WordPress Releases an AI Writing Assistant, SGE Concerns, and a Business Competition on YouTube

Want to hear about the latest developments in AI and the potential impact on website owners?

Don’t miss the latest episode of Niche Pursuits News!

Once again, Jared and Spencer team up for an engaging and informative discussion that covers a range of exciting topics.

They start by talking about how the WordPress Jetpack plugin incorporates an AI assistant directly into the editor. This feature will allow users to generate text directly in WordPress and also correct spelling and grammar, generate titles, and uses several different prompts for tone, all for $10 a month.

Then they discuss a report on the Search Generative Experience, the “new featured snippets,” and how quotes may be pulled directly from websites without any attribution or backlinks. This would cause quite a stir among SEOs and publishers, and Jared and Spencer discuss the implications and concerns surrounding this development.

Watch the Full Episode

On a potentially positive note for some, they share a recent tweet by Cyrus Shepard, who crawled millions of URLs to compile a list of 7 categories of searches that are unlikely to trigger AI results in the SERPs.

Google Bard is also a topic of conversation in this episode. Jared and Spencer discuss the new location settings, which have been added to help localize queries, and new developments in exporting tables to Google Sheets, which is now easier than ever.

The discussion then shifts to Spencer and Jared’s side hustle projects.

Spencer talks about his idea for a YouTube series, where he acts as a mentor and host in a competition between two or three people.

Their challenge?

To start a small online business in just 30 days, with the winner taking home a monetary prize. The journey would be documented in a single, well-edited, and inspirational video.

Speaking of inspiration, Jared and Spencer share their experience being part of the Amazon Influencer program. Both believe this is a great program for quick financial wins, and they talk about content ideas as they continue to upload videos to see where this side hustle leads.

Jared briefly shares his other side projects, including a YouTube channel he’s working on at the moment. In subsequent episodes, he expects to give listeners a better status update.

In the final segment of this episode, Jared and Spencer talk about some of the weird niche sites they’ve discovered.

Jared reviews a website called Best Love Text Messages. It was likely originally created as a source of messages for loved ones but eventually expanded into a wider variety of messages, quotes, and captions.

The website used to get 300,000 organic page views until a Google update, and although it still boasts a substantial number of keywords and page views and could be easily replicated with AI nowadays, there are also areas for improvement.

Spencer shares a website with several web-based games he used around 2010: QWOP. It’s a video game that was extremely popular back in the day and still manages to attract almost 50,000 organic visitors per month. With a DR of 64 and a substantial Twitter following, Jared and Spencer discuss the potential of supporting it through a Patreon-like platform.

As always, this is another episode filled with thought-provoking discussions, innovative ideas, and actionable tips.

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to learn and be inspired by this episode of Niche Pursuits News.

Transcription

Spencer: Hey. Hey everybody. Spencer Haws here with niche pursuits.com, and welcome to another episode of This Week in Niche Pursuits News. I’ve got Jared Baumann with me. Jared, how you doing? Great, 

Jared: great. Good to be here. Spencer. Excited to talk about the news this week with you. 

Spencer: Yep. Always fun to sit down and reflect on what’s going on in the industry, what news is happening.

There’s always some news. And so we’ve got a few items that we’ll go over here, of course, in the news has, has been happening over the last month or so. AI seems to be the central focus of everything, and that’s no change. Today, just some new developments with artificial intelligence, how it applies to content marketers, bloggers, niche, site creators.

So we’re gonna, we’re gonna touch on that. And then we have our two additional segments that we’ll do here where we talk about our side projects, our shiny object shenanigans. I’ve actually got a new idea that I’m gonna kind of pitch to you, kind of throw your way and maybe we can bounce the idea off each other and maybe listeners will chime in and let me know if I should go ahead with this idea or not.

And then finally, we have a couple of weird niche sites that we will review and reveal and share with everybody. Yeah. To, to give a little inspiration, maybe a little bit of fun at the end. So should we do it? Should we jump into it? Let’s dive in. Let’s get to it. All right. So just today, or maybe yesterday, WordPress announced that for their jet pack plugin, they have a new AI writing tool that’s integrated directly into WordPress.

Now why does this matter? Well, first let me just share this article for those that maybe are watching on YouTube. They can see this article. It says WordPress now has an open AI powered content generator, free access available. So what’s going on here? Well, basically WordPress is a. Non-profit organization.

It’s an open source code base, but the organization WordPress formed a for-profit business and they own several plug-ins. One of those being jet pack, you know, that gives a lot of statistics and, and other functionality traffic statistics and things like that for your site. But it looks like.

They have now basically have a writing assistant that lives directly within WordPress. And so if you’re using Gutenberg, and if I can get down to the the sort of video here, this is really grainy, but you know, it sort of shows that hey, you can create you can create a prompt, hit go and it’s gonna write it directly.

For you, and, and it’ll say, okay, rewrite that paragraph. So it includes a list of yada, yada, yada, and I’ll put it in bullet point format for you. So why, why is this cool? Well, one, it’s created by the founders of WordPress, right? Jet Pack is owned by Matt Mullen Webb, and. He is the founder of WordPress, and so he’s going all in on ai.

He sees it. And so they’ve created an AI writing assistant that lives directly in WordPress. And that’s the other big thing, is it is in WordPress, makes it super easy and integrated. So what are your thoughts on this? 

Jared: Well, I have, I have a lot of que abs with everything. I have a lot of questions, but from a high level, just look at this.

