The 3 Biggest Opportunities for Bloggers in 2022

i hear all the time that it is too late to start a niche site or blogging is dying um all the good topics are taken and i hear it all the time and when i say all the time i mean like really all the time every day like since i started for over six years people have been telling me it's too late and yet we start in the last year we started over a dozen new blogs and new niche sites so um not dead in fact what we're seeing is the exact opposite i actually believe that 2022 presents one of the best opportunities for bloggers even people just getting started that we've seen before and so today we want to show you why and show you how you can take advantage of that yourself all right today we actually are here live and we are going to be taking questions but first we have some things that we've prepared that uh we're excited to share with you so we're gonna jump right into that okay so there are three main things that we kind of identified well they're very overarching yeah very very large category there's so many opportunities for bloggers today i think but yeah we've tried to narrow it down to three big ones yeah so the first one is monetization opportunities there's some big things going on with this one some huge things and really like again i think better than ever so the first thing that is happening right now and that's been happening recently is that bloggers are able to get ads on their site premium ads on their site sooner than ever so this year zoeck announced that they're working with people from the beginning we we started this with project 24 members they were working with us to be able to get ads on project 24 member sites from the very beginning they saw that actually that model works they could do it at scale and so that's what they've been doing and they're getting better and better and better at it so um you can start monetizing your your site earlier than ever before yeah i think that's big yeah i think it's really cool that there there becomes multiple opportunities to make money in your first month two months three months seriously it's huge i see a couple people commenting here real quick hey jonathan brent i feel like to see a couple other you guys thanks for joining it's good to see you yeah thanks for being here all right and so that's number one right just being able to get ads on your site right away um just a few years ago we basically didn't do ads we were like affiliate uh maybe info products and stuff but mostly um not ads ads has just added this huge new revenue stream that's even more passive than affiliate but the opportunities with affiliate are getting better as well um what kovit did to us worldwide it shut people up it put people indoors and it kept us out of the stores and so people's buying behavior is changing more and more and more and there's more commerce being done on the web than ever before yeah people are are buying not only physical products but even information products i think substantially more than they were before and i think one thing that's important to recognize about that is it's not just amazon right you know a couple years ago it was 100 amazon that was just like your go-to affiliate but now people are getting more comfortable shopping off of yeah their platform on tons of other platforms where two three years ago you wouldn't want to enter your credit card information i mean there's even like there's you know there's more safety and security features that are all over the web now to protect buyers which makes it great for us yeah absolutely i mean people are much more comfortable paying across the web totally up across the web you're able to use your apple pay your google pay etc you're able to use even amazon pay all across the web you can um a lot of uh sites will take cryptocurrency now um as a payment method and so your information is much more secure but also we have these several other third-party platforms that are providing not only payment but like um you know shipment tracking there's like the shop yes um there's several others and so again people are like yeah i can get free shipping no matter where i go right walmart offers me two-day shipping now on things and so people are shopping elsewhere which is fantastic because conversion rates on amazon have been notoriously been very high but their commissions have been just dropping and dropping and dropping and so as that happens we can now have success outside i think and then you mentioned when we were chatting about this yesterday a survey where people said that they will trust an online review just as much as they'll trust like a recommendation from a friend yeah something around over though there have been several surveys i found over the just the last several years um where it seems like about 80 percent of shoppers say that basically before any purchase they'll look at reviews whether that be reviews on the product page itself which is a big part of it but also just um reviews on the web the thing is though that consumers are getting savvy and so some of these really like spammy crummy reviews that we see on blogs are not cutting it anymore but that that is that is really cool that people are like yeah if i have a friend that i know knows about this and i go ask them and they tell me what to buy i'm about just as trusting of a stranger who reviews the product online especially if i know they actually have the product and they've used it before yeah definitely i'm seeing a lot of comments come in hey everybody good to see you um as you might i think the text is still on the screen there we are going to be taking questions in a little bit we just we talked about some really cool things yesterday that we wanted to share yeah before we examine that yep but i am taking note of a couple of these questions that i think are really really fitting okay so the second big thing that we found or that we think that for 2022 it's just gonna be huge for internet marketers is low competition now as we talked about this when we were like okay you might get a little backlash for this but no hear us out yeah absolutely okay so first of all um we need to talk about barriers to entry yes so barriers to entry i mean in any business or really in anything these are the things that prevent just everyone from doing it right um internet marketing is not that expensive to get into that's a very low barrier to entry i mean pay for hosting a few dollars a month and maybe a wordpress theme maybe a logo a couple things but really you can it could be done very cheaply and what the work is is just the sweat equity right so the competition has just been fierce for years and years and years and it's only been getting worse but the last couple years we've seen this like marked shift not not necessarily in the behavior of bloggers but in the capability of the search engines to weed out the trash which has created actually a high barrier to entry i think for new people yeah um i i see comments all the time in fact i just did a poll um on our youtube channel if you don't see those by the way check out the community tab i've been doing um about one a week it's been really interesting um and i've seen several comments of people who are just like ah it's too late it's too hard it's too saturated etc and because the question i asked was like why haven't you started your blog yet if you haven't and those were the you know i was getting that a lot like it's just too saturated it's too hard there's too many people yeah okay so i and here's the