Google Search Team Deletes Tweets, Gemini Pro, Amazon Influencer, and 2 Weird Sites

Hey everybody, welcome back to the latest episode of the Niche Pursuits Podcast. 

Like they do every week, Spencer and Jared cover the latest happenings in the Google, SEO, and content creation space so you can feel informed and make the best decisions for your business.

The first news item they discuss is a tweet from Barry Schwartz

noting that Danny Sullivan and John Mueller from Google had deleted some of their previous tweets about the Helpful Content Update.

What does this mean? 

Watch the Full Episode

The HCU is not being rolled back, but what would lead them to delete their previous tweets? Is there a glimmer of hope for the people affected by the update? Is the potential December update actually a “rollback?” Or are we all reading too much into this? Spencer and Jared have a few thoughts to share on the subject.

The next topic is Google’s new update, Gemini Pro, which is already rolled out into Google Bard. A ChatGPT competitor, this is an advanced multimodal AI model that will be part of the Google Search experience very soon. 

Jared and Spencer talk about how Gemini and SGE are actually in conflict with what Google wants and show a few examples. What happens when Spencer pokes around to test Gemini out? What are the implications and how will this look going forward? Listen to hear what they think!

The next news item is how there are continuous leaks of information and tidbits of Google’s strategy that have been coming out as the company faces its major anti-trust lawsuit. 

Most recently, an article was published that offers a ton of insight into how Google works behind the scenes. Spencer and Jared share a few of the highlights, like Google’s many ranking signals, the use of keywords, how websites are rated and tested, and the Navboost system. 

Listen to the tidbits that surprised them in the super-detailed article.

Moving on to the side hustles, Spencer gives an update on the Amazon Influencer Program. He has 967 videos live and he shares a screenshot for over $3k in earnings for the last 30 days.

He talks about the cost of outsourcing his videos, and he and Jared talk about whether they think earnings are up because of the holidays or if this upward trend will continue.

In the ongoing competition between the hosts, Jared talks about reaching the 1000-video mark and his most recent earnings from the program, $4600. This is a great performance for a side hustle he started just a few months ago.

He and Spencer talk about the enormous possibilities of this side hustle and share an inspiring story of a podcast listener who earned $11k in November from the program and started in July!

The big picture message is that there are lots of side hustles out there that anyone can start and potentially earn life-changing money if they’re willing to put in the work.

Spencer then goes on to share his weird night site, which may very well be someone’s side hustle: Flpbk.io. 

This cool, little website lets you submit a 1-minute video and they will turn it into a flipbook and send it to you. 

Although this website ranks for 0 keywords and only gets about 17k visitors per quarter, which is probably direct traffic and social. That being said, if the traffic is targeted, the website could be quite profitable.

Jared shares his weird niche site next: Celebrity Cutouts, where you can buy masks, large heads, and life-size cut-outs of your favorite celebrities.

This DR28 site is doing pretty well, ranking for 47k keywords and getting 17.5k a month in traffic. They discuss how it’s most likely a print-on-demand business and encourage listeners to take advantage of the holiday sales to buy loved ones cutouts of their favorite celebrities.

And that brings us to the end of another episode of the Niche Pursuits Podcast. Hopefully, this episode inspires you to start that side hustle and keeps you informed of the latest SEO news.

See you next week!

transcription

Spencer: ​Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of this week in niche pursuits news. And, uh, anytime you have somebody deleting tweets, boy, it could be an interesting story. So, uh, we are going to tease that we’ve got somebody that’s deleted some tweets and is causing a little bit of controversy, uh, potentially.

But Jared, first of all, how are you doing? Good to have you. 

Jared: Good to be here for another day, another week in the news, the podcast for us to wax poetically about what’s going on in the online marketing world today. 

Spencer: Exactly right. We’ve got a, a few big, uh, SEO related stories that we’re going to jump into here.

Um, Google released a, uh, a new update to one of their tools. So we’ll share that, uh, as well. But, uh, in addition to the news, we’re going to talk about our shiny object shenanigans. Uh, we’re going to give a couple of updates, uh, on side hustles that we got going on. And then we got two weird niche sites that we’re going to talk about, uh, as well.

That, uh, mine maybe isn’t quite as weird, but I think is a really interesting site nonetheless. Uh, so I’m, I’m excited to chat about that. But, uh, in the news, so first of all, you know, Barry Schwartz tweeted this morning, and maybe let me share my screen so that everybody can see that. Um, Of course, he covers, you know, he’s been covering the SEO news, uh, world forever.

And, uh, so of course he noticed that, uh, Danny Sullivan deleted and, and John Mu both, uh, deleted a couple of tweets related to the helpful content update. Uh, and uh, John Muse said back on September 24th, 2023, that was shortly after the helpful content update came out. And I imagine at that point he was getting a lot of pushback.

People were seeing their sights dramatically drop in the rankings, and in response to that, what did he say on September 24th? Well, he said, I really don’t see a rollback happening. And I agree, it’s sad to see people put their heart and passion into making something and not seeing long term results. But things can be both heart made and not as helpful as the makers want.

And so that’s what he said on September 24th. And then it appears that, I don’t know when it was deleted exactly, within the last couple of days probably. It’s now been deleted. Um. It no longer says that. And, uh, so why would that be? Um, Jared, what do you think? Like, like, why do people go about deleting tweets?

Well, 

Jared: the general kind of sentiment about this one specifically is perhaps it means that the helpful content update has been rolled back or is subsequently going to be rolled back. You know, nobody likes to be, um, quoted as saying, I don’t see a rollback happening. When a rollback happens, that’s, this is again, just the, uh, the theory out there.

Now, Google went on to clarify again, we’re believing them, but they went on to clarify that their helpful content update has not been rolled back, which. I think it’s true, like, certainly I’ve seen little stories here and there about recovery here, recovery there, but by and large, like, the vast majority of sites that got creamed by the HCU are still in, uh, creamed status, but, um, maybe it’s omniscient in terms of what could come, maybe it’s, uh, people, maybe Google gave them permission to stop taking a beating about the HCU publicly, and they were allowed to go take stuff, I don’t know, you know, like, it’s hard to read too much into what it means, but, You know, to have both John Mueller and, uh, search liaison, which is Danny Sullivan, kind of removing tweets about the HCU at the same time.

Seems a little fishy, right? We should at least be talking about it. Yeah, I, 

Spencer: I agree. I mean, is it a glimmer of hope for people that were hit by the helpful content update? Right? That’s, that’s what, of course, where we go. And that’s what we want is like, gosh, our sites got hit really hard. Google said they’re super happy with this update.

They’re not going to change anything. But now those tweets have been deleted. So is that a glimmer of hope? Um, perhaps, perhaps, uh, we don’t know. Time will tell. What I found interesting is that, of course, you know, Danny Sullivan, the official Google search liaison, he responded to this and simply said. To clarify any potential confusion, no, the last helpful content update was not rolled back.

Um, and I just find that funny as though that does clarify any potential confusion. No, to clarify any potential confusion, why don’t you just tell us why you deleted the tweet, right? That would be a great way to clarify any potential confusion. But, uh, this cryptic tweet of no, the helpful content update was not rolled back.

Doesn’t really, um, clear up the confusion as to why you deleted a tweet. Right. Um, and it’s a very savvy way of not admitting that maybe in the very near future, the helpful content update may be rolled back, uh, to some degree, you know, you can still be in, you know, say, say in the right thing by saying it currently has not yet been rolled back.

