This week’s Niche Pursuits News Podcast features Jared and guest host Morgan Overholt, who dive directly into the latest news stories, share their side hustles, and talk all about some weird niche sites.
The first thing they dig into is news that AI Overviews is only appearing for 7% of queries. Jared shares a helpful summary of how this Google feature has evolved over time, and he and Morgan share their opinions.
How big has the decline been? What was their personal experience with AI Overviews? And which industries have been the most affected? What kinds of queries saw growth and declines?
And how did AI Overview citations from Reddit fare? And what do they think is going to happen down the road? Tune in to hear the discussion.
Watch the Full Episode
Moving along, they talk about Google and Meta’s investment splurges in AI, according to interviews with people from leading investment banks who essentially expressed shock.
But how much are Google and Meta planning to spend? What do the financial analysts liken the situation to, and do Morgan and Jared agree? Do you think we’re in a bubble?
Then they move into their Side Hustle Shenanigans. Morgan talks about how she was inspired by Spencer’s Facebook page project and decided to try it out herself.
She created a brand new Facebook page for her freelancer brand and hit 7k likes and followers after about 30 days.
How did she do it? What are her plans for the group? And how will it be different from her previously successful niche sites?
She also shares her experience in the Amazon Influencer Program. She shares her journey: how many videos she has, how much she’s earned, and how she’s doing it.
The conversation then shifts to Jared and his Amazon Influencer Program side hustle. He recently released a video about his experience after completing a full year in the program.
He shares his processes, talks about crossposting, and divulges some of his “editing” secrets.
Then it’s time to reveal their weird niche sites. Morgan goes first with My Instants, a site with funny sound buttons.
How much traffic is the DR58 site getting? And where’s the traffic coming from? As Morgan says, it’s a great reminder that sometimes the simplest of ideas can be the most profitable.
When it’s Jared’s turn, he shares Bored Teachers, a DR56 site that gets 55k monthly visitors. But he reveals something really interesting about it after he consulted the Wayback Machine.
What did he find back in 2016? And what about during Covid? What does the site teach out about pivoting? Tune in to find out.
That brings us to the end of another great episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast.
We’ll catch you next week when we explore the latest happenings in the space and share our ideas and inspiration for all you entrepreneurs.
Transcription
Jared: All right. Welcome back to this week in the news on niche pursuits. Today. We have some really fun stories to dive into most notably. Is that AI overviews have dropped to an all time low in the SERPs. And we’re going to talk all about it. There’s actually a ton more data that came out of this recent study.
So it’s not just the headliner of 7%. We’ve got a couple of those stories we’ll go through. We also have the weird niche segment at the end and in between all that we’ll feature some side hustles. Spencer’s out this week. I’m joined by a guest Morgan Overholt. Morgan, welcome.
Morgan: Thank you. You ruined my joke.
I was going to introduce myself as Spencer Hawes. You could have, I think it might’ve thrown a few people off. If you’re watching on YouTube, you might already have seen that Spencer’s not here, but you know, there may be a little bit of anticipation, uh, anticipation there.
Yeah. There you go. Long time listener, by the way.
First time caller. So thank you for letting me guest host today. I appreciate it.
Jared: I’ve tried to get you on as a guest on our Wednesday segments for a while now. So I have to admit, I didn’t expect this to be your first time on the podcast, but we’re super stoked to have you here. You’re an active member inside the community, not only the niche pursuits community, but just the community at large here.
So welcome. I know you’ve been, um, a big proponent of, of freelancing and, and, uh, you have some, some websites that have done really well throughout the years. I know you have some opinions about Google. So I don’t know. Did I kind of sum you up in a nutshell there?
Morgan: What? Me have an opinion about Google?
Heavens, Jared. You know, I’m so reserved on this topic. I would never say anything about like bad about Google.
Jared: Oh, well, we’ll see what comes out. We’ll see what comes out. We are talking Google today. So let’s get into the first story here. And, uh, it is a bit of a doozy, you know, this one just, I just caught wind of it.
Um, I think earlier today or yesterday, but it, um, it’s, it’s, it’s a really interesting story. Uh, the headliner here is that Google AI overviews only show for 7 percent of queries, which is by all accounts, a brand new low. So there’s a lot in this article. So we’ll break down this first part of AI overviews to start with, but then there’s a lot of other data that I definitely want to chat through.
Um, and just to give people some context here, I even put a little timeline together. Um, This is the timeline of a overviews. Remember, we used to refer to this as SGE, the search generative experience. Uh, if you’ve been living under a rock, it’s this, this AI answers at the top of the SERPs when you type something in.
So pre April of 2024, AI overviews had risen to about 75 percent of queries. So they were present in about 75 percent of queries. And again, this is all data in this article here. By mid April of 2024, they had reduced down to 35%. Then we had Google IOs announcement in May. Of AI overviews, that’s when we kind of started switching from calling it SGE to AI overviews, and it spiked to 85 percent of queries right out of the gate.
Then you might remember, we covered it here on the podcast, we had immediate pushback, and mostly over inaccurate and the dangerous AI overviews. Remember, make glue, uh, use glue for pizza and all that kind of stuff. Um, and so they reduced it right, and that was when we had Liz Reed come out, and I believe that’s her name, uh, apologize.
You know, kind of give a public, uh, reason for it, but they reduced it down to 15 percent of queries that was in May. And throughout the month of June, it started off at 11 percent and it’s now down to 7 percent of queries. Um, Morgan thoughts on this study that just came out.
Morgan: I mean, one only has to assume this is based on metrics and popularity within Google, right?
Um, I have to say as far as how. AI has been received or AI overviews have been received by the general public. Uh, I know this is not a visual podcast, but please bear with me as I practice my shock faced Not Not very shocked by this at all guys. Um, I mean honestly AI overviews from the very beginning I think going into it a lot of especially people in the community were already have had a bit of a Uh, sour taste in their mouth over everything that had preceded it after everything had been deranked and how serbs had kind of been messed up and, and, and also seeing such a lack of diversity in the serbs.
Right? So I think that we were all kind of going into this with super low expectations, and then it rolled out. And for some of us, again, I cannot speak for the entire community, but. It was even worse than what we had expected. Now, what I am really happy to see here, Jared, is the fact that it seems like Google is doing something about that, despite perhaps all the hype and expectations that they had laid out, especially to their investors.
Jared: Well, we’re going to have a story in the second half of the news segment that addresses everything you just talked about. And I don’t mean to over tease, but seriously, that is literally what we’re talking about. It’s such an interesting juxtaposition between these two stories. Um, we’ve covered it a lot.
The CEO of Google continually comes out and says, this is our future. This is where we’re going. Google IO in May was all about AI. They just, they’re so all in on it. They’re putting billions of dollars into it. And yet they seemingly cannot get out of the way themselves. Every launch, every product, every deployment, uh, goes wrong.
Doesn’t go as well as they want. They’re pulling back. I mean, I’m being overly generic. Uh, I’m summarizing, but that is the reality. Like it just keeps SGE took so much longer to launch than, than they thought. And then now we have AI overviews that didn’t go out of the gate. Now we’re seeing it pull back more and more.
I mean, if the future. Of search is AI overviews and it’s gone from 85 percent of SERPs to 7 percent of SERPs. I mean, it’s just, you can’t argue it’s going well.
Morgan: No. Yeah. And that’s the thing, you know, I can’t help, but wonder like, what’s the next Google IO event going to look like? Are they going to come out, give their keynote speech and be like, guys, we have the most innovative thing.
