Welcome back to another episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast!
This week Spencer and Jared cover all the latest happenings in the SEO and content creation space and share their opinions and insight. Then they share some very interesting and inspiring side hustles they’re working on, and they wrap things up with some weird niche sites.
They jump into things with the news that Google’s March Update is finally complete!
Watch the Full Episode
It finished rolling out on April 19th, and Spencer and Jared discuss the update in general, how long it took, and why its conclusion might not have been announced by Google until later.
They talk about Google’s original ambitions with regard to the update and the feedback form they created as well as the site reputation abuse update that’s going to get underway.
They also discuss why nobody has recovered from the Helpful Content Update, whether Google even knows how someone might recover, and what this all means.
They move on to discuss the winners and losers from the March 2023 Core and Spam Updates, looking at different types of traffic losses and naming some surprising sites on the list as well as looking at some of the winners.
Of course, Amazon, Reddit, and YouTube come up, as do dictionary sites, Etsy, and Quora.
Moving on, they share an article on HouseFresh about how it no longer appears in Google Search and how Google is killing independent review websites.
They show the article’s graph, which reflects a giant 91% decline in traffic, and discuss interesting topics it covers, such as the rise of Forbes in Search and keyword swarming.
Spencer and Jared then share a public plea from Marie Haynes for Google to help publishers hit by the update.
Why is this unusual? How does Jared summarize the situation?
As for their Shiny Object Shenanigans, Spencer talks briefly about his Amazon Influencer Program side hustle.
He shares his earnings for the last 30 days and talks about his future plans for it. Although this project provides passive income, Spencer actually gave a highly detailed presentation as part of his Niche Pursuits Community program where he talked about all the work that went into the side hustle in the beginning.
Jared then goes on to talk about his Amazon Influencer side hustle, talking about the new videos he’s uploaded in 2024 and his total earnings for March and April.
How did he do? How do his stats measure up to Spencer’s?
He also talks about his most recent newsletters side hustle, which of the 2 is getting the most traction, his Facebook page lead generation strategy, and his current number of email subscribers.
Tune in to hear more about his strategy.
As for their Weird Niche Sites, Spencer goes first with Secret Fan Base, which takes a closer look at the story and clothes from well-known brand Banana Republic.
As the clothes are now more mainstream and mass produced, the site covers its original safari style and is created by a group of original fans.
Although it doesn’t get a ton of traffic, the site has a unique story and is a true labor of love.
Jared shares his site, Passport Waiting Time, and shares some of the site’s interesting aspects, like a forum. This DR27 site is ranking for 2k keywords and gets 3k in organic search traffic per month.
They discuss potential strategies the site could use, its current monetization, and why they think the site wasn’t impacted by Google’s updates.
That concludes another great episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast.
We hope you learned about the latest events in the space and that you’re feeling inspired by the conversation.
See you next Friday!
transcription
Spencer: Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of this week in niche pursuits news. And Google has finally finished the March core update. Uh, they announced it about a week after they actually finished, but we’re going to dive into what happened now that the rollout is complete of. One of the longest Google updates ever.
We have winners and losers, which sites gained traffic, which sites lost traffic. We’re going to look at specific examples. We’re going to pull those up. Uh, and then a lot of commentary as well. There’s a couple of other commentators, I will just say in the industry. They have a couple of really, really strong opinions.
One of them is somebody who lost 91 percent of their traffic. So we’re going to talk about that. Uh, another one is a, an SEO consultant that is basically makes a plea to Google to do more. And so stick around for all the news. We’re going to cover all of that. I promise. But in addition to that, we will also talk about Jared and I’s, uh, shiny object shenanigans, a couple of side.
Hustle projects that we’re working on trying to make a little bit of money here and they’re, uh, not our main focus, but some fun projects that we have. And then at the very end, we will have two weird niche sites. Uh, Jared and I have both found a weird niche site and, uh, so we’re going to dive into those.
So having said all that, Jared, how are you doing today? Oh,
Jared: doing well. We’re talking. It’s a little bit weird. We’re talking about a Google update that it finished two weeks ago today, uh, technically the day this comes out Friday. So finished two weeks ago, they announced that it finished a week later, which was a week ago, but to some degree, it’s nice because sometimes we’re talking about these updates right when they finish, but we don’t have much to discuss other than it’s done.
So we do have a week’s worth of kind of analysis that people have done to talk about. So that’s kind of nice.
Spencer: Right. It is nice. Um, apparently it finished rolling out on April 19th, uh, but then they didn’t announce it until April 26th, uh, that had been finished. I don’t know why they did that. Jared, have you ever heard of Google waiting that long to say, hey, oh, by the way, we finished a week ago.
Jared: Well, you know, I think the search team had some mandatory furloughs, so no one was in the office when they finished rolling it out and, You know, bear, uh, uh, uh, John Mueller, somebody got back in the office like, oh, it’s done. We should probably tell everyone, you know, it took a week off. And so, you know, that must’ve been what happened vacation over at Google.
Spencer: Yeah.
Jared: Just take, take the week off, you know, they knew the update was going to be going so long. So, no, I haven’t, i’m kidding. I, I, I think that I, it was a long rollout. Obviously, longer than normal. Normally these things are two weeks. This one ended up being six weeks in the end or so. And, um, then it took a while to announce that it was over.
It was just a very bizarre update in general.
Spencer: Right. Very bizarre. Um, so, there’s lots of articles that cover this. This is just search engine land that I’m sharing on my screen here. The March. Uh, the Google March 2024 core update rollout is now complete. And so we’re going to talk about, uh, this, you know, for, for a good chunk here of this, uh, podcast episode.
Um, initially Google said, Hey, we’re going to try and reduce unhelpful content by 40%. Uh, but then they said, a Google spokesperson said, uh, the updates led to a larger quality. Let me rephrase that, restate that the updates led to larger quality improvements than we originally thought. You’ll now see 45 percent less low quality on original content and search results versus the 40 percent improvement we expect, uh, we expected across this work.
So, you know, the Google apparently is happy saying, Hey, we reduced 45 percent of unhelpful content, how they measure that. They don’t really tell us because they don’t tell us what is helpful and what is unhelpful content. Uh, but apparently they have their internal measuring system to say, Hey, we made this a big reduction.