reason why we think it's not the case so you mentioned that google is getting better at removing the spam so what we're left with is higher quality content but fewer pieces of fewer pieces of content overall so that gives us who are going to be teaching and learning and sharing really high quality content that gives us a place where we can actually dominate the search engine ranking page it is such an awesome opportunity um we were looking at a graph yeah i think that's what i'm pulling up here um not this one with this other one this graph that we're looking at shows something really really cool this there's a little spike here at the end but it's just so interesting so this you can see here on the screen like this little spike here over the end look at us getting fancy going doing a screen share in a live um alright so this spike coincides with google's latest algorithm update what this chart is showing is the at least for the you know the searches that that moz is tracking specifically um how many of those searches um are you know dominated or at least represent are showing the top 10 websites on the web right so what they what they're looking at is like the 10 websites that show up the most often how often are they showing up and you know a week ago 0.15 of the time now 0.16 percent of the time and a sudden shift why would that be and why would we be okay with that because it's like you know does does that mean that you have to be a massive website to succeed and and no that's i don't think that's what this shows i don't think that this is necessarily showing that you have to be the biggest authority i think what it's showing is that overall fewer sites are making up more of the search results um and that doesn't necessarily mean only authoritative sites it means that there are i think there are so many blogs because for so many years you could do that you could rip other people off you could create trashy just one page websites um with uh like hundreds of backlinks that you bought um or just you know created through black hat spammy means and then you could get traffic yeah and it stopped working yeah and you don't even just have to take our word for it like we're seeing it yeah so the other day we were i was in a group with some project 24 members and there were a couple people in the group who said you know two three five years ago this is what they were doing they had over a thousand sites they were just spammy because now you imagine managing a thousand sites can doing it right i can't even imagine can't be done but they said that it just stopped working it is just over time it has progressively gotten worse and worse and there was one who said they even saw all their rankings being stolen by project 24 members so there's just like there's this quality it's quality content it has the user in mind it's just that is the way that things are moving exactly in that direction and i don't think that it's gonna stop doing that so what this does is it creates this huge barrier to entry so not only have we taken a whole ton of spammy sites that just no value no no just nothing of substance there and we're removing them from the serps de-prioritizing them as i'll say um they're they're just not ranking the way that they were and they're losing their traffic and so more traffic is going to legitimate content but what that means is this is also no longer just this easy game for um again for just these trashy sites to come in and so people will stop doing it that's the way that behavior is if it doesn't work people are going to stop doing it and so new high barrier entry it's kind of like the ghost town phase of a blog yeah which is another massive buried entry that's been there which is just when you create content and it just takes several months for google to start to pick it up this is really cool though because we're still seeing it work um cook for folks is a site that we've talked about publicly on this channel so i'm happy to continue to reveal it um and that is a website that we first started having content for google to index in january so we're not at a year yet and we've hit the hockey stick yeah and so we just saw this really really really slow growth and then for the last month or so it's just been ticking out really nice at this it's a hockey stick shape because the growth becomes exponential until it tends to level out at some point up higher later so very exciting the competition really is effectively lower even if there still are millions of spammy bloggers their content is failing and the people that are doing it this way the project 24 way are generally not seeing the same sort of impact certainly project 24 sites sometimes get hit in algorithm updates it happens it's totally outside of our control i i'm sorry i gotta add this this is my you know tinfoil hat moment actually i i'm kind of taking there's a project 24 member who said the same thing in the community the other day you know put on my tinfoil hat it looked it seems like every year right around this time when google pushes out their algorithm update during the holiday season the shopping season all of a sudden all the major retail sites seem to get a bump in traffic um and then and then for some reason it levels out again after christmas um so we'll just leave that there but sites are still making a lot of really really great money this time of year um ours up we didn't even see i didn't see a blip nope well and i think not only that not only are they still making money but it's still a great time to get in it is i mean like you said in the past year we've built over a dozen sites yeah and they're all growing everyone you just can't say that there's not a way to get in right now okay so the third thing that we identified and this i have to admit might be the one that i'm probably uh most excited about there are some opportunities with what we are calling superior formats yeah um there are some really really cool opportunities coming um google updates i think that are going to impact us that where right now of course blogging you know writing blog posts images all those are great but there are some other formats that we're seeing just pick up and kick up some huge traction for blogs so google's updates tend to benefit the most um google yeah and so as we see the their search experience starting to you know mold over time and it has been for a long time um you know the rich snippets and stuff they they benefit google yeah we what do we do we find a way to take advantage of that and use them to get more traffic more quickly well right now we're also seeing google um and again i say starting to see but no it's this is the writing's been on the wall for a couple years um surfacing more youtube videos directly in the search results video is becoming a key place to send people and i have to admit there are a lot of search queries where the visual format is better it's a better result if i'm asking a question how to how to stain a fence how to pressure wash a driveway i'm sorry an article doesn't do the same right as a video and so if there's a video that shows explicitly how to do that thing it's better but it's also better for google because they keep people on a platform they conveniently own known as youtube and so there are really two different um approaches that you can take to youtube as a blogger and the first one i think is going to be the most popular for bloggers because you're not building a youtube following right you're not creating a channel that requires you to publish one or two