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- ISSUE 80
ISSUE 80
MuellerBot; E-A-T; Link Rot; Worst Types of Buyers; Fake AI Lawyers; Expired Domain Scammers; Niche Ventures Fund; and Much More!
Yoyao
April 30, 2022 • Est. Learning Time: 17 minutes
FIRST…
We have a couple of big hitters this week for Niche Creator Q&As - Charles Floate and Larry Ludwig!
These are great one-page profiles that many people love. People enjoy getting down to some of the core drivers for the success of these Creators.
Who are the other niche site builders / content creators that you want to hear from?
I don't have a specific order when asking people for interviews. It's all been pretty casual and loose, so far. I have a list of people I know, then I also come across people once in a while on Twitter or elsewhere who I see has had some success.
Charles talks about how having mentors accelerated his journey the most. Even if you don't have a mentor, there are many people that you can follow. @NicheSiteLady recently tweeted a thread of 25 YouTube channels to follow that you can follow and use as "mentors." (She has an upcoming Q&A as well!)
There are many ways to stay updated and continue learning. Larry said that the best decision he's made is to continue taking on new skills where he lacked the experience.
Aged domains have become a hot topic recently. Many people have talking about it and sharing success stories about how much traffic in days/weeks/months. Those are great and all, but those aren't as helpful when it comes to learning, because those posts are just about the results. It's not about how they got there.
Go to people like Mushfiq at The Website Flip and Adam/Mark at Niche Website Builders to learn the how and why aged domains work.
Mushfiq has paid courses (72-hour sale below), but also lots of free articles on TheWebsiteFlip.com. He also did one of the first Niche Creator Q&As.
Adam and Mark has aged domain services, but they have also been on a YouTube tear with many videos on aged domains. I'm obligated to also mention my NWB Interview with them here - one of the first videos on their channel!
There's lots of free information out there. There's also lots of paid information out there that offer a structured plan to learning. No matter how you go about it...
Always Be Learning!
NICHE CREATORS
This week's two Niche Creators are very active in sharing their knowledge. They are both very active on sharing their journey.
Check out their interviews:
Charles and Larry are two of the more influential SEOs and affiliate marketers out there. Larry also had a $5.8 million sale on one of his sites!
TOOLS AND RESOURCES
Acumbamail - Create and manage email campaigns and landing pages in a flash. Ends in 1 Day.
Heights - A popular online course platform. Create and sell your online courses, digital products, and memberships, along with content bundles. Supercharge student engagement with challenges, points, badges, projects, and forums.
Beacon - Beacon is an all-in-one tool that helps you create professional lead magnets, opt-in forms, and resource libraries to boost lead generation. I've used this and it's easy to use.
WriterZen - Generate unique content ideas and use detailed insights to create content that thrives.
I've been using WriterZen recently since they released their keyword clustering tool. This is great for keyword/topic research and creating clusters based on the SERPs. You can create clusters based on the results from their Keyword Explorer tool or import your own list of keywords. WriterZen will then go through the SERPs to find clusters based on similar SERP results, from 3 to 7 similar pages. This is a super easy way to create topical maps.
A Free tool from Alexis Rylko, a SEO, that lets you retrieve questions from Google Autocomplete and People Also Ask.
Great thing is it also supports multiple languages - English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
The inimitable, John Mueller is Google’s Search Advocate and the host of Google’s SEO Office Hours webinar. This script was originally intended as a light-hearted joke, until it became apparent the responses it gave were, in most cases, surprisingly accurate…
This is definitely a fun bot to play around with. You'll need to have a free OpenAI account that you also get $18 worth of API credits for free. Then use it with the Google Sheet and you have your own John Mueller answering your SEO questions.
CONTENT
A good look by Siege Media at E-A-T and what's good and bad when it comes to how you present it. They also give 7 tips to improve your E-A-T SEO:
Display your credentials
Build relevant links
Keep content fresh
Consult outside experts
Conduct a brand audit
Build E-A-T into your strategy
Invite reviews and engage with them
Tory Gray at OnCrawl takes a look at a few common international SEO issues like duplicate content and properly utilizing hreflang tags.
He takes a look at these common issues:
Full or near duplicate content across international page variations (color vs colour and pants vs trousers are duplicate content).
Low-quality (often automated) translations
Non-localized page copy and keyword targeting (Spanish in Spain vs Spanish in Mexico)
A nice collection and overview of 10 popular blog types + examples.