We can publicly say, Hey, we did all these things. Um, you know, the other thing I guess to note is that, uh, Google did create a feedback form that if you. Basically don’t like what you’ve seen. You can leave feedback and go to the form. And I’d actually encourage everybody to do that. If your site saw a reduction in traffic and you feel like it shouldn’t have.
Submitted on the feedback form. I don’t know if it’ll do anything or not, but, uh, that’s basically the only way Google has provided for official, uh, feedback on the update. Um, so let’s see what else, uh, overlapping updates. Yeah. The Google had, um, kind of multiple updates. We talked about this kind of going into it.
Uh, and in fact, they are now about to roll out the, uh, site. abuse update that’s been in the works supposed to start May 5th as well. So there’s been a lot of turmoil updates going on. Of course, the helpful content system is now baked into the March core update. And so, uh, I guess that is maybe the big topic here that I’ll, I’ll shift the discussion a little bit to here, Jared.
Is that so many people that were hit by the helpful content update in September 2023 have been waiting for a core update that would roll back that helpful content update or would give them the opportunity, uh, to. Recover from that update. And unfortunately, all of the analysis done in the industry, uh, Glenn Gabe in particular has been, you know, posting daily on Twitter about sites that he’s been following that were hit by the helpful content update.
Uh, there is not a single example. Of a site where their penalty or their traffic, um, was reversed that, uh, they, they saw increased traffic after the March core update. So unfortunately, even though Google says, Hey, the helpful content update was part of the core update. There’s been no. Improvements for people that were hit.
So, uh, that leaves a lot of question marks. And I think that is at least when I look back at this, that is one of the biggest question marks that remains is, well, why did nobody overcome the helpful content update? If this was supposed to be something that would improve that after. Seven, eight months.
Jared: I think it’s safe to say now that probably broadly speaking, Google doesn’t really know what’s going on with the helpful content portion of the algorithm.
And I’m not trying to say that tongue in cheek. I’m actually being honest. We look back, you know, they’ve come out with statements saying that you could expect it to take several months, that it’s a classifier that continuously runs. And so you could expect to make improvements and see improvements when you’ve fixed a majority of your content.
It actually got. Came out that, um, Danny, uh, Sullivan had said two weeks at one point, Morgan, um, Morgan overhaul shared that and, and, and that got released. And so, so, so there’s definitely been language that you can get out from underneath this update, but now we are sitting at almost nine months since the help, since the helpful content update of September.
2023 launched and no one, not one site’s moved. Not, not one site is moved. That means it’s not possible at this point to recover from it. I guess the silver lining is that maybe that they’re either lying to us or they intend for it to be recoverable and they haven’t figured out how to make it recoverable.
Uh, right, but, but I think it’s safe to say now at this point. It’s not likely to recover unless they tweak something because no one has recovered yet.
Spencer: Right. And there’s so many people that were impacted and you have to know there’s varying degrees of effort. Some people have gone through massive overalls of their entire site.
And yeah, some people probably didn’t do anything, uh, but nobody made any improvement. Um, it, it’s, it’s a difficult pill to swallow, uh, for people that were hit. And what makes it worse, uh, is that a lot of people that were hit. Uh, with the helpful content update, we’re hit even harder with the March core update, um, the March core update hit a lot of people hard, both that were already hit and had, had not been hit, uh, previously.
Uh, and so it’s not, uh, it was not a small. Uh, update a lot of people impacted, but no, uh, improvement for people hit by the helpful content update. So, um, but I, I, I think you make an interesting point that does Google even know, uh, how somebody could improve. I don’t know. Um, we know that they use a lot of machine learning.
Exactly. Not one engineer knows everything that goes into the Google algorithm. It’s, it’s a cobbled, I shouldn’t say cobbled, but it’s a massive, massive algorithm, right? Um, that not one single person understands. Danny Sullivan does not know what you can change on your site that is going to make it improve.
He doesn’t, because the engineers, All by themselves don’t know. There’s so many different things going on that are way above my pay grade with machine learning, AI, you know, massive scale of all this information that, um, maybe there’ll be more tweaks in the future, but. But we don’t know, um, where it’s going to go from here.
Jared: Yeah, obviously, we can all hope that it is the, uh, former, not the latter. The former, I’m sorry, the latter, not the former. I’ll go back. We hope that it’s that they haven’t figured out how to allow their algorithms for a site to make improvements and recover to some degree from it. And not just that they, Fully intend for to wipe these sites off the map and just chose this poor way of communicating it to us You know, um doesn’t doesn’t seem like that would be in their best interest But at this point nine months in uh, and we’ll we’ll get on to it later in the podcast.
We have some other Some other things that tie into this in the news episodes That will bring in, and so I don’t want to steal that thunder, but certainly these thoughts, generally speaking, that we’re talking about right now are pretty much echoed universally, whether you have a quote unquote content site that was obliterated or whether you’re just participating in large scale kind of, uh, SEO that might not be in a niche that’s as affected these sentiments about kind of, where are we with this is generally.
Taken by almost everybody that, that I’ve seen.
Spencer: Yep. And so we are, we’re going to talk about that, uh, in just a second, a couple of voices, uh, in the industry, but let’s go ahead and take a look at some of the winners and losers of the March, 2024 core and spam updates. Uh, and so I’m going to just defer all of this data over to Cistrix.
Uh, they always put together a nice list of winners and losers after Google updates. Uh, and so, um, some sites were, yeah, hit, hit pretty hard. So this first one here that we’re looking at biggest domain losses by percentage. Okay. So really just look at the far right hand column, uh, for people that are watching this, you can see that like number one on the list, the biggest percent change.
Is none other than a dash Z dash animals. com AZ animals. com. If people don’t remember, we covered that site. Specifically in this podcast previously, um, you know, that I think it had been hit, uh, before in a previous update. And now it’s apparently hit even harder. Uh, and it, so it’s visibility is down over 80 percent just from this update.
Uh, which is, um, yeah, pretty incredible. I think they’re comparing the dates of something like January to, uh, April, if I’m looking at this, uh, properly. Uh, but basically you can see that, um, you know, you can kind of go down the list here. Uh, grammarist is down 62%. Uh, safetydetectives. com is down 64%.
Outlookindia. com. Yeah, I was waiting
Jared: for you to bring that up. Ah, I just,
Spencer: I just noticed that. I was scanning through the list and I was like, Oh, that’s one many, many people may be familiar with. They’re down 50%. They were very well known for the site reputation. Uh, sort of parasite SEO. A lot of people would publish articles on Outlook India and rank really quickly.
