like one of ’em is, is a channel called Funnel Vision.

Right. And it’s like, I mean, I think they have. 10 or 20 million subscribers and it’s, it’s, it’s a eight figure a year business. So, I mean, of course I’m thinking like a marketer’s like, Hey, okay, hey, can I drop affiliate links in the, in the description and do this, you know? But right now it’s just, it’s just having fun getting them involved in in a good way for me just to get more comfortable being on camera because it is tough, you know you know, getting here and putting yourself out there and putting yourself on camera just getting the reps in and then just kind of see where things.

Jared: Yeah, you talk to most YouTubers who are successful now, whatever your measure of success is, but maybe a hundred videos in and to a T. They all say, oh my gosh, my first videos, I’ll go back and watch ’em. And I’m like, what was I doing? How did I even make it here with the videos I was producing? You know, my first five videos were just awful.

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The sound, the boring, all these things. Gotta cut your teeth, you know? Actually I have not listened to my first five podcast interviews and I, I would not want to go back and do that. I feel sorry for the, yeah. Poor suckers who were the first five people I had to interview. I feel like I’ve probably gotten better since then.

You know, all of this stuff just takes practice. Yeah. I mean, yeah, your 

Josh: podcast interviews are great, you know? And I was li there’s a Mr. Beast clip somewhere out there from an interview he did. And he said that everybody always ask him, Hey, what can I do to make better videos? Or Hey, I just started like, how can I make my videos better?

He said, go shoot a hundred videos, then come back and talk to me about how to be better. Right? So it’s like the toughest part of though is getting the first one and then it’s like, okay, you got one now you gotta get the second one and then to get through that a hundred. So yeah, I mean it’s just, Good for him, good for me, good for the family and, and we’re all having fun doing it.

So 

Jared: I’m on she’s, she’s pretty popular on Twitter niche site lady. Yep. Yep. She’s good. Good follow shares, great information. Her emails are fantastic and I, I don’t know when she’s been sharing recently over the last couple months about how she’s trying to start filming her own videos and they’re just taking forever, you know?

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But I just, I appreciate her approach cuz it’s always like, I know this is taking forever and I know I will get better at it and I know I’ll continue to knock time off of it. I know the videos will continue to, Better quality. I’m gonna learn about how to produce them better. I’m gonna learn how to storyline them better.

Yeah. And I appreciate that approach cuz it’s a reminder, like yeah, your first video is gonna take a long time. Yeah. And it’s probably not gonna be very good. And that’s just part of the process. 

Josh: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s, it’s understanding the the equipment, the lighting you know, all the, there’s so many things that go into it, but the beauty of it is that you can find all the information on.

But you know, the biggest thing is just getting started. You just, like, you like, Hey, I don’t have the, this fancy DSLR camera or mirrorless camera with the wide angle lens. Like, we’re using our smartphones, turn ’em sideways and it looks great. You know? We gotta work on sound quality and stuff like that.

But there’s always, there’s gonna be things you can iterate in. Things that I’ve gathered, like Mr. B says, and other creators are saying is they’re saying, do it. And then the next one just get a little bit better, a little bit better each time, just try to improve a little bit. And I think you know, I think it’s, I mean, I think it’s great for anything we’re, we’re trying to do, building sites or make videos, whatever it is, is just getting started and then, and then trying to just get a little bit better each time.

Yeah. 

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Jared: Good thoughts. Let’s move on to our last segment here. This is perhaps my favorite one was where we talk weird niches. Now if we’re follow. Our back and forth. That means that you are up and you get to bring a weird niche to the table. And I’m gonna bring it up here on the screen too, so if you’re watching on YouTube, you get to kind of ride along with us.

Why don’t you take us to the site? 

Josh: Yep. So the site is Taste taly box.ca. That’s ta a s t e l y B O x.ca. So it’s a Canadian candy store. But again, this came from YouTube, right? We’ve seen this on YouTube and what they’re doing is they’re getting everyday candy like you think Skittles or Starburst sour Patch Kids, and they put it in this machine that is freeze drying the candy, and then the candy comes out.

