AI transcript
0:00:04 here’s how to get traffic to your website without relying on Google.
0:00:05 What’s up, what’s up, Nick Loper here.
0:00:09 Welcome to the Science Hustle Show, part of the entrepreneur podcast network.
0:00:11 It’s the business podcast you can actually apply.
0:00:16 And the last 12 months have been challenging, to say the least, for individual content creators.
0:00:18 People making money from their websites.
0:00:20 But does that mean online publishing is dead?
0:00:22 Is the niche site era officially over?
0:00:25 Well, don’t throw in the towel just yet, because all my guests today
0:00:29 has definitely been through the wringer when it comes to losing traffic from Google updates.
0:00:32 He’s also proved his resiliency as an entrepreneur
0:00:35 and tapped into new traffic sources that you can too.
0:00:40 I’m excited to welcome John Dykstra from fatstacksblog.com back to the show.
0:00:42 It’s been far too long, eight plus years.
0:00:43 John, welcome back.
0:00:45 Hey, thanks a lot for having me, Nick.
0:00:46 Yeah, it’s been a long time.
0:00:48 Eight years.
0:00:48 I was surprised.
0:00:50 I remember doing it, too.
0:00:52 I distinctly remember talking to you.
0:00:53 So this is great to be back.
0:00:56 We may have still been recording in the corner of the living room at that point.
0:00:58 It’s a different era.
0:01:02 Times have changed, but one thing remains constant.
0:01:04 And that’s, well, how do you make money on the internet?
0:01:05 That’s what we’re diving into today.
0:01:06 Stick around.
0:01:10 We’re talking creative ways to build traffic and revenue to your website
0:01:14 from email, from Facebook, from Pinterest, from other sources
0:01:18 that don’t rely on the whims of SEO algorithms.
0:01:21 So you can still build that viable online income.
0:01:24 After that, John’s got a business idea to donate to you,
0:01:26 something you might be able to take action on right away.
0:01:29 And then we’ve got round three, the triple threat and marketing tactics
0:01:32 that’s working today, a new tool that John is loving right now
0:01:34 and his favorite book from the last 12 months.
0:01:39 So the basic business model, as it has stood for the last decade,
0:01:40 is my understanding, right?
0:01:41 Publish helpful content.
0:01:43 We’re going to monetize with display ads and affiliate relationships.
0:01:46 And I’m going to pull in traffic from Google for people searching
0:01:50 for these informational and maybe transactional type of keywords.
0:01:51 Is that still the game?
0:01:53 That has changed a little bit.
0:01:55 It’s changed a ton for many of us.
0:01:58 We’ve all sort of experienced Google losses at different phases
0:02:00 since September 2023.
0:02:02 I took it on the chin in the first one.
0:02:06 And I think maybe that was a good thing because that forced me sooner
0:02:08 to adapt, which I have.
0:02:12 So I mean, when we’re talking like 90, 95 percent, you know,
0:02:15 basically for a lot of people, I know drops in Google traffic.
0:02:18 And most of us, that was the lion’s share.
0:02:19 So brutal. Yeah.
0:02:21 It was scramble time. It was like figure out.
0:02:25 Now, fortunately, I kind of had built up some side traffic sources
0:02:30 and web assets over the years for my largest site project.
0:02:34 And so I had kind of something to get rolling with.
0:02:35 But I really had to dive in.
0:02:40 And, you know, if I was going to recover, at least even a portion of what I had lost.
0:02:41 So that’s what I’ve been working on.
0:02:43 And we’re coming up to a year now.
0:02:45 And what’s been the most effective so far?
0:02:47 Email without question.
0:02:49 Now, I say that with a caveat.
0:02:53 OK, email late fall after a few months, I decided, OK,
0:02:56 I got to make the email work because I get the most control of that.
0:02:59 There’s lots of platforms that can drive lots of traffic.
0:03:03 But again, you’re relying on a platform and they all make changes.
0:03:04 And you already want to go through that again.
0:03:07 So and I should say, you know, I don’t have one regret
0:03:11 about doing the Google thing because for 10 years, it was awesome.
0:03:13 Sure. It’s been so good.
0:03:15 It was such a great business. It was a fun business.
0:03:17 So I don’t regret it. It’s just a big change.
0:03:18 It was a sudden change.
0:03:22 I’d say that that it was like out of the blue overnight.
0:03:23 That that was a big surprise.
0:03:25 So yeah, it’s a fantastic life.
0:03:29 You can make it work, create a piece of content once and have it pay you for years.
0:03:31 Like it’s it’s a beautiful model.
0:03:34 It really is. It was great.
0:03:35 It was a good ride.
0:03:38 It was like a golden era of long tail SEO.
0:03:41 But a few months after that, I made the decision.
0:03:43 It’s like, I got to make email work somehow.
0:03:46 I, you know, I’ve had some email success with Fatstacks,
0:03:50 but that’s a totally different type of project than my main,
0:03:52 I would call it a B2C type website.
0:03:54 It’s in a home and garden space.
0:03:57 I won’t specify which one, but it’s it serves that audience.
0:03:58 And so I was like, I got to make email work.
0:04:02 Now, I never really had the pressure to really make it work back when the SEO was working.
0:04:04 So I didn’t try that hard.
0:04:08 So I didn’t really do it, you know, but I decided I’m like, I got to make this work.
0:04:12 And I met and became friends with a guy named Scott DeLong,
0:04:17 who founded Viral Nova many, many years ago and since then has gone to launch
0:04:20 some really big sites and all his sites focused on email,
0:04:22 which I didn’t even know about.
0:04:26 And he was he was saying, I’ve just been an email guy like from for a long time.
0:04:29 And, you know, so I talked to him and I’m like, all right,
0:04:31 I got to do what this what Scott has done all these years.
0:04:33 So that’s what I did. And I have made it work.
0:04:37 And that’s been the focus now since I would say just before Christmas 2023.
0:04:42 OK, I think the challenging part is one need traffic to get people on to my email list.
0:04:47 So then I can email them to get traffic to like this weird chicken versus the egg thing here.
0:04:49 Oh, absolutely. Right.
0:04:52 Just you can’t just say, I’m going to do email and there’s traffic.
0:04:55 So there’s two things you have to figure out with email first.
0:04:57 Like you say, you got to get subscribers.
0:04:58 That’s super important.
0:05:01 The thing is how you’re going to monetize it in a nutshell.
0:05:06 I focus on Facebook for a lot of traffic, a combination of organic and paid.
0:05:09 I also do a lot of Pinterest.
0:05:11 Pinterest works for my niche. It’s a visual niche.
0:05:12 It works quite well.
0:05:18 And I’m moving into some push notifications, which is kind of working.
0:05:19 Now, here’s the thing.
0:05:24 As your email list grows, it’s now one of my largest traffic sources.
0:05:28 And that’s the whole point. OK, so I monetize the email by sending readers back
0:05:31 to my website where I have Mediavine ads.
0:05:33 And that’s the model that I love.
0:05:35 I love monetizing with Mediavine ads.
0:05:37 It’s very passive on the revenue side.
0:05:41 OK, rather than selling sponsorships directly in the email
0:05:43 or doing affiliate promos directly to the email.
0:05:46 Yes, absolutely. I’m not opposed to that 100 percent.
0:05:49 I’ve tried affiliate, didn’t really work with my readership.
0:05:52 I’m not opposed to sponsorships, but that takes legwork.
0:05:57 My favorite is throwing a bunch of links with, you know, little teasers
0:06:00 and article titles and so forth and link back to my website
0:06:03 and just get readers to go back every day, every day, every day.
0:06:06 And that’s where I get the traffic now for the ad revenue.
0:06:10 OK, got it. And then those subscribers are coming through initially
0:06:12 Facebook traffic, Pinterest traffic.
0:06:16 Let’s let’s dive into the Facebook side of things for what that looks like.
0:06:17 So Facebook’s fickle.
0:06:19 So I have my ups and downs.
0:06:22 It’s not something I would 100 percent rely on in terms of the subscribers.
0:06:27 Facebook ads for leads is quite good if you can get the costs down
0:06:30 because that’s like instant subscriber to your email list.
0:06:36 And then I even basically will run like boosted posts to my content on my site,
0:06:41 which I’m paying for clicks and the ad revenue will sort of balance out.
0:06:45 And I’m getting free subscribers from like the various email sign up forms.
0:06:50 And that’s a bit of a tricky operation because you can lose money very quickly.
0:06:52 So if I break even, I count myself lucky.
0:06:55 I even sometimes make a make a small profit.
0:06:59 But, you know, I’m basically sort of supplementing the traffic on Facebook
0:07:01 with some paid ads. It’s a real mix.
0:07:03 And that’s how I like it.
0:07:06 Got it. Where do you like to see the cost per subscriber
0:07:07 when you’re running these lead ads?
0:07:09 Ideally, under 50 cents is good.
0:07:10 I’m not always hitting that.
0:07:12 Sometimes they creep up higher.
0:07:17 I’m in Canadian currency, so I always have to do quick conversions in my head.
0:07:22 So, yeah, if you can get something around 50 cents, that’s pretty good.
0:07:25 But it’s really important if you’re going to get started with this
0:07:28 and make sure you’re tagging your new subscribers properly.
0:07:31 And the reason for that is you want to be able to track
0:07:33 how well they’re performing as email readers.
0:07:37 You want to see that in a month, a good chunk of them are still opening and reading.
0:07:39 Otherwise, you’re throwing your money away, right?
0:07:42 Right. You’re not going to make money from subscribers
0:07:46 with this model of people, basically unsubscribing after a week.
0:07:48 Right. The real hope is here.
0:07:52 They stick around for a few months or a year and they’re regular readers.
0:07:55 Yeah. How many times do they have to click over to make your four or five
0:07:57 cents worth of Mediavine?
0:08:00 Do you think about it in those terms of what’s my break even point on this?
0:08:03 Yes and no. I mean, I did for the first, I would say,
0:08:06 five, six months. I was, I’ve kind of got it down to a system now.
0:08:08 It’s just kind of works on its own.
0:08:11 I really do focus now more on just growing the traffic side of it.
0:08:13 The numbers work for me, so I don’t really have to.
0:08:16 But yeah, at first, I was like, obsessed with the numbers.
0:08:21 And for every, every subscriber source and looking at performance and revenue
0:08:23 and click through rates and all of this stuff.
0:08:24 But I pretty much got it dialed in now.
0:08:29 So I don’t really pay too much attention to that because it is working
0:08:31 and the revenue slowly grows.
0:08:33 This is not a fast growth model.
0:08:36 But I like it because it’s fairly sustainable.
0:08:38 Like I can count on it like clockwork.
0:08:42 And do you have a sense of what the lifetime value of an email subscriber is for you?
0:08:45 No, not yet. It’s too soon, I would say.
0:08:47 But it’s over 50 cents.
0:08:48 Yes.