We’re going to have. Blue links insert. I mean, it feels like that’s the direction that we’re going, right. We’re going backward after all this time and all this investment and all this hype, like we’re almost back to where we started, like in some ways, the new AI overviews to have been noticing since they kind of moved the citations, they almost look when present or like the old featured snippets did.
Jared: Yeah. I think we mentioned that last week. It might’ve been like, yeah, they look so much like snippets now that it’s almost hard to tell the difference.
Morgan: Yeah, I mean, and we’re already kind of seeing Google, uh, at least, you know, the Google search liaison, Danny Sullivan, you know, he mentioned, uh, several months ago that he’s been pushing for that, you know, that classic, that retro tab or whatever on Google, you know, so obviously I do think there’s some kind of a, a demand for it, whether it be from the public or internal at Google or what have you to kind of have the Google of yesteryear.
Um, I will say though, Jared, I, you know, and I am definitely, especially if y’all follow me on Twitter, you know, I’m not wanting to sing Google’s praises ever, but I will say. I am actually glad to see that they have been responsive to this versus continuing to ram it down people’s throats, you know? And so in fact, it kind of made me feel a little bit hopeful seeing it scaled back.
Like, I don’t know about you, but I am one of these people that after I saw all the like pizza glue, you know, shenanigans going on, every time I saw an AI overview pop up for something that I was Googling, I would just skip over it and look for the next result. I wasn’t even trusting them. Like, There were times I’d catch myself accidentally reading the AI overview and think, Oh no, no, this is AI.
I can’t trust that. I’m going to go on to the next result. Like stopping myself.
Jared: Yeah. I, I, I mean, I, I can’t separate how I feel about the AI overview and I definitely will look at something and then question it, you know, um, and I feel like I have to go do more research. I do wonder how I felt about Google’s results.
Before AI though. And if I was doing the same thing, I can’t really remember, but there’s definitely a lot of trepidation. You know, there’s a lot of other information in this article that we should touch on. For starters, it’s important to kind of note that that’s an average, right? The 7%. And we’ve done this before where it really is at the nuance of, um, It’s like industry specific.
So different industries are experiencing this drop more than others. So, uh, uh, you know, the, uh, the writer of this, Danny, uh, not Danny Sullivan. Uh, Danny Goodwin with Sir Gingerland talks about how the presence of AI overviews remain stable in many industries, but Three of them saw the biggest drops education queries, 26 percent to 13%.
This is interesting. Entertainment queries, AI overviews fell from 14 percent to nearly 0%. Could that be because some of these lawsuits that are coming out from big famous stars, uh, maybe not by the way, e commerce queries. Decreased from 26 percent down to 9%. Boy, doesn’t that just back up all the e commerce we talk about here.
Uh, this is also interesting, to your point, AI overviews take up less pixel space now. They’re 13 percent smaller. Um, what are some other cool things I wanted to point out here? Let’s see. Um, this is interesting, especially for those of you in the affiliate game. Uh, Search intent increases. So best saw, so best keywords saw an increase of 50 percent for AI overviews.
Um, what is how to symptoms of saw all saw increases. Whereas brand specific saw a negative 15 percent general product saw a negative 14%. And then finally, UGC losses. Uh, let me find it here. Where is it? Here we go. Hang on. Let me go get
Morgan: my party hat real quickly.
Jared: Oh my gosh. Right. If you’re looking on screen, all we’ve been seeing are the incredible growth graphs of Reddit’s presence in the SERPs.
Well, this is the exact opposite. It went from, they lost a staggering number of AI overview citations. I’m reading out loud from 85 percent down to where is it? Almost 0%. Um, and this is a direct quote from, um, from Liz Reed, who I mentioned earlier, VP, head of Google search. We’ve updated our systems to limit the use of AI.
user generated content in responses that could offer misleading advice. We added triggering restrictions for queries where AI overviews, AI overviews were not proving to be as helpful. And, and Danny, the author suggested that, you know, this is more than likely a result of, um, just, you know, the fact that there was so much misleading information that came out of, um, uh, of UGC, which is, Flatly, just any, any person on the internet can, can show up as an AI overview answer previously, because they posted, they posted their thoughts on, on, on Reddit, you know?
Morgan: Wait, are we supposed to surmise from that, that Reddit can maybe not be helpful?
Jared: I thought Reddit was always helpful. This is like the first. Sign of the love affair between Reddit and Google. Maybe, I mean, certainly not ending, but like maybe we’ve got to, maybe they had a little bit of a tiff finally for the first time, the love affair, they have had a tiff or something.
Morgan: Yeah. And I’m here for it. I gotta be honest with you. I mean, so I gotta say, so really quick on the whole entertainment thing, I’m actually less surprised about that. That being, uh, decreased more than any other category, right? Because the entertainment niche is just absolutely crazy to try to keep up with.
I mean, that thing is changing by the hour. So it could either be the lawsuits that you talked about, or perhaps even just the crawl budget, trying to constantly come up with that content and to provide a, an actual accurate response. Yeah, that almost accuracy. Problems
Jared: in many ways, to your point, like it changes by the hour.
It almost feels like news, which AI overviews has traditionally stayed out of
Morgan: horrible at. Yeah. And then seeing the lack of Reddit and core in there, thank God, honestly, y’all, this is like one of the biggest complaints I’ve personally had since the HCU. And since we’ve seen, you know, Reddit being pushed up and the results more in Quora and these UGC type formats being pushed up in the results, you know, seemingly manually.
Um, and of course we all know the, the deal that’s been made, you know, with Reddit. Um, and Google and training on their data. But to me, it was seeming to create seemingly creating a lack of a diversity problem. Like, I don’t want to take the conversation in a completely different direction, but y’all remember that form that they asked us to fill out about the March core update and provide our feedback, et cetera.
I’m actually one of the dorks that filled out that form like multiple times. And one of the examples that I specifically cited was a site, a page on my site where the same website outranked me like 13 times. Like literally, it was just 13 results of the exact same website. It was all a forum and then it was my page.
And that was the one I specifically gave an example of. And I said, Hey guys, look, this is a serious diversity problem. It goes against your own standards. And then I even cited Google documentation about diversity. And would you know, the only one of my pages that’s seen any kind of significant jump Since I sent that form in was actually that specific page and I got the exact ranking that I asked for.
So I, I do hope again, I, Oh, Jared, I hate using the word hope at Google in the same sentence. I’m going to need to go wash my mouth out with soap as my Southern mother would say. But I do hope this is a sign that they are saying, okay, maybe we have been a little too UGC, a little too Reddit heavy, perhaps there’s a time and place for these things.
And diversity does have a place still in the Google SERPs.
Jared: Well, there’s no doubt that the Reddit obsession has just gone to crazier levels than I think anyone could have predicted. And we’re all left scratching our heads a little bit going like, does the general user really want UGC content that bad?
Like, are we all missing it? Or do we all? Cause maybe we’re just too far in it to realize, but you just don’t get that sentiment. And there’s no data coming out that would suggest, unless you look at their stock price, That they love this, uh, this type of content and their stock price has no correlation to the engagement levels.
But what do we know? I mean, what do we know? But I’m with you, like, so frustrating seeing, you know, uh, some, some result showing up, not only in search, but then as, uh, in the AI overviews for results that need, We’ll call it more of an expert to weigh in on.
