#344 – 1 Year Since HCU: What’s Working Now

It’s quite ironic, we’ve planned this podcast for the 1 year anniversary of the HCU release for a while and just as we sit down to record it, Google releases a massive update that seemingly undoes a lot of the damage from many sites.

Now recovery is a strong word for what we’re seeing so far.

Many sites experiencing improvements are still over 80% down in traffic compared to a year ago and to return to their previous level they need a 400% increase and we’re very far from that at this point.

But let’s imagine for a second that this actually happens.

Do we just go back to the old way of doing things, ignoring completely the looming threat of AI on informational queries or the fact that Google could totally do another update like HCU in the near future?

I don’t think we can afford to do that as an industry.

Regardless of what happens with this update, this past year has permanently changed the industry.

And from having conversations with many of you in the community or through direct messages, it’s clear there’s still a lot of confusion about the path forward.

The strategy of generating a lot of site traffic and monetizing it solely through ads and affiliate marketing can still work to some extent, however, I am confident that the best days of this method are behind us at this point.

And if you’re still pursuing this model, you should be aware that you are probably investing in a declining strategy.

Now we’ve dedicated an entire podcast discussing how we are adapting our strategy which you can check up there.

We’ve also interviewed a bunch of interesting guests that do different things in the past few weeks, but many of you guys have told us that you want to see other options before committing to something new.

So that’s precisely what this episode is about.

We aim to create an inventory of what actually works today.

We wanted to answer the question, what strategy can you invest your time in now that will yield dividends for years to come?

And as this is a authority hacker, we have a lot of examples of real small businesses for each strategy so you can study them yourself if you’re interested.

Before we begin, I’d like to thank today’s episode sponsor, Search Intelligence, the place to go to get high quality PR backlinks.

We’ll share more details about them a little bit later in the episode.

From now, let’s get started.

Today’s episode was actually planned a while ago, but it so happened that Google decided to release a core update just at the time when we actually decided to record this episode, which I think makes it an even more interesting episode.

We wanted to go back and look at what people have been doing for the last 12 months because it’s almost a year since the fateful, helpful content update where it has killed so many people’s traffic.

And so we wanted to look at that because a lot of people since then have been coming to us and are asking, “What should I do?

What kind of business model should I pursue?”

And I think this core update is also reigniting this debate because things are changing quite a bit and we’re going to talk about that.

And so I’m not going to do the ‘How is it going, Mark?’ but how is it going?

I mean, it’s the same thing.

It’s an interesting time for sure, right?

Because we’ve been through 11 or so months when we hadn’t really seen a single recovery of any sorts from from HCUs, almost as if you got classified as like in Google’s bad books and then that was it.

Like there’s literally nothing you could do.

But during that time, obviously a lot of sites were doing things, cleaning things up, improving things and some, not all, but some of those sites are starting, just starting to see a bit of a recovery, which is good news, I guess.

We’ll have to wait till the full update is rolled out.

It should take a month or so before we know.

Emphasis on starting, right?

Because it’s like a lot of people lost like 90% traffic.

And now, like even if they’re doubling their traffic now, if they start from a base of 10%, really they’re just back to 20.

If they don’t, it’s 20% of their old traffic.

So it’s like they need to kind of like 800X or 900X to…

We’ve seen a few examples of sites going up 500%.

But again, those, they’ve probably gone down 90% nine months ago or six months ago.

So I don’t think I’ve seen a full recovery yet, but I’ve certainly seen some very promising movements.

I’ve actually seen some tweets on Twitter to people who replied to me because first of all, let’s just give some context to that genre.

Basically people were like, Google is just doing a PR stand, they’re recovering the people who complained and who went to their office, retrodo-do, house fresh, et cetera.

It’s not true.

If you actually check a lot of sites, like a lot of sites are seeing similar bumps up at this point.

It’s very early at the time at which we’re recording.

Hopefully it’s a little bit more by the time you’re watching this podcast, but it’s pretty early.

But a lot of sites, nobody talked about, including some HPRO members, et cetera, are seeing recoveries right now up to 50% of the traffic they lost for some people.

It’s still significant for a lot of people.

For balance as well, there are also some people that have lost traffic or lost more traffic in this update.

So it’s not as if everybody is going up.

There are people going up and it sounds like there are a few people going further down as well.

Yeah.

All people who did not get affected by the updates who are now actually going down, actually.

That’s happening.

I checked a few sites that we talked about previously on the podcast just to see how they’re doing.

Again, these are very early trends.

It’s like you could reverse.

There’s a whole month of update going, like we’re recording.

It’s been five days, six days.

We’re looking at Ahrefs that likes two, three days.

Really, we have a couple days of data, but ShaverCheck that we talked about, like the Shaving site is up.

They did go down over the past few months, so they’re just recovering that traffic right now.

Pack Hacker, which was like a backpack review site as well, is up.

One that was interesting to me is CJ Eats Recipes.

We talked about that in the context of a big TikTok that actually made a website that looked like every other recipe site.

When every other recipe site was going down, they were going up.

Well, now they’re actually going down in this update.

They actually lost 15%, 17% traffic since this update started.

It looks like it’s rebalancing a little bit.

Maybe the influencer advantage is being reduced or something like that, but it’s an interesting case study to me, and Reddit is up.

In a surprise to nobody, yeah.

It’s interesting.

It’s being reshuffled.

I wanted to talk about how we feel about that because obviously there’s the context of people looking for what to do.

Then they’re looking at these changes and they’re like, “Okay, well, does that mean we go back to how things were?

Can I trust Google again?”

Etc.

Personally, no.

Personally, I don’t think that’s the case.

Well, first of all, nobody has recovered even to a point where it’s super meaningful to their business.

It’s like, take this with a big, big, big, big grain of salt.

It might just be a 20% or 30% recovery for many of these businesses to the point where it would still not be a profitable business.

It wouldn’t work for them, basically.

The second thing is I think the breach of trust.

Google has been a stable traffic source for over 20 years for a lot of people.

That’s what was very attractive about it.

It’s like social media where you keep needing to post content, et cetera, to actually get traffic.

Google felt like, “Well, if you build something solid, they will allow you to glide a little bit and you’re not supposed to perform every day.

You’re not supposed to do something amazing every day.”

That trust has been broken and I think will take a very long time to rebuild for a lot of people.

I just don’t see us going back to the way we are.

Most importantly, if you Google many commercial queries, there’s still very much e-commerce ranking, et cetera.

So ranking, roundup reviews, et cetera, seems still very difficult, in my opinion.

It’s possible, but you have Reddit that wasn’t here a year ago that’s everywhere now.

You have e-commerce sites that weren’t here a year ago that are around there now.

You have local business sites that also rank for it now.

The space is crowded and I think doing a good old affiliate site that writes 70 roundup reviews, it’s not going to be nearly as valuable as it was pre-HCU regardless of what happens with this update, given what we’re seeing.

We talk about platform volatility.

Typically in the past, we’ve seen likes of Facebook, Instagram, even YouTube to an extent, has been pretty volatile in that they change some settings and then your group or your page goes from sending you thousands of visits a day to going send you nothing.

There was a perception that Google was a bit more stable in that.

There were swings up and down, but it didn’t change that much.

What you’re saying is this has shattered that perception and now they’re just like all the others.

You can work with them and you have to work with them if you want to get traffic from search.

You’re still 90 plus percent of the search market, but you shouldn’t rely on them completely and they should just be one part of your traffic portfolio, as it were.

I think what’s going to change though is that a lot of people had completely given up on Google.

They were like, “Fuck Google.

I can’t get traffic from them.

It’s not worth it.

I have almost no traffic from search at this point.

It’s not worth it.”

To Google, we’ll send probably quite a bit more traffic to smaller sites after this update to the point where it’s something that you will have to consider because it will drive revenue for you and it’s going to still be important.

This old in SEO approach probably won’t hold nearly as well as it held pre-HCU.

We’re going to leave in an in-between world, basically.

That’s kind of when- We used to be big proponents of pick one traffic source and just do it really, really well.

Now it’s really a case of you have to do all the traffic sources pretty well and have that kind of diversity in order to have any kind of security, but also just there are more and more platforms and content formats coming out these days.