I mean, this definitely solves some of the problems that chat G p t has. I don’t know about you, but. Sometimes I’m looking for a way to rewrite, like an answer target in my blog post. Or maybe I’m redoing an introduction. I have found chat G P D to help with that. Maybe gimme some ideas for introduction.

I’ve used them for FAQs and you gotta like copy and paste. Or if you’re pulling headers over, it’s even worse and you’re trying to tell it to write it in markup. And so this is now a and I, as you read the article, it says it’s, it’s being executed in the block. Portion of WordPress. And so you know, I mean, it’s right there as you saw in the video, and I think that that’s really compelling.

Like I said, I have a couple questions I’ll ask you, but from the high level, this will make using a chat G p t style content in your WordPress website significantly faster and easier. Yeah, 

Spencer: absolutely. It removes a lot of that, you know, copying, pasting, and formatting. It’s all right there. It, it isn’t free for everyone.

It’s free if you are on WordPress. Dot com, which is WordPress’s free blogging platform. So most, most of our listeners have their own self-hosted WordPress, so it’s not free. It’s I thought, I thought it was. $20 a month. 

Jared: It is. There is a free version of the Jet Plat plugin that allows for up to 20 free requests.

Yes. Right here. Thereafter, you have to go to a the cost of the WordPress content generator plugin is half to price a chat g p t $10 per month. That has no limits on request. 

Spencer: Yeah, so that’s actually, gosh, that, that’s perfect, right? If you’re paying premium for chat G P T, well maybe stop doing that and you pay 10 bucks a month.

So 

Jared: that’s my question. Is this getting you chat G P T four or is it three or 3.5? I mean, I assume it’s four since they kind of reference it’s half the price of chat. G P T, which you’re paying for chat G P T four, right. I would not, but it didn’t actually explicitly say which one you’re getting access to.

It 

Spencer: does not say that, but I would, I would assume and hope that it is the latest version of chat, g p t. But great question. That 

Jared: was one of my questions because yeah, I’ve noticed a, a big difference in 3.5 and four. I would prefer to be using four and and then if I could pay only $10 a month for this, I mean that now you can’t go to chat g p t through OpenAI at that point.

But you know, you’re using chat g p T in your blog. I mean, it could really be a good cost savings for some people 

Spencer: too. Right. Exactly. If that’s all you’re doing with chat, G P T is blog content, this could be a good solution. I don’t know. I mean, I haven’t used it, but it looks pretty interesting. If you’re using open AI for lots of other stuff.

Yeah. You know, maybe keep that so, but yeah, big announcement, just kind of cool to see, you know, formally WordPress organization embracing. AI content has, has an AI writing assistant. So that could be a whole podcast episode to be honest. 

Jared: Oh yeah. Cause I was gonna say a few other things are that it will automatically go through the document and correct spelling and grammar.

It will create titles and summaries for you. It has tone options, so that’s something that if you’re not maybe native at prompting. And chat G p t. You can get a tone back and you’re like, I don’t like this tone, but how do I tell it to give me the tone I want, right? Like, you gotta kind of figure out how to ask for what you want.

But this comes with tone prompts. I’ll just read ’em out loud really quickly while I have ’em. Formal, informal, optimistic, humorous, serious, skeptical, empathetic, confident, passionate, and provocative. So there’s some other things they’re doing that aren’t just, you know, copy paste. Like it really has A couple features that could be helpful for people who aren’t engaging in prompts on chat G P T right now.

Spencer: Right, and I could envision this becoming a lot more robust, right? Maybe WordPress or Jetpack, you know, tweaks the prompts or the settings that they have to just make it better and better, give you more tone options or more, you know, writing style or length or whatever, you know, type options for different types of articles.

So wanted to keep your eye on one that is very interesting for Sher. So this second article that we have is from Marie Haynes. Marie Haynes Consulting. She’s exploring the Sge, which we have talked about a lot, the search generative experience that Google has. And maybe Jared, I’ll let you tackle this one.

But we did just talk about this, or at least Sge quite a bit last week. On the podcast and she shares some of her findings that if I can find one of her images, maybe I’ll click on that and yeah, you can maybe tell us what you’re seeing here. Yeah, so we 

Jared: talked, I mean, I think pretty much about this exact topic yesterday.

I mean, her headliner here was the sge answers are not. Necessarily AI generated answers. It is pulling from content that is already available on the internet that has already been published on the internet, rather than pulling from AI repository system a, a a language model like we assumed maybe Sge would pull from with Bard, and we kind of surmised this could happen.

Like, why, why would they have to go to the why would Sge sge for all queries sorry. Sge could be used for all queries, only some of them pulling from, say, Bard and AI with others pulling from content that’s already available on the internet. So basically she saw this live and and in the flesh it was out there in the wild, as it were.

So what she said was let me pull it up here. Basically Google Sge answers don’t appear to all be ai, but rather weaving together pieces of indexed information taken from websites into coherent and helpful responses. And of note, there’s no attribution to specific websites used to make this answer, which is gonna gonna make SEOs all bothered about it for sure.

But mm-hmm. You know, it, it obviously, and she’s clear to say it, and I agree with her, like, Early days with Sge, and so this could develop and morph as they figure that out. But clearly there’s testing going on where they’re looking at using Bard and AI answers and stuff from their database and their index that they already have.