Morgan: I mean, look, devil’s advocate here. I’ve got friends who are the normie friends, as we call them.
Sometimes they were not in this industry who are reddit diehards. They say that they only use Google to get to read it, but I think even they would probably say that if Google ranks, nothing but Reddit, Is it not just an unnecessary middleman at that point? Like, why do we even need Google? Why don’t we just improve Reddit search and go straight to Reddit?
So I think that if Google wants to remain a search engine, instead of just a way to get Reddit traffic, I think they need to offer at least a choice. So to me, even if Reddit and UGC responses are super popular, at least offer people an option to do that. Or do something else.
Jared: Yep. There’s been talk about the, the UGC tab getting introduced.
So you could pick your journey in Google, whether it’s more of, I guess we would call it traditional experience where we’re not getting UGC responses. I mean, I don’t know where we heard that. I think we heard that a month or two ago that somebody was floating that idea around, but it’s interesting, you know, I 7 percent where Reddit or not, UGC, user generated content or not.
And it is industry specific, but in the end of the day, we’re, we’re at the lowest point of AI overviews that we’ve ever seen. And is it just can’t be a, a good sign and we’re not putting the nail in the coffin on it, but it can’t be a good sign for AI overviews. Um, Hey, let’s move on to the next story, which I don’t know, could be even more fascinating.
You tell me, uh, this one is one that you found good job, by the way. We, we, this is a collaborative effort here, uh, on any given week. But uh, Morgan jumped in and participated in the collaboration here. Um, this is titled the incineration, incineration, am I saying it right? Incineration of cash. High profile analysts question Google and Meta’s AI investment splurge.
And the article is really an interview, uh, of a number of different people and their perspectives on Google and Meta. Their investment in AI, um, the analysts were from Goldman Sachs, Barclays Investment Bank, Sequoia Capital, and they all express skepticism over the massive investments in AI by these tech giants.
Uh, let’s see Google CFO, uh, estimated 45 billion. Billion in capital expenditures for AI meta is projecting 35 to 40 billion in AI spending with more plans for next year. Apparently that’s a yearly amount that cannot be true. Uh, it’s gotta be spread out maybe. And it’s going to grow as, as they continue to spend.
I don’t know. Maybe it is a yearly amount. Um, let’s see. Let me just get a couple of notable quotes here and then we’ll, we’ll, we’ll chat about it because certainly this echoes are very unsophisticated opinion and they have a lot more data behind their analysis. But I mean, it feels like it’s an arms race for something that’s a bit speculative.
Sequoia’s David. Khan. I hope I’m saying that right. Warns of capital incineration from speculative investment frenzies. Um, Barclays Ross Sandler suggests the investment is driven by FOMO, fear of missing out. Predicts that some companies might reduce spending next year. Goldman Sachs Jim Covello questions the ability of AI to solve significant problems.
Cautions against replacing low wage jobs as expensive technology and And this is interesting, references the dot com bust as a warning against over building. Um, boy, there’s a lot there. Uh, I mean, again, Morgan, you’re the one who found this article. Like, what do you think? Is it, is it an arms race or is it a speculative, a FOMO attempt?
Morgan: I love how this article calls it FOMO. Um, and I also love this headline by the way. So shout out to whoever wrote that. Incineration of cash, because that just so visualizes what I feel like is we’re seeing happen in the industry right now. You know, I don’t want to come across Jared is like an AI hater at all, because I want to assure you that it’s not.
ai. I use it all day long, right? Like right. But where I love AI the most is in like the image generation. Some of the beta features that Photoshop has released. Oh my gosh. I just found the feature in Premier, the text-based editing thing and the AI enhancement. I accidentally broke my mic the other day. I dropped off a balcony’s ad story, but tangent broke the thing.
I thought, oh no, I can’t film any more videos. I popped in those videos. AI enhanced everything. It sounds like I have a road mic now, like. Readable things that AI can do. Okay. So I want to preface it with that, but here’s the problem that I’m seeing too much personally in the industry. I feel like chat GPT came out and that was revolutionary.
That was basically like the iPhone keynote of our time. Like that will go down in history, you know, and everyone else, instead of being like, Hey, how can we use AI in these like revolutionary ways? Like I’m saying. Seeing that some of these other people and some of these other companies doing like Adobe, you know, instead they’re like, how do we be a clone of open ai?
And, and that’s what it feels like is happening. Like, we’re putting billions and billions and billions of dollars. I mean, imagine what we’d accomplished in a year if we were given personally $40 billion to play with Darren. You know? And do you would I think I’d, I would like to think I’d have way more than just another chat.
GPT, how many more chat bots do we need? Right? I wanna see some actual, like. You know, new products being produced with AI. So it does seem a little bit like, Oh, well, you know, a little FOMO y to me.
Jared: It’s so interesting. I mean, when you really get into the science and the technology behind LLMs and, you know, how they, how they work, obviously we know like this is changing at a more rapid rate than probably any of us really are able to get our minds around, you know, There’s so many updates constantly.
They’re expanding the models, the language models so frequently. Um, and yet there’s so few real products that we have yet. Right? Like Google came and figure out how to insert AI into their existing product line, um, and Chatsy BT backed by open AI, which is backed by Microsoft. You’re right. Led the charge revolutionized the world, but we still see not very much adoption when we actually look at the global economy.
Um, It’s interesting that I haven’t heard it referenced or related to the dot com bust and many people might be too young to remember that or have been around during that or have been in, you know, I was in college when the dot com bust happened so you can do your own math on that one, but I remember it very well and it was very interesting.
You know, it was like, how did this happen? How did we get here? We have the internet. It’s the biggest thing since sliced bread. How did we actually have a bust over this? Um, it’s an interesting analogy. I don’t, I’m not saying it’s going to happen, but it is a ton of money being dumped into something that so far is amazing and how amazing it is to use, but yet hasn’t seen a lot of uptake and it hasn’t seen a lot of monetization behind it.
Morgan: Well, and more importantly, you know, again, since chat GPT came out, the funny thing is I do know people who openly adopt adopted chat GPT and the open AI tools, you know, I am definitely one of those people, but what I haven’t heard is a lot of like, Oh, you know what? I really love Google AI overviews. You know what I really love?
Those Facebook AI overviews. The Facebook AI chatbot. Instead I see a lot more people just like arguing with the chatbot and accusing it of copyright infringement. That’s what I’m saying. These tools are not popular. Again, is this more about like offering the public what they wanted or what they needed?
Or just saying, eh, what’s the point? What’s the thing that we can do that will sound really impressive to our potential investors? It’ll make some headlines, you know, but at the end of the day, it’ll be like a cheap copycat of what chat GPT did.
Jared: And to your point, like investors are loving it. Um, the article talks about it.
Venture capital investments in the AI space, scale AI secured a billion dollars in funding, which sounds so small now that we just read off these other numbers, but still a billion is a lot of capital to raise. Um, Elon Musk’s X AI raised Six billion. I didn’t know that. That’s a lot. Um, Salesforce, uh, cohere.
I’ve never heard of that company. Uh, maybe parent company. Maybe I just don’t know what it is. Uh, lots of other AI investments and we know Google stock price. I mean, I haven’t checked it and pulled up, but it’s certainly always trending these days at record highs. Um, you know, so it’s so intriguing to watch this at a corporate level, scale out.
