Meet the Man Killing Google Search…

Welcome back to another episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast! Are you ready to hear the latest news affecting Google, SEO, AI, and web publishers?

They kick things off diving straight into a particularly spicy topic: who’s killing Google Search.

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They maintain that it’s an inside job, and talk about the news that came out this week about an internal meeting at Google regarding the division’s “new operating reality” and the decline in search queries and engagement.

Word on the street is that the man who heads the Search team is the man who killed Google Search.

Spencer and Jared talk about this possibility as well as a little bit about the history of Search, the results of updates over the years, why results have gotten worse over time, how ads have been redesigned, and how Google is trying to squeeze more money out of Search results.

What incredible irony does Jared point out? What’s Spence’s takeaway for bloggers? Is Google going to implode?

Spencer and Jared then move on to a related topic: how product recommendations have broken Google. They reference the Housefresh debacle from a few weeks ago, and talk about how the search for products has changed over time. 

How do we know if the reviews are honest, or if they’re sponsored, or if they’re authentic? And what does the future hold for product reviews?

The last article they discuss is how Google has become defensive when it comes to its Search quality and forum results.

Experts are pointing out that the results being delivered by Google on Reddit offer very poor and misguided advice, especially when it comes to health queries.

How has Danny Sullivan responded? Why do Spencer and Jared talk about the difference between “trust” and “like?”

Moving on to their Side Hustle Shenanigans, Spencer talks about his Amazon Influencer videos going live on YouTube. Before his channel got shut down, he was getting between 100 and 200 views per day, peaking one day at 250.

Now his biggest day has been 11 views. He and Jared talk about why this may be as well as his process for getting his videos live on YouTube.

What program does he recommend using to automate the process?

Jared then talks briefly about his Alt G Conference, which was held just a few days earlier, and he shares some interesting stats and stories from that online event.

When it’s his turn, he talks about his email newsletter side hustle. 

He recently launched a second email newsletter using content from one of his sites that was crushed by the HCU. He goes through many of the steps he took to get the project off the ground, so tune in for some great ideas!

When it comes to Weird Niche Sites, Spencer shares his, which is Brick Economy, on the economics of Legos.

The site offers the current value on lots of Lego sets as well as annual growth of certain themed Legos, and the ability to track the prices of your own Legos. It’s monetized with affiliate links and display ads, and according to SimilarWeb, it’s getting over a million visitors per month.

When it’s Jared’s turn, he shares his site, Tractor Data, which is a small, family-run business that has been tracking data on tractors for the last 20 years. This DR61 site includes a news section and a directory and gets almost 400k pageviews a month, according to Ahrefs.

What keywords is it ranking for? Does it rank first for any terms? Is it making any money? And what kind of potential does Jared see in the site?

As both of these sites are doing well in Google, what can we learn from them and their strategies?

And that brings us to the end of another informative and inspiring episode. See you next Friday!

transcription

Spencer: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of this week in niche pursuits news. And today we’re going to talk about a huge story all about the man who is killing Google search. Who is this person that is killing Google search? Well, it is actually a Google employee. It’s an inside job, if you will. And we’re going to talk about who that is.

And some of the emails, internal emails that have now been made public. And so there’s a lot of evidence behind this of why the search quality of Google is going down. And maybe it’s due to this person. Uh, and so we’re going to dive into that story. We’ve got a few other stories as well. Um, related to, uh, how Google product recommendations maybe are actually further getting worse and worse.

Uh, Danny Sullivan’s comments on forums. Reddit results, all of those things and a whole lot more. Uh, and then of course we have a couple of side hustle projects that we’re going to give updates on that. Hopefully you guys find interest, interesting things that we’re just working on the side. And then finally, we’re going to bring it home with two weird niche sites.

One each, uh, Jared, how you doing? Welcome to the podcast. 

Jared: You know, Spencer, we’ve been doing this for a year and a half now. It’s finally good. It’s good to finally have an answer on why search results 

Spencer: stink. That’s right. We, we have somebody that we can pin the blame on finally. 

Jared: Uh, and here we’ve been planning it.

Well, we haven’t been spreading the pinning across the board and I guess we can just laser sharp focus our efforts now. 

Spencer: That’s exactly right. We know who, who to target. Uh, so. So what happened, right? I’m going to give just a little bit of a backstory because there was a all hands on deck with the Google search team that just happened a couple of days ago.

Maybe it was, you know, Monday, maybe three days ago, something like this. And it kind of introduced to the world a little bit, um, because this internal memo came out and the highlight of this meeting came out publicly. Um, and so the head of search is, uh, Prabhakar Raghavan, right? He is the head of search.

Hopefully I pronounced that properly. Yeah, but he basically in his internal memo and in the meeting, it basically said, Hey, we are facing a new problem. Operating reality. And just some of the highlights here are basically that, um, he warned employees that the search division faces this new operating, uh, reality.

Um, they’re softening revenue and user engagement metrics for Google’s core search product. And recent quarters have seen weaker than expected growth in search queries and engagement. Right. And, uh, he kind of goes on to basically say, Hey, you’re going to have shorter timelines. You’re going to need to do more and we’re going to need to essentially, my word, squeeze out more revenue with every search query.

Um, and so, uh, Raghavan reportedly told a gathering of 25, 000 employees. I think we can agree that the things are not like they were 15 to 20 years ago. Things have changed, right? And he cited heightened competition, regulatory environment, yada, yada, yada. And we can dive into this a little bit more, but.

This meeting, this all, you know, 25, 000 employees that he gathered, you know, together and sent this memo out to, uh, kind of put this, the head of search, and I’m going to try to say his name one more time, Prabhakar Raghavan in the national spotlight. There was tons of news coverage of this meeting of this memo, and I think I could be wrong, but I think part of that sparked this.

Commentary that we’re going to cover a little bit more in depth because it’s extremely interesting, right? So this is an article written by Edward Zitron called the man who killed Google search. I’ve already said his name a couple of times. So, uh, the current head of the search team apparently is the man who killed Google search.

Now, Jared, do you want me to try and give an overview of, um, Opinion on this analysis, or do you want to kind of jump in here and give some of your highlights and thoughts? 

Jared: Oh, there’s guy. Um, let’s see. I have one specific thing I want to come back to about the memo and about the article about the all hands on deck.

I think it’s better to come back to it. Let’s dive into this article. This article has been making waves. I’d say on a national level, not just an internal SEO level. And I think there’s a lot to unpack there, but I’ll save my thoughts for later. collectively. 

Spencer: Yeah, there,

20 minutes, half of the podcast, right? So you really, I would recommend reading it. It’s super interesting and gives you some insights into kind of the history of Google search. Um, somebody, you know, a couple of names, Ben, um, GMEs or Gomes? Maybe it’s Gomes. I think it’s Gomes. Yeah. Ben Gomes, um, has been with Google since 1999, like the early days of Google search and a lot of people there.

This article paints him as sort of the good guy that’s always tried to make sure the quality of search was good. Thinking about the end user first, making sure it’s a good experience. So they come back again and again. However, uh, before 

Jared: we jump into the podcast, I wanted to let you know that today’s episode is sponsored by search intelligence.

