Google August Core Update Results, Reddit AI Keyword Research Tool, and 2 Fun Niche ‘Tool’ Sites!

Get ready for another great episode of This Week in Niche Pursuits News to help start your weekend.

Spencer and co-host Jared kick things off by discussing Google's August Core Update. They share whether it has affected their sites and discuss some of the devastating screenshots they've seen from other site owners.

They also discuss a study highlighted in the Search Engine Journal regarding ChatGPT and its reach among USA adults. A shockingly low number of Americans have actually used the tool or feel that it will affect their jobs. So, the guys spend some time weighing in on this interesting topic.

The conversation then gets into the ongoing adoption of AI-powered features in search engine results and the inclusion of links within results.

Plus, Reddit just launched an AI-powered keyword research tool. A development, they discuss, could be very useful for content creators and advertisers looking to optimize their strategies.

Watch The Episode

After a nice catch-up on the latest news, it's time for their shiny object shenanigans.

Spencer starts by sharing how he's hiring local individuals to assist him in recording product review videos for the Amazon Influencer program. And discusses how this will not only help to create engaging content but also support the local community.

Jared then chimes in with his own Amazon Influencer program update and how he's ramping up video production.

In fact, he just set a personal record by recording a staggering 122 videos in just one week!

As usual, the conversation then goes into awesome and weird niche site discoveries.

First up is a website called Language Guesser. It's a creative and simple game for language enthusiasts to guess the language being spoken in videos.

After that, they discuss another fun little site called Word Unscrambler. This site offers visitors a handy tool for unscrambling letters and finding words, particularly useful for Scrabble players!

As always, they discuss the traffic and potential revenue of these niche sites and give some valuable insights into their profitability.

They also offer suggestions for improvement, such as design tweaks and creating mobile apps.

To wrap things up, they highlight subscribing to the newsletter to get regular updates and stay in the loop on the latest online business news and success stories!

Stay tuned for next week's episode!

transcription

Spencer Haws:
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of This Week in Niche Pursuits News. I'm Spencer here and I've got my co-host with me, Jared. How you doing?

Jared Bauman:
Good, good, good to see you Spencer.

Spencer Haws:
It's good to be here. You know, we've got another fun field day here of topics. Got some news topics to cover here. It seems like the world of AI is never ending in its changes. And so we've got, gosh, are all three of our subjects all related to AI? I think they are

Jared Bauman:
They are.

Spencer Haws:
in different ways. And so we'll share that. And then we're gonna talk about our shiny object shenanigans. Um, both of us are working on the same side hustle, if you will. And so people that listened to our show regularly will know what that is, but I'll just tease it, um, that people can listen in, uh, to hear what our shiny objects are that we're working on. And then, um, we are going to also talk about, uh, one weird niche, one weird niche site that each of us have found, uh, in the wild. that, yeah, we'll cover that are kind of fun.

Jared Bauman:
I've got a surprise for you today, Spencer. I'm gonna throw you off when we get to one weird niche. I'm gonna, let me just put it this way, it's gonna fly in the face of the concept of one weird niche, so I'll leave you with that.

Spencer Haws:
All right, all right. Okay, listeners be on the edge of your seat for that.

Jared Bauman:
That's something to stick around for.

Spencer Haws:
Absolutely, stick around. So let's jump into it. Let's cover the news. Now, breaking news, just as I was doing the intro, Jared, you kind of stealthily reminded me that we should probably talk about this Google core update that we did talk about when it just started last week. And so now it's been about a week. And they say it takes about two weeks for these things to fully roll out.

Jared Bauman:
We're only four months in, five months in on doing these news podcasts. And I finally figured out how to communicate with you while we're, while we're doing it live.

Spencer Haws:
Luckily I have two screens over here and out of the corner of my eye.

Jared Bauman:
That's the first time that's ever happened before where we've actually communicated about this. Yeah. So we have a core update and we did promise last week that we'd kind of update the results of what happened. I think the day that the podcast of last week went live, which is Friday, where the day was the day that most people started seeing results. from the podcast and from the core update, excuse

Spencer Haws:
update.

Jared Bauman:
me. And yeah, I mean, I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Certainly I've seen some fluctuations across various client sites and some of the sites that we kind of own and some of the niche sites we run.

Spencer Haws:
Right. Yeah, so I'm just pulling up my Google search console. People are wondering what I'm looking at over here. Okay, so for my main site, Ninch Pursuits, I don't see like a major fluctuation. Do things do appear slightly lower than last week, but last week was also a record week. So it's like… I don't know. It's like one of those things I'd like to wait really until it's

Jared Bauman:
Nothing

Spencer Haws:
finalized.

Jared Bauman:
major. Yeah, nothing major.

Spencer Haws:
Nothing major that I'm seeing. I am seeing an uptick on another one of my smaller sites. I do see definitely more impressions coming in. But overall, I guess maybe I could look at my third site, one that I've had for, oh gosh, about 10 years.

Jared Bauman:
Oh wow.

Spencer Haws:
No major changes, if anything, on this one, maybe slightly up on this final site that I'm looking at. So, no big fluctuations for me. I have seen some chatter, and I didn't come prepared with some screenshots, but I have seen a couple of fairly devastating looking screenshots that have been shared.

Jared Bauman:
I went and dove into it on, I think it was Saturday last week, because I did see some movement. None of the movement on any of the bigger sites that we either manage, work on, or own, none of the movement that was big happened on any of those sites. It was all on our smaller sites, like sites that were getting a couple hundred page views a day. And one of those had a 150% upswing. Another site had like a 15% downswing and stuff. So I did look in analytics to try to, I still have UA on some of these sites, so it's like a dream to go in. It's almost like you're doing it just because you still can in many ways. But I did go in and look at some of the sites that had the huge increase. I did look at the site that had some decreases. I couldn't find any necessary correlations in terms of topics or article types or like that. So, you know, don't wanna overanalyze it until the update's done because Just as soon as you get excited about that 150% increase, you know, a week and a half into the update, it could be gone. So yeah,

Spencer Haws:
Mm-hmm.

Jared Bauman:
but definitely seen a lot of movement from not only some of our sites, but, but chatter and people sharing, you know, screenshots and stuff.

Spencer Haws:
Right? Yeah, so I haven't seen any analysis in terms of what types of sites have been impacted or what this update might be all about. And when Google says it's a Google Core update, it's just a general broad update. So it might be hard to pinpoint what exactly is going on. But next week, it should have completed rolling out. And so maybe we'll have some more final analysis to share at that point. So, okay, so in the world of AI, one thing that is interesting is that we talk about it all the time, especially as we're doing these news segments. I mean, it feels like we're talking about chat GPT almost every single week. But the reality is that a lot of people in the US and elsewhere have never used or even heard of chat GPT even still. And so there was a recent study here on search engine journal, at least they talked about this study by Pew Research, that shows that 18%, I should say only 18% of Americans have used chat GPT so far. 18%, that's one in five, less than one in five have even used chat GPT. And only 19% think chat bots. will substantially impact their job. And 67% want more government regulations on AI tools chatbots. And so that was kind of a little bit shocking to me is that I certainly would have thought that, hmm, maybe more than one in five had actually used chat GPT, but I don't know, I guess that's where we're at.