Spencer: Right. And yeah, it kind of, as we pointed out, it’s like, okay, is this different than featured snippets? Is this gonna be better than regular results that we’re already getting? We don’t know. I think they’re figuring that out. But yeah, the big sticking point here is, gosh, if you’re gonna pull a quote directly from our website, please give us some attribution, give us a link.

Send us some traffic. So so, 

Jared: but it, you bring up the exactly what I was gonna say, which is, So this to me feels like instead of like bef, it feels like a, a, a more advanced, mature version of a feature snippet. Previously and currently as we exist in Google, a feature snippet is a snippet from one article.

And therefore they give attribution to that one article. And I don’t wanna get too far ahead, but if they’re gonna weave, as Marie Haynes said, weave multiple answers from multiple articles, do they now feel they’re off the hook and don’t have to quote any of them because they’ve actually created their own unique answer by quoting three people’s answer.

I don’t 

Spencer: we. That’s, we should let him off the 

Jared: hook. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. Maybe they think that that’s getting them off the hook that they can now because they created their own unique answer. Air quotes from three other web publishers answers that maybe now they don’t have to have attribution.

I don’t know. We’re obviously, I hope that’s not the case, but 

Spencer: well, maybe let’s move on since it’s not making me any happier talking about it, so, all right. I’m 

Jared: ruining your afternoon here. 

Spencer: No, not at all. I, I’m still, I’m still bullish and, and positive on the outlook, but you know, I don’t, I don’t like the direction of some of these things.

But okay. We’ve got another tweet. Cyrus Shepherd, he was on the podcast not very long ago, came and gave some great advice on internal linking, on page seo and just a deep dive. If people wanna check out that episode they can do that. He went through and he shared in this tweet seven categories that don’t trigger AI results in the Sge experience.

And maybe I’ll just read what he says here. Taken together these searches likely comprise 50 to 70% of all searches. And are likely the safest from ai. So, interesting. Very interesting, very interesting. You tweeted this out about, about a week ago. But let’s see. I guess we could go through and just quickly read off all of the categories here.

Right. I’ve got a 

Jared: list here that’s truncated if you want me to read it off. 

Spencer: Yeah, why don’t you go ahead and read that off, and if you’ve got that in front of you, that’d be great. Sure. 

Jared: Yeah, so number one is navigational queries. So that’s gonna be like when you search a brand name, like let’s say you wanna go to target.com, but instead you just search Target or NASA, I think is the example.

He used recipes. He did say, I can get it to do simple things like how to cook broccoli, but more complex recipes did not trigger an AI result. Very interesting for the food bloggers out there, there’s a lot of concern about that. That’s interesting. Not safe for web stuff. N S F W, we’ll leave that there.

I’m sure you can all figure out what that might be. Some Y M Y L topics. We talked about this a bit last week. I mean, originally we thought that Sge was gonna cut, was not gonna cover any of those. Then we saw that it was covering some of them. So Cyrus is kind of sticking with what others have seen, which is some Y M Y L, some not.

Number five of the seven is news and current events. We, we, we know a lot of news publishers, so that’s very interesting to see. Mm-hmm. I thought this was very interesting. Number six is quick answers, like weather and song lyrics. Mm-hmm. So that’s, I don’t know why that would be the case, but we could talk more about that if we wanted or just leave it there.

But, and then number seven is sensitive queries. I mean, that, that can be kind of open to interpretation, but but you know, that, that makes sense that, you know, some of the topics of the day, they don’t wanna wade into. 

Spencer: Yeah, no, that is interesting. Maybe the quick answers, you know, weather song lyrics, maybe they’re already doing a good enough job.

They feel like, Hey, we just use our existing engine. Yeah. You know, they, they’ve done quite a bit there to give you quick answers, but so very interesting. Again, it’s early days, but, but Cyrus is a smart guy. If he says that covers 50 to 70%. Of all search queries. Like that’s a positive in my book.

Right? It’s like, hey, 

Jared: yeah, I agree. He’s a smart guy. And when he, when he puts his mind to doing something, boy, I mean, how many URLs did he crawl for that study that we talked about? The internal link study. 18 million or something. 

Spencer: Yeah, some. Some huge number. It was millions. Yeah, it’s a lot. So, all right, very good.

So we do have one more sort of, AI update, if you will. And just a little bit of commentary I suppose. You know Google Bard is continuing to come out with updates and they publish these updates. You know, they call it their experiment updates, cuz Yeah, it’s still an experiment. But you know, less than a week ago since we recorded our, our last episode, they came up with.

Or, or they added some location settings. And, and Jared, I know you looked at this or talked about this a little bit, so maybe you can clarify what this update’s about. Yeah, 

Jared: basically Bard is gonna now start incorporating your location on your phone or IP address and incorporating that into local queries, you know, so we’re all familiar with maybe like pizza shop near me.

Or you know, if it’s a local query like you search like best plumber, they’re not gonna show you a plumber in New York City. When you’re in Seattle, Washington, they’ll show you a plumber in your area. And so we’re still trying to figure out exactly what, you know, AI’s gonna, what role AI will have in local queries, but it looks like they are localizing where you are for Bard style queries.

Whatever that ends up meaning. 

Spencer: Yep. Exactly. And then the other updates that just came out today I just saw the article update and here it is on the experiment, update sheet here is that one Bard codes for you for improved math and data analysis. Okay. I’ll let people read into that a little bit more, but they’ve made some updates to make it better at mathematical tasks, coding questions, string manipulation.