videos every single week you're actually just creating a channel just like you would create a blog and having it as a place to put video content that is very search focused that's what we're going for yeah and i think that when you rather than thinking of it oh becoming like a youtube influencer you're really using youtube or whatever video hosting you're using really right you're using it as a tool to build your website right you know it's it's like it's just a tool in your toolbelt it's not necessarily saying you have to become something else like become a youtuber that's not the case and we've done that multiple times where we build a channel or put up a channel with five 10 15 videos that just do some great things to our blog traffic it's amazing i mean when we built camper report yeah we had a channel with about 10 videos on it that was it i mean and they were like jim set up a cell phone sat in a camper and talked about a topic just answering a specific question those videos did well back then just in youtube search now they would do really well even in just search and but that those videos drove considerable traffic to the website built it up much faster so that's what we're suggesting is keep your blogger hat on just make a video that covers the same information but show when rather than tell and then what we do is we create supplemental content on the blog so we want the video to be um to be able to stand on its own answer the search query completely in the video but still have additional helpful resources so if it's a how-to blog post a tools and materials list um the steps written out as a reference guide that sort of thing is really helpful and you can direct people to that from the video but then you also embed the video in the blog post and so no matter how people find that content they're getting the best experience possible yeah here's the other cool thing about video nobody can scrape and spin your content on a blog post people are doing that yeah um they'll they'll just spin an article you took the time to research and and it's it's you can't fake it yeah and i think something else that's really important with youtube is obviously that huge benefit that you just can't steal someone else's face yeah you just can't currently anyway but there's also built-in trust um when you're on youtube it's a great place to review products it's a great place to actually build some rapport with an audience so even if your goal isn't to become a youtuber people who find you on youtube are going to be more connected to your brand absolutely than they would if they have found you through your website so when you transition them to your site there's a good chance that they could actually be returning visitors when typically we don't really have returning visitors and really don't care if we have our journey visitors and honestly it's i think you're going to see much higher conversions on your affiliate recommendations especially like for your own info products but even on affiliate like there's just a different level of trust and engagement you get with video you just that is really hard to get in a written format um taking lots of your own photos is really good for a blog um i think that's pretty key as well and makes it also harder for other people to steal and make their content outrank yours um but a video just takes that you know five steps further the other thing is that we have seen over and over and over again that google indexes and ranks video our latest turned off we're sending tuesdays that's all right [Laughter] but at least this light's still on um google indexes and ranks video content very quickly yeah you put up a brand new video on a brand new channel and still within a matter of hours not months yeah weeks or even days but within a matter of hours you can type in a search on youtube at least and have that video show up and then you can type in a search on google and we've seen this within a matter of a couple of days even on a brand new channel and website where that video is already ranking on the first page of google search right getting traffic right whereas a brand new blog you're talking about months um and so and the same i think is true for um when you have a more established channel versus a more established blog you could put up an article on a well-established blog and it can be up in hours but um i mean just on average it's just going to be so much faster okay so if you're a brand new blogger what do you do with this yeah well if it was me it is me actually i put up five ten videos on on a channel pretty early on um because what the potential is i could drive early traffic from those videos to my website and if google starts seeing you getting some traffic that way i mean that's a perfectly above i mean that's totally that is like white house i mean 100 you can totally do that because you're providing value yeah you know there's nothing scammy or spammy about it you're providing value to a visitor and then providing them extra value on the website i mean you're going the whole nine yards yeah absolutely i did say there were two approaches to youtube the other one is building a brand yes building a channel a following now as bloggers if you've gotten to the point where like you're going full time with your blog and stuff man i've if if you want to build it into a brand youtube is a great place to do it and i think you can take a channel where you've done search videos like this before and that's fine and that's kind of the foundational content and you can take that new strategy but it's so so different than blogging the types of videos you make though just the whole mentality of it the way you create content is very different if you go into that with a blogging mindset you're gonna spend months spinning your wheels but it's a fantastic way to build a brand we've interviewed even on this channel members of project 24 who even i'm thinking of one in particular who we interviewed about a year and a half ago and he was just doing awesome back then hit full-time income and now he's doing multiples multiple times of what he was earning then um just from a youtube channel and a blog right one youtube channel paired with a blog and that's something that you can do when you start to build that influence and that authority and that rapport on a youtube channel so it is a different skill set some people find that they love video even more than writing um if that's something you want to learn we just launched i'm going to show you guys this in project 24. this is the coolest thing um we launched we were working with if any of you have been following us uh closely and kind of the whole business sorry let me find the right one um you've probably heard of channel makers it's another youtube channel um and uh nate on channel makers nate's awesome nate is part of our team we're part of his team we all work together and uh nate has been working really hard on this new i would call it a course but it's not a course it's the youtube system so here in project 24 i mean we have loads and loads of courses right well the youtube system that's nate right there and it's right here across the top is one of our two sort of flagship main courses this is just incredible so it has seven phases and the phases are meant to help you no matter where you are on your youtube journey to um to know exactly what to do next right so you know there's a roadmap for every phase that shows you exactly how this phase works and how to work through it and at what point you're ready to