So, 

Jared: yeah. Yeah. I like how, um, Barry finished his article, uh, quote, it does make you wonder if Google did roll back in the last. Helpful content update and why there has not been another helpful content update since September and why there was only one helpful content update. I presume you meant to put this year, you know, these a lot of questions.

Certainly. Um, I think if anything, like maybe we’re not, maybe this isn’t as indicative again. I agree. Maybe it is indicative of what’s coming by the way. But another, another way to look at it is. Maybe it had nothing to do with what’s getting rolled back or what’s changing, but more of a softening, because it certainly seemed like when this came out, John Mueller particularly was very staunch, even going to battle against a few niche site owners on Twitter, who’s very staunch about how helpful this update was, and perhaps this is maybe the end.

Maybe not significant enough to warrant a rollback, but a softening of their stance that this really is as good of an update as they kind of came out of the gate saying, 

Spencer: right? And also just 1 other thing to kind of, I guess, um, clarify Danny Sullivan, uh, apparently on his twitter account. He automates the removal of his tweets from his personal account.

Uh, and so he tweeted about the helpful content update on his personal account, apparently, and those were set to auto delete, uh, for anything that’s been in place for over a year. So that’s perhaps the reason Danny Sullivan’s tweets were removed, but doesn’t explain why the tweets He 

Jared: said, he said this software auto renews things that don’t get engagement.

Now, I didn’t track. Danny Sullivan’s most engaged posts of the year, but I’ve got to imagine when a groundbreaking Google update comes out and you’re the person in charge of communicating set updates. That might be one of your more engaged posts of the year. I don’t know. I guess I’m just thinking out loud.

I don’t have any data to back that up, but I mean, I don’t have any reason to not believe him. Like, you know, he’s lying, but that’s just, it’s weird. The whole 

Spencer: thing is weird because it’s certainly one of the hottest topics of the. Final quarter of the year, uh, is certainly the helpful content update, right?

Came out at the end of September and, uh, all Q4 that I feel like that’s all we’ve been talking about here, uh, on the podcast. So, you know, this, this sort of news topic is certainly a little bit more on the, on the rumor. And, uh, you know, he said, you know, he didn’t say a niche pursuits, gossip 

Jared: train. It’s 

Spencer: the, the niche pursuits, gossip train here that.

The Jared and I are fan in these flames here because it’s fun and exciting to think about, you know, does it provide this glimmer of hope? Does it mean that the helpful content update is going to change slightly? Does it not mean a thing? Uh, we don’t fully know that answer, but we’re always here every week to cover the 

Jared: news for you.

Maybe that’s the, uh, the December update you and I have been pining on and on about. It’s not actually an update, but a rollback, huh? A little Christmas gift under the tree. 

Spencer: And they would never call it a rollback. Let’s just be clear. Google won’t, you know, even if they do roll this back, it’ll be called some update, or it’ll be called a core update, and this is snuck into it.

So we’ll never know. What is rolled back and what isn’t other than hopefully we get to the point where a bunch of sites are showing us screenshots of like, oh, it was this and now it’s this and, uh, things appear to have been rolled back. So, 

Jared: yeah, Santa, all we want, all we want for Christmas is up into the right.

Spencer: That’s exactly right. Google Santa. We’ll, we’ll see what Google Santa brings. I do not know. Tell, uh, but always fun to talk about nonetheless. And, uh, speaking of gifts that Google is giving us, uh, they have just rolled out a big new update called Gemini pro and Gemini pro, I guess. Powers a few different things.

Um, I guess I’ll stop sharing this screen and share the one that’s, uh, related to Google Gemini. Um, so Google, uh, Gemini or Google Gemini Pro is a multi modal AI model. And it says it will be added to search and ads next year. So it’s not in search, I guess, regular search right now. Um, but Jared, as you’ve, you’ve said it already is implemented into SGE.

I know you played around with SGE and some of the results, uh, that are, that are there and we can look at that. Uh, but it is also already rolled out into Google Bard. So if people want to go over to Google Bard and play with that, you know, that does include the Google Gemini pro. Uh, update. It’s there.

It’s free. You can use it. And this is essentially supposed to be the competitor of ChatGPT, you know, OpenAI, their, um, GPT 4 model, right? Uh, Google Gemini is supposed to be the equivalent or better, if you listen to Google, uh, than, you know, the model used by OpenAI. And that’s in Google BARD for free, as opposed to paying 20 a month for ChatGPT Pro, right?

You get it all for free. So. Um, it’s supposed to be super interesting for, for a number of things. It’s multimodal, meaning it, uh, you can, uh, take pictures, right? You can give it images and it’ll tell you all about what’s in the images. It can read the text, uh, in the images. Of course, it’s, it’s text based as Jim, as a Google Bart has always been video.

Um, it can do live searches, right? And as we showed last week and pull in YouTube videos. So it’s got all of these different data sources, um, that it can look at, it can output, you know, for, and it’s supposed to be much more advanced. So kind of cool, uh, update from Google. I, if you go over to YouTube, I should have pulled this up.

Like, and just type in Google Gemini. Like there is a ton of official videos on the Google channel. Yeah, where they’re, they even had Mark Rober do like a whole science experiment based on the feedback he got from, uh, Google Gemini, right? So they’re really pushing this publicly, getting names like, you know, big YouTubers like Mark Rober and just tons of videos of like, I think this is supposed to be like, okay, Google Bard, Google Gemini is better than open AI and you should definitely be using it.

Jared: Yeah, there’s, um, just, you know, to even go further, there’s three levels of Gemini. Um, there is Gemini Ultra for complex tasks. There’s Pro, which is the highest performing model for a broad range of tasks. And Nano, which is looking like it’s specifically for on device tasks. So your phone, something like that.

Um, this is interesting. This is what they said in the announcement. Um, it’s currently being tested in Google search and it’s already reduced the latency of the SGE. The SGE responses by 40 percent in English in the U S uh, we’ve been complaining on this podcast quite a bit about the latency that the time that it takes.

And wondering, you know, how long SGE was going to last if it takes so doggone long to get a response. 

Spencer: Yeah, that’s a great point. Uh, so they’ve listened, they’ve listened, right? They, they saw our podcast that reduced the latency by 40%. Um, so things are, are happening a lot quicker. Obviously it’s super smart.

It’s 

Jared: interesting that their benchmark, I think I read this, uh, towards the bottom was benchmarked on chat GPT 3. 5. Okay. But you know, and maybe that’s because chat GP three chat GPT 3. 5 is the, the, the most advanced free one, right? So maybe that’s, they’re thinking is barred. Uh, Gemini will be incorporated into Bard.

Bard is free. We will benchmark our, uh, our LLM in essence off of chat GPD 3. 5. I was interesting though, because I don’t really care too much about how it performs up against 3. 5 cause I’m paying for four, you know, like I want to, I’d like to see how it compares. Up against chat GPT 4, but then again, would I really trust a benchmark commissioned by one of the creators?

Probably not anyway, so I guess it is what it is. Yeah, 

Spencer: and so maybe one of the other things that perhaps we can clarify is, um, it says that it’s going to roll out or it’s currently being tested in search. And that it will be part of the Google search experience soon. Now, does that mean, um, beyond SGE?