Feels like the game is more unlike …

We’ll see this in some of the examples we’re talking about in the podcast today, but you have this way or something cool, some kind of cool value content you’re able to produce for your niche or your industry.

Then repurposing that across different channels, different mediums does very well for a lot of businesses if they have some kind of product to sell.

That’s the theme, I think, for a lot of these businesses.

The way I see it is we really need to move the center of the business from the website to the email list.

The email list and then the audiences on advertising platforms if you’re doing advertising.

Who can you retarget?

Who is your warm audience, et cetera?

For me, in my head, the website is just a tool to build the email list.

That’s pretty much the way I’m looking at it.

Whatever traffic source works for that, then I’ll just do that.

I’ll just build an audience that way.

We can shift whatever platform works and just build the email list, which is …

The cool thing with the email list is it has that glide effect.

Even if you stop collecting these tomorrow, you still have your email list that you have so far.

Yeah, people don’t subscribe if you email a lot.

Yeah, people get called.

Your email lists do decay all the time too, but it’s so much softer than the big ups and downs of traffic.

It just evens it out and that really helps dealing with inconsistencies in traffic, et cetera.

Move the center of your business from your website to your email list.

One last thing I wanted to say is now that we’re starting probably to see the other side of HSU, it starts to feel a lot like how the Penguin update worked where for a year, you could literally not recover from it.

There was no disavow tool and then many things you could not remove at the time.

They would penalize heavy anchor text links and natural links.

Then they released the disavow tool around a year after and then people started recovering basically.

It took almost two years for the industry to actually start feeling stable again.

I want to say some people recovered from Penguin, but many did not.

Before Penguin and Panda, we had a site called EZINE articles that used to rank about the same as what Forbes ranked today basically for everything.

It’s crazy, I take it.

I’m not considering.

It was full UGC.

Anyone could post anything on that website.

They were a public traded company as well, I think.

It was a big company.

Really?

Yeah, it was big.

They had a company called Demand Media that owns eHow.com, et cetera, but they took a massive hit on the stock market, et cetera.

All that to say, the other side of these updates doesn’t mean everyone recover.

Usually it means like 20 to 30% of people recover and 70% of the worst sites do not recover.

It looks like this is where we’re going as well.

There’s lots of people not moving.

The worst sites are not really moving very much in traffic.

The best sites, I’m saying, like the creator sites, that’s what I call it, people who don’t just do SEO but actually do other things tend to actually do a lot better with this update.

To me, it feels like back to 10 years ago.

Sometimes that means completely tearing down your business and what you do and rebuilding it almost from the ground up again structurally.

That’s a really difficult thing to do for a lot of people, but as you grow a business and speaking to people who have businesses 10 or 100 times the size of ours, you go through, even without algorithm changes, you go through periods of plateau decline and then you have to tear things down to rebuild it the way you want to get to the next level.

It feels like for a lot of people, that’s the process that they’ll need to at least consider if they’re not seeing recoveries at the moment or if those recoveries are minimal.

Before we jump into the business models, I just wanted to shout out one of our free resources if you guys are interested.

We have listed all the best online marketing tools, the ones that we use in our business to produce these podcasts, do shorts, create SEO content, etc.

You can get them all in a nice, sortable notion list if you head on over to ahkr.to/tools-swipe.

If you see what we did here, we actually sent people to our email list, which is exactly what we said.

We make the email list the center of our business as well.

The goal of our website, if you go on there, is to capture emails and then we decide to also do that on this podcast because, well, we actually think that it would make sense for the business.

Let’s jump onto the business models, Mark.

You do the first one, right?

Okay, so the first one we have is agencies.

We actually know a little thing or two about agencies because we used to run one.

This was 14 years ago now.

Can you believe that?

We started our agency, ran it for four, four and a half years, something like that.

And we’ve made a few podcasts very, very early on in the Authority Hacker podcast about it.

We didn’t really have a great experience with it, but we didn’t really know what we were doing either.

I think were we to do it again, that we would approach it kind of differently.

I’ve got three examples of people who are running an agency or agencies.

I just wanted to talk about them in the context of how they get leads, how they create content, their audience, and make the email list the kind of center of what they’re doing here.

Can we talk about who should do that?

Like who it’s interesting for?

Well, honestly, anyone.

So there’s a few reasons for that.

When we started our agency, the goal was to make enough money to live, right?

You had a job.

You wanted to quit.

You had diet coke every day, right?

Yeah, I mean, very low standards.

If I could afford to drink all the diet coke I wanted every day, it would be good.

And very quickly we were able to do that.

But this is a thing with an agency model.

You can go from zero to making like thousands of dollars a month very, very, very quickly because you’re charging per month and the revenue per customer is very high.

You only need a couple of customers, a couple of clients to really get going.

Now, if you’re listening to this podcast, you probably know a thing or two about many aspects of online marketing, SEO, video, these types of things.

And all of these things work very, very, very well in agencies.

So even if you’ve been struggling with a niche site in a declining industry, everyone’s been hit by HSU, your SEO skills will translate directly into agency work, right?

Yeah, I just want to say this is who this is for.

If you’re not interested in any other niche, you like marketing, but you can’t be bothered with learning how to do knitting or how to do outdoor camping or whatever other niche, you just want to do the marketing and that’s it.

And that’s why you were doing that.

And that’s probably the business model for you because you’re going to do this all day.

You can create content around that if you want.

And that’s going to make you happier rather than just going into something that you don’t give a shit about.

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And now back to the episode.

Now let’s dive into a few examples here.

So the first example is actually Matt Diggity.

Now a lot of people who watch this podcast will be familiar with Matt.

He’s been on here I think two or three times.

Very very popular guy in the industry but he actually has or had five agencies.

I could count so he had Diggity links which he sold, Authority Builders which I think he sold as well.

The Search Initiative which is SEO agency, the first two are link building agency.

Search Initiative is still active and he has two new ones.

He has Epic Video and he has his Facebook Ads agency as well.

Is he paying us for the sponsorship?

He’s absolutely, this is not sponsored at all.

In the context of the 4C model that we’ve talked about before, create, connect, capture and convert, I want to kind of break down what he’s doing here because it’s quite interesting.

Now it’s worth obviously disclosing he’s been in the space for 10 years and he’s relatively famous I guess.

Almost as old as we are you know.

In SEO.

He’s older than we are actually, age-wise sorry Matt.

But he has a very very popular YouTube channel, Matt Diggity is the name of the channel.

And I believe he also runs a number of other ones for his different businesses as well.

He has a successful blog in the space as well and he gets I think according to Ahrefs about 100k traffic or something a month which is good you know in a B2B space like SEO.

He’s one of the last quote unquote competitors we have left in SEO I would say.

A lot of blogs have died especially with the SEO etc.

And it’s like he and his pursuits and us are like the last kind of small publishers left on the surface.

Yeah like a lot of big Ahrefs and SEM rations.

Yeah yeah HubSpot etc.

They’ve got millions of visitors obviously but they have big budgets to achieve that with.

Anyway Matt creates some really good content across his channels and he aims to kind of like build this solid connection with his audience right.

And he does that because he’s quite a likeable guy like you’d speak to people and everybody has apparently, everybody has good things to say about him.

He does a lot of kind of community events, masterminds, meetups.

He started the Chang Mai SEO conference from a mastermind that just grew and grew and now he has 800 people coming to some random city in the north of Thailand every year.

So in this way and he speaks at a lot of conferences as well like in this way he like really cements himself as an authority in this in the space right.

And people a lot of people have met him people connect to him with him that way.

They subscribe to his YouTube channel as I said they are on his email newsletter which he sends out every month and he’s building his retargeting audience that way.

Now from the perspective of his agencies with those three things it’s then very easy to send out an email saying hey I have this new video service come and I’ll do some videos for you.

Or he can make a video on his YouTube channel talking about where he talks about SEO talking about some case study from his agencies.

And if you look in the pinned comment and in the video it’s like wow we can do this for your ecommerce site as well or whatever it is.

And then he’s kind of promoting his agency or his agencies kind of that way through his conversation.

That’s his model right.