Gotta think Outlook
Jared: India might continue to drop with the update that launches on May 5th.
Spencer: Yeah, most likely, uh, it has, uh, any others that you wanted to look at there? I mean, there, there also is, um, the biggest domain losses by absolute traffic that I also think is kind of interesting to look at here. In a second, but that was the percent loss.
Jared: Yeah. No, you called the one. The Alec India one was the one I wanted to discuss. And then the, the absolute loss, I think that, um, you know, a lot of people might be a little surprised to see some of the health sites in there, you know, some of the very trusted health sites in their Mayo clinic, uh, up in the top 10, their health line as well.
Health line has been losing in a couple updates. Remember the, the darling child of the 2008, um, uh, medic update. Uh, that was kind of. The one we all grabbed onto to talk about has been sliding, not just in this update, but in several recent updates.
Spencer: Yeah, and then, uh, wikipedia. org, now of course, it’s such a massive site that, you know, if it loses a few million visitors a month, it’s like a blip, right?
Um, but it is up there as well. Merriam webster. com, Indeed. com, Britannica. com. Good. I don’t know,
Jared: Spencer. What do you think? Microsoft? Do you think that’s a little gamesmanship there? You know, it was like, Hey, we can still press a few buttons in our algorithm. We don’t like what you’re doing with all this AI stuff.
We’ll knock you down.
Spencer: Direct competitors. That’s right. You know, maybe tweak something here to make sure Microsoft goes down. Uh, good. I there, Jared,
Jared: uh, I’d say I’m sure they didn’t, but they are embroiled in antitrust lawsuits as we speak. So I guess nothing’s really off limits. And so, so what does this mean?
Google.
Spencer: com is
Jared: okay.
Spencer: I was going to ask you that,
Jared: like I, in the comments, maybe you can give us an eloquent answer on that one.
Spencer: Yeah. Somebody look into that. I mean, that’s, uh, there’s a lot of different things that are hosted on google. com, right? So it would take some deep analysis of like, cause that’s not their really their search page isn’t down.
Right. Obviously. Yeah. Well, you also have google. co. uk right above that. So
Jared: yes, you do. It’s showing up a couple of times.
Spencer: Yeah. So they penalize themselves. Go figure. Um, And then there was a couple of graphs. Well, maybe let’s, let’s cover the biggest gains. I mean, that’s, we better do that. Got to talk about big positives.
Yeah. Let’s let’s have some positives. Let’s all the sites
Jared: that did well for the top six. We can’t even talk about,
Spencer: yeah, you know, that’s sort of the, the one thing that, you know, if you’re looking on here, uh, they, you know, I’m kind of glad they do, you know, they block out the domain and just say it’s an adult website, uh, which.
Yeah, a lot of these as I scroll through these, um, apparently saw a lot of, uh, visibility increase, uh, percentage gain increase, um, the top one that we can talk about is hmrc. gov. uk. So a government website, um, just some massive traffic increase, 146%, uh, save my exams. com. You know, I don’t even know what that site is, but it’s a 120%.
Um, site increase. So let’s, uh, let’s take a look at this. Uh, the examiner written revision resources that improve your grades to X. Um, helping students study effectively
Jared: and get higher grades. What does it actually do? Uh, very good question. It looks like a revision. It, it, it, it, it’ll give you a revision on maybe your papers or something.
Spencer: Yeah. Um, I don’t know. Revision notes.
Anyways, it looks like it’s, yeah, it’s a big, I, I don’t know. I’d have to, to look into this
Jared: to see exactly what it is. All these tools that these, uh, these young students have at their disposal that we didn’t have. Boy.
Spencer: Mm. Oh, I know. I had a calculator and, you know, three ring binder. Man, some of my classes didn’t
Jared: even allow me to bring my calculator.
Spencer: They were like, you gotta do it by hand. You gotta know how to do this. Um, so that’s, uh, savemyexams. com. Let’s see, is there any others that sort of. Uh, jump out at us here, um, sciencedaily. com,
Jared: food. com. There are some odd ones. I mean, lettress. mus. br, uh, uh, friendsoftheearth. uk. Wouldn’t that be co. uk? You would think so.
Um, so there’s some, some odd ones there. Research gate. Yeah. Yeah. Up
Spencer: 77%.
Jared: Um, I mean, I guess the one thing to pull out on HMRC dot, and they say this below the graph there is it’s the forum that really picked up so much of that government. Domain.
Spencer: That’s
Jared: right. And so, you know, in essence, government user generated content.
I mean, you’re putting two things. We know Google loves Google. We know loves government sites historically, and you get a government site that has UGC on it and bam, you’ve got the biggest visibility increase out of everything. I mean, it seems like 2024 all over again, summed up in a nutshell right there.
Spencer: It is very interesting. Yeah. That, uh, their forums is what saw this massive increase. Uh, and then of course, uh, we got to talk about a couple of names that we talk about all the time. We’ve got the biggest domain gains, the absolute gains.
Jared: I’m going to go read my coffee for this. Jeez.
Spencer: Yeah. You know, people can just hit previous episodes on replay here.
You know, we’ve got the usual suspects here. We got reddit. com a 93 percent change. In the March core update. Unbelievable. Etsy. com. How
Jared: can they keep going up? There’s just no more room for them to go up. It’s like they bumped into the ceiling a long time ago.
Spencer: That’s what you would think. There’s room to grow though.
Uh, we’ve got Etsy. Uh, which I guess we haven’t talked about a lot. But they’re up 83%. Then, uh, Quora. com, which we have talked about. 69 percent increase. Um, Well, I think you’ve got all these really large sites, YouTube, uh, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter.
Jared: I think we talked in previous episodes, uh, in past updates, how dictionary sites were on the decline.
Uh, we talked about how they’re such a candidate for, um, you know, search generative experience and Google to just kind of really, Perhaps not even need them anymore, but, um, collectively you see a lot of vocabulary. com, yourdictionary. com, wordreference. com, oxfordlearnersdictionary. com, thefreedictionary.
com. These all went up this update. So clearly, you know, a dictionary site, uh, as a niche went up in the, in this update.
Spencer: Yeah, and then maybe just one other interesting is that WebMD is up big where like Healthline and Mayo Clinic was was down. So WebMD. Yeah, that’s a good point. It’s a health site that went up.
