How to Sell Your Site for $200,000 (With Doug Cunnington)

all right Doug thanks so much for taking the time uh we've had some issues with organizing this call just because I'm 15 hours behind ahead I don't even know anymore where are you where are you based right now I'm in the Boulder County area of Colorado so yeah I think you're like 13 hours ahead of me or something like that okay yeah some some crazy stuff anyway so um in 2023 I actually attended a bunch of of SEO conferences and in these SEO conferences you end up meeting a bunch of the SEO uh big shots I've had quite a few people actually tell me that I had to meet you and talk to you uh specifically I recall Jamie if who's big on Twitter I'm sure most of the audience knows who he is and also Ariel Phoenix a lot of them credit a lot of their success uh to you so super stoked that we can make this happen and watching your your channel and all the stuff you've been doing for a while so thanks for coming on really appreciate it yeah thank you and those uh those two folks are super nice to say that obviously they did a ton of hard work but if they want to tell people to meet me that's great so yeah thanks for inviting me yeah absolutely so given your your exper your expertise and your experience on building Niche sites I do want to talk about a lot of SEO specifics is that cool to you yeah anything you want all right dope so actually before we get into the the SEO I need to ask a personal not a personal question but a question for me that I need to know which is how the hell is your YouTube channel growing so fast because I think I remember seeing your channel a few months ago maybe you was under 50K maybe around 50k and now you're over 100 yes what what's going on so I would love to say that it's uh some little trick that I found something where I'm like all right I'm producing better content I really figured out the algorithm but it's far simpler than that I'm just running some ads using the promotions tab under uh the dashboard and content so this is a feature that was in beta for I don't know six months or something like that and I didn't play around with it too much I have always dabbled probably for the last four years with um AdWords and just running some YouTube ads like suggested videos nothing aggressive I'm not selling anything I was really just trying to promote the channel and I would spend maybe between say 50 and $300 per month or so depending on what I was testing adwards did not see to be very effective I would get a little bit of traction but not too much but I I like to test things then after a few months of the beta testing for the promotions tab under content in your dashboard under YouTube Studio A friend of mine Alex Cooper from WP Eagle mentioned hey I tested it out and it looked like it worked pretty good but I got some views I got some new subscribers like 1,000 new subscribers but it looked like maybe they didn't really interact with the videos they didn't like it they didn't comment but they subscribed and I was like oh that's interesting and then didn't do anything with it anyway for probably a year or so my subscriber growth had dropped down to maybe like 150 new subscribers per month okay before that it was like about 500 per month for like five years straight just pretty consistent some of those old videos pulling in but algorithms change and that's what happened here so in early December of 2023 I started running ads I had 39,000 subscribers and sure as just like Alex said I started running some ads to a couple of the recent videos I was getting like a thousand new subscribers um per day so it's crazy right and it wasn't a huge amount of money it was virtually the same as what I was spending I I haven't tracked it super close or gone back to look but really it's I'm just running ads the downside is so you know most of my most of my viewers have traditionally been in like us UK Canada Australia English banking sort of uh like bigger countries right most of the new subscribers and Views most of the time seem to come from India Pakistan and uh Bangladesh right great viewers and all that stuff like great countries but it's just like not the not the English-speaking countries right so anyway it's now it's over 100k I'm gonna get the little silver plaque and everything you're gonna get yeah yeah yeah that's great and so are are those viewers interacting with videos are the views going up as well the views are going up they're interacting a very very minor amount okay not what I would expect so basically no the answer is they're not interacting much but I was like this is an interesting test I don't see anyone else doing it like there's some smart other folks in our industry that are doing um a lot of videos they're publishing one per day they have tremendous growth I don't know if they're running ads or anything like that but I haven't seen any like other channels growing like that that don't have some viral component so it's working right now and it's one of those things where I'm like you know what didn't think I would ever hit 100K or it would be like five or six years and my so anyway that's all I've done the other I mean I don't know if this would work if other people did it right how many videos do you have on your channel maybe long form or just doesn't matter I think yeah I think probably under 200 okay still a solid amount I mean that takes a lot of time I have over 2,000 so I don't know there's some component where it's like okay like like I have a foundation that allows it to grow like that but for now it's working and I'm checking it out