He just does a video about a popular topic.

People click and the kind of examples he gives in the videos are basically from his agency and he will like offhand comment that and then he’s just going to have a CTA like get a thousand dollars off your first month.

I think that’s the CTA that he puts in there.

And he will just like put the pinned comment just to get the click because like otherwise it’s quite difficult to put a link on YouTube.

And that works really well.

He does that on his blog too actually.

He has this if you subscribe to his autoresponder you’ll see that he will send you blog posts that are basically case studies of his agency with like strong CTA’s to that.

So it’s pretty smart how he funnels you down.

It’s like the hard promotion is actually happening after you can engage, give you your email, etc.

You get retargeting ads, you get the blog posts, you get all of that.

Whereas his free content doesn’t look like it’s trying too hard to sell basically.

So like if you’re just a lurker you don’t feel like he’s like selling very hard, but he actually does once you get into the system.

And that’s the interesting part with his model actually.

And all these different platforms they kind of build on each other, right?

So you know his agencies are all sponsors at his conference and you know like they get promoted that way.

So there’s a lot of I guess synergies by doing so many different things there.

His model, at least from the fact that he sold the digity links and authority builders seems to be like rapid growth to a certain point and then sell it for the cash injection, spin it over into the next thing.

Now we compare that to a different influencer.

His name is Ben Heath.

So he’s in slightly different space.

He’s in Facebook ads or meta ads space.

If you do this you probably have heard of him because he has one of the best YouTube channels on Facebook and meta ads.

Really really good if you want to learn that stuff.

So highly recommend that one.

He creates just a lot of simple actionable tutorials.

Anything from how to do meta ads in 2024, the complete step by step to Facebook just added this new advantage plus conversion.

What does it do?

Let’s play around with it kind of thing.

His videos I really like them because we call them a kind of like top and tail video.

So it’s really just quite a rough like him messing around on his computer on his ads account doing stuff.

And then there’s a very well produced intro, very well produced outro that’s all scripted and then it comes together.

It’s really really nice.

You get a lot of value from it and I imagine it’s relatively easy to produce.

He’s also all over LinkedIn and other social media channels as well.

When you start following him I got tons of recommendations for he has like a podcast about football and other stuff and all the interviews he’s been on all the talks the presentations he’s given at conferences things like that.

So you kind of get soft opted in that way and you build this this connection with him.

In all of his videos he pushes you obviously to subscribe to his YouTube channel and then he’s directly pushing people to his agency.

It’s like here’s how to do all this cool stuff.

If you want us just to do it for you come check out Heath Media which is the name of his agency.

And on his agency site he has various lead magnets you know five secrets I learned to spending after spending 50 million on meta ads.

He also runs a webinar which he promotes on LinkedIn as well.

He uses Everwebinar to do that.

And yeah like in terms of conversions he’s sending direct traffic to his agency in the description in the pinned comment in the video.

And he also as well I just saw he has a course in community which is kind of position.

Yeah he just launched it yeah.

The agency is like we’ll do everything for you but not everyone can afford that or not everyone wants that.

So there’s a bigger group of people below that who want the information.

So like how do I do it myself.

Well here’s all the tutorial and here’s the community to support that.

So very successful I don’t know how much revenue they’re doing but it’s you know for sure this is multiple multiple millions per year.

They’re very very well established now.

And one more example I want to touch on just quickly is Neil Patel NP Digital.

So he obviously has a huge brand in SEO.

He’s been in the industry 20 odd years and he used this to get his agency very very quickly to a few million a year.

But then the agency started to grow on its own organically they developed their own internal sales teams.

They started in cold outreach which anyone could do at any level right.

You don’t need to be have a huge team to do that.

In fact you can do that day one to get your clients.

A lot of link building agencies do that if you run a site you probably get outreach all the time by these guys.

I have small agency friends who do that right now.

They don’t rank on Google they don’t do anything.

They just do outreach to get clients and it’s easy and everyone can do that.

It’s like if you have the skills and you just build an outreach system you warm up your accounts you find the qualified leads and you email them like it’s not hard to find clients over time.

The trick is to niche down right.

If you offer like SEO services you sound like every single parody Indian email trying to sell you backlinks or whatever.

Like people that do that successfully they build services for sub niches.

So maybe you just do SEO for SaaS.

Or maybe you just do SEO for local shops or something like that or for flower shops or for dentists or for lawyers.

That kind of outreach can be successful.

The generic outreach will not be successful because they’re receiving a thousand of them.

But if you can be quite precise and you can be tailored to their business it’s the most cost efficient way to make sales.

It scales to a medium level but to the point where you will make good money at this point already.

This is why this business model of an agency I think is so good because you can go from zero to being cashflow positive to making job replacement income in month one or two if you’re really hustle with some outbound cold sales.

You’re not afraid to pick up the phone every now and then as well.

Or email.

I mean you should talk to them on the phone after but you can start with email.

The way it works is you bait people with email.

You make something maybe a bit personal.

You can make a loom as well for example.

Like a loom, sending a loom on an email is pretty cool.

Then people reply and then you get an email.

We used to do this thing in our agency actually where we would basically go on Ahrefs, find problems with people’s site with their SEO, their links because everybody has problems, everybody.

I would email everyone.

I would just email everyone.

I’d be like hey I found a bunch of issues on your site.

Who do I report this to?

You can check the issues after people reply because it doesn’t matter.

Shotgun cold outreach style.

Shotgun outreach.

So it’s like yeah everyone has issues.

I did that for broken links for a long time.

It doesn’t really work as well broken links.

I’d be like hey I found broken links but I would just mask up and email everyone.

And whoever replies I would find broken links on Ahrefs in two minutes anyway.

And then just start the discussion from there.

So it’s like you need to be smart with your angle, you need to go initially etc.

But if you do that it’s so powerful cold outreach.

It’s unbelievable that SEOs will believe that it works for links but they don’t really think of applying this skill to anything else in business.

And this is it, we’re talking about skills transfer from stuff you’ve already been doing.

Everything maps over almost perfectly to this.

So it’s really quite interesting.

I know.

It drives me crazy.

You have the skills, you have the method to get clients.

You just need to kind of build templates so that you don’t have to come up with the way you sell etc. every time.

And you have a business and it’s okay.

And then you can start outsourcing stuff as well, hiring stuff and so on when you’re making money.

And yeah, the demand engine is cold outreach is enough to over a million a year.

Like easy peasy.

I mean we did that 15 years ago and we really didn’t know what we were doing.

Like at all.

None of this technology for cold outreach or no AI, no GMAS, no Hunter, none of that existed back then.

It was all manual.

I did it on BuzzStream at the time I remember.

So yeah, it’s like if you’re in an easy business just do that.

Just make a service that is specialized to a sub-niche.

Try a little bit of a marketing pitch.

Find a way to find sites that are businesses that do the thing that you’re trying to sell wrongly and reach out to them pointing this out to them and just engage this.

Jump on the call.

Don’t be afraid to get on the phone with people.

Show your face.

Don’t be afraid.

That’s a recurring thing across a lot of these businesses we’re going to talk about today is like you need to put yourself out there a little bit more and kind of be the face of the company.

But it doesn’t mean getting sucked into agency life and working on terrible clients and that.

You can be pretty picky and you can choose who you work with.

These are a really good book, Built to Sell.

It’s about building a business and building a product in one way and just finding customers for that.

A big problem a lot of agencies try and fall into is they’ll just try and tailor what they do for every single customer and then it gets really difficult to kind of scale and grow and adapt with that.

So highly, highly recommend that book.

Should move on to the next one now.

The next one is one that we actually like if you follow us.

You know that is selling info products.

I have a few cool examples of creators who do that, like small creators, single solo products for one of them.

Essentially is creating small info products, building an audience with free content and then selling your info product.

The skill level I would say is intermediate to advanced because you need to manage multiple things.

You need to manage your free content.

You need to make free content that’s good enough not just to get traffic from Google, but that people actually enjoy consuming it because otherwise there’s no way they’re going to give you money for your paid content.

So it’s another skill.

I see a lot of people ranking on Google but have shit sites and there’s no way people consume them.