graduate from the phase um so you know phase phase one is more is a phase that you come back to regularly to reevaluate where you are what your channel is and what you want it to be it's kind of like revisiting your search analysis right and battleshipping and everything kind of all in one you know in phase two you're learning the basic skills a lot of people are going to be able to jump through or past phase two really quickly um if they've been doing youtube already but then phase three is where it really picks up and nobody should skip phase three um you should work through every single step um but anyway i think it's fantastic i'm really excited to actually do um basically take the same approach for the blogging course right now it's a course it will soon be a system like this that's just designed um and built in a better way to help people to uh again just kind of work through on their site and just grow and grow it great something that i love about the youtube system just really quick nate has put so many really cool resources tools in there to help you plan out yeah you validate your channel so many opportunities but one thing that i really really love is you know people along their journey you're going to get stuck sometimes and so we've planned mastermind group meetings for people in each face who are struggling with the the graduation requirements and so you know of every month or two times a month we're going to meet with those people specifically and we're going to be able to help them and say hey here's what we would recommend do a b and c go off two weeks later or a month later you're going to be able to see if you've made the progress if not come back to the mastermind and we're going to like work you through the steps and so you're not it's not like you're just going to be floundering on your own i mean i think that to me that is so much value like as myself wanting to build another youtube channel i think i would love that yeah some validation on my on my work and really like i have to really credit anna she's like okay so anna inside project 24 if you're in there you've you see anna all the time right um anna puts on the masterminds we participate we run them um but she schedules them she knows she talks to all the members she knows exactly what they need when people join project 24 like every week she's doing a mastermind for new members yes um she has masterminds for women in blogging um just because it's kind of a different approach different mentality a lot of people are coming from a blogging background they've been doing it for a while but their style's different and their approach has been different um and so just like so much that she's doing there and so she's coordinating all of these and has been for several months yeah the masterminds i think have been a game changer for the people that are taking advantage of those um another thing that i hear frequently i gotta bring this up and then we are getting to your questions right now um right after this i get this all the time um thank you for your youtube content i love it which you're welcome by the way that's why we do this um i i thank you for your youtube uh stuff it's so helpful i'm i'm working hard on my blog and someday i'll be able to afford project 24 once i make enough for my blog and then i plan to join which i admire i would probably take the same approach myself i am a save up for it and then buy it kind of person i would never recommend going into debt to buy um i guess people go into debt for college all the time but i didn't even do that right like just not something that i would do um and the problem with that though is the hardest part of blogging is that ghost town phase and you don't earn anything and so you spend months and months and months and you don't even know if you did it right and so i get people all the time that are like can you just look over my site and tell me if i'm doing the right thing so that i don't waste you know months with bad content and i'm like i i i'm only one person yeah we're two people right we can't do that for everybody but project 24 does that for you that's why we created it and that's why we keep the price so low i i look in our industry and i see so many people charging a thousand dollars for their course they're like one course and project 24 is our entire system of everything it includes the youtube stuff somebody just asked how much are the masterminds uh they're part of project 24. there like is not a single upsell the only thing is if you want one-on-one coaching help at some point then once you're to a point where like we say okay yeah you a little bit of direction would would really go a long way for you then it's like okay yeah we'll consider it nate's nate's offering that um we i may start offering that again as well on the blogging side but beyond that like there's not and that's not even an upsell that's like uh okay fine if you insist i guess i'll let you pay me to help you on your website and those are usually people that are already earning good money and just trying to figure out how to take it to the next level all right i do want to get to your questions now so um here we go um all right did you see one already nathan um i did i i just saw the one about the masterminds other than that i hadn't had a chance to look at any yet okay so we get questions a lot about is this a good niche is this a good niche and i'm saying niche right now i think i'm just gonna own the word i'm just people are like it's niche like you know what for a hundred years english speech speakers have been saying niche and it's okay to pronounce a word that you've appropriated from another language because it is french and in french it is niche and that's okay but i'm sorry british speaking like proper british speaking people i've been saying niche for a hundred years and i think it's okay for americans it's not just rednecks guys it's it's people all around the world have been saying niche for a long time and so to me i like it better niche okay but i get this question all the time is is xyz a good niche is intermittent fasting a good niche so there are really just a few guidelines i'd give you on selecting a niche i just said niche it's both they're they're both correct look in a dictionary both pronunciations are there okay um really there's just a few criteria for me the first criterion is do i like it would it be something i would be interested in like blogging about for a long time for years and not get tired of it intermittent fasting falls into a category of nutrition which falls into a category of health and fitness which is very saturated with bloggers if you think about it what most bloggers from the beginning got into were things like um moms raising you know having babies and raising kids um nutrition and fitness um though i mean those are some of the i think big ones that travel is another one that's like every blogger wants to be one of those three things and then there's the health and wellness stuff that is more medical that it's not that it's oversaturated it's just that it's really competitive with a few big players who have all the authority but here's the thing if it's something you're willing to go all in on then yes you can do it but you have to be willing to go all in on it which means you probably shouldn't just pick something out of the blue you should pick something that you're willing to go all in on if you are willing to take the topic a step further um if you're willing to go on youtube in particular then yes even some of