And then the other one that’s kind of cool, I think, I haven’t played around with it, but it sounds cool, is that you can export Bard generated tables to Google Sheets. So now they have an export function directly to Google Sheets. Which I could see being extremely useful in a lot of different cases.

You know, a lot of data. Yeah. So many different queries can produce data. Tables of data. It could be lists of things for a listical article, it could be number data, anything, right? But Google Bard creates the table, automatically exports it to a spreadsheet where you can then do whatever you want, right?

Manipulate it, filter or import it into your website, whatever. 

Jared: I mean, I, yeah, that makes it, again, I feel like a lot of what we talked about today is less in maybe the advancement of the ai, but more in the usability of the ai, you know? Yeah. Using AI inside of WordPress going straight to Google Sheets from a, an AI query, like these are things that will make it less clunky.

An experience for for everyone. 

Spencer: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. So constant updates always changing. Maybe we’ll leave it, leave it there. I mean, it’s like, Ever progressing news that is interesting, I think for publishers and maybe there’s some ideas there that people can use, whether that’s the, the WordPress AI assistant or exporting data to Google Sheets.

Yeah, that’s, that’s kind of the news for the week. But beyond that, you know, we’ve always got our side projects, our. You know, businesses that we’re trying to operate, and I do have a number of side projects that I’m working on, and I just felt like maybe it was time to add something to that list, I guess as if you needed to add more.

Yeah. I, I will clarify that this is less of a side hustle. This, this would be for niche pursuits. So it is really for my, you know, One of my core businesses. It’s not something that’s totally unrelated like a, you know, Amazon influencer, a faceless YouTube channel. But what I’m thinking of doing, and I haven’t done this yet, is trying to figure out a way to grow my YouTube channel while still being extremely.

Helpful, educational and hopefully having a lot of fun doing it. And so this is the idea that I came up with. Jared. I’d love your thoughts, listeners. I’d love your thoughts. Basically, I, I tweeted this idea out, Jared on social media was basically, Hey, what if I got two or three people to compete against each other to try and start a small online business within 30 days?

And the. Contestant, quote unquote, that had the most traction, made the most revenue earned a little bit of prize money. You know, I don’t know how much that is, but I would maybe give him a little bit of money and make it, make it fun. But condense this whole sort of month long journey of going from idea to launching, to making, you know, the first dollar or a hundred dollars or whatever it is in 30 days, condensing it down into one.

Just really fun. Experiential video that’s, you know, 15 minutes long or something like that. And along the way it would not be me creating the side hustles. I would be more of an advisor and sort of referee, if you will, right. Host of the show. I would, you know, maybe do calls with them once a week.

Hey, how’s your, you know, your little idea coming along. Here’s what I would do. And, you know, I would document all of that and, and hopefully make it a very Involved, you know, well produced video. So that’s sort of the idea. What do you think, Jared? 

Jared: I think it’s a good idea. I think it would do well.

And I think I have some data for you that would suggest it would do well. So you don’t even have to go by my opinion. 

Spencer: I like that data’s good. What do you got? 

Jared: Yeah. And I was not prepared for this, by the way, so you did 

Spencer: literally, you just are a data nerd. You just, but data at 

Jared: your fingertips. So shameless plug, I just hit a hundred episodes as the host of the podcast Little Side and I, I, I realized it a bit last minute and it got me thinking about, man, I, I, I, I wonder what some of the most popular episodes of the podcast were.

So I just, Went over to the Niche Pursuits YouTube channel and hit You Can Sort by latest, which is how it defaults and it hit most popular. It’s interesting to see. What I noticed is that some of the top YouTube videos on the Niche Pursuits Channel are back from, I believe it was Niche Site Project three, where you had multiple people building niche sites and you documented their journey with multiple coaches and their progress.

You are right. I don’t know how many years ago that was. But many. 5, 6, 7, 7, 8, 7, 

Spencer: 8, 20 

Jared: 15. I was trying to be generous maybe, but they were very watched in terms of YouTube and they were even more rude of, I mean, if you went back you’d probably be embarrassed by like the quality and like from a YouTube standpoint, they’re not at all what we would expect on a YouTube today.

But they were very popular to watch people engage in the niche pursuits brand, but seen. Kind of people get coached along and starting a website and all the little steps that would go into, and that was focused on a website. This is a little bit different, but I think you have. Very limited amount of data to suggest that actually people would be very interested in that.

Spencer: Yeah, that’s a good point. I, I didn’t think about that exactly in terms of the videos. You know, I have some experience, of course doing similar projects. You know, that was niche site project three. It was very popular, very well followed. What is fascinating that you pointed out that I didn’t realize, Is that those are some of the most watched YouTube videos.

Which, which I, I knew. But what’s fascinating is that those videos were never created for YouTube. No. Like when I created them, YouTube was just the hosting platform and I would publish them on my website and I’d blog about it and embedded in my website. That’s where all the views were coming from.

I thought, you know, maybe I’ve always had this, you know, half my audience on YouTube, I just never tailored to. So yeah, that, that’s some, some good data, some good points about, hey, if, if I actually put the effort into making a great video and making a great experience it could do really, really well.

And, you know, part of it, it, I think it would be a lot of fun for me not only to like help people, Hey, let’s. Encourage you, keep you motivated, launch a website, launch an online business, whatever it is. But it, it, it would allow me to express some of my creative site as well, you know, sort of putting together, you know, how do you edit all this together in, in a well put together story.