Here’s a short clip of Ferry from search intelligence, showing you how their agency built digital PR links to a client’s website. 

In this video, I will show you how we landed a placement on BBC and dozens of links in massive regional online publications such as Wales Online, Daily Post, and many more.

This PR campaign was about the easiest place to pass your driving test for the first time in the UK.

This is how we’ve done it. We simply went to DVLA website, found the latest car driving test data by a test center, and downloaded the data in a CSV format. Once we had the data, all we had to do is to look at the number of total tests per test center, then look at the number of first time passes to calculate the percentage of people who pass their test for the first time.

Once we have the percentage numbers, We created a press release with our findings. Then we went to Roxhill and found journalists who talk about driving tests and also look for journalists who write in regional publications in the UK. In total, we have found about 1, 800 journalists and sent them our press release by email.

Within less than a day, our story got picked up by BBC, Cornwall Live, Wells Online, and dozens of other publications in the UK, providing our client a tsunami of backlinks, perfectly relevant to the audience of the client, who is a specialist in learner driver car insurance. I hope this video is helpful and it shows you how you can also build links with freely available data from official sources.

Jared: If you want similar link building PR campaigns for your website, Head to search intelligence. co. uk and get in touch with them now. 

Spencer: Then there is, you know, Prabhakar here that has worked his way. Originally he was with Yahoo, uh, search from, I think, I want to say 2005 to 2012. That went well. And as this article points out, that is like the exact timeframe that Yahoo lost its massive market share.

It went from like 35 percent market share of search Down to by the end, it was like maybe 15%. And of course it’s dropped even further since then. Um, and so what does Google do when they see that? Well, they bring them right over to the Google team, right? Uh, yeah, you tank Yahoo search, let’s bring you on.

And, um, there are a lot of internal emails that were. Sourced from the DOJ case against Google. And so you can click on these and read the internal emails about all of this back and forth between the people that were trying to keep the search, um, results, high quality, user friendly, uh, and then, you know, which, which was like gomes, right?

Trying to keep it a great user experience. And then, uh, Prabhakar, who. Uh, was brought on as the Google ads person, right? So he was all about the money and these two teams started to, um, kind of intermingle, disagree, intermingle, right? Uh, intermingle. Originally they tried to keep the teams very separate because a lot of reasons, right?

Uh, but eventually Prabhakar took over search, right? A lot of it because of his. Ability apparently, right. To kind of drive additional revenue. And so it’s a pretty scathing article of how, uh, one individual kind of play a huge role in using sort of this managerial, you know, numbers based, uh, style to. Try and, uh, grow, grow, search, grow revenue, and do all sorts of things.

That’s apparently seemed a little bit of shady. One of those is potentially in 2009, um, or 2019. Thank you. Um, a couple of things happened. Um, there was a core update in March, 2019, but apparently a lot, a lot of people felt like rolled back a lot of the things that happened with, uh, Google’s Penguin update that happened in 2012.

So a lot more spammy results were showing up and, uh, part of that maybe is so that people would go back to the search engine and search again, I guess. Right. To get the, the attempt was to try and, and increase the number of queries that people were searching on Google. And it’s like, well, if you have bad results.

Maybe they’re going to come back, right? They didn’t get it at the first result. So they’ll come back and search again. Um, so that’s maybe suggest that, Hey, he was the reason behind a lot of the results got worse and that was intentional. Uh, and then also, um, They rolled out a redesign of how ads are shown on the platform, right?

They, instead of this bright green word of ad, it was kind of suppressed a little bit, it was just in black letters, right? It intermixed ads with organic results made it hard to distinguish between the two, um, lots of other little changes, but kind of the bottom line is this kind of scathing review that.

Uh, Prabhakar Raghavan is the person that led this, um, sort of movement to decreased, um, quality of search results and, uh, squeezing out more ad revenue. And there has been so many articles written publicly about the decrease, the decline in Google search results. And so he’s sort of the villain, the one.

Kind of behind all of this. And he seems to be in very close, uh, connection, cahoots, whatever. Uh, with CEO, uh, Sundar, uh, Pichai seems to really like him a lot. And there was one quote that I wanted to read and I’m gonna have to go over to a, um, Our doc, where I, where I had it here, but it basically says, okay, now Raghavan has told those working on search that their new operating reality, which we referenced in the beginning is one with less resources and less time to deliver things.

Rock master Raghavan is here to squeeze as much as he can from the corpse of a product he beat to death. With his bare hands. Ouch. That hurts. 

Jared: So much to talk about here. Um, so much, so many things. I mean, for one, from, uh, from one perspective, we have been a lot of us blaming the poor search results on the influence of AI.

And not to say that that hasn’t had an influence, but it’s important to look at actual data. And that’s the thing, like we surmise a lot. This article for the most part is based on actual data, emails that were exchanged, things that happened, conversations that took place, uh, items that were, were changed.

And, and, and there’s obviously a growing narrative that’s, uh, based on fact of the merging of the. Uh, organic search team with the ideals of the ad team. Obviously the revenue is an important facet for any publicly traded company, but it looks like since this gentleman came to term, came in, uh, it came into power in terms of search.

It looks like they’re, um, sacrificing longterm results for short term gains. 

Spencer: Yeah, that’s exactly what it looks like. Um, and again, he kind of references this, you know, McKinsey consulting style of, you know, just kind of doing everything you can with the product to to, to squeeze more money out of it and maybe even decreasing the quality.

Of the search product itself so that it makes more money. Uh, and so all of those that have been saying, Hey, Google search results are getting worse and worse. There’s actually, like you said, some hard evidence to support that potentially now. 

Jared: Now I will say one thing I’ll hold it up on camera here.

Google’s stock has tripled since he started in charge of search. So perhaps that’s why the referenced CEO that you mentioned loves him. Yes. Um, I want to go back to that all hands meeting and the memo that was sent out. And pull a quote that he said, and I think it ties in. So interestingly, he, he says, quote, people come to us because we are trusted.

They may have a new gizmo out there that people like to play with, but they still come to Google to verify what they see there because it is the trusted source. And it becomes more critical in this era of generative AI. And I find. That to be such an interesting comment. No, that wasn’t said in 2019. That was said days ago in an era where you are happily promoting.

Comments about products and Amazon URLs instead of say product reviews or additional perspectives and saying that that’s the case because people prefer user generated content over your own search results. And so this. Complete circle narrative here is so interesting to see him come out and say that people come to us because we’re trusted and Specifically when it comes to products they look to Google which we then refer them to reddit because they don’t trust Google boy Is that just a weird ironic circle of a 

Spencer: statement?

It’s this yeah, it is just this yeah circle argument It 

doesn’t hold water 

Spencer: Right. And, and still he takes this sort of management approach. The next quote here, you know, is basically saying, Hey, project deadlines are shortened. There is something to be learned from the faster Twitch, shorter wavelength execution.