the most competitive niches can be done but that one is gonna be tough okay more questions here we got new ones coming in now oh here we go um oh how much money can i sell my website for i think that's a cool question that's actually one of the course we have a course roadmap in project 24 of courses that we have recently planned and put out we just put out an affiliate course affiliate marketing course um of course the youtube system but this one is actually on our list it is we buy and sell websites fairly frequently and we've learned a lot about it but as far as simply evaluate like valuing a site it can it really there's quite a large range i've seen them sell as low as 20x so it's you it's a multiple monthly multiple so from 20x to 48 50x it just depends on the monetization the seasonality um how it was built um we look for a lot of different factors probably 10 to 15 different factors so yeah that's kind of a short answer there it becomes tricky if your site isn't really monetized because then it's a question it's like am i just buying the content and then i have to look at the quality of the content do i think it's going to work and because now it's riskier because i it doesn't have a track record of income um i'm probably going to give you a lower multiple of what i think it's probably going to earn right because it's not earning it yet there's there's all those factors but again take that monthly profit so what it earns minus what it costs your cost is probably very low um but usually um for those higher multiples you know 40x or so people want to see 12 months of history because they want to be able to take into account seasonality if you don't have 12 months or if you've been ramping up quickly and 12 months looks bad compared to now then hold it for a while if you're considering selling it yeah let it you know work on making it making the income on it just passive cut your cost to bare minimum and just let it run and then you'll see what it's worth um but actually it used to be we'd see a lot of 30 32 and now like 38 and 40 are really really common people are seeing that it's worth a lot yes um i saw a comment up here from jim uh ricky they said looking forward to seeing you at the affiliate gathering yeah next year that's an exciting one um another question that i saw it already scrolled up but it basically was how can i write better um well there's a lot to it but a couple of little tips that i have i work with a lot of our writers um to write on our websites and we tell them do your research before you write um spend research time outside of writing time and then write in a friendly manner um friendly like in a way that you would speak to a friend right because that is easier to write it's easier to write that way and then break up your post into subheadings um think of it as you know if you have five subheadings and you're gonna write two thousand words or a thousand words break it up and do 200 word blog posts or 400 word blog posts inside a large blog post those little things right there some little technical writing hacks those work super super well um a couple people have said i sound loud and nathan sounds quieter that's because i talk louder i happen it's not quiet sometimes so we will we will try to readjust if i get a little quieter then maybe like the stream will kind of pick it up um okay um a couple of questions around monetization what's a normal epm vienna zoic this varies a ton from niche to niche um it varies with the content substantially it also varies with how much traffic you have so when you first sign up with zoic or any like premium ad network what's gonna happen is you're gonna earn a very low epmv you know it might be anywhere from two to ten dollars per thousand views or which is what epmp means earnings per thousand views or visits and so you might find something in that 2 7 10 range we find that over time sites on a zoic easily get up into the 20s and 30s and more especially the more you take advantage of like video ads um it depends on how many ad placements you have but then you know how friendly is your niche and your content to advertisers um are advertisers going to want to associate their brand with your content um is it is it a really like just audience friendly for for broad audiences is the topic something that's divisive at all that's gonna cause a struggle and also it just you have to be willing to put in the effort zoic now has their levels if you will take the time to go through and implement the things they say at each level and level up then as you get more traffic on your site um the the epmv not just the total earnings but the epmv will go up by the time you hit a level that you could go sign up for mediavine you can actually be earning just as high of epmvs on zoic as you could over there but only if you're going to take the time to learn the system because up until then on azoik you're kind of having to do it yourself which is the only way that they're by the way able to uh help brand new websites to be able to do that yeah um one question or quite a few questions or comments that i've seen here are about the recent algorithm updates uh that's something that's on our radar yep um we're still looking into all of that we don't want to make any comments or calls too early because sometimes it just needs time to settle out yeah usually when there's a new algorithm update it's like give it two weeks so for the first couple of days project 24 members most people were saying uh i'm not seeing anything um then after a couple days a few of them were like whoa 20 30 drop well okay but a one-day 20 drop on a lot of sites looks not that different from normal variability yep um and so it's like okay now we gotta let it play out um some of the websites that track like literally millions of searches to just kind of see how the domains are changing how the rankings how the serps are changing we're showing high amounts of change fairly high volatility for a couple of days right after right as it started to roll out we've seen that kind of level off i showed you the moz cast earlier i like the mozz cast it'll show you that temperature and you know we saw it as the temperature rises what that means is there's just more volatility in the serps things are shifting um but it takes a couple of weeks to kind of figure out okay what really changed um our sites like legitimately if you look at the analytics i can't tell there was a core update just can't even tell um yes and uh akil says amazon is the biggest winner for this update actually um large retail sites yeah i know i just said like tinfoil hat time again right no but um we we did see at least for right now i have to wonder though how much of that is just a shift in search of behavior yeah it's a good question i mean there are right now it's like black friday is literally this week people are shopping deals right now so are large retail sites going to be popping up more of course right because that's what people actually want to find and if google's doing their job that's what they should be surfacing so i don't i don't really know um latest caleb says hello hello hi i saw a question a minute ago uh how's jim doing i actually talked to jim on the phone yesterday um we haven't talked a little while he's been really busy doing his stuff i've been we've been obviously busy doing income school um but he he's doing well uh is is good to catch up with him and kind of see what he's up to um he's living the the blogger life which means he can dedicate some of his time to building