I mean, you’re telling us a month long story of two to three people building a business. Like there’s a lot going on. To fit in like 15 minutes 

Jared: and it would, you know, obviously there’s, there’s so much I mean, you know, I’m thinking like amazing race style. Yeah, yeah. Drama you know, survivor style drama.

Like you could actually you know, leverage some some tactics that create interest, intrigue, and entertainment mm-hmm. That people love on YouTube. You know, I think back to our interview, again, we’ve rested for many times, but with Pat Flynn and about. All the little things he does to his YouTube videos that make them super intriguing and watchable and creating hooks and building intrigue.

Yep. And having, you know change of pace and having misdirection and all these different things. 

Spencer: Yeah. And you know, I think. This would allow this, this would sort of feel feed my shiny object syndrome in a way through other people. Right. I’d like be able to watch and have the inside scoop. I could probably have, you know, maybe a couple of these going on every month.

I, I, I don’t know, but 

Jared: would I like is it just screen share videos you’re gonna put together and then you’ll do like a voiceover you thinking? Or am I gonna like. If I’m one of the contestants, am I like, you know, kind of videoing myself here? Yes. Or, okay. I’m 6:00 AM I’m really cranking away. Spencer.

Yes, I would me up require 

Spencer: first person video of, of the contestants. Okay. I would require them to film themselves, so we’d get a lot of great shots. There might be, you know, a little bit of screen shares, you know, on a Zoom call when we chat or something, but Yeah. Yeah, it would be hopefully, Lots of different locations, shots, you know inter, you know, interactive, I guess.

Yeah. Fast paced. Okay. 

Jared: So I think that’s, I think that’s good. Yeah. I think that’s far more intriguing than. I’m always amazed at how many people watch our podcast interviews on YouTube when it’s just two floating heads for an hour instead of Exactly. Very engaging to me. 

Spencer: Exactly. But it, it could also lead to a lot of follow up videos, right?

If, if they built an Amazon influencer business, you know, we’re showing a lot in 15 minutes, but we could, I could then, or. Bring on the person and we could do a 30 minute tutorial, you know, video, couple of follow ups, right? Yep. Something like that. So anyways, that’s the idea. I’m you know, I’ve got the whiteboard filled out over here with ideas and I posted a couple of things on Facebook and Twitter asking for ideas.

So I, I, I think I’m moving forward with it. So we’ll see what happens over the next week if I take a, take another step forward. So we’ll keep everybody posted. 

Jared: Sounds good. Exciting. 

Spencer: Cool. All right. What are you working on this week? Oh, 

Jared: boy. Okay. Let’s see. Let’s see. Okay, well, Amazon Influencer, you wanna talk about that?

Yes, always. So where were we? Last week? I think we’d gotten a hundred articles live articles. Man, I’m such a blogger. Videos, yeah. A hundred video live. And we had just started earning some money, probably $3 or $6 or something like that. Right? 

Spencer: Nine bucks maybe. I don’t 

Jared: remember. Yeah. So let’s see.

We’re recording this on a, we’ll call it a Wednesday afternoon here, so, mm-hmm. Sorry, it is a little early this week, but according to Wednesday afternoon, so Monday. We made $34. What? And yesterday we made $46. Are you serious? So it is growing quickly. 

Spencer: Wow. You’re up to my earnings level. 

Jared: Day nine of day nine of monetization, and we’re at $46 a day.

Wow. That is day 10. Maybe it’s day 10. It’s like day nine or day 10. Now we didn’t get a hundred videos live this week. Technically it’s only been six days since we last recorded. You know, but not seven, but six. We, but we have I’m looking right here at, I got my numbers here. Let’s see. So we have a hundred and 49 videos live now with 17 uploading, I guess as we speak.

So that’ll bring us to 166 videos. Two weeks in basically. 

Spencer: You are so awesome. You’re making me look bad though. Have I, 

Jared: have we cut up? Cuz you said you were what, 160 last week? I 

Spencer: think I had said 160 and I went back and looked. It was actually like 136. I may have flip-flopped the numbers. Have we passed you now?

And you I, I got maybe five or six more uploaded. But you’re, you’re past me now. Yeah. Making me look bad, and here I am, outsourcing it. Oh man. So, 

Jared: so I mean, yeah, it’s yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s interesting. I’ll say that like I such early days, I mean, first off, don’t know if that $46 mark is gonna continue.

It could have been couple good days. Who knows up or, yeah. I mean, I’ve, we have, we don’t know much about this program in general. So hard to expand on that. I don’t know how long it takes videos to index. I don’t know if we should expect videos that we published a month a week ago that don’t have any views to get views down the road, or if things get bounced around.

Typically, so really early day. 

Spencer: Typically it takes a week-ish plus to get ’em kind of in there and start getting views is what I’ve noticed. So that should ramp up Ah, wow. Is what I would think with all the new 

Jared: videos. That’d be great. So I am getting to the bottom of the list here at, at the house. In terms of stuff that I can make videos on, it’s a shame.

I, I feel like I have a good process, but, you know, so we’ll get through all the stuff in, in our house and then Caitlin’s doing the same, and then we’ll kind of circle the wagons and figure out what’s what’s go to 

Spencer: grandpa’s house and Yep. 

Jared: You know, record everything there. I did text my neighbor cuz I was over down there over the weekend and they have a really nice espresso machine.