Like we just got done talking about the practical levels of AI in our lives and that AI overviews Google’s flagship product is at an all time low in terms of where it’s being visible. And then we transition into Google stock price. Is that an all time high as they tout the future of AI? It’s, it’s such an interesting juxtaposition.
Morgan: You know, I’m not going to compare this to NFTs because I promised myself I would not, but let me just say, like, I do remember a point in time where if you included something like NFT or crypto, like John Oliver on his, uh, his show, his last week tonight show, I think I got the name of the show. Correct.
But I remember like several. Uh, maybe even a year ago now, I can’t quite remember, but he talked about how, like this whole segment on how there’s a certain value add to any company that included the word, like crypto or NFT or their name or their no name name or whatever. And I almost kind of feel like, and now it’s like, we’re never hearing about, especially NFTs.
I’m not saying AI is going to go in that direction, but I’m seeing a similar, like love affair. Like all of a sudden it’s become. This thing, like how many times a day on Twitter do you read the same tweet? Oh, if you’re not using AI, you’re being left behind. Like, I am so tired of that line. Y’all we get it.
AI is really, it’s a big deal, but like, I can’t help, but feel like we’re entering a bit of a bubble and perhaps we’re fixated on it or obsessed with it just because it sounds cool. Or it sounds like it’s going to be the next big thing, or it sounds like it’s going to be super investable. But like, what are we really getting out of some of these products?
Some of these products are really cool. I’m wrong, but some of these products are just. Just again, they’re just copycats. And not that, you know, it’s for being real
Jared: to your point. I have a friend who sits on a lot of earnings calls and he says so many of them are just so focused on, you know, Hey, what’s the newest AI product that we are launching, making sure that we’re launching the right AI product or that, you know, we’re in, uh, putting it and infusing it into our current product line and stuff.
So yeah, it, um, it, let me put it this way, maybe as we kind of draw to a close here on this, like this article doesn’t feel too off base. It doesn’t feel. Like it’s that far out in left field. It doesn’t feel like it’s reaching. It doesn’t feel like, and it’s not saying this is a bubble. It’s saying it could be, it’s not saying that’s a bad investment.
It’s just saying there’s a lot of it going into it, but I read it. And I don’t feel like it’s that off. You know, I don’t feel like it’s reaching that much. So, you know, that’s something to it.
Morgan: And again, like, I mean, I would even kind of challenge people to think about this. At least this is the way that I think about it.
Again, to reference like that original iPhone keynote, right. When they came out and said, Oh, wow, we’re going to put an iPod. Yeah. In a phone, an iPod, in a phone, you know, and that was revolutionary. But let’s think about the way our phones look today. It’s more or less, I mean, there’s been a lot of advancements, but more or less, it’s kind of the same.
We’ve not had like a doubling or a tripling of that. There’s going to be a threshold in tech for any new toy. Right. And I do, I am a little bit concerned that we are starting to approach that threshold of growth. With AI to where the really giant leaps forward are going to start appearing to be a bit fewer and far between.
But then again, I’d love to be proved wrong. So time will tell.
Jared: Well, and it’s a good point as we close on it. Like the internet didn’t go away when the dot com bust happened, you know, and no one I don’t think here is arguing that AI is not going to be where everything goes. Uh, just the same as I don’t think when the dot com bust happened, that wasn’t because the internet wasn’t here to stay.
You know, it’s still here. It’s just the economics around it. It’s the conversation around it. It’s the monetization of it. It’s the investment of it. It’s how fast it’s getting deployed. It’s where it’s getting deployed. I think that’s maybe a lot of what these stories are really addressing. Today, so, uh, a couple more that were on the list, but I think we are at a point where we need to move into our side hustle shenanigans.
Now, are you familiar? You’re familiar with this part of the show. You’ve got to bring a side hustle to talk about, uh, knowing you, I’m sure you have more than one you can talk about. Um, let’s see, do you want to go first or do you want me to go first? I’m going to give you the option.
Morgan: I got to tell you, I got so many side hustles as a point.
I barely even know what my main hustle is, but I feel like I should probably just go first because you’re going to upstage me. So we’ll start with a nice low bar and then we’ll go into your side hustles.
Jared: Just depends on what we’re talking about. But, but that’s, that’s ladies first. I will let you go first.
Um, Take us through one or multiple, you know, we don’t really have too many rules around this, uh, side hustles that you want to talk about and share with everyone.
Morgan: All right. Well, basically my main side hustle is riding, uh, Spencer’s coattails. So of course I’m in the niche pursuits, you know, premium group, and I’ve, I’ve been getting all sorts of, you know, Awesome insights from that group and kind of been inspired by a lot of the goings on, uh, both some of the, uh, formal contests and competitions, as well as some of the informal contests and competitions.
And one of the things that I was most impressed with recently was Spencer saying, Hey, look, I’m going to start building a Facebook page from scratch because I am currently in the process as a site owner who was hit by HCU on multiple sites, including my, my largest and my second largest of have being at this crossroads where I need to choose, am I going to like, Sit here and hope for salvation.
Where am I going to make some big changes in my company? Um, and so I decided the latter, I’m going to make some really big changes. So I took Spencer’s Facebook challenge on myself and I started just a few days after him and I decided to make a brand new Facebook page from scratch for my freelancer brand.
Um, just to give you guys a little bit of background. I was a freelance, well, and a freelance graphic designer went full time in 2017. That was my original entrepreneurial venture and what kind of launched me into everything else because I was building like sites for clients and I eventually started building them for myself, et cetera, et cetera.
But of course that site was HCU slammed where I was giving out freelance tips. So I decided, all right, let’s start from scratch. Oh, so unhelpful. I mean, because why would you ever want to learn from a six figure freelancer When you could learn from people complaining on Reddit. Oh, did I say that? I’m sorry that I apologize.
But anyway, so I decided to take that challenge on and I started that thing from scratch and I got to tell you, I am really impressed. I hit the over 7k mark in only 30 days on a brand new Facebook page. And Jerry, that was after like me. Messing up for two weeks and really not getting any traction. So like 75 percent of that growth happened in the last two weeks.
So I was totally thrilled. And I have got to say the thing that really worked for me was like just running like little mini ads, AB testing, and making sure that my content fit the Facebook platform, if that makes sense.
Jared: So when you say seven K unpack that a bit, like, what does that look like? 30 days in, what does that, what is that?
Morgan: So I knew that I would not be able to make any money off of this within the first 30 days, right? Because a, I’m still building my site behind the scenes and I made the conscious decision to demonetize my old site after the HCU hit, because I thought, all right, we’ll see if it recovers. Didn’t spoiler alert.
But, um, so I really didn’t have like a true money making, uh, thing going. But while I’m building my website behind the scenes, I thought, okay, let’s just see how big I can build this audience. Because that’s something that we did unknowingly when I launched my travel brand several years ago, we started with the audience, built up a really strong community.
Then we started posting content later on. They were super, super engaged. And that was kind of my thought going into it. And so one of the things that I did was I started out trying to like, You know, talk about all this like different historical stuff in freelancing. And then I was like trying to be funny and I clearly wasn’t very funny.
So that all flopped. And then I asked chat GPT to be funny and that was even worse. And so I finally, though, started getting some traction, just posting like more inspirational stuff. Um, you know, talking about some of the hardships, like even inspirational quotes and about freelancing. And that’s finally some of the stuff that kind of started to hit.
And again, that AB testing was totally key. Like I wouldn’t put more than five books behind any single page like ad to start. I would see how that went. If I can get it below a certain threshold, then I put some actual power behind it. And I got to say it was, it was shockingly easy in this day and age.
