Who Are the Winners in Google’s Core Update and the HCU Recovery?

Welcome back to the latest episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast!

This week Jared is joined by Brooks Conkle, a member of the Niche Pursuits Community as well as an entrepreneur with many, many income streams, lots of experience in the industry, and plenty of insights to share.

There’s some interesting news for publishers this week, so get comfortable!

The first order of business is the recently released Google Core Update, for which there is now some data available. Jared and Brooks talk about the absolute winners so far.

Who’s benefiting the most from the update? Are you surprised by the results? What’s “normal” now? And what do Jared and Brooks think?

Watch the Full Episode

Then Jared shares a particularly exciting promising news item: signs of life after the HCU. 

Brooks shares his experience with the HCU and his perspective now. Do you agree with his new interpretation of SEO?

They also share information about sites that are recovering, and Jared asks some important questions and talks specifically about HouseFresh and RetroDodo. 

Then he and Brooks share their thoughts about the current landscape and suggest that there are greater questions to be answered, about Google, the future of search, and AI.

Moving along, they talk about Google AI Overviews and where they’re pulling their information from.

The sources cited now match one or more of the web pages from the top 10 organic results. How is this different from the SGE? And how do Jared and Brooks think this will impact SEO?

Tune in to hear their thoughts and discussion!

Then they move on to the Shiny Object Shenanigans, and Jared talks about his focus on earning money from projects he’s already working on. 

First, he shares his experience to date with Creator Connections. How much has he made so far? What percentage of his total income from Amazon Influencer does this represent?

Then he shares a new side hustle he recently started: publishing the content he’s already written on Medium. He talks a little bit about how it works and his future plans.

When it’s Brooks’ turn, he talks about a new side hustle: domain name investing. He shares all the interesting things he’s discovered about this world and some of the domains he’s purchased. Listen to the full episode to hear more about it.

Then it’s time for some Weird Niche Sites, Jared shares his site first: All 8, a very strange DR47 site with just 3 links on it related to square dancing and beat measurements. Surprisingly, this site gets 30k visitors per month while only ranking for 1k keywords. 

How much money are they making? What else does Jared share about this site?

Brooks then shares a weird site he found called The Pet Psychic, which gets 11k pageviews per month. What do they say about the niche?

And that concludes another episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast. We hope you feel better informed after listening to what’s happening in the industry, motivated by the stories about our side hustles, and inspired by the weird niche sites people are creating.

See you next week!

Transcript

Jared: All right. Welcome back to this week in niche pursuits news. My name is Jared Bauman and we have some great stories to get onto today. First off, first and foremost, it’s been about a week, a little over a week, actually, since Google’s August core update launched. So we have some winners and losers that we’re going to be talking about some early winners.

Obviously the core updates can take a little while we’ll get into that. But I think the big headline we’re going to get into today is that the helpful content update sites that were hit. Are seen signs of improvement, not all of them, but many of them. And we’re going to cover some of that, dig into a lot of the news behind that.

We’ve got a story on Google AI overviews, of course, our side hustles and our weird niches. We have a first time co host today. Brooks Konkel. Welcome on board. 

Hey, Jared, glad to be here, man. Excited to chat with you. 

Jared: Good to have you always good to get fresh opinions. Let’s go ahead and dive in. I do want to get to know you a little bit better.

We’ll do that in the side hustle section though. Let’s get to the news. Sounds good. That’s what people’re here for. . 

Sounds good. Let’s do it man. 

Jared: Alright. Um, I, I mean, first up we’ve got this core update. We announced that it was rolling out about a week ago. We kind of, um, uh, led with that last week.

Obviously at that time we didn’t have any information on what was happening with the, uh, the, the update. It was so, so new, so fresh, I guess you could say that. Um. You know, it was just something that we were talking about, hopeful for in terms of what it could possibly do, but we are starting to get some initial results I have on the screen in front of me.

Uh, Lily Ray shared some of the biggest winners so far. These are absolute values, not percentages, which I think it’s, it’s good to point out and lo and behold. Number one on her list of the biggest winners and we’ve been talking about this podcast about how how could they go up anymore? And it’s reddit.

So we’ll touch on that here in a second, but other big winners from the august core update so far spotify Um nih the national institute of health, uh cleveland clinics. That’s two medical sites rotten tomatoes Uh, Facebook, YouTube, PC mag. Uh, these are some of the big ones that are winning so far. All of those are obviously the big sites.

So when we look at absolute values, they’re going to be the ones, bigger sites are going to show bigger gains. Uh, there are lots of smaller sites winning, which we’ll talk about here in a second. I think. On that Reddit note, here’s another, uh, tweet that shows the visibility graph for Reddit. And, I mean, it just, it’s, it’s insane.

Like, we keep saying that it’s going off the actual chart, and they’re having to make new charts every single time. Uh, an update happens because Reddit continues. To grow brooks. We haven’t heard any of your thoughts on this whole reddit saga If you will and the fact that now again, they are growing in this core update 

Jared when I saw this image right here that you have on the screen Uh, I I kind of like pushed back to my chair earlier when I when I saw it.

It reminds me literally of uh, climbing mount everest Uh, that A, that little letter A down there is like the Everest base camp, which takes like a, I think a day to like get to. And then basically that’s the tallest, uh, peak in the world, um, is what it looks like, like up and up and to the right, like insane.

Um, yeah, it’s wild. I mean, obviously, obviously Google did the deal with Reddit. Obviously Reddit’s on every dead gum, like, like literally every search result I think has a Reddit. I don’t, I mean, maybe there’s a few that don’t have one. Um, I have never been a Reddit user. Myself until recently. So it’s just kind of like, it’s one of those things you got to do, right?

If one of, uh, If one, if every page of a Google results going to have a Reddit thing, it’s, you know, obviously it’s like something we all need to get more entrenched in or involved in, even if we weren’t before. So that’s kind of my take on 

Jared: it does seem to be here to stay to some degree. I mean, when you look at the fact that they made a deal with Google, it’s a licensing deal for Google to access all their content.

It’s a very large deal. Um, it’s interesting because last week. Morgan was on the podcast and we talked all about Reddit’s kind of investors expressing a lot of skepticism about the fact that all this newfound traffic from organic search isn’t, I guess the best way to put it, monetizing as well. Um, you know, I’m sure they’ll try to figure that out.

More traffic is going to improve their ability to do that. And they just keep winning. Like this is update after update after update that they continue to win and go up. At some point you just start to say this is the new normal. 

I guess so. I don’t, I definitely don’t have a clue what, what normal means anymore.

As of like, as of like a year ago, as of like a year ago, from week to week, I’m like, it’s a new normal and I I’m, I’m completely, I’m open to anything, Jared. I’m open to anything that next week, whatever we see, I’m, I’m up for it. 

Jared: Well, let’s talk a little bit about, um, this article here and I’ll pull it up on screen.

I got a lot of tabs today, folks. So, um, you know, bear with me here. This one is, is really a search engine land article all about the Google, uh, the August core update. Sorry, what we’re seeing so far. And again, the big storyline, not just here on this podcast, but in general, when it comes to this update, is this helpful content update just to bring people to speed.

We’ll be quick. Helpful content update that is the big one we all talk about hit last year, September 2023. So 11 months ago, um, a lot of us were hoping that the following core update or helpful content update would solve a lot of the problems that came as a result of that announced. It was, uh, the helpful content update was no longer going to be its own update, but it was rolled into the regular algorithm where the end had the March 2024 update and no helpful content update at all.