Mm-hmm. And I thought, so I texted my neighbor actually this morning. I was like, Hey, can I come down and maybe make a couple coup like a latte day tomorrow and film myself doing it? She’s like, yeah, why would you wanna do that? Like, no, don’t worry about it. Don’t worry 

Spencer: about it. I wanna make a couple bucks on Amazon.

So it kind of 

Jared: gets your head going, you Yeah. A little bit in terms of like, you know, what you can cherry pick elsewhere and stuff. So that’s, that’s the influencer program. It is definitely still a very. Shiny object just mm-hmm. You know, but it’s I’ll just say this, it’s such the opposite experience of building a website where you, you really dig in for six to nine to 12 months of no feedback loop, no adrenaline rush, no dopamine hit, and it’s just such the opposite to.

Publish a bunch and then have that dopamine hit come so quickly. It, it’s so it throws you off when you’re so used to the opposite. Mm-hmm. In terms of website creation and SEO and these kinds of things. 

Spencer: I love it, man. It so true, everything that you said, I, I think this is evidence that if somebody really just wants to hustle their way to a thousand bucks a month or something, man, this is just a great route.

I mean, yeah, you, you’re working with somebody to get your 160 or whatever videos right now, but. You know, still within a matter of a few weeks I mean 10 

Jared: days in, it’s on pace to earn, what is that, $1,300 a month. 

Spencer: Yeah. So that’s fantastic. So Yeah. If people got two, three hours a day, they could just hustle and yeah, you can go to your neighbors, you can go to your parents, your friends.

You go through five or six houses worth of stuff and you, you got hundreds of items I’m sure. 

Jared: And, and I think that’s the right strategy for someone. Cuz I’ve tried both. I’ve tried, I slogged away on a Friday and did a lot of videos. I think that was two weeks ago. That was the big push to that first hundred.

And I think I did 33 in a day or something like that. Like five, six hours of recording and then I’ve also done just like eight in a day. Mm-hmm. And that takes, with uploading and everything, that probably takes an hour to an hour and a half for me. And I think that’s a much more achievable pace.

You know, like if you have a day that clears out and you got some time, moisture do two, three hours. But I think if you could do five to 10 a day mm-hmm. Which is probably for most people, anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half a day. Like that’s a very reasonable target. And then you’re at a hundred in 10 to 20 days.

You’re at 200 videos in four to six weeks. I mean, that’s very reasonable. 

Spencer: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I, I, I’m almost thinking that a way to kick off my YouTube video series is maybe we have, we dramatize. What’s happening here with you and I on our Amazon influencer? You know, pretend like it’s happening live, maybe, but you’re gonna beat me out.

I can tell you that much. That’s, that’s, you’re, you’re pretty much there. You’re earning about what I am already and I’m worried next week you’re gonna be way past me. So I 

Jared: wonder if there’s a velocity component here, you know, could be. None of us really know, like, is there an advantage to publishing a ton at once rather than dripping it?

Yeah, I mean their algorithm, no one knows what’s going on with how they figure out what videos to put where, and yeah. At the time I earned something. And it’ll say where you’re, you know, what video you use to earn. And so I’ll go to the Amazon listing and try to see the video and how it, how it’s, it’s not there.

So I, yeah, this is all just the wild, wild west in my opinion. So 

Spencer: pretty much Good. Very good update. I did tease. I love 

Jared: that it’s going well. I did tease last week about a summertime project on YouTube with my wife. We talked a bunch more this weekend about it. We did some research. So again, to borrow a Spencer term, we we did spend some time on, I think Sunday night going through doppelganger research, so trying to find other YouTube channels that are doing it.

In a similar fashion but that are not, you know, really established or competitive trying to find those kind of unicorns that are succeeding on YouTube in this kind of sub niche, but that don’t necessarily have a lot of subscribers, followers, videos, that kind of stuff. So we did some doppelganger research, got a lot of good insights from that.

So it’s moving along. You know, it’d probably go a little bit slower pace than the influencer program, just to be clear, but, We’re taking good steps forward in that. I hope to have like a real solid update maybe next week or the week after, like we’ve set up the account or something like that. That’s the 

Spencer: goal.

Yeah. Cool, man. I love it. That’s good. So let’s jump into our final segment here, our weird niche sites. So each of us have done our job here. We’ve found one weird niche site each. So we’ll review these let people check ’em out, let us know what they think. And see, see if they like them.

I’ll, I’ll be honest here, Jared, I saw your sight, but I didn’t look at it. So I’m coming in, I’m coming in fresh. Well, so I gonna 

Jared: share my screen now. It looks, it looks a lot more we’ll say risque or, or, or or, or sketchy if you if you just look at the url. Right? 

Spencer: Best love text messages.com. I 

Jared: Okay.

Probably gonna throw everyone off if you just hear that and, and have to go. You’ll probably be wondering what in the heck we’re talking about for the next five or 10 minutes here on on the podcast. So yeah, the website is best Love text messages.com. Bit of a mouthful. Mm-hmm. And I, I, I’m pretty sure when they started this website, they really were focused just on the concept of finding the best text messages to convey love.

To send to people cuz this is really all about prompts that you can use to send people. And it has clearly expanded over the years. It according to HFS now has 777 pages and ex expanded into a whole variety of. Message related things you can send. And so, you know, if you kind of produce through the website, you can see like 10 prayers for Mother’s day you know, different thank you quotes for community helpers and captions for Instagram.