0:08:51 Yeah, I imagine there’s an 80/20 dollar, like we’re the, you know, 20 percent
0:08:53 of the most engaged subscribers are the ones clicking on everything.
0:08:54 They’re making tons of money.
0:08:57 You’re like, well, shoot, I would gladly play two or three dollars for each one of these.
0:09:01 But for every one of those, there’s four others that, you know,
0:09:02 click on two things and then unsubscribe.
0:09:04 So it balances out.
0:09:08 100 percent, a pleasant surprise I had with this was the ad RPMs
0:09:12 that I earned with Mediavine are double what Google ever paid.
0:09:16 And that was unexpected and that has really helped the model.
0:09:22 So with Mediavine, you can get certain links that work with some email service providers.
0:09:23 There’s these tracking links.
0:09:25 I think they call them email connect.
0:09:26 Interesting.
0:09:30 And so you get these links for every link or URL to your website.
0:09:35 And if email readers click those, the RPMs, for me, are about double
0:09:37 than what they would be from Google.
0:09:40 So I don’t even have to send a whole ton of visitors daily.
0:09:42 It generates some really good ad room.
0:09:46 And by double, I mean like 100 and anywhere from 120.
0:09:52 I’ve even had over 150 ad RPMs per thousand sessions from email with the email,
0:09:54 with Mediavine ads.
0:09:58 That’s why I’m such a big Mediavine fan, because those are ridiculously
0:10:00 high numbers for ads.
0:10:01 Yeah.
0:10:04 That’s probably double or triple what I’m seeing from just Google traffic.
0:10:08 And it’s because now they have kind of some identifier of who that person is.
0:10:10 Like it said, more targeted stuff or show more targeted stuff.
0:10:12 Yeah, it’s exactly it.
0:10:16 And so it really helps make the model financially viable and it’s really good.
0:10:17 That’s a job.
0:10:20 I’ll try to figure out a way how to disable Mediavine for email traffic.
0:10:21 It’s like, hey, you already subscribed.
0:10:23 Like, I don’t need to be showing you a bunch of ads and stuff.
0:10:26 It’s like, oh, hey, well, maybe shoot, I could triple this.
0:10:28 That’s really interesting.
0:10:31 And then the emails that you’re sending out are like, here’s what we
0:10:32 published this week.
0:10:33 Like, how often are you sending?
0:10:34 Like what in the content?
0:10:36 I send three day, three emails a day.
0:10:37 Yeah.
0:10:38 Who’s writing all this stuff?
0:10:39 I have a team.
0:10:39 OK.
0:10:40 We’ve got to iron down.
0:10:47 I’ve like been so zeroed in on this model for a long time and we’re training my team.
0:10:48 I had a good team in place.
0:10:49 That was a huge advantage.
0:10:52 So it was just a matter of, you know, training them.
0:10:56 But yeah, we’re cranking out the content as fast as we can.
0:11:00 Yeah. If you’re relying on that as a traffic source, I guess you got to push send.
0:11:03 I started out a few times a week and I built it up to one a day.
0:11:06 Now, I monitor my complaint rate very carefully.
0:11:11 OK. Postmaster Google, postmaster.google, if anyone cares, you can
0:11:14 track your spam and complaint rate in Gmail there.
0:11:16 And those are very important numbers.
0:11:20 Anything higher than 0.3 percent convert kits not going to be happy.
0:11:22 And they may do, I don’t know what they would do.
0:11:22 Maybe kick you out.
0:11:23 I don’t know.
0:11:26 I haven’t come close to that, fortunately, but I do pay attention to that.
0:11:30 So anytime I make a big change with my email, I will monitor that for a week or
0:11:33 two just to make sure that my complaint rates down.
0:11:36 But so I went up to two per day, complaint rate didn’t change.
0:11:39 My revenue went up, went to three a day, same thing.
0:11:42 Now, I think four would I think I’ve hit a diminishing returns.
0:11:47 But I’ll tell you, you know, here’s what got me on to trying that is I’m a regular
0:11:49 Quora reader. I know a lot of people hate Quora.
0:11:53 I like Quora and same with I check out real estate websites regularly just kind
0:11:55 of for fun. These websites will send you.
0:12:01 If you subscribe and they track everything you do, like Quora sends me five emails a day.
0:12:05 And I don’t not only do I not mind, I actually like it.
0:12:06 It’s sort of like, oh, it’s interesting.
0:12:07 They’re not selling me stuff.
0:12:09 I don’t sell my readers anything.
0:12:14 I’m just sending them interesting information that they’ve showed an interest in.
0:12:17 And it’s the type of information that it’s just ongoing.
0:12:20 There’s never really like, it’s not like you’ve, you know, you’ve you’ve it’s sort
0:12:22 of like celebrity entertainment news.
0:12:24 We just keep reading it, right?
0:12:25 So they don’t mind.
0:12:28 Is it through like an automated sequence?
0:12:32 Or I got to come up with three new things to send every day, 15 times a week.
0:12:34 It’s like a link to one article, it’s a roundup.
0:12:36 Like what’s what’s in the content of the messages?
0:12:39 Most of it’s all going to different articles on the website.
0:12:40 I do I do a variety of stuff.
0:12:42 And then I always test new stuff.
0:12:44 And because you’ve been publishing this for a decade, right?
0:12:48 You have this huge, huge library of content that you can point people back to.
0:12:50 I do. I have 15,000 articles.
0:12:55 OK, you can recycle like every six or 12 months.
0:12:59 I know Scott DeLong, who’s who’s the guy who I’ve who I’ve learned so much from.
0:13:02 I mean, he said, yeah, I would have no problem recycling every six months.
0:13:05 Because realistically, you’ve got new subs, you’ve got a lot of subs that have left.
0:13:07 I mean, they’re going to forget whatever.
0:13:10 So yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, yeah, and I do recycle at this point.
0:13:12 So, you know, it gets easier and easier.
0:13:15 How many email subscribers are on that list now?
0:13:18 155,000, 155 K.
0:13:19 And that’s through ConvertKit.
0:13:22 Yes, which is expensive, but it pays.
0:13:24 But the ROI is there.
0:13:27 Here’s if you want to get all sort of technical on the email side of thing.
0:13:28 I still don’t know what the answer is.
0:13:31 I used to be very diligent in scrubbing weekly.
0:13:34 And if you didn’t open for 90 days, you were removed.
0:13:38 And then I talked to, you know, I’ve done a lot of reading about it.
0:13:42 Now, the most damaging type of thing that can happen with your email list
0:13:46 is a complaint or spam rating or spam complaint.
0:13:48 That’s based on your total number of subscribers.
0:13:52 So if you have a hundred subscribers and two people complain,
0:13:54 you have a two percent complaint rate.
0:13:57 If you have 2000 subscribers and two people complain,
0:14:00 you have not going to do the math because I’m terrible,
0:14:02 but a far less smaller percent.
0:14:05 And it’s a percent as far as I know is that what matters.
0:14:09 So it sounds like I have a huge list, but I haven’t been scrubbing.
0:14:14 And the reason I don’t scrub is I want to keep that complaint rates really low.
0:14:15 And that’s why it’s so low.
0:14:19 Yeah. So you’ll see a lower open rate because subscribers go stale.
0:14:21 But if they’re not opening, they’re not complaining either.
0:14:22 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
0:14:26 And can I tell you that this is the right way to manage my list?
0:14:27 I actually I actually don’t know.
0:14:32 I think I think there’s a lot of different theories on on the best approach.
0:14:36 But for me right now, the complaint rate to keep it low is really important.
0:14:36 So this is what I’m doing.
0:14:38 So sounds like I have a really, really big list,
0:14:41 but my open rates sort of get lower and lower, but that’s OK.
0:14:43 The revenue just keeps going up.
0:14:45 So that’s all that really matters to me at the end of the day.
0:14:47 Right. It’s not necessarily open rate.
0:14:51 It’s raw number of people who are seeing this message.
0:14:53 Yes. I’ve been back and forth on this.
0:14:55 Well, do you remove people who are unsubscribed?
0:14:57 Do you try and reengage them?
0:14:58 Do you delete the ones?
0:15:03 And I historically have deleted those people after maybe six months.
0:15:07 But it’s painful, especially if you’re paying for subscribers like in this case.
0:15:08 But I don’t know.
0:15:10 And then you see like a temporary spike in open rate.
0:15:14 And maybe that sends some positive signal to, you know, to the inboxes.
0:15:15 Maybe it doesn’t.
0:15:18 Maybe it’s all individualized, personalized based on how you reacted
0:15:20 for messages from the sender in the past.
0:15:20 But that’s fascinating.
0:15:23 I had no idea that you’re sending that volume.
0:15:26 I know the the Fatstax blog newsletter is really interesting to read.
0:15:28 And that’s a very prolific writer there,
0:15:31 sending multiple times a week on the online business side of things.
0:15:35 But you’ve been cranking out more content on the actual B2C site.
0:15:39 What else is getting people in the door at the top of the funnel
0:15:42 to join the email list to get traffic initially?
0:15:44 Anyways, what’s working in the Pinterest world these days?
0:15:45 Pinterest is good.
0:15:49 I bet I think a lot of people have hopped on Pinterest.
0:15:53 And so I used to I used to get like really high amounts of traffic from Pinterest.
0:15:55 It’s gotten down. It’s still high and still good.
0:15:58 And in fact, I’m doubling down big time on Pinterest.
0:16:02 I am working with a service just to scale up faster.
0:16:04 I was doing a whole bunch of stuff.
0:16:08 And then I stopped just because I just didn’t have I had to deploy team members
0:16:11 to the email and it just sort of took away from Pinterest.
0:16:14 But now we’ve got the email humming and working Pinterest really hard again.
0:16:15 So Pinterest is good.
0:16:18 Pinterest is really good traffic source if you’re in the right niche for it.
0:16:21 And Pinterest is publisher friendly.
0:16:23 That’s what I like about it’s relatively stable.
0:16:27 And you know, they have had their algo shifts over the years.
0:16:29 But I would say for most publishers,
0:16:33 it’s been a relatively stable traffic source, which is nice because you can count on it.
0:16:37 You can invest time and money into growing on the platform.
0:16:40 If you’re in the home and garden space, it could be, you know,
0:16:44 15 ideas to redo your backyard or, you know,
0:16:47 the top 10 paint colors that are hot this season.
0:16:51 Like it seems like it lends itself well to Pinterest versus, I don’t know,
0:16:53 I was having a hard time like in the personal finance space.
0:16:56 Let’s say you’re in SEO niche or personal finance.
0:16:58 It’s not great to be on Pinterest.
0:17:00 Your time and money is much better spent elsewhere.
0:17:03 OK, so you got to create these special graphics.
0:17:05 You know, probably last we spoke eight plus years ago.
0:17:07 You know, group boards, we’re all the thing.
0:17:12 Is this is anything that goes into the I mean, it’s kind of an SEO content platform
0:17:15 to where people can use that search bar to find what they’re looking for.