Hit site moved, right? So there was no movement. So a lot of people are starting to think, Hey, is this, if you got hit by the helpful content update, is that game over at this point? And here’s the fascinating thing. Um, there are signs of life for sites that were negatively impacted by that September, 2023 helpful content update.

And there’s a lot of nuances to this. So let’s first talk about what we’re seeing. Um, Most of the sites that are seen positive movement from the, uh, as a result of this core update and that were previously hit are seen not full recoveries. So perhaps 10, 20, 15 percent recovery is what we’re seeing so far now.

We’re only a weekend. So that’s interesting to note. Could that improve? Could that, uh, continue to improve or could that get reversed? We see in core updates that sometimes something will surge and then it will drop as Google is kind of tweaking the update live and in real time. Um, another, another thing that people are talking about is that, um, Sites that were hit by the helpful content update and that there were then subsequently hit by the March 2024 core update are seeing visibility increases and ranking improvements, but they’re a bit on pace with the drops.

They had in the March 2024 core update. We’ll get into all of that as well. Here’s a quote from Glenn Gabe, and we’ll look at a couple of his tweets throughout the day, but he said, um, he’s been tracking a few hundred of these sites. Um, and he wrote that 47 of the sites that he’s seen are showing signs of life.

So quote, uh, out of the 380 plus sites I’m tracking that were hit by the helpful content update, 47 have surged since the August core update began rolling out. Note, some of them have very low visibility, but they’ve spiked with the update. Others have greater visibility and are surging back nicely. Um, let me, um, I mean, before we get into some of the specifics here, um, you know, Brooks, talk just briefly about how your personal approach online has changed as a result of the helpful content update and then what you’re seeing as a result of this August core update with relation to those things.

I don’t know how many people relate to the way that I look at stuff now, but I forgot that there was this update coming. I don’t check Search Console as much anymore at all. Uh, and that’s not like, I don’t have my head in the sand and I’m not like whatever, but like, I, my, my view now on everything is much more, it’s much more broad.

I see. The web, and search it, search engine optimization to me, used to mean Google. For me, personally, it no longer, it just doesn’t mean Google, it just means wherever people are searching on the web. Um. I love that Google potentially is about to get broken up. Like the DOJ potentially is going to break Google up into multiple companies.

I mean, I, I don’t think we know like the, the exact results or how that’s going to work, but like, I’m pumped about that. And not even just as a publisher, like obviously it’s potentially good for us because, but it’s like, it’s good for other companies, search engines, perplexity, like whatever, like it’s going to create competition and then like, I just think that’s good for like the market because it means less control from one company and then just a lot of ways for us to be agile and innovate.

Um, I probably answered your question in a really broad stroke brush, but that’s like my like philosophy on all this. I know, I almost don’t, I almost don’t care about like the intricacies of these, of these updates. All the core updates to me are all flowing in together. Um, and there may be people that share that, you know, that sentiment and point of view.

Um, I’m cool with them. I am all about it. If everyone can get more traffic. Awesome. Like I’m, I’m excited for those. I’m excited for those examples, right? I’m excited for Google to do that, but it’s, it’s not affecting me and like what I’m doing on like a day to day basis. Um, 

Jared: did you have any negative effects from the helpful content update?

The original helpful content update in 2023? Yeah, 

a hundred percent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I, I’ve lost, I’ve, so I run two main brands. So one is like my own personal brand and then one’s a local media brand. And yeah, whatever. We’ll talk about that later. But like I, yeah, probably from my high points of like a few years ago, I’ve probably lost 70 percent of my traffic.

Overall, um, the bulk of it was from originally was Google, right? I was like, I was pumping that, I was pumping that SEO, Google, um, wheel, if you will. Uh, and, and why, why wouldn’t we, it was working for all, you know, brands and brands and when things change. Yeah. Um, so yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. So I have, I have my point of view and my philosophy, but I’m also a publisher that took like, took big hits over the last year and a half.

So 

Jared: I think you, uh, kind of echo a lot of the thoughts of small publishers, right? I’d say the majority of small publishers got impacted negatively by the helpful content update. And a significant number of them have had to find different ways to, uh, get traffic. Get their brand, get their business, get their website out in front of people.

Um, a lot of people have gone down the road of trying to make corrections to their website improvements to, to recover. A lot of people have just thrown in the white, just thrown in the towel and said, like, I’m going to move on to other traffic sources. I’d rather put my time towards other things. This is why this stuff that we’re about to talk about intrigues me so much, because if these improvements in ranking to HCU hit sites sticks.

Remember, if it sticks after the algorithm update is done, the core update is over. We can start to look at and see if there are any correlations between what people did And what improved as a result of it now, I will say I’m not getting my hopes up because we couldn’t really find many correlations between why sites dropped in the HCU or a lot of theories at the end of the day, a lot of sites dropped that, you know, were by all accounts, very good sites.

Um, we’ll touch on a couple of those today. We’re going to look directly at how some of the examples that have been given Retro Dodo, uh, House Fresh, we’re going to look at a couple of those. Um, so let’s look at a couple of the winners here so far. And, uh, let’s both you and I try not to be bitter that it’s not our sites that are on this crazy winner list, right?

We’re, we’re just hosts for the day. We’ll leave our opinions out of it. 

Do you know, I was just thinking about earlier when I was like looking at this Retro Dodo and House Fresh have gotten. So much just in general publicity from the SEO community around all of this. I’m like, man, they’ve got to be getting like a ton of direct traffic possibly, uh, over the course of the last number of months from like all the, I mean, the, the, the Google CEO, uh, what was, Well, I’m trying to remember that interview, whatever.

But, um, Retro Dodo, I think it was directly mentioned, right? Like in the, uh, in this interview. And, um, that’s just really interesting to me. It happens a lot as we go. So, all right. 

Jared: The verge did that interview. They directly asked, it was the CEO about, I believe it was both house fresh and Retro Dodo, Brandon.

From Retro Dodo actually went out to Google headquarters in London, was invited out by Danny Sullivan, did a big write up on it. We’re, we’re going to talk about a couple of these things here. There’s a lot of interesting ideas around that. Um, uh, I’m glad you brought it up. Cause yeah. Well, I’m going to save my thoughts for that for a few minutes.

So stick around. We will touch on that. Here is a great tweet by Ian. Um, who, um, uh, has, has gone through and, uh, we have it up on screen. I’ve been tracking the traffic changes for all sites monetized by Mediavine and Raptive since the start of Google’s August core update. Now this is a couple of days old, uh, two days old at time of, uh, at time of recording here, he says, Many HCU hit sites are recovering.

Here are the 107 sites with traffic increases of at least a hundred percent. So just going to go through a couple of these here on screen. We’ve got the number one, the biggest increase that he’s found, uh, drive and. Review. com and that has gone up 36, 000 percent but again, when you look at the graph and that’s important, you pull back a full year, you’ll see that they’ve only gone up a slight amount in overall value compared to what they lost from the helpful content update.