But I think the root of it is certainly rooted in this idea of messages you send to people. And it’s mainly all listical style. So it’s, it’s, it is a outta the box generate press theme with zero modifications done to it. It is loaded up with Zoic ads. They got the video ads, the sidebar ads, the bottom footer banner ads, the in incent ads.

It’s all there. It’s all there. I got a whole, if you wanna see every ad unit that is Oak offers, this is a good spot to look. Here’s 

Spencer: a good, just take a look at your screen right now. Yep. 

Jared: That’s gotta be every one of them. A couple stats for you. It Right. It has 128,000 keywords. All right. Dr. 11 128,000 keywords.

It was at almost 300,000 organic page views per month. Wow. According to hres, until the helpful content update came along. It did knock this one back quite a bit cuz I would argue that this is not a very helpful website. The articles, while they do have content, they’re. In a terrible format.

Ads are overwhelming. I don’t think I saw one image in the articles. No internal linking. You know, I mean, man, this site though was out of left field. I mean, it’s ranking till this day, number one. For the keyword seven years of togetherness and still counting search volume of 200, if you’re wondering.

Spencer: Okay. That’s an odd keyword I would suppose, but yeah, just looking at the aare graph, right? It’s got this huge spike. Looks like it did well for a while, but yeah, it’s come, come back down to reality. But it’s, you know, still. It, it’s probably getting a hundred thousand visitors a month plus. 

Jared: I mean, this site, if you just go to it, you wouldn’t think a hundred thousand visitors.

No, no. And at hundred thousand visitors, and let’s say that it’s not getting monetize, you know, like it’s not getting higher RPMs from Ezoic, but even a hundred thousand visitors at a $10 RPM is a thousand bucks a month from, from this. 

Spencer: So with a website like this, I mean, you have to imagine they’re just copying these quotes from some other article or something, right?

And just compiling them all into a listical. So it’s probably not very much original content. But this could be accelerated a great deal with AI tools now, right? Like just ask the AI to write you a list of 10 loving messages to your. You know, fill in the blank, right? Wife, husband, daughter, uncle, whatever.

And I’m not saying somebody should do that, but it would be a lot easier to replicate this website even, even nowadays than it was but on the other hand, the devil’s advocate here is maybe you don’t wanna do that because, Maybe people aren’t gonna be searching these types of keywords as much.

They’re gonna just be using their AI tool in the future. I 

Jared: mean, to get their own, I’m not sure I’d start this site nowadays, but if I had this site, I think that there’s a lot you could do with it to both expand on it and improve it. And I, you know, as we always talk about, like, I do think of some great.

Monetization things that are being left on the table. I mean, if I’m, like, I’m looking at the keywords they rank for birthday wishes for supportive person. Thank you for gracing the occasion with your presence. They rank number one, think no one searches for that. 150 searches a month. 12 years of togetherness.

They ranked number two, that’s 400 searches a month. These things have search volume and typically when people are searching these things, they’re looking for cards and gifts and these types of things to send out. Certainly some of them are, I’m not saying all of those are buyer related keywords or searches, but you think that there’d be a, a good ad play here or a good monetization play for some affiliate offers for some products to send out on a 12 year anniversary.

Or a birthday card for a loving friend or et cetera, et cetera, 

Spencer: right? Yeah, exactly. You know and there’s just, it’s just always a good idea to build an email list, right? If you got a bunch of traffic and you can get people on an email list, even if you’re just sending ’em right back to your website with a weekly newsletter or twice a week newsletter, you know, that’s better than trying to get new traffic every single day.

Yeah, so I, I agree, monetize quite a bit better. 

Jared: Who knows if the reason they lost so much traffic in that, what looked like the helpful content update based on the timing of the drop. Who knows if that was related to just being such a poor user experience between stock generate, press theme you know, no images, no internal links, overwhelming number of ads.

Like, I wonder if the site would rebound, at least to some degree in terms of traffic if people, somebody just went in and actually like, cared about the user experience a bit. 

Spencer: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that’s totally feasible. Totally plausible. All right, very good. Great sight. 

Jared: It wasn’t as weird as the URL implied though, right?

Spencer: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It’s it’s like they tried to keyword stuff. That URL real good. You were, 

Jared: You were a little nervous clicking and opening that up live on the podcast. 

Spencer: So what’s Jared doing this time? Alright, now it’s, it’s p it’s pretty pg you know, I think we’re okay. Yeah. So. Okay. Now I have one that I don’t know what triggered this memory, but this, there is a game that I used to play like 10 years ago, and I don’t know if you’ve ever played this game either.

But the website itself is, I believe I’m saying it right, fadi.net. So it’s Bennett Fadi is the person. He creates a bunch of games, a bunch of you know, web-based games. And the one that I used to always play, I shouldn’t say always, but I, I have played in the past and I can see that the year is 2010.

Oh boy. Is in, I didn’t notice that before, but it’s in the url, October, 2010. The game is coop, which is. Q w o P. Have you played this 

Jared: before, Jared? I have not. I have not. No. What? You haven’t 

Spencer: lived. You haven’t lived? 

Jared: This looks like my type of game to be clear. So I, yeah, 

Spencer: so I haven’t, you know, it’s been a long time, but all you do is you use your keyboard to control his, his calves and his thighs here.