and I mean unfortunately I don't have a better story other than I found a little trick we'll take it yeah we'll take it no it's great that's great yeah all right so let's get to let's get to what the audience really wants right they want to get all that SEO juice from you um but let's go to the start so how did you go from I know you were in corporate for quite a few years how did you go from corporate to that first success with your first niche so I had a job as a Management Consultant and I did like project management one kind of cool thing I actually worked from home from maybe like 2008 for not not completely but it would be like you know about halftime at home and I was on various projects so there was actually a lot more flexibility than what it could have been in the old days before um you know we were able to work from home home at all with like a laptop and all that kind of stuff so I'm that old just to to reference reference myself okay so I wasn't interested in entrepreneurship or side hustles or anything but one day I found a podcast smart passive income and he was talking about Niche sites and earning money online and it sounded like a scam but I was hooked so I started listening basically like all day long so I was probably listening like six seven hours a day and within month I was like I'm gonna start a website I'm G to check this out it sounds kind of cool it was a total flop that did that one didn't work out but okay I was definitely willing to take action and make mistakes and keep moving forward so uh one one of the other mistakes just a fun thing that everyone does I think I had all these different Niche ideas and different website ideas so I think I bought like 25 domains like yeah know yeah I was like okay next year I'll do something with it and then eventually I realized I'm not doing anything with any of those and then you have to let the registration go which is what people should do so if you're out there and you have a bunch of domains that are future projects yeah save yourself some time yeah so after a few months I started to learn a little bit more I understood sort of the keyword research tools and some of the pieces of the puzzle and all that and Spencer Haw at Niche Pursuits he was doing a challenge he called it nich site project which later on I asked him if I could use that that name for my blog and he said sure go for it h so thanks to Spencer for that anyway that Focus was Amazon affiliate and that worked so my goal with that project was to earn $350 per month and I was hoping that I could do that within say six months or a year I think I hit say $100 with within two months these were the old days this was 2013 so you can't really do this now but is this site number two this your second site uh we could call it like the second major project but I'm sure I had maybe like two other small sites but yeah second second site yep okay damn and by I think four months in I made like 500 bucks so completely shattered like what I saw yeah and then it went from like five 00 to 1,200 to like 3,000 to like 6,000 and I hit the retail season so I started the site like in July like I bought the registration and then it just grew really fast really sharp steep curve to December and I was like I'm a genius I got everything figured out and like all good SEO stories I got a manual penalty the site dropped uh Revenue went down to like 150 bucks in January and then I learned my first lesson about like you know don't fly too close to the Sun were you building what were you doing that got the penalty you think pbn's or what was what was going on at the time oh so many things yeah okay pbn um pbn's for sure we were also doing I mean this was the practice back in the day um so I literally looked at Pat Flynn's like link building guide from 2011 and he was going to Fiverr building link Wheels link pyramids web 2.0's private blog networks were in their Heyday you know people were starting to really they were public networks and anyway we're very sloppy very aggressive and I mean it worked like a lot of you know bleeding edge uh SEO tactics very effective very voluble super risky and you can't you know quit your job based on that you have to understand that it is extremely volatile and risky but yeah we did everything um the one good thing I wrote All That content myself the content was great um and it was something I was interested in and doing research on and I I've probably only spent that sort of time and effort on one or two other sites but it was I mean I learned it a ton about that specific industry amazing okay and so from there how many more sites came after that were you just copying and pasting what you saw worked on that site and just continue to build more or less so I had that penalty in January of 2014 and then I thought you know what I'm gonna get a an age domain we call it was an expired domain I actually filmed it myself and I was like I'm just G to move the content over there so this old domain didn't uh wasn't going to be recoverable so I moved it to all the content to a new one that didn't work for some reason or another and the reason why is it was like not not the same Niche at all it was like some random other uh domain and at the same time that I had that going I was like okay I'm gonna use my skills uh from like operations I have a project management professional certification so I'm I'm good at scaling things and like repeatable processes so I was like all right I'm going to I'm going to move the site that was penalized over somewhere else and then I'm gonna start new sites so I think I started