Oh, it it blows the candy up. Yeah. Like those are your Skittles. Like, it, it, it makes the, can be bigger. It dries it out and no matter what it is, it’s gonna come out crunchy. So. It’s really interesting and like this, this, this couple here, they have like 2 million followers on, on TikTok. Their site’s two years old, and I was reading a little bit about ’em.

And so it looks like they already had two candy shops in Canada. But then this, this whole freeze stride movement came about and then they started packaging it, filming it online I guess selling it in their shops. And now they’re selling it online. And you could see. Like you’re on like a bag of candy that would be like $2 at the store.

They’re selling it for eight or $9. Right, right. So and it’s, I think it’s interesting because it’s, this is, anybody could do this. I mean, you just go to the store, buy a bunch of candy. My wife did look into getting one of these machines or like three to 5,000 bucks. So 

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Jared: well you could buy a freeze dryer for a lot less than that.

I don’t know if it would work on candy. I used to backpack and we would freeze dry food to take backpacking with us. Okay. Interesting. You know, and I, yeah, we didn’t have a budget growing up to buy a three to $5,000 freeze dryer, so I can promise you whatever it was, it was a fraction of that cost. 

Josh: Yeah.

Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So then that might be, you know, that might it would be cool to see somebody try this is go get a freeze dry machine and, and buy some candy and start putting some tos out. You don’t have to show your face or whatever. YouTube shorts and. See if you could blow it up into a little business.

You know, 

Jared: I mean, look at this. They have, I, I found some information on, on them on the screen, and James and Polly started in 2021. Follow us on TikTok and Instagram to join our 2.1 million followers. I mean, this brand was just started in 2021. Yeah, 

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Josh: yeah. It’s with like, yeah. The site’s like just two years old now.

You know, it’s it’s pretty wild. It’s I, you know, again, I think it is like a trend. I don’t know how long it’s gonna last. But I think if somebody has the time and like you want to, like, I think this fits really well into the, the shiny object shenanigans. You know, it’s one, you could create content around it, and two, then you can sell what you’re creating content around.

So it’s, it’s kind of like a double whammy there, you know? 

Jared: Yeah. And it looks like a pretty simple Shopify site. You know? It doesn’t look over complicated. Not, you know, just classic setup. You got your categories. You got your product skews and your product pages and your homepage and they pretty much, I mean, they don’t even have an outage on there.

You just gotta look at the homepage for that. So, very good niche. That’s fun. That’s, oh, 

Josh: go ahead. Yeah, I was just gonna say, I bet they’re not SEOs. So if an SEO did go put up a Shopify store, you probably could outrank them for some of these keywords and there might not be a lot of search volume, but I mean, I’m sure if you looked at Google Trends, you will see that it, it’s probably exploding.

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Jared: I wasn’t gonna comment, but you’re right. As I was looking to the side, I was like, Ooh, ooh, we need about page, Ooh, we gotta get better. Category description better product descriptions. Oh, is this, is this marked up properly? I’m not gonna go into the schema. Yeah, 

Josh: yeah, yeah. You know, opportunity. There.

There you go. 

Jared: All right. Good. I I like this. Can this food theme we have going, last week, Spencer brought the, the, the Costco hotdog. You’re bringing the candy. Should stick with this. I haven’t caught onto that. I’m sticking with other niches, my niche. Oh, I think yours is great. Yours is? Yeah. I went back and forth.

I dunno if you saw on the notes. I switched it this morning. I had a different one planned out and I switched it today. I I 

Josh: thought that maybe was last week. Cause I was like, wow, that’s wild too. Right. That was a like, who thinks of these things? 

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Jared: So here we have it. It is titanic fax.net. This is a website completely dedicated to the Titanic, the boat that sank in the Atlantic.