Um, just talking about, Hey, we need to get things done faster. Things are moving quicker. It’s like, boy, there’s, um. There’s a lot going on and there’s a lot in flux. And I guess that’s what I sort of see as the takeaway here for SEO is for bloggers is that, uh, there’s a lot of movement and commotion even now publicly, um, showing that the internal workings of Google are not like some stable thing.

Like it’s very much in flux and they’re tweaking, they’re changing their, um, It feels like almost a little bit like panic mode of like, Hey, we got to have an all hands on deck meeting. We don’t got time to mess around. We need to throw something at the wall and see what happens. That’s a little bit what it feels like.

Jared: And to your point from what you said earlier, where you referenced how it’s like the rot economy and they’re just trying to squeeze more water out of that rock that they have. And I mean, to your point of that last quote, so what are you going to do? Just squeeze. It’s still a rock that doesn’t produce water like you can’t get anything more out of it.

Uh, from a product development standpoint, moving faster with shorter deadlines isn’t going to fix the fact that. Sounds like searches isn’t working. It hasn’t really worked since we lost the true intent of what, uh, the goal of search is, and we focused more on blending the revenue targets than we do on blending the user user experience.

Again, I’m not trying to try to actually keep my opinion out of this on this one. Normally I’m first to throw my opinion. I’m actually just trying to piece together. The narrative in these various memos and articles to kind of bring it all into a statement of sorts, if you will. 

Spencer: Yeah. And it’s really interesting to think about, um, kind of the chatter that’s within the community.

A lot of people are now, uh, you know, it was a year ago or something, the New York times article that we talked about, you know, when, uh, the author talked about. Users a pending the term read it to get better search results. Um, you know, back then I was sort of of the opinion, you know, Google results are, they’re really not that bad.

Um, but it feels like since that article was written, Google results have gotten worse. And especially after the helpful content update. I actually feel like things are worse. I mean, now we’re, we’ve got Reddit all over the place, Quora all over the place. Um, and as we’ll talk about a lot of sort of product recommendations are all over the place, um, And if we were to just look at the community and what we’re talking about, it’s almost like we’re predicting that Google is going to have this massive demise of some sort.

Um, but you just pulled up their stock price, right? They’re doing better than ever. Um, there’s some nuance there because they Google alphabet. The company has a lot more than just search, right? Uh, going on. But, um, You know, a couple of weeks ago, we talked about, Hey, being is, is increased their market share of search just a little bit.

It’s not a lot. That’s 

Jared: referenced by the, in the memo, he says, increasing competition is one of the big reasons for why this whole memo and why this change of, of approach is coming. 

Spencer: Right. Um, but it’s interesting because every company has this sort of growth phase, the stable phase, and then this. Maturity phase, right?

Where they maybe start to see this little bit of a decline. And so Google is maybe there. I mean, there’s still the giant 800 pound gorilla in the room and they probably will be for a long time, but there’s a lot of space now. There’s chinks in the armor. Of these younger, faster, more nimble competitors potentially to innovate and come in and chip away at that.

Jared: And, 

Spencer: um, 

Jared: you know, it’s important to kind of re reference some of the other things that we were talking about in previous episodes, probably maybe three months ago, you and I are terrible at dates. We really should have like a running punch list here, but I’m going to guess three months ago or so that memo, the internal, um, Uh, somebody, a Google employee, a Google leader shared on LinkedIn about what the culture is like and referenced, uh, like the large companies that felt too big to fall that went on to fall in past and previous history, right?

The Boeing’s, uh, which haven’t fallen, but you know, have started to fall and then referenced other companies that have completely gone, gone out the door because of. Literally these things that were referenced in the article you have up right now, cultural problems, changing the focus of the company to be on short term, typically revenue based targets at the expense of the long term core that made it possible.

Successful in the first place. 

Spencer: Yeah, that, that is a great reference to that. I wish we had had that LinkedIn post pulled up, but I remember it exactly was written by a, you know, a computer engineer works internally at Google. And she could see that basically one of her big points is like, there’s no leadership here.

There’s no visionary here. Like the CEO and. Probably the head of search are saying, you know, go do something new and innovative. We have to, you know, move forward, but nobody really had any ideas. They sort of just throw out AI jargon that we’re embracing AI and AI, this and that when there’s. She was saying no real leadership.

And this, I mean, this, you know, the man who killed Google search, this article feels like a continuation of that thread that Google’s almost just this giant bus being driven by nobody, uh, that where they’re going to end up. Exactly. We don’t know. Um, we should have had that. It’s fascinating to watch. 

Jared: And we should see if she still actually works at Google too.

Spencer: That, Ooh, maybe, uh, maybe, uh, a listener can find that for us. Let us know. Yeah. Um, we, uh, yeah, we really should keep our notes better. Um, we could pull that up really 

Jared: quick, but it is what happens when you’re, you know, over a year deep on these news episodes, you know, cause it’s hard to keep track of. 

Spencer: That’s right.

Um, but this is just a fascinating read. Uh, it does feel like there’s a lot of internal turmoil going on, especially as you start to read some of these emails that are now publicly released. Like there’s been a fight between like. The ads team, the search team, where do we keep the quality of the search results?

All of that’s happening right in front of us. And so it feels 

Jared: like something’s ready to boil over and I don’t, I don’t, you know, I’m terrible at predicting the future, but you’re talking every week about some different thread that’s going wrong at Google, whether in the future, it’s a D it’s the department of justice actually.

Kind of coming down and adjudicating on the case, whether it’s all of the, um, legislature, not just the United States of America. We talked about California last week, but across the world and, and the legislature that’s coming to play with against both Google and their AI model and how they’re doing that, whether it’s internal, it’s just, uh, an implosion internally with, uh, leadership, perhaps, you know, uh, having some turnover there.

Feels like something’s ready to boil over. It doesn’t feel like one thing. It feels like a collection of a lot of things. 

Spencer: Right. It sure does. Um, so we, we actually have a couple of sort of related stories. I feel like they’re, they’re always very related as we talk about this. Uh, and so these, these will be pretty quick hits because they’re, they’re semi review, uh, in a way, there are continuations of, of stories that we’ve talked about in the past, but there’s, they’re being covered now a little bit more.

Broadly. Uh, and so one of those was covered by, uh, the New York, uh, magazine, the Intelligencer, I guess is the anyways, the section of that magazine, um, that they have, and it talks about how product recommendations broke Google and ate the internet in the process. And this references the house fresh article that we talked about.

A couple of months ago. Um, and kind of leads in with that, right? Um, basically saying, Hey, you need an air purifier. You know, you need one, but you go to Google and you get, um, you get a bunch of ads and then you get a bunch of, um, uh, other sites that don’t seem to be very helpful. And even the sites that maybe seem like they’re helpful, don’t show that they’ve actually hands on tested anything and they’re doing these reviews.

And then of course, um, you know, it references again, the house fresh that they’re share their, their results of their tests and all of this, but you know, they’re not quite ranking as well in Google. And, uh, it’s just, um, an expose article, if you will, on how search. For products has really changed a lot. Um, and that it’s difficult to know.

Are these real reviews? Are these sponsored reviews? Uh, have they really tested these products or not? And it’s all very, very difficult to find. 