Jared Bauman:
Another stat that they listed, and Pew does a really good job on these, you know, so it's not like some SEO went out and did this research, not that it would be bad, but Pew Research is quite a reputable kind of above aboveboard, like really well reputed research company. And so this is one of the stats I thought was weird because I was kind of like you Spencer, I'm like, well, you know, maybe, you know, we live in this AI bubble, we live in this AI world, and so that 18% of Americans have used ChatGPT. Maybe that's just because we're so in it that it doesn't it doesn't seem normal to us but then there was a stat down in the article that said roughly 24% of Americans who are aware of chat GPT have used it and that means it like you know not only What you can take that out of the equation of maybe the people aren't hearing about it people are hearing about it And only one in four less than one and four are even bothering to be concerned enough Or affected enough by it to even go bother trying it out

Spencer Haws:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I can't remember if it was here on one of these calls where we looked at Google Trends.

Jared Bauman:
Yeah, it was. I was going to bring that up.

Spencer Haws:
Yeah, and so I just pulled this up just now again, right, just to remind people that, man, chat GPT, okay, that is just for the past day. Is that right? Wow. Okay. Past 12 months. Let's look at that,

Jared Bauman:
There it

Spencer Haws:
right?

Jared Bauman:
is. There

Spencer Haws:
you know,

Jared Bauman:
it is.

Spencer Haws:
it just out of the box. Boom, right? And then sort of peaked in April and now like people are like, okay, whatever,

Jared Bauman:
Yeah,

Spencer Haws:
you

Jared Bauman:
and

Spencer Haws:
know.

Jared Bauman:
it's declined even more since a couple weeks ago when we talked about it.

Spencer Haws:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so, um, I don't know, take what you will from this news. Um, but, uh, you know, a lot of people out of the gate, there was a lot of interest. A lot of people tried it out, used it, uh, but still, you know, over 80% of Americans have, have never tried it and seeing the trends of, you know, less and less interest, that number is not likely to increase.

Jared Bauman:
Yeah, the flip side is, you know, people have always said AI is more of a revolution. It's going to take time to truly make its way into the current culture. So this doesn't, this doesn't necessarily mean that like AI, chat GPT as an AI bot is going away or anything, but just that perhaps the initial buzz and the initial hoopla that you're looking at on the screen there in terms of the interest spikes that happened in the first three to four months maybe aren't. aren't withstanding as it's aged.

Spencer Haws:
So what is the last thing you used chat GPT for? And when's the last time you used it, Jared?

Jared Bauman:
Ah, I used it this morning, and it didn't work for me. I tried to use the Wolfram plugin to

Spencer Haws:
Hmm.

Jared Bauman:
normalize some data. We basically got some results back from a survey, but the data was all like, you know, there were variations of data, and we just needed it all to be the same. It was a very simple task. You know, imagine if, you know, like, you could identify different colors. And one was red, and another person said dark red. So

Spencer Haws:
Mm-hmm.

Jared Bauman:
I asked it to make, hey, make all reds red, make all blues blue, make all yellows yellow, so I have it normalized data and it couldn't handle it.

Spencer Haws:
It was too complex for

Jared Bauman:
Yeah,

Spencer Haws:
chat GPT. All right.

Jared Bauman:
yeah, so. But that

Spencer Haws:
All

Jared Bauman:
was

Spencer Haws:
right,

Jared Bauman:
this

Spencer Haws:
well,

Jared Bauman:
morning.

Spencer Haws:
I was just testing you to see if you're an active user, so very good. My writers use it all the time. I just used it two days ago, I guess. I don't think I used it yesterday, but…

Jared Bauman:
I don't know about you, but there's like some weeks where I use it a lot and some weeks where I probably use it once or twice. It

Spencer Haws:
Yeah,

Jared Bauman:
comes and goes.

Spencer Haws:
yep, definitely goes in spurts. I've got a process now where, like I said, my writers are using it probably every day. But yeah, I'm the same where it's like, okay, two, three times a week, maybe it's like, ah, this would be a great job for ChatGPT to help

Jared Bauman:
Now,

Spencer Haws:
me out with.

Jared Bauman:
here's a really, I know this is not what we're talking about today, but cool story. I will tell you a success story for ChatGPT. Last night, my wife and I were sitting around talking after the kids went to bed about, Hey, wouldn't it be nice to get away? And you know, our typical getaway is a couple hour flight when we get around to doing that, blah, blah. And we started talking about, Oh, where could we go? That's a little further. And so I actually just pulled out ChatGPT and I said, Hey, I, our, our home flight base is San Diego, uh, list off every place I can get within eight hours on a flight. including layovers, including stopovers from San Diego.

Spencer Haws:
That's a

Jared Bauman:
And

Spencer Haws:
good

Jared Bauman:
it was

Spencer Haws:
idea.

Jared Bauman:
really interesting to see and really got our minds going in terms of, oh man, I didn't know we could get there and

Spencer Haws:
That's

Jared Bauman:
all this

Spencer Haws:
cool.

Jared Bauman:
kind of stuff. So that was a pretty cool use for it last night.

Spencer Haws:
Yeah, oh, very good. I like it. Creative. So next up is more AI related topics. So we've talked a lot about, I think even last week we talked about the Google search generative experience about how they had been testing out these little carrot symbol that you could click on and it would expand and show a website that you could click through and you can get traffic to your blog or website. So apparently just, is it today? Yesterday,

Jared Bauman:
Yesterday,

Spencer Haws:
it looks

Jared Bauman:
yeah.

Spencer Haws:
like Google

Jared Bauman:
Last

Spencer Haws:
Search

Jared Bauman:
night.

Spencer Haws:
General Experience officially rolls out links to web pages within Answers. So I guess they're officially saying that they've adopted this UI. Right? So here I expanded this image that people can see that was shared in the article, right? Where you've got the little carrot that you can expand. And I think I demoed this last week. But now it's official. It looks like they've gone through a bunch of different iterations and they've landed on this. And as of yesterday, they are officially rolling this out within the US. Yeah.

Jared Bauman:
Japan and India next.

Spencer Haws:
And then that's what I was going to look up. Yeah, Japan and India coming over the coming weeks. This will be rolling out. And what's kind of cool about this is that, you know, we've been following this pretty closely

Jared Bauman:
Mm-hmm.

Spencer Haws:
for a while. And so it was only a month ago, August 1st, where, you know, we had this headline of Google testing links directly in search generative experience snapshot. answers. So as a reminder for people, it used to be, hey, they tried something with the website name that you could click on. They tried something that looks more like this. They had quotes

Jared Bauman:
I wanted

Spencer Haws:
ready

Jared Bauman:
to

Spencer Haws:
to

Jared Bauman:
hear

Spencer Haws:
click.

Jared Bauman:
what you were going to say for that.

Spencer Haws:
I don't know how to explain that. I guess multiple websites within one answer

Jared Bauman:
Yeah, yeah, there you

Spencer Haws:
is

Jared Bauman:
go.