maybe like four new sites that spring and things were kind of growing at that point I wasn't writing all the content so that that was another issue the quality wasn't as good I was also good at hiring people so I started hiring more writers and I would train them but the quality wasn't as good good as anyone knows right like anyone else writing it is not going to do as good of a job as you are they don't care as much they're watching the clock they're trying to hit a word count um so those started to get a couple sales get some traffic and then penalized again because things with pbns and web 2.0's and all that kind of stuff it was still working a little bit but Google was figuring things out so it was one of those days where I logged into search console and like everything had a manual penalty so they just went to my account and everything was in there so that was another mistake so they just they they turned everything off and everything got a penalty so I was like oh man all right I need to I need to rethink these things a little bit closer but the other thing that we haven't mentioned so far is at the beginning in 2013 when I had that first success I was naive and stupid enough to start nich site project and think I want to have a personal brand I want to build an email list and I want to have digital products and I'm going to do this in parallel which really suppressed the growth on everything but in the long run you know here we are 10 years later it was a really good move to spread my efforts and I mean I I worked much harder than I needed to like focusing is always better but now I can sit and tell you like hey it did pay off like having an email list was huge because I was able to share my stories and sell products and be an affiliate for other products and it gave me a way to like connect with other people because you know if someone developed a keyword research tool they maybe would reach out to me or I would reach out to them I could feature their product so I'm like networking within the industry so like you said if you if you go to conferences like a couple people will know who I am because I've been around doing this stuff for a little while yeah yeah so how how did you go from building all these Niche sights to then coming up with the keyword golden ratio what was the what's the story behind that so around that time in 2014 I was realizing that our normal approach the approach that I use for the first view sites wasn't working as well and it's one of those where everyone is doing a certain thing so why don't I try to do the opposite so at the time people were looking at search volumes of say three to you know 8,000 or something for like their main keyword and then they would find like some secondary keywords but most everything was based on this like big multi thousand searches per month keyword and that was great for a time like I said I was able to rank a pretty big term within a couple months in 2013 but things were shifting and I was like all right if everyone's doing that why don't I try the opposite it I was also in a couple Mastermind groups with people that were you know doing low uh low search volume low competition keyword research and they were like this is working great and I remember hearings a couple interviews out there too where people were doing things a little bit differently instead of going for even like 10,000 searches per month or like you know 10 to 20 searches per month if it shows up if it looks like anyone Sear in at all I'll go for it so I kept hearing a couple stories like that it was kind of On The Fringe so I thought all right I'm going to take that approach and like like a lot of good ideas this is like pieced together from like good ideas from many other people that were doing similar things so people keep an eye out right like this stuff happens all the time and you could do the same thing like cherry pick the good ideas from various people maybe you could mash it together and make up your own thing but that was it I was like I'm going to try the opposite so I tested it out I can't even remember the sort of case study I did but I was like all right I'm going to try this with say 20 or 30 keyword golden ratio keywords and see what happens and it was crazy I think it was like a 70% success rate like traffic was coming in and I was like okay now that I've tested it on a smaller scale I'm going to take this a little bit further now this is not going to sound impressive now but back in 2015 2016 this was a lot of content so I was like I'm going to publish 200 articles that are keyword golden ratio um compliant and I'm gonna publish it like whatever six months or four months or whatever it was again not impressive now in the day of AI but 200 articles back then like that that was one what most popular videos right because people are like 200 articles this guy's crazy yeah so that worked great like I the blog grew earnings grew again back in 2016 the commission rates at Amazon were they were volume based so if you sold enough products you could be getting like eight eight and a half percent not what we see today which is more like 3% so we're talking like close to 3x so like Revenue exploded and then I was like I am I'm I'm figuring of this stuff out so keyword golden ratio it's awesome branding like there's no golden ratio in this right like if people go look up Golden Ratio th this doesn't fit it's just cool branding and by the way smart really smart really smart than thanks and again like it was someone that I was uh a neighbor of mine who I was showing some of this stuff and he was