Jared: Yeah, this is a little bit more of a prominent take on it. I would say in that just that it’s in the New York magazine, in New York magazine, so a little bit more of a, maybe less techie, more broad based, um, uh, viewership.

Um, I mean, it just, we, this feels like something we’ve been talking about at length for a while and, uh, less DOJ related, more just the way Google’s choosing to handle specifically product reviews and the way that they’ve gone about it, I mean, um, It’s just, it’s very interesting. I think one thing we haven’t necessarily talked a lot about is for, um, for big brands or small, like.

Uh, as Google continues to rank more, uh, user generated content and, um, and even direct e commerce, you know, brands like Amazon’s one of the biggest winners, amazon. com from the March core updates so far as Google continues to prefer those, like at some point, the ROI for these brands to invest in really high quality content goes down because if you can only get, you know, As far as spot five, we know that that means that your, uh, ability to get a certain number of clicks is going to drop and that’s your ability to earn enough revenue to kind of justify.

So it’s again, almost this, um, uh, the problem begets the solution sort of situation here where, uh, these, this article kind of highlights, but also starts to make you wonder about the future of product reviews. As it relates to what people want and what’s currently ranking. 

Spencer: Right. So yeah, a little bit of a review, you know, a topic that we’ve talked about to quite a bit, but nonetheless, uh, very interesting.

So people can read that if they would like. And, uh, then the final, uh, sort of article that we’re going to talk about here is, uh, in the SE round table. Google goes on defensive on its search quality and forum results statement. So again, it’s just a little bit of banter back and forth between the usual suspects on Twitter, like Lily Ray.

And then of course, Danny Sullivan jumping in, um, you know, basically, uh, Lily Ray and many others have kind of complained, Hey, these results that Cora and Reddit are producing. A lot of this is like, not just like. Poor results, but actually really bad advice a lot of times when it comes to health queries and other things.

Cut your arm off. Wasn’t that from last week? Cut your arm off to lose weight. And I’ve seen other, any other things that are, you know, Just about as bad. I saw someone respond to that and say, well, it is factually correct. Exactly. Exactly. It would work, right? It would work. Um, you know, but, uh, Danny has responded to a lot of these comments and basically trying to defend Google and, um, I don’t know.

I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s a lot, you know, it’s, it’s a lot, but basically just saying, Hey, we’re, we’re not always promoting Reddit. We’re not always promoting, you know, Quora. We just found that people like to have this sort of, um, what is it? The forums and discussions, uh, results and Reddit is sometimes in that.

It’s not always the top result, but you know, uh, sometimes it’s in there and pretty prominent. And, uh, basically it was a little bit of a wishy washy answer, basically saying, Hey, we don’t always rank Reddit, but, um, people tend to kind of like these types of discussions. And that’s why we put Reddit in search results.

Jared: And this is what I was referencing earlier. You can’t send an internal memo out as a head of search in one week, in the same week and say, people come to us because they trust us. And then in the same week come out and say, well, We don’t really care what people trust. We rank Reddit because people like it.

We don’t really care if it’s wrong. It doesn’t matter. That’s not our concern. We, we, we show what people want. When the head of search just came out and said, we show what is real because people trust us. Like those two statements, do they exist in the same world? They don’t in my world. 

Spencer: Yeah, there’s a big difference between trust and like 

Jared: exactly like, again, like I’d like to have, or I was referencing my, my kids would like to have ice cream all the time.

That doesn’t mean that anyways, I won’t, they, they don’t trust in like, you’re exactly right. Like they, they aren’t always the same. They’re very often not the same. 

Spencer: Yeah. You know, if I’m going to ask for money advice, you know, I might go to, uh, my parents or a financial advisor, somebody I, I trust and know is maybe good with money.

Right. I’m probably not going to go to the frat boy. Who’s a lot of fun. I like him. He’s a great guy, but I’m probably not going to go to that guy to ask for money advice. Right. 

Jared: Likewise, when you want to know how to lose weight. The guy who says to cut off your arm is probably the fun guy at the party, to your analogy.

Yeah, he’s great. But probably not the guy 

Spencer: you should be getting advice from. Hmm, Google, Google needs to put 

Jared: out a memo on that. So, uh I get it, it feels good from a PR standpoint to say, well People, you guys were the ones who reported this. People want Reddit stuff and it’s like, no, no, no. That’s the, that’s the symptom.

It’s not the problem. 

Spencer: Yes. 

Jared: People don’t trust Google anymore. So they’re going other places with Reddit being the most prominent of them. And yes, there’s a component that people like user generated results. I’m not trying to take that away, but let’s not ignore the problem for the symptom and diagnose the symptom as though it’s the problem.

Spencer: Well, you are just making a lot of logical sense here today, Jared. Um, sorry, I’ll go back to, I’ll go back to my usual approach to these things. Make a lot more sense than Google is 

Jared: making 

Spencer: is what 

Jared: I hope you’re enjoying the podcast so far. Just want to take a short break and remind you that today’s episode is sponsored by search intelligence.

I’ve got a short clip from ferry at search intelligence showing you how their agency built digital PR links to a client’s website. 

What a masterpiece PR link building campaign with 20 links in big publications, such as the sun express. Mirror, Wales Online and Still Landing, I would say this campaign is a massive success.

We told the press that people should turn on their heating this summer if they want to save money next winter. And we landed over 20 links in national and regional channels. UK publications for our boiler client. That’s crazy. The campaign hook was pretty clever. It is a known fact, at least in the boiler trade, that if you keep your boiler off for many months, it might rust and it might get you into trouble if you keep it turned off from spring to next winter.

We therefore advise the press, with an expert commentary piece, on behalf of our boiler client, that people should turn on their boiler this summer, just when the heat wave is in full swing. This way, they can avoid a boil of failure next winter and save money. Massive publications picked up our story including The Sun, Express, Mirror, Wales Online, and a few more dozen publications giving our client links, lots of links, and lots of happiness hormones.

No wonder that so many journalists covered our story as this headline is a massive link magnet to their audience. This case study highlights the fact that A clever hook can be applied to any insight or story to make a campaign more successful and more compelling to journalists. Can you imagine when people see this headline in the news, you should turn on your boiler this summer.

There is no way they will not click on it. I will click on it. So this was the hook and this is why this campaign was so successful. I hope this video inspires and shows you what’s possible with a clever hook. 

Jared: Are you looking for similar link building PR campaigns for your website? If so, just go to search intelligence.

co. uk and get in touch with them today. 

Spencer: Um, well, you know, maybe, we’ve got a couple other like news stories, but I don’t think Yeah, we’re out of time, you’re right. Let’s not tap into it because they could be long discussions as well. But those are kind of the big, the big ones I think. We’ll see, we’ll see where some of these other stories play out and maybe we’ll cover them, uh, in future weeks, but, uh, a lot going on in, uh, the Google world, the man who is killing Google search, there you have it.