Spencer Haws:
what that was. And then yeah, the quotes, which I really did not like because

Jared Bauman:
Mm-hmm.

Spencer Haws:
who thinks that you're supposed to click a quotation mark? I don't think anybody. Uh, and then they, you know, where we're at today, you know, they, they've kind of landed on this experience. So I'm very happy about this. I expressed that last week. I think this is going to send more traffic to our websites.

Jared Bauman:
I think it's almost, if you've been listening to the news, at least for me, I feel like we've been talking about it so much, like you said, that it almost feels like an announcement that we foresaw coming from the last couple weeks of what they've been testing and what we've been seeing. But this is a big deal because it means it's official. And yes, they could change it down the road. We know they changed their algorithm constantly. They could change this. But clearly, thank goodness, something in their testing and in the data that they got back machine learning at scale said that users prefer this, right?

Spencer Haws:
Mm-hmm.

Jared Bauman:
The only other reason they would be doing it is because it makes more money, but we haven't seen ads in the beta of it yet. So it seems to me that it kind of has to be based on user data, and that tells me that users like knowing where their content is coming from. And so not only is it really encouraging for just the SG experience in general, but I think it's encouraging for where AI is fitting into our role as publishers. I might be making a little bit. A little bit of a stretch there, but that's what we do here, right? We can speculate a bit. And I just think it's encouraging that perhaps users have spoken this month, which is why we have this attribution in the SGE.

Spencer Haws:
Right. Yeah, I agree. I mean, they certainly are following the data. And this is the user experience that is working. They do mention, you know, ads. Ads will remain to be seen in the dedicated spots in the SGE, AI-generated answer interfaces. So for certain queries, you do see ads and other queries you don't. And so, yeah. That's great. I think it's nice to have some normalcy maybe. Hopefully this is what sticks and we can kind of expect that and not have this big question mark of, okay, am I going to get traffic from SGE? What's it going to look like? Hopefully this is how it looks and feels and how it works going forward.

Jared Bauman:
So when do we start seeing this sort of information in, say, in ahrefs?

Spencer Haws:
Hmm

Jared Bauman:
Because they tell you when you have a featured snippet. Are they going to now put a carrot icon there when I have a carrot, like when I'm part of the SGE? I mean, obviously we don't know. But that's an interesting thing to start to think about. Do I now get to start to track when I land inside of SGE carousels? And what does that do for my traffic? And how do I start to learn how to optimize for it? So some big questions that can kind of can start to come out of this.

Spencer Haws:
Right? It will be coming. Whether it's in Ahrefs, Google Search Console, there definitely is gonna be all sorts of analysis. And yeah, that'll be coming soon. I don't know how soon, but it'll happen.

Jared Bauman:
Yep, agreed.

Spencer Haws:
All right, so the final news topic that we wanted to cover here today is about Reddit. So Reddit has launched an AI powered keyword research tool. And so Reddit, you can run ads on Reddit and through their Reddit ads manager, they now have a keyword suggestions feature, right? So they gave a screenshot here of this. where you can go in, you can, I guess, maybe you start with a keyword and then it gives you a bunch of AI suggested results. I haven't actually seen it in action other than that one screenshot, but I assume that's kind of how it works, right?

Jared Bauman:
It says

Spencer Haws:
And…

Jared Bauman:
it uses machine learning to generate relevant keywords. So maybe you put in like a seed topic, and then it gives you keywords based on monthly Reddit views while filtering out unsuitable content.

Spencer Haws:
Hmm. Yeah.

Jared Bauman:
So I guess it's somewhat of a keyword research tool, even though it's really masked to some degree behind an ad platform of sorts.

Spencer Haws:
Right. Yeah, which as we know, that's how Google does it. They've got their Google Keyword Planner, where you go in and you type in a bunch of keywords. And of course they've evolved quite a bit from where it used to just spit out a big list of keywords. It's kind of works a little bit differently now, but the fundamental idea is there. And I have not tested this out. This is something that maybe… Maybe everybody can use this. Do you have to actually have an ad account? Is it free? Right? If it's free, maybe it's kind of an interesting tool to use that can help you find SEO keywords to target. Even though it's not an SEO tool, maybe you can go in there and get some good ideas of things that are getting a lot of traffic on Reddit that you can then kind of port over to your website and use.

Jared Bauman:
Yeah, there's multiple ways it would seem to use this. First off, if you want to maximize the Reddit platform for whatever reason, maybe to make your brand larger, to send traffic to your website, to become a bit of an influence on there, whatever it is, it looks like now you finally have some sort of machine learning data in front of you. But to that point that you said, Spencer, a lot of us have known to go to Reddit to pull topics, or at least go look at. topics that Reddit is ranking for. Because if Reddit's ranking, often that means that Google is ranking user-generated content. And they tend to prefer authoritative sources for topics rather than user-generated content. So sometimes if you find a good keyword in Reddit, it could give you ideas for what to write about on your blog to rank in Google.

Spencer Haws:
Yeah. So this is something that we need to go and check out. Maybe this is

Jared Bauman:
Yeah,

Spencer Haws:
our homework for the week.

Jared Bauman:
I agree.

Spencer Haws:
Let's go see if we can use this and see if it's worthwhile. If anybody does try it out, let us know. We'd love to know your experience with that.

Jared Bauman:
Yeah, I agree. I'd love to hear. Because we're only going to look at it from our perspective, our niches, our whatever. So anybody who's used it or is going to use it, maybe post a note on the feedback.

Spencer Haws:
Yeah, absolutely. So, all right, I think that takes us to our next segment here, where we talk about our shiny object projects. These are just, of course, side hustles that we have going on outside of our main business, just things that we either do for fun, or maybe we're trying to grow and make some money. I guess that's always the ideas that we hope they become much more than just a side hustle, right?

Jared Bauman:
both fun and money.

Spencer Haws:
Fun and money, exactly. The things we do for entertainment around here. So… I will go first and as I teased in the beginning, I think we're going to cover the same thing here. So I am still working at the Amazon Influencer program and I've decided to try and ramp up the number of videos that I've been publishing

Jared Bauman:
Mmm, okay.

Spencer Haws:
and what is new and unique. And I think this is the first time ever in my business, if my memory serves me correct, that I have hired somebody local. in person in that lives in my city.

Jared Bauman:
Whoa.

Spencer Haws:
I don't believe that I have ever done that. I'm thinking back all the way through 2011 when I quit my job. Have I ever hired anybody in person? Nobody's coming to mind. I apologize if somebody that I hired in my town is listening and I totally

Jared Bauman:
Well, that's a lot of

Spencer Haws:
forgot

Jared Bauman:
history there.

Spencer Haws:
about you.

Jared Bauman:
That's a lot of history

Spencer Haws:
But

Jared Bauman:
to remember there. So.