like oh yeah that's Doug's golden ratio and I was like can do you mind if I use that and I'll say keyword golden ratio so the thing is like there it's been around long enough where people have said ah you know I don't like that or here's the issues with it or whatever it's not perfect it's a good tool but the thing is like people don't pay attention and they don't care I talked about this stuff for two years before anyone like paid attention but eventually enough people used it enough enough people talked about it um and I was chatting with Kyle rof the other day and he's actually gonna he's gonna talk about how he uses the keyword golden ratio which is a fantastic endorsement and he has a couple of layers that he's added on top but he mentioned to me I have it written down something like a 70 to 80% success rate but he puts it through like two additional little filters to make sure that it's a keyword that he wants to go after can we know what those filters are or is that is that a is that Under Wraps I don't know what they are exactly um we didn't get super in depth we were just chatting but I know one of them is just to look at the sort of tier or authority of the the sites that have keywords that are ranking so pretty standard competition analysis right okay and then there's another one that I don't know so Kyle Kyle was keeping me interested yeah so I need to chat with him again and he'll tell me what it is which yeah I gotta get I gotta get Kyle back on here yeah yeah yeah cool so how do you think SEO has changed from from those days to to SEO today A lot has changed but what do you think are the main the main things and and we're gonna talk about AI so if you want to save your AI speech for later I'm down before I mention what has changed I think a lot of stuff has still remained so a lot of the content that I created like five over six years ago like it holds up and I've talked to other people that maybe they've created courses with the context that I asked them about but foundationally it's like 70 or 80% the same it's like links matter a lot good content matters even more and you know don't don't mess around too much with gry hat stuff like if you remember those couple things then you're in good shape awesome links from like New York Times or big media Outlets those were always awesome they're still awesome now we're calling it like digital PR but it was kind of the same thing right so foundationally a lot of the stuff is really the same and if you just stick to that and you're really good at getting you know links from Niche relevant sources and you were doing that five years ago it's even more effective now because it's it's hard to do so yeah it's harder yeah so a couple things that have changed like Google has gotten better at I think maybe catching up with some of the gray hat activities that it doesn't like or at least are I don't know if they're better at reacting to it with helpful content in The Helpful content update at the end of 2023 I think the consensus overall is it wasn't that good of an update and people don't seem to be finding the things that they're looking for in certain areas so another thing is I think the time to rank has just gotten longer and that's a pretty easy one to see like I I mentioned in 2013 I ranked the site pretty quickly and nowadays like that's a lot more difficult unless you're doing something much more dramatic so I have heard of people getting a lot of traffic if they're publishing like thousands of Articles using AI or something like that but I mean I think generally people are taking much longer to rank so those are the main couple areas um I think it might be a little more saturated as the SEO industry has matured and there's more information out there there's more conferences there's more qualified people doing SEO I think that makes a difference too so the the bar is higher just generally to rank what do you think do you have any any big ones what no I think the the main goal of that question is for people to realize that it's like mostly the same thing right it's just you just have to keep creating really solid content and just great links and and that's that's half of it right um and just being consistent because most people aren't consistent most people they work in spurts and then they just die off and and the people who are consistent are the ones that win so that's what I think yeah for sure and I think you know just on that note I mean we're talking SEO and usually the written word and Google but I think the consistency makes a huge difference in anything whether it's like a podcast or I mean I don't do much social media but with anything you know you get your reps in and if you have a long enough timeline a lot of times your competitors are going to drop off they're not going to keep going so if if I could do something that's uh subpar yet sustainable like look at my YouTube channel I have a lot of videos there's a lot of there's a lot of stinkers in the 2000 but there's a lot of them there's a lot of them and I've consistently publish videos for a very long time yeah yeah my uh my younger brother's also on YouTube he's got around 50k subs and the our main motto is just A+ consistency B+ effort like regardless if the video is going to be kind of trash just get it out just get it out it doesn't matter maybe next week it'll be better next week it'll pop off but this week just get a video up um yeah and yeah and and that works that works yeah all right so one thing you said is that content you were creating in 2015 very similar no maybe I don't know if you 2015 or 5 