Like how is that going to be implemented into just regular Google search? Do you have any insights on that or does it just mean SGE? I 

Jared: don’t know. I mean, I think right now it’s pretty clear. It’s only SGE. This is kind of like to the best of the ability, like. It’s an LLM of sorts. And you know, that’s where that LLM is being kind of put into Google is through the SGE.

Right. Um, uh, I think it’s interesting. I was poking the bear a bit today on Twitter and stuff like Gemini is Google’s LLM of sorts, right? And when you start playing around with what it looks like, uh, Gemini is doing, it’s almost playing against a lot of what Google wants and publicly states, you know, um, you got a tweet pulled up.

It’s like, yeah, these are, these are things that Google does not want us to believe are relevant, you know, uh, domain authority. Uh, trust signals as per outside websites, uh, uh, you know, uh, uh, all these things, right? And yet here, uh, here it looks like the new SGE, or this is something I’ve never gotten before Gemini was released, is now showing us these sorts of things in the SGE result.

This is owned by Google. This is a Google product. And they’re telling us something that flies in the face of what Google wants us to believe. And there’s a bunch more. I, um, you know, I asked Bart a question about how content creators can use SGE. And it literally told me it could help me enhance and optimize my search engine rankings, which is something I’m not supposed to be doing according to Google.

So I find it fascinating, and we could talk for an hour about this, that Gemini and SGE are now in conflict with what Google wants, but they’re almost acting in different interests. 

Spencer: Yeah, it is really interesting, you know, from the previous screenshot that I just had, right, is talking about, um, authority, domain authority, right?

And that definitely on a number of occasions, uh, the search liaisons have essentially said, you know, Google doesn’t look at domain authority. That’s not, we just don’t content. We just surface the best content. That’s not a metric we look like, look at, which technically is true. You know, Google has their own page rank or other metrics, right?

That they look at, but I do, I do find it, um, kind of funny as you pointed out that, uh, Google’s tool though, says, Hey, this site probably isn’t trustworthy because it has a low domain authority. It has these things, right? And other things that yeah, officially Google doesn’t say to look at. And things that they don’t use, it’s 

Jared: just, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, what it is is a challenge for Google because Google is, you know, I think there’s just another notch in the ongoing, uh, we’ll say critique we have of the way Google’s PR communicates about search, right?

It’s like, you know, don’t, don’t look at what actually ranks, just listen to what we say ranks. And now they have a language model that is kind of substantiating a lot of the stuff they say. It doesn’t matter. Yeah. 

Spencer: So, um. Um, yeah, I went over to Google Bard and, um, so I started poking around or I was like, okay, let’s, let’s play with this new, uh, Gemini, uh, here.

And so I basically, uh, asked, you know, Google Bard, what, what’s a YouTube video, good YouTube video about internal link building. It actually gave some, some good ideas, bullet points. You know, these are some great launch points of where I could brainstorm some YouTube video ideas. Um, and then I was like, okay, what, what would make this video better?

You know, what would make this get more views? And I linked to one of my recent YouTube videos. Uh, and it, you know, it gave some ideas. Use stronger call to actions. Optimize the video for search. Uh, and it, it did okay. I, I wouldn’t say it actually did that great, uh, on some, some of the suggestions, but it’s okay.

And then, of course, I hearkened back to last week of like, okay, who is the face of niche pursuit YouTube channel? I said, who created this video? It seems like a really easy answer. And, and well, this time it just says it was created by niche pursuits. I was like, okay, you’re sidestepping the question. I see what you did there.

You got niche pursuits. That’s right. And I said, who is speaking in this video? In this video, the speaker is niche pursuits. All right. Well, so I asked right out who is the founder of niche pursuits? This is a softball, right? Like Google, like anybody can get that answer right away. The founder of niche pursuits is not explicitly mentioned in this video.

I just, so I’m a little baffled that Google barred with Gemini can’t, um, go out and find this and it appears that the reason perhaps is because of this dropdown, like it’s only looking at this. It’s. Narrowing it to YouTube, right? Because then further, uh, I said, uh, can you do a search on the web and find out who the founder of Niche Pursuits is?

And he says, I’m sorry, I’m unable to do that. Right? And so I found it really interesting, and so I started just a new chat. And I just asked, okay, who is the creator of the Niche Pursuits YouTube channel? And it got it right off the bat. So if you get it into this vein of like looking at YouTube, like it stays on YouTube.

Well, it’s 

Jared: really weird. And I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to dive too far into it when you brought it up earlier. But yeah, that’s really actually very interesting. Uh, as I’ve got out of focus here on the camera. This is so funny. This is a problem we were having for you beforehand. Don’t, don’t look at the hand.

Just look at what I’m saying. That’s right. We’ll get it. We’ll figure it out. Um. I think it’s really interesting because, uh, and again, I only had time to study Gemini for a few minutes and, uh, and watch the videos and whatnot, but Gemini is supposed to be multi, uh, it’s supposed to look at multi in the first way ever, because previous to this, if you would, and forgive me if I’m explaining this wrong.

Don’t have this rehearsed, but previously, like go to chat GPT, give chat GPT a video. It’s going to read everything in the video, but it’s not able to take and then go look at other sources outside or you give it an image and it’s going to read the image and kind of look at what, but Gemini is supposed to be able to do this cross platform analysis.

And data. And so I think that’s interesting because that’s kind of what Gemini’s supposed to be able to do is go, well, I know this is a YouTube video by the Niche Pursuits channel, so let me look elsewhere into everything else I can see and know about niche pursuits beyond just the video I was provided.

Spencer: Exactly. And so maybe I am still not on the latest Gemini. Right? True. We are guessing. Maybe that’s possible. Yeah. I, I don’t know because it was just released, but I assume everybody was on it, so let’s. Give the benefit of a doubt. Maybe I’ll try it again next week. Ask something about my YouTube channel.

See if you can figure out who owns that darn niche pursuits YouTube channel. Um, that really complicated question. So anyways, 

Jared: if, if nothing else, the upgrade clearly was worth it for Google because Nick pursuits is, uh, has been put to pasture. 

Spencer: Ooh, somebody needs to register that domain. Nick pursuits.

You’re altering. Alter Ego. I like it. Spencer 

Jared: Hawes and Nick Pursuits. 

Spencer: Nick Pursuits. Uh, anyways, uh, Any other Google Bard or Google Gemini things that you played around with that, uh, you wanted to mention? If you want to have a 

Jared: good time, I asked, I asked Bard, uh, what was it, um, uh, how can content creators benefit from Gemini?

Um, and it had a lot of interesting responses, similar to what you’re saying. Some of them are, were very good. Uh, it had some good ideas about, Hey, you know, you can load competitor information up into here and we can look at it and we can tell you insights. Like it had some really good thoughts. And then I had a lot of thoughts that you’re like, Hmm, if this is the most advanced LLM model on the planet, we’ve got a ways to go.

So, yeah, 

Spencer: yeah, no, it is, it is interesting. And I know there’s been analysis comparing, you know, Google barred and open AI, and I think that’s going to be an. Interesting comparison going forward because Google certainly is one of the other few companies that have deep pockets, uh, similar to open AI with Microsoft behind it, um, that can pour all this money and to get the latest and greatest and that advancements.