There’s no way people give them money because it’s not engaging.

So you need to be a bit of a content creator.

You need to then capture people.

So you need to do some email marketing skills, right?

It’s like both on the opt-in side and on the nurturing side, what do you email to people to actually keep them engaged.

There’s a little bit of tech as well because when you deliver info products, you need to deal with a checkout.

You need to do all that.

You need a bit of analytics as well, et cetera.

So you need to be able to do all of that.

And then you have customers.

So there’s the whole part of dealing with support, dealing with all of that.

So there’s a little bit of everything.

It doesn’t need to be at a very high level, but you’re going to touch a little bit of everything.

The good thing though is the income ceiling is very high.

You can make tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions.

I saw this website I sent you yesterday, Marc, called publishing.com.

And it’s like these guys just teach you.

It’s kind of like the caricature of a Bizop online business selling stuff, but they’re executing it at a very good level.

It’s quite interesting to see, even though I couldn’t see myself just translating one-to-one what they do to what we do.

They teach you how to publish on Amazon.

Yeah, write an email and publish on Amazon.

But they teach you how to do it with AI, which that’s why I was like, “Hmm, okay.

You’re writing books with AI.

Is AI good enough?

I’m not too sure about that.”

Anyway, that’s what they’re teaching.

These people apparently make 100 million a year.

It’s like apparently they’re doing very well.

Given how many ads they have, et cetera, it’s possible, I would say.

But I want to talk about examples I personally connect a little bit better with.

The first one is actually Isla.

Isla actually wrote a blog post about them on the blog.

He sells Notion templates.

If you don’t know, because I’ve never really talked about this on the podcast, but I love Notion.

I think it’s awesome.

You can build your business on that.

It’s incredible.

If you’re not on it, you’re crazy.

Get started.

Anyway, Isla sells Notion templates.

He previews work environments in Notion.

There’s lots of task system and project system and goal system, et cetera, so you can stay organized and you can pay 70 bucks, 80 bucks for one of these templates.

The way he grows his business is in terms of free content.

He’s primarily on social media.

He doesn’t really do SEO at all, which is also interesting to me.

He’s quite big on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter.

It’s kind of like all these platforms, he makes short content on all of them.

He never shows his face, by the way, which is quite interesting.

It’s always just tutorials with his voice and that’s it.

What’s really cool about his content is very aesthetic.

It looks cool.

It appeals to productivity freaks that want everything to be neat, et cetera, and well-organized.

He does that very, very well.

If you check his TikTok, you’ll see he has hundreds of thousands of likes on some videos for Notion videos.

That’s his content.

Basically what he does is he creates free versions of his paid templates and then you can download them on his site.

The CTA is like click on the link in the bio or whatever and download the free template.

You give your email for that.

Once you give your email, he has a pretty hard-selling sequence that will essentially sell you the paid templates, give you promos, discounts, et cetera, and you go and check out for $49 to $99 per template.

It works quite well.

I think he’s making multiple six figures per year as a solo pronoun.

He has nobody else.

I quite like this one.

The second one that I want to share is a little bit bigger.

It’s a YouTube channel primarily called Belt with Science.

It’s a fitness YouTube channel.

The guy is on YouTube since 2017 and he teaches science-based fitness, basically.

He has lots of videos on how to exercise, how to do squat, how to do whatever, best exercise for back, things like that, basically.

He does long form videos and he repurposes very well.

That’s what’s really cool about his business.

These long form videos are his primary content, but then that content is then translated into short videos on TikTok and Instagram doing very, very well as well.

He has over a million subscribers there.

He also transcribes them into blog posts using the same graphics from the videos, et cetera.

His blog is doing well.

He’s actually getting quite a bit of traffic, getting leads, et cetera.

Then what he does is he sends people to a quiz funnel.

People actually answer questions on their situations.

Quite long.

I did it.

It took me like seven to 10 minutes to go through the quiz.

Essentially, what they do is you get a personalized sales page to the product when you learn because of all the answers you gave.

They essentially do that and then they sell very, very hard on their email list as well.

I think he’s making quite good money.

There’s no official numbers, but he’s doing quite well, basically.

These are the two examples that I quite like in terms of creating info product.

It’s really cool because you don’t need to deliver an info product physically, so logistics are a lot easier.

The profit margins are very high, like selling an ocean template.

There’s no cost to it apart from the marketing.

You get to actually have fun with marketing when you do that.

Most importantly, it’s multi-platform.

You see they are on YouTube, they have a blog, they have all the shorts platform.

Izo is on Twitter as well.

It’s like every single platform you can actually drive traffic from, including affiliates, et cetera, which makes it very appealing.

It’s a really interesting example in the fact that he doesn’t show his face anywhere.

Yeah.

It’s like many of the others, you’re able to do that really.

Speaks to the quality of his content, I guess.

He has updated his website where there’s one photo of his face on the homepage now, but none of his content, if you go on TikTok or something like this, will show his face for Islo.

For build with science, he shows his face.

I think Islo is the perfect solo programmer business, to be honest.

It’s really, really, really cool.

Building a template like he does, if you know an ocean, it’s a day, basically.

It’s not very long to build an info product like that.

The skills that transfer is basically content creation.

It’s like, yeah, creating content that engages people, you can do that from being a blogger to actually doing this, and an email list building.

It’s like if you have been collecting emails, if you’ve been running an email list with your blog, essentially that works the same, except in this case, your email list is for selling and you should not be afraid of selling.

I feel like a lot of bloggers, their issue is they’re super afraid of directly selling to their audience.

They feel like they’ve given content for free forever.

Now they have to, if they sell, it’s like, “Oh my God, a big betrayal to their audience.”

They’re actually asking for money when they actually gave everything for free before.

That’s a mental hurdle you need to get over.

Nobody cares if you’re selling.

When you’re opting on an e-comm site, every single email is a sell, every single one.

Don’t feel bad, email marketing is for selling and that’s how you make money with this business model.

You want to go for the next one, or you have something else to say on this?

No, let’s jump on to the next one.

The next one is on platform affiliate marketing.

We’ve talked about this before in the podcast when we had Jared Bauman on, and specifically, this was around the Amazon influencers program, which has nothing to do with being an influencer.

Don’t know why they called it that, but it’s about creating these hyper casual videos using your smartphone of products on Amazon.

There’s 350 million products and I think Amazon is trying to get people to make videos like UGC style content so that people get a better feel for what the products actually like.

If you’ve ever been on Amazon and you’re looking at USB stick or a webcam or something, it’s really hard from the two or three crappy vendor images to really get a sense for is this good or not.

I think this is a way for them to kind of crowdsource that.

It’s really interesting because this is like a super beginner level thing.

You don’t really need any experience in doing this.

The flip side of that is it means that the income ceiling’s a little bit lower.

We’ve seen a few people make five figures a month, so like 10 to 20K a month, but I haven’t seen anyone make more than that.

It’s still a good income for a side hustle.

It’s a side hustle.

It’s not like a business in the sense like the others are.

You’re not going to be selling your Amazon influencer company to someone else.

I think this model is really for the people who were not expecting to make a ton of money or investing a lot of time in their site.

If you were just trying to make a few hundred dollars a month or you were at low level, you had no interest in building your team, building your business, etc.

This is for you basically.

This is who should do this.

The beauty, I guess, of this is that you’re using Amazon’s traffic and they have a lot of traffic, a lot of people ready to buy on the sales page and you don’t need to generate anything yourself.

All you need to do is you create these, I call them like hyper casual videos, just using your smartphone of a product that Amazon sells.

You don’t need any fancy equipment, website, anything like that.

It was quite funny.

Jared, when we were talking about this, he went around his entire home.

He went around all of his friend’s homes and then he started getting creative.

When he was in an Airbnb on vacation, he’d start recording some because they had extra items there and just going wherever he could to get products to review basically without obviously paying for them.

I want to say as well, it’s like Amazon is not the only one with such a program.

It’s kind of a trend that’s developing on more platforms.

TikTok shop is a big one as well.

Lots of people are making money with TikTok shop.

It’s a little bit different because it’s TikTok, so you still need to make viral videos to get rich and then make money whereas Amazon, it’s like your video gets plastered on the product page.