years ago um but the content you're creating a few years ago very similar to the content that you'd be creating now so could you talk to us a little bit about what that process looks like are you using AI nowadays um and if you are what what tools are you liking what tools have you tried what do you think so a couple caveats just to let people know where I'm at so I'm not currently building like new sites the the last one that I started fresh was I think in 2020 or so yeah that sounds right so a few years ago and a lot has changed since then AI was not where it was back then so where it is now so just keep that in mind so I'm not I'm not using any tools um to publish in Mass I am using AI quite a bit for some other things and I may start publishing a little bit more so that's sort of the the caveat okay what I would do these days is use AI for for research and as I've used AI for the things that I am am doing it's it is research or maybe uh prep or maybe like coaching for a podcast interview I might do so I'm using it for that kind of stuff which we can get into the details but I think the best way to use some of these tools is to put in your own sources and your own references that you want say chat GPT to use so very specifically I interviewed someone named Tony Merado he's a physical therapist so he's an expert in his industry already he also because of his background he's able to find good Journal references like medical journal references that are peer-reviewed they are as correct and valid as information as we could use so he puts that information into chat GPT as the reference material then he asks chat GPT to give him a list of questions to answer as an expert then he uses uh like a voice typing feature on Google Docs or whatever you want to use you could use like the voice memo he answers those questions puts it in a text document and then feeds that into chat GPT so now if you remember we have the medical journals we have his own input in his own words as an expert and then he asks for an outline maybe he tweaks the outline maybe puts in the outline himself and then you end up with a much better more customized version and it's not like sort of a generic article plus it has his own input in chat gbt can use quotes So I think that is like the perfect way to do it it is certainly more manual than some of the bulk publishing tools out there but I'm not interested in bulk publishing right so whatever I do with AI is not related to that and my my take there is like it's interesting you could earn a lot of money in a short amount of time but generally I'm looking at longer time frames and I'm not really interested in working on things that are you know riskier if I'm putting in a bunch of time I know things that could work really well like I know I'm launching a new podcast and a YouTube channel and a brand there and I know spending time on that that's GNA pay off and I there's no question right and it's probably going to be a higher leverage activity than publishing 3,000 articles on a Blog and then have it penalized or whatever in like six months so yep absolutely and so yeah that's interesting what about link building where where do you where are you seeing like any link building opportunities today I know digital PR is just uh all the hype right now um but or are you seeing opportunities where people could maybe get get some links I think an under utiliz space and now that I'm talking to a couple more people they're like oh yeah this works so podcasting and this is the uh the hammer that I'm going around and hitting everything with is podcasting I'm telling people start a podcast do a podcast come on people podcasting is it's awesome so you can basically go on a little tour right you see book authors do this all the time and you can go pitch yourself to be on podcast you have to you know make sure you have a solid pitch there's ways to do this where you'll get accepted I get multiple pitches per day for my shows and I delete almost all of them so there's a right way and a wrong way to do this but if you could be on various shows then you'll get a link back it's super Niche relevant they'll probably link back to whatever you want like I usually like if someone sends me a list and it's like five or six links and it's like all their property like whatever it is like I'll link to it because it came up in the the article right or it came up in the interview rather so that is really underutilized and uh secondary right so I I learned this because I have a show so someone contacted me from I don't know some it was some software product I don't I don't even know what it was so it was some software product and they were like hey do you take advertisers for the Doug show yeah I do like let's talk I don't have like a specific rates but what are you looking for and I'll we'll figure something out so they explained a little bit and I was like all right your tool seems fine but I'm telling you this is the wrong audience and I'm telling you you're not going to get any con conversions but if you want to pay me 500 bucks then that's cool I'll put the ad in they're like sure let's do it so I ran it and then after we did the campaign and they they paid me on time you know I usually get paid up front because I don't want to mess around with other uh you know chasing people around for money so I was like hey what's the angle on this and I really don't understand why like you're not gonna get gonna get any sales from this and she was she was cool she opened up and she was like it's the iHeart radio link so she was doing a link building campaign