So yeah, Quora and Reddit, obvious winners from the March Quora and Spam update. Big shocker on that one. I don’t know. I’m a lot of things to say about Reddit. Yeah. Tell me something I don’t already know. Um, so there you go. There’s some of the biggest winners, biggest losers of the March core update. And again, if people want to check that out, then go to cistrix.
com. Um, I actually have some additional data that, uh, I’ll, I’ll be sharing. I don’t really have it prepared today, but I’ve been looking at some of the Google, Google publisher success stories. Um, They have a history of publishing, you know, success stories of small website owners, publishers, bloggers. And I took a look at the history of those.
Um, it doesn’t specifically apply to the marked core update. Uh, but I have sort of a comparison of where their traffic was, you know, a year ago or whenever their success story was published and where it is today. And, uh, so I’ll, I’ll be sharing a video over on the main niche pursuits channel, uh, on that, that people can, can, um, Look forward to watching over there.
So
Jared: I can only imagine how that’s going to turn out.
Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. It should be, uh,
Jared: should be a fun one. There actually were some, some big winners,
Spencer: but there’s a lot of big, big losers. Yeah.
Jared: I imagine Google’s heralded, heralded, uh, sites of sorts might not have survived any better, you know, only further the fact that what Google tells us is.
Helpful content now isn’t, I mean, odd.
Spencer: Yeah, exactly. So, okay. So, uh, a couple of people that have loud voices about the March core update, uh, one is over at housefresh. com, uh, Giselle Navarro. She wrote the big piece that we covered a few months ago about how. Essentially, Google is killing these small individual review websites of which they are, right?
They, in their example, back a few months ago, they talked about reviewing air purifiers and how they’re very hands on their public with their data that they’ve actually tested all these units and then a bunch of large news publications, um, are outranking them now and have In their words, no data to back that up.
They don’t really have any evidence to show that they’re hands on. It’s kind of boilerplate reviews where they’re very, you know, house fresh is, um, you know, they have a methodology that’s well documented and appears to show that firsthand expertise. Well, they have a followup and basically says, um, well, here’s the title.
House fresh has virtually disappeared from Google search results. Now what they say two months ago, we sounded the alarm about independent publishers being demoted on Google to give way to big media sites. This is what happened next. And I’ll just scroll to the graph. Um, it’s down here that you can see what happened to their traffic.
If I can find that, here we go. It’s, it’s not a pretty graph. Um, it shows in the March core update. I mean, it, it very obviously is this huge cliff in early March that they went from, you know, 4, 000 over 3000 clicks a day right now down to like 237. Uh, and their traffic obviously was much higher. Even before that, before the helpful content update, because it’s what, that’s kind of what they initially wrote about is that, Hey, our traffic is, is down big from the helpful content update.
And now they’ve just been demolished. This says, um, she says that their traffic is down 91%. Um, and I, I don’t know if that’s directly from the helpful content update or, um, or, or since, you know, before the, Here we go. Uh, Google’s latest algorithm update led to a 91 percent loss of search traffic. I was going to say it
Jared: implied strong as from the March core update.
Yeah. And that doesn’t take into consideration the losses from the helpful content update that they wrote about, uh, 10 weeks ago, as the article said.
Spencer: Yeah. So. Oh man, it, uh, again, it’s just painful to see, right. She goes through, um, sort of specific examples that, Hey, it’s Reddit and Cora. Then you get a big media site.
You might get YouTube, right? You get all these things and then way down somewhere, you might get an independent, uh, you know, publisher in one little slot here. Um, and they’re just in the market that house fresh, you know, is in the niche that they’re in. There just isn’t a lot of room. Uh, for these independent publishers, apparently on Google anymore.
And so there’s a lot of data here, but it’s just a very public story about how painful this March core update has been to a lot of independent publishers.
Jared: It is, uh, you know, it sums up, I think a lot of what. Different people are talking about it’s not if you’re if you’re wondering if it’s worth your time You you really should go read it because they don’t just hem and haw about the March core update.
That’s what we do They uh Yeah, that’s our job. But um Uh, they go into a lot of examples. Uh, one of the ones they talked about is the dot dash Meredith technique of swarming, um, uh, keyword swarming. And they walk through a process for that. They talk about, um, the, uh, uh, Forbes. com and exactly why they’re ranking so well.
Content and so there’s a lot of examples that she goes into that aren’t just kind of core update related, but kind of deep dives of specific topics. I found all that stuff super interesting,
Spencer: right? Yeah, it’s fascinating. It’s uh, they found large. Media websites, large publishers with, you know, lots of authority and history and clout, if you will, have found ways that they can survive, uh, in Google and kind of drown out these individual publishers, like you referenced, the kind of keyword swarming where dash, they find a little pocket of keywords that does well, and they come in, not just with one of their sites, but But they come across all of their sites and they all write articles about these one, you know, this one set of keywords and just drown out all the independent publishers, um, which Google has not apparently cared to pay attention to or do anything about.
Um, maybe they will, maybe they won’t.
Jared: Yeah. And again, I mean, that technique isn’t illegal or against the law, you know, it’s not like wrong. It’s. Many would say that if you were, uh, the head of SEO at that, at that company, that’s a good thing to be going after. I think that they’re just highlighting the ways that these big sites are able to drown small publishers.
And that’s kind of the theme of this article is small publishers lose every update. And this is one example. House fresh, but really it’s happening broad stroke across the board, and it’s a problem for a free and open web as they put it later on the article. You know, they acknowledge that Google doesn’t owe house fresh traffic, but this is really more of an expression about what it looks like to have a free and open web and how this is moving forward.
Further and further away from it,
Spencer: right? When certain players in an industry have an upper hand based on their authority, their links, whatever that may be, uh, it is very, it’s an unfair advantage that, uh, Google is not. Really paying attention to, um, and one reason this is so important is because Google puts on this public, uh, public image that they support, small publishers, they support creative writing.
They support bloggers, individual creators. That is absolutely the messaging that they put out by their PR team is that, Hey, Google supports, you know, the individual creator and that’s why they have, uh, this, Google publisher success stories that I kind of referenced. They have this whole thing on their domain that highlights these individual creators, right?