up a very substantial blog by the way yeah um that's doing really really well um but he's able to dedicate time to other projects and things that he wants to do with his life so he's not working every single day a 40-hour week right on his blog anymore like we do here at income school because we don't just have a blog we run this whole thing blogging is a software engineer okay here's here's the thing like uh i get questions often like you know what should i do or you know can i blog is it this or is it that i am a chemical engineer income school is not a chemical engineering blog it's not i also have an mba and frankly like i teach a fraction of what business school teaches because i teach the stuff that's applicable to internet marketing if your background's in software engineering like that's actually really cool because you have a more technical knowledgeable background than a lot of people it's going to give you some um some good skills that a lot of us have to figure out when it comes to the computers and the web etc but that doesn't have to be your niche so you can talk about programming you can talk about software etc but you could also blog about pest control you know you can blog about whatever it is that you want to blog about so find something that you can if if writing about something in the software space would um would be just drudgery for you then don't do that okay yeah um someone here says are you guys selling any sites soon we don't have actually any cur like really really soon um i think we'll have some and in a while we're working on quite a few um but yeah i don't think i don't think right now none of that no no um really like we're we want to build up um a portfolio of sites that bring in a good solid passive income also um a couple almost two years ago now we sold all of our sites to start over yeah and while that was cool because it kind of forced us again to start from the beginning um what that also did is it made it so we didn't have any large blogs right to test things on right and when you can test on a site that already has a lot of traffic you can get results very quickly and see the outcomes very quickly and so um anyway i'd like to own several so what we'll probably start doing is selling one or two over time and starting a new one to kind of replace it rather than doing a wholesale ride sale right okay uh does a free wordpress theme collect user data it would depend on the theme i've noticed i don't know that i've ever come across a theme that um is like collecting user data without you knowing it um really the only reason you're you would collect user data is one the comments are turned on it's it's gonna get their ip address and their email like that's it though um you know with ads they're gonna to the extent possible try to collect some user data to target ads but of course things are changing there in the ad space google's changing the game there i mean so unless you're like you have an email list for people are directly signing up or you're selling an info product and again people are directly signing up you're not collecting user data um that might be something to look into with themes but legally they if someone's collecting user data on your website they have to notif they have to you have to know that so read through their terms make read through their privacy policy make sure um that you know but and then if they are you better include that in your privacy definitely um someone says what do you think does is the fishing niche profitable uh very shortly i'd say yes i'd say it is a pro i know of quite a few examples of profitable fishing niches or blogs in the fishing niche so yeah great niche um i saw the question how would you incorporate original research in the tech niche um and i've seen this question so you may have asked this before like in our community um i think this applies actually to me it's one of the easiest ones if i'm doing tech like any sort of tech reviews like original research means getting my hands on a product and that can be really hard with tech because you have a short window of time before like the text obsolete and you're competing against people who get the tech early but if you don't do like not all tech is that way if you're doing iphones like forget it you you better get your hand on the phone early but if you're doing um audio gear well that doesn't change as much over time right like you know um i did this isn't so much tech but i did um pellet grills a year and a half ago bought five of them well here i am a year and a half later and every one of those companies has put out a new model and they all say that they updated their uh pretty much all say that they updated their temperature controllers i'm like okay but really like did they really change um they're basically the same like the models have updated but the technology is the same um and so do i have to buy all the new ones again this year if i want to make some fellow girl videos not necessarily so um anyway like testing stuff testing gear uh but also it's not just about reviewing the gear if you have tech and you're just like hey i want to write an article about um i saw an article about how much a particular tech thing how much power it uses so what do you do you plug in a little like amp meter in the wall and then you plug the thing into that and it measures how many amps it's pulling and the guy did that for like an hour and took readings every five minutes and just had the chart of how much power usage it had and was like i used about this many hours of power over an hour well cool that's a definitive answer to that question it's not just uh well i read the specs and it says it uses this no no so if you're just like hey how much does this particular refrigerator use how much power does it actually use well okay yeah i'm going to plug it into an amp meter yep and that's like a 10 tool yeah julia here asks how do you afford to personally review products from expensive niches um or do you do that further in i think that you could do it further in you could do it at the beginning i like to think of my websites my projects as businesses yeah and if you think about it as a business making some sort of upfront investment isn't that uncommon and so if that's something you can do that's a great way to invest in your business up front if you can get like the pellet grills video if you can do that then that's a great way to kick start your business however if that's not something you can do then yeah you're just gonna have to push push push until you're actually making some revenue right and then definitely be reinvesting what you're making back into uh your project yeah we talked about barriers to entry before like if if you can set aside something to invest and somebody else either can't or won't well now they have another barrier to entry right and so when when we started backfire and this isn't about the topic of the channel i know it's fine but when we started backfire one of the first things that we did was we bought five hunting rifles they were the least expensive ones we could find basically and we compared them side by side and the channel got monetized within a month yep people spend more than a year oftentimes trying to get their first thousand subscribers getting advertised we launch a a series of videos reviewing five hunting rifles the five cheapest ones side by side and we're there i mean just ten thousand subscribers within a month or two i was just crazy that differentiates um you from other bloggers who just aren't