Fascinating story, uh, for sure. So. We’re going to get a little more, I don’t know, lighthearted, but we’re going to, we’re going to turn it to something that’s like, Hey, let’s cover our side hustle projects. I know at least mine initially is a little bit more lighthearted than just that. You know, I, I don’t have like serious results to share.

Um, I did want to give an update on my Amazon influencer videos that I took and I put on a YouTube channel. So I took all my videos. Not all of them yet, but I started with 70 ish videos. I put them on a YouTube channel. As I shared last week, that YouTube channel got banned, uh, for no apparent reason, was shut down for seven months.

And then out of the blue, YouTube emailed me and said, Hey, your channel is back. And so I thought it would be interesting to share. Well, how many views. Am I getting now on this reinstated channel? And so as I shared, uh, last week before it was shut down, it was getting, oh gosh, I’ll have to get back. But it was, um, 250 clicks of 

Jared: something.

Spencer: Yeah. 250 

Jared: views a day or a week or something. 

Spencer: That was where it, it had peaked. It had, it had a day that was at 250 views. That was very compelling. Yeah. For the week before it had gotten shut down, it was getting, yeah, between a hundred and 200 views per day, um, with 250 being the peak. Uh, and so I was hopeful that, Hey.

Soon as we get this channel reinstated, we’ll get things right back to where they are as me chuckling, you know, a little bit, obviously that is not the case, uh, unfortunately, but it is back and it is getting views. Uh, the highest view day I’ve had is 11 views. Oh, let that sink in. 11 views. Um, so I feel like the channel and the videos, it’s an interesting thing.

You know, they were at least seven months ago. And so maybe that’s just kind of the nature of it. They treat them as old videos. It’s not new content. They’re they’re pushing at all. 

Jared: I was going to say, or do you think they treat him as like. Brand new videos on a brand new channel. Like if I went and started a new channel today and posted a video, I would expect it to get about 11 views.

Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. M maybe right. It’s sort of in one of these mysterious sort of middle ground cases where, is it a new video? Is it not? I don’t know. But, um, so I’ll simply say that it’s not getting, you know, It’s not getting a lot of use right now. Uh, but I have not uploaded any new videos, uh, this week. I didn’t have any time, had a few other projects going on, but, uh, the channel is reinstated, it’s starting to get views again, and we’re figuring out a process, uh, to make it much faster to upload all of these videos.

Cause it’s like a thousand videos. And so you 

Jared: share anything about that? Because you got me, you peaked my interest last week. I kind of argued my way into my interest being peaked because I was like, ah, I haven’t seen anybody succeed at it. Kind of figured it was a waste of time. And I was like, and then as I’m talking, I’m like, but all the content’s already produced.

Like there’s gotta be a good way to do something with it. And you, you peaked my interest. I started thinking about it more this week. 1100 influencer videos. And I mean, they’re 

Spencer: already made, they’re already done. It’s the hard work’s done, right? You just got to get it on to a platform. Um, and so yes, I have seen somebody, um, that has been able to develop a process using Zapier.

To get all the videos to, to automate a significant portion of the process of taking the videos, uploading them to Amazon. Um, even so far as to getting, uh, titles. And I believe as thumbnails, I think it takes a lot of setup where you have to get things into specific Google drive. But once you do that.

Zapier can do a lot of the heavy lifting, including writing the descriptions. I think you can say essentially like, Hey, you can have a description that kind of references the title, you know, the quotes, here’s the title. So it includes the product name. If you want to go check this out, click this insert Amazon affiliate link type thing.

And so I think you can automate most of that. And so I’m working with just my VA. We’re kind of figuring out a process to get that done. So I’ll share that. Yeah. As soon as we get actual progress done, but we have looked at that over the last week. Um, and so that’s what we’re going to do is, is try to get those uploaded.

I was thinking 

Jared: this week about one of your more successful YouTube videos of late, and the title was Google has a Reddit problem. I was thinking maybe an upcoming YouTube video for you should be Spencer has a YouTube problem or YouTube has a Spencer problem. Cause man, I was thinking about, we have this banned account that disappeared for seven months.

You had your faceless YouTube channel. Just not go anywhere last year after they kept dinging you with copyright stuff. I mean, man, it’s a, it’s been a rough YouTube go in the side hustle world in the last 

Spencer: year. I guess so. I guess so. You know, it has been thanks for, you know, reminding me of all of that.

But yeah, I had that channel that was, you know, it was making a hundred dollars a day for a while. And yeah, copyright, you know, can’t, can’t monetize that video anymore. Um, Spencer has a YouTube problem, right? I like it. I like it. I’ll make a video of that posted on YouTube to remedy my maybe that’ll be your top performer.

It could be. So, um, the other thing that I kind of sort of did this week is, uh, in conjunction with you, I had a presentation released on the alt G conference. And so I’ll let you talk a little bit more about that, but. You know, it was a prerecorded presentation that I did on the Amazon, um, influencer program and, uh, you released it as part of the all G conference.

So how did that go? It just happened yesterday. It happened yesterday. It was, uh, 

Jared: all yesterday. So people could log in for the entire day. Watch, uh, 10 up 10 presentations by, uh, Um, nine presenters, um, are, are, are favorite on the podcast. Thomas Smith did too. He did. So he, that’s where the overlap there is, but yeah, you present on an Amazon influencer, more of an outsource model.

I presented, I was one of the presenters on Amazon influencer as well. More of the. I went, um, I got some, it went really well. Uh, you know, like, uh, there’s obviously like people having trouble getting access here or get the video to work there. So you’re kind of doing a little bit of that troubleshooting stuff, which we kind of anticipated.

Um, full disclosure, we just put it, it’s all done through Vimeo. So all the problems were Vimeo’s problems. And we were just kind of the go between, and there weren’t many, I think, I think we got like six emails all day, but, um, so, so. I got, I asked Caitlin if there were any cool stats from yesterday, because I knew we were going to talk about it here today.

Um, I don’t know if this is good, this is the first time I’ve ever done this, but I thought this was cool. There were over 36, 000 minutes watched, uh, of content yesterday. Wow, that sounds like a lot. Sounds like a lot. I mean, that’s over 600 hours of presentations were watched yesterday. Okay. Um, there are around 2, 000 people that logged in and, and watched yesterday and, uh, yeah, I’ve got tons of great feedback.

Uh, Spencer, I did get an email in particular about your presentation, which, um, it’s positive. Would you want me to read it out loud? Yeah, let’s, uh, hear, hear what somebody has to say. So, uh, he said, I loved, loved the conference, in particular, Spencer’s presentation, although I’m a bit skeptical. He’s brilliant and I’m not.

He makes hiring people to do videos sound so easy. 

Spencer: I gave, I gave my playbook, you know, now, now he knows how to hire people. That’s, that’s right. You even told people the exact, um, ad copy you used and the one you used that failed. Exactly. I did. Well, thank you for that. Whoever that is. Thank you for calling me brilliant.

That makes my day. 

Jared: Exactly. So it was all good. The, um, if you missed it, the recordings are on sale through the end of the month. So through the end of April for 75 percent off. So, you know, you can get that for 75 percent off. Try not to make it. Uh, you know, uh, well under a hundred dollars, um, through the end of the month.