It’s not big media brands that can publish their success stories, right? Uh, it’s the individual blogger, the creator. And, um, if there’s this sort of unfair advantage that Google isn’t paying attention to, I mean, they, Absolutely are crushing the individual publisher. Uh, and so, uh, that’s the story with house fresh in the exact same vein and the same tone.
Um, Marie Haynes goes one step further beyond, you know, what they’re saying over at house fresh and even what I’m saying here, and Marie is making a public plea. To Google and saying, dear Google, please do more to help the website owners impacted by HCU and March core. And you know, it goes on dear Google.
If you are reading this, I’d ask you to do more to help the business owners who have been impacted by the March core update in September, helpful content updates to understand what is happening or what direction to take. And I’m going to just keep reading. It’s the first couple of paragraphs are just so good.
Uh, it says, I know so many good. Hardworking people who are struggling immensely right now and have no idea what to do. One of my friends is a recipe blogger. She worked hard to learn SEO and created a recipe, a really nice recipe website. It was her passion. She made enough money with this website to be the sole income earner in her family and allow her spouse to retire.
Her site was obliterated by the September helpful content update. She studied your documentation. She worked hard to improve all the time, not knowing. What to work on. And was full of hope that the March core update would turn things around. It did not. And then there’s a, an image of a graph that is just showing this person’s traffic getting completely obliterated.
Um, and it’s hard to see the numbers, but it looks like she was getting something like 10, 000 visitors a day and is now down to, you know, Maybe a couple of hundred.
Jared: That would be what the house fresh graph would look like if they had pulled it back out with the FCU, you know, I mean, and that’s, but Spencer, isn’t that odd that all the graphs look the exact same.
You just take out the numbers and they all look pretty much the exact same. It feels so punitive.
Spencer: It’s, it feels very punitive. Um, and so Marie Haynes just really making kind of a public plea, which is really unusual because, uh, Marie, as she states in her article is usually been a Google cheerleader, you know, somebody that has always sort of said, Google is great.
Google does so many good things. And she continues to kind of say this, Hey, Google is doing a lot of things. I’m excited for the future. So. You know, I’m also excited. Um, all these things going on, these breakthroughs technology, Google search can and will get better. Uh, but she doesn’t know what to tell, what to tell her clients.
Google doesn’t tell anybody what to do with their sites, traffic that’s been impacted. And she’s trying to just echo this statement that individual, true individual creators, people that are in their kitchens, trying to make Creating unique recipes, making the food, taking pictures of it, getting their hands, you know, quote unquote dirty, and then writing the articles like.
These are hard working individual bloggers and creators that have just been decimated to now be outranked by what us news and world report on, you know, whatever recipe they feel like writing about. It’s a, it’s kind of ridiculous.
Jared: And again, we go back to the fact, if you rewind to a couple of weeks ago where you and I tangentially went off on this, but Google got themselves into this problem by creating it in the first place by ranking big sites that didn’t have any business.
Ranking for a certain topic and pushing the small publishers down. That’s for specific topics by and large. Many people wanted more on the ground real world experience. That’s why they started appending user generated content like reddit to the end of their query. They were trying to get a more realistic result to their question.
That’s what started all this. And then now we end up with. Either Reddit or a big site and nobody else in the SERPs. It’s almost this circle jerk Reaction that didn’t really resolve what most people were originally intending when this all got started a while ago
Spencer: Yeah, I tell you what jared you and I need to be in the boardroom Uh with the ceo So we can explain.
Hey You know, you want a good PR story here. Maybe you start actually supporting individual creators. That’s somebody that the public can get behind and cheer because they understand and appreciate all these large companies, these no name, you know, dot dash, you know, Meredith brands that are ranking just because.
I don’t know why they’ve been around so long. Um, anyways, so much that we could say on the topic. Uh, I wish Google would listen to us. So. A little bit more, but that is what has happened with the March core update. There have been some winners, um, but a lot of losers and unfortunately no recovery from the helpful content update.
So having said all that, uh, we do need to move on to our. Shiny object shenanigans. Uh, a couple of side projects, you know, maybe a little bit more light, lighthearted, if you will. Things that are not our main business. So we can stop talking about Google just for a little bit. Um, no, Google allowed in this segment.
That’s right. This is no Google allowed. Uh, so I’ll, I’ll start. I don’t have like a huge update. Um, but I don’t, it’s been at least a few weeks since I’ve shared kind of an update on my Amazon influencer program in terms of earnings. I talked about my YouTube channel that’s tied to that. Uh, but as far as Amazon influencer, I’ve been pretty happy.
Like it’s still just continues to earn on its own. I haven’t really done anything for the entire year. Uh, we’re now in may. And, uh, I did post a few new videos this year, but they were more basically videos that were recorded last year. We finally got around, you know, I don’t remember when it was February or something.
We kind of uploaded those. Um, but in the last 30 days. I met right around 1, 700, uh, in earnings. Um, and I’m really happy with that, right? Like things are still clipping along well, earning 50, 60, 70 a day. And, um, really no effort on my port, my part. So it’s, it’s been pretty passive, pretty happy with it. Um, I’m going to just kind of let it keep doing its thing here.
I’m happy if it’s between the 1500 a month, I think. Um, and so, yeah, that’s, that’s kind of just my quick update, uh, if you
Jared: will. I have a question for you, just maybe as an advocate, just because I’m curious. I mean, you just got done giving a presentation at the Alt G online conference about outsourcing and how you’ve figured out how to outsource that.
Succeeded with it. I watched your presentation inside the Niche Pursuits community. Uh, which was even longer and more involved about how you’ve kind of outsourced, figured it out, figured out how to get the ad going, all that kind of stuff, it’s cashflow positive. Why not continue to invest in it? I’m just curious.
Spencer: Yeah. Um, you know, I probably should, other than it’s just. It is a shiny object, right? Uh, so for, for right now, I I’m trying to focus more on my main thing. Uh, so maybe in a month or two, I’ll come back and find a little bit of time and go, you know what, maybe it’s time to restart that outsourced engine. It doesn’t take a lot of work.
It really doesn’t, but it’s just one more thing to
Jared: think about. Nothing is truly passive and even small things add up and do take time. Yeah,
Spencer: exactly. You know, like we were talking about before the show, I just spent a few days, uh, out at the Grand Canyon, uh, you know, hike to the Grand Canyon with my family.