to get an iHeart radio link so I went and looked and I'm 90% sure it was like a do follow link from iHeart Radio which is like a dr90 so I I don't even know what it is but it's like a very big Network right so there's probably other places where that happens too and the thing is no very few people are doing I'm like I'm trying to talk about it a little bit um so those are two ways that you can get links via podcasting and I'll tell you one more is uh if you launch a show it like you're going to show up on different directories all over the place right I don't know the threshold right on how many shows you need to have but I was chatting with shaa Newman and she mentioned this in the interview where some companies are literally they're launching a podcast they'll publish like whatever 15 20 episodes I don't know what it is and then they'll be on all the directories with a do follow link and it adds Authority right so yep and think about this again take these IDE is from somewhere where it works and then you could transfer it to somewhere else and be like oh that's a great idea so let's say you want to speak at a conference right and you're like well people you know maybe they don't know me maybe have some impostor syndrome like a couple other things but if someone uh Googles you they have your pitch right they have your pitch and they Google you they see your YouTube channel and then they're like oh there's a podcast too and he has a handful of episodes there's like all this evidence that you're an authority and EXP expert or at least you're like in the weeds doing stuff so if you're if you're again people don't even have to listen to the show as long as you have the presence out there so podcasting great way to build links there's some friction to this right it's a little bit harder to do than like okay I'm gonna go to some crappy uh agency where they're all buying links from a white label company that everyone else uses right yep so that's too easy but if you start a show which is really it's actually not even that hard but it takes a little more work so a little bit more yeah yeah again yeah everything everything solved with podcasting and um I think people have a hard time focusing on like the three main things um when when they're starting a brand new site what what are those first three things that you're doing for a brand brand new site and also would you ideally like to have an age domain an expired domain or are you thinking you know what I'm going to get a fresh domain and I know you haven't done it in a while but still if you were to do it today right so yeah everybody keep that in mind um so H domain for sure I'm a Otis Mentor over there those guys are great and I mean I think they have some of the best selection and the vetting process is excellent so I would start with an age domain definitely sort of a a shortcut the the other stuff like I said is is probably not very interesting because um it is what people were doing like a few years ago so I I would look for the low competition keywords I would use the keyword golden ratio in conjunction with some other keyword research methods but I would use that the other thing that I would do that I wasn't doing in the past and I think it's super important at least the word on the street is topical Authority so I would have a topical map and I would be super intentional about completing one cluster one you know sort of branch of the map at a time before moving on to the next one the other approach that maybe I did in the in the past is like you kind of spread it out and you're like I'm gonna work on these things in parallel I would not do that I would focus on one branch at a time and really nail it down and how how are you building those branches so in theory I would probably use an AI tool to do uh the the heavy lifting at first and then I probably would just look at the different topic areas and instead of thinking like an SEO I would think like a book author or a librarian and put things where they make sense and this is one of the Lu I have a lot of footage of me saying stuff like this so I've been saying it for years that when there's something that seems a little funny or I'm not sure what to do there's these classic dilemas like should I use this keyword or this keyword they're kind of similar I take off my tinf foil SEO hat and I think like a normal person and I just ignore what Google might think because they change what they want all the time so why should I make decisions and you know I'm coming from a place really a privilege because I don't have to you know have every single decision right because it's not going to be right so all I could do is do the best I can and just think like a normal person and try to help the Searcher the best I can and there have been times and actually if you go look on nich site project like I tried to rank you know Amazon affiliate for years and I had like a super long article and then I separated it and then I tried to like do different things and eventually I was just chasing my tail around like I I was never able to like get up higher because I wasn't doing link building but at the end of the day I just organized it in the most logical way possible and then I moved on and I don't I don't care about it anymore so you know if you're working for a client you can't necessarily do that but the thing is like yeah you may end up in a place where you're like this worked six months ago and now they've changed some things so like topical maps and this link article it's too long so we need to shorten it but overall I would just like try to