So, 

Spencer: yeah, yeah. Making it really easy. Like you said, well under a hundred bucks, uh, discount, uh, for a week. If people want to do that, I do have a special link for podcast listeners here. It’s niche pursuits. com slash alt. G. So it’s just four letters. I see. A L T G um, alt G niche pursuits. com slash alt D G.

You can go get that, uh, discount. You can see both of our presentations and then everybody else’s, uh, as well. There was, uh, Tony Hill on Pinterest. There was John Dykstra on, was it newsletters? Yeah. Uh, 

Jared: My side, us will be email, man. 

Spencer: I learned a lot from watching his I’ll tell you. Yeah. Yeah. So there was a lot of good presentations.

Let’s let’s uh, that’s what you’re going to talk about. Isn’t it? Um, here, you want to talk about your, um, your newsletters, right? Yeah, I do. Yeah. Yeah. 

Jared: No, there were a lot of great presentations, man. I’ll just highlight one Sammy Ellard. King shared about how he’s pivoted Instagram. He only had 5, 000 followers at the start of the, of the year.

He has over a hundred thousand now, and he’s made over 40, 000 pounds from Instagram this calendar year. Really? Yeah. And he shared all about it. Oh my gosh, it was wild! 

Wow. I mean, 

Jared: that is meteoric growth. And then to actually be able to profit on it as well, right? So, man. Anyways, there were some good presentations.

Spencer: Talk about brilliant, you know, or genius, whatever the word was. Um, he, he’s Spencer’s brilliant, and I’m not. That was the quote. Yeah, well, I think Sammy Ellard King is brilliant at Instagram. Yeah. Uh, but yeah. 

Jared: While that, while that did wet my whistle on, uh, it piqued my interest on Instagram. I’m staying committed to this email newsletter.

So committed. Um, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the phrase, good things come in pairs. Spencer, it’s a Chinese proverb. So I realized like we’re doing all this work here to launch this email newsletter. Um, and I have some updates on it, but I, um, I, I, anyways, long story short, analogies aside, we launched a second email newsletter this week.

We’re building all these processes and I just thought that it would be better to have Multiple irons in the fire and part of the reason and this is what was talked about a lot yesterday at the conference, but it’s been talked about a lot is I’m like so many people. I have this web. I have a content website that got crushed by the HCU.

It’s got decent content and I’m looking for ways to use that. And it would really make from my analysis, a good candidate for an email newsletter. So the second email newsletter that we launched this week is with one of our current content sites that got crushed by the HCU. If you reference back to last week, last week’s email newsletter that I talked about, totally new project, totally new domain, totally new everything.

I picked that based on a very specific. I guess we’ll call it niche that I thought would do well in the email newsletter space. This is taking advantage of a website that we have three or 400 articles live on and a whole profile built out for to build an email newsletter 

Spencer: for. 

Jared: Oh, 

Spencer: so you, I mean, you talk about side hustle, you know, shiny object, whatever you want to call it.

Two totally different, unrelated newsletters. Yes. Totally unrelated. But the process is a lot the same, right? For the newsletters. Exactly. So that makes it nice. 

Jared: There’s some crossover. A lot of crossover. There’s some unique things. And I’ll walk you through it. I’m guessing a lot of people who are listening are like, What do I do with, you know, my, my site?

I’m not sure what my Google traffic is going to go on to look like. So. There, there wasn’t a Facebook page for that. That was a fail. There were social profiles. There were all other social profiles. We must’ve just missed creating a Facebook page. So we created a Facebook page for this. Um, this is, uh, uh, another double, it’s just a double whammy.

Uh, we had an email list. We were generating emails from this. And so I said, okay, Caitlin, let’s go dust this off. We built a lead, a lead generator of a free ebook that people could download, pop up on the website was getting lots of traffic at last checked. We had over 5, 000 email subscribers. Nice. They were light erased our account three months ago.

Spencer: Oh no, I’m not even making this up. This sounds like a Spencer YouTube story. 

Jared: Caitlin went back and forth with them. She has a good relationship with them. We do a lot with Miller lights. I’m not trying to slam their great company, but in this case that apparently we were notified that we were anyways, I don’t know how it is.

So no Facebook page, no email accounts. We were basically starting from scratch here. So we use the existing. E book. We’re going to use that for lead gen. The graphics for that, um, the graphics for the Facebook lead ad are done as of today. I have to review them. We’ve already written the first 20 emails for our new male light auto email sequence and those are ready to go.

Um, and I started a likes campaign two days ago for the Facebook page to get it off the ground. So there were some likes. Um, right now. Oh yeah. I wanted to ask you about that. Cause you. I’ve been doing that for a while now. I am paying after about 48 hours. I’m paying about 7. 1 cents per like, I can’t remember your numbers.

How is that? 

Spencer: Yeah, that, that’s good. Um, you know, anything under 10 cents, I’m usually okay with like to, if I can get below 5 cents, I’m jumping, you know, I felt like you were getting into the threes 

Jared: at one point. 

Spencer: I did. Yeah. I had a campaign that was running for 3 cents for quite a while. God. Okay. It was well, early days.

But 7 cents, 8 cents. That’s, that’s 

Jared: okay. That’s exciting. So I even put a, I even dropped that, uh, that screenshot from the, the, the campaign, if you want to share that. Um, so anyways, all that to say, we’ve got the Legion piece. Well, you know, we’re basically done with the graphics, so we should launch a Facebook ad.

To generate newsletter subscribers this weekend or early next week. And then we’ll kick that one off and see how that goes. 

Spencer: So you’ve spent a whopping 8 and 18 cents so far on your yeah, no, that’s a good, good, uh, good step. So, uh, remind me, so you’re, you’re building the page. Um, and then do you run lead ads to that page followers or is that just sort of bonus?

Jared: No, that’s just bonus. I’m just going to do that for a week or two at current state just to get enough people that like it. So if somebody, you know, gets over to that page that they’ll feel like there’s a little bit of a presence there seemed worth throwing 5 a day at, um, yeah. And again, this model will be a little bit different.

This site is monetized with raptive. Um, so it’s, again, was getting good enough traffic to be unraptive. Thank you, Google. Um, apparently it’s awful now. Uh, sorry. I, uh, I, I digress. Um, and so really the goal will be to use the email newsletter to drive, you know, traffic to articles that are already on the website, and then we’ll start publishing more content going forward.

But we’ll take advantage of the content that’s on the site already for the first initial round of emails. very much. 

Spencer: That’s awesome. Cool. I love the hustle. I love to see it taking action making things happen 

Jared: Well, like I said good things come in pairs. So why do Why do only one when you could do two?

Spencer: Yeah. No, I I like it You know, why only have one youtube account problem when you have two youtube accounts not gonna let that go, right? You know, we’re We work well together here jared um All right. So speaking of actually things we’re doing a little bit similar here, I noticed is both of our weird niche sites are somewhat similar, totally different niches.