Spencer Haws:
yeah, so I hired not one, not two, not three, but four. people that live in my city to help me record product review videos. And, um, part of this is, uh, because there, there's some incentives with Amazon right now to, to publish some more videos. Uh, so I'm going to try and get that, uh, in quickly, but also longterm. I think it just makes a lot of sense if either I'm getting free product from. other brands, right? If I can have them ship it to my location, it's very easy. If somebody lives in my city, I can just hand it to them. I don't have to ship all over. And so I may try some of that, try to get some free product, or if I've got product here at my house, it's very easy to hand that to a neighbor, right? That's going to then record the video. So that's why I'm doing it. I am wanting to ramp up and scale. especially in preparation for fourth quarter, but

Jared Bauman:
Yeah.

Spencer Haws:
long term I'm just seeing opportunity. I think the math all still works out if I hire people to record videos. I still can eke out a profit here and I can just manage the business. And so that's basically what I wanted to share. I'm still stuck at about 374 total videos. I think is what… I looked at this morning. So I've kind of been roughly at that number, it feels like, for almost a month now. And so it'll be good to start ramping up and publishing a lot more videos. But yeah, that's kind of where I'm at. I don't know

Jared Bauman:
So

Spencer Haws:
if you have any follow-up questions for me, Jared, but that's what I wanted

Jared Bauman:
I do,

Spencer Haws:
to share.

Jared Bauman:
and I'm pulling up my number right now, because you made me think I didn't check before. OK, there, I have it for when we talk.

Spencer Haws:
Okay.

Jared Bauman:
The old model, and maybe this is still the model, but I know the old model that you were working off of was hiring someone and saying, hey, you just record stuff that you already own that's in your house. Will these people you hired locally still be doing that? Or will it be more of this, hey, come pick up a ton of product or come pick up stuff that I've sourced for you to review?

Spencer Haws:
So they will do both.

Jared Bauman:
Both, yeah.

Spencer Haws:
They are gonna start with everything in their house. I figure that's gonna get them a couple months down the road. And then I'll have things figured out better, right? I'll either have a stash of product that I can get them. I do have a number of products already here at my house that I have divvied out. Some videos that they can do here in the next few weeks. And then, like I said, a couple of months, they'll record in their own house. And then… I've kicked the can down the road to decide,

Jared Bauman:
You better be careful. I could see a couple months from now and you have a garage full of stuff. Mrs. Hawes is a little frustrated.

Spencer Haws:
Yeah, yeah, we won't go into all the details, but I've already kind of broached that subject a little bit and I'm getting some pushback already, so…

Jared Bauman:
Good. It's OK. No one wants to come here for marital talk, but yeah. No. That seems smart, because I haven't dove into it at all on my side of the influencer. But from people I've talked to, you get offered a decent amount of product without even trying. And

Spencer Haws:
Mm-hmm.

Jared Bauman:
so I'm going to be curious to just see if you decide to go down the road of actually somewhat pursuing getting brands to send you product or purchasing product.

Spencer Haws:
Mm-hmm.

Jared Bauman:
or that specifically kind of how you do that, how it goes. So I think that'll be really interesting to watch that unfold.

Spencer Haws:
Yeah, like I said, it's really early on. I have had two different brands send product

Jared Bauman:
Okay.

Spencer Haws:
my way in the past. And then, yes, I've looked at purchasing product, trying to do the math of like, okay, if I get this many commissions, is it gonna pay for the $25 purchase or whatever? It might be, right? So I've kind of run some of those numbers as well. And so, yeah, we'll keep chatting and I'll keep sharing. So.

Jared Bauman:
Good, very good. Well, yeah, I'm talking Amazon Influencer today as well. And it's been a long summer of vacations. And I was telling you before we started recording, like there's just been kids running around the house. And it's kind of hard to find good time to make the videos, certainly in the last month or so. I'm kind of like you. I really either hadn't published anything for a good month there, or if I had, it was very minimal. But I got back on the video production horse this past week and I hit a personal record for a number of videos recorded in a seven day period. So from last week when we recorded, I hadn't recorded a video in a month or so. And since last week, seven days later, I have recorded 122 videos.

Spencer Haws:
122 videos

Jared Bauman:
122

Spencer Haws:
now

Jared Bauman:
and they're all submitted bringing us to a total of 510 videos live because you and I were must have been neck and neck there

Spencer Haws:
We were very close for a long time. But you have quickly surpassed me,

Jared Bauman:
I've put a good

Spencer Haws:
making

Jared Bauman:
dent

Spencer Haws:
me look

Jared Bauman:
in that.

Spencer Haws:
bad.

Jared Bauman:
Yeah, I've put a good dent in it. I think you're gonna have a, you know, that's a good hill to climb now.

Spencer Haws:
It is. I got a lot of catching up to do. Man, maybe we should like bet something first to a thousand, you know, like,

Jared Bauman:
Oh, maybe we

Spencer Haws:
I don't

Jared Bauman:
should.

Spencer Haws:
know what we have to do on the podcast or something. I mean, leave a comment if there's something

Jared Bauman:
Like

Spencer Haws:
you

Jared Bauman:
it's…

Spencer Haws:
want to see Jared and I,

Jared Bauman:
Like…

Spencer Haws:
you know, risk put

Jared Bauman:
David

Spencer Haws:
on the line

Jared Bauman:
versus

Spencer Haws:
here.

Jared Bauman:
Goliath here, you've got an army of four people recording. But I'm scrappy and I can just knuckle… I don't know.

Spencer Haws:
Yeah, so now did you do all of these? I know in the past you've had somebody

Jared Bauman:
Yep.

Spencer Haws:
help you out.

Jared Bauman:
Yeah, Caitlin's been traveling this past week, so she's not even in her office. I did. Not a shameless plug, but if you didn't listen to last week's episode, I outlined some of the strategy behind how I was going to go about recording a lot of videos this week. And I'll say it worked really, really well. And so I will say this is probably the most organized I've been in my approach to recording. I'm not saying I'm not organized, because I do have a spreadsheet and stuff. But. the organization from this past week was a cut above. And that really helped a lot. So encouragement to people, I suppose it's to each their own, but for me, I really benefited from really being super organized. And if you're wondering, I did keep track. And so it took me under 10 hours to do those 122 videos.

Spencer Haws:
Is that right?

Jared Bauman:
So I was averaging with recording and uploading just under five minutes per video is what I came out to. So,

Spencer Haws:
Wow, that's very impressive.

Jared Bauman:
and a lot of that said organization, and a lot of it's the process I outlined last week because of that process, like, I was almost going through a formula, video over video, so it was agonizing. Like, I felt like I was saying so much of the same stuff, but it really was the right approach to take because each video on its own had that structure to it, so. Yeah, listen last week if you want to get those insights, you know to it to that exact process But suffice to say there was a process behind it that really allowed me to get so many done

Spencer Haws:
So, how many are you gonna do this week?

Jared Bauman:
I don't even want to look at the back of my phone this week, but I'm going to try to keep it in the momentum. I'll put it out.

Spencer Haws:
Okay.

Jared Bauman:
I'm going to do 30 or 40 this week.

Spencer Haws:
All right. Wow.

Jared Bauman:
It is a holiday weekend here. We're traveling a bit. That'll put a dent in it. So let's say 30 or 40. I'll give myself a target.