0:17:19 And if your content can rank well there, it could be a consistent traffic source.
0:17:23 But like, do you need to be constantly feeding that machine by re pinning
0:17:27 and refreshing the images and creating multiple images and split testing?
0:17:31 Like there’s a whole there’s a whole Pinterest economy that is a black box to me right now.
0:17:34 Yeah, you pretty much hit it there.
0:17:36 Yeah, I mean, that’s that’s a big part of it.
0:17:38 I mean, Pinterest is a search engine.
0:17:41 It’s an image search engine, but it’s also got a social aspect.
0:17:46 I think the social in terms of pins being distributed to your followers
0:17:48 is less important now than the search aspect.
0:17:52 So I think learning how to find keywords and topics.
0:17:57 And then, of course, trending pen designs that work is really what you want to do
0:18:00 and find those topics that are going to work for you that are within your niche
0:18:02 or what your whole website’s about.
0:18:04 There’s this really great new tool.
0:18:07 It’s going to be the new tool I talk about, but I might as well mention it now.
0:18:10 It’s pin clicks just came out not even I think about a month ago.
0:18:13 It’s the only thing it’s a it’s a SaaS cloud software.
0:18:16 It will actually do Pinterest keyword research for you.
0:18:19 It will track the keywords you’re gunning for on Pinterest.
0:18:24 It will show you the top trending pin designs for particular keywords.
0:18:28 It’s basically a drafts for Pinterest in a nutshell.
0:18:31 And I’ve been using that and it’s awesome.
0:18:33 And it’s a lot of people are loving it
0:18:36 because it’s just Pinterest used to be a lot of guesswork like you had mentioned.
0:18:40 You try to find keywords by doing auto complete in the Pinterest search.
0:18:41 We all did that, right?
0:18:42 You don’t have to do that anymore.
0:18:44 That’s tedious and it works.
0:18:48 But it’s tedious and you’re going to get a lot more ideas with pin clicks.
0:18:50 So finally, there’s a tool out there for us.
0:18:52 Takes a lot of the guesswork out of the whole Pinterest.
0:18:56 But the downside with it, there’s a lot more people on Pinterest now
0:19:00 because let’s face it, a lot of us were focused on Google before.
0:19:02 And now, you know, we have to switch to Pinterest.
0:19:05 Yeah, we got to go someplace else using tailwind or anything else
0:19:09 to schedule stuff out, or is it best to have somebody post this manually?
0:19:12 I post manually, actually, I’ve used Buffer.
0:19:15 I like Buffer is because I can do all my social media in one place.
0:19:18 And their Pinterest posting is actually it worked for me.
0:19:20 It’s good. But I think most of what I’m doing right now
0:19:22 is direct through Pinterest scheduler.
0:19:25 I’m also, as I mentioned, working with a new service
0:19:27 that’s taking over a lot of it.
0:19:30 And they’re not only like pinning, they’re actually doing the keyword research
0:19:33 with pin clicks, they’re creating the content on my site
0:19:36 and then creating all the picks on a light like a to z for me.
0:19:39 Just because it was either that or I had to hire a couple of people.
0:19:43 And a lot of times I prefer to just contract out.
0:19:44 It’s easier for me.
0:19:47 OK. And so Pinterest drives traffic that generates
0:19:51 Mediavine page views that generates, hopefully, some email signups.
0:19:55 People see the opt-in on the site and they say, sure,
0:19:58 send me send me emails about home and garden decor or whatever.
0:20:01 You know, and so they join the email list that way.
0:20:02 Well, yeah, exactly. That’s the point.
0:20:05 And Pinterest traffic is high quality traffic.
0:20:08 We look at the time on site and the page views per visitor
0:20:13 and the ad revenue is it earns typically more than Google traffic.
0:20:16 So it’s an engaged audience and they’re good email readers.
0:20:18 That’s it. It’s so niche dependent.
0:20:19 My experience was like the exact opposite.
0:20:24 It was like super low engagement, you know, really low time on site.
0:20:25 Never I’ve never clicked on anything.
0:20:28 It was like this is before I had any ads on the site.
0:20:31 And so I was like, we’re spending all this time and effort and energy
0:20:33 to try to get this traffic and it didn’t even do anything.
0:20:35 Once we do get it, I was like, forget it.
0:20:37 And then, you know, to the point about, you know,
0:20:40 playing in somebody else’s sandbox, somebody else came in and claimed
0:20:41 that we had like ripped off one of their pins.
0:20:45 And it was like a competing account, you know, was a baseless claim.
0:20:49 And then you try to file this appeal and they’re like, your account is suspended.
0:20:52 You know, it’s not even worth fighting it because, you know,
0:20:56 the cost to hire a service or have a VA manage this was less than what
0:20:58 the traffic was breaking in, like, forget it.
0:21:01 So my account has been banned for years over there.
0:21:05 I don’t think you’re missing out, given the niche that you’re in, Nick.
0:21:08 You know, 201 Creative, which is my Pinterest service.
0:21:10 They’re helping out big time to scale.
0:21:14 I like to keep a really lean team in terms of they just
0:21:15 deal with a certain type of content.
0:21:18 And then the other thing you mentioned was push notifications.
0:21:21 These is like when the little browser thing pops up and says, this site
0:21:24 wants to send you notifications and people click yes or no.
0:21:26 Yeah, that’s OK.
0:21:28 You know, I’ve done it three different times over the course
0:21:31 of 10 years use push and I’m always optimistic.
0:21:33 But the same thing always seems to happen.
0:21:36 I get to a certain amount of subscribers, no matter how many push notifications
0:21:40 I send, no matter how good I think they are, I sort of hit this plateau
0:21:42 of how much traffic I can send.
0:21:45 And it seems I’ve hit it again and it’s not really enough traffic to warrant
0:21:47 continuing, but I am going to stick with it for a little bit.
0:21:49 I’ll, you know, pretty inexpensive.
0:21:52 I’m definitely making like 10 times what it costs every month.
0:21:56 OK, it’s just I don’t know if I can like scale it really, really high.
0:21:58 I don’t know. It’s one of those things I don’t have heard.
0:22:01 I’ve talked to people where some publishers have really good
0:22:01 success with push.
0:22:04 I’m just sort of mediocre right now.
0:22:07 And of course, you got to have visitors to your site
0:22:10 initially before they can even opt in to a push notification.
0:22:11 So it’s kind of like a second tier.
0:22:13 Like how do I get how do I turn one visitor into two?
0:22:14 How do I make sure people come back?
0:22:16 You know, obviously, I’d love to capture their email.
0:22:19 That’s going to be a really high value action that they can take.
0:22:21 But barring that if they want to sign up for a push notification.
0:22:23 That’s also cool. What’s the tool that you’re using for those?
0:22:27 Subscribers.com quite reasonably priced, easy to use.
0:22:29 I’ve got no complaints with the platform.
0:22:31 I’ve used a number of platforms over the years.
0:22:35 It’s good. Again, just sort of hit this plateau.
0:22:40 Like so I send most days when I have the time for a day, which might be too many.
0:22:46 But, you know, so I’m averaging 200 to 50 visitors a day from that,
0:22:46 which is not great.
0:22:51 I have 9000 push subscribers, sort of like, OK, it should be going up higher.
0:22:54 So basically, my click through rate has sort of dropped, right?
0:22:57 It like the first month that was really high when I didn’t have many subscribers.
0:23:01 And so the actual click through rate number is just keeps going down and down.
0:23:05 If it if it keeps going that way, it may not be worth doing
0:23:07 because it does take time to make these things.
0:23:09 Right. I don’t I don’t I don’t have the automated ones
0:23:11 that’ll just pick up your posts and blast them out.
0:23:13 I do actually make them.
0:23:17 Yeah. And at 250 visitors is worth $25.
0:23:19 Like I’m trying to do the math or like what that might be worth to you
0:23:21 in terms of ad revenue like that.
0:23:24 Yeah. They’re quality traffic.
0:23:27 I use I use plausible now instead of Google Analytics.
0:23:28 I’ve given up on Google Analytics plausible.
0:23:31 It’s just an alternative and it’s such a simple platform.
0:23:32 So I can see what’s going on.
0:23:36 The engagement and time on site and everything from from pushes is decent.
0:23:37 The ad revenue is decent.
0:23:39 I actually on Mediavine is great.
0:23:44 They don’t because push is such under two percent of my overall revenue.
0:23:47 It doesn’t show up on my dashboard, but I can email my rep
0:23:51 and she can actually get me the RPMs from push and it was like $75.
0:23:53 So that’s pretty good.
0:23:55 That’s higher than Pinterest, actually.
0:24:01 I’ve been playing around with a tool called Gravitek, G-R-A-V-I-T-E-C Gravitek.
0:24:05 It was on an AppSumo deal and I have yet to hit my lifetime cap on those.
0:24:08 So, you know, thousands of people have opted in,
0:24:11 but I still have a few a few more left to go before I got to renew that thing.
0:24:16 But sending, you know, one to two a week when I get around to it versus four a day.
0:24:19 So, again, it’s similar to the email where it’s like, if you’re going to really
0:24:21 look at this as you’re going to rely on it as a traffic source,
0:24:25 really got to push that lever down and see what see what happens to it.
0:24:25 Yeah.
0:24:28 I mean, I think that’s a key distinction between B2B here and a B2B.
0:24:29 FATSEX is B2B.
0:24:31 My niche site is B2C.
0:24:33 And the huge distinction is volume.
0:24:34 Yeah.
0:24:39 B2C is typically volume that makes up for and B2B is typically more surgical,
0:24:45 more specific, but your audience per thousand readers is much higher value.
0:24:46 Well, very good.
0:24:50 Appreciate sharing all of these different tools as well as we talked Facebook,
0:24:53 we talked to email, we talked Pinterest, we talked to push notifications,
0:24:57 we talked plausible as a Google Analytics software alternative.
0:25:00 That was that was one of the business ideas that I either have donated
0:25:02 or would be willing to donate in the past.
0:25:04 It just just rebuild, you know, GA4.
0:25:08 Just make it look like the old analytics and you have a huge business.
0:25:10 Like, how do I how do I reverse this and make it make it easy?
0:25:12 You just just rebuild the old platform.
0:25:13 That would be totally fine.
0:25:17 With that in mind, we’ll be right back with John right after award
0:25:20 from our sponsors with round two and round three right after this.
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0:27:54 All right, back with John Dykstra from fatstacksblog.com with round two.
0:27:56 This is donate a business idea,
0:27:59 something that you would start if you only had more time,
0:28:00 something that’s been on the back burner,
0:28:02 something you think listeners can run with.
0:28:05 Faceless YouTube channel, but story based.
0:28:08 I read fiction. I love reading. I like writing.
0:28:09 I think it would be a lot of,
0:28:11 I’ve been kind of studying it just for fun.
0:28:16 Some people make some amazing like documentary or story based
0:28:18 typed videos. I think they’re fascinating.