And I barely spent a thousand bucks. That might seem like a lot to some people, but if, if history repeats itself, like it did with my travel blog, I expect that to pay dividends on down the line, because the truth is all you really got to do to get a Facebook page started, have a few thousand likes, it starts to grow organically after that, if you’re doing it right.
Jared: So you basically 30 days in, you got 7, 000 followers. Or page likes or, you know, whatever we want to call it nowadays. And it’s testing a lot of different content, a thousand dollars. I mean, so you’re just buy back the napkin mess somehow landed at somewhere between 7 cents or lower in terms of getting that, that page to where it’s at.
What, what are you going to, I mean, where are you going to, where are you going to go with it?
Morgan: Well, I mean, eventually I actually want to, um, in my new branded thing, instead of just like talking at people all the time about freelance, I plan on being e commerce and community forward and e commerce and community first.
In fact, I’m not even going to be doing, I’m going to do something crazy with this new brand. It’s going to be freelancer files. It’s a free plug for me, freelancerfiles. com. And of course it’s also the Facebook group end page, but I’m going to start with inviting other people to share their stories, inviting other people to offer their advice and instead of just offering a bunch of courses and a whole bunch of digital downloads, I’m not saying I’ll never do those things, but I actually want to have a foothold in the physical product.
Um, you know, that’s one of the things I, I did all day long as a freelance graphic designer for my clients. I helped them build workbooks and, you know, actual like, um, you know, order print to order books and that kind of stuff on Amazon, like from the KDP program. And so I thought, well, why am I not doing this stuff, right?
Like I could, I could do all this same stuff too. Um, and it would be a little bit different than, uh, you know, everybody else, uh, that’s kind of, you know, in my niche or adjacent. So that’s sort of the plan, you know, on down the line. I’m not saying I won’t do some of my, uh. You know, the, the popular niche site tactics, but I’ll say the new plan, new business plan and the new website looks nothing like a niche, niche, niche site.
So that’s the plan.
Jared: Touched on all the audiences here. You touched on niche, niche. We’ve got to make sure we’re agnostic about how we say it. I know quite well here. Well, congratulations. That is a fantastic platform or base, you know, to get off the ground with.
Morgan: Yeah, I’m super excited. And then this will be a great segue into your side hustles, but I actually watched your video, by the way, at lunch today, because I know that you just released a brand new YouTube video about your, uh, thing, but I don’t want to tease it too, too much.
Cause I Uh, inspired by Jared Bauman, started on Amazon Influencer back in April. Now, like a crazy person, I started on Amazon Influencer the month I was moving and renovating a house and physically packing things up as I was reviewing them, so it was a little hectic and I definitely didn’t come out of the gate with as many videos as you did, but.
Um, right now, right now I’ve only got 167 videos up and I just passed the 1k mark, which I’m honestly shocked by. I did not expect to hit that number with so few videos because I’ve been so almost, both inspired, but also intimidated. You know, Jared, I mean, I got questions for you when you get to your side hustle because I don’t know how you were doing so well.
So many videos, but I thought I am never going to be able to keep up with that. This is not going to go very well. So to see that one K for just 167, like I am beside myself.
Jared: And you did it in what, if, if you said you started April, but really probably didn’t off the ground for a little while, it’s now July.
I mean, that’s a couple of months.
Morgan: Yeah. And I’ve really not done anything with it in the past couple of months. Like seriously, the first month I did about a hundred and I’m lucky to get in maybe a dozen or so just every once in a while when I’m thinking about it. So yeah, I’m totally tickled and it’s been like 500 bucks in the past 30 days.
And we’re not even to prime days yet.
Jared: Congratulations. I was going to say, we got prime day coming. That’s um, that’s something that, uh, a lot of people talk about historically. Obviously we know. You know, uh, the, the holiday sales are, are amazing, but even that little bump in the summer is also very motivating.
Uh, I mean, you got on right around the same time I got on last year. I think I was end of May, which we’ll talk about here in a second. So that puts you at like almost, you know, I can almost compare my journey to yours on a month over month basis, just different years, right?
Morgan: I don’t think we can compare our journeys, Jared, because you are killing it.
Jared: We’ll get into that one day, but I don’t know. It just depends on what perspective you want to have. I had more videos live, but I also had to put in all that work to get them live. You making a cool thousand dollars on, like you said, a hundred, 167. Is that right? 167 videos. That’s. It’s amazing. I mean, how are you finding, you talked about the time.
So, you know, just really quickly, like unpack that time commitment. Is it really hard? Are you getting better at it? Has it been something where you progressively made it easier for yourself over time?
Morgan: You know, one of the things that you talked about actually, um, On this very topic was how video editing experience would really kind of come into play in this and be helpful.
Not necessary people, but helpful. Um, and I had zero. So the, the first video I uploaded it to basically took me all day. I mean, it was like, I was struggled us and people, but, uh, yeah, after like the first few and after I started kind of getting my flow, especially after last week, when I learned about text based editing, I mean.
Holy cow, guys. Like, you can literally just film a whole video in Premiere. You can have all the awkward pauses and ands and ums you want to. And by the way, if you are using text editing, uh, for this video, I apologize because it probably just threw it off with the ands and the ums, but, and you can tell Premiere, Hey, just, Zap all that out.
So now I’m editing my videos in a flash. I’ve gone from like 10 hours in the first video to like five minutes. So I’m now I’m kind of starting to crank stuff out a little bit. But yeah, in the beginning it was a super super like so slow go. I’m just glad I didn’t let that stop me because there were times I thought I’m not meant for this.
But what I am meant for is talking and talking about things I like to buy and And making money off of my terrible Amazon habit, like side effect, the program guys, my husband complains less every time an Amazon package shows up at the house now. So that’s a silver lining.
Jared: It’s true. It’s very true for the
Morgan: business.
Jared: Ah, you’ve got the right perspective. I’ll tell you that much. Well. Yeah, cats out of the bag. My update is that I finally did released a video. It’s about a month late, but I had some vacations in there and all that. But my video is on one full year on the Amazon influencer program. So you’re in a couple of months.
I’ve got a year under my belt now. And, um, man, what a, what a side hustle. Like I did release a video. If you want to see it, it’s on the weekend growth, YouTube channel. And, uh, I think it’s like 20 minutes long, 15, 20 minutes long. Um, I, I try to go quickly cause I think a lot of people have heard at this point.
Try to go quickly through the month by month, but I did want to include that, you know, so people could kind of get a sense for what’s possible in terms of especially the first couple of months. Like, that’s one of the one of the coolest things about this program is, and I’d be curious to hear if it happened to you, but like, I think I was making.
I mean, granted like under a dollar, but I think I made like under a dollar three days in, you know, and it’s not much money, especially if you’ve been in the online world for a while, but there’s just something about that dopamine hit that gives you such a feedback loop so quickly that really does inspire you to be like, well, that first video took me in your case like a day, but.
It’s already making me some amount of money. I can do this. I can get better at this. I can get faster at this. I can, and it’s very, it’s very different than this online world. Many of us bloggers are used to where it’s like six months before you get a little feedback loop at the earliest. But, um,
Morgan: I remember the first 6 I made and it literally was 6.