And I, I just was blown away that there’s an entire site about the Titanic. Yeah. The homepage seems to be focused on Titanic facts, but if you if you go look around, and by the way, this. A very basic article right here. Basically, it’s the history in numbers and it just literally goes through, they’re not even bullet points, they’re just, you know, how long was the ship?

How many tons was it? And then you can kind of navigate through the site and you can look up like ta, Titanic, passengers and, and get again, just a list of facts about the Titanic. There were 3,547 was a maximum capacity of the Titanic when fully. 2,222 people were on board you know, et cetera.

And so it’s just big lists of of things related to the Titanic building the Titanic, how long it took, when it commenced, all this kind of stuff. Pull the site up in ah, res and you know, it ranks for it’s a DR 39. It ranks for over 10,000 keyword. Estimated traffic is 33,000, which we know that typically, ah, reps will under under predict, right?

So I mean, it could be getting 50, 60,000 pages a month. Here’s where I think it gets really interesting and I’ll scroll down while, while you comment, Josh. Yeah, I was 

Josh: gonna say, so I just checked in SimilarWeb and it says 90,000 a month and the domain is 12 years old. So, I mean this, whoever created this, right?

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Like they’ve been on it for a while and I bet they’ve just been cash and checked, man. Like, it’s like, I, I think this is amazing. Like who would’ve thought to build this? I mean, this guy apparently and I think it’s a great example of what is now Semantic seo, where what we would say topical authority is that he just went and covered every section of the Titanic and it’s put it in the navigation, like the SEO on the site looks really great.

Jared: I agree. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s not a big site. It’s only got 50 pages. Again, roughly 50. We pulled it up here on the screen in H refs, but I mean, it’s not a big site and so you just nicely teased where I was gonna go. If you go, it just monetize by AdSense, by the way. I think it doesn’t look like it’s a premium ad network.

But you know, it’s a very basic site, super easy to build. Mm-hmm. And you’re right, if you have any kind of semantic not semantic programmatic SEO experience, like this would be something that you could probably create quickly. If you go down to the footer, it, it, it, it says, basically this site was created by somebody named Dave Fowler, and it links to history in numbers.

So if you then you know, just doing what I do, I’m just curious. Mm-hmm. I start going over to history and numbers. Now it looks like just another one of these number webpages, but ah, no, it’s not. This is a, a dashboard or a gateway to what I would imagine or all the different data sites this guy has built.

Here’s one, and if you go roll Doll Facts, he’s the guy who wrote a lot of those books you read in like, you know, junior high and high. Here’s the Titanic site, but there’s also an Oliver Cromwell. There’s also a William Shakespeare the Vikings. He’s got a couple sites he’s built out that are focused and then some of them just linked to Cat.

Here we go, land speed record.org. It’s just a fast sight on fascinating facts of the history of the heroes and the cars of land speed records, and we could go look at that. Some of them link out to categories on his site here on history and numbers, so it’s clear he’s kind of built out like a bit of a online empire around these topics 

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Josh: around history.

Right. Excuse me. I think it’s so impressive that like the, his the history and numbers I looked here and it is seven years old, right. So like he’s been at it for, so. It doesn’t even have any competition. But I think too now, like you mentioned with the programmatic and now with with ai, like you could spin these sites up pretty quickly.

Then what, what, what is there to update? Right? There’s like, there’s not gonna be a lot of new information come out about the Titanic. I mean, I think 

Jared: it’s, you can think about the Titanic, but like you could, I mean, just starting to rattle off, like you could do one of the Empire State Building. Mm-hmm.

You could do one of the Statue of Liberty. You could do one, and every country had the Eiffel Tower and like, I mean the Titans on a landmark, it’s more of an event, but like, just thinking through what he did and like, oh my goodness, your mind just starts to, to kind of roll, rattle. 

Josh: Add this to the shiny, shiny object list.