0:28:20 I think it’d be something that would be in my wheelhouse,
0:28:22 but they take a lot of work and I just don’t have the time,
0:28:24 but it’s something I would love to do.
0:28:26 You would do something in the, in a fiction niche,
0:28:27 like a creative type of thing?
0:28:31 No, I would think business history, history.
0:28:34 Okay. Something like that. Yeah, that’s so I read a lot of that.
0:28:38 I find that interesting. I think it’d be a lot of fun to write it by story.
0:28:42 I mean that the videos would have some form of a narrative instead of being
0:28:45 such as a how to or review or something like that,
0:28:49 but more of just engaging, interesting, story based type video.
0:28:52 Okay. Yeah. You can go back in time. You could have,
0:28:56 we probably have chat GPT come up with a bio of Andrew Carnegie
0:29:00 and make it a YouTube script and then have somebody narrated
0:29:04 or have AI narrate it and then have it set to some timely images.
0:29:07 You source some of these images. I think that’s an interesting one for sure.
0:29:09 Yeah. I think I think it’s something I could do. I don’t know.
0:29:13 I just, they are, I know you mentioned AI and all that and probably could do it all,
0:29:16 but it still takes time. Everything takes time.
0:29:19 Feeding, whatever it comes up with, it’s not going to be perfect.
0:29:22 And that’s kind of the secret sauce is we did, we did an episode recently
0:29:25 on somebody creating these faceless YouTube channels,
0:29:29 leaning really heavily on AI. But then as we dug a little bit deeper,
0:29:32 it was like, well, the secret sauce is really adding your own expertise
0:29:34 because everybody is trying to do that. And it’s like, well,
0:29:36 how are you going to, how are you going to differentiate yourself?
0:29:38 It’s like by adding your own insight, expertise,
0:29:42 authority and layering that on top of what to, to make that compelling and interesting.
0:29:43 Cause like, well, you know,
0:29:47 does the world really need more digital clutter of the same 15 videos?
0:29:50 Trying to, trying to tell the same story. Exactly. I like that one.
0:29:54 Definitely, but playing around with more of the YouTube stuff myself, you know,
0:29:58 on camera, off camera, it’s, I don’t know, even though it’s been kind of the same,
0:30:01 you know, very much backburner for the last four or five years,
0:30:05 it still feels like a new frontier. It’s like, it feels like it’s all
0:30:07 incremental and exciting and different, you know,
0:30:10 you have yet to hit, you know, really the viral lottery over there.
0:30:12 But, you know, trying to plant these evergreen assets,
0:30:16 it’s a lot like the SEO game where you can create something and have it collect
0:30:18 incremental views for years and years.
0:30:22 Totally, I agree with you. There’s a lot of great reasons to, and it’s in it.
0:30:26 There’s monetization built in, you know, I’m, I’m a, I’m a display ad person.
0:30:31 I just love that model for monetization and YouTube offers it. So I like that.
0:30:34 Yeah. It’s built in, it’s low. You don’t have to sell anything.
0:30:37 It just, it just happens. Like if people expect ads on the internet,
0:30:39 they expect ads on YouTube. So it doesn’t feel,
0:30:42 it doesn’t feel intrusive. So it’s just expected.
0:30:43 Well, I appreciate you sharing that.
0:30:46 Round three here is the triple threat.
0:30:49 And we’re going to start off with a marketing tactic that is working right now.
0:30:50 It’s possibly one that we already covered,
0:30:52 but we’ll, we can revisit it here if that’s the case.
0:30:55 I would say push notifications right now for me.
0:30:58 And even though I’m getting at best mediocre results,
0:31:01 it’s something that not a lot of people are doing.
0:31:05 And I think it’s worth trying because it’s, like I said,
0:31:08 even though it’s not a grand slam for me right now,
0:31:11 I’m still 10 Xing what the subscription is. So it’s free money.
0:31:13 And I’m making the content anyway.
0:31:16 Yeah. I mean, that counts, that counts as a win for sure.
0:31:19 I think it’s worth trying for people. I don’t see a lot of people doing it.
0:31:21 I don’t hear a lot of people talking about it. Give it a shot.
0:31:25 Do those go out on mobile too? Or is it only like desktop browser?
0:31:27 I think mostly mobile.
0:31:32 I don’t know. There’s, it seems I had to pay an upgrade to get on a Safari or something
0:31:35 or something. Apple always has to be difficult with everything.
0:31:39 I’m not really sure how it behaves on Apple, but I think like with Chrome,
0:31:42 regardless of which device you’re on, it’s, it’s getting sent out to you.
0:31:45 Okay. Yeah. There’s a trade off because it adds, you know,
0:31:48 some non-zero amount of extra load time.
0:31:50 You have to load the script onto your site, but a certain percentage of people
0:31:53 will click, yeah, sure. Send me, send me notifications.
0:31:57 And then it’s a chance to remarket to those people and collect that
0:32:01 Mediavine income over and over again instead of just that one time.
0:32:02 Exactly. All right.
0:32:08 The next one is a new or new to you tool that you’re loving right now.
0:32:09 I already mentioned, I gotta say, PinClix.
0:32:12 It’s probably the only latest tool I’ve used in the last month or two.
0:32:16 That’s the Pinterest analysis tool, keyword tracking, keyword research,
0:32:19 pin design trends, all of it. That’s my latest toy.
0:32:21 Very good. That’s new to me. Very cool.
0:32:23 Ahrefs for Pinterest, as it was described.
0:32:26 PinClix will link that up in the show notes and your favorite book
0:32:29 from the last 12 months.
0:32:31 Yeah, I had to think on this.
0:32:33 I have to go with Suley by John Grisham.
0:32:36 I read everything John Grisham publishes.
0:32:38 I thought this was a cool book.
0:32:41 Not it’s outside of his wheelhouse of being a legal thriller.
0:32:46 And it’s about basketball and it was, it was a really, really good book.
0:32:48 Okay. You’re a recovering attorney yourself.
0:32:50 We’re still practicing law.
0:32:51 No, I’m done.
0:32:53 Cos it quits, I’m going all in on this online business stuff.
0:32:55 I did some time ago.
0:32:59 But I do, you know, it’s interesting because I like the whole legal drama,
0:33:03 thriller stuff, I read, I read the novels, I watch the TV shows, I watch the movies.
0:33:05 So I still find it fascinating.
0:33:08 In fact, if I could, I could totally do a faceless YouTube channel
0:33:12 on interesting legal cases or instances or laws.
0:33:16 I thought I kicked around law in what I do a number of different ways.
0:33:20 It’s never really materialized, but it’s something maybe one day comes about.
0:33:21 There you go.
0:33:24 You have trying to find those overlapping circles of, you know,
0:33:28 what you know about and what is interesting, what people are looking for
0:33:30 and what you can get paid to do.
0:33:34 And yeah, maybe there’s something in the middle that overlaps all of those
0:33:38 different areas, but Suley by John Grisham will link that up as well.
0:33:41 John, you can find him at fatstacksblog.com.
0:33:43 Thanks again for joining me.
0:33:46 Again, much belated from our last catch up.
0:33:48 And so we’ll have to do it again before eight years are up.
0:33:51 Any parting words of guidance for the SinehustleNation audience?
0:33:54 I know it’s been a tough year.
0:33:55 There are options out there.
0:33:57 SEO is not the only option.
0:34:01 And, you know, see if there’s other examples of sites in your niche
0:34:04 and look what they’re doing, where they’re operating, where they’re getting
0:34:07 success and see if you can hop in and do the same.
0:34:11 I mean, have you seen any recovery or is it just now we’re going to be dominated
0:34:15 by by Reddit and by Good Housekeeping and Better Home?
0:34:18 Like, is that who’s kind of taken over in your niche?
0:34:22 Oh, yeah, it’s it’s all it’s all the legacy print publishers who, you know,
0:34:25 print like who have magazine subscriptions that have been around forever.
0:34:26 They get all the traffic.
0:34:30 You know, I doubled my Google traffic, but it was from hardly anything
0:34:34 to still hardly anything, but it was 100 percent increase from the update.
0:34:35 But divide by a small number.
0:34:38 Yeah, still amazingly to 200 a day just from the Google.
0:34:41 So, I mean, it’s it’s not totally useless.
0:34:43 It’s just a far cry from what it was.
0:34:46 And it’s not really a business sum to itself.
0:34:50 But I haven’t talked to anybody who’s had a full recovery at all.
0:34:51 I’m sure some are out there.
0:34:55 I’ve seen some people on Twitter posting some charts, but I don’t know anyone personally.
0:34:59 Yeah, you put in any effort towards it or just I’m going all in on these other channels.
0:35:02 You know, it’s interesting because I do a lot of stuff now in my site.
0:35:06 I’m testing stuff like that I would never have done in the SEO days
0:35:09 in terms of like duplicate content or thin content or, you know,
0:35:13 I followed all the SEO rules for years, not trying to game it,
0:35:17 just doing what I was told needed to be done to get my content in Google.
0:35:19 I don’t care about any of it anymore.
0:35:21 I will do whatever I need to do to make Pinterest work,
0:35:23 to make it work on Facebook for email.
0:35:24 And that’s my focus.
0:35:25 Yeah, very good.
0:35:30 It’s a different game, but it’s all under the same online business umbrella.
0:35:32 That’s a side hustle that is near and dear to my heart,
0:35:35 but it’s not the only game in town when it comes to making extra money.
0:35:39 And that’s why we’ve got over 600 episodes in the archives for you to choose from,
0:35:40 but don’t get overwhelmed.
0:35:43 The easiest way to get started is to build yourself a personalized playlist
0:35:46 of the episodes most relevant to you to do that.
0:35:50 You got to go to hustle that show, answer a few short multiple choice questions.
0:35:51 You do it right on your phone.
0:35:54 And then right away, you’ll get this curated playlist of eight to 10
0:35:57 episodes based on where you’re at, where you want to go.
0:35:58 We’ve got online business models.
0:36:01 We got offline business models, service businesses, passive businesses.
0:36:05 All it depends on what answers you feed in to that quiz.
0:36:08 At hustle.show, but John, thanks so much for sharing your insight.
0:36:11 Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone.
0:36:15 You can hit up side hustle nation dot com slash deals for all the
0:36:17 latest offers from our sponsors in one place.
0:36:20 Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show.
0:36:21 That is it for me.
0:36:22 Thank you so much for tuning in.
0:36:26 If you find a value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend.
0:36:28 So if it’s valuable, make it viral.
0:36:30 As they say, easiest way to do that is to fire off that text message.
0:36:32 Hey, go check this out until next time.
0:36:34 Let’s go out there and make something happen.
0:36:38 And I’ll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show hustle on.
0:00:05 What’s up, what’s up, Nick Loper here.
0:00:09 Welcome to the Science Hustle Show, part of the entrepreneur podcast network.
0:00:11 It’s the business podcast you can actually apply.