It’s funny you say that, but I remember the first 6 I ever made on my blog. It took me like two months to get there and I was jumping up and down in my living room. That’s fast. Yeah. On Amazon Influence. Yeah. I know it was fast on Amazon Influencer. It was like week and a half. I’m like, oh, .
Jared: Mm-Hmm. . It’s amazing.
Yeah. Well, it’s funny, uh, the second half of my video is all about kind of the big mistakes that I see people making. Some of them, by the way, are mistakes I made. So it’s not like just, but generally speaking, I, I end up seeing a lot of people, uh, hit me up with influencer questions. I get a lot of emails or dms about it.
Um, see the occasional video. And then obviously I kind of have been able to reflect on the year. And, you know, one of the things I think to your point, just to encourage you, like one of the biggest mistakes is spending too much time on it. And it really is that UGC model of trying to find that blend between delivering something that’s really valuable for people, but not spending too much time on it because it really is a numbers game to some degree.
Um, you know, like your thousand dollars is probably more than Mostly related to the fact that you took 167 swings, i. e videos. And I’m guessing it’s like the 80, 20 rule. Like probably you’re making most of your money off of a handful of videos, but you need, you don’t know which ones are going to hit. So you got to have some volume in order to start making that money.
Morgan: And I am curious, Jared, my, my question is probably a little bit twofold because I’ve been thinking about that whole time commitment lately. I’ve noticed that half of my time is spent re uploading to YouTube. Cause I’m also like then adding graphics, like link in the description and doing all this stuff and making a cool thumbnail for YouTube.
So I’m spending half my time there and YouTube is. If it’s paying, I have like, I don’t know, I actually have like 70 something subscribers, which is kind of weird, uh, for an Amazon influencer channel, but it’s, it’s not like paying like the actual Amazon influencer site is. So my question for you is, I guess, like when, have you thought about cross postings?
I know it’s something that Spencer did. Um, and two, how the dang hell are you going so fast?
Jared: I have thought about it. I, Spencer kind of didn’t call me out, but a couple of weeks or months ago, we were talking about it. I was like, maybe I should do it. And, you know, we went back and forth on that. No, I’m not doing it.
And it’s because. I don’t know anyone who is making anywhere near the amount of money from going to YouTube with it in comparison amount of time it takes them to do that. And that’s one of the things I love about the Amazon influencer program is the ROI, the return on your investment, your investment is time.
You know, I’m not doing the model where I buy stuff. I just review stuff that we buy when we buy plenty of it. So it works out just fine. So the investment is my time. The return is what Amazon influencer pays me. And if I go to YouTube, now the investment is my time to take that same video and put it on YouTube, which seems like a no brainer.
But you just don’t convert as well because the difference between putting on YouTube is that you have to get the traffic. The difference between YouTube and Amazon Influencer is that Amazon’s already bringing the traffic. So I don’t do YouTube and I’m leaving money on the table. But from a ROI standpoint, I still can’t justify the time it would take to, like you say, get it over to YouTube.
Morgan: I’m actually thinking about not even cutting it out completely, but maybe just reserving it only for like the most expensive items or perhaps even the items with the most potential keywords, you know, cause I’d tell you at one place, SEO is still alive and well, it’s over on YouTube. So I might even just kind of change that strategy because I am wasting a lot of time, but how are you filming and editing so fast?
Are you actually filming on your phone? Are you bringing these things into a professional editing program? Are you doing the whole process on your phone? What’s your secret? I don’t,
Jared: I don’t edit anymore.
Morgan: Okay. So that’s for
Jared: starters. Don’t edit. Uh, it, um, I, I’ve probably edited maybe five videos in the last hundred.
So, when I say I don’t edit, I edit far less than 10 percent of my videos only if I have to do something that requires it. And if Honestly, if I do something that would require editing, I’ll start the video over instead of edit it. I’ll just read the video. I just won’t even. So literally like I don’t edit, that’s one of the first things like just the amount of time to take it over, boot it up, do the export, all that.
Nope. Not worth my time. Not worth the time. And again, I don’t, I don’t, I have edited videos. The first couple hundred videos, I definitely edited maybe 25 percent of them and saw no correlation to edited videos doing better. So huge time saver. Most of my videos are one, two, and three minutes long. So you’re probably uploading
Morgan: directly from the app and everything then, right?
Jared: I’m not. I’m bringing them over to my computer. I’m bringing them over my computer. So I’ll do 10 or 15 videos in a session and then I’ll bring them all over my computer and upload with web app because I just find I can do it faster when I’m in the web app than one at a time on my phone.
Morgan: Okay. Gotcha.
Yeah. That does seem like it’d be difficult on the phone, which is why I’ve not even bothered trying. So, okay, that’s good to know. All right. Good tips, man. I’m such a perfectionist, Jared. How am I supposed to like not edit things? But there’s an argument that your
Jared: videos might perform better or might stay longer or all these things, right?
Like, it’s so hard to say it’s such a bit of the wild, wild West with it, you know, and, um, but it’s wonderful, you know, and it’s really cool when, uh, people You get a video and it does well in a carousel and you see it helping people and you’re proud of it. And you feel like, you know, um, I really was able to kind of help someone make a decision one way or the other.
I think that’s, uh, it is kind of fun.
Morgan: Yeah. I gotta say it’s a thrill ride every single morning. First thing I do, I look at Amazon influencer.
Jared: I know.
Morgan: Yeah, I, I used to check like, you know, my raptive earnings and my blog, you know, or I’m still making way more money than Amazon influencer. But for some bizarre reason, I’m just like, I don’t know.
I’m obsessed with it.
Jared: Is there something unique about it? Right. There is something unique about it. Well, I’m glad you’re off the ground with that. And you’re off the ground on the Facebook page. I mean, you’ve got such a platform there for the Facebook side of things and for such a big business opportunity for you on the freelancing side.
So congratulations. And, um, you know, uh, if you want to see how much I made in the first year on Amazon influencers, You can go check out that video. Let’s just say that it’s, um, it’s, uh, like a mid five figure number. It’s a, it’s a pretty healthy number from a really side, side, side hustle. Shockingly. So, uh, a lot of that because of, um, uh, because of, of things like black Friday, but a lot of it just because of the earnings that kind of continue to come in from videos I made even a year ago, you know?
So. You’re talking about mid five figures somewhere around that, uh, 30, 40, 50 K in a year. So it’s really inspiring. And, um, uh, that’s one year. And then looking back on June, June, I’ve had a few people ask me, June, June did dip some from previous highs, uh, in May and April, but still was well over 3, 000 for the month.
And again, I don’t think I uploaded one video in June, if I remember correctly, cause I was on vacation a lot. I was whining to Spencer last week. It’s hard to put time towards your side hustles when you’re on vacation a lot during the month for, for summer break and stuff. So, um, you know, it does have that passive, uh, aspect going for it.
So, yeah, cool. Well, congratulations. It’s just fun too. Well, we are into the final segment. Some people’s favorite segment. What is your favorite segment? Is it the news where you kind of we’re serious and we talk reality? Uh, or is it side hustles where you know? We kind of it sounds like you have a side hustle problem like spencer and I do or is it the weird niches where?
We just literally find the weirdest things available on the internet.
Morgan: Oh now niche pursuits is like a child I’m, not gonna pick a favorite segment I love the entire podcast,
Jared: Jared. You could or you don’t have to. You love them all. That’s fair enough. We don’t need to pick sides here. I just didn’t know if the weird niche segment was your favorite.