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You know 

Jared: next week we’re gonna have you back on Josh, and you’re gonna spit out uh, five of these websites. So 

Josh: Right, Spencer, I’m calling in sick. 

Jared: I got a little bit of programmatic eota to, to crank out. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll be there by lunch. 

Josh: Yeah, right. It’s I think, I think this is amazing, man.

This is a really great find and like you said, like it, there’s so many ideas and possibilities. Of different things and you know, I think it’s just start looking at history and go to, ah, RFS and see how many keywords are there, you know, and this guy’s got 50 pages. Can you find 50 to a hundred pages? And within a weekend or two you could probably, you know, knock out one of these sites with AI and put it up, let it sit and go on about your business in, you know, in, in three to six months.

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Jared: Come back point. Google Trends is also, Google Trends would be a great place to research and find more information on stuff like this, you know. An off ignored, or forgotten area to spend time on. But man, you could probably find a lot of good stuff relating to these kinds of topics on Google Trends.

Josh: And then tying this into the faceless YouTube, right? You build a site around the Titanic, you could create a faceless YouTube channel around the Titanic. There’s a faceless YouTube channel called nutty History that just covers a lot of his, they’re videos. I don’t know if you come across ’em or not, but if you look like for me, like I could just sit there and watch their videos and it’s all this kinda like B-roll put together and it’s a faceless video, but really well put together.

That could now you’re building this whole brand even further, you know, reaching more people. 

Jared: A very successful YouTube channel I love to follow is something like the world according to Briggs or something like that. Mm-hmm. And he’s got a huge channel and I think he has shown his face a couple times, but most of the videos are faceless and it’s all B-roll.

Of these stats, these history, it’s more like stats on demographics and stuff that he goes through. They’re really interesting. He’s really good at it. I think that’s why it’s just, yeah, he’s just such a good energetic voice, the way he walks through boring data and makes it interesting. He’s funny. Mm-hmm.

But yeah, faceless YouTube channel, all based on kind of demographic data that he pulls from various reports, surveys, these kinds of things. 

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Josh: Does he have a site to go with it? 

Jared: I haven’t checked. I should look at that. 

Josh: Yeah, it would be interesting, right? Like, hey, if he, if he was to learn programmatic seo and now it’s like, hey, you have the video and now you’re doing the site, and again, right now you’re getting this, the YouTube traffic, you’re getting the Google traffic, you’re, you doubled your ads, you know, it’s yeah.

So many possibilities. So little time. You know, we’ve gotta 

Jared: get off this this, this call here, this podcast, so we can get back to work and start Yeah. More shiny objects. Yeah Josh, it’s been fun having you give us like one or two minutes on what’s you’re, you know, just, we didn’t talk much about Lin Whisper, but that’s kinda where you spend the bulk of your week.

Like, just give us a little high level and what’s going on over at Linquist before we close out for the day. 

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Josh: Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having me, Jared. It’s been fun too. mean, what we’re doing there is right. Trying to steadily improve, right? There’s a developer working full-time that’s continuing trying to, to just make it better and make it better.

Me on the marketing side is I’m just trying to let more people know that Link Whisper exists. Get more new customers in and grow the business that way. So far we’ve been doing really well this year, so now we’re just gonna hope to just build on it and you know, try to just make it the best we can and, and let as many people know as.

That it does exist and we’re out there and it can make their life easier. And one thing too, we also have a coupon code for the podcast, if I could plug it. Podcast 15. If you go tolin whisper.com, use podcast 15. You’ll save $15. If you want to give Uhlin whisper a shot. 

Jared: And now just before we go, cuz I’ve, I could ask this a decent amount.

There is a free version of Link Whisper, right? Like I use the paid version, but there is a free version, 

Josh: right? There is a free version. Yep. wordpress.org. If you just, or you just Google Link Whisper free, you can go to wordpress.org and you can use it. And I think it’s a lot of the same features as, as the pro version.