0:00:16 And the last 12 months have been challenging, to say the least, for individual content creators.
0:00:18 People making money from their websites.
0:00:20 But does that mean online publishing is dead?
0:00:22 Is the niche site era officially over?
0:00:25 Well, don’t throw in the towel just yet, because all my guests today
0:00:29 has definitely been through the wringer when it comes to losing traffic from Google updates.
0:00:32 He’s also proved his resiliency as an entrepreneur
0:00:35 and tapped into new traffic sources that you can too.
0:00:40 I’m excited to welcome John Dykstra from fatstacksblog.com back to the show.
0:00:42 It’s been far too long, eight plus years.
0:00:43 John, welcome back.
0:00:45 Hey, thanks a lot for having me, Nick.
0:00:46 Yeah, it’s been a long time.
0:00:48 Eight years.
0:00:48 I was surprised.
0:00:50 I remember doing it, too.
0:00:52 I distinctly remember talking to you.
0:00:53 So this is great to be back.
0:00:56 We may have still been recording in the corner of the living room at that point.
0:00:58 It’s a different era.
0:01:02 Times have changed, but one thing remains constant.
0:01:04 And that’s, well, how do you make money on the internet?
0:01:05 That’s what we’re diving into today.
0:01:06 Stick around.
0:01:10 We’re talking creative ways to build traffic and revenue to your website
0:01:14 from email, from Facebook, from Pinterest, from other sources
0:01:18 that don’t rely on the whims of SEO algorithms.
0:01:21 So you can still build that viable online income.
0:01:24 After that, John’s got a business idea to donate to you,
0:01:26 something you might be able to take action on right away.
0:01:29 And then we’ve got round three, the triple threat and marketing tactics
0:01:32 that’s working today, a new tool that John is loving right now
0:01:34 and his favorite book from the last 12 months.
0:01:39 So the basic business model, as it has stood for the last decade,
0:01:40 is my understanding, right?
0:01:41 Publish helpful content.
0:01:43 We’re going to monetize with display ads and affiliate relationships.
0:01:46 And I’m going to pull in traffic from Google for people searching
0:01:50 for these informational and maybe transactional type of keywords.
0:01:51 Is that still the game?
0:01:53 That has changed a little bit.
0:01:55 It’s changed a ton for many of us.
0:01:58 We’ve all sort of experienced Google losses at different phases
0:02:00 since September 2023.
0:02:02 I took it on the chin in the first one.
0:02:06 And I think maybe that was a good thing because that forced me sooner
0:02:08 to adapt, which I have.
0:02:12 So I mean, when we’re talking like 90, 95 percent, you know,
0:02:15 basically for a lot of people, I know drops in Google traffic.
0:02:18 And most of us, that was the lion’s share.
0:02:19 So brutal. Yeah.
0:02:21 It was scramble time. It was like figure out.
0:02:25 Now, fortunately, I kind of had built up some side traffic sources
0:02:30 and web assets over the years for my largest site project.
0:02:34 And so I had kind of something to get rolling with.
0:02:35 But I really had to dive in.
0:02:40 And, you know, if I was going to recover, at least even a portion of what I had lost.
0:02:41 So that’s what I’ve been working on.
0:02:43 And we’re coming up to a year now.
0:02:45 And what’s been the most effective so far?
0:02:47 Email without question.
0:02:49 Now, I say that with a caveat.
0:02:53 OK, email late fall after a few months, I decided, OK,
0:02:56 I got to make the email work because I get the most control of that.
0:02:59 There’s lots of platforms that can drive lots of traffic.
0:03:03 But again, you’re relying on a platform and they all make changes.
0:03:04 And you already want to go through that again.
0:03:07 So and I should say, you know, I don’t have one regret
0:03:11 about doing the Google thing because for 10 years, it was awesome.
0:03:13 Sure. It’s been so good.
0:03:15 It was such a great business. It was a fun business.
0:03:17 So I don’t regret it. It’s just a big change.
0:03:18 It was a sudden change.
0:03:22 I’d say that that it was like out of the blue overnight.
0:03:23 That that was a big surprise.
0:03:25 So yeah, it’s a fantastic life.
0:03:29 You can make it work, create a piece of content once and have it pay you for years.
0:03:31 Like it’s it’s a beautiful model.
0:03:34 It really is. It was great.
0:03:35 It was a good ride.
0:03:38 It was like a golden era of long tail SEO.
0:03:41 But a few months after that, I made the decision.
0:03:43 It’s like, I got to make email work somehow.
0:03:46 I, you know, I’ve had some email success with Fatstacks,
0:03:50 but that’s a totally different type of project than my main,
0:03:52 I would call it a B2C type website.
0:03:54 It’s in a home and garden space.
0:03:57 I won’t specify which one, but it’s it serves that audience.
0:03:58 And so I was like, I got to make email work.
0:04:02 Now, I never really had the pressure to really make it work back when the SEO was working.
0:04:04 So I didn’t try that hard.
0:04:08 So I didn’t really do it, you know, but I decided I’m like, I got to make this work.
0:04:12 And I met and became friends with a guy named Scott DeLong,
0:04:17 who founded Viral Nova many, many years ago and since then has gone to launch
0:04:20 some really big sites and all his sites focused on email,
0:04:22 which I didn’t even know about.
0:04:26 And he was he was saying, I’ve just been an email guy like from for a long time.
0:04:29 And, you know, so I talked to him and I’m like, all right,
0:04:31 I got to do what this what Scott has done all these years.
0:04:33 So that’s what I did. And I have made it work.
0:04:37 And that’s been the focus now since I would say just before Christmas 2023.
0:04:42 OK, I think the challenging part is one need traffic to get people on to my email list.
0:04:47 So then I can email them to get traffic to like this weird chicken versus the egg thing here.
0:04:49 Oh, absolutely. Right.
0:04:52 Just you can’t just say, I’m going to do email and there’s traffic.
0:04:55 So there’s two things you have to figure out with email first.
0:04:57 Like you say, you got to get subscribers.
0:04:58 That’s super important.
0:05:01 The thing is how you’re going to monetize it in a nutshell.
0:05:06 I focus on Facebook for a lot of traffic, a combination of organic and paid.
0:05:09 I also do a lot of Pinterest.
0:05:11 Pinterest works for my niche. It’s a visual niche.
0:05:12 It works quite well.
0:05:18 And I’m moving into some push notifications, which is kind of working.
0:05:19 Now, here’s the thing.
0:05:24 As your email list grows, it’s now one of my largest traffic sources.
0:05:28 And that’s the whole point. OK, so I monetize the email by sending readers back
0:05:31 to my website where I have Mediavine ads.
0:05:33 And that’s the model that I love.
0:05:35 I love monetizing with Mediavine ads.
0:05:37 It’s very passive on the revenue side.
0:05:41 OK, rather than selling sponsorships directly in the email
0:05:43 or doing affiliate promos directly to the email.
0:05:46 Yes, absolutely. I’m not opposed to that 100 percent.
0:05:49 I’ve tried affiliate, didn’t really work with my readership.
0:05:52 I’m not opposed to sponsorships, but that takes legwork.
0:05:57 My favorite is throwing a bunch of links with, you know, little teasers
0:06:00 and article titles and so forth and link back to my website
0:06:03 and just get readers to go back every day, every day, every day.
0:06:06 And that’s where I get the traffic now for the ad revenue.
0:06:10 OK, got it. And then those subscribers are coming through initially
0:06:12 Facebook traffic, Pinterest traffic.
0:06:16 Let’s let’s dive into the Facebook side of things for what that looks like.
0:06:17 So Facebook’s fickle.
0:06:19 So I have my ups and downs.
0:06:22 It’s not something I would 100 percent rely on in terms of the subscribers.
0:06:27 Facebook ads for leads is quite good if you can get the costs down
0:06:30 because that’s like instant subscriber to your email list.
0:06:36 And then I even basically will run like boosted posts to my content on my site,
0:06:41 which I’m paying for clicks and the ad revenue will sort of balance out.
0:06:45 And I’m getting free subscribers from like the various email sign up forms.
0:06:50 And that’s a bit of a tricky operation because you can lose money very quickly.
0:06:52 So if I break even, I count myself lucky.
0:06:55 I even sometimes make a make a small profit.
0:06:59 But, you know, I’m basically sort of supplementing the traffic on Facebook
0:07:01 with some paid ads. It’s a real mix.
0:07:03 And that’s how I like it.
0:07:06 Got it. Where do you like to see the cost per subscriber
0:07:07 when you’re running these lead ads?
0:07:09 Ideally, under 50 cents is good.
0:07:10 I’m not always hitting that.
0:07:12 Sometimes they creep up higher.
0:07:17 I’m in Canadian currency, so I always have to do quick conversions in my head.
0:07:22 So, yeah, if you can get something around 50 cents, that’s pretty good.
0:07:25 But it’s really important if you’re going to get started with this
0:07:28 and make sure you’re tagging your new subscribers properly.
0:07:31 And the reason for that is you want to be able to track
0:07:33 how well they’re performing as email readers.
0:07:37 You want to see that in a month, a good chunk of them are still opening and reading.
0:07:39 Otherwise, you’re throwing your money away, right?
0:07:42 Right. You’re not going to make money from subscribers
0:07:46 with this model of people, basically unsubscribing after a week.
0:07:48 Right. The real hope is here.
0:07:52 They stick around for a few months or a year and they’re regular readers.
0:07:55 Yeah. How many times do they have to click over to make your four or five
0:07:57 cents worth of Mediavine?
0:08:00 Do you think about it in those terms of what’s my break even point on this?
0:08:03 Yes and no. I mean, I did for the first, I would say,
0:08:06 five, six months. I was, I’ve kind of got it down to a system now.
0:08:08 It’s just kind of works on its own.
0:08:11 I really do focus now more on just growing the traffic side of it.
0:08:13 The numbers work for me, so I don’t really have to.
0:08:16 But yeah, at first, I was like, obsessed with the numbers.
0:08:21 And for every, every subscriber source and looking at performance and revenue
0:08:23 and click through rates and all of this stuff.
0:08:24 But I pretty much got it dialed in now.
0:08:29 So I don’t really pay too much attention to that because it is working
0:08:31 and the revenue slowly grows.
0:08:33 This is not a fast growth model.
0:08:36 But I like it because it’s fairly sustainable.
0:08:38 Like I can count on it like clockwork.
0:08:42 And do you have a sense of what the lifetime value of an email subscriber is for you?
0:08:45 No, not yet. It’s too soon, I would say.
0:08:47 But it’s over 50 cents.
0:08:48 Yes.
0:08:51 Yeah, I imagine there’s an 80/20 dollar, like we’re the, you know, 20 percent
0:08:53 of the most engaged subscribers are the ones clicking on everything.
0:08:54 They’re making tons of money.
0:08:57 You’re like, well, shoot, I would gladly play two or three dollars for each one of these.