And so it’s like, I get a few things like that on my schedule and it’s like, okay, well, I definitely got to focus on my main business, get that taken care of. And at some point, you know, maybe I’ll have a little bit of time to relook at this, but for now, super happy with the way it’s going.
Jared: Well, there you go, folks.
We don’t, uh, just spend all of our time on side hustles, uh, even if it seems like it’s some episodes. That’s right. So
Spencer: I think you wanted to provide a little update as well on Amazon Influencer.
Jared: I feel a little awkward talking now. I feel like I had to just skip it. Now I feel a little embarrassed. Go for it.
I
Spencer: can
Jared: take it. I can take it. We were commiserating beforehand about why this is, to be clear. I don’t really know, because I’ve only uploaded a handful of videos in 2024. In April, I did upload, what’s the number here, 39 new videos. You know, so it’s something, right? And I did upload videos where I know you didn’t upload any in April.
But I certainly wouldn’t consider it like I, Went on a bender and, you know, filmed another 150 videos in the month or something, but April came in at over 4, 000, uh, for me and earnings just under 4, 100 is the final tally. Um, and now March was just under 4, 000. So this was actually up a tiny bit. Um, but I mean, you know, again, in the grand scheme of things, I have right now, 1, 125 videos live.
So I added. I mean, what is that? A two to 3 percent increase in number of videos. I don’t think that was one of the trending reasons for why it performed so well, but it’s been really good for about two months now, both March and April. We’re really good. Um, I don’t know exactly why it’s doing so well compared to yours because you and I have tended to be somewhat similar for the most part as we hit Q3 and Q4.
Spencer: Yeah. Now, and I, at one point we had talked about like how many clicks a day you’re getting, and I think they were pretty similar. I, you know, I’m getting, you know, 500 ish. I’m getting, I don’t know if you know,
Jared: yep. 500 to five 50 a day. I had that, that data up just in case you wanted to talk about it.
Spencer: Yeah.
So interesting. So we’re getting the same amount of, you know, clicks. Uh, but maybe you just have higher price. Yep. That’s right. If.
Jared: If we’re getting the same amount of clicks, then it has to come down to the amount. What’s your conversion percentage that Amazon tells you? What’s it? Roughly mine’s roughly 20 percent or so mine’s at about 15%.
Okay. So a little bit higher conversion percentage, but not enough to more than double, you know, mine’s not more than double yours, but my earnings are more than double yours. So it’s gotta be higher price products.
Spencer: I think so. It’s got to be. Um, I was going to anyways, we, we would have to look at the data, but I’m, I would assume that that is the reason that you’re selling more high price products.
So, which is awesome. That’s good. Just for people that are going to
Jared: think I do have, I do have some videos about some high price products. I mean, what do we call high price? I mean, there’s kind of, in my mind, there’s the a hundred to a thousand dollar product, right? And then there are some of those that are over a thousand dollars.
Um, and yeah, you notice that when someone buys it, you notice it when you wake up in the morning, you’re like, Whoa, you’re like, why did I just make, you know, for me, I’ll, I had a couple of 200 days and you’re like, Whoa, what happened? And it’s like 50 bucks on a 2, 500 purchase kind of thing, you know? Yeah.
Spencer: Yeah. So, uh, so kudos to you. That’s good. That’s exciting. You know, and, um, I guess the one other thing that I’ll just interject here is that, uh, both you and I. Did do a full video on this in, uh, as part of the niche pursuits community, we did a call with, uh, the niche pursuits community and that got a lot of people fired up within the community.
And we, we kind of have a private discord chat of people specifically have now started Amazon influencer businesses. It’s cool to see the success that they’re starting to have. We’re having people, you know, making a hundred dollars a year, getting their first, you know, commissions, a bunch of accounts are getting approved.
Uh, and so. People are quickly getting up and running just in the last month or two, uh, with the Amazon influencer program, kind of based on what you and I shared in the community. So, uh, there, of course we recorded those calls, you know, people want to go check those out. They can just go over to community dot niche pursuits, uh, com.
Jared: They’re also testing things out that you and I have never tested out. So I’m enjoying reading about the things they’re testing to see if it’s something that I should try going forward. You know, I mean, it’s, it’s cool.
Spencer: Uh, yeah. Kind of got a whole group now sharing ideas and doing different things.
Jared: It’s great.
That’s great. Um, well, I’ll, I’ll share an update as well on my newest project. I feel like that’s probably going to be something I share about it almost every week now. Um, uh, you know, I did commit to starting a newsletter. And I actually started to, as I said last week, why start one when you can start two?
So I have newsletter number one and newsletter number two. We’ll just kind of call them that going forward. Newsletter one was go figure the one I started first and newsletter two was the one that I started second. So if you’re referencing back to previous podcasts, we’ll just call them that going forward.
Um, I’m putting most of my effort into newsletter number two. Mainly because it’s getting the most traction out of the gate. That’s just kind of what I, what I do. I, that’s why I like to have two different options. Can you imagine if I’d only started with newsletter number one, I never would have even seen that newsletter two is seemingly taking off quicker, but anyways, that’s a, that’s a different story.
So some of the things I’ve talked about, I’ll just give an update. Um, I was hoping to have broken a thousand, uh, Facebook page likes. I’m at nine 65. And so I did start that. It’s very close, very close. So, um, again, I started a Facebook page with this for this website, uh, with the goal of using the Facebook page to advertise for new leads.
And those new leads would become email subscribers and then would get the content that the newsletter had. So I started that Facebook page. Probably one and a half weeks ago, we’re up to almost a thousand page likes running a page like campaign and I asked you last week, I think last week was at about seven cents per page.
Like I asked you, you said anything below five is good in your book. You’ve gotten it as low as three. Well, now we’re down to 4. 6 cents per like now and that’s historically. So the last week has been even lower. To take into account the 7 cents average before that. Um, so I, I kind of at this price, we’ll probably continue to let it run for a bit of time.
I mean, I’m thinking at least 10, 000 followers to kind of substantiate that Facebook page to give me more opportunity for organic, um, clicks and organic traffic from future posts and stuff. But yeah, we’re getting that down to 4. 6 cents per like now. That’s excellent. That’s really, really good. Um, okay.
Started the ads campaign on Tuesday. And so we’re recording this on a Thursday. So I’ve had two days since the ad, the Facebook lead ad, uh, uh, ad has been going live, I’m running two of them. Um, just to kind of split test. And at this point I have 29 email subscribers after two days. And I’m paying, on one campaign, I’m paying a dollar and one cent on average per new lead.