I mean, it’s pretty minuscule, but it still is a massive increase from where they used to be. Um, number two. Feast for a fraction. com almost a 5, 000 percent increase, very similar chart though, nowhere near recovering the full amount of traffic they lost. Nowhere near. Um, here’s an interesting one because this will buck that trend urban matter.

com number three, almost a 3000 percent increase. And they have more than recovered what they lost in the March, 2024 update. And I’d say gotten reasonably close to back to where they were. Prior to the HCU. If we’re looking at this graph here, I’d say they’ve recovered 75, 80 percent of their traffic, according to what Ahrefs is showing here, just to round out the top five, you’ve got explore.

Hmm. What is that explore no war never. com explore now or never. com. There we go. Sorry. Now 

or never. Got it. Got it. 

Jared: It’s a word puzzle. I should have pulled these up before I, uh, before I read it. Explore now or never. com 23. 100 percent increase, although looking like the other ones we talked about, nowhere near recovery for recovery from the HCU.

And then we’ve got another one that looks like urban matter, bake, uh, bacon, bacon. com boy, a lot of tongue twisters today, bacon, bacon. com just over 2000 percent increase and also looks to have recovered 60, 70, 75 percent of their traffic. From the HCU losses. So a couple of interesting things here. First off, super cool to see recoveries, right?

We’ve got Glenn Gabe talking about how he’s got dozens and dozens and dozens of HCU hit sites that he’s tracking their improvement. Ian’s got 107 sites at the least a hundred percent increase and some with really substantial increases that are almost back to their pre HCU levels.

Yeah, when you’ve, um, when you’ve been punched in the face for so long, it’s always great to have good news of someone picking you back up. 

Jared: Are you seeing any improvements to your sites? 

No, uh, I didn’t, but again, again, I didn’t, I don’t check GSE. I literally checked today. Cause I was like, Oh yeah, there is a, there is a, um, 

Jared: Jared’s probably going to ask about this.

There is an update happening, so like, I should probably log in and have a look at this. Um, nah, everything’s kind of just, just kind of cruising along. Yeah. Kind of cruising along the same. Uh, I work with a couple of clients as well, and Yeah, I mean, everyone’s kind of humming along. But some, yeah, some people haven’t seen, um, Disruption, obviously.

Jared: It’s interesting, I would be so curious for those five websites that we just featured. How much work they did to their site since they got hit by the HCU. Was it a dramatic amount? Was it, I just haven’t done anything to it. Or I just continued doing things as I was. And I’m recovering, right? Like, it’s so curious.

Some people walked away from their websites and just said, organic traffic was my source of revenue, my source of traffic. So I’m, if that’s not coming in, I’m just going to walk away. Some people went through major overhauls. So other people just said, you know what, I’m just going to keep doing business as usual.

So it’d be super interesting to see. I know I’ve gotten emails from several of our clients who we did, um, content plans for, um, Helped them, you know, make changes to their website. Several of them have emailed me and I’ve gone and popped in and looked and have some similar recovery stories. So I hope that continues for them.

And what now you mentioned it, it’s on the list. We’ve got to talk about it. Retro Dodo house fresh. Obviously, you know, if you’ve been living under a rock, if you, if you just started listening to this podcast, you don’t know, like a couple of things about these two brands specifically. First off, Retro Dodo, we had them on the, we had Brandon on the podcast probably two years ago to talk about a success, a website that he put his heart and soul into, and it got absolutely creamed.

He was very vocal about it. He was very vocal about what it’s doing to his personal life, his business life, his employees, all of that about basically barely being able to get the lights on at this point. Google definitely took notice. He was called out, mentioned in interviews. By the CEO by Danny Sullivan.

We’ve also got house fresh who went about it a little bit differently, but much the same way, just wrote this huge article that we featured about, um, much less of a emotional plea and much more of a data driven plea, a data driven example about. Why their results aren’t showing and the results that are now showing are worse are not good and not helpful And they’ve been also a feature So should we kind of check in and see how they’re doing cat’s kind of out of the bag you mentioned it But let’s go ahead and look at it here Um, and I think a lot of people will probably know because this has been the talk of a lot of this update Um, i’m gonna go ahead and pull up house fresh first here in ahrefs Um, and so we got the one year view here.

And so again, you know You Brooks is a lot like some of the other graphs we’ve been seeing. What’s interesting about House Fresh specifically is that they took a hit in the HCU, um, back here in, uh, in August. But their, their hits really weren’t helpful content update. They really were October core update here and then really they just got completely annihilated in the March core update.

And so House Fresh has become this example, but when you look at it, they really weren’t that impacted by that September, um, the September helpful content update. So that’s one thing I, To point out, but then, you know, they are improving if we zoom in on a one month view, you can see that they’ve gone from an expected organic traffic of only 1, 692 prior to the update up to 10, 604.

So that’s like a 500 percent increase in terms of estimated organic traffic. 

Exactly. Yeah. And all these is kind of crazy to see in the short term that we just showed on all these tweets too, from the previous brands. Interesting to see like in the short term, You see that buck up increase and you’re like, oh, wow.

And but , but when you zoom out, for the majority of them, it’s pretty interesting because you’re like, oh, that’s a big increase, but you’re way down from, from previous for the majority of these brands. It’s just kind of interesting when you look at the big picture versus like short term. Um, but up is good man, up into the right.

I’m excited for any brand up into the right. Always good. 

Jared: I mean, you know, bio accounts, they do make good content. I mean, I haven’t studied all their stuff, but certainly some of the articles we were featuring, uh, on the podcast, when that, when that article they wrote broke, we’re, we’re pretty darn good, you know?

Um, so I agree with you. I mean, if we can just like, if we can get good content to rank again, um, people that, Experts in their niche, people that actually are trying to put out good content, um, AI assisted, not whatever, like we can just leave all that out of it, but just good content to rank. Like, I think that’s all anybody’s really actually asking for.

If you’re going to move the goalposts, at least make it. So there’s still goalposts in the field. Like we got to at least have something we can aim for. Um, it felt like the goalposts were just like removed from the field and we were trying to score. Without any goalposts, at least if we can get the goalposts back in the field, even if they’re a long ways away, I think that that’s to some degree all we’re asking.

Totally. Totally, man. 

Jared: Let’s go over to Retro Dodo here. Uh, RetroDodo. com and again, a much different graph, really. You can see that Retro Dodo, uh, will look, here’s the one year look. And again, folks, you’re looking, I’ll just pull all this stuff off actually here. You’re, you’re looking at the, uh, 

there we go.

This is 12 months that we’re looking at? 

Jared: It’s 12 months, 12 months. I should’ve listened to you on the previous one. Sorry guys. I now just have isolated organic traffic. So super easy to see. So we see a little bit of a different story here. We can see the telltale signs of dropping on the 15th of September.

Um, and, uh, or around there, right? 12th, 15th, 18th. That’s when the helpful content update really kicked in. But again, it was not a big drop. It was a gradual drop. And then we had the October core update come in and then we also had updates in November and December. And so it’s just kind of this gradual.

Steep but gradual slide down all the way through the end of the year and then we hit the core update in March that continued that and so there’s kind of this theory going around. Um, I think I’ve seen Marie Haynes talk about it. I don’t have it up directly. So if I’m misquoting her, I apologize, but I know that she was talking about how.

Something she’s seen is that in reality, a lot of the sites she’s looked at that are getting these improvements that were correlating to helpful content update hit sites. A lot of those sites are actually showing signs that they’re just regaining traffic they lost from the March core update. Now we saw a lot of similarities to helpful content update site hit sites.