Is this a marathon runner’s game? Is it not gonna let me play? Let’s see here. Oh. Maybe I’m not actually on the game yet. How do I get to the game? I was gonna play it, play it online for free. Here we go. So you just, you try to make this runner run,

Jared: that was a great, 

Spencer: Which that was not very good. And if you’re 

Jared: watching on the YouTube, you’re watching Spencer fail dramatically at the, oh, that’s not good. 

Spencer: Oh, now I’m gonna make it go backwards anyways, it’s. Ah, I can’t make ’em go forward. So this is just a ridiculous flash based game that got really popular back in the day.

I think if the guy just falls forward, I’ll get further there. I think I set a set of record 0.8 meters. Point eight meters. Okay. I’ll play this for a couple hours after the podcast. But if we look at a trs let me share my screen on this. We can see that back in the day. I mean, this only goes back to 2015.

It may have actually been quite a bit pop, more popular in 20 10, 20 11, but for a while, you know, it was getting 300,000 as much as almost a million visitors Wow. A month from organic traffic back in 2017. Right. And it’s slowly petered out. Right. But it’s still Almost 50,000. Mm-hmm. Organic visitors a month, and I think that the coop game is the most popular one.

But there’s several other games on the website as well. And I think I looked at this on SimilarWeb and the, the website as a whole was getting like 150,000 visitors a month. I don’t know if he’s still posting games. I guess if I look in his sidebar, looks like he, you know, in 2020 he posted one.

I’m not sure if this is a new one in 2023 maybe. 

Jared: I don’t know if you noticed, Spencer, if you scroll down, they, they have coop for iOS now. Oh, they do? Yeah. Oh yeah. For iPhone. So you could you find 

Spencer: that on your iPhone? I just might do that. You know, it’s, I really embarrassed myself here in front of, front of the audience.

Maybe next week I’ll practice and, and see if I can make it a hundred yards. I think that’s the goal is you try to make it a hundred yards. Yeah. So but yeah, it’s got display ads all over the website and you know, so probably making, I don’t know. A thousand dollars, 1500 maybe, maybe a little more, a couple thousand bucks 

Jared: a month.

He has a newsletter. I see. At the bottom it says, I’ll only ever email you if I release a new game. Okay. Yeah, I mean, you know, I, I, you know, this feels ripe for Out the Gate is, is one of these kind of Patreon plays, you know, one of these you know, hey, like I’m, I’m just a guy who’s making cool games.

I’m not trying, you know, just reading that newsletter line and seeing this, like he’s not trying to. You know, make a big run at selling his games for five bucks each, or something like that. But I, I do think people like that get supported in a Patreon type environment or a similar type environment by the community.

No, people throw a couple bucks a month at it and ask them to make a game a year and feel very happy to be a part of the process. 

Spencer: I don’t know. Yeah. And he is followed quite a bit. I just went to his Twitter following and he has over 102,000 followers. Yeah, he’s got a lot of supporters. So, and his very first, you know, thing that he calls is out is he is the designer of Coop.

I think that’s the game, the game coop. So Jared, you definitely need. Play it. If you haven’t played it. Audience needs to check it out, play it, you know, waste, waste a few hours. I’m gonna get better. I’m gonna try to make it a hundred yards. So we’ll see if I can do that. You know, by next time, currently 

Jared: the goal I have is to get more than 0.8 meters, which is where you’re currently land landing at.

Shouldn’t, 

Spencer: shouldn’t take too long. 

Jared: That’s interesting. So, I mean, with the website that’s been around that long, clearly. If you wanted to have a change of heart about that website, there’s a lot you could probably do with it if you really wanted to completely go all in on a, on a site in a, in a brand like that.

Spencer: Yeah. I’m just looking at the dr, it’s a DR 64. Yeah. I 

Jared: mean, with that age, so, and that Dr that is that, that he’s probably has social traction coming to the website given his Twitter following and. Given the cult classic that it was in your life and many others, I’m sure. So I, yeah, I don’t know. It probably has a, is a brand worth worth?

It would be, it would be a brand worth investing in. 

Spencer: Yeah. You know, there’s probably a lot of search traffic for other random flash games. It, it, it could be, I. Either a repository of flash games or review or, you know, there could be a lot of content related to all these that his website would be well positioned to rank well for.

So I’m gonna 

Jared: guess he had it was a bad day in the Bennett Fadi house. The day Adobe announced they were sunsetting Flash. 

Spencer: I’m sure it was. I’m sure it was a sad day. A sad day. Certainly it coop lives on it looks like. Fortunately he made it work. So we can all enjoy it, but, all right, so there’s your, there’s your couple of weird niche sites for everybody listening.

Hopefully you enjoyed those. A blast from the past. Certainly I’m one of those. And yeah. Overall great episode. I think we covered the news. We covered our side hustles. We covered the weird niche sites. I think we covered it all. So Jared, any final thoughts, any closing remarks that you have? 

Jared: I think I’m gonna tease this podcast.

Before we release it on Twitter and the like with with that weird niche URL about about buying text, love text messages. Yeah. See if we can increase the drama. No, it was, it was a good episode. And I mean, it is just always, everything’s changing in this, in this every week. The news alone is worth paying attention to.

I’m glad to do these because it forces me to pay a lot of attention to the news. But I mean there’s so much going on. It’s just good to be doing these and talking about what’s happening in the changing landscape right now. 

Spencer: Yep. It’s been good to chat Jared, and thank you everybody for listening and hope you all have a great weekend.

See ya.