But, um, I’ll just share mine and we’ll Oh, yeah, they are. Yeah, I only saw the name. But as soon as I saw what it was, I was like, Oh, that’s that’s kind of kind of interesting. So 

Jared: I have a confession to make quickly. I did finally tap into your Amazing list of weird niches. I, I, I was up against it. I’m sorry.

You know, I can’t keep coming up with a miracle every week, Spencer, you know. 

Spencer: You know, people left a list of weird niche sites for me. Uh, I feel a little bit cheated. It was in the public, but it was in the public domain. So I guess it was fair game. I subtly encouraged you to go back and delete the tweet so that I 

Jared: would not have 

Spencer: access 

Jared: to it.

Spencer: I’ll just have to delete this domain from my spreadsheet. So don’t forget. And, uh, not cover it 

Jared: full disclosure on that one. Go carry on though, with your weird niche supplied from everyone. 

Spencer: Give Jared a thumbs down in the comments. If you could, that would help the algorithm. Thank you. Um, so I have a weird niche site that, uh, yes, somebody shared with me.

Um, I, I saw it and I was like, Ooh, this is a good one. I got it. And actually I’m super fascinated with it. Uh, the website is brick economy. com. And we’re talking about Lego, the economics of Lego is a sub headline. Um, welcome to brick economy, a comprehensive guide to Lego economics, market values, and trends, and like.

This is like, you think you were doing in depth stock market research here. I mean, you’ve got charts, you’ve got graphs, you’ve got historical data, um, that you can look at so many things. I mean, some of the stats here, there are over 19, 000 sets in their database. Um, they have the current values on over 99 percent of all of those.

Uh, and it shows. Some of the highest annual growth, uh, themes of Lego themes, right? So you’ve got a brick link overwatch, Lord of the rings, Scooby Doo, the Hobbit, SpongeBob SquarePants, all of these have really high annual growth rates. And so as I was going through this and looking at it, like, honestly, I’m thinking, you know what I need to add Lego as an alternative asset in my portfolio.

Jared: You were, you were tweeting about a portfolio stuff this week. I mean, Spencer, I don’t know, maybe. You know, your growth rates seemed a little off from your tweet and traditional retirement assets compared to these 

Spencer: here. I know if exactly, if I could punch in this, you know, 10. 9, 4 percent that I’d get with the overwatch Lego sets into my portfolio retirement, I need half as much money as I was, you know, planning on, um, so.

I know I, I, I’m semi joking, but semi not like, wouldn’t it be cool to take, you know, name your number 10, 000 and invest in Lego and just like get on open sets, let them, you know, marinate for five or 10 years and then, you know, see how well they did. So, um, I’m tempted, you know, based on this to, uh, to invest in Lego.

Uh, you can track your own collection, you have to create an account, you can log in and then you can track, uh, what you have, uh, there, but basically if you, uh, come through here, just any of these, you go to the sand crawler, the Lego Star Wars sand crawler, it shows the, um, sort of the, the estimated prices that have been, you know, trending over the last, as long as it’s, you know, existed, I guess.

Here, you can see that back in 2017, it was, you know, 323 now in 2024, it’s like 611, right? Uh, is some of the highest thing, but what’s cool is they have links here. You can go in, go buy it on eBay or wherever else it’s available. And of course, these are all affiliate links. That that’s how this website makes money is through affiliate links.

They have display ads. Um, and I believe that is how they are making, uh, all of their money. I don’t think there’s any paid, um, membership area or anything like that. So how is this website doing? Well, it’s doing extremely well. If we look over at similar web, you can see that they’re getting over 1 million visitors a month with, um, you know, March 1.

2 million. Um, And its highest traffic sources is organic search organic search is about 60 percent direct traffics, 30 percent and then with a mix of others. So, um, what does a trust look like? Well, if we look at this here, we can see that it’s, it’s doing well in search, right? It’s getting, um. 138, 000 organic visitors a month.

It, it probably is a little bit more than that. It’s a, 

Jared: it’s a relatively new site. 

Spencer: Relatively. 

Jared: Yeah. I mean, I see there was a little bit of traffic in terms of success, in terms of ranking, like it was fairly recent. Like that’s just a late 2021, early 2022. Really? Exactly. 

Spencer: Yeah. Only about two years has it really come onto the scene, uh, in terms of organic, uh, search and doing really well.

And it, um, I mean, it ranks for things, as you might guess a lot of Lego, um, things. Okay. Most expensive Lego set, uh, Lego tall neck, Lego, Concord, Lego, rigger, razor, crust, all these things that it is ranking for, but just, um, A very interesting site. I know that there are a lot of Lego enthusiasts out there big time.

And so this is a site you would go back to over and over again, if you’re collecting Lego or just wanted to see how much you could sell it for, or how much you could buy a set for, like. This is the site to go to 

Jared: man. I love it. Um, can I, uh, this is so cool. I mean, again, my nerdy side comes out here and there was someone I wish I had it obviously, but who posted on Twitter many times about it and I saved it because I thought I found it so interesting who would go in, um, in anticipation of the holiday sales and buy toys.

And I had a whole course for it, frankly, uh, I thought it was so interesting. I, I mean, I don’t have time for that, but I just thought the concept was so intriguing. It kind of reminds me of this to some degree, obviously it’s a little bit more collectible, but, uh, this is so fascinating. 

Spencer: Yeah. And in case people are wondering what the most expensive Lego set is.

It is the 2017 Millennium Falcon for 849. So there you go. My daughter would love that. 

Jared: Um, their about page, Spencer, is interesting. Uh, at the bottom, I’ll highlight this. AI machine learning, really? Oh, yes. Brick economy, price evaluations, predictions are based on artificial intelligence via machine learning to provide an accurate estimated, uh, blah, blah, blah.

When you look at the current value of a set, the data is based on our machine learning models. It’s not only very cool, but it’s extremely accurate. We use a variety of algorithms to train our machine learning predictions, but typically rely on neural network regression and linear regression models. Very normal ones.

Uh, we’re consistently retraining, um, Uh, even cooler, our machine learning model can even predict future gains for newly released sets at an 89 percent accuracy rate. If you’re interested in geeking out like we are, look for this, uh, AI kind of icon, click on it, and we will show you some machine learning stats based on all of our predictions.

Wow. So, not only does it tell you the value of what’s going on right now, but Predictively nine out of 10 times can tell you what it’s going to be going forward. 

Spencer: So there you go. I’m going to take my 10, 000 use this predictive analysis and home run nine out of 10 times. 

Jared: Versus this. Yeah. I mean, I, I won’t get into the stats of the stocks and they say monkeys pick better than humans, 

Spencer: something like that.

I mean, it makes me want to put a lot more than 10, 000 in this. I’m going to just throw it on my life savings on Lego. Well, that kind of, uh, predictive Lego 

Jared: collection model. So, I would say that ours are less related than you might think by glancing at the URLs. Okay. Alright. Well, let’s see what you got then.

Um, I understand when you look at BrickEconomy. com, and then you were to pull up my weird niche, which is TractorData. com. They do seem to have a lot of parallels, but, They are not related for starters. My site looks like it was made in 2000. Whereas we just validated that your site is a lot newer. 

Spencer: Yes. 