Losing traffic also in March. And so there’s this interesting correlation that maybe they’re just getting back the traffic from March. And so maybe this core update actually has nothing to do with helpful content update. It’s just reversing some of the things that were happening in the March core update.

I don’t have a clue. Is there, is there a way, is there a way for us to actually know that? And some, some, like it’s exciting to talk about, right? It’s exciting to be like, Oh, this is what’s happening. Do you ever wonder like, should we even worry about it? Like, are we focusing on the right things? And I don’t know the answer there, I’m just kinda, I’m just kinda curious.

Like, if, if we don’t know, is it worth the effort? Is it worth spending tons of time on? Should we, you know what I mean? Like, like what’s your take on that? 

Jared: Well, I mean, I remember Google core updates of old where we would quickly be able to determine what the really old ones, they would actually tell us what they were updating.

They would be like, 

yeah, 

Jared: this is Panda. We, this is penguin. We are targeting. You know, spammy backlinks. We are targeting low, thin, thin content. We are, you know, and then we moved into an era where there were core updates, but they were very easy for us to kind of figure out what was going on. Um, yeah, you could kind of plainly see that longer content was winning.

Remember that whole long content thing we went through for a couple of years. And so we could kind of pick it up lately. I mean, yes, there are drivers, but lately it’s like, Oh, Mayo clinic went up. Then they went down, then they went up, then they went down. Like, why? Well, I don’t, you know, so I think it’s a lot harder to determine what these core updates are really doing.

There’s so much that’s going on. They’ve talked about how they’re doing that on purpose at different points to try to make sure that we can’t, you know, isolate exactly what it looks like to rank better. I mean, do we care? Uh, I, do I answer that with my client facing hat on? Because I think for a business.

It’s my job to care and understand what impacts my local businesses, rankings, what changes happened for a company like a SAS. I’ll say personally, after the helpful content update, and like I referenced earlier, the goal post just completely disappearing from the field, I care a lot less about these darn things.

I certainly don’t check GSC or GA very often anymore with my own personal sites, but I do for my clients and stuff. So I guess I would answer that in two different ways. 

Yeah. No, that’s a really good point, depending on like, yeah, what point of view are you coming from? Who are you? Okay. Um, is it weird that there’s a piece of me that actually feels.

Like, I feel like, I feel like not, not bad, like I really care, but I don’t feel like Google owes any of us a thing. They’re a business like any other, they’re making money, they’re doing their thing. Now they’ve kind of blindsided people, right? That’s what they’ve done over the last, like, obviously plenty of, plenty of irate publishers because of like, They flipped a switch.

They flipped the switch. Um, granted AI itself kind of flipped the switch on the entire industry. Uh, and that was November 2022 

Jared: really where that started. 

Yeah. Like AI, I mean, obviously, I mean, Google’s known about AI for a long time. They have that like voice chat bot, like long before long before the invention of that, but I think when, when that fire, I’m gonna call it fire, when the fire got into the hands of publishers, like AI, like, Oh wow, we can click and, and then, and then you have thousands of articles coming in.

Rushing, rushing Google SERP. And I know we’ve like, like you guys have talked about this on the podcast. It’s like, that’s the little piece that I almost feel like. That’s the one little piece I almost feel bad for Google about. They’re, they’re like my big buddy that, uh, that lifts weights, and he’s so big and he can’t put his arms down, and he’s walking around like, he’s walking around like this, and I almost feel, I almost feel bad for him.

I’m like, dude, man, I got, I have to, I have to pick up this thing off the shelf for you because you can’t, like, you can’t, you can’t get it or whatever. That’s kind of the way I feel about them, and I feel like, I’m also pumped about disruption, though. Like, I don’t think Google’s going anywhere. Like, they’re not going to disappear, but they’re just, they’re not going to have 99 percent of the market share anymore.

Jared: I’m excited about that part. The fun part about hosting this podcast is that I get to have two different people on two weeks in a row that have very different opinions about Google. Uh, I’ll say Morgan last week was a lot more critical about Google than you are. I get where you’re coming from though.

They’re a victim of their own success. Certainly. And, um, you know, with, with all that goes into an algorithm nowadays, we’ve talked long and hard about how much do these updates even reflect the Exactly what they’re trying to accomplish, you know, um, it’s, it’s so big, it’s such a big algorithm. It’s such a big company.

Um, Hey, 

I know. I’m sorry. 

Jared: I was going to say, you know, we got to button it up on this topic. Get one more topic in before we finish the news. But I think in summary, so many bigger questions about where search is going. So many bigger questions as it relates to AI and search. So many bigger questions about how it relates to small, small publishers.

But today we got us put a flag in the ground and celebrate that there are a good number of helpful content update hit sites recovery. There are a good number of what we would call. Content sites that are showing signs of recovery. Do we know what they did yet? No. Do we know if they did anything yet? No.

Do we know if it’s haphazard and random, which ones are recovered and which ones aren’t yet? No. I think for today, let’s put a flag in the ground. Let’s call this a win. This is a win. HCU sites are coming back and let’s keep tracking it. We’ve got a couple more weeks of this update and we’ll keep tracking, uh, checking on this week by week.

Heck yeah. Heck yeah. A win’s a win, man. Got to take the 

Jared: W’s cause we sure have been taking a lot of L’s lately. 

Yeah, take the dub, man. When you can get it, take it. Yeah, totally. 

Jared: Hey, so this was something that caught my eye this week, switching gears, because we’ve talked about AI overviews quite a bit, and this is fascinating, I wish we had more time to go into this, um, I said a lot about a lot of the topics, but we got to at least touch on it, and it’s this idea of Google AI overviews and where they are pulling their results from.

To make up the overview now again, we started with SGE search, generative experience. We moved to AI overviews when they went official or live with that. I believe that was May 2024. There was a huge debacle when they released AI overviews that were showing up in 85 or so percent of all search results.

They had so many problems. They pulled it back to, I believe, sub 10%. Yada, yada, yada. Well, one of the big things. That people were always wondering is what, you know, we like to optimize for the featured snippet. We obviously like to optimize for to be in the top one, two or three spots in Google organic search.

Well, how do you get into the overviews, especially now that they have links in them, right? And what a lot of people are finding is that AI overviews were pulling from content that didn’t rank on the first page of Google and sometimes didn’t even rank, literally didn’t even rank. And, um, so, so here’s a new study that came out and I’ll just read it.

The new data that was shared on LinkedIn by Mark Trafagan. I hope I’m saying that right. VP of product marketing and training at SEO Clarity. Um, uh, this new data basically is saying that the sources cited in Google AI overviews now match one or more of the web pages from the top 10 Google organic search results 99.

5 percent of the time. So that was a little confusing. What that means is that similar to the featured snippet, if you will. Google’s pulling high ranking results to get into the AI overviews. Now, previously, this wasn’t the case. I believe that there is a, um, uh, I believe let’s see here, uh, in January, the sources appearing at SGE were different from the top 10 Google organic search results, an incredible 93.

8 percent of the time. So we basically in, you know, six, seven, eight months went from 94 percent of the AI overview results, not being from top ranking content to now. Almost 100 percent of the results in AI overviews being from top first page ranking content. Um, that’s a lot to, to kind of get your mind around.

It’s a big flip, right? Yeah, it’s a huge flip, right? 

It’s a huge flip. Yeah. 