How-to guides
Content hubs
Expanded definition posts
Listicles, aka list posts
Expanded list posts
News
Data studies
Case studies
Cheat sheets and checklists
Templates
LINK BUILDING
Do you want to increase your guest posting outcomes and get high-quality backlinks? In this video, Matt Diggity offers up 3 techniques to get real results from guest post link building:
Re-write Old Content
Pitch Rankable Content
2-for-1 Guest Posts
Anchor text is one of the parts of SEO and links that beginners don't often consider, but it can also have a big effect. It's a part of backlinks from other sites and internal links. This Loganix article covers these types of anchor text:
Exact match
Phrase match
Partial match
Branded
Naked URL
Random
Image links
When keeping track of your links, I always include anchor text and the type it is. I keep track of the ratio of exact match/Target vs the others because if it's too heavy, it will hurt my site and/or page.
EDUCATION
Shawna Newman discusses the 3 buyer profiles that are the worst to sell to because they tend to take up the majority of your time for no real ROI on that time spent:
The tire kickers
The cheapskates
The gaslighters
I love how candid Shawna is with everything she does. She doesn't follow the herd. If you haven't read what she's said in her Niche Creators interview yet, definitely go check it out.
Mushfiq at The Website Flip is having a 72 hour sale with a 30% OFF discount for all his products! These are great courses and databases that act as checklists (EasyWins and EasyDiligence)
Use coupon code APRIL30 at checkout.
Course on Website Flipping: A decade of experience in a day with 6+ hours of videos, due diligence reviews, templates, and more!
Course on Aged Domains: Learn the ins and outs of using aged domains to build 6-7 figure content websites. Bonus: $200 credit to Odys market.
EasyWins.io: 120+ battle-tested tactics to 10X your site's traffic and revenue. Join over 500+ people using this database today
EasyDiligence.io: 45+ due diligence questions database and dashboard. This tool helps you structure your due diligence when buying sites.
If you bundle 2 or more products, he will give you an additional 10% OFF your entire order. Once you bundle, send an email to [email protected] and he will issue the funds back to your payment method.
CASE STUDY
Ahrefs found a total of 74.5% of the links in their study since January 2013 are considered lost, with at least 66.5% being rotted.
The web is constantly changing, and pages get removed or redirected. This makes links to these pages go to a broken page or possibly a page that’s not like the original. This phenomenon is called link rot.
BUSINESS IDEAS
Announcing Niche Ventures! I'm Looking to Fund and Partner on Your Next Big Idea... - Niche Pursuits
Spencer Haws is launching Niche Ventures! A fund that seeks to invest in profitable business ideas in the digital marketing, SEO, or online business market. In particular, he's looking to invest in Saas or other ideas that target digital marketers, bloggers, affiliate marketers, and SEOs.
He's not seeking to invest in “moonshot” ideas. He's not seeking to invest in ideas that hope to be profitable in a few years or go public.
He's looking for “niche” software or other businesses that are either currently profitable or expect to be profitable as soon as their product is launched.
Invest anywhere from $20k to $100k per business to help it grow.
On-going advice, connections, and coaching. A typical ongoing schedule would be 1 call per month to discuss the business.
Introductions to the right people, affiliates, and media.
Limited mentions of your business on Niche Pursuits (email, social, blog, podcast, etc.). These would be limited in nature, perhaps just a few times to help the business gain some traction.
NEWS
Haje Jan Kamps writes about how expired domains snapped up by scammers and black-hat SEO folks could erode the trust people have in Google.
Yes, there's a dark side to aged domains, especially with all the poor content and sites out there due to the Poor AI Content + Expired Domain formula. But this author has a clear-cut animosity towards expired domains. He must've been burned at one point or another.
He even goes so far to mention and link to places to buy aged domains, but those links are nofollow and he says this in parenthetical:
(As a side note, I stuck a rel="nofollow" on all three of those links in the HTML of this article. They ain’t getting TechCrunch’s sweet, sweet link juice on my watch...)
Wow. Just wow.
Spammers (scammers) are using AI-generated photos to create fake lawyers in a fake DMCA ploy to get backlinks for using copyrighted images.
This is a good look at how the author, Ben Dickson, investigated and found out that it was a scam scheme. These steps are similar to what you'd do when looking into businesses, as well as the history of aged domains.
LIKE NICHE SURFER?
Be sure to also join others riding the passive income wave in the Niche Surfer Discord group.
Have questions? Reply or email me at [email protected]. I’d love to know what you think and if you have any ideas.
I’d also appreciate it if you shared it with fellow niche surfers.
Have a great week taking your niche sites to another level!
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