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I think you can get pretty far with it, you know. But then again the, yeah, the pro version is, it starts at 77 bucks annually, so I mean, it. It’s not too, too bad. Depends on where you are in your journey and how large your site is. You know, it can save you a lot of time. Yeah. Oh, well, going 

Jared: back to that a, a r pmm.

Mm-hmm. I’ve already forgotten it exactly what the acronym is, but you know, something, you can use the free version for the while. And if you’re, if you’re using it, it’s saving you time. You know, at some point you kind of look yourself in the, in the mirror and say, all right, what’s my time worth? Right.

Exactly. And that’s what the pro provision might be available. 

Josh: Yeah, exactly right. And like one thing is like, is, is the orphan page report, right? Like, you know, I’m sure you use Screaming Frog and you go more detailed, right? But if you don’t have Screaming Frog or you don’t even, like, that’s a whole nother animal.

You know, with Link Whisper you can go and find your orphan pages, pages that don’t have any internal links and just add ’em with a few clicks of a button which can dramatically help your s. Yep. Yep. 

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Jared: And that it’s a lot easier to dolin whisper than to run a whole site crawl with Screaming Frog, for example.

A a lot 

Josh: easier. Yes. Cause that takes time to set that up. Yeah. 

Jared: Well Josh, it’s been fun. Thanks for being a guest today. We’ll probably see you again at some point. I don’t even know if I’m gonna keep getting invited back. But I’ve been here for a few and, you know, we’ll probably see you again. But thanks for joining us for this week this week’s news.

And again, we. Every Friday for now, it’s new for us, so we’ll see how many we keep doing, but as long as there there’s as people enjoying it, we’ll probably continue to do it. So definitely let us know your feedback in the comments. I know we had some audio issues a week or two ago that we, we do think we got cleaned up, so apologies for that.

But in general, if you have any questions, any topics you want to see you want us to cover in the. Let us know when the comments there on YouTube. I do encourage if you typically listen to the podcast on audio, maybe give this one a try on YouTube, cuz we do share the screens a lot and it’s a lot more interactive.

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So, and then you can leave us a comment with how it’s going. So anyways, thanks so much for, for joining us today and have a great weekend everyone. We’ll see you next week. All 

Josh: right, thanks, Jared.



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AI Will Transform the Workplace. Here’s How HR Can Prepare for It.

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AI Will Transform the Workplace. Here's How HR Can Prepare for It.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Our workplaces are about to undergo an unprecedented level of transformation, and HR will take center stage. Artificial intelligence will dramatically reshape HR in a way that goes beyond recruiting, hiring and talent management. Leadership teams at all levels need to embrace this change to transform and lead their organizations forward.

It’s the people, and not the technology, that makes AI initiatives a success. Intrapreneurs, in particular, are the driving force behind it. As I shared in Fearless Innovation, I noticed this when I was working on the innovation agenda for the Great Places to Work study — the most innovative companies were those that had a leadership team that was embracing intrapreneurship and were open to change.

HR is the beating heart of any organization, and as such, it needs to take center stage in both adopting and leading ethical and innovative AI transformation across the organization.

Related: How Artificial Intelligence Is Reinventing Human Resources

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4 tectonic shifts AI will drive in HR

1. A new wave of massive reskilling

As AI becomes more prominent across business functions, the need for new skills will only grow. Forty percent of enterprise leaders believe that their workforce would need to reskill as a result of AI and machine learning. In fact, research shows almost a third of all hours worked in the U.S. could be automated by 2030.

All of us need to reskill to some extent to be relevant in the AI era. Not only would people need to re-train, but generative AI is introducing a whole host of professions that have been non-existent until recently, from AI ethicists to human-AI interaction designers. Some of these roles might sound futuristic, yet they are becoming increasingly relevant as technology advances.