And on the other campaign, I’m paying 89 cents on average per new lead. So one’s doing a little bit better, obviously. Um, that one’s the newer one of the two. And so, yeah, 29, 29 email subscribers. 29 people have gotten the free, uh, lead, lead magnet. And are already off to the races and getting the, uh, the, the first, uh, the first email, um, from the email funnel we’ve created.
Spencer: So question about your lead magnet, like how big of a giveaway is it? It was a pretty easy to create. Is it just like a little PDF or what is it?
Jared: Well, again, newsletter number two is based on a content website that I owned, that had gotten hit, that we owned a tool and creative that had gotten hit by the HCU and that website had probably four or 500 articles on it.
And so what we did is we created an ebook, you know, like. You know, 50 this, you get 50 of these for free in this ebook and we pulled that from the different articles and kind of pieced it together, got it designed. So it’s really pretty looking, really big images. Go figure. You know, we use an image forward approach, give them my background and it’s just a, it’s a download that you get.
It’s a free ebook download that you get. All you have to do cause Facebook lead ads make us, you don’t even have to leave Facebook to get this. Right. You don’t have to go to my email. My website or anything like that. You just do it right there in Facebook and you get access to that, that PDF. Cool. That’s good.
I mean, it sounds like, uh, it’s not a great lead gen piece to be clear. Like there’s so many things I think that would be more valuable, but I wanted to get off the ground and that was the easiest thing to get off the ground. With. So yeah, that’s
Spencer: great.
Jared: Doing
Spencer: all
Jared: right.
Spencer: Yeah. You’ve got a, got a nice Facebook page with a thousand followers.
That’s a great thing. Solid start and a 29 email subscribers. So here we are. We’re in the early days. We’ll keep checking in, in future weeks.
Jared: Here’s the fun thing. Two of those 29 email subscribers, I was talking to Caitlin about it. Um, and I think there’s a good sign to her. Wait, let me look. No three, three of them.
She noticed had gotten the lead, had taken advantage of the Facebook ad and gotten the piece through Facebook’s lead ad, but then went over to our website, found our website. And went over to our website and on the front page of our website is a big call to action to join the newsletter and then submitted their information there again because they wanted to join our newsletter to make sure that they got our content.
And so that over 10 percent of the people have done that thus far. I get very small numbers. But I thought that was cool. That means, I mean, it seems it had to provide some value if they sought us out in our email list.
Spencer: Yeah, that is cool. It’s an interesting little stat.
Jared: So feeling pretty good so far about this.
I mean, we are early, early days, but, uh, feeling pretty good so far. So dollar per lead four and a half cents per page. Like those are, those are numbers that I’m very comfortable with. I, if we can keep that up. Cool.
Spencer: Well, very good. Uh, we’ll keep following you until you know, we take this thing to the moon.
So there we go. We’re excited. Um, okay. So let’s talk about our weird niche sites. You know, we have a few minutes here where we can each talk about one weird niche site that we found. Um, this one that I will share. Is, um, how do I explain this? Let me, let me just share the website. Um, because the main website actually really has nothing to do with like the sub folder that I’m going to talk about.
Um, so it’s secret fan base. com slash banana. And I just want to talk about the slash banana. Uh, okay. So they have like this whole unique like website. That’s just a subdirectory. Uh, for the Abandoned Republic, a journey through the Vintage Banana Republic catalog. So, I, you know, I didn’t know all this, I don’t follow the Banana Republic that closely, right?
Um, so, yeah, you know, but apparently in 1988, Republic travel and safari concept was scrapped by its corporate masters at gap. Right. Um, and so, which maybe was just like a specific line of their clothing. I don’t know, but it’s just saying, you know, Hey, there was the classic 1978 to 1988 banana Republic travel and safari catalog that is no more.
And they’ve come in and they’ve found old, you know, images of it. They’ve recreated what they can. Uh, to kind of bring back this original, you know, merchandise and articles and pictures from Banana Republic. Now, uh, the Banana Republic brand itself never died. It continued to live on, right? And it’s grown, but apparently in my brief reading of this, like it’s, It’s become a much more mass produced, uh, brand instead of its original concept.
It was more unique and high end and that sort of thing. Um, but yeah, I can just click on some of these things. You can just look at some of the artwork and, and, uh, what a fascinating
Jared: story. I’m reading at the bottom after. Yeah, they basically got, you’re right. 1983, they got bought by gap and, uh, the head of gap at the time at a hands off agreement that promised total creative freedom.
And so the influx infusion of money, um, and manufacturing power of gap led to them growing ex explosively. They have lavishly decorated safari stores, but then after five years of success, a fading safari trend was safari fashion, ever a trend, I don’t know, uh, a stock market crash and new management. It pushed the Ziegler’s out of their beloved company and slowly.
But surely banana Republic became much more of a main main, um, mainstay Americans, uh, they call it a sportswear company. I would call it more of a general company, I guess. But anyways, wow. I didn’t know any of this.
Spencer: Yeah, neither did I. And, uh, as you’ve been talking, I’ve just been scrolling through sort of their original catalogs, right?
You can see all their safari gear. And, um, I guess just there’s this. Secret fan base, if you will, uh, that just loves the original banana Republic and this website also has somewhere they’ve got, you can browse actual clothing and maybe, um, surplus items from banana Republic. Uh, let’s see. Anyways, they, they, they have some links like to eat very bottom footer
Jared: link is what you’re looking for.
The very bottom footer link all the way down, all the way down, keep going down. Keep going down at the bottom. Oh, you can go further. It’s the very last link. It’s got all this stuff for sale.
Spencer: Yeah. So maybe I’m not seeing it on my screen, but I believe you. But, uh, so, um, the site itself, you know, it, it doesn’t really, you know, get a ton of traffic, right?
If I go over to Ahrefs, this, um, subdirectory slash banana, it’s 392, uh, traffic, but it’s, it’s kind of this. Unique story that somebody has put a lot of time into kind of recreating this, um, sort of catalog, this banana Republic experience. And I mean, we don’t have a lot of time to go into it, but if I just go to secret fan base.
com itself, it has nothing to do with the banana Republic. Uh, this is Robin Adams design and illustration. So maybe this is just one of his sort of. Portfolio items where you can point people to say, Hey, look what I did. I kind of recreated some of this banana Republic, you know, feel he does graphic design, illustration, website, animation.