People are already in the mood for buying this product, etc.

Whereas on TikTok, you need to generate demand.

It’s a bit more challenging, but apparently, there’s a rumor that YouTube’s coming out with something similar as well with YouTube shorts, etc.

And maybe even YouTube long form videos.

I can really see how the “site hustlers” affiliate marketers are going to transition from building your website and getting traffic to a website to actually just doing this on platform directly.

You get paid less.

Don’t get me wrong.

The platform is taking a cut, but they drive the traffic in exchange basically.

You can’t really lose money on that.

Yeah, it’s like this idea of affiliate marketing on your site is definitely declining.

It’s something that’s difficult with e-cons, with all of that.

That was a site at the beginning of the episode.

But I am pretty sure at this point, seeing how many platforms are showing interest in doing this, that this is going to be the future of the site hustle of making a small review site and ranking a goal is going to be doing this on platform.

And that’s why we launched product review profits.

It’s because we actually think that this was a solution for all the site hustlers who don’t want to build a real business because building an info product business, doing an agency, etc.

Many people don’t want to do that.

So if you’re that person, keep looking out for these opportunities.

I think Amazon is the best one right now, also because TikTok has a chance of getting banned in the US at this point.

But there will be more like that.

And over time, it’s possible that you’ll be able to do reviews for products and post them on YouTube, on Amazon, on TikTok, etc.

And eventually kind of like build a business that way.

The trade-off is like you have to jump on video.

All these platforms will do that through video.

There’s no way this is going to be written reviews because people don’t read anymore.

And that obviously discounts people, like non-native English speakers, unless you’re really, really fluent.

I could see myself doing it.

You could potentially do it.

I still think there’s enough people that would be just a little bit put off that it would work, but it would still be a bit of a handicap.

Yeah, but I think it can sell better than most people.

So I think I would make it up.

Oh, I wouldn’t say you’re the typical kind of person that’s going to be doing this program, though.

I wouldn’t, but also Amazon is opening that up in more countries.

Yeah, that’s true.

So I can imagine the French one would be very low competition, for example.

It can probably rank for like MacBooks and stuff like that and take like a 2% commission on selling a MacBook or something.

Obviously, with this, you’re not capturing any leads.

You’re not owning the audience in any way.

It’s not a business.

They’re just essentially paying you commission to make videos.

And the commission can be very good, but there is a variance there.

And knowing what we know about Amazon as well, like for sure, at some point in the future, they’ll change their rates.

They’ll change the deal.

Like when they get enough people doing this, they’ll change the terms more in their favor.

But for now, it’s like it’s a good time to be in the program.

Let’s just say that.

I think there is more platforms launching things like that.

They will actually force the platforms not to cut their rates too much, et cetera.

Hopefully.

But because it’s both your traffic source and your monetization in one, they really have full control over how well you’re doing.

Now, I want to talk about skills transfer here, because if you’ve ever tried to create a written review of a product, you’re already ahead of most people on the influencers program in terms of understanding what it takes to not sell, but like break down a product.

So the difference between features and benefits, for example, or how to be objective about a product, how to be genuine when you’re reviewing a product.

These are what Amazon cares about.

Like a lot of people go into this thinking that they need to make like a sales video for the product, but it’s not that.

It’s like a real human’s genuine thoughts, good and bad of a product.

All right.

So shall we jump on the…

Do you want to take the next one?

Yeah.

Let’s talk about local SEO.

So this one is interesting as well.

I know Jackie Chow is doing that with like Rankin Rant, et cetera.

Just to explain who Jackie Chow is, because not everyone will be familiar with him.

It’s complicated to explain who Jackie Chow is.

You met him recently, right?

I met him in London.

It was cool, actually.

I had a good time chatting with him, actually.

Jackie Chow is like, let’s say he’s a gray hat SEO.

He’s openly gray.

I should have said that.

Unlike many people in the industry, he’s 100% honest.

It’s like, even though we don’t do what he does and we don’t necessarily agree with the way he does things, the way he shares things is refreshing.

I enjoyed listening to some of his stuff, actually.

That’s what he does.

He does many things, but one of the things he’s done for a bit is local Rankin Rant.

He basically makes a website that’s like, I think he did physiotherapy, Toronto, something like this.

I can’t remember exactly.

Something like that.

He basically places any business that pays him a monthly fee.

He puts their contact information on that site, and then he just makes money.

Now, Rankin Rant, that’s not my favorite way of doing things, but there’s something here in terms of local SEO.

Local SEO is significantly easier than national SEO.

The classic updates don’t seem to apply the same way that they would apply to big, broad, informational or commercial.

Do you think that’s because very, very few people are actually searching for the brand or the company name when they’re doing local search?

No.

I think it’s because there’s just not that many local companies for each vertical.

If you think about it, take a given medium-sized city and you look for Loxmi, so Plumber, how many out there?

There’s 20 max.

You’re really competing with 20 people.

It’s pretty easy.

Most of them, they don’t do online marketing very well.

They have a shitty website.

It’s not responsive.

It’s so much easier.

That’s the thing.

If you look at these Big Queries now, all sites are well-developed.

I really see a gap in development of the website for small niche sites versus big sites.

Whereas on the local scale, if you build sites like you’ve built a niche site, it’s fine.

It’s good enough, actually.

You can rank quite well.

Now, as I said, I’m not a huge fan of Rankin Rant because I think at some point, Google is going to catch on the fact that it’s not a real business.

I like the idea of partnering with a business and actually just essentially running the site and taking a cut of that.

I actually run local SEO for my sister in France.

She has an interior design company.

I do that and I run AdWords as well.

We actually pay for ads.

I spend about 300 to 400 euros a month on ads plus a little bit of SEO and we get 15 to 20 qualified interior design leads per month for basically that money.

How much is a lead worth or how much is a sale worth to that business?

I mean from a thousand to 20,000 euros, something like this.

Let’s say around that, I would say.

It’s totally worth it, basically.

The idea of partnering with a local business, rebuilding their website usually is terrible.

They don’t have a booking system quite often if you have a business that is booking or something like that.

Integrating all the tech that you know about.

You also can compete on three levels.

You can compete on the Google Maps.

You can compete on organic rankings.

Then you can compete with AdWords, basically.

You can have three places where you can compete in SEO.

They’re all completely different though.

Google Maps is almost entirely review based whereas organic placements, your typical content and links on page and then ads is just…

What I’m saying is unlike a content site where ads don’t make sense economically, there’s no maps and organic.

You have three chances at actually getting some traffic.

It’s more forgiving if one doesn’t work.

You can always make the other one work.

Again, the PPC is pretty easy and cheap because if you have 20 plumbers competing with you, there’s probably three or four only doing AdWords.

There’s a lot of developments in the ad tech space around that as well.

On Facebook, for example, you have these messenger form things that you can fill in now.

They’re developing a lot of stuff.

There’s most small local businesses.

They’re nowhere near this.

There’s huge, huge opportunities there in most cities for this.

It’s also, for example, in terms of landing pages.

It’s like most, let’s say your plumber or like interior design.

I’ll talk about interior design because I know that.

If you compete for the sentence like interior designer plus city, there is competition.

Several people are going after this keyword.

What does an interior designer do?

They do many, many things.

They do wood flooring.

They do plastering.

They do demolition.

They do all of that.

If you start creating landing pages for all these sub services and ranking for all these long-tail queries, which nobody does locally, nobody makes these landing pages.

You can do it with AI content on local.

No problem.

Slightly edited AI content is plenty.

You get very little traffic.

You get like five, 10, 15 visits per month on a given landing page.

These people are looking to buy the exact service.

If you have a contact form next to a description of the exact service they’re looking for and some kind of relevant photo, hopefully a photo that you’ve taken in real life, like holy shit, it’s so easy to generate more leads.

There’s nobody competing with you.

These are keywords where people spend thousands or 10 of thousands of euros that we’re ranking for.

The challenge is obviously to do the real business part where you need to partner with someone that’s going to deliver the service or deliver it yourself if you feel like it.

Once you do that, the opportunity is massive.

Again with Plumber, you could be like fixing washing machine.