And so we’ll see if one of those just rise to the top, uh, and kind of where that lands, but it’s kind of fun to play with the tools, uh, along the way as they’re building. One 

Jared: final thought, I think it is, will be interesting to see Gemini’s impact on SGE. We’ve been noting for several months now here in the podcast, the diminishing role of SGE in the SERPs in terms of size, in terms of how many SERPs have an SGE getting generated, et cetera, et cetera.

So was that because they were waiting for Gemini to come out? I know Gemini was delayed a little bit. So perhaps, uh, Google was just like, let’s just. We know what’s coming. We know it’s going to be way better. Let’s dial back the SGE so people don’t get burned out on it. Or maybe that actually is the advancement of how Gemini is going to be implemented in SGE and a more reduced environment.

I don’t know. I think that’s something to pay attention to going forward. 

Spencer: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. It’s always, um, will be fascinating to watch and see what advancements impact S. G. E. Impact search results. Um, and so, yeah, we’ll, we’ll see here in the coming months how that’s all implemented. Uh, so in other Google news.

Um, there’s this antitrust lawsuit that has been going on now for a number of months, and, uh, there’s always been these little bit of leaks or data or information that comes out of some of this testimony. Sometimes it’s bigger than others. Um, and there was some more news that came out recently, uh, just within the last couple of days, at least this was revisited or resurfaced, I guess is the best way to say it, um, that.

Uh, just some of the ranking factors that Google uses, of course, to index, crawl and rank websites on, uh, on the web. And, uh, so in this article, Search Engine Land, they covered it here, how Google search and rankings works, according to Google’s Pandu Nayak. Uh, and this whole article gives a ton of data about their deep learning systems, their algorithms, their human raters, click and query data.

And, and other details about how SERPs are, you know, are ranked. And so we don’t really have time to dive into this because this really is, um, they cover a lot. Of any one of these subjects. Like if we were to jump into to rank brain or hummingbird, uh, or this, um, human IS system, um, and, uh, there was some others.

What was the, the glue, the Nava boost system? Uh, anyways, there’s like half a dozen different, um, Either systems or technologies or processes that they use to, uh, rank different results. And so we don’t really have the ability to dive into all of those. Uh, but some of the, you know, interesting highlights here is that, uh, in his testimony, he says, quote, somewhere along the way, he says, quote, that.

There’s maybe over 100 rankings is signals that appears to be lower, you know, than what Google has said in the past for a while. Google used to always say it was about 200 rankings signals that were used to rank pages. Uh, and then, um, that number ballooned briefly to 10, 000 ranking factors in 2010 when Google’s Matt.

Cuts explained at one point that many of Google’s 200 plus signals had more than 50 variations with a single factor. Right? So we don’t know the exact number, but it’s still today is probably over 100 ranking factors. So has that been pared down? Maybe, um, I don’t know exactly if that really has been, but some of the key signals that Nyack mentioned here is really the importance of the document.

We always call it, you know, the actual page of the website, right? So a single article is what Google kind of refers to as a document, right? The words that are on the page, the title, right? Everything that is Within that blog post, that really is the most important, uh, ranking signal. And I’ve always harped on this ever, you know, since before I created Longtail Pro, just the importance of actually mentioning the keywords that you want to rank for in your article, right?

Having those phrases in your document, right? So the document, the, the article itself is certainly the most powerful ranking signal of all, right? Uh, but then there’s things related to that topicality. Page quality, reliability, localization, and this nav boost, uh, system, which I don’t, 

Jared: have you heard of nav boost 

Spencer: before?

I don’t think I had heard of nav boost. That’s the first time I’ve heard of 

Jared: it. I think that was interesting. It basically said the nav boot boost system is one of the most important signals. The core system is focused on web results, blah, blah, blah. It’s also referred to as a memorization system. The nav boost system is trained on user data.

It memorizes all the clicks. On queries for the past 13 months before 2017. It was the past 18 months. The system dates all the way back to 2005. If not earlier, it has been updated over the years. Obviously, it’s looking at a lot of documents and figuring out things about it. So it’s the thing that calls from a lot of documents to fewer documents.

Um, you know, I think that. Uh, it, it, it points to a lot of what we’ve been talking about this year with user signals, 

Spencer: right? Yeah, it’s interesting. You know, is it, uh, purely based on, you know, clicks, right? That, that was also a leak from the antitrust lawsuit here is that they use data from users, right?

Clicks, navigation. Did they go back to the search results? And so nav boost system. At least that’s kind of what it sounds like. 

Jared: There were some other interesting things that were shared in here. Um, I agree with you by the way. It’s one of those things that, it’s a great read. I, I, it would be impossible for us to cover everything.

Like this is one of the most in depth kind of juicy type of articles. But definitely going down and maybe getting a little bit of discussion on that IS score. Uh, that, I mean, it’s based on search quality rater rankings. Which we’ve talked a lot about ever since the advent of EEAT. But I don’t know. From afar, it would seem like they put more stock on quality raters themselves, and like, they’re more integrated into their system than maybe I would have previously thought, based on what, you know, what is said.

Like, they’re more core to the algorithm than I think we were giving it credit for, maybe? Am I stretching by saying that? 

Spencer: No, I don’t think so. Right? Um, it, it says right here, the IS score is Google’s primary top level metric of search quality and it’s computed. Um, it’s an approximation of user utility comes from 16, 000 human testers.

Right? And so, of course, we’ve always had Google’s human radar guidelines, right? That you can use and you can read and look at. Uh, but this is clearly They get a lot of this feedback and this data from users going through websites, uh, and how they rate individual websites that goes into the algorithm. 

Jared: I mean, they have, like, he, Pandu really explains it, like, he gets into the details of it.

It’s a point system, he gives the example Wikipedia and how many points Wikipedia accounts for in the ratings and, you know, it’s very interesting, it’s very interesting. 

Spencer: Yeah, no, very interesting. Indeed. So there’s a lot here that people can read through. Um, you know, one thing that’s another interesting discovery here.

Google decided to do all Raider experiments with mobile. So according to the question was, you don’t know what the I s gap would be if human Raiders were looking at desktop presentation, right? Uh, and then the answer here from Professor Edward Fox, a Google expert witness, says Google made a decision some years ago to do all Raider experiments with mobile.

So that’s all I know. 100 percent of the way they test and rate websites is on a mobile device. So I think that’s maybe a wake up call for anybody listening out there. If you’re only looking at your web design or how your website looks on desktop, you’re, you’re missing out, uh, mobile. Might be impacting your search ranking, right?

If your website is a terrible user experience on mobile, but is amazing and stellar and fast on desktop, it doesn’t matter, Google’s not really looking, they’re certainly not looking at the user metrics on desktop, right? They’ve sort of built the algorithm based on all these human raters that do 100 percent of their tests on a mobile device.

We know the 

Jared: bot. Only crawls mobile and uh raiders only apparently look at it on mobile So, I mean there’s really not much left in google’s world to to justify desktop. 

Spencer: Yeah, it’s kind of crazy and that’s uh, Perhaps a wake up call for me as well. Like I still do everything, you know on my desktop It’s it’s nice, you know I sit here on my my my desk and I write my blog posts or anything else right on my desktop But not only our desktop, but how 

Jared: big is your monitor?

Spencer: Well, you know, i’ve got like 20 Two or 

Jared: 24 inches, right? Okay, that’s not bad. I thought you would have like a 60 inch monitor, you know. Got your dashboards up for niche pursuits, for Link Whisper, for RankLogic. I mean, you need a big screen to fit all the data for all those companies there. 