willing to do the same thing so if you can um it one option is to just build up your blog starting as inexpensive as you can or starting with things where you can do some original research without testing products um we've talked about pets and it's like well can i call a pet store and interview the person who works there that's the dog expert or the cat expert that's a good start walk into the pet store for heaven's sake and go ask them like which of these cats would you would you take home would you adopt and why you know that is a form of original research but then um you know take that a step further when you can right um but the other option is like okay maybe if blogging takes six months to a year before i'm really making any money that would that like make me want to tell my friends what i'm doing on the side like a lot of us are kind of embarrassed to say yeah i'm blogging on the side until all of a sudden we're making good money then we're like i'm a blogger and it's awesome um but anyway like if that isn't gonna work if it's gonna take too long to be able to do what's gonna take make your blog take off okay that's fine do another side hustle in the short term that gives you immediate cash it's not there are a lot of side hustles that are not in my mind scalable there's only so many lawns i can mow right in a given week but i get paid for mowing those lawns immediately right and so go do the little side hustle for a couple of weeks save up your money and then go buy the stuff when jim got into photography he literally sold everything in his garage and bought a camera because he didn't have extra money and he just bought his first dslr camera and started learning how to take pictures that's something sometimes what you what you got to do yep well i don't know if we're going to be wrapping up here soon but probably in the next couple days yeah next couple minutes but there was a couple i've seen quite a few questions about ai blog posts or ai writing we did a test on this i think it was probably close to a year ago now we tested a couple different ones um it wasn't that great no um i think that it's something that could potentially be something interesting to follow but from what we've seen a human can just still write a better blog post than an ai can um there's just a lot more that you can do personally um with the topic and it might feel great to try and outsource it that way it might be feel cheap or like a cool hack but for now it's just not the same quality and so we don't use it we don't recommend people use it so that's kind of where we are on that topic yeah i you can use it to take some shortcuts yeah we found um there go the lights again we found that um some we got these like motion activated lights and if we don't move enough they just turn off um no but we found that like if you like coddle it and feed it it'll give you the next little bit it might it might um give you some subheadings you hadn't thought of but you can't just like have an ai write an article for you so it can help um but i mean how much time and effort and money are you putting into getting that help that you could just anyway it's not there yet a couple of questions here how do you optimize for featured snippets we actually have like a whole course yeah and it's not just a lesson like a course with multiple lessons in project 24 about all the different types of featured snippets and how to optimize content for each one but in short basically we're just giving the best answer in the best format that you can for search queries so in one article i might be writing content that really like there are a dozen searches that should maybe land on that article well within that article as many of those searches as i can think of i'm going to write a one paragraph answer about 300 characters that definitively answers the question in more encyclopedic style rather than kind of the more friendly style there's some other nuances to exactly how to do that but basically that's what it is sometimes the best format is a list that's fine right it is a list or each of the items in the list can be the subheadings of your article if the entire article is the list um that works really well too google can pick that up if it should be a table make it a table etc and google will even take certain rows and columns from the table right and condense it down and make a snippet so um yeah and then what is the best tool for optimized featured snippet keywords i i don't think there's a best um frankly again i'm back to looking for search queries some of the q the keyword research tools do a decent job of identifying search queries um the search volume numbers they give are still very off they're getting better particularly ahrefs in part because they have a free version now and they get you to install it on your website and so now they know all of your search volume you connected to search console and you're feeding their data set which i'm okay with that actually um they provide you a free resource and in return you provide them with data that makes their tool better yeah but that's why ahrefs is actually getting better at it most everybody is using clickstream data which is just a survey it's a subset of data from the web and um search queries that are searched less often which are the longer tail keywords that we should be going for um their data is going to be least the least accurate in a survey yeah and so it's just not that good and so anyway the idea here is we're looking for search queries that people are actually searching the volume of each one i care less about and so really what i'm looking for is what are people actually searching right it's not that hard to write one paragraph yeah right and so even if the search volume is 50 like okay i'm going to include it in an article yeah yeah i i give long answers [Laughter] and thanks carl i appreciate it um carl broadbent nice guy um here in the in the live um he has his own youtube channel as well um and uh anyway great guy he's uh he's the one who's hosting putting on the affiliate gathering in the uk and york um if you're anywhere around there or can get to anywhere around there in may we do have um an affiliate marketing event um affiliate marketing is a piece of what we do at income school but really like everybody that's there it's a piece of what they do almost everybody there's using ads etc to monetize their blogs and so um got a good lineup of speakers and stuff luke asks how long can you give a blog to marinate in the serps before adding new content well i think a lot of times we or ours or project 24 members will write a good batch of content in the beginning um we never really tell you to stop i mean it's always maybe slow down a little bit once you hit 30 40 50 articles maybe slow down to one or two a week if you have to um but other than that i don't think i would stop i would always be dripping content onto the site um if you're wanting to take a break if you just need a break for a week or two weeks or a month that's probably not going to hurt it no as long as your content is pretty evergreen if you're a news site or something yeah you're going to be on that content treadmill but other than that i would just drip a few articles a week keep your search analysis up so that you can always have fresh content hitting i think that's probably the best way to do it there's a question here about using podcasts as a medium with your blog um i love podcasts in fact podcasting is something that i think we'll probably start talking about more the