Spencer Haws:
That's very good. Man, you are gonna be hard to catch. All right.

Jared Bauman:
Are we

Spencer Haws:
No,

Jared Bauman:
going to

Spencer Haws:
that's

Jared Bauman:
a thousand?

Spencer Haws:
the first one to a thousand.

Jared Bauman:
All right, how about, we'll take the best, most reasonable idea for a wager in the comments below.

Spencer Haws:
There you go, I like reasonable.

Jared Bauman:
It's gotta

Spencer Haws:
I like

Jared Bauman:
be reasonable.

Spencer Haws:
reasonable.

Jared Bauman:
Can't be outlandish. I don't need to shave my head or anything, but you know, something good here. Maybe we can come up with something.

Spencer Haws:
Alright, alright, yeah. I would like to hit a thousand. I'd like to hit a couple thousand videos, right? Like, why not?

Jared Bauman:
Well,

Spencer Haws:
Let's go to the moon if we

Jared Bauman:
and

Spencer Haws:
can

Jared Bauman:
I

Spencer Haws:
make

Jared Bauman:
mean,

Spencer Haws:
it work.

Jared Bauman:
just by your math, just for people who haven't listened, I think what was the number you were saying? I think the minimum that you were seeing was about 20 cents per image per day, if

Spencer Haws:
Yeah,

Jared Bauman:
I remember correctly.

Spencer Haws:
so right around that. Mm-hmm.

Jared Bauman:
We should probably better prepare for these things, but anyways.

Spencer Haws:
Yeah, I think I'm a little lower than that,

Jared Bauman:
Yeah, well,

Spencer Haws:
but…

Jared Bauman:
that makes the math nice though, because that's $200 a day

Spencer Haws:
Mm-hmm.

Jared Bauman:
in

Spencer Haws:
Yep.

Jared Bauman:
earnings at 1,000 videos. And that would be a $6,000 a month with probably swelling times of high purchase like Prime Day and Q4 and stuff. So that's 1,000 videos is a lot, but so $6,000 a month. So it's a

Spencer Haws:
Mm-hmm.

Jared Bauman:
good number.

Spencer Haws:
Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, we'll see where it goes. I'm probably thinking about this too much for like the percentage of my business that this is, right? It's a side hustle, right? It's like this tiny little sliver of my revenue is from Amazon Influencer, but I'm enjoying it. I'm having fun.

Jared Bauman:
This was the first week where I was like, 10 hours, that's probably not the right number of hours to spend on it. I've always said a couple of weeks, and so 10 felt to be clear. I don't think that's gonna happen again anytime soon.

Spencer Haws:
Yeah, yep. Yep. Kind of got this special Amazon deal happening and it makes sense to crank out a bunch. And so I'm hoping we'll see the four people I hired there. I expect them to be submitting their very first videos today

Jared Bauman:
Okay.

Spencer Haws:
because I just had them over at my house last night, sat them all down,

Jared Bauman:
Man,

Spencer Haws:
you know, the five of us in a room

Jared Bauman:
yeah, in-person training

Spencer Haws:
and

Jared Bauman:
and everything.

Spencer Haws:
in-person training. And I, you know, I like pulled up the Amazon app and like showed them how you can like take pictures of stuff and it was cool. It was fun. It was like, nobody's ever seen, you know, more than just

Jared Bauman:
No,

Spencer Haws:
my head

Jared Bauman:
I

Spencer Haws:
and

Jared Bauman:
was

Spencer Haws:
shoulders.

Jared Bauman:
going to say, waist down. We have no idea, Spencer.

Spencer Haws:
Yeah.

Jared Bauman:
Aside from the

Spencer Haws:
Um.

Jared Bauman:
every five years of a marathon photo of you that pops out there. I mean, you could be.

Spencer Haws:
That's true. You could find me if you look for my marathon pictures, but don't usually show that to my employees just if you're in person.

Jared Bauman:
You can be live in Boston for that.

Spencer Haws:
Yeah. So, very good. Let's move on to our final subject of the day here, which is our weird niche sites. We're going to talk about a weird niche site that both of us have found. Maybe I'll go ahead and go first. So I found kind of an interesting site that is actually getting more traffic than I thought. When I first was playing around with this site, I was like, yeah, certainly not that many people are visiting it. There's no search traffic really to speak of when I pull it up in Ahrefs, but there's a decent amount of traffic according to, well, I'll jump into what SimilarWeb says, but let me just reveal the site here for you. So it is language guesser.com. So language guesser.com is what it is. And it's just like a little game. I played it before the podcast started. It's kind of fun. And it's got a leaderboard. So I'll just, I'll lead with that. As you can see,

Jared Bauman:
Oh

Spencer Haws:
who's

Jared Bauman:
yeah.

Spencer Haws:
got the highest score today, the

Jared Bauman:
Yeah.

Spencer Haws:
highest score this week and all time. Okay. And I think, well, all that I can see on the homepage is you can either play the classic or infinite game. And when you click this, okay, I guess you, oh, I didn't realize you could select like the number of rounds and difficulty, right?

Jared Bauman:
Oh

Spencer Haws:
So

Jared Bauman:
boy.

Spencer Haws:
let's make it easy. And okay, Niche King was my name. So let's do that again. And it basically, It plays a YouTube video. This one actually has words on it, it looks like, and I would sit here and I would listen and I would try to think, okay, what language are they singing in? And I haven't really listened to this, but based on the writing, let's see what can we guess here. Maybe Slavic?

Jared Bauman:
gonna say Swedish?

Spencer Haws:
There you go. Okay,

Jared Bauman:
Oh man look at

Spencer Haws:
so

Jared Bauman:
you

Spencer Haws:
I got

Jared Bauman:
how'd

Spencer Haws:
it.

Jared Bauman:
you get that?

Spencer Haws:
Well, I don't know. I got some in the back of my head. I know

Jared Bauman:
Wow,

Spencer Haws:
what Slavic looks like.

Jared Bauman:
that is impressive!

Spencer Haws:
And so then you go to the next one.

Jared Bauman:
Awesome.

Spencer Haws:
Okay, and then, you know, and you, that looks like maybe some sort of Russian character, right?

Jared Bauman:
Yeah,

Spencer Haws:
So I'd guess

Jared Bauman:
I was gonna…

Spencer Haws:
Russian. Okay. Well, there you go. I got,

Jared Bauman:
Oh my gosh, you are good at this.

Spencer Haws:
I'm amazing.

Jared Bauman:
How

Spencer Haws:
I'm,

Jared Bauman:
are you not on the leaderboard?

Spencer Haws:
well, I haven't played long enough. Um, after, after this podcast, I'll play more, but like, that is the whole website. Like you just, like, there's nothing else I can do. Um, what is interesting is that I don't see any display ads. Um, they,

Jared Bauman:
I do.

Spencer Haws:
oh, is there,

Jared Bauman:
There one right there.

Spencer Haws:
Oh, there

Jared Bauman:
There

Spencer Haws:
we go,

Jared Bauman:
it is.

Spencer Haws:
you're right.

Jared Bauman:
Just one.