Spencer: Yeah, yeah, you know.

Not, not quite. But it is definitely different than mobile. Than mobile. 

Jared: My point being is A lot of us who sit behind a computer all day and work on some of this stuff have, you know, larger than expected. This is my point when I was, uh, a photographer. Like, you know, we look at our pictures on these big, amazing, um, uh, monitors that are designed to edit photos on.

They look beautiful. When you, when you send them to a client, they’re going to be looking at them on some office, some Dell 16 inch, you know, monitor at work that hasn’t been color calibrated in 30 years. And so, you know, exactly like Google’s not probably looking at it from the lens of your desktop and your monitor size.

Spencer: So, um, yeah, no, I think that’s fascinating something for people to think about, look at their websites, how they might be able to improve their websites, but certainly go and read this article on search engine land. Maybe see if you can get gather any other insights on how you might be able to improve. So, I mean, there’s certainly a lot of other tidbits that we could cover in here.

Maybe we will on another episode. We’ll dive deeper into some of these individual points, like the NAF boost system or, you know, rank brain or whatever it might be. Uh, but for now, maybe we’ll move on and talk about our. Uh, shiny object, uh, 

Jared: just one more humorous thought to transition out of this. And again, I don’t know who’s sitting in on the DOJ antitrust lawsuit.

He’s like, who sits there and listens to this stuff. But again, going back to the comedic live television publication, last time Google sat before Congress, where people were asking questions like, are you tracking me right now with my phone? Like. This is some pretty complicated stuff that they just shared in this article and the documentation.

And it’s long, it’s lengthy, it’s in depth. This is what we do to some degree for a living. And I’m going to have to read this a couple of times to understand it. I mean, I can only imagine what people sitting in this. Courtroom are trying to kind of piece together and figure out in terms of what actually Google is doing.

It’s got to be Slightly amusing at least from afar Yeah, 

Spencer: and and I agree and I think a lot of this this testimony that comes out like it isn’t big news like it when They say it it’s only when the SEO community hears about it or looks deeper into the the slide presentation that maybe was You know, an exhibit deep into the testimony or whatever that like, okay, now this is news, right?

It’s like, oh my goodness, they’re talking about how they actually, uh, the search engines work. And so it’s not the news you’re going to read on the New York times, right? But you’re going to hear about on search engine landed on this podcast. So CNN 

Jared: didn’t pick this one up, I guess what you’re saying.

Exactly. Anyways, uh, on to side hustles. 

Spencer: Yeah, side hustle, uh, shenanigans. And, uh, you know, we’re not going to rock the boat too much in terms of, uh, changing the subject. It, it looks like, you know, we’re in Q4, uh, Christmas is just a couple of weeks away and people are buying a lot of stuff on Amazon. And so fortunately for Jared and I, uh, we’ve been doing this Amazon influencer thing now for me for almost a full year.

Uh, I started in January of this year. I did. It was January of this year. And, uh, you know, I had a slow. Start took me a few months to really kind of get going Uh, but as soon as I got going then you started and you just blew me out of the water you blew right Blew right past me. So we’ll we’ll talk about yours here in a second, but Amazon Influencer is going well.

Uh, I love seeing the numbers for Q4. Um, and so for my, I’m going to share, uh, my Twitter thread because that’s where I talked about it just a couple of days ago. And that’s probably just the easiest way. Uh, I just sort of said that, you know, December is shaping up to be a really good month for the Amazon Influencer program.

I now have 967 videos, at least I did on December 6th, uh, when I tweeted this out and I shared a screenshot of my earnings. And so if people are watching the video, they can see that here, uh, on the screen. So this is a period over the last 30 days from November 6th to December 5th. Um, I’m at 3, 256 in the previous 30 days.

And you can see that, you know, over the last week and a half or so, my days are usually. Have been hovering around, I want to say 150, 175 a day ish. You know, I haven’t quite cracked the 200 a day, but I got one day that was very, very close, but, um, yeah, I’m sort of averaging in at this 150, 175 a day. So. I definitely think that December I will do more than 4, 000, probably more than 4, 500, but I don’t know for sure where it will end.

So it’s, uh, it’s nice to see this nice bump in earnings because, uh, unlike you, Jared, I’ve been outsourcing. All of these videos for the most part. And so I’ve been spending, you know, money. I, I tweeted out or people asked about, uh, how much I was spending. And, uh, my average cost is usually around 20 to 25, uh, per video.

It just kind of depends on the product. I pay more for higher priced, uh, products. That’s how it works. So it averages out somewhere, uh, between there. I have just shy of a thousand videos that people can do the math, right? I’ve spent probably 20 to 20. 5, 000 on the high end. I think it’s a little, you know, it’s not the high end, uh, but somewhere in between there, call it 20, 000 that I’ve invested.

And now, uh, my monthly expenditure for the last month, I spent less than 500. Uh, about 500 is my costs ongoing for, for new videos basically. Um, and so I’m, I’m profitable, right? I spent about 500 bucks, made 3, 200. So I netted about 28. 2, 800 in the last 30 days. And, uh, that should just continue to, to, to be great.

Right. I should net hopefully 3, after expenses in the month of December. And, uh, I should be very, very close to actually breaking even right. If I. My outlay was 20 grand and over the past year, I don’t think I’ve quite made 20 grand, but I should, uh, very soon, maybe in, in January or so, and then everything after that’s just gravy, 

Jared: hopefully.

I mean, your November is fantastic and your December is shaping up to be fantastic as well. Super curious to see how long we get to ride this, this gravy train of, of holiday earnings. You know, you kind of, part of me goes, Oh man, we probably just got this one little bump for black Friday, cyber Monday weekend.

Then we’re back to, but then the other part says, no, not already buys all their stuff that weekend. People are just buying stuff. Daily, uh, every day leading up to the, the kind of the, the holiday finality of it. So, uh, there’s every reason to believe that that stuff will continue right into December, all the way up until the 

Spencer: holidays hit.

Oh, I think so. Certainly if anybody’s like me, which I think a lot of dads out there don’t want to call out the dads, but sometimes we wait until the last minute to buy things. So I think all the way through like the week of Christmas, we’re going to be seeing a lot, um, a higher volume. Uh, certainly than, than normal.

So I think it’ll be good. And then I just, um, noticed here, of course, the first comment here is, uh, to my tweet was Jared has a thousand. You’re slacking. I didn’t see that. I guess that’s letting the cat out of the bag, right? Because I don’t think last week you would hit the thousand dollar mark. Nope. Not yet.

Jared: Spencer, I did not have time. I did not have time this week to make influencer videos. I will tell you what, but the competitive nature in me came out and I’m like, you know, I’ve come so far. I would hate to come in 20 videos shy. Of beating you to a thousand and so I um, I pulled it off. I have a thousand videos 

Spencer: Congrats, that’s huge Hats off to you.

I know how much work it is 

Jared: No, but so just bragging rights. 

Spencer: No bet just just bragging rights It does make me feel a little bit like a slacker like like the guy said because you’ve only been at this since uh, like may 

Jared: End of May. Yeah, Memorial Day weekend here in the States, so it’s like, whatever that is, May 25th or something like that.