The tap is draining.

If you have a landing page that says problem plus city, and then you can also make landing pages with a problem plus neighboring cities and all of that, you can really expand your site almost programmatically and get lots and lots of very long technical.

Again, your landing pages will get five visits per month or something.

It’s nothing, but every three months, the landing page will generate one lead that spends five k or something.

That’s totally worth it if you do it with AI.

Local SEO is very much untapped yet and there’s so much money because people spend a lot of money on these services.

The challenge is you need to find a way to deliver these services.

I would argue as well, it’s a really great place to start learning about ads actually.

If you’ve never run advertising, it’s very uncompetitive for most things.

With a few hundred euros a month, you can run ads for your best keywords.

It’s a skill that most people should be picking up at this point because ads and organic just work together.

Local SEO is really good.

You can do rank and rank like Jackie or you can do like me actually working with real businesses that, in my opinion, you will make way more money if you actually are real business.

He does that as well though, Jackie.

I’m sure I saw him partnering with some company in the UK at one point.

I think he partners with publishers, no?

He partners with newspapers.

No, I mean like an actual local business.

He has something on his YouTube channel about that, I’m sure.

I saw mostly his stuff on Rank and Rent, but if he does that, yeah.

Local SEO is easy guys.

Honestly, if you still want to do SEO, you don’t want an agency and you’re finding it too hard to do national SEO, do this basically.

That’s who you are.

Just pick that one.

It’s not that difficult.

Do you want to do the next one?

Next one is newsletter businesses.

Now we talked in all of these examples about how important the email list is.

Of course, in your newsletter it’s even more so because it kind of is your product in a way.

Now, I got a couple of examples here which is quite interesting.

Both are sort of around 500 to a million in revenue range.

First one, we’ve got Lenny’s newsletter.

Lenny is just a guy.

He used to work for Airbnb.

He was, I think, a product designer or product manager there.

He talks about product management, design, career growth.

It’s essentially kind of like a personal blog style but still teaching in a way.

He makes almost half a million dollars a year from this.

He creates free content, like blog style.

As I said, this is what you would use to write on a blog 10 years ago which was actually helpful for people but for the last 10 years or so, it just wouldn’t rank for anything.

It’s not keyword focused.

It’s people focused.

He has a podcast as well which has gotten really popular recently as well.

He had the CEO of Airbnb on there.

He had Elizabeth Stone, the CTO of Netflix, famous author Rory Sutherland on there as well.

He has a newsletter as well.

Now, what’s really interesting is you can get one issue of the newsletter each month for free.

That’s the kind of like capture process.

It’s your hard opt-in there.

But to get all of the issues in the newsletter, you’ve got to pay 10 bucks a month which isn’t too much.

It comes with a Slack community and a curated list of coaches, resources and deals, whatever that is.

He also makes some money of a sponsorship on his podcast as well.

Essentially, he’s built this thing around having this really cool newsletter.

It looks really slick.

It kind of looks like it was built on Notion, the way the use of emoticons everywhere, really clean, no fluff.

Content reminds me a bit of the way you word things a little bit.

It’s very short and snappy and to the point.

Does really, really well from that.

So he’s free.

Now, he has essentially made his newsletter the product.

You have to pay to get access it.

It’s like a freemium type model.

You get a little bit of it for free.

If you want all of it, you have to pay.

There’s another way you can do this business model and that is to have the newsletter be completely free.

So I know the pilot dot com dot au, which is a very small travel deals newsletter in Australia.

So not so many people in Australia just focused on that one market.

Yet they make eight hundred and forty thousand dollars per year from from this.

So what they’ve done is they figured out how to get a constant feed of great flight and holiday deals from Australian cities to destinations worldwide.

I don’t know exactly how they do this in the back end.

I’ve seen in the past people in this industry, they’ll source it, first of all, from other sites, from forums like Flyer Talk more these days from like user communities on WhatsApp where people share like these error fares and these kinds of things.

So they’ve got a system for getting these deals, organizing them, classifying them and then distributing them.

And they do that through a free newsletter.

It’s really cool when you sign up.

And normally it’s like, oh, put your email address and you just get all the deals.

But once you they’ll send you a double opt in so you confirm it and the page that that takes you to is a kind of classification page.

You say which city are you in and how often would you like to receive emails and where you can even filter by where you would like to go.

So if you want to focus solely on going to the US or to Asia, you can do that as well.

And they’ll customize what the content you get based on this.

So it’s free to sign up to this newsletter.

As I said, they make their money through sponsorship and through affiliate commissions.

Like a lot of these travel companies that they’re recommending, they’ll have deals with them.

And also because they are like their content is essentially the deals, they’re able to distribute this across different platforms.

So they’re on social media.

They have a Facebook page.

They have an app on the app store, which will notify you when these new deals come out.

I’m not really sure why that’s like you need an app for that.

But there you go.

It seems to be quite popular.

To get the notification.

That’s why.

Exactly.

I mean, you could get the same from email, but like hundreds of thousands of people have downloaded this.

So it’s like a popular, popular thing.

And they’ve also got their website with all their deals on there as well.

So really, really simple business.

Again, don’t really need to put yourself out there so much, but they just figured out a great content pipeline and distribution channel for.

I think the challenger is finding the discounts, like is actually creating the content.

It’s like it’s not easy.

Yeah.

And this is true with Lenny’s newsletter as well.

Like he’s been in this product industry for five, 10 years now.

He’s good at, he knows this stuff and he’s good at communicating it.

So this newsletter based business is really for someone who is, you know, has something to say, something of value to an industry to say.

I know a lot of site owners who maybe unfairly got hit by HCU did fit into that category.

But if you’re someone that hasn’t really done much with their life, maybe you’re earlier on in your career and you’re just looking to make some money online, you don’t really care why, it’s harder to make this a success because you need to be a bit more, you need to have stuff, something to say.

And it’s difficult to do that over a long period of time.

Yeah.

And it’s a, you need a format as well.

I think the trick is like actually having a reputable format.

I think that’s one of the main reasons people struggle with content.

We see it with the news channel, for example, like now that we have a format for the news, we don’t have to question every week, like, well, how do we do the video?

You know, it’s like, okay, like we just made the intro with first story, second, like second story, and then kind of like rapid fire, small stories and then conclusion.

It’s always the same.

And so it’s the same for these newsletters.

And I think it’s, if you want to make something like this work, you need to find the content format that you think is going to work, experiment it.

If it works, just scale it up, basically.

I think like these kinds of newsletters are the new blogging as well in a way.

Like it’s like people don’t, and we’re going to talk about that in the next one.

So let’s transition slowly to the next one.

But I don’t think people want to read blogs anymore.

I’ve kind of made peace with that.

It’s like, I was looking at stats, right?

I was like on mobile.

So on mobile only, right?

90% of the time spent on mobile is on apps and 10% is on the open web slash website slash everything.

Right.

It means like, and then most traffic is mobile.

So it’s like that makes, and the next, the next business model to just transition to that is to drive traffic from social, but keep the same business models of putting ads and affiliates on the website and then just not count on Google so much anymore because it wasn’t good for a year.

And instead of doing that.

So there’s many people in the industry that have been doing that still.

So like seeing Admos, Tony Hill, Nishite Lady, these kind of people have been kind of like maintaining the same business model, but diversifying their traffic sources, which it’s not bad, but to me, that’s what scares me with this business model is that people don’t want to read blogs anymore.

Like they, they, they, they’re okay to build a relationship with your content, but they want it to be on Instagram, on YouTube, on TikTok or wherever on the email is probably better than on the blog, mostly because websites are clunky on mobile.

Let’s be honest.

Like most of the time it’s not, it’s not as nice and smooth and fast as an app is.

And so people just tend to consume content there and, and would really open the browser on the mobile, navigate to a blog.

Like it’s, it, blogs get traffic because Google sent traffic to them.

If there was no Google, there wouldn’t be that much traffic to most blogs actually.

But anyway, let’s talk about that business model.

So skill level, I put low income ceiling and put low to medium.

And then one of the examples I wanted to talk about is actually Nishite Lady.

She actually runs a public case study.