Jared: I mean, I’ll ask you this Brooks, like, how much are you using what you see in AI overviews? How much are you clicking through? How much are you believing it? Do you question it’s authenticity? Like, I’m just curious for you as just a person of a user of the internet, where are you at with AI overviews?

Um, I wouldn’t say it’s a belief or not belief. I mean, I’m seeing what they’re changing over time. I, as a, as a, so I, as a user and probably only using Google a third of the time now, um, this morning I had a conversation in voice chat with chat GPT and literally fixed my AC. I trusted a large language model that’s like, just has all this information just to have that, that chat.

It didn’t, I shouldn’t say that, it didn’t fix my AC, but I got an idea from that one source. And then I can dig into another source. Um, I’m also using perplexity, right? So like, And I, I, what I think Google has kind of done on the AI overviews, it looks like they’ve like more perplexified it a little bit with, with the, with the information and the dropdown, like today was the first time I realized, Oh, they have these little dropdown links where you have to go to the source.

Um, and I feel like they’re constantly evolving that like clearly Google sees what perplexity is doing and tons of people are talking about how amazing perplexity is and Oh, wow. If Google was just like this. And so, um, Maybe Google keep getting it right. But yeah, obviously all the examples of like, Hey, but whatever, put glue in your pizza and stuff was like really dumb, uh, you know, that Google did in the overviews, but I, I am kind of rolling through that information and, uh, and I continue on, right?

So I may glance at it, give it a glance. Um, but then continue on and I click and read whatever I feel I need to read as a user. Um, and that’s how I use it. But I think for me, the biggest thing is that a smaller portion of my time is going to Google as a. Consumer. 

Jared: It’s it’s fascinating. We talk like at least once a quarter about arc people continuing to utilize Google as their search engine.

The numbers still seem to point to, to most people using it. Uh, I’m even curious, like. AI overviews. How many people just don’t even realize it’s Different than featured snippets. Yeah. It looks so similar. It acts so similar. It now pulls from the same types of content. It’s just, I wonder if they’re just kind of making it look like more and more.

They’re making it look like a featured snippet used to be. And if the general user is like, I don’t know what’s changed. 

We forget man, like Jared, I think we forget that we’re, we’re these like weirdos that are in this, like, like we’re looking at the Google search engine in a completely different light than your average person.

That’s like trying to get some information. You know what I mean? I think they’re just like. They look at it, if it’s helpful, great. Um, look, this is going to be unpopular. If Reddit continues to, it’s going to stay in there if it’s helpful and good. If people hate it, they’re going to leave. They’re going to, they’re going to use something else.

They’re going to use something different. And that’s where I’m like, I’m just like a capitalist point of view. I’m like, hey man, if it works for them, that’s fine. And so I see AI in that same way. I feel like, you know, they’re tracking all the data and like, I feel like the majority of users are completely fine with it.

If it’s helpful, then they, they use it. They click through whatever. So that’s my thought. 

Jared: Well, most people are saying this article we’re talking about this new, new, new, this new finding is good news for SEOs because it, we’re all kind of scratching our heads about if, if ranking, if getting our, our content into AI overviews, if that’s what we want to do.

And if the way to get in it is not by ranking your article higher, but by somehow some other set of criteria that we don’t know and understand, that’s going to make it very challenging because the set of actions you would need to take to get your content in AI overviews would then look very different than what it would look like to get it organically ranking.

But now it appears for now, this could change, but for now, based on this study, it looks like the same set of criteria that you use to rank number one on Google, you would also use to get in the AI overviews. That makes life a little easier. 

And that is why the SEO industry. We’ll always be there. It’s about how can you optimize for a search engine?

And in this particular example, you’re talking about Google and the AI overview, but it could be whatever, right? As an SEO professional person, whatever. So yeah, exactly. You’re right today. That’s the rule. And that could, that could change in the future of how you, of how you do that. 

Jared: And that’s also why I have a job as a podcast host, because this stuff changes so doggone much.

That’s it, man. You’re gonna have new con You’re gonna have new content every week, that’s for sure. Yeah, you’re gonna have new stuff, man. 

Jared: Guy, I don’t really worry about the news not happening in this industry. 

That’s right. 

Jared: I only worry that we’re not we’re not talking about it enough on here, you know, it’s once a week enough.

But, uh, and speaking of which It’s probably a good time for us to move on to side hustles and talk about our side hustles before we do that Let me turn it over to you Tell us a little bit about yourself the the the audience might not know much about you if you’re in the community You know, you know brooks, but uh the niche pursuits community, but beyond that like give us 30 30 45 60 seconds on yourself 

I’ll give you maybe even shorter than that.

I feel like my, the best way to describe myself for the last year, I’ve been saying, you know what? I’m kind of like a full time side hustler. Um, I just bought that domain name the other day, actually full time side hustler. com. But like, I, I basically have 15 to 20 different income streams just that kind of make up our livelihood both online and some offline.

I do some real estate. I have a broker’s license, Airbnb, Flip, TypeSource, a little bit of real estate stuff. But then in the online world, same thing. Content, content websites, a little bit of agency stuff, marketing stuff, YouTube, um, stuff, email newsletters. I have a personal one and one for our local media brand.

So. Um, I run two main brands. Like one is content for myself, just like Brooks Conkle, um, my, my personal name and then, um, or local media brands like the mobile rundown. So it’s a local media company. We have a newsletter website. Um, and we even like produce events. We’ve had a niche publication come out of that.

And so, yeah, all, all of this melds in together and makes up, you know, our, our, our family income. So like me as a, basically a full time side hustler, I feel, I feel comfortable to say that now. Um, I think 10 years ago, uh, even though I, that was me, uh, I was, uh, I don’t know. I was just hesitant to say that it just seemed weird, but now I feel like I’m just leaning into it.

Like, yeah, it’s kind of, it’s kind of who I am. So 

Jared: did you say 15 to 20 streams of income? Man, that’s an accomplishment. 

Well, yeah. And they’re not all, they’re not, it’s not like they’re all ginormous. I mean, some could be like, it could be like, um, Oh, five to 600 bucks a year from like credit card reward points.

Cause whatever. Um, but man, you, you, you start like. You start adding them all up and and really looking at them and you’re like, oh wow, this is crazy Like there’s it’s crazy how our kind of our fingers or tentacles are in all these different just kind of Things and projects and in the online world, you know, obviously ad income affiliate income sponsorship income Yeah, it’s like there’s all these different I guess you could just lump it together and be like online income.

Um, but, but, um, but yeah, 

Jared: well, I’m excited to hear which of those income streams or potential income streams you choose to talk about today for the, uh, the side hustle section. I’ll, uh, I’ll kick it off. Um, I’ll put, I’ll put an end to this update. I’ve been talking about creator connections, which is, we’ll call it inside the umbrella of Amazon influencer program.

Um, I started doing it very, very part time, uh, a month ago. Um, Four weeks ago, actually. So 28 days ago. And, um, basically I’m going about it in terms of just trying to, to, to maximize the content I’ve already created and use creator connections, which is kind of another platform inside of Amazon influencer to get even more benefit from some of the videos I’ve made.

So I am not taking advantage of it. If I wanted to dive. Really heavy into it. I’m not really making any new content for it, but after four weeks, so we’ve got a month here, I’ve made 80, which represents less than 5 percent of the total income, far less than 5 percent of the total income I made on Amazon influencer in the last, uh, saint in the same time period.