Spencer Haws:
Okay,

Jared Bauman:
Just one, though.

Spencer Haws:
I don't think there was one on the game.

Jared Bauman:
No, I don't think, I think the game was, I think it's only the landing page maybe.

Spencer Haws:
Yeah, yeah, you know, when you select there and that they've got, you know, Twitter following, oh, it wants me to promote it. Okay, I thought it was gonna like, anyways. So kind of a fun website. And so like I said, if we come over here to Ahrefs, like almost no traffic, 598 traffic from search, right? Like it's probably people typing in the domain name itself. Like if I go to organic keywords, I bet it's language guesser. Okay, guess language, language guesser, right? So it's pretty much direct traffic. And then if you come over here to similar web, it shows that 224,000 visitors a month,

Jared Bauman:
Wow.

Spencer Haws:
which was shockingly high

Jared Bauman:
Yeah.

Spencer Haws:
for what I thought. After I looked at Ahrefs, I was like, ah, it's not gonna be anybody. Looks like it's increased quite a bit over the last couple of months

Jared Bauman:
I wonder,

Spencer Haws:
for some reason.

Jared Bauman:
I was gonna say I wonder why.

Spencer Haws:
795% change. Oh, interesting. So I did find it on a certain website that I won't share because that's a source of a lot of my weird niche sites.

Jared Bauman:
You still won't tell me.

Spencer Haws:
So I want… No, I can't because then where am I going to find my sites if you

Jared Bauman:
I

Spencer Haws:
know

Jared Bauman:
get

Spencer Haws:
where

Jared Bauman:
it.

Spencer Haws:
I'm…

Jared Bauman:
You've

Spencer Haws:
Yeah.

Jared Bauman:
got to keep your

Spencer Haws:
So…

Jared Bauman:
watering hole to yourself.

Spencer Haws:
Exactly. So maybe that's why there's a big bump. It made it onto this particular website and that got a bunch of visitors. But it's, where's my breakdown of traffic? I guess that was maybe these big bubbles was it.

Jared Bauman:
I

Spencer Haws:
You

Jared Bauman:
think

Spencer Haws:
know,

Jared Bauman:
that's

Spencer Haws:
social

Jared Bauman:
it.

Spencer Haws:
media networks, search engines. Oh, that's categories. I

Jared Bauman:
Where

Spencer Haws:
gotta

Jared Bauman:
did

Spencer Haws:
keep

Jared Bauman:
it come

Spencer Haws:
going.

Jared Bauman:
from?

Spencer Haws:
There we go. Oh, that's weird. It says organic traffic.

Jared Bauman:
Yeah, I mean, I won't

Spencer Haws:
Well.

Jared Bauman:
tease mine, but when we get to mine, it has some very similar, confusing, similar web versus Ahrefs sort of stuff. That's interesting.

Spencer Haws:
Mm-hmm. Maybe maybe everybody's typing in language guesser, you know and this month, right? And it's just getting a ton.

Jared Bauman:
Well, maybe

Spencer Haws:
I don't

Jared Bauman:
to

Spencer Haws:
know

Jared Bauman:
your point, maybe, I mean, it takes keyword tools like Ahrefs a while to catch up with something that is a hit right now. And SimilarWeb's showing this massive spike right now, so maybe the keyword data hasn't caught up with the true search volume.

Spencer Haws:
That's a good point. Yeah, that could definitely be it. So it's kind of a fun game. So if I were to like think about how can I improve this site or how can I make more money? From this site, like I could see this almost being like an app, you know, like a game that you just have on your phone, right? When you're bored, you pull it up. And so I don't, I don't see a mobile version of this. So I'd create like a, a mobile version that's on the app store. You know when I think about word all or other

Jared Bauman:
Yeah.

Spencer Haws:
little games

Jared Bauman:
Yep.

Spencer Haws:
that are getting millions of downloads This could maybe be one of those just kind of fun things like oh you share with your friends Can you get this one? I you know, my score is 30 for the day. What are you gonna get? so

Jared Bauman:
I could see gamifying it. Spencer, you could earn badges. Maybe you're a Russian language specialist.

Spencer Haws:
Maybe.

Jared Bauman:
You get all the, you're 100% when Russian pop videos come on.

Spencer Haws:
Your weakness is Albanian

Jared Bauman:
Albanian,

Spencer Haws:
or

Jared Bauman:
you're just, you're O

Spencer Haws:
you

Jared Bauman:
for everything on that.

Spencer Haws:
just need to work on that, right? Hire a coach or something.

Jared Bauman:
You know, it could break down like the, the regions of the world that you specialize in, you know, like you need to work on your South American region. And, uh, I don't know. I mean, as cheesy as it sounds, stuff like that really does gamify and oftentimes increases engagement and people have a lot of fun with that, you know.

Spencer Haws:
Yeah, so I was playing on easy, so maybe I'll try around and hard, you know, next time and…

Jared Bauman:
What would hard be, I guess, like, you know, Antarctic?

Spencer Haws:
I'm not sure. I don't know. Well, here's the languages, but from what I can see, there's no words

Jared Bauman:
There's

Spencer Haws:
on the

Jared Bauman:
no

Spencer Haws:
screen,

Jared Bauman:
words.

Spencer Haws:
right?

Jared Bauman:
Yeah.

Spencer Haws:
So I have to actually listen for one thing, but I don't

Jared Bauman:
I can

Spencer Haws:
know.

Jared Bauman:
imagine like a rap video in a different language would be pretty hard to pick up.

Spencer Haws:
It's interesting though that they're using some sort of smart technology to blur out the title. These are all just YouTube videos, obviously, right? That they're blurring out the title so you can't see any words. But it looks like I can click on it. If I want to cheat,

Jared Bauman:
Yeah.

Spencer Haws:
I can go over to the YouTube page

Jared Bauman:
I mean,

Spencer Haws:
and

Jared Bauman:
seriously,

Spencer Haws:
see what that is.

Jared Bauman:
who knows? Could this be the next wordle? Or could it, if somebody put time and effort in, it'd be the next wordle?

Spencer Haws:
Maybe so, maybe

Jared Bauman:
New York

Spencer Haws:
so.

Jared Bauman:
Times buys languageguesser.com 2024.

Spencer Haws:
I mean, that seems like a New York Times type thing. They do their crossword puzzles, they do wordle, they do all sorts of things related to language, so why not?

Jared Bauman:
Good find, very good find. That's a fun one, that's a fun

Spencer Haws:
Thank

Jared Bauman:
one.

Spencer Haws:
you. All right, Jared, what do you got for us?

Jared Bauman:
uh… well you know it's uh… it's pretty simple spencer i just uh… you know you can boot it up and show it to everyone is it christmas dot com When we talk about simple websites, this website is comprised of five total words. And it's isitchristmas.com. And

Spencer Haws:
Let me

Jared Bauman:
let me ask

Spencer Haws:
share

Jared Bauman:
you a question

Spencer Haws:
this here.

Jared Bauman:
right now. Today, Spencer, is it, I mean, you can answer this yourself. Is it Christmas?