0:09:01 But for every one of those, there’s four others that, you know,
0:09:02 click on two things and then unsubscribe.
0:09:04 So it balances out.
0:09:08 100 percent, a pleasant surprise I had with this was the ad RPMs
0:09:12 that I earned with Mediavine are double what Google ever paid.
0:09:16 And that was unexpected and that has really helped the model.
0:09:22 So with Mediavine, you can get certain links that work with some email service providers.
0:09:23 There’s these tracking links.
0:09:25 I think they call them email connect.
0:09:26 Interesting.
0:09:30 And so you get these links for every link or URL to your website.
0:09:35 And if email readers click those, the RPMs, for me, are about double
0:09:37 than what they would be from Google.
0:09:40 So I don’t even have to send a whole ton of visitors daily.
0:09:42 It generates some really good ad room.
0:09:46 And by double, I mean like 100 and anywhere from 120.
0:09:52 I’ve even had over 150 ad RPMs per thousand sessions from email with the email,
0:09:54 with Mediavine ads.
0:09:58 That’s why I’m such a big Mediavine fan, because those are ridiculously
0:10:00 high numbers for ads.
0:10:01 Yeah.
0:10:04 That’s probably double or triple what I’m seeing from just Google traffic.
0:10:08 And it’s because now they have kind of some identifier of who that person is.
0:10:10 Like it said, more targeted stuff or show more targeted stuff.
0:10:12 Yeah, it’s exactly it.
0:10:16 And so it really helps make the model financially viable and it’s really good.
0:10:17 That’s a job.
0:10:20 I’ll try to figure out a way how to disable Mediavine for email traffic.
0:10:21 It’s like, hey, you already subscribed.
0:10:23 Like, I don’t need to be showing you a bunch of ads and stuff.
0:10:26 It’s like, oh, hey, well, maybe shoot, I could triple this.
0:10:28 That’s really interesting.
0:10:31 And then the emails that you’re sending out are like, here’s what we
0:10:32 published this week.
0:10:33 Like, how often are you sending?
0:10:34 Like what in the content?
0:10:36 I send three day, three emails a day.
0:10:37 Yeah.
0:10:38 Who’s writing all this stuff?
0:10:39 I have a team.
0:10:39 OK.
0:10:40 We’ve got to iron down.
0:10:47 I’ve like been so zeroed in on this model for a long time and we’re training my team.
0:10:48 I had a good team in place.
0:10:49 That was a huge advantage.
0:10:52 So it was just a matter of, you know, training them.
0:10:56 But yeah, we’re cranking out the content as fast as we can.
0:11:00 Yeah. If you’re relying on that as a traffic source, I guess you got to push send.
0:11:03 I started out a few times a week and I built it up to one a day.
0:11:06 Now, I monitor my complaint rate very carefully.
0:11:11 OK. Postmaster Google, postmaster.google, if anyone cares, you can
0:11:14 track your spam and complaint rate in Gmail there.
0:11:16 And those are very important numbers.
0:11:20 Anything higher than 0.3 percent convert kits not going to be happy.
0:11:22 And they may do, I don’t know what they would do.
0:11:22 Maybe kick you out.
0:11:23 I don’t know.
0:11:26 I haven’t come close to that, fortunately, but I do pay attention to that.
0:11:30 So anytime I make a big change with my email, I will monitor that for a week or
0:11:33 two just to make sure that my complaint rates down.
0:11:36 But so I went up to two per day, complaint rate didn’t change.
0:11:39 My revenue went up, went to three a day, same thing.
0:11:42 Now, I think four would I think I’ve hit a diminishing returns.
0:11:47 But I’ll tell you, you know, here’s what got me on to trying that is I’m a regular
0:11:49 Quora reader. I know a lot of people hate Quora.
0:11:53 I like Quora and same with I check out real estate websites regularly just kind
0:11:55 of for fun. These websites will send you.
0:12:01 If you subscribe and they track everything you do, like Quora sends me five emails a day.
0:12:05 And I don’t not only do I not mind, I actually like it.
0:12:06 It’s sort of like, oh, it’s interesting.
0:12:07 They’re not selling me stuff.
0:12:09 I don’t sell my readers anything.
0:12:14 I’m just sending them interesting information that they’ve showed an interest in.
0:12:17 And it’s the type of information that it’s just ongoing.
0:12:20 There’s never really like, it’s not like you’ve, you know, you’ve you’ve it’s sort
0:12:22 of like celebrity entertainment news.
0:12:24 We just keep reading it, right?
0:12:25 So they don’t mind.
0:12:28 Is it through like an automated sequence?
0:12:32 Or I got to come up with three new things to send every day, 15 times a week.
0:12:34 It’s like a link to one article, it’s a roundup.
0:12:36 Like what’s what’s in the content of the messages?
0:12:39 Most of it’s all going to different articles on the website.
0:12:40 I do I do a variety of stuff.
0:12:42 And then I always test new stuff.
0:12:44 And because you’ve been publishing this for a decade, right?
0:12:48 You have this huge, huge library of content that you can point people back to.
0:12:50 I do. I have 15,000 articles.
0:12:55 OK, you can recycle like every six or 12 months.
0:12:59 I know Scott DeLong, who’s who’s the guy who I’ve who I’ve learned so much from.
0:13:02 I mean, he said, yeah, I would have no problem recycling every six months.
0:13:05 Because realistically, you’ve got new subs, you’ve got a lot of subs that have left.
0:13:07 I mean, they’re going to forget whatever.
0:13:10 So yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, yeah, and I do recycle at this point.
0:13:12 So, you know, it gets easier and easier.
0:13:15 How many email subscribers are on that list now?
0:13:18 155,000, 155 K.
0:13:19 And that’s through ConvertKit.
0:13:22 Yes, which is expensive, but it pays.
0:13:24 But the ROI is there.
0:13:27 Here’s if you want to get all sort of technical on the email side of thing.
0:13:28 I still don’t know what the answer is.
0:13:31 I used to be very diligent in scrubbing weekly.
0:13:34 And if you didn’t open for 90 days, you were removed.
0:13:38 And then I talked to, you know, I’ve done a lot of reading about it.
0:13:42 Now, the most damaging type of thing that can happen with your email list
0:13:46 is a complaint or spam rating or spam complaint.
0:13:48 That’s based on your total number of subscribers.
0:13:52 So if you have a hundred subscribers and two people complain,
0:13:54 you have a two percent complaint rate.
0:13:57 If you have 2000 subscribers and two people complain,
0:14:00 you have not going to do the math because I’m terrible,
0:14:02 but a far less smaller percent.
0:14:05 And it’s a percent as far as I know is that what matters.
0:14:09 So it sounds like I have a huge list, but I haven’t been scrubbing.
0:14:14 And the reason I don’t scrub is I want to keep that complaint rates really low.
0:14:15 And that’s why it’s so low.
0:14:19 Yeah. So you’ll see a lower open rate because subscribers go stale.
0:14:21 But if they’re not opening, they’re not complaining either.
0:14:22 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
0:14:26 And can I tell you that this is the right way to manage my list?
0:14:27 I actually I actually don’t know.
0:14:32 I think I think there’s a lot of different theories on on the best approach.
0:14:36 But for me right now, the complaint rate to keep it low is really important.
0:14:36 So this is what I’m doing.
0:14:38 So sounds like I have a really, really big list,
0:14:41 but my open rates sort of get lower and lower, but that’s OK.
0:14:43 The revenue just keeps going up.
0:14:45 So that’s all that really matters to me at the end of the day.
0:14:47 Right. It’s not necessarily open rate.
0:14:51 It’s raw number of people who are seeing this message.
0:14:53 Yes. I’ve been back and forth on this.
0:14:55 Well, do you remove people who are unsubscribed?
0:14:57 Do you try and reengage them?
0:14:58 Do you delete the ones?
0:15:03 And I historically have deleted those people after maybe six months.
0:15:07 But it’s painful, especially if you’re paying for subscribers like in this case.
0:15:08 But I don’t know.
0:15:10 And then you see like a temporary spike in open rate.
0:15:14 And maybe that sends some positive signal to, you know, to the inboxes.
0:15:15 Maybe it doesn’t.
0:15:18 Maybe it’s all individualized, personalized based on how you reacted
0:15:20 for messages from the sender in the past.
0:15:20 But that’s fascinating.
0:15:23 I had no idea that you’re sending that volume.
0:15:26 I know the the Fatstax blog newsletter is really interesting to read.
0:15:28 And that’s a very prolific writer there,
0:15:31 sending multiple times a week on the online business side of things.
0:15:35 But you’ve been cranking out more content on the actual B2C site.
0:15:39 What else is getting people in the door at the top of the funnel
0:15:42 to join the email list to get traffic initially?
0:15:44 Anyways, what’s working in the Pinterest world these days?
0:15:45 Pinterest is good.
0:15:49 I bet I think a lot of people have hopped on Pinterest.
0:15:53 And so I used to I used to get like really high amounts of traffic from Pinterest.
0:15:55 It’s gotten down. It’s still high and still good.
0:15:58 And in fact, I’m doubling down big time on Pinterest.
0:16:02 I am working with a service just to scale up faster.
0:16:04 I was doing a whole bunch of stuff.
0:16:08 And then I stopped just because I just didn’t have I had to deploy team members
0:16:11 to the email and it just sort of took away from Pinterest.
0:16:14 But now we’ve got the email humming and working Pinterest really hard again.
0:16:15 So Pinterest is good.
0:16:18 Pinterest is really good traffic source if you’re in the right niche for it.
0:16:21 And Pinterest is publisher friendly.
0:16:23 That’s what I like about it’s relatively stable.
0:16:27 And you know, they have had their algo shifts over the years.
0:16:29 But I would say for most publishers,
0:16:33 it’s been a relatively stable traffic source, which is nice because you can count on it.
0:16:37 You can invest time and money into growing on the platform.
0:16:40 If you’re in the home and garden space, it could be, you know,
0:16:44 15 ideas to redo your backyard or, you know,
0:16:47 the top 10 paint colors that are hot this season.
0:16:51 Like it seems like it lends itself well to Pinterest versus, I don’t know,
0:16:53 I was having a hard time like in the personal finance space.
0:16:56 Let’s say you’re in SEO niche or personal finance.
0:16:58 It’s not great to be on Pinterest.
0:17:00 Your time and money is much better spent elsewhere.
0:17:03 OK, so you got to create these special graphics.
0:17:05 You know, probably last we spoke eight plus years ago.
0:17:07 You know, group boards, we’re all the thing.
0:17:12 Is this is anything that goes into the I mean, it’s kind of an SEO content platform
0:17:15 to where people can use that search bar to find what they’re looking for.
0:17:19 And if your content can rank well there, it could be a consistent traffic source.
0:17:23 But like, do you need to be constantly feeding that machine by re pinning
0:17:27 and refreshing the images and creating multiple images and split testing?
0:17:31 Like there’s a whole there’s a whole Pinterest economy that is a black box to me right now.