So, I mean, I guess a month out. Cool to try 80 bucks is 80 bucks, especially with videos that I’d kind of already made. Um, I did make one or two new ones, but it was with products I already owned and already made a video on. Um, so yeah, not going to make you rich, but again, the way I went about it, not bad.

That’s what I was going to ask you that if you use the exact same videos from the influencer program and just like click the button and like connected it, or if you did, if you did new ones. So I did, I read, yeah, I 

Jared: read the, the brand will say what they want. And they’ll say, here’s what we want out of the video.

And so then I was, I was like, Oh, cool. Like for most of my videos, I did that. They’re like, we want you to demo the product. I’m like, I demoed it. And they’re like, we want you to talk about your favorite features about it. And I did that. So some videos I was just able to totally submit others. They were like, we want you to do this.

And I hadn’t done the video. So I just quickly got it out, did another quick video just for that purpose and then submitted that. 

Got it. You read the instructions. That’s brilliant. I actually read 

Jared: the, I know. 

I, I think I’ve done a few and I don’t, I don’t think I read like you did. It was just probably got me in trouble.

I don’t know. I 

Jared: don’t think you’re going to get in trouble, but you know, you never know. I just like to play it by the rules, but, um, here’s the other thing I want to talk about is my going to be my first time talking about it. So I guess it’s a bit of a new side hustle. I’m, I’m going Brooks on, on, on us here.

Start a new stream of income, hopefully. Um, so I, again, in the vein of trying to take something I’m already doing, and make income from it in multiple places. So we just talked about that with Creator Connections, that was the goal. I recently did an interview that will come out in the next couple weeks on the Niche Pursuits podcast, all about someone who’s making pretty good side hustle income by publishing articles on Medium.

Huh, okay. So, 

Jared: making anywhere from three, four, five thousand dollars a month. And so, I have, The luxury of I’ve already done the interview. So I get a little sneak peek to this and it really got me my mind going. And where it really got my mind going is that a lot of the content that I write each week and send out in the weekend growth newsletter would very possibly do really well medium.

And so what I did is I took a lot that I learned from this podcast interview, which you will all get to listen to very soon. And I took this week’s newsletter that I sent for weekend growth and I retweaked it just a little bit, not much. Very similar to that Creator Connection, I just changed the title, I changed a couple headlines, did a better intro, a better conclusion, and I published it on Medium today.

Um, and so again, the concept is that over time, publishing my newsletter on Medium, some of those will get views, and when you get views, since it’s a paid community, you get paid for it. That’s it in a nutshell. So I did my first one. I think I might go back and reap and publish a medium. Some of my older newsletters, I’ve been sending newsletters for almost 18 months now, and then also getting the cadence of publishing my future newsletters on medium and see if I can turn this into another viable income stream from this weekend growth newsletter.

I think it’s a great idea. Let’s see. Uh, it’s the future of the web, man. That’s it’s wet. So like. Not SEO, like webo man web optimization. We have to optimize, optimize for the web. And that’s kinda like, you know, that’s what you’re doing. That new idea is, and you’re using like current content to, to go and do that, which, so that’s, I think it’s great.

That’s awesome. We’ll 

Jared: see, we’ll see. I mean, you know, again, the interview Sure. Made it sound like this is a brilliant idea. Whether or not I actually pull it off. Well, we’ll see about that. Um, I, so I, I did sign up for like the, the, the $5 a month medium subscription as well. Um, so I’m kind of excited to start.

Like, I don’t know. I download the app. I’ll start kind of using it and see if I, uh, kind of try to learn what medium users or readers want. I think that’ll help over time. My first article probably will go nowhere cause I don’t really know what the platform exactly is looking for, but yeah, I’m excited to learn about it.

I think it’s a good, a good avenue for publishers and content creators. 

Do you have a certain number that you’re going to force yourself to create like a certain number of articles where you’re like I’m not stopping until I do X. Do you have that or not necessarily, 

Jared: you know, I didn’t define it I’ll say that in my mind.

I’m thinking 20 or 30 is what I would give for an initial run 

You 

Jared: know and again, I think I think there’s at least 10 or 15 previous Newsletters I’ve sent that probably fit mediums pretty well, you know, some are like, Hey, here’s what’s going on in the Google core update and like that isn’t relevant anymore.

Right. 

Yeah. Many of 

Jared: many of them are like just about really good topics that people on medium would enjoy. So I think I can get 10 to 15 published call over the next couple of weeks just from past newsletters and then going forward some of my future newsletters. So probably 20 to 30. That’s what I’m thinking.

Yeah, I’m excited to hear some updates on that. I’m excited to hear that, uh, the, uh, the interview that, that you do with that, for that information. It is, I’ve heard, I’ve heard a lot of cool things about medium. 

Jared: Yeah, it’s a couple weeks away. So definitely tune into that one. Sorry to tease. I ended up doing that a lot on here because I do these interviews and then they get me excited and I started doing it, but I’m ahead of all you guys by a week or two or three or four or whatever it is.

So coming soon. 

You’ve already had the chat and you know, it’s coming out. You’re like, you’re like, I know, but you guys don’t know. I know. 

Jared: Well, what can I say? Uh, at least I’m telling you, I’m giving you a heads up, right? I’m, I’m, I’m building the hype. It’s, it’s authentic hype though. It’s true hype. So, okay.

What are you working on in the world of side hustles? What do you want to share with us? 

Okay, so, I, I do need to mention, I was gonna say, not, not the fact that I’m getting Facebook likes for super cheap, that I have you guys to thank for, in the Niche Pursuits community, not the fact that, like, I joined Amazon Influencer because of you guys, it’s y’all’s fault, in the Niche Pursuits community, and I’ve made over a grand there man, I’m not gonna share that, But it’s y’all’s fault, man.

It’s y’all’s fault in a good way, in a good way. It’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s been encouraging for me to try like new things that I haven’t done. Um, but what I’m, what I’m kind of working on that I’m kind of excited about is, um, is domain name investing. Um, so, I don’t know why I haven’t done this sooner. Um, because here’s what happened.

A few, so I used to own a real estate brokerage. My wife and I had our own real estate brokerage. Obviously we had a domain name. So it was ForefrontRE. com. Well, we closed the brokerage and moved our licenses somewhere else a few years back. Okay. Didn’t need the domain. Uh, I didn’t even know what it meant to click this button in my domain registrar.

Like, oh, do you want to sell or put it on the market? Uh huh. Okay. Okay. So we sold it for like 1200 bucks, but it was like six months later. It was months later. And I got an email that I thought was like a scam email. It was like, Hey, this has been sold. We have this money because honestly, like the, the, the go daddy stuff looks like it’s from the nineties.

Like that’s the way that some of that stuff is like using any web or something like 

Jared: that. 

Exactly. So like, now I don’t know why the second I actually got that money in my account. I didn’t say. Whoa, what is this? Because I get real estate like domain domain names are just lots man. They’re just like They’re the lots of vacant land, right?

They’re vacant land in the digital world like you got to build on something and so it’s like now what I didn’t realize Is that the that industry is so much bigger than I thought I had no idea I I was following people on twitter in the seo world like over the last couple years So I have a little list with like 60 or 70 people You Over the last like three weeks, I’ve been adding people to domain investing like a list It’s up to like 175 people people that are like full time domain name investors domain conferences like What I had no idea.