2. The great restructure

As automation takes center stage across more business functions, there will be the inevitable need for organizations to restructure and rethink how they work. This transition will not only involve the integration of new technologies but also introduce a shift in the workforce dynamics. Intrapreneurs will need to identify gaps both in skills and operational processes and forge brand-new roles for themselves and those they manage. HR must play a key role in enabling a smooth and easy transition in this regard. The transition will not be smooth or easy, and it’s only HR that has the capability to make it impactful.

3. Arrival of “digital humans”

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“Digital human” may sound like an oxymoron, but that’s the term that’s starting to appear in business and operational plans. More roles, regardless of industry, are becoming digitally enhanced where some form of AI assistance is embedded in their everyday work. A real-life example is the introduction of the digital nurse — AI-powered healthcare agents which have already been proven to outperform human nurses in certain tasks.

Imagine the impact these digital roles will have on the workforce the more sophisticated and prevalent they become. Eventually, HR will need to create policies and systems in place that account for this new type of “staff augmentation.”

4. Regulating the robot

The threat of AI bias and misuse is serious. Not only can the technology put many jobs at peril, but potential improper implementation can expose organizations to serious liability and negatively affect the workforce. From avoiding bias to inclusivity, HR teams play a critical role in the ethical deployment and management of AI technologies.

HR professionals will be tasked with navigating the delicate balance between leveraging AI for efficiency and ensuring that its application upholds fairness, privacy and non-discrimination.

Related: How to Successfully Implement AI into Your Business — Overcoming Challenges and Building a Future-Ready Team

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What HR intrapreneurs must do to embrace AI the right way

The future of work is being shaped by AI adoption, and its success hinges on the right approach from the outset. My experience shows that for successful organizations, one universal trait stands out: the presence of change agents. Every organization, regardless of size, benefits from intrapreneurs who are open to change and committed to spearheading transformation efforts. These intrapreneurs are pivotal in driving the future of work, as they help orchestrate the integration of new technologies into their business models.

HR and talent leaders should harness this dynamic, encouraging a symbiotic relationship with intrapreneurs to develop customized solutions for AI adoption, ensuring that they are not just keeping pace with technological advances but are actively shaping their trajectory.

Securing a seat at the table:

HR should take a proactive stance in the adoption of AI, even if it is still in its early stages within your organization. By securing a position at the forefront of the AI initiative, HR can and should facilitate and guide the entire organization in embracing this significant change.

As AI has the potential to impact every facet of the organization, it is imperative for HR to not only understand and advocate for this technology but also lead its integration across all departments. HR should encourage and support intrapreneurs and all employees to leverage AI in their daily tasks, demonstrating its value not just for operational efficiency but for personal and professional growth as well.

Master the technology:

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To effectively navigate and regulate AI, HR must first understand it thoroughly. Grasping the full potential of this technology is crucial for reaping its extensive benefits. HR plays a vital role in identifying the necessary tools and skills that employees must acquire and then integrating these learnings into daily work practices.

Before implementing AI more broadly, HR should initiate comprehensive training programs that not only educate but also reassure employees about AI’s role in the future of the business. By leading these educational initiatives, HR can shape the structure and effectiveness of these programs, ensuring they meet the needs of the organization and its workforce.

Related: 3 Ways to Prepare Your Business For an AI Future

Looking ahead

Generative AI has the transformative potential to redefine the business landscape, but realizing this vast potential hinges on more than just the adoption of technology. It critically depends on the talent within the workforce, driven by HR and bold intrapreneurs. These visionary leaders don’t just implement new tools; they exemplify their use, demonstrating the profound impact of AI across every level of the organization.

HR plays a pivotal role in fostering this environment, enabling intrapreneurs to guide and inspire every individual they touch. Together, they turn each employee into a catalyst for change, igniting a widespread passion for innovation that deeply resonates and sustains long-term success.

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Samsung: 6-Day Workweek For Execs, Company in Emergency Mode

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Samsung: 6-Day Workweek For Execs, Company in Emergency Mode

Four-day workweeks might have all the buzz, but one major tech company is going in the opposite direction.