Our Facebook page that she’s running to drive traffic to a new website called vegan wins.

She shares that in her newsletter.

So it’s like she, if you’re all the details sign up for her newsletter, I’m sharing a little bit on it and mostly sharing the top level of business model, not all her stats, et cetera.

So if you want that, check out her newsletters.

But what the business model is basically buying likes to the page initially, like try to do kind of like interest targeting.

So in this case, like vegans post memes for engagement, like get people to kind of engage with the page and like it a lot, et cetera.

And this works well, right?

If you open her Facebook page, you’ll see that she actually has like hundreds of likes and comments on, on the kind of like engagement posts and we shares and so on.

And once in a while share a link post that drives traffic to your site.

That’s pretty much, you know, there’s some more complicated things like, you know, sometimes you post an image and you post a link in the comments, et cetera, like lots of like tactics, but that’s, that’s pretty much the gist of it for, for Facebook.

And then you make money two ways, right?

You make money from the traffic that goes to your site and then you can do it through ads affiliates, capturing an email and running an email list.

But actually Facebook has a partner program where they pay you for impressions now.

So even on the impressions you get on your memes, they actually pay you, but the RPM is very, very low.

Like they don’t give you a ton of money.

Like people do make thousands of dollars sometimes per month doing this, but they really need a lot of reach, right?

It’s not like these vegan’s reading pages is very far from that.

It has 13,000 likes and you know, like a good post will get like a few hundred likes.

That’s not a lot of money if you’re in the program, you probably make like 30 bucks, 50 bucks.

Actually, Spencer does that as well and shared his made like a few thousand dollars on one of his pages recently.

So it’s possible.

My fear is obviously like platform change and Facebook changing the conditions, etc.

But it’s not worse than Amazon influencer.

I would say it’s kind of like about the same level of risk.

And then there’s Pinterest as well, right?

It’s kind of like the two platforms that have been driving lots of traffic in the last year.

That’s Facebook and then Pinterest.

Pinterest, we have a podcast with Tony Hill, but basically he’s business model in a nutshell if you don’t want to listen to his podcast or listen to it before.

He makes gallery posts from either images he found on social.

So he said in the podcast that he gets images on Instagram and post them on his site with attribution to like essentially be okay.

It’s kind of a gray area on the internet, let’s just say, to do that.

And these days people use AI images as well.

And then they essentially pin these images from his pages to Pinterest and then work out discovery on Pinterest and get traffic to the website and then make money with that.

That’s pretty much the business model for these two.

It’s good because it’s very close to what the business model used to be before.

Like people didn’t have to rethink how they make money.

They kept the same affiliate and ads and then just swept the traffic from Google for traffic from Facebook and Pinterest.

My honest thoughts with this is that it’s not the right approach because it’s not really like fixing the underlying issue.

Which is that you’re still moving from being platform dependent on one platform to being platform dependent on another platform.

And we saw, I think last week actually or two weeks ago, Pinterest actually changed its algorithm and some people, not a lot of people, but like some people lost a ton of traffic from Pinterest, from their accounts overnight because of that.

So you’re kind of like, you know, you have this saying out of the frying pan into the fire kind of thing and it’s not really any better.

It may kind of put off the inevitable for a period of time and clearly it’s worked well for some people.

But I think if you want to build something really long term, you have to kind of start to capture emails, have some kind of product to sell, you know, like move in that direction rather than just trying to keep doing the same thing.

That’s my take on it.

Yeah, I mean, I agree.

I think it’s similar in risk level to Amazon influence a little.

Maybe around the same.

Like I can’t say exactly, but it’s not too far.

The problem is these platforms do not want to send traffic out of their platforms.

It just makes them less money.

So whatever happens, they’re having meetings every day on like, how do we send less traffic, but still maintain people publishing content on our platform so we keep making money.

Right.

That’s pretty much something that’s happening every day in these platforms so that they can make more money with advertising, et cetera.

So you’re fighting against them on their terrain.

Like that’s what you’re doing.

And so whereas on the Amazon influencer, you could argue that there’s a symbiotic relationship where Amazon gets you GC that leaves their conversion.

They give you part of that lift and then kind of like everyone leaves happy forever.

Because you’re publishing on their platform from day one.

It’s all understood that that’s going to happen.

And so it’s like they don’t have to worry about reducing traffic to your videos.

They want to send more to it.

Yeah.

I mean, they might adjust commissions or something, but like you’re not fighting against them.

Like it’s not like you make money.

They lose money when you make money.

Like it’s you make money together.

To that argument, I will actually even say probably this kind of on platform effect programs might be a little bit more stable than actually doing Facebook and Pinterest.

So it’s like, I think it’s the reason people did that is because one, they didn’t have to refigure out the business model.

Like they didn’t want to refigure this out.

It’s difficult to change that.

It’s not comfortable.

It’s easier to just change the type of content you’re making and then just kind of do the same old that you’ve known and then you’ve built skilled in.

Like I think that’s the main thing.

The second thing is because of AI, because like essentially now that you don’t try to rank on Google anymore, you don’t need to make this amazing article anymore.

Like Pinterest is not looking at the article that they’re sending people to.

They’re not crawling it and indexing it the way Google is for quality and so on.

They’re just basing it on the image that you’ve posted on Pinterest that links back to that post.

So like a lot of people have essentially made worse content by switching to this business model because like an AI article would do just fine to just slap some ads in between paragraphs, you know, and who cares if people read or not, as long as I get the impression.

And so like that essentially kind of like simplified a lot of the business model and made it easy to automate outsource for cheap.

The problem is, and I think we’ve been saying that for a while, I think, I think these people will have to eventually, you know, address the main issue, which is the business model of sending lots of traffic to a website is something that’s not very future proof, especially as AI and so small queries, et cetera.

And these platforms are going to be fighting against that.

So it’s like, you can do that.

It works for some people right now.

And some people make good money right now doing this.

But for all these reasons, I’m not super excited about personally doing that.

You made an interesting point in your notes.

You said, well, why don’t they just like use that as a traffic source, get a lot of traffic while it’s good.

I can’t believe that.

I gave you credit to start, but then like…

I was going to say it.

I was building up the dramatic effect and everything.

I can’t believe it.

So that’s the thing.

Like for direct traffic to like an ad monetized page, I don’t think it’s very good.

However, we talked about how email is kind of like even outs, all these bumps in traffic, et cetera.

And it’s like if Facebook pages or Pinterest are a very good traffic driver, personally, I find that the opportunity to be to drive traffic, not to blog posts with ads, but rather to squeeze pages.

Like I’ll tell you, our opt-in rate on squeeze pages on an authority hacker is 65 to 70%.

So go and copy them if you want.

That will give you an idea of how many, like, you know, seven out of 10 people give us their email when you click on this.

And then you get less when you drive traffic from social because people might be a bit surprised.

They expect a blog post to get a squeeze page.

However, you probably collect a lot of emails and that allows you to then sell to these people long-term.

And actually traffic from Pinterest is quite wealthy.

They have money.

The traffic from Facebook, not so much from like free Facebook pages, but traffic from Pinterest, people have money.

The household networks is higher than average from other social networks.

So I think there’s a huge opportunity there of driving traffic to a lead magnet directly, like fuck the blog post.

It’s just almost like there will be these kind of opportunities, short, medium term opportunities to get traffic from current platforms, from new sites, new platforms as they emerge.

But if you’re not capturing that lead long term, if you’re just using that as a visit to count as one impression on an ad, it’s nothing.

But if you can capture an email from it, then the value is so, so much higher from that.

I agree.

And it’s like, yeah, it’s like there is short term opportunities.

And I think it’s important to be able to not just push them away because they’re not long term, but you want to almost find a catalyst to transform them from a short term opportunity to a long term opportunity.

And that’s through capturing people long term, you’re showing them and essentially promoting things to them related to what they opted in for.

It’s like, I could see myself making some kind of like beauty newsletter where I capture emails and then I just like promote products on that newsletter and then just make a bunch of pages that I promote on Pinterest that are mostly here for opt in to just feed my email list of buyers who buy beauty products.

It’s like, it wouldn’t be crazy.