0:17:34 Yeah, you pretty much hit it there.
0:17:36 Yeah, I mean, that’s that’s a big part of it.
0:17:38 I mean, Pinterest is a search engine.
0:17:41 It’s an image search engine, but it’s also got a social aspect.
0:17:46 I think the social in terms of pins being distributed to your followers
0:17:48 is less important now than the search aspect.
0:17:52 So I think learning how to find keywords and topics.
0:17:57 And then, of course, trending pen designs that work is really what you want to do
0:18:00 and find those topics that are going to work for you that are within your niche
0:18:02 or what your whole website’s about.
0:18:04 There’s this really great new tool.
0:18:07 It’s going to be the new tool I talk about, but I might as well mention it now.
0:18:10 It’s pin clicks just came out not even I think about a month ago.
0:18:13 It’s the only thing it’s a it’s a SaaS cloud software.
0:18:16 It will actually do Pinterest keyword research for you.
0:18:19 It will track the keywords you’re gunning for on Pinterest.
0:18:24 It will show you the top trending pin designs for particular keywords.
0:18:28 It’s basically a drafts for Pinterest in a nutshell.
0:18:31 And I’ve been using that and it’s awesome.
0:18:33 And it’s a lot of people are loving it
0:18:36 because it’s just Pinterest used to be a lot of guesswork like you had mentioned.
0:18:40 You try to find keywords by doing auto complete in the Pinterest search.
0:18:41 We all did that, right?
0:18:42 You don’t have to do that anymore.
0:18:44 That’s tedious and it works.
0:18:48 But it’s tedious and you’re going to get a lot more ideas with pin clicks.
0:18:50 So finally, there’s a tool out there for us.
0:18:52 Takes a lot of the guesswork out of the whole Pinterest.
0:18:56 But the downside with it, there’s a lot more people on Pinterest now
0:19:00 because let’s face it, a lot of us were focused on Google before.
0:19:02 And now, you know, we have to switch to Pinterest.
0:19:05 Yeah, we got to go someplace else using tailwind or anything else
0:19:09 to schedule stuff out, or is it best to have somebody post this manually?
0:19:12 I post manually, actually, I’ve used Buffer.
0:19:15 I like Buffer is because I can do all my social media in one place.
0:19:18 And their Pinterest posting is actually it worked for me.
0:19:20 It’s good. But I think most of what I’m doing right now
0:19:22 is direct through Pinterest scheduler.
0:19:25 I’m also, as I mentioned, working with a new service
0:19:27 that’s taking over a lot of it.
0:19:30 And they’re not only like pinning, they’re actually doing the keyword research
0:19:33 with pin clicks, they’re creating the content on my site
0:19:36 and then creating all the picks on a light like a to z for me.
0:19:39 Just because it was either that or I had to hire a couple of people.
0:19:43 And a lot of times I prefer to just contract out.
0:19:44 It’s easier for me.
0:19:47 OK. And so Pinterest drives traffic that generates
0:19:51 Mediavine page views that generates, hopefully, some email signups.
0:19:55 People see the opt-in on the site and they say, sure,
0:19:58 send me send me emails about home and garden decor or whatever.
0:20:01 You know, and so they join the email list that way.
0:20:02 Well, yeah, exactly. That’s the point.
0:20:05 And Pinterest traffic is high quality traffic.
0:20:08 We look at the time on site and the page views per visitor
0:20:13 and the ad revenue is it earns typically more than Google traffic.
0:20:16 So it’s an engaged audience and they’re good email readers.
0:20:18 That’s it. It’s so niche dependent.
0:20:19 My experience was like the exact opposite.
0:20:24 It was like super low engagement, you know, really low time on site.
0:20:25 Never I’ve never clicked on anything.
0:20:28 It was like this is before I had any ads on the site.
0:20:31 And so I was like, we’re spending all this time and effort and energy
0:20:33 to try to get this traffic and it didn’t even do anything.
0:20:35 Once we do get it, I was like, forget it.
0:20:37 And then, you know, to the point about, you know,
0:20:40 playing in somebody else’s sandbox, somebody else came in and claimed
0:20:41 that we had like ripped off one of their pins.
0:20:45 And it was like a competing account, you know, was a baseless claim.
0:20:49 And then you try to file this appeal and they’re like, your account is suspended.
0:20:52 You know, it’s not even worth fighting it because, you know,
0:20:56 the cost to hire a service or have a VA manage this was less than what
0:20:58 the traffic was breaking in, like, forget it.
0:21:01 So my account has been banned for years over there.
0:21:05 I don’t think you’re missing out, given the niche that you’re in, Nick.
0:21:08 You know, 201 Creative, which is my Pinterest service.
0:21:10 They’re helping out big time to scale.
0:21:14 I like to keep a really lean team in terms of they just
0:21:15 deal with a certain type of content.
0:21:18 And then the other thing you mentioned was push notifications.
0:21:21 These is like when the little browser thing pops up and says, this site
0:21:24 wants to send you notifications and people click yes or no.
0:21:26 Yeah, that’s OK.
0:21:28 You know, I’ve done it three different times over the course
0:21:31 of 10 years use push and I’m always optimistic.
0:21:33 But the same thing always seems to happen.
0:21:36 I get to a certain amount of subscribers, no matter how many push notifications
0:21:40 I send, no matter how good I think they are, I sort of hit this plateau
0:21:42 of how much traffic I can send.
0:21:45 And it seems I’ve hit it again and it’s not really enough traffic to warrant
0:21:47 continuing, but I am going to stick with it for a little bit.
0:21:49 I’ll, you know, pretty inexpensive.
0:21:52 I’m definitely making like 10 times what it costs every month.
0:21:56 OK, it’s just I don’t know if I can like scale it really, really high.
0:21:58 I don’t know. It’s one of those things I don’t have heard.
0:22:01 I’ve talked to people where some publishers have really good
0:22:01 success with push.
0:22:04 I’m just sort of mediocre right now.
0:22:07 And of course, you got to have visitors to your site
0:22:10 initially before they can even opt in to a push notification.
0:22:11 So it’s kind of like a second tier.
0:22:13 Like how do I get how do I turn one visitor into two?
0:22:14 How do I make sure people come back?
0:22:16 You know, obviously, I’d love to capture their email.
0:22:19 That’s going to be a really high value action that they can take.
0:22:21 But barring that if they want to sign up for a push notification.
0:22:23 That’s also cool. What’s the tool that you’re using for those?
0:22:27 Subscribers.com quite reasonably priced, easy to use.
0:22:29 I’ve got no complaints with the platform.
0:22:31 I’ve used a number of platforms over the years.
0:22:35 It’s good. Again, just sort of hit this plateau.
0:22:40 Like so I send most days when I have the time for a day, which might be too many.
0:22:46 But, you know, so I’m averaging 200 to 50 visitors a day from that,
0:22:46 which is not great.
0:22:51 I have 9000 push subscribers, sort of like, OK, it should be going up higher.
0:22:54 So basically, my click through rate has sort of dropped, right?
0:22:57 It like the first month that was really high when I didn’t have many subscribers.
0:23:01 And so the actual click through rate number is just keeps going down and down.
0:23:05 If it if it keeps going that way, it may not be worth doing
0:23:07 because it does take time to make these things.
0:23:09 Right. I don’t I don’t I don’t have the automated ones
0:23:11 that’ll just pick up your posts and blast them out.
0:23:13 I do actually make them.
0:23:17 Yeah. And at 250 visitors is worth $25.
0:23:19 Like I’m trying to do the math or like what that might be worth to you
0:23:21 in terms of ad revenue like that.
0:23:24 Yeah. They’re quality traffic.
0:23:27 I use I use plausible now instead of Google Analytics.
0:23:28 I’ve given up on Google Analytics plausible.
0:23:31 It’s just an alternative and it’s such a simple platform.
0:23:32 So I can see what’s going on.
0:23:36 The engagement and time on site and everything from from pushes is decent.
0:23:37 The ad revenue is decent.
0:23:39 I actually on Mediavine is great.
0:23:44 They don’t because push is such under two percent of my overall revenue.
0:23:47 It doesn’t show up on my dashboard, but I can email my rep
0:23:51 and she can actually get me the RPMs from push and it was like $75.
0:23:53 So that’s pretty good.
0:23:55 That’s higher than Pinterest, actually.
0:24:01 I’ve been playing around with a tool called Gravitek, G-R-A-V-I-T-E-C Gravitek.
0:24:05 It was on an AppSumo deal and I have yet to hit my lifetime cap on those.
0:24:08 So, you know, thousands of people have opted in,
0:24:11 but I still have a few a few more left to go before I got to renew that thing.
0:24:16 But sending, you know, one to two a week when I get around to it versus four a day.
0:24:19 So, again, it’s similar to the email where it’s like, if you’re going to really
0:24:21 look at this as you’re going to rely on it as a traffic source,
0:24:25 really got to push that lever down and see what see what happens to it.
0:24:25 Yeah.
0:24:28 I mean, I think that’s a key distinction between B2B here and a B2B.
0:24:29 FATSEX is B2B.
0:24:31 My niche site is B2C.
0:24:33 And the huge distinction is volume.
0:24:34 Yeah.
0:24:39 B2C is typically volume that makes up for and B2B is typically more surgical,
0:24:45 more specific, but your audience per thousand readers is much higher value.
0:24:46 Well, very good.
0:24:50 Appreciate sharing all of these different tools as well as we talked Facebook,
0:24:53 we talked to email, we talked Pinterest, we talked to push notifications,
0:24:57 we talked plausible as a Google Analytics software alternative.
0:25:00 That was that was one of the business ideas that I either have donated
0:25:02 or would be willing to donate in the past.
0:25:04 It just just rebuild, you know, GA4.
0:25:08 Just make it look like the old analytics and you have a huge business.
0:25:10 Like, how do I how do I reverse this and make it make it easy?
0:25:12 You just just rebuild the old platform.
0:25:13 That would be totally fine.
0:25:17 With that in mind, we’ll be right back with John right after award
0:25:20 from our sponsors with round two and round three right after this.
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0:27:54 All right, back with John Dykstra from fatstacksblog.com with round two.
0:27:56 This is donate a business idea,
0:27:59 something that you would start if you only had more time,
0:28:00 something that’s been on the back burner,
0:28:02 something you think listeners can run with.
0:28:05 Faceless YouTube channel, but story based.
0:28:08 I read fiction. I love reading. I like writing.
0:28:09 I think it would be a lot of,
0:28:11 I’ve been kind of studying it just for fun.
0:28:16 Some people make some amazing like documentary or story based
0:28:18 typed videos. I think they’re fascinating.
0:28:20 I think it’d be something that would be in my wheelhouse,
0:28:22 but they take a lot of work and I just don’t have the time,
0:28:24 but it’s something I would love to do.
0:28:26 You would do something in the, in a fiction niche,
0:28:27 like a creative type of thing?