Yes. There’s a domain name conference. Yes There are there there are people that own of course there are companies There’s companies that own tens of thousands of domain names that probably have a million dollar like monthly renewal fee. There are people that own thousands that I’ve met some people that own four or 5, 000, they do it full time.

Um, what I’m doing, I, I’ve over the last three weeks, I’ve bought 70 names that I and I’m going to buy another 30. Yeah. So I’m going to buy another 30. I’m gonna get to a hundred. When I get to a hundred. Uh, those are kind of going to be my, my lots, if you will. And I’m gonna, as I, this is my current, this is my current plan.

As I sell, um, those, I’ll reinvest those funds back into, back into that business. Um, it’s interesting, like a lot of people, you can do, I mean like, if you buy a good name, you have two options. You can like go out there and try to like sell it to somebody that you think may need it. Or you can just, you know, patiently, patiently wait and put like a, you know, for sale lander on your page.

Um, and people apparently industry ish. If you have good stuff, it’s like one to 2 percent ish per year of your names might sell. Um, these are all the things I’ve learned in the barrage of information over the last like three weeks. And it’s been really fun, like getting into this, getting into this new thing.

Um, but yeah, I’ve got like 70 names over the last three weeks and I’m, I’m shopping for domain names. So if anybody has some cheapies or something, hit me up. 

Jared: So generally speaking, what’s your criteria? Like, are you just Carpet bombing the whole thing, like just trying to find stuff, or do you have a kind of a Approach or a niche you’re focusing on or something or?

I have no idea. Um Yes, and uh, if I were to give you, if I were to give you criteria, the main criteria right now, only I 99 percent of the names are dot coms. Yep. Um, there are, they’re called TLDs, top level domains, like, so dot whatever, there are, I didn’t even realize, like, I knew there were a bunch, but I didn’t realize that there were like hundreds, there may even be a thousand now, like, they keep getting introduced, these, these TLDs, so like, there are literally combinations out there in the world, you could probably register a billion in.

Potential domains. It’s crazy. So my criteria is dot com. Um, I like names that are, uh, that could be, I’m going to try to go and just like literally just like look at some of my names, um, I like names that could be used, like, potentially for a business. Like, so, for example, I bought, uh, I own pillarbuilders.

com, which I think is, like, a pretty great name for a, for a building company, a construction company. Um, that, like, I mean, that’s an example. Um, propoolbuilders. com. It’s an example that I own. I, I think that would make a good pool company name. Right. So I’ve spent a ton of my time like digging into what I think would be like cool names.

And then I have like a mix too, because some, I bought some in things that I think are futuristic. So, you know, maybe, maybe think AI or robotic type stuff. I’m trying to find stuff in that room. Um, and then just weird, like. Things that are also weird. So, um, quirky up, I didn’t quirky up. com. Nice. Just kind of scrolling through.

I mean, it’s just a weird one, right? Uh, uh, crib zip swoleo. com. It’s just kind of a funky brandable type domain. Um, so I’m kind of spreading myself over these hundred to get. To kind of see long term where I want to go and I’m like Jared I don’t know what I want to do this long term I don’t know if I want to do it full time or just to be like an income stream but I can tell you this it’s it’s fun and I love like trying new things and this is kind of like this is my new exciting kind of uh New, you know, new, new income stream.

Then I’m testing out. 

Jared: It checks a lot of cool boxes, obviously super passive. Like it sounds like once you, once you buy them, you just kind of wait, you’ll wait and you’ll wait and you’ll wait, but you don’t have to do a lot of work. And it does sound like once you sell them, maybe you don’t sell many in a given year, but we know it doesn’t take much to renew them.

And we also know that it sounds like you’re making a pretty penny when you sell one, 

if you, yeah. So, so that’s what I’ve done a lot of research on too. Like. I just like, just yesterday I was reading something, uh, from name bio or something. So their sister company owns like 70, 000 domains. And, and, and on, uh, on, on Twitter, they were like, yeah, they’re like, our studies showed that like, it was like in the low two thousands that they would price domains that they thought were good.

They were like, they’re like our data show that. It didn’t, if we price below that, it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t sell any faster. So they’re like, if you priced it at 500 bucks or 900, they’re like, you’re just leaving money on the table. So they’re like, you’re, you’re, and so, so I’m just taking all this stuff that I’m learning.

I’m just soaking it up like a sponge and I’m just turning around and doing the exact same thing in, in my strategy. I’m like, you know, these people have been doing this for like 15 years, you know, so I’m like, man, I’m just trying to learn from, from all these people that are teaching, you know? 

Jared: Man, that is really cool.

I want to obviously hear how this progresses over the, uh, the coming year or so. So thank you for sharing that. That is a new one. We have not talked about that side hustle yet here on the podcast. 

I’ll let you know when my first sale goes through, I’ll make sure to ping you. 

Jared: Okay, definitely. Who knows? You might be on the Wednesday interviews about that someday teaching us all how to do this.

Um, well, cool. Let’s 

get 

Jared: It’d be great because that would mean you’d be, you’d be killing it. I mean, and that, that’s a, that’s a cool, that’s a cool model. I love the analogy to real estate too. That’s a good one. Cause it gives me, think about driving down the road and you see those signs that say like, you know, land for sale.

And you’re like, how many people call that? And you’re like, well, they, not many people have to call for that to work really well, you know, uh, over time. So, um, Hey, so we got to get to weird niches. We gotta get to weird niches before our time is up. I’ll go first. My weird niche is weird. Oh boy. Um, it’s, I guess, maybe not quite as weird as when I first saw it.

Uh, but I’ll tell ya. It is, it is, it definitely fits the bill of weird. My weird niche is all8. com. That’s A L L. And then the number eight. com, if you’re looking on the screen, there’s not much to it. It’s a kind of chalkboard logo of all eight. com. And all it is is three links, square dance, collar notes, tap for BPM tool.

And about me. Now I was sent this by the same person who shared the famous. Checkbox weird niche site with us And I asked her I’m like what the heck is square dance color notes, and I’m like I’m not trying to be you know rude I just I’m not a square dancer, and she’s like I have no idea. I’m not a square dancer either I asked chat GPT about it like what is this um and It I had it like look at this page and basically it just gives you like all these different dance calls for It Square dancing, um, you know, songs and choreography.

It has all these articles it has, um, you know, and we’ll get into a little bit more about this here in a little bit, but somebody has to say, I know nothing about this, but it’s. It’s not a very pretty site, but it has a ton of information on here. Like an insane amount of information. Um, the other page is this tap for BPM tool.

I’m like, well, what the heck is that? Well, BPM stands for, as it turns out, you click on it, beats per minute. Exactly. I see the drums in the background. So I feel like you might be able to help me out a little bit here. Yeah. So you might be able to do this better. I’ll try to do it live on screen here. But basically what you do is you can tap any button on your keyboard.

And it tracks how many beats per minute it is. So I hope this works live. I could just go like that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that. And I guess I’m tapping at 240 beats per minute. Now am I, am I doing that right? I’m talking to musician.

I, I really should have had you feature this. 

Yeah, no, I mean, that’s, yeah, that’s kind of what you’re doing. This is how many beats per minute. So if you went slow, like theoretically, if you tap slow, that number should get lower. Right. If you want to try it again. 

Jared: Yeah, there we go. So I’m going much slower and now I’m at 47 beats per minute.