I know it’s a lot of people’s favorites. Let’s continue with a theme. I’m going to let you go first, if that’s okay. And I’ll go ahead and pull your weird niche up here. But you go ahead and walk us through your weird niche site that you found.
Morgan: Okay. So first of all, I’m mad at you because two weeks ago you had the, I don’t know if we call it famous or infamous checkbox website.
Yes. And unfortunately, uh, we will never ever top that. So at first I was like, Oh yeah, I’m going to find something even crazier. And then I realized that was not possible. So. Instead, I started kind of asking around, uh, just, you know, shots in the dark, asking people, normies again, if you’d call them people, not even in the industry.
Hey, is there some kind of really weird website that you’ve ever seen that you like to use or whatever that I’m doing this podcast thing? They’re like, most people looked at me like I had two heads. Um, but I randomly shot off a text message in my WhatsApp group, my board game, geeky friends. And this is such a funny story because I don’t even know everybody.
Exactly. I don’t even know these people really well. But one go replied and she said, Oh, I work in ad monetization. Here’s a website that I think is perfect for this. And this is what she sent me. All right. So this is called my instance. And by the way, I also made a friend look at niche pursuits, bringing people together.
I had no idea that girls in this industry, but anyway, this is called my instance. Instance. com. And while I know this does not look very impressive to y’all, I’m going to kind of describe it real quick. Basically, this is like an in browser soundboard, if you will. It’s got just hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of different little sound bites.
And apparently, the way that people use this site is they send their friends like links and text messages or links and whatsapps and almost kind of make a audio meme out of these when they’re texting people or privately messaging people. And it’s got like everything from just like dings and bells to, as you were playing a few minutes ago, the whole hock to a thing that, Viral somehow.
It also has a thing where it encourages people to upload their own sounds. Now I will, I will say I, uh, being, putting my copyright hat on here. I’m no lawyer, but I did dig around cause I was a little concerned about how they’re, you know, handling all the copyright infringement. It does seem as though their policy is a little bit as forgiveness instead of permission.
It basically says, Hey, look, don’t, don’t submit copyrighted stuff. And if you find a copyrighted thing on a website, let us know. We’ll take it down. The more or less it kind of seems to be their own. Their thing. But Jared, have you actually looked at the stats on this website? There’s a reason I did not put the stats on this website in our show meeting notes.
Because I wanted you just to take a guess.
Jared: I’m not even logged into Ahrefs. I need to do that while we’re talking here. So let me give me a second to log in, but you will have to tell me a little bit more. So yeah, this is always, you know, that sort of thing, right? Like, is it even possible for a random site like this to get a ton of traffic?
Because It just feels like who’s searching for this kind of stuff. And yet I’ve been doing this segment long enough to know that it’s either doing insanely well or getting trickles of traffic. It’s one of the two.
Morgan: If you were just to throw out a crazy number, what number would you give me?
Jared: I’d say a hundred thousand a month.
I’m going to go hot. A hundred
Morgan: thousand a month. That is cute. It’s 2. 5 million.
Jared: And this is all from organic traffic.
Morgan: Get it starts traffic.
Jared: And you gotta imagine it’s doing well on social as well. Right?
Morgan: It’s gotta be, I’m dying. I’m dead. I mean, that was why I was so surprised when my friend, my new friend sent me this link because I thought, Oh, I pulled it up first thought, ah, this is going to be like some small thing, whatever.
I’m not even sure if I’m going to pick this website. I put this into SEMrush. And my jaw hit the desk. I mean, it’s got a DA of like 59, according to SEMrush, uh, organic search traffic, it says here 2. 5 million on organic search traffic worldwide. I mean, these are absolutely crazy stats and this is monetized by the way, by Playwire, I know this because it’s the company my friend works for apparently.
So, yeah, so they gotta be killing it. I mean. Amazing. Like this, I like this example just because this is a good reminder. Like it’s no checkbox, right? But it’s a good reminder that sometimes the simple simplest ideas can be so profitable.
Jared: We feature all these really simple sites on here, right? Like in many cases, one page, I mean, this looks like almost a one page site.
Again, didn’t boot it up and we’ll try to get it up here as I go. But, um, it like so many simple sites. This is another one of those simple sites. I mean, would it be fair to say this is like. All user generated. Like everyone’s just uploading stuff that they find. They don’t have to do anything. Right.
Morgan: I mean, it looks like it’s mostly being, yeah, just submitted.
So it’s pretty incredible. And I mean, in the cat and the amount of audio files they have, I mean, it’s gotta be like in the multiple thousands.
Jared: So, okay. I finally got logged in here. Let’s let it load here a bit. Uh, you got your, you don’t have your usual host here today. I failed on that host duty. Let me go ahead and pull it over here.
Share this tab instead. There we go. Can you see, Oh my goodness. So age refs has it as a DR 58 and they have it at 2. 2 million organic. Absolutely unbelievable. Um, yeah. And you look at like what it’s ranking for. I mean, look at that sound buttons. Is there ranking number two for and look at that that’s a search volume of six hundred twenty nine Thousand per month that is one of the highest search volumes.
I think i’ve ever seen in my life I’m working too hard darren. I’m working too hard Let’s see here. Okay Well, I tell you, it’s uh, it’s a very good niche site. I mean, you, you didn’t happen to find out from your friend how much it’s earning per month. Any guesses if Yeah, I think,
Morgan: you know, oh gosh. If I were to guess, how would I even guess that?
I don’t know. I mean, she kind of insinuated it was one of their, uh, better clients, so,
Jared: well, two and a half million. Even if it’s like only 10, $10 RPMs. I mean, you’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, right?
Morgan: You would think,
Jared: wow, that’s amazing. That’s a good one. I didn’t get to play a lot of the sounds.
I feel like I. Would have to, uh, uh, I don’t know if you, if you notice we had something come up on screen the other, the other week that we had the sensor out. So yeah, it makes me a little gunshot, but what, what buttons I got to press around here?
Morgan: Use your imagination people.
Jared: Yeah. Yeah. There’s someone here.
I’m like, I’m not going to press that one.
Morgan: Yeah.
Jared: Yeah.
Morgan: Yeah.
Jared: Um, that’s a good find guy. That’s a good find. Um, that is up there with weird niches and again, uh, surprisingly successful niche, we, we always have these like calculator websites that come on and you’re like, It just does something so random and then you look and it’s absolutely destroying it in terms of traffic.
It’s unbelievable. Well, I don’t think mine’s as cool. I’m going to be honest with you. Um, I’m having a hard time replicating that success from a couple of weeks ago where, uh, you know, it was really one of the weirdest stitches ever. I think I did call it the weirdest niche we’ve ever had, but. Um, let’s see here.
So I hope I’m sharing the right screen. Uh, ’cause I have a couple here. Yeah. So my weird niche is, uh, so it’s board teachers.com and, uh, it’s such a funny premise. I feel like, uh, now it’s not one of those weird niches that like no one, um, has seen before. I think it is fairly popular. Uh, as a matter of fact, if we look at the metrics behind it, it’s a DR 56, 67, 000 keywords, 55, 000 monthly organic traffic.
So nothing like yours. Um, but, um, it’s been around since 2016 and, uh, it’s got about 1200 pages going for it. And the, um, so it’s a pretty big site. Now here’s where this gets interesting is I went back because. I was just super curious about it over time, and I went back to the Wayback Machine or archive.
org, and I pulled up what the site looked like in 2016, right?