Some, some number there at the end of May. That’s incredible. And to be candid, so it, it’s both Caitlin, my business partner, and I making videos. I’ve made a few more than her because I’m faster at it. You know, we probably put in about the same amount of time. And I have experimented a little bit with outsourcing some videos.

Um, I didn’t try hard. I had a neighbor. Made some videos went about their day and that was that but i’ve had the lion share the videos on there are me Bunch made by caitlin, but it isn’t one guy making videos. It is, you know, kind of a company approach with us Um, but yeah just eclipsed over a thousand videos.

I’m actually i’m looking right now. I’m at 1011, you know Why why stop the momentum? Why not just go a little further? So I hit 1011 right now at this point 

Spencer: just keep you just out of reach of me catching up. Uh So that’s good. Well, I’d hate, you know, 

Jared: I’d hate to wake up and somehow they rejected a video or something.

And all of a sudden I’m back below a thousand. I thought, you know, let’s not leave this to chance. Let’s really seal the deal. So, um, that’s, um, that was cool. I mean, I remember talking about a thousand videos being the marker in the summer, like late summer for me. So, um, and we joked about it. I think it was around late summer.

So yeah, I won’t say that it’s been something I’m dying to hit before the end of the year, but I do think that for me, it’s one of those who would have thought. That’s something that I hadn’t heard of at this time last year, that’s something that going into summer, I hadn’t started that I would have a thousand videos and just like you be, um, making it, you know, my case, I broke 4, 000 last month.

Um, I just pulled up where we’re talking my last 30 day average that includes like what the first six days of December. So the last 30 day average right now is at 4, 600. Oh, that’s awesome. 

Spencer: You know, and it’s incredible. It’s incredible. It’s incredible that in, in 

Jared: six months. So, um, you know, I, I did some math like since may, since I started, I’ve, uh, I’m above 16, 000 in earnings.

You know, and so, um, you know, we’ll come in, I believe that’s the math shoot. I should’ve brought that up. Um, uh, but yeah, we’ll come in at somewhere around the 20, 000 mark, just like you, absolutely amazing for a side hustle started in 

Spencer: May. Yeah, no, it’s incredible. I think it’s, uh, hopefully kind of motivational for people out there that it was, it was something that I had never heard about, you know, a year ago.

Right. I heard about somebody doing Amazon influencer videos. I had no idea what it was. I watched a couple of YouTube videos. I then heard, you know, some people that I actually knew that we’re in the niche pursuits community, right. That we’re making videos and doing well. And I was like. I got to try this.

This just sounds so fascinating us coming from the world of where we need to build a website. We need to wait for it to rank in Google. And then people need to, you know, come to our article, read that article, click a link, then go to Amazon and then buy something. Then I get my commission. We just cut all of that out and just put a video on Amazon.

Like this is just, is, I couldn’t 

Jared: believe it was real. I pulled it up. Just for clarity, I’m at, I’m at 14,500 ish for the year after November’s earnings, so I think I was anticipating that I would be between 16 and 18,000 by the end of the year. So just for clarity. Makes sense. If you do the math on that, just say, I started June 1st for nice round numbers, you know?

Mm-Hmm. , I’ve been doing it six months and 14 five like. That’s well over 2, 000 per month on an average from the day I started. Like I will tell you that it’s been a while since I started blogging, right? Like it’s been a while, so it’s hard to put myself back in those shoes. But if I could have been making over 2, 000 a month on average, out of the gate from my website in the first six months, that would have been my average.

Not I reached that average on month six, but that’s been the average looking back over the last six months. I mean, I would have been stoked about this. Eight years ago when I started getting into blogging. 

Spencer: Absolutely. 

Jared: And it’s only gotten harder in that in that world since then, you know, so Um, it’s it’s it’s really fascinating.

Now, of course, you can start a blog today start publishing today With the influencer account you have to qualify. That’s kind of the big bugaboo there. Uh but outside of that one sort of caveat, it’s a very Fascinating side hustle and you know This week, we’ve actually, both of us, or I only speak for myself, gotten a couple different people that have shared some feedback, uh, that they’ve started this year and that they have, um, uh, started doing Amazon Influencer this year.

And some part, you know, from what they said, at least from hearing us on the podcast, talk about it. I mean, you and I’ve been sharing some really great numbers, 3, a month, but there’s one story that caught my attention of someone who made hold, hold the phone here. Over five figure in the five figure number in the month of November.

And they just started this summer, 11, 000 in November. And they started even later than me. 

Spencer: This is incredible. I’ve got this pulled up on, on Twitter here. Matt super niche sites. Yeah. A total of 11, 000 from Amazon in November. And he started in July at, at zero, unbelievable, 

Jared: unbelievable. Now he did go on to say that granted, I spent a lot of money buying products to create videos on.

I also invested a ton of time to do research for products, but then he went on to say, but to see that massive growth in just four months is absolutely mind blowing. You know, so different approach i’ve talked about it quite a bit I published a video this week on my earnings and on the things I did wrong for black friday And it centered really around only going after household items Even if you had told me by the way that my black friday earnings would have suffered as a result I would have said well, that’s about all I have time for anyways, but still You know, Matt clearly went the other direction and said, I’m going to go strategically invest in products that some combination of how he evaluated probably underserved products, high price products, really well rated products, new products, brand deals, all these other things you can be doing on the program, but I mean, he’s got quite a runway now he’s got, uh, he went on to comment, he’s got.

I think over, how many videos did he say? It’s well over 1, 000. There it is. Yeah, 

Spencer: it was 1, 300 videos. 1, Yeah. 

Jared: See, he’s, yeah, that’s hard. It’s a lot of work in four months. He’s, he’s working at it, but. That’s, 

Spencer: that’s, I, I love it. You know, it just takes. Sometimes it just takes a lot of hustle, right? And I find that most people are unwilling to put forth the hustle.

Like, I hate to say it, but most people listening to this that are like, Man, I wish I could do that. A week from now they’ll forget about it, right? But somebody like Matt, he stuck with it for five, four months and just went all in and like put a ton of time and energy. And he’s, uh, man. Reaping huge rewards right now because it’s so 

Jared: cool.

So inspiring man. So inspiring just to see Like I mean I I had another person dm me and talk about how they made a thousand dollars And about how big of a deal that was for them because of you know Their website had gotten hit by the hcu and that’s a big deal Um, you know, so even in it’s kind of more basic like I made a thousand bucks and that’s helping out That’s a success story.

That’s an inspiration. Here’s somebody making what I would call life changing income, right? Like that’s the 11, 000 per month is, is, is significantly more than, you know, most people are making it a month at their day job now, again, granted he has expenses there, but nonetheless, like that’s, um. You know, that’s, that, that, that’s changing, changing your career potentially.

I mean, that, that, these are some cool stories. Very inspirational. Yeah. 

Spencer: And I don’t think either of us, um, are trying to convince people to do the Amazon influencer program. We don’t get anything if you do the Amazon influencer program. And in fact, it just adds competition, right? So somebody out there listening is it can create a video on a product that I created and I won’t make as much money.

So we’re, we’re just sharing our experiences because, you know, we get excited about side hustles, right? I. I enjoy the shiny objects, uh, out there. And so I put a little bit of my time out there, but I think the bigger idea that we’re trying to get across is not go do the Amazon influencer program, although you could do that if you want, but there are dozens, probably hundreds of different ideas, online businesses, side hustles that you could be doing right now, that if you really put hustle in for six months, like you can create life changing.