0:28:31 No, I would think business history, history.
0:28:34 Okay. Something like that. Yeah, that’s so I read a lot of that.
0:28:38 I find that interesting. I think it’d be a lot of fun to write it by story.
0:28:42 I mean that the videos would have some form of a narrative instead of being
0:28:45 such as a how to or review or something like that,
0:28:49 but more of just engaging, interesting, story based type video.
0:28:52 Okay. Yeah. You can go back in time. You could have,
0:28:56 we probably have chat GPT come up with a bio of Andrew Carnegie
0:29:00 and make it a YouTube script and then have somebody narrated
0:29:04 or have AI narrate it and then have it set to some timely images.
0:29:07 You source some of these images. I think that’s an interesting one for sure.
0:29:09 Yeah. I think I think it’s something I could do. I don’t know.
0:29:13 I just, they are, I know you mentioned AI and all that and probably could do it all,
0:29:16 but it still takes time. Everything takes time.
0:29:19 Feeding, whatever it comes up with, it’s not going to be perfect.
0:29:22 And that’s kind of the secret sauce is we did, we did an episode recently
0:29:25 on somebody creating these faceless YouTube channels,
0:29:29 leaning really heavily on AI. But then as we dug a little bit deeper,
0:29:32 it was like, well, the secret sauce is really adding your own expertise
0:29:34 because everybody is trying to do that. And it’s like, well,
0:29:36 how are you going to, how are you going to differentiate yourself?
0:29:38 It’s like by adding your own insight, expertise,
0:29:42 authority and layering that on top of what to, to make that compelling and interesting.
0:29:43 Cause like, well, you know,
0:29:47 does the world really need more digital clutter of the same 15 videos?
0:29:50 Trying to, trying to tell the same story. Exactly. I like that one.
0:29:54 Definitely, but playing around with more of the YouTube stuff myself, you know,
0:29:58 on camera, off camera, it’s, I don’t know, even though it’s been kind of the same,
0:30:01 you know, very much backburner for the last four or five years,
0:30:05 it still feels like a new frontier. It’s like, it feels like it’s all
0:30:07 incremental and exciting and different, you know,
0:30:10 you have yet to hit, you know, really the viral lottery over there.
0:30:12 But, you know, trying to plant these evergreen assets,
0:30:16 it’s a lot like the SEO game where you can create something and have it collect
0:30:18 incremental views for years and years.
0:30:22 Totally, I agree with you. There’s a lot of great reasons to, and it’s in it.
0:30:26 There’s monetization built in, you know, I’m, I’m a, I’m a display ad person.
0:30:31 I just love that model for monetization and YouTube offers it. So I like that.
0:30:34 Yeah. It’s built in, it’s low. You don’t have to sell anything.
0:30:37 It just, it just happens. Like if people expect ads on the internet,
0:30:39 they expect ads on YouTube. So it doesn’t feel,
0:30:42 it doesn’t feel intrusive. So it’s just expected.
0:30:43 Well, I appreciate you sharing that.
0:30:46 Round three here is the triple threat.
0:30:49 And we’re going to start off with a marketing tactic that is working right now.
0:30:50 It’s possibly one that we already covered,
0:30:52 but we’ll, we can revisit it here if that’s the case.
0:30:55 I would say push notifications right now for me.
0:30:58 And even though I’m getting at best mediocre results,
0:31:01 it’s something that not a lot of people are doing.
0:31:05 And I think it’s worth trying because it’s, like I said,
0:31:08 even though it’s not a grand slam for me right now,
0:31:11 I’m still 10 Xing what the subscription is. So it’s free money.
0:31:13 And I’m making the content anyway.
0:31:16 Yeah. I mean, that counts, that counts as a win for sure.
0:31:19 I think it’s worth trying for people. I don’t see a lot of people doing it.
0:31:21 I don’t hear a lot of people talking about it. Give it a shot.
0:31:25 Do those go out on mobile too? Or is it only like desktop browser?
0:31:27 I think mostly mobile.
0:31:32 I don’t know. There’s, it seems I had to pay an upgrade to get on a Safari or something
0:31:35 or something. Apple always has to be difficult with everything.
0:31:39 I’m not really sure how it behaves on Apple, but I think like with Chrome,
0:31:42 regardless of which device you’re on, it’s, it’s getting sent out to you.
0:31:45 Okay. Yeah. There’s a trade off because it adds, you know,
0:31:48 some non-zero amount of extra load time.
0:31:50 You have to load the script onto your site, but a certain percentage of people
0:31:53 will click, yeah, sure. Send me, send me notifications.
0:31:57 And then it’s a chance to remarket to those people and collect that
0:32:01 Mediavine income over and over again instead of just that one time.
0:32:02 Exactly. All right.
0:32:08 The next one is a new or new to you tool that you’re loving right now.
0:32:09 I already mentioned, I gotta say, PinClix.
0:32:12 It’s probably the only latest tool I’ve used in the last month or two.
0:32:16 That’s the Pinterest analysis tool, keyword tracking, keyword research,
0:32:19 pin design trends, all of it. That’s my latest toy.
0:32:21 Very good. That’s new to me. Very cool.
0:32:23 Ahrefs for Pinterest, as it was described.
0:32:26 PinClix will link that up in the show notes and your favorite book
0:32:29 from the last 12 months.
0:32:31 Yeah, I had to think on this.
0:32:33 I have to go with Suley by John Grisham.
0:32:36 I read everything John Grisham publishes.
0:32:38 I thought this was a cool book.
0:32:41 Not it’s outside of his wheelhouse of being a legal thriller.
0:32:46 And it’s about basketball and it was, it was a really, really good book.
0:32:48 Okay. You’re a recovering attorney yourself.
0:32:50 We’re still practicing law.
0:32:51 No, I’m done.
0:32:53 Cos it quits, I’m going all in on this online business stuff.
0:32:55 I did some time ago.
0:32:59 But I do, you know, it’s interesting because I like the whole legal drama,
0:33:03 thriller stuff, I read, I read the novels, I watch the TV shows, I watch the movies.
0:33:05 So I still find it fascinating.
0:33:08 In fact, if I could, I could totally do a faceless YouTube channel
0:33:12 on interesting legal cases or instances or laws.
0:33:16 I thought I kicked around law in what I do a number of different ways.
0:33:20 It’s never really materialized, but it’s something maybe one day comes about.
0:33:21 There you go.
0:33:24 You have trying to find those overlapping circles of, you know,
0:33:28 what you know about and what is interesting, what people are looking for
0:33:30 and what you can get paid to do.
0:33:34 And yeah, maybe there’s something in the middle that overlaps all of those
0:33:38 different areas, but Suley by John Grisham will link that up as well.
0:33:41 John, you can find him at fatstacksblog.com.
0:33:43 Thanks again for joining me.
0:33:46 Again, much belated from our last catch up.
0:33:48 And so we’ll have to do it again before eight years are up.
0:33:51 Any parting words of guidance for the SinehustleNation audience?
0:33:54 I know it’s been a tough year.
0:33:55 There are options out there.
0:33:57 SEO is not the only option.
0:34:01 And, you know, see if there’s other examples of sites in your niche
0:34:04 and look what they’re doing, where they’re operating, where they’re getting
0:34:07 success and see if you can hop in and do the same.
0:34:11 I mean, have you seen any recovery or is it just now we’re going to be dominated
0:34:15 by by Reddit and by Good Housekeeping and Better Home?
0:34:18 Like, is that who’s kind of taken over in your niche?
0:34:22 Oh, yeah, it’s it’s all it’s all the legacy print publishers who, you know,
0:34:25 print like who have magazine subscriptions that have been around forever.
0:34:26 They get all the traffic.
0:34:30 You know, I doubled my Google traffic, but it was from hardly anything
0:34:34 to still hardly anything, but it was 100 percent increase from the update.
0:34:35 But divide by a small number.
0:34:38 Yeah, still amazingly to 200 a day just from the Google.
0:34:41 So, I mean, it’s it’s not totally useless.
0:34:43 It’s just a far cry from what it was.
0:34:46 And it’s not really a business sum to itself.
0:34:50 But I haven’t talked to anybody who’s had a full recovery at all.
0:34:51 I’m sure some are out there.
0:34:55 I’ve seen some people on Twitter posting some charts, but I don’t know anyone personally.
0:34:59 Yeah, you put in any effort towards it or just I’m going all in on these other channels.
0:35:02 You know, it’s interesting because I do a lot of stuff now in my site.
0:35:06 I’m testing stuff like that I would never have done in the SEO days
0:35:09 in terms of like duplicate content or thin content or, you know,
0:35:13 I followed all the SEO rules for years, not trying to game it,
0:35:17 just doing what I was told needed to be done to get my content in Google.
0:35:19 I don’t care about any of it anymore.
0:35:21 I will do whatever I need to do to make Pinterest work,
0:35:23 to make it work on Facebook for email.
0:35:24 And that’s my focus.
0:35:25 Yeah, very good.
0:35:30 It’s a different game, but it’s all under the same online business umbrella.
0:35:32 That’s a side hustle that is near and dear to my heart,
0:35:35 but it’s not the only game in town when it comes to making extra money.
0:35:39 And that’s why we’ve got over 600 episodes in the archives for you to choose from,
0:35:40 but don’t get overwhelmed.
0:35:43 The easiest way to get started is to build yourself a personalized playlist
0:35:46 of the episodes most relevant to you to do that.
0:35:50 You got to go to hustle that show, answer a few short multiple choice questions.
0:35:51 You do it right on your phone.
0:35:54 And then right away, you’ll get this curated playlist of eight to 10
0:35:57 episodes based on where you’re at, where you want to go.
0:35:58 We’ve got online business models.
0:36:01 We got offline business models, service businesses, passive businesses.
0:36:05 All it depends on what answers you feed in to that quiz.
0:36:08 At hustle.show, but John, thanks so much for sharing your insight.
0:36:11 Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone.
0:36:15 You can hit up side hustle nation dot com slash deals for all the
0:36:17 latest offers from our sponsors in one place.
0:36:20 Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show.
0:36:21 That is it for me.
0:36:22 Thank you so much for tuning in.
0:36:26 If you find a value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend.
0:36:28 So if it’s valuable, make it viral.
0:36:30 As they say, easiest way to do that is to fire off that text message.
0:36:32 Hey, go check this out until next time.
0:36:34 Let’s go out there and make something happen.
0:36:38 And I’ll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show hustle on.
How can you drive traffic to your website without relying on Google?
The last 12 months haven’t been easy for content creators, especially those hit by Google updates. Some people saw a massive drop in traffic — up to 90-95%!
So is online publishing done for? Is the niche site era over? Not quite.
For those who adapt, new opportunities arise.
Jon Dykstra from Fat Stacks Blog was among those affected but has since turned his attention to other strategies — and here are some of his strategies you can adapt.
Full Show Notes: How to Get Traffic to Your Website Without Relying on Google
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