Spencer Haws:
well let me let me check uh… what the website says no it's not christmas

Jared Bauman:
Unfortunately, we can't get a different result until I'm going to imagine Christmas. I don't think we're recording on that day either. We're going to have to…

Spencer Haws:
I keep refreshing and yeah, it's nothing. It's still an O.

Jared Bauman:
I'm kidding, that's not my weird niche of the day. Although I do think that qualifies, but there's really not much to talk about here.

Spencer Haws:
It's a fun one for sure.

Jared Bauman:
Are we?

Spencer Haws:
I love it. It's just, just no.

Jared Bauman:
Missed,

Spencer Haws:
I mean, is

Jared Bauman:
no.

Spencer Haws:
it just black letters that says yes? I mean, maybe you come on Christmas and it's a whole, it's a whole experience.

Jared Bauman:
I'm

Spencer Haws:
I don't

Jared Bauman:
gonna

Spencer Haws:
know.

Jared Bauman:
see if I can remember, Christmas is a pretty crazy day around here, I'm gonna see if I can remember to come on Christmas and see if I can get a screen shatter.

Spencer Haws:
Someone remind us, reach out on Twitter or YouTube,

Jared Bauman:
Yeah,

Spencer Haws:
and on

Jared Bauman:
maybe

Spencer Haws:
Christmas.

Jared Bauman:
we would be lucky if Archive.org grabbed a snapshot on Christmas Day.

Spencer Haws:
There you go.

Jared Bauman:
I

Spencer Haws:
All

Jared Bauman:
doubt

Spencer Haws:
right, what's your real one?

Jared Bauman:
it. Okay, the real one is, you know, following in the vein of some of the ones that you've had over the past, I feel like a couple weeks or maybe a couple months. This is a bit of a tool, you know, and it is wordunscrambler.com. And you know, I mean, when I first saw it, I thought this is kind of a gimmick. And then I started reading a little bit below the fold. And where this really becomes interesting is if you are a Scrabble player. And I'm sure there's other reasons too, but basically what you do is you put in letters. It even has fields for wild cards. So you could get like in Scrabble a blank, right? I think you would use the wild card, the star. and you put them in there and it, not only does it unscramble them into words for you and give you all the word options, but it will sort them in order of which ones have the highest point total unscrabble. So you could just type in seven arbitrary letters and as long as it had some vowels and some consonants in there, Spencer, you can see that it will unscramble it for you and then prioritize it by which ones are gonna score the highest there.

Spencer Haws:
I don't know if that's any words. I just typed in really

Jared Bauman:
There you

Spencer Haws:
random.

Jared Bauman:
go. Go down, you got an eight score word

Spencer Haws:
Oh,

Jared Bauman:
there, which is code for eight

Spencer Haws:
down

Jared Bauman:
points.

Spencer Haws:
here. Okay.

Jared Bauman:
I think they

Spencer Haws:
Poster,

Jared Bauman:
call it points

Spencer Haws:
Presto,

Jared Bauman:
and scrabble. You

Spencer Haws:
oh,

Jared Bauman:
can make

Spencer Haws:
repose.

Jared Bauman:
poster out of that. You could make tropes.

Spencer Haws:
Oh, wow.

Jared Bauman:
You can make a resort out of that.

Spencer Haws:
Hmm.

Jared Bauman:
If none of those worked, you could move on down and find a seven point words. They have, I do not know, what? Probably 15 of them there.

Spencer Haws:
Mm-hmm. Yep. Interesting.

Jared Bauman:
If you are not watching, it is a very simple design.

Spencer Haws:
Oh yeah.

Jared Bauman:
I would not call it user-friendly.

Spencer Haws:
or beautiful.

Jared Bauman:
Um, I don't even sure you knew that you actually gave your results, Spencer.

Spencer Haws:
I did not, I didn't know exactly. I mean, the button is above where you, like

Jared Bauman:
Yep.

Spencer Haws:
usually the

Jared Bauman:
I hit

Spencer Haws:
enter

Jared Bauman:
the same

Spencer Haws:
button's

Jared Bauman:
button you

Spencer Haws:
below.

Jared Bauman:
hit it first, which is why I thought it was amusing, because I did the same thing. I thought it was just me. It does have some, I guess we'll call it filters, and for whatever reason, you can change the font that it renders in for you. I don't know why that's valuable.

Spencer Haws:
Make it, yeah.

Jared Bauman:
Here's the fun thing about it, I thought. I mean, obviously, if you're into Scrabble, my mom would love this, but if you go over to hrefs, as you can imagine, it's not really a… a very popular website. It's a DR10, so you're not getting a ton of backlinks with this. But Ahrefs predicts that it has over 150,000 organic search visits per month.

Spencer Haws:
Yeah.

Jared Bauman:
And that is down from almost a million at one point in, I think I saw 2018

Spencer Haws:
2019,

Jared Bauman:
or 2019.

Spencer Haws:
yeah. Wow. So yeah, it's definitely trend down, but still like 153,000 visitors a month. Does it say, again, this is one of those that I would think is like people typing it in. Yeah, word unscrambler.

Jared Bauman:
It doesn't even rank number, you know what, maybe that's it. Maybe it's because it used to rank number one for that as a brand name. And now somebody came in, look at ranks number three now for word on scrambler.

Spencer Haws:
Mmm.

Jared Bauman:
I wonder if it went from like one to three for a lot of these terms here.

Spencer Haws:
Maybe it's time to update the website, you know, beyond the 1999

Jared Bauman:
Yeah.

Spencer Haws:
look

Jared Bauman:
I mean,

Spencer Haws:
of it.

Jared Bauman:
it does have ads. I feel like it would be well worth the investment to

Spencer Haws:
Mm-hmm.

Jared Bauman:
update it. If it's getting anywhere near a couple hundred thousand page views a month, I feel like it would be well worth modernizing the look and feel of it. It's basically a one page website.

Spencer Haws:
Yeah, it's interesting. Sorry, I'm just going over to the Google results. So I search for Word on Scrambler and there's word on scrambler.me,

Jared Bauman:
Mm-hmm.

Spencer Haws:
word on scrambler.net, right? Word tips dot or word dot tips. And then yeah, number four or five is the dot com. And usually it's the other way around. And

Jared Bauman:
Yeah.

Spencer Haws:
so… Here's this website. I guess it's not that much more beautiful, but it's

Jared Bauman:
It does have,

Spencer Haws:
a little bit cleaner.

Jared Bauman:
it does have a text on it, you know? I mean, it does have like content. We'll call it a thousand words of content

Spencer Haws:
Yeah,

Jared Bauman:
below

Spencer Haws:
exactly.

Jared Bauman:
the fold there.

Spencer Haws:
Yep, so that could be helping. It's probably more SEO friendly for

Jared Bauman:
The

Spencer Haws:
sure.

Jared Bauman:
UI is also a lot better.

Spencer Haws:
Yeah, yep. So.

Jared Bauman:
Hey, this is interesting. I didn't see this until just now, but if you go back to the weird niche site that we had, the word unscrambler.

Spencer Haws:
Mm-hmm.