difficulty with podcasts is it's not a great um it's there's not a great place for people to just find you right um but it's a fantastic place to get your message out especially if you're you know youtube isn't quite your thing yet you're you're nervous about that but i can maybe do audio yeah right that's fine start with the blog add your podcast on there just know that unlike youtube it's not really going to get spread the same way and so you're going to need to go be interviewed on other people's podcasts which means you need to interview them and vice versa you got to do a little more work to get found but the followership that you get with the podcast is a lot more like what you get on youtube but i also what i like about it is you kind of have their ear for a longer time like you can share a lot more in a podcast right so um i really like that swing for the ring says i'm here for the free thai curry me too someone asked any chance of jim doing update on the backfire blog i think at some point we'll get him on here to do that i'd love to see um love to talk with oh yeah about that yeah um another uh learners asked how do you start from scratch we will soon be doing a new webinar um very like in-depth video um just like so yesterday on channel makers on that youtube channel nate did a walkthrough of the new youtube system just kind of showing start to finish this is how i would build a new channel and we're going to be doing the same thing on income school for a blog talking about some of the different kind of paths you can take as well as just the steps from the very beginning so keep keep your eye out for that okay we should probably take like we'll let's each take okay we'll teach take one more okay um okay i'll take how do you manage running multiple blogs at a time i'm running three and find it difficult on just difficult just one man oh yes yeah yeah it's it's a lot of work um i think that having some amount of the work outsourced can definitely help um whether that's you hire a rider or if you have someone to help you edit or you have someone to help with some aspect of the work that's really the only way that we can do obviously we could not write content for 20 or 30 or 40 websites that's just not realistic and so really just have to find out the balance you know could you be doing one site better than you could be doing five sites you know if you put all your focus on one site would it be more valuable in the long run to just have total focus there and sometimes that is the case especially if you struggle with delegating some of the work but there's a lot of value to having a portfolio to kind of minimize your risk on one site but it is a lot of work you know keeping up with the content keeping up with the monetization um making sure your links are all organized all of those your amazon links and you know it's a lot of work yeah um so how do we do it um probably not as good as we should yeah with a team but it is something that it's it's worth doing to diversify and i think along those lines like having a system for everything yes and so like okay i want to do a good job of an internal linking strategy okay you need a system for that if you have multiple blogs like you know i need all the articles on the website need to structure them so that i know like what goes with what so when i write a new blog post not only do i interlink out to other articles but i link from some of those to this one right as appropriate etc so you need a system for that if you have a system you can hand it off to a virtual assistant and then my last question that i'm going to take was um i lost it here oh it was about email lists i don't think we talk about this enough frankly because again that's another one of the things we should be doing more of and better at but this is a great question how do you manage an email list when your your site covers multiple kind of related topics um i think you know on income school we have people that come to income school to learn about youtube we have people that we have content about podcasting we not enough again we have content about email lists we have content about blogging starting a blog in wordpress but also affiliate marketing i mean there's there are a lot of categories of content that people come to us for so what do you do well i think you we all need to get better at tags so within your email list provider you should have a way to tag different users and so what you do is you create an email signup form that you put in different places so if i have a blog post that's about podcasting then you know what i'll do is i'll have somewhere in the blog post if i'm if i want people to sign up for the email instead of just having it in the sidebar or a pop-up which is really bad for seo by the way and user experience you don't really want that even though they convert well they're probably harming your traffic yeah um that's a whole other point um but but somewhere contextually i'm gonna give people a reason to wanna sign up but i'm also gonna make it clear that like hey if you put your name here and give me your email address you're gonna get relevant content about podcasting this is the topic of this post podcasting and maybe you know i have some sort of simple lead magnet to get them to want to sign up for that list and then now when they sign up they are just they're put on my normal email list but they're tagged with the tag podcasting and so then when i want to send out an email that's about podcasting fantastic they like i just only send it to people with that tag what if i want to send out an email that's more generally just about internet marketing yeah well then i send it to everyone and so we just need to get better at being smart about our list you don't need a super expensive email provider to do tags and you know this can be done um we if you want to see who we recommend we have a couple recommendations at incomeschool.com tools um where you can see who we recommend who we use send in blue is still pretty cheap you can get started for free convertkit who we're using for income school also has a free level you sign up and until you have some email some actual subscribers um a few hundred at least you're gonna be able to do it for free yep okay okay go for a thing to say but i want to say right at the end here um so we've talked about a lot of different courses today that we have we just we announced the new uh youtube system launch our affiliate course um we have stuff on podcasting everything frankly if you've been struggling with this at all for a while and want to make it work yeah us making a living like for me to make a living um i don't feel good about it unless i'm actually giving people value i don't feel good about just like collecting money from the internet because i know that that's not from the internet i know that's from actual people yeah and so nate and i talk all the time we talk all the time and it's just like nope if we're going to do something it's going to be done right and we're going to help people and what project 24 is all about it's helping you to get to success helping you make money from the internet um create things of value and be able to use that to earn a living so go check that out that's it see you guys later

Channel: Income School

Views: 26,337

Keywords: internet marketing, passive income, website, seo, content marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, youtube creators

Id: HuuqcAeOZ8w

Length: 60min 47sec (3647 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 23 2021