Jared: Um, you know, since 2000 monitors have actually gotten wider, which you wouldn’t know by looking at this website, this still looks like a pamphlet that you would get when you go to the local grocery store.

Um, sorry, the stereotypes aren’t helping in this case, but what is the site? It is the internet’s largest tractor resource with data on 17, 556 farm lawn and industrial tractors for 20 years. They’ve been doing this. It’s a family owned small business in southern Minnesota. And so, I mean, it’s exactly what it says.

You can just, first off, they have a whole tractor news section. So you can kind of hear what’s going on in the latest tractor world. And then, uh, almost like a directory. It’s very, uh, it’s, it’s a very rudimentary, but still from a directory standpoint, another example of a site where we can just click in and kind of get.

A content organized in a way that Google, um, well, we’ll get into Google here in a second in a way that people can utilize that doesn’t have to be super fancy or pretty. You know, it’s kind of got every model of every tractor and you can click in and get all the stats and all the features about it and kind of, you know, compare on horsepower and a couple other things.

And then, um, Et cetera, et cetera. Now I did reference what it’s doing in terms of, uh, rankings. Um, nothing to really write home, but it is a DR 61, but, um, you know, unlike some of the other ones I’ve been featuring, it does get almost, according to HRS, 400, 000, uh, organic page views a month. Um, so I don’t know for a site that looks like that.

Probably 

Spencer: might be surprising to some people. Yeah. Who’s searching all this tractor data? Is there that many farmers? 

Jared: Yeah. Yeah, man. Tractors. It’s a, it’s the backbone of your workforce as a farmer. 

Spencer: I mean, you got to get your food somewhere. So I mean, go to the 

Jared: keywords, go over to keywords and look at the number one rankings.

I mean, it’s unbelievable what it ranks number one for in terms of just specific tractors and it just owns the SERPs for it. 

Spencer: Yeah, every, every model of, of, you know, John Deere, uh, Ford. Yeah. Every kind of model. I mean, number one. Wow. They’re just position one for everything. I mean, there’s just position one for everything.

It’s it’s 

Jared: blows your mind. Right. Wow. Unbelievable. Um, If you go to the contact page, I mean, uh, it’s pretty, again, I think those pictures are 20 years old. Um, but, uh, it’s owned by this guy, Peter, and it’s in Minnesota. He’s got his address there. Um, he reads every email and says, uh, and look at this tractor data.

com receives over 60, 000 visitors on any given day from around the world. I personally read every single email. It goes on to say, I don’t sell anything. I don’t sell tractors or parts. I don’t have secret sources for equipment. I buy all my parts from the dealer. I have a long family history and I believe that a relationship with your local dealer is a good thing.

Interesting. Do you know how, I mean, he does have ads on here. But they’re not, um, the ad density is not high. Yeah. So I mean, at 60, 000 pages a day, I still think he’s probably making a few bucks on it. But you just think about back to your brick, uh, brick website where they’re getting commit, uh, affiliate commissions on every link to eBay.

And you just think about these John Deere tractors that they could sell for relationships. I mean, my mind just starts going nuts on what this website could earn. 

Spencer: That’s a good point. Yeah. I mean, some sort of sales commission or affiliate commission, or 

Jared: you can just, yeah, like, uh, going to, you know, each region and kind of getting a dealership to advertise, you know, just to pay monthly.

So maybe it’s hard to qualify or quantify how many people buy a John Deere from this website because you probably just don’t go and Press a button to buy a John Deere. You go in, you look, you drive, you talk all that. So maybe even just take an ad revenue though, from, Hey, Denver’s John Deere dealership, or, you know, whatever it is.

Spencer: Yeah, but boy, what a site. I mean, 60, 000 visitors on any given day. I mean, that’s 1. 8 million visitors a month. That blows my mind. That’s 20 

Jared: million, over 20 million visitors a year. 

Spencer: I had no idea the tractor market was that big. 

Jared: Man, 

Spencer: I 

Jared: mean, I know the site gets updated, but from a design standpoint, the site hasn’t been updated since it came out.

I mean, it’s just, it’s amazing. It’s not needed, I 

Spencer: guess. 

Jared: Yeah, so much for all that UI stuff being important. I guess maybe to this demographic, it’s not, I don’t know. 

Spencer: But, um, 

Jared: I mean, It is getting 

Spencer: official, full page. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. How are we not supposed to guarantee? Um, it works, I guess it does. Um, but yeah, kind of interesting is I didn’t know this beforehand, but both of our websites that we shared are doing well in Google search.

And so people can maybe look at their website, see what they’re doing. Maybe, I mean, data is a big portion of both of the websites, maybe being able to pull in some sort of Original data or making data easier to, to view, sort and understand. Google likes that. You know, I think 

Jared: going back to some of the interactions you had back and forth with Lily Ray about sites that have been hit and the, I would definitely say these sites are not optimized for Google.

Spencer: Good point. Good point. Just thinking about somebody landing and trying to find a tractor. Just trying to give people good tractor stuff. So. Ah, good find. Well, I’d say good find, but uh, thanks for, thanks for stealing that one. That was a good steal. Normally, you can tell me good find. 

Jared: You know, everybody needs a break at some point, Spencer.

Spencer: Yeah, that’s all right. We’ll, we’ll give you a week off. Next week, come up with your own though. Yeah. Um, so. Listeners, 

Jared: if you like, if you like me having to take this sort of shaming, then continue to give Spencer all your good ideas, but If you want to throw me a bone so I don’t have to deal with this kind of a public shaming, my, my DMs are open.

Spencer: There you go. All right. Call to action. There’s our call to action. End of the episode. One per one person will have a sympathy on me this week. That’s right. All right. Well, Jared, thank you so much. Thank you so much, everybody for listening to this week in niche pursuits news. I hope you have enjoyed the episode as much as Jared and I have.

Jared: Thanks everyone. Have a great weekend. We’ll see you next week.

Today’s episode is sponsored by search intelligence. Here’s a short clip of Ferry from search intelligence showing you how their agency built digital PR links to a client’s website. 

What a crazy campaign! How to sleep on your back. This campaign got us links in Huffington Post, Glamour Magazine, Mirror and lots of other great news publications.

Let me show you how we’ve done it. It was so simple. Our sleep client provided us with expert commentary about how to train yourself To fall asleep on your back. They also gave advice on why it’s best to sleep on your back. Once we’ve had this information, we went to Muckrack and search for journalists that consistently write about sleep and wellbeing.

We’ve sent these journalists the advice provided by the client and within one day, the links started flowing in. Glamour Magazine, a DR81 website, picked it up. Huffington Post, DR88, Mirror UK, DR90, a massive avalanche of links blasted to our client’s website. With this simple yet effective campaign about how to sleep on your back.

I hope this inspires, and I hope you’ll use this technique to land massive links to your, or your client’s website. 

Jared: Thanks for joining us today on the podcast. Just a final reminder that it was brought to you by Search Intelligence. And if you’re looking for link building PR campaigns for your website, just head over to search intelligence.

co. uk and get in touch with them today. Cheers!