logically uh you know put it in a book that's all okay yeah take off the 10 foil hat it's important it's hard though it's hard when you're so when you're so deep in the in the weed it's really hard to just think like a normal person just no this has this volume that's why I'm going for it you know but maybe it doesn't make any sense for your website yeah right and I think the the other part is you know if you are in the industry a little bit more and you're going to conferences and like your Social Circles and Mastermind is around SEO like you can get really deep in the weeds and things seem totally normal to do and sometimes they really not if you step away and I'm I'm part of the sort of financial Independence retire early community and there are piece every subculture or Counter Culture has this thing where like if you're around enough people doing it you're like oh this seems totally normal but but a lot of times it's not normal at all you get around like a normal civilian population it's very odd yeah yeah it is it is so back to the odd stuff um your thoughts on on E eat eat um call it whatever you want to call it do you believe in it is it link based can you just fake an author fake a LinkedIn profile fake all that I I don't know I don't have enough experience on the field I think I think it is probably link based overall and you know I mean we're kind of splitting here is like the the links matter but like is that where Google is evaluating eat I'm not really sure if we're talking like hey you're gonna work on a project and you're thinking I'm gonna work on this for a little while is it worth your time to create that appearance where you could create a persona and I I think it could be possible but for me personally when I look at my life and what I want to spend time on I'm like do I want to spend time can we cuss uh here absolutely yeah do whatever you yeah so if I'm looking and I'm thinking all right I'm gonna work on this project I'm gonna create a fake LinkedIn profile I'm gonna create um this other other social stuff but I also need to make sure it looks real so I need to connect with other people and do this other stuff it's like what the are we doing this is bananas right like why would I spend my time creating that stuff and and you know no no offense to anyone who is spending their time doing this like I'm not talking to you personally or anything but for me as I'm you know W I'm middleaged right I keep referencing this for people who don't know what I look I'm bald right I'm like 44 years old I'm on the the tail end of of the life here so Jesus that's not a dramatic here yeah so but but you know we all have limited time out there right so right yeah so keep that in mind so that is what I'm thinking about like do I want to spend time building this fake persona and all this stuff the answer is no and I cannot answer for anyone else and I will not judge any I won't apply my judgment filter to anyone else but for me personally not my thing so can you do that my hunch is you could probably trick Google sure yeah I bet you could do it so and and I bet there are plenty of examples where people did a good job job and there's a a great sort of uh Network sort of a layer where you know if you look at it you're like this looks real they actually have some connections or some posts and I think that's possible it it lines up with some of the stuff that we were doing in you know whatever 2011 to 2015 or 16 setting up fake blogs and stuff we tricked Google back then this is a little more sophisticated so do you what do you think I think it's I think it's basically link based yeah yeah I think it's all LS yeah but uh but yeah I know there's a lot of people that are building these these networks of like fake doctors fake you name it anything um just to just get past that that level of the eat um so who knows yeah um question about the future of SEO where do you think where do you think we're headed uh clearly sge has gotten delayed or we don't really know what's what's going on um what do you think's happening I don't yeah I don't know I have to be honest and say with probably the last 18 months or so you know I was not I was not on board with the AI content and you know Jasper was kind of the front runner for a couple years and I was just like this is not that good and then chat GPT really changed things and it accelerated much faster than I expected once I saw some of the power I was like okay things are going to change a little bit faster than we think when we zoom out a little bit we I mean things aren't that much different and yet things are different in the in the rate that content Publishers are able to publish and it's dramatic and the quality is probably as good as you know some writers out there were producing anyway except it's 150 times faster or thousand times faster or whatever so I think like most things it's probably going to change a little bit slower like there's going to be some pieces that will be consistent I think on the edge it could be much faster than we think so I I mean I have no no really specific sort of predictions I mean Thinking Out Loud it seems like Google is trying like they realize they have a problem in the help content update at the end of 2023 was perhaps an overcorrection and I think Google will try to get it back I mean the thing is I was chatting with some neighbors who were you know they're like in their 60s and they were they were like oh yeah like Google hasn't been uh working as well I've actually had to research uh several times and you know they would get Reddit results and they're