Jared Bauman:
Speaking of Wordle, look at that in the upper left there.

Spencer Haws:
Um, in the upper left.

Jared Bauman:
You've got links

Spencer Haws:
Oh,

Jared Bauman:
for

Spencer Haws:
oh, links

Jared Bauman:
comics

Spencer Haws:
directly to.

Jared Bauman:
and Wordle.

Spencer Haws:
Wirtle solver.

Jared Bauman:
Wordle solver.

Spencer Haws:
Oh, interesting.

Jared Bauman:
And it has, if you

Spencer Haws:
You can

Jared Bauman:
go,

Spencer Haws:
cheat at Wirtle.

Jared Bauman:
yeah, you could cheat at Wordle.

Spencer Haws:
Put in your yellow letters. That's just sad. Come

Jared Bauman:
Isn't

Spencer Haws:
on.

Jared Bauman:
that terrible?

Spencer Haws:
That takes all the fun out of the game.

Jared Bauman:
Why would you want to play wordle if you just want to go here and get it answered for you?

Spencer Haws:
Yeah, it's like,

Jared Bauman:
But I guess

Spencer Haws:
yeah,

Jared Bauman:
it's the

Spencer Haws:
I

Jared Bauman:
same thing.

Spencer Haws:
s-

Jared Bauman:
Why would you want to play scramble- a scrabble if it unscrambles the word for you?

Spencer Haws:
So this is for people that aren't very good at word games, that are willing to cheat.

Jared Bauman:
Yeah.

Spencer Haws:
Oh man, this, I don't know. There we are. We're back.

Jared Bauman:
We're back.

Spencer Haws:
So the website may have some technical problems. I don't know.

Jared Bauman:
Might also be why it's falling out of the Google's good graces

Spencer Haws:
It could be. So if you've created this website, I was just seeing if there's any more details, right?

Jared Bauman:
I've got a proposal if you create that website. Let my agency split any future upside with you, and we'll handle the workload for you.

Spencer Haws:
I like it. I like it a lot.

Jared Bauman:
Feel like with that domain age, and the fact that it's such a bad experience, we just, with a little bit of work, could get that at least one or two positions higher in Google.

Spencer Haws:
Mm-hmm, and that's gonna you know double your traffic again

Jared Bauman:
Yeah,

Spencer Haws:
at least so

Jared Bauman:
right. Going from three to two or three to one, I mean, that's such a different ballgame.

Spencer Haws:
different ball game for sure. And then we were gonna share the similar web

Jared Bauman:
Oh yeah, that's right, yeah.

Spencer Haws:
data on this one as well. And so I've got that pulled up. It was interesting because it shows, it only shows 181,000. Well, I guess that would be about right. If you, you know, Ahrefs is showing 150,000 organic searches. So maybe that's right. But then when we looked at traffic sources, We showed kind of the opposite here of it's showing that 80% is coming direct and only 17% organic.

Jared Bauman:
It's gotta be a way that similar web looks at, because we saw so much basically branded traffic, right?

Spencer Haws:
Yeah.

Jared Bauman:
When we looked at Ahrefs keywords. I wonder if basically similar web is saying, yeah, that's direct.

Spencer Haws:
Maybe so.

Jared Bauman:
You know?

Spencer Haws:
It could be.

Jared Bauman:
And they're just categorizing a little bit differently.

Spencer Haws:
Yeah. But interesting nonetheless. I mean, almost 200,000 visitors a month on kind of a clunky looking website. Hopefully they're making a little bit of money.

Jared Bauman:
Imagine

Spencer Haws:
But

Jared Bauman:
a couple thousand bucks a month,

Spencer Haws:
yeah.

Jared Bauman:
you know?

Spencer Haws:
But definitely a interesting niche site.

Jared Bauman:
For something that you built clearly like 20 years ago, haven't touched since then, and doesn't have a lot of backlinks or press or you know, virality to it. I mean, I don't know, a couple thousand dollars a month, pretty easy.

Spencer Haws:
Yeah, I mean they've made some updates, right? They've got links to Wordle, which hasn't existed that long,

Jared Bauman:
Yep. They've

Spencer Haws:
right?

Jared Bauman:
got a crossword

Spencer Haws:
So, mm-hmm.

Jared Bauman:
puzzle solver, it looks like. Spencer, it says right there, our old version is here. So apparently, this is the new version.

Spencer Haws:
Oh, well we better check out the old version.

Jared Bauman:
I don't even. It's got to break your computer.

Spencer Haws:
So here's the old version.

Jared Bauman:
I kinda like the old version better. Ha ha ha.

Spencer Haws:
Um, yeah. There's a cartoon

Jared Bauman:
and or tune.

Spencer Haws:
I clicked on. I don't know, well, it's broken. This link takes you back to Word on Scrambler. I love it.

Jared Bauman:
Interstitial, good.

Spencer Haws:
Well, there you go.

Jared Bauman:
All right.

Spencer Haws:
So, good find. There's so many websites out there that we could be talking about and covering. That's a

Jared Bauman:
So

Spencer Haws:
fun one for sure.

Jared Bauman:
just a final thought on it, but this is one of those that I've heard this strategy from several people. But if you have the time and the energy, this is one of those where you, I mean, why not just pop an email off to the owner and say, hey, can I take that site off your hands for you? It doesn't look like it gets updated that much. I'd love to work on it. Can I make you an offer? How much would you want for it? And you just never know. Somebody could have forgotten they even own the site at this point.

Spencer Haws:
Yeah, that's what's cool is there's like so many sites out there and I've heard a lot of stories of people reaching out

Jared Bauman:
Right?

Spencer Haws:
to these old websites. They make an acquisition. The owner, you know, the existing owner's happy, the new buyer's happy and they're able to improve it, improve the UI or just improve the technical SEO and it's a win-win all around.

Jared Bauman:
I just did an interview yesterday. I'm sure you haven't even heard it yet, because it doesn't go live for a little while. We pre-record the interviews that go live on Wednesdays. And I won't spoil the story, but he reached out to somebody of a site he wanted to buy, and they were like, we don't want to sell. And he said, OK, no problem. And then years later, they contacted him and said, OK, now we want to sell. We looked your name back up.

Spencer Haws:
Really?

Jared Bauman:
Mm-hmm.

Spencer Haws:
Oh cool, I'm gonna listen to

Jared Bauman:
You

Spencer Haws:
that.

Jared Bauman:
never know what's going to come out of it.

Spencer Haws:
Absolutely. So that's it. That's a wrap. That's what's going on this week in Niche Pursuits News. We covered, of course, the news, our side hustles and now the Weird Niche site. Thanks everybody for listening in. Following along if you want to hear more and get all the updates for when the podcasts are coming out. Of course, be sure to subscribe wherever you can. YouTube, any podcast app that you might have out there, or you can subscribe to the Niche Pursuits newsletter. You just go to nichepursuits.com slash newsletter. I send out emails when these episodes come out so you don't miss anything along with other tips that I have as well. So just wanna say thank you everybody for listening. Really appreciate it.

Jared Bauman:
Have a great weekend.

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