There are a lot of offers, affiliate offers that sell for a lot of that gift that pay high commissions in this niche.

And yeah, it wouldn’t be crazy at all.

I could sell diets.

I could sell everything in there.

So yeah, I think there’s opportunities.

I don’t think the people who are promoting these methods are necessarily doing that.

They’re a little bit too short and oriented for my taste.

And it’s inevitable that these things are going to be moved around at some point and not work as well.

So it’s a good idea to start thinking about how to deal with that now because it’s going to happen regardless.

So that’s the one.

Let’s talk about the last one, which is e-comm, right?

So e-comm, I’m going to go fast because people know what e-comm is.

It’s like sourcing and selling products that are to do customers either by dropshipping or stocking the products yourself.

And in case you don’t know, a lot of the logistics can actually be handled by Amazon for you.

It has a cost.

It’s a little bit of your profits, but you could literally outsource all the logistics to a lot of services these days and run an e-comm store mostly during the marketing.

It takes a lot of skills though because you need to deal with the logistics.

You need to deal with product creation.

You need to deal with supply chain and you need to deal with cash flow as well because actually when you’re buying your products, you’re buying ads, you’re buying all of that link.

The costs add up to most of what the money people pay you.

So maybe you charge $100 for the product, but it’s going to cost you $80 or $90 to supply it.

And so very often, you’re going to be quite thin on margins and when you need to prepay ads, for example, and you get paid later through payment gateways or something, managing cash flow is actually quite challenging.

And the example we’re going to talk about is actually Menta’s sleep.

And Mark didn’t want to show you, but he actually left to get his Menta mask here.

And actually mine actually.

You got the pro one or the normal one?

Yes, I have the pro one.

Oh, is there much difference?

We can go over that, but if you want, there’s like some air things in there.

So what is Menta’s sleep?

Let’s just explain to people who are watching.

This is a very good sleeping mask basically that is very light.

You can like sleep on the side with it.

You can see it has these cups.

I’m not here to sell it by the way, but you get the idea.

It’s a very good sleeping mask.

It’s kind of like a niche product, but it’s cool because it’s made by a solo entrepreneur.

I think it’s two of them.

Sorry.

They started in 2016 and they gave the first prototype at a conference we go to regularly called DCBKK from the Dynamite Circle.

And now they’re a brand that makes over 10 million per year.

So they’ve done quite well as small entrepreneurs.

I didn’t want to take big examples in this podcast, just small people.

And what’s cool is like they started with a single product, right?

They made one product.

They make the mask that Mark has actually.

It’s the first product.

And they started expanding it to the pro version, which is the one I have.

They expanded it with like different eye cups, like cold ones, hot ones.

They have a silk mask.

They have a weighted mask now, et cetera.

There’s one that plays music as well.

Yeah.

So they do a lot of stuff, but like they just do sleep masks.

It’s just, that’s what they do.

And they make 10 million a year.

Now that business is so good because you basically can do all traffic sources, but everything works.

And that’s probably the most scalable business model out of everything we’ve talked about.

If you’re successful and if you can navigate the cashflow issues that I mentioned, paydads work extremely well for that.

Like you can just do cold ads to your product page and make money with an e-comm.

The challenge is to obviously have a good product people want to buy and have the social proof.

You can do SEO.

It works very well.

I see a lot of people doing SEO for e-comm now.

E-comm sites rank better than they ever have right now.

I don’t know if it’s going to be forever, but right now it’s very good.

You can do social media.

You can talk about sleep.

You can make funny ads, funny, funny short videos, et cetera.

People will watch that and buy the products.

You can pay influencers to talk about your product and you’re going to make money.

You can have affiliates and you’re going to make money.

You can do every single traffic source.

The challenge is the product creation basically.

I think it’s really for the most seasoned people who listen to this basically.

Even me, I’m scared of jumping into e-comm.

I feel like it’s a lot of things to navigate, especially the cashflow scares me.

Coming from an info product business where we have a lot more cashflow than these e-coms have, it’s pretty scary to me.

There’s a lot of logistics issues that you face as well with shipping and customs and import and manufacturing, quality control and all the stuff that because it’s a physical product you just don’t really think about when you’re doing non-physical product stuff.

Mark Zhang’s co-founder was a product designer as well.

They have someone in the company that was able to create this product at a very high level from early on.

I don’t want to go too much over e-comm.

I feel like the people who want to do e-comm know it.

It’s probably going to be the least peak option, but that’s probably the one that can make the most money if you’re successful with it.

We had to mention it.

I think most people who listen to this podcast, in order of preference, I think there will be a lot of people who just do the social thing.

Even though we don’t like it, I know a lot of people do it.

I see the numbers on YouTube videos that talk about this.

People like it.

They want to do that.

It’s easy.

I think the agency and freelancing is also an easy one.

A lot of people should be looking into that.

On-platform marketing, we saw a product review profit.

A lot of people joined in.

It’s something that people are quite interested in.

Info products is less popular.

It’s personally my favorite option.

Just because it allows me to do some crazy funnels, etc., which I have a lot of fun with.

Maybe I’ll talk more about this.

The podcast with Lucy was that, etc.

But the people who do that and manage to nail it, they will get quite wealthy, actually.

There’s still a big opportunity.

The local SEO, I think the people who don’t want an agency but still want to just do SEO and not touch social, not touch paid, etc., the local SEO is for them, basically.

Now, let’s talk about what we’re going to do going forward.

I just want to circle back to where we started the episode.

For me, it doesn’t matter where that Google update is landing.

I’m still on my quest to essentially elevate the business model, have a business model with more added value, so that we can both have more traffic sources and be less dependent on a single traffic source and improve our profit.

It starts with business model.

That’s what a lot of people are refusing to do.

But if you don’t diversify traffic without changing your business fundamentally, if you couldn’t make other traffic sources work before, it’s because they don’t work for your business model.

You have to change what you do.

Usually, that means selling products with more added value equals you can do more traffic sources.

I personally like the info product creation more, but we’re looking at SaaS and the services as well.

We work with Marketing Pros, for example.

It’s a service.

It’s a recruitment service, but it’s still selling something to people.

I think we’re going to focus mostly on funnels, CRO, and traffic generation so that we can actually buy the traffic and convert high enough that we can actually afford the traffic.

I think that’s the main thing we’re going to focus on.

We’ve mentioned that more into another episode, which is called the future of authority sites.

You guys can go check that one out.

I just want to add to this that these things aren’t really new.

Pre-HCU, these are the things you probably should have been doing.

Anyway, we did this big survey of affiliate marketers in, I think it was like summer or last year, before HCU or just as HCU was coming out.

We looked at people’s income levels, and the people that were making lots of money, like 100K a month or more, they all had audiences, they all had products, they all had newsletters, they all valued those things.

The people that were making much less than that, they were much more than were just pure affiliates because there’s a ceiling on that type of business.

When you own your audience, you own the list, and you have that real relationship with people, then you can make just 10 times, 100 times more money.

It’s much more achievable.

Yeah.

Basically, do that stuff.

Regardless of how much traffic Google gives you back, don’t change the calls.

I would say keep going with wherever you’ve been going or pick one of these, but I expect most people have been picking something already.

We are going to keep moving along and not just talk about SEO.

We will talk about this year again.

I think we have an SEO podcast planned next time.

Someone commented, “When are you doing an SEO podcast?”

We’re going to talk about this year again.

We still do SEO, but SEO is a traffic source.

I don’t want to elevate it past being a traffic source.

The business model that goes behind and how you make money from that traffic source is really where the game is played.

Getting the traffic is the easy part.

The hard part is to get the money from the people who come to your website.

That’s why we’re spending more time talking about this, but yeah, we’re going to talk more about SEO.

We said that for years.

Traffic, it’s a vanity metric.

It doesn’t matter whether you have 10 visitors to your sister’s company that’s making thousands per conversion, or you have 100,000 visitors and you make a few K in ad revenue.

The result is the same.

It’s really about the money you make at the end of the day.

Exactly.

You don’t pay your bills in visitors.

That’s what I say usually.

Anyway, we’re going to end it here.

I hope you enjoyed this podcast.

We’ll see you next week for an SEO episode.

See you later.