like I don't want to read the Reddit result I need to I want to go to a website where the you know a pro someone who works in the industry can help you know sort out some of the questions I have so like regular people are seeing this so my hunch is the next year or two Google will be trying to like figure out how to deal with all the AI content because the fact is some of the AI content is probably good and is probably right and it might be based on like human it's gonna get better yeah exactly so I don't know I don't know and what about someone who's who's thinking about starting a new Niche site today what are you telling them what are you saying currently and I have a couple videos on this but currently I would say I I would look at it as starting like a brand and I would I would focus on YouTube and podcasting as well all at the same time because at least then you have a little bit more of a footprint print it also forces you to actually be interested or part of the the niche or the community or whatever and I mean you don't have to be passionate about it but you have to have some interest level and it's going to get hard like whatever you're working on it's not going to go like you think it's going to take you three to five times as long as you think everyone thinks you're a little bit smarter than average but By definition most people are not so you're not going to be able to do it faster and it will take you a little bit longer if you know that you're going to be starting a podcast in the YouTube channel and you need to have some written content as well you probably are going to try to pick something that you care about because you know you don't want to write about um some something just random that is like a good a good keyword and people used to do that a lot more so other than that it's a lot of the same stuff now one thing you know I mentioned the sort of three tiers I'll add another one which is an email list so those are the four things that I've spent the most time on in the last few years and it helped I mean it really helped me be somewhat immune to the Google updates because I I was like you know what if I rank for some stuff that'll be great but I'm not I'm not going to put too much effort into it but email list podcast and a and a Blog those are pretty much independent like no one is going to like deplatform you YouTube pretty independent but your channel could disappear very pretty rare but you occasionally hear that happening right don't say that that shares the out of me yeah you're telling me I mean the thing is um they don't have good customer support for the for creators so I've heard I've heard that yeah um it can happen but fairly rare the point is like those things are indep dependent and if the hosting company is like you can't be here anymore you can go to another hosting company same with the email service provider like you have the email list so those are super important and I think a focus on having those four different areas is really important it gives you great skills too the cool part is and what I'm gonna be doing with like my my new show and I'm starting to do a little bit more with my current show the Doug show is repurposing the content in a very intentional way so I'll record a video which has audio and video then you can take that transcript I use descript and get a transcript and then I'll feed that into chat GPT or Gemini and then you can get an outline for a blog post you could tweak it do what you need to then you have a blog post then you could take that and then you could say all right like can we turn this to into an email sequence can we turn this into uh you know just some educational content for the email so I created one piece of content but I put it in like four different places if you want to take it a step further you could again I'm not a social uh like short form video person but someone could take those shorter Clips put them on various social channels and just have one piece of content that you created and then you just kind of propagated it out across whatever you want to whatever wherever your audience is is that's where you should put it you know amazing well yeah that's a lot of value there um that was sick Doug thank you thanks for thanks for taking the time where can people find you where would you want yeah so YouTube is probably the the biggest area but you can go over to nich site project and sign up for the email list I usually let people know when a new podcast or YouTube video comes out and the other place I'll Point people is Doug huntington.com so I'm starting to just mention that here and there to hopefully get some links to it another another little Pro tip and yeah I saw I saw in the in the in the word document you sent me in the the Google Doc you had all the links so you're just ready right yeah yeah smart yeah and if you want to like we could put the that in I don't know if you have like freebies or whatever but like basically I have like a a podcast prep sheet so if someone invites me to a show I have my bio I have an image for the thumbnail I have the links and suggested topics right so come in like a pro and then someone's like oh okay like this is gonna be a much easier interview than the random person that just showed up yeah absolutely all right amazing well thanks for taking the time that was really cool thank you thank you

Channel: Jaume Ros

Views: 1,545

Keywords: doug cunnington, niche site seo, niche site project, doug cunnington seo

Id: OMSwXaQDgAo

Length: 49min 48sec (2988 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2024