Morgan: This is like extreme makeover website edition. I know this is not a visual podcast, but y’all, This is, uh, quite the, this is, this is quite the change. Yeah.
Jared: This in 2016 is what we’d all consider your standard like drop shipping site, right? Where you just go and you like come up with 25 t shirts and cutesy glasses and stuff.
And you put them up there and you can, it’s like an e commerce site, right? Um, that’s basically what it is. And they do have a blog up top and videos and humor, but Clearly the goal of this site was e commerce when it first started. Um, so that’s cool, right? Then I went, I thought, I wonder what this site looked like when COVID hit.
Because when COVID hit my wife’s in the education industry and a lot changed in education during then, right? And sure enough, here we are on April 19th, 2020. And I mean, this is a news theme. This site turned into what would better be called like a news site, right? Um, uh, certainly humor based in many ways, in many ways, not the worst part of the quarantine is not knowing if my students are okay.
It’s like op ed piece next is humor, the life of a remote teacher as told by funny dog gifts. And it’s just a very, you know, news focused site. And so it having that perspective is so interesting when you come to now what this website looks like, because now, uh, front and center there, they have a comedy tour.
And you can buy tickets for their comedy tour. So apparently they’re like going out on comedy. It looks like they feature a ton of people. Are these just funny teachers? I didn’t really look into it. They have a whole store where they’re selling stuff. It seems like when you scroll down, they’re a hybrid of e comm.
They’re a hybrid of news and they’re a hybrid of like a content site. Now. I love
Morgan: this
Jared: one.
Morgan: This is like so inspiring. I wonder, I mean, I guess they had to have just. Probably started posting some sort of humorous content and leaned into what was working. This transformation is unreal.
Jared: It’s really interesting and it’s kind of one of those things where like, you know, I guess I would say don’t be, don’t be afraid to pivot.
Like they’ve pivoted three or four times already complete pivots.
Morgan: Yeah. Not even recognizable. I mean, this is honestly, that’s, this is inspiring in a whole different way. Right? Like the, the last one was inspiring in a way that almost depresses me. Like again, I’ve been trying too hard. This inspires me in a way of, Hey, look, you can always reinvent yourself, whether what you are doing.
Jared: I have a podcast. I mean, in terms of monetization, it looks like they make money off this comedy tour. I mean, uh, that’s. You have to buy tickets. Um, I wouldn’t call the ads obtrusive. Yeah, I should. I should pull it up. Maybe we should stop. Tell me.
Morgan: Look at, look at all these different places. I mean, they are really touring.
Jared: Are they really? Let me pull it up. Look at this. Um, New York,
Morgan: Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Connecticut. I mean, all over the place.
Jared: So are these teachers? Are they comedians? Are they real comedians? They said, are comedians.
Morgan: What?
Jared: Oh yeah, look at that. They get, they kick off in Montana here in, uh, in, well, two weeks, 14 days from now.
Morgan: I have so many questions. Is this also the kind of like, I mean, I would, I could only assume it’s got to be, Is it, well, is it G rated you think? Is it designed to where the students could be like, Hey mom, dad, let’s go like see my teacher on, on a comedy tour. Or is it more for like, you know, the parents?
Jared: Uh, Kai, it would be hard to say.
I mean, show start at seven 30. That’s kind of early for a comedy show. Maybe it is family friendly. Um, trying to see, they’re not really coming near any of our towns. I don’t see your town on there. I don’t see my town on there They’re kind of sticking to the the midwest and the northeast it looks like but there’s a lot of shows folks If you’re not watching online, I probably scrolled through I don’t know what 50 shows here.
Morgan: Oh, yeah, and the tickets. Oh very healthy Jared, maybe you and spencer need to go on tour. Okay, like I got a new idea for niche pursuits All right niche pursuits the tour because these tickets start at 35 bucks Which might not sound like a lot but to get for a bunch of teachers to go on it. I mean no offense I’m, I bet they’re hilarious.
I’m sure they are but like You And they go up to, it looks like 55 bucks a piece. And you never go to a show by yourself. So, I mean, they’re probably getting a minimum of what? 60, 70, a hundred dollars for every sale, essentially. This is
Jared: huge. The niche pursuits, a comedy tour. We could just, you know, maybe a night, a night of roasting Google hosted by Spencer and Jared and guests.
I’d
Morgan: show up.
Jared: I’m there. The audience participation. Welcome. Welcome. I mean, who knows? I mean, they had 50 shows and. 55, 75 bucks a pop. I mean, I don’t know, boy, this is hilarious. Uh, if you do know more about this brand, if maybe you’re a teacher and you happen to know more about it, and we’re missing some of these things like comment in, uh, on the YouTube, if, if you want, but the weird niche keeps getting weirder.
I’ll tell you that much.
Morgan: Yeah, I’m watching their videos. It does look like the actual comedy tour is definitely more adult based just from kind of looking
Jared: at
Morgan: it. Yeah. It’s what it looks like. I shouldn’t take my eight year old is what you’re
Jared: trying to say.
Morgan: Well, I don’t have the audio of, I’m seeing a lot of adults in the audience and not a lot of kids.
So I, I’m kind of making some assumptions here, but this is just wildly impressive. I mean, the only problem with this model is, you know, exactly what the problem with this model is. These guys are going to make so much more money. They’re not going to be teachers anymore. It kind of phases itself out.
Jared: Yeah, yeah If you are one of the comedy, uh one of the comedians that was a teacher and now does comedy as a result of this that’d be a great interview on the niche proceeds podcast, but Yes man, talk about pivoting, uh, and and you know brings us to a good close here like Uh, the weird niche segment’s always fun because I think it gives a lot of people ideas, but boy, if that site can go from where it was, which was selling funny, whimsical, uh, teacher coffee mugs, to now putting on a 50 show tour across the United States, turning teachers into comedians.
Man, what, what could your site turn into? So how cool is that?
Morgan: Or
Jared: you could just have odd sound clips and have three and a half million visitors per month or whatever it was.
Morgan: From your basement. If you want to do slightly one, one slightly more complicated than the other.
Jared: Yeah. Fair enough. Fair play. Yeah.
What do you want to do with your life? It just all depends. So, Hey, um, Morgan, this was great. That hour flew by. What’d you think? First time on the pod.
Morgan: Oh my gosh. I’m just like so excited, Jared. You know, it’s funny. You once told me that I, I hold this, I take this podcast more seriously than even you and Spencer, but this is like a lifelong dream.
I listen to niche pursuits. I niche, I listen to niche pursuits religiously every single week. So it is an absolute honor. And I thank you so much for giving me the chance to co host. Um, and I’m sure y’all are very excited for Spencer to get back, but I would totally come on again if one of y’all are not available.
Jared: Oh, that’s great. We did a great job, but a lot of value and a lot of fun. And some fun perspectives, you know, we have to get the occasional Google rant in there. Where can people follow along with you? Where are you living these days in terms of your online world? And people can interact and connect with you.
Obviously you’re in the niche pursuits community. We see a lot there, but outside of that, where can people connect?
Morgan: I’m most active right now on Twitter. It’s Morgan O media though, on everything, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you name it. It’s Morgan O media. And of course, I’m rebranding right now and do freelancer files.
So you can also follow me in all the socials there.
Jared: Awesome. Well, Hey guys. Thanks again for another great week on the news. Hope you enjoyed it. Would love to get your thoughts on some of the, of course, we’ll see you back here next week for another episode of niche pursuits news.