Uh, money, right? Niche sites is one of those. Amazon influencer is one of those. Creating a Facebook page that sends tons of traffic is one of those, right? There’s so many different ideas that you could be doing. You just need to find something that you’re excited about, passionate about, and just really stick to it and put the hustle in and do it.

And 

Jared: I think we’ve been clear like it hasn’t been all roses along the way like we had some really rough months where we were like man This is what a waste of time for sure 

Spencer: still could be but shown that the down clicks and 

Jared: Yeah, I was hoping the influencer program was gonna be kind of the anti venom to niche sites to websites because it’s like man There’s so many ups and downs and website building.

Maybe this will be a little more more flat a little more Less volatile. How’s that? Nope. Not so nope. Just as volatile algorithm. Exactly. Just a different form of volatility. So it, it isn’t for everyone. Um, but in the, you know, a lot of, I talk to a lot of people that want to talk about this podcast, you know, and I think a lot of people echo the larger point of it being an inspiring way to hear about side hustles, hear about success stories, hear about ways people are.

Finding to make money, uh, to change their lives, to replace their income, to, to set up a side hustle. And I think overall you can hear us talk, uh, but you can also listen to these kinds of people’s success stories that went out and did it as well. And frankly, smashed us in the process, just did it way better, which is so cool to see.

Spencer: Absolutely. Yeah, I agree. I applaud Matt and everybody else out there that maybe is building something and, uh, is seeing some success. So, um, kind of speaking of, of side hustles, I kind of feel like this weird niche site that I’m about to bring up probably was somebody’s side hustle. Uh, at some point, I don’t know if it’s a full time thing, uh, right now, but it’s, um, kind of a fascinating little product, little website idea.

That, uh, I thought I would share as my weird niche site. Um, and that website, uh, here is, essentially it’s, it’s pronounced flipbook. io. How are you going to say that? It’s not spelled, uh, that way. I mean, the idea is that it’s a flipbook, but it’s flpbk. io. So it’s flipbook without the, um, without the vowels.

In it, if that makes sense, right? So flip flip book. io, and you can see pretty readily if you’re looking at the screen, what it is. So if you know what a flip book is, um. It basically allows you to send in a video clip of about one minute in length and then it will turn this into a printed flipbook in the mail.

It will ship it to you. You can flip through it and it looks like an, you know, it’s an animated video. It’s a flipbook. Um, I have found this fascinating, probably. Uh, because my son, he’s nine years old right now, he has really been into flip books this year. Like, I, we have like a dozen, we bought him a package of like, you know, 10 blank flip books that are this exact size.

And he’s, you know, created those, he’s drawn a bunch of pictures and doing kind of silly things. He’s created his own flip books. And, um, and so seeing a website and a service that creates these flip books out of videos, I just thought it was kind of cool and just a very niche idea that, if I’m honest, I may actually buy a couple of these for Christmas.

Yeah. I think these would be great gifts. Probably one for my son that loves flipbooks. Maybe one for my wife just because, you know, anything sentimental. You know, it’s always good to get your wife, so. 

Jared: Now, one thing, Spencer, don’t buy it on December 23rd, okay? 

Spencer: Don’t buy it on December 23rd. You can order it now.

Oh, yeah, I can order it. Yes. I can get it here, you know, hopefully before Christmas, uh, is, is the idea. Um, so that’s on my to do list right after this podcast is, uh, by, by a flip book. So yeah, um, just to kind of a cool, uh, niche site. I don’t have the AAHREFs, um, raffled up. It’s, 

Jared: I want to ask you, how did you find this?

Because it ranks for zero keywords, it ranks 

Spencer: for zero keywords. So I saw this in a Twitter, uh, post, somebody shared this, uh, website. And I was like, you know what, that actually would be kind of, kind of cool to feature on the podcast. Uh, so it doesn’t get much traffic. It’s certainly from search. Uh, I did have similar web pulled up.

I should have pulled that up before. Um, so I could share it, but if I recall, it was about 17, 000 visitors a month. Um, so it must be a lot of direct, uh, traffic. Let’s see if I can actually get this up on the fly. Actually, I lied. That is on the quarter. So about 17, 000 visitors. So five plus. On the quarter.

So it’s, um, yeah, so it says 16, 000 here, but then here it says monthly visits about 8, 000, right? So it’s, it’s not a massive website, but I can tell you that if you get 8, 000 visitors of highly targeted. Traffic people that are interested in buying like that can be a very profitable business. Now I’m looking at similar web here in top countries.

The Korea Republic of Korea is 88 percent of the traffic. Um, that’s interesting. 

Jared: Maybe they ship out of Korea. 

Spencer: Yeah, I might need to, uh, double check if I can even get this here in the U. S. Um, and, uh, I mean, they’ve got a contact us page. I was just looking at that. 

Jared: It’s just 

Spencer: a chat bot. It’s just a chat bot.

So they may be based out of Korea and I may be already too late to get a Christmas gift, uh, for my wife. Uh, on this, but, uh, where did they get their traffic direct 21 percent social 52 percent makes sense says 21 percent is still coming from organic, but you know, mostly social indirect, it looks like. 

Jared: I mean, you know, if you, um, if you had your product line dialed in, you could, uh, and, and, you know, it’s, it’s different for every single product, but you could see yourself making a living off just pushing Facebook ads and different ads, you know, ads in different platforms.

Right. Uh, this is exactly, this is exactly the type of thing you see kind of popping up in your Facebook feed, your Instagram feed, something like that. You know, this looks very reminiscent of the stuff I see popping up in my ads. They probably have a pretty healthy margin. Looks like they’re charging 25 bucks a flip book.

That can’t cost a lot to make. It’s more about just the technology they’ve packaged together. So their margins have to be pretty good. 

Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. I think it is. I think it’s a social play. I think you get people sharing this more often running some Facebook ads, right? This is definitely the type of product, like if I saw on Facebook ad, like I might at least click over and check it out.

Yep. 

Jared: Right. This is made for Facebook ads made for, for, for Instagram ads, that kind of stuff. 

Spencer: Exactly. Perfect for birthdays, gifts, you know, holidays, that sort of thing. Mother’s day. Um, gosh, I feel like this business should be doing better. So we’ll see, maybe we’ll check back in in six months and see what’s happening.

Maybe I’ll order it and I’ll let everybody know how the flip book looks. There you go. 

Jared: Yeah. I mean, it’d be fun to see how they incorporate this in with like an app, you know, I mean, in theory, if they did it really well, like you’re, you should be able to go straight from. Um, they could target your mobile device where I already have my video.

They could target Matt specifically on say, Facebook. I click, they go cool. Which one do you want? Which video do you want? They say just upload a video that is shorter than a minute. You know, they gray out all the videos on my phone that are less than a minute, or that are more than a minute. I can pick one that isn’t.

And then, bam, I just hit a button. And, uh, you know, it taps in with my Apple Pay or whatever. And I could have that ordered in 30 seconds. You could see how this could be very successful in an ad environment on social media. Yeah, 

Spencer: I agree. Great, uh, great ideas. We’ll, we’ll see what happens. But, uh, just wanted to highlight this sort of weird, uh, different, uh, niche product here.