Samsung is implementing a six-day workweek for all executives after some of the firm’s core businesses delivered lower-than-expected financial results last year.

A Samsung Group executive told a Korean news outlet that “considering that performance of our major units, including Samsung Electronics Co., fell short of expectations in 2023, we are introducing the six-day work week for executives to inject a sense of crisis and make all-out efforts to overcome this crisis.”

Lower performance combined with other economic uncertainties like high borrowing costs have pushed the South Korean company to enter “emergency mode,” per The Korea Economic Daily.

Related: Apple Is No Longer the Top Phonemaker in the World as AI Pressure and Competition Intensifies

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Executives at all Samsung Group divisions will be affected, including those in sales and manufacturing, according to the report.

Samsung had its worst financial year in over a decade in 2023, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that net profit fell 73% in Q4. It also lost its top spot on the global smartphone market to Apple in the same quarter, though it reclaimed it this year.

Though employees below the executive level aren’t yet mandated to clock in on weekends, some might follow the unwritten example of their bosses. After all, The Korea Economic Daily reports that executives across some Samsung divisions have been voluntarily working six days a week since January, before the company decided to implement the six-day workweek policy.

Entrepreneur has reached out to Samsung’s U.S. newsroom to ask if this news includes executives situated globally, including in the U.S., or if it only affects employees in Korea. Samsung did not immediately respond.

Research on the relationship between hours worked and output shows that working more does not necessarily increase productivity.

A Stanford project, for example, found that overwork leads to decreased total output. Average productivity decreases due to stress, sleep deprivation, and other factors “to the extent that the additional hours [worked] provide no benefit (and, in fact, are detrimental),” the study said.

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Related: Samsung’s Newest Galaxy Gadget Aims ‘To See How Productive You Can Be’

Longer hours can also mean long-term health effects. The World Health Organization found that working more than 55 hours a week decreases life expectancy and increases the risk of stroke by 35%.

The same 55-hour workweek leads to a 17% higher risk of heart disease, per the same study.

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John Deere Hiring CTO ‘Chief Tractor Officer,’ TikTok Creator

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John Deere Hiring CTO 'Chief Tractor Officer,' TikTok Creator

This article originally appeared on Business Insider.

Agriculture equipment company John Deere is on the hunt for a different kind of CTO.

The brand on Tuesday announced a two-week search to find a “Chief Tractor Officer” who would create social media content to reach younger consumers.

One winning applicant will receive up to $192,300 to traverse the country over the next several months showcasing the way John Deere products are used by workers, from Yellowstone National Park to Chicago’s Wrigley Field and beyond.

“No matter what you do — whether it’s your coffee, getting dressed in the morning, driving to work, the building you go into — it’s all been touched by a construction worker, a farmer, or a lawn care maintenance group,” Jen Hartmann, John Deere’s global director of strategic public relations, told AdAge.

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To kick off the search, John Deere tapped NFL quarterback Brock Purdy (who will presumably be a bit busy this Fall to take the job himself) to star in a clip in which he attempts to set out on a road trip in an industrial tractor.

Suited up in the obligatory vest, work boots, and John Deere hat, Purdy’s progress is interrupted by teammate Colton McKivitz hopping into the cab while a string of messages floods in from other athletes and influencers expressing interest in the job.

The clip also represents the first time that the 187-year-old company has used celebrities to promote itself, Hartmann told AdAge.

According to the contest rules, entrants have until April 29 at midnight to submit a single 60-second video making their pitch for why they should be the face and voice of the company.

In addition, entrants must live in the 48 contiguous states or DC — sorry Hawaii and Alaska residents. Interestingly, any AI-generated submissions are prohibited, too.

Videos will be judged against four categories — originally, creativity, quality, and brand knowledge — after which five finalists will be chosen and notified after May 17.

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