Um, so totally unrelated to the banana Republic, but he’s got this whole cool, uh, or she’s got this whole cool subdirectory. So
Jared: what a labor of love it’s you’re right. There’s a ton of effort that got put into it.
Spencer: Yeah, so that’s my, uh, that’s my weird niche site, um, maybe I’ll, we’ll just move on to yours, uh, since we don’t have a ton of time.
Jared: When I first saw the URL in our agenda, it just said secretfanbase. com slash banana. And so, I thought maybe you found a website that was just like odes to different fruits and how people are secretly obsessed with it or something. There you go, like, banana fans. Grape fans and, uh, you know, coconut fans and I was just thinking, yeah, for you that obviously wasn’t the site, but hey, wouldn’t that
Spencer: be a weird niche?
Somebody come up with that one. I mean, we did have a weird apple website. If you remember, we had one that rated all the different. Oh, my goodness. That’s right. In a comedic way. Um, so yeah, you could dedicate a whole site to people.
That was a great site. Remember, it was a great, we found all these apples.
We never even heard of before.
Spencer: I think it was apple ratings. com. Oh, that was a good one. I remember they put the red delicious apple in the bottom. That’s not it, but it’s something like Apple ratings. Anyways, we digress.
Jared: We digress. My webs, my weird niche. I’ll just pause a moment of silence. Thank you for the listener who gave this to me.
I had one listener contribute. After all the shaming I took last week for stealing one of Spencer’s. I got one. Thank you. But I’m hoping for a few more to be quite honest with you. Not sure how my poll is here. Uh, on this podcast, uh, but thank you. So the weird niche is passportwaitingtime. co. uk. And so as you can imagine, this exact match domain is exactly what you think it is.
How long does it take to get a passport? Now, obviously this is for the UK. Um, and it’s about passport waiting times. They’re doing some things kind of interesting here though. Uh, they are relying on, from what I can tell from reading user generated support to get these passport waiting times. Um, it says they have a passport forum.
I don’t know, I guess maybe people who are passionate about passports are just really interested in learning about where it’s at right now. Go join their forum, but it says, join our community and read about other passport applicants experiences. Find out how quickly different passport offices are processing Passports.
Um, and so it says, uh, on the homepage, our website uses this information by asking recent passport applicants and calculates an average, which is updated daily whilst it is not precise. It will certainly give you some idea of how long you may need to wait. We calculated an average of the last 31 days of user tweets and website submissions to display a figure in days.
So it’s helpful. Fascinating. I would imagine it was helpful. I mean, I’ve had to get a passport quickly. One time, uh, we, we booked a trip and then thankfully one of us in the family, not me had the idea to check our passports for expiration and mine had expired. Um, I ended up just paying the expedited fee because I didn’t want to chance it.
So to some degree, I suppose there’s, You’re kind of wondering how long it’s going to take and you’re going to use a site like this, but I can think of scenarios where that would be really important. I mean, if you need a passport, you need a passport. There’s kind of no way around that. So, um, in terms of, uh, kind of how they’re doing, uh, ranking wise, they’re doing better than.
They’re doing better than, than your site. Your weird niche was that they’re a DR 27. So nothing to write home about it. Rank him for about 2000 keywords. Um, just over 3000 per month in organic search traffic. Um, I think it’s interesting when you go to the pages, uh, the top pages there. You can see that they’re ranking for much more than just their homepage.
It’s, um, all of these forums are go figure ranking pretty well for some of these queries. The bulk of the traffic is to the homepage to be perfectly fair, but they do have all these forums that they do have indexed and they, uh, you know, as you would imagine their ranking.
Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. You can see that a lot of the forum pages are ranking there.
Um, Interesting. Obviously, UK traffic, right? I mean, it’s, uh, only if you’re in the UK, does this really matter? Uh, so maybe they could replicate this across different countries? I don’t know.
Jared: I mean, it would seem like they could. And, and, um, you know, I would, I would say also that, uh, you know, they’ve had their share of ups and downs, as you’re showing right there.
Um, and, uh, it’s, it’s been a, it’s been quite the journey for them. Uh, but I mean, again, the DR 27, it’s not something that really is. Uh, yeah, hasn’t gotten a lot of backlinks over the years, but I think that certainly, especially as user generated content has come into vogue, it seems to have kind of mirrored with them going up and, uh, in previous, you know, last couple updates.
Spencer: Yeah. And I was just looking at how they’re monetized, you know, on previous pages, there was definitely display ads. Uh, but if you go into their departure lounge, uh, you can buy all your holiday essentials and they have a bunch of Amazon, you know, buttons, a bunch of affiliate links, you can buy Amazon pass or passport holders, travel wallets, carry ons, packing cubes.
Luggage, all sorts of things. So maybe they’re making a little bit there too.
Jared: I checked because this is one of those sites that’s ripe for, we would see a lot of times we’ve featured it on the podcast where they would go in and add a bunch of, you know, best affiliate style articles, right? Because you’re like, Oh, I’m an expert.
I mean, I’m topically authoritative and Google’s mine on passports, which must mean I’m an expert on general travel. So I’m going to write about the best resorts in Cancun. And perhaps that’s why they didn’t get slaughtered in one of these updates. They’ve kind of stayed on point to some degree, you know, in their lane.
I don’t know, I just have plenty of sites by the way that got slaughtered. I know, I know, but, um, but anyways, you know, I kind of half expected to see some of these best, you know, roller boards for, for airplane kind of articles and I didn’t see them. So,
Spencer: well, I think the bottom line is, Hey, we do these weird niche sites to kind of inspire and, and spotlight and show what is possible or just to spark an idea.
So hopefully that sparks an idea for somebody out there, whether it’s, you know, Related to passports or it’s related to old brands like the banana Republic, uh, or whatever it is. Hopefully it just kind of sparks an idea for you, uh, for listening. If nothing else, maybe it was a little bit entertaining. So,
Jared: or a general banana fan club.
Spencer: Oh, that’s right. Somebody do that. Let us know. We will definitely feature that here on the podcast and the weird niche site section. So, um, having said all that, it has been entertaining for me. Once again, Jared, hopefully the listeners enjoyed this. Thank you so much everybody for listening to the podcast today.
Have a great weekend. We’ll see you guys next week.