Kind of slick looking website too. Yeah, absolutely. So what do you got for us, 

Jared: Jared? My website is not as good looking. Okay. Uh, you know, a couple of weeks ago or months ago, I don’t remember this time. Do you realize by the way, that I almost featured. A weird niche that I’d already featured. 

Spencer: Uh, I don’t remember 

Jared: that.

I was, I didn’t tell you about it. I was minutes, we were like an hour or two away. And I was, I had already prepared, put an agenda, this weird niche that I had saved. And I was like, I feel like I had this flashback to where I talked with Spencer about this. And I had to go back and look at our past recordings and I found that three months ago, I had already done this weird niche.

Man. Dementia is setting up. The audience would have roasted me on that one, so anyways. Yes, they would have. I needed a replacement pretty quickly today. Alright. Uh, this one was actually shared to me by Tony Hill. Uh, okay. Uh, and uh, so, I’ll cut to the chase here. Uh, it might say a lot about Tony, I don’t know what he’s looking at.

Celebrity cutouts. com Ha 

Spencer: ha ha ha. You got Dwayne The Rock Johnson front page here. Look at this! 

Jared: You can have Dwayne The Rock, uh, you can have mini duos by the way. You can have Dwayne and uh, who is that with him there? Sitting, um, standing, basically this is a celebrity cutout. Kevin Hart. There you go, Kevin Hart, yeah.

You can order a, um, a, a celebrity cutout. A life size, to my knowledge. You can do minis as well, by the way. But you can do life size cutouts of different celebrities to put up in your office, at your home, on your desk, on your mantel. Uh, and they sell these, and they sell a lot of them. There are They do. 33, 000 pages.

Spencer: Oh, wow. 

Jared: Now, I don’t know if all of those are sales pages. I think the majority of them are, to be quite honest with you. Um, it’s just unbelievable. So, you can basically order different sizes of this. They have masks. Uh, life size, they also have big heads, you know, you go to the, you see the big heads at like the, the, the football games and stuff, where you can order the big heads and carry them around, you can do that.

Um, I don’t know what this buddy is. Is that somebody you can sit with at your dinner table in case you’re 

Spencer: lonely? Get a buddy for yourself? Get a buddy for yourself. Probably single fans out there. You can 

Jared: order singles and then doubles. They’ll put different celebrities together for you. Um, they have Christmas cardboard cutouts that are focused on celebrity Christmas themed cutouts.

Uh, they’ll do for you like a Christmas cutout nativity. Um, a couple, a little bit of information on just the stats here. So they are a DR 28. Uh, so, uh, they, they rank for 47, 000. You’re just laughing. Is it, is it? 

Spencer: I’m just clicking on somebody. I don’t know who this guy is. I’m just wondering why somebody would want a large cutout of I’m sure he’s a nice gentleman, but 

Jared: He looks nice.

I just don’t understand, uh, you know, with 33, 000 pages, you’re gonna have to scrape the bottom of the barrel on celebrities if you had 33, 000 of them. Yeah, that’s, that’s true. You know, you gotta move past the A list celebrities here. Uh, 47, 000 keywords that it ranks for. Uh, 17, 500 a month organic traffic according to Ahrefs.

Uh How much was it? Organic traffic? 17, 500 a month. Okay, okay, okay. You know, respectable. Gotta be a surge right now. Um Maybe for the holidays. I mean, I could see, I could see where this is like a gag gift and like sticking it in your, uh, you know, in the garage or something. Your wife walks out and Kevin Hart’s standing out there or something over in the corner.

Um, so it was, it took. It took a big drop in the October core update, but it did not seem to take a hit from the helpful content update. So apparently what you’re looking at right now is helpful content. I do find it interesting. You got the page up here. So I’ll talk about it. They tout made in the USA, right?

But everything is in pounds or euros. The measurements are in centimeters. Um, they got a little target market situation going on here, but Hey, they’re featuring their trust pilot score in the footer. Do you see that? 

Spencer: Yeah, I see the trust pilot score. Yeah, very well liked, 

Jared: uh, again, it’s a UK website. Uh, sorry, a UK, uh, it’s a UK website made in the United States.

It’s a UK Trustpilot score, but 4. 8 out of 1, 794 reviews, so that is not bad at all. Yeah, 

Spencer: yeah, it’s a UK, uh, Trustpilot score. Yeah, I didn’t notice that. Okay, very nice. Uh, 

Jared: no, that’s good. So, you know, if you’re looking for a Christmas gift, you were saying you still have some Christmas gifts to order, Spencer.

I mean I do. 33, 000 options here for you. Ooh, you know, like, 

Spencer: I know you’re joking, but There’s a couple celebrities that my wife would find quite hilarious if it’s just a bachelor fan That’s actually we did talk about bachelor. Yeah at one point That’s not one I was thinking but you know that that could probably get a chuckle as well Certainly if the latest bachelor show on the doorstep Lifestyle good Yeah, you got gingerbread cookies now.

I mean this has to be Like a print on demand thing, right? Totally. I mean, this is just, they’re just, they’re just loading up thousands of celebrities and when somebody owned, you know, buys it, they, they print it. Yeah. They don’t have inventory. Exactly. 

Jared: Like, and just reveal, you can get inventory and And make it wholesale, or you can go through many of these print on demand services that you charge a lot more because it’s basically a one off every single time they printed, but you don’t have to worry about inventory.

You don’t have to worry about storage. You don’t have to worry about that stuff. Usually has a drop ship straight from the print on demand to the customer. It’s just like completely outsourced. Your margins are a lot less, but you don’t have 

Spencer: to worry about it. Yeah, so it looks like a mask is 5. 69. Okay.

All right, not bad. Not bad. Um, no, this is great. This is a, this is a fun website. A couple of good websites for Christmas shopping. We didn’t do this on purpose, but tis the season, right? Celebrity Cutouts has got their Christmas deals going on. Flipbook. io, that’s just good for any, you know, holiday. So, um, so there you go, Potentially Christmas ideas that also just happen to be weird niche sites.

Jared: I’m going to laugh when, you know, we’ve been starting to get people sharing their stories about their Amazon influence for success. I’m going to laugh when we start getting tagged on Christmas gifts they gave to their, uh, family or significant other based on our, uh, our, our news podcast. 

Spencer: Listen, you know, we’re broadening, right?

What, what we cover here. You not just SEO news, you want gift ideas. We got gift 

Jared: ideas. But you should see if you get an affiliate link for some of this stuff before this show goes live. 

Spencer: There you go. Yes, I should. Yes, I should promote this. I mean, it’s going out to the whole email list. Might as well make a few bucks.

You 

Jared: could make a pretty penny selling some flip books here. The commission on 

Spencer: that. Now, you know, the real reason I do this podcast, all the back end affiliate commissions. Got to pay 

Jared: for those Christmas gifts one way or the other. 

Spencer: That’s right. Kids aren’t getting any smaller. Gifts are bigger and bigger each year.

So have a good point. Oh, man. All right, Jared. Well, we’ve gone over an hour. So, uh, we’ve covered the news, we’ve covered the, uh, side hustles, we’ve covered the weird niche sites. I think we’ve covered it all. So thank you everybody for listening. Uh, appreciate you all for tuning in, Jared. Thank you once again for joining us, uh, here on the podcast.

Jared: Always good to talk about the news. Have a great weekend, everyone. We’ll talk to you next week. 

Spencer: Goodbye, everyone.