There you go. 47 beats in a minute. Cool. 

Jared: And again, like, could I think we feature simple tools here in this podcast, but could you think of a simpler tool to make than this one right here? 

I mean, well, 

Jared: let’s go take a look at this in Ahrefs. We are talking about a DR 47. We are talking about a site that only ranks for just over a thousand keywords and gets an estimated 30, 000 visits per month of traffic.

And if I go to top pages, you can see that this beats per minute tool gets the lion’s share of traffic. Of the traffic, it gets almost 28, 000, uh, views per month. And we know that a dress tends to underestimate, um, that keyword, uh, you know, the keywords around beats per minute, uh, BPM tapper, 15, 000 search volume.

They ranked number two BPM counter also 15, 000. They ranked number two. Um, uh, they used to rank number one, actually, uh, tap for BPM 2, 800. They ranked number one. So this is crazy, right? Like that is the simplest tool to make. It is literally just tap your keyboard and it just tells you how many taps per minute and they are getting some significant traffic.

Now they’re not getting. I don’t need to make any money on this. I don’t see any ads. I don’t see any way for ads. Um, I’ll go back here and just quickly show this about page. He’s got an about me page. Uh, he calls weekly for three area square dance clubs, teaching classes from beginner through a two. He talks all about this.

Um, This, this site, this popular app, his beats per minute brings a lot of traffic to all eight. com. Uh, he has view source and you can see exactly how he built it. He’s a engineer in the, um, biotech sphere. He has everything here. What a fascinating website. 

Yeah. I was wondering, like, does this site owner know?

That it ranks for all this stuff and traffic, but it, but it sounds like he does. 

Jared: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don’t know if he, he realizes he could throw ads on it and make, I don’t know. A couple thousand dollars a month on that traffic. Um, but I, he, he definitely knows he’s getting, he’s ranking well because he kind of mentions it in his about page.

Right, right, 

right, right. Yeah. So interesting. I, the people that do stuff and they may not even know how much traffic. And then like you were saying, they, I don’t think they would know like what that traffic is worth. Like, I think if we could call this guy up and be like, Hey, if you wanted to put some ads on here, that wouldn’t be too worrisome, you might can make a couple of extra, you know, a thousand plus dollars a month.

I feel like a lot of people would be like, how do I do that? They just don’t, they just don’t have a clue how to do it. You know, I totally agree. Cool. 

Jared: I work with a lot of local businesses at my, at my marketing agency. And when I tell them like, Oh yeah, by the way, once you start getting traffic to these random blog posts, you know, that, that, I mean, they’re not random, but you know, write some blog content and then we start getting traffic to them, like, Oh yeah.

We could throw bads and you can kind of pay for my service every month. I’m like, what? My mind is blown. So I’m sure they’d have a similar reaction. 

Yeah, exactly. Man, that’s a good one. I mean, you have a, you have a good little source of these, uh, these weird niche. I do. I mean, when I, when, 

Jared: when the sources hit, they hit really well.

I say, I will say that when people give me websites, they give me really good ones. So appreciate that. Uh, what have you got for us here? 

Uh, well today I found the pet psychic. Um, I just thought it was really interesting. I mean this, this, this is exactly what you think it is. It’s, it’s a pet psychic. Uh, Laura here, Laura who’s getting free promo, which is pretty crazy, Laura can like connect with animals or whatever and I happen to see this.

I mean, this is, this is not like some random site. This is, this is her business website. I was just like, man, I did not know that this niche existed. Until today when I happened to I was trying to think of actually chat GPT helped me figure out What are crazy weird interesting things that people do with their pets and it got me down this avenue in this path And I found this website and I clicked it.

I mean I haven’t even I mean, it’s actually a pretty awesome site. Like I clicked, uh, I clicked the video and they were like, it was people and there was a veterinarian and then they had a horse and she was like chatting with a horse and she was like, gonna, she’s listening to the horse or something and like having these, um, moments she’s, she, she’s the medium.

She’s the medium for animals. It’s like, it’s like wild man. It’s amazing. Uh, and so 

Jared: in terms of the psychic, is she like kind of. Okay, looks like a lot of it’s with maybe some animals or pets that have been lost. Um, and I mean, she’s written some books. Look at these. She’s got two books out. 

Yeah, in industry, I didn’t know exist.

Jared: Yeah. 

Until today. Which is kind of the beauty for me of this whole idea of like, man, let me try to find something random that I had no idea was there. So she ranks number one, apparently, for psychic pets. Like the term psychic pets. First of all, I didn’t know anyone was searching psychic pets. But they are.

Yeah. Yeah. And she ranks top for that phrase. Pretty crazy. 

Jared: That is crazy. So she’s got a featured story here on the tv show animal zone. Laura demonstrates her gift while talking with an old mayor Uh named butterscotch when laura asks how butterscotch is feeling she tells laura that things are okay except for a loose tooth in her mouth Later when dr.

Charlie liskey the veterinarian examines butterscotch Scotch’s mouth he finds and removes a loose tooth 

crazy the horse told her man 

Jared: So like you said, it’s a well done site like so many times. Yeah Feature weird niches and their sites like I featured that, you know, no offense to all eight. com, but you know, it definitely was built quickly.

It hasn’t been updated much. This is a good looking site. It’s just about a kind of a niche that like you said, is definitely, we could definitely classify as a weird. It’s 

just interesting. Right. Just something that, you know, you, you didn’t know existed and I’m like, man, yeah, this totally qualifies. Even though obviously the sites, yeah, the site’s great.

This is like, this is her business website. You know, I hope she gets a new customer because of our conversation. Um, well it needs, you know. They’re psychic pet or whatever. So, but, um, 

Jared: you know, we do have quite a bit of, uh, we do have quite a bit of listeners here. So you never know business could, could abound here.

It looks like her traffic is, uh, it’s not terrible. I mean, she’s a DR 39 makes sense if she’s been featured, you know, a lot of, you know, locations or something like that. She gets about 1100, uh, organic page views a month. Kind of like you mentioned, um, most of it is the homepage. She get her to write some blog content.

Yeah. She could, she could produce some blog content there about all this. That’d be very interesting. Um, 

hit her up. Hey, that’s a great agency, man. 

Jared: Exactly. She knows who to call. Uh, she knows who to call. Uh, let’s see here. Yeah, here’s, and like you said, she’s got a lot of good number one rankings. Um, smaller search volume, but, uh, but people are searching for it.

Look at that. Boy. Best pet psychic. She ranks number one for that. Even though it’s a very small search term. 

She’s it, man. People, people are looking. People are looking for their, uh, for a pet psychic. See, I didn’t know people were looking for that until today. Which is the beauty of a weird niche, you know, people searching for stuff that you didn’t know existed.

Jared: Oh man, I could hang my hat on some of the things we’ve found here in this podcast over the year and a half we’ve been doing this news segment. Well, that takes us to the end here. That hour flew by. Thank you for joining again. Um, I feel like talking to an old familiar face. You’re active in the niche pursuits community.

And, uh, thank you for joining here with us to talk about the news. Um, uh, appreciate it for everyone listening. We’ll see you back here again next week. Have a great weekend. Good luck. With the Google core update. Can’t wait to hear more success stories. Hopefully we’ll get to share some of yours here on the podcast in the coming months and years as recovery start to happen.

That’s my hope, but until then, have a great weekend, everyone. 

See you, Jared.