Spencer Haws (Niche Pursuits) is an OG PLAYA in the blogging world.
He has an incredible track record of building up blogs for affiliate income (both old school niche sites, and “modern” niche sites–i.e. normal blogs ????)
He also has a WEALTH of experience driving blog traffic across multiple channels (SEO, Pinterest, you name it).
Soooooooo on this episode:
- EXACTLY how much should you use keywords in your content (for SEO?)
- Why internal linking is awesome & super easy low-hanging fruit
- Why you SHOULD seriously look into buying a blog
Spencer’s got me up here absolutely ITCHING to buy a blog and grow it for money. So tempting. Anybody wanna partner up and do this? ????
Enjoy this chat!
Listen to my episode with Spencer Haws from Niche Pursuits:
or listen on Apple Podcasts \\ Google Podcasts \\ SpotifyResources mentioned:
- Link Whisper – Spencer’s tool for auto-pilot internal linking for SEO!
- Problogger job boards – for hiring contractor/freelance writers
- Motion Invest – Spencer’s newest service business for flipping blogs
Special thanks to today’s sponsor, Freshbooks!
- Freelancer?
- Online business?
- Blogger w/ expenses and revenues?
Freshbooks is for you! It’s an incredible tool, AND it’s thanks to them the DYEB podcast is possible–so go show them some love!
Head to Freshbooks.com/doyouevenblog and enter DO YOU EVEN BLOG in the “how did you hear about us” section.
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Here’s the full transcript with Spencer:
spencer: [00:00:00] In the beginning, we could talk about probably a a dozen different traffic sources, right? Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, SEO, traffic, paid traffic, , email, newsletter, traffic, referral, traffic, , lots of different things.
Pick one and just become really, really good at it and focus on it.
pete: [00:03:00] So you have been, quote unquote, retired from corporate America life for roughly nine years at this point. First of all, congratulations. I should have said that. What was the point where you realized you had kind kinda made it, I’m sure you were kind of nervous back when your niche sites were just taking off.
It was like 2011 right? I think I read you
spencer: [00:03:18] yup.
pete: [00:03:19] When did you finally have like a little bit of confidence or when did you feel comfortable that you had done the right thing? Quit the job and doing this whole, on my business thing full time.
spencer: [00:03:30] Well, the niche sites, uh, certainly provided me the confidence to quit my job. But when did I make it? , over the first couple of years of quitting my job, I had created long tail pro. And so a couple of years into after creating long tail pro, we did a massive promotion. And it brought in something like $250,000 in sales in a week.
Uh, you know, my cut was less than that, you know, with affiliates taking their cut, et cetera. But it was like, Holy cow, I think I’m onto something. I think I’ve made it now. , so that, that was a couple of years after quitting my job. Um, that was one of the. Definitely one of the big moments. Um, and I’ve had a couple sentence, but that was probably early on.
Definitely was a confidence booster.
pete: [00:04:23] Okay. Have you ever had like a low point or felt like, you know what, maybe I should go back to working in banking or something? Any times you felt like quitting during that time?
spencer: [00:04:32] , yeah, actually, uh, within the first year of me. Well, it’s always a roller coaster, always a roller coaster. But within the first year of quitting my job, uh, the Panda update from Google came out, and this is only for old school, you know, bloggers or niche site builders that would remember the Panda and penguin came out shortly thereafter, I think it was six months later.
And those had, . Big negative impacts on a lot of my websites. And so that was, that was definitely a low point of, do I try to rebuild this? Um, you know, I’ve lost a lot of my income, or do I buckle down, try to evolve my strategies and, , try, try to work well with the new Google. And, uh, luckily I stuck with it.
pete: [00:05:22] So I’m really glad you did that. That’s the perfect transition into kind of what I want this podcast episode to be about.
I want to ask you about blog traffic. I know that’s super broad, but let me give you some context,
you as well as anybody else who has done more and more. Niche sites, authority sites, buying and selling new blogs in recent years.
I tend to trust when it comes to how you talk about blog traffic and you’re not like this, this, like Spencer who started back in 2011 and he made it big and then he didn’t do anything for like the past five years and just been living on this one big brand that you built like a decade ago. That would be great too.
spencer: [00:06:03] Right?
pete: [00:06:03] me wrong, I don’t want to put those people down, but you’ve also done really cool stuff. In the meantime. Including, Oh, what was I, I was just reading about this in the prep for this interview. I think it was like niche project for, did
spencer: [00:06:17] You got
pete: [00:06:18] You released an update last month.
spencer: [00:06:20] Yup.
pete: [00:06:20] , I was like, Oh man, it’s just like he, he’s still talking about like Pinterest, what’s going on there?
And of course SEO and stuff like that. So let’s start with this, Spencer, for anybody who’s started and 2019, this is January, 2020. So I’m gonna say, anybody who’s started in the last 10 to 12 months. What advice would you give them when they have no idea about blog traffic? These are new bloggers specifically.
They’ve landed on ditch pursuits or they’ve landed on do even blog. They kind of got excited and they started a blog and they had fun, and now they realize traffic is hard and they’re starting to go out there and learn more about SEO and or Pinterest or maybe paid ads. What would be your very broad generic advice for those people?
spencer: [00:07:06] well, as far as blog traffic, I would say pick a strategy and just become an expert at it. In the beginning because there we could talk about probably a dub, a dozen different traffic sources, right? Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, SEO, traffic, paid traffic, you know, email, newsletter, traffic, referral, traffic, you know, lots of different things.
Pick one and just become really, really good at it and focus on it. Probably for your first year, maybe longer. , and, and, and that just depends on, what maybe you’re good at or your personality. some people love Pinterest, right? And so maybe they’re happy to spend hours every day pinning things and, and, you know, sharing and tribes, et cetera.
That’s honestly not really me. Uh, but you know, right. Right? But at this point, you know, I’m a little more advanced and I’ve been able to outsource some of that, right? So I’m not personally on Pinterest, but I still have a little bit of a Pinterest, a traffic source. Uh, but maybe it’s SEO. And that’s my primary source of traffic for most of my sites is I’ve become really good at keyword research, , figuring out how to write articles so that Google will rank them and you can perform better than others.
Websites that have written on the same subjects. , and so that, that would be my advice is pick a source of traffic and, and stick with it, become an expert at it, and just go all in on that source.
pete: [00:08:43] This, this is totally random and always slightly off topic maybe, but outside of the two of us, quite frankly, who are you learning. A SCO from personally, like is there anybody you still follow now 10 years after being in this game that you look for for like, I’m going to say trending, but like updated SEO strategies and stuff like that.
spencer: [00:09:06] Yeah. Like, I, I read the search engine news. So search engine land or, you know, search engine journal just for, not so much tips, but, , changes, right? Like, I think it was just maybe two days ago, Google announced that there’s the January update, you know, a core algorithm update, right?
So I read the news sources to make sure I’m on top of, you know, Google has announced this. I want, I want to know that, . But as far as strategies, um, there’s a few, you know, if, , Brian Dean or Neil Patel, , Matt diggity is another one. , or, uh, a few other guys that either I’m just connected with.
Honestly, a lot of, or at least a couple of other people that I’m connected with are just on Facebook and private Facebook groups. You know, like, uh, SEO, Facebook groups. , you know, I’ll, I’ll kind of browse there and just, uh, I like to read any sort of case studies or people saying, Hey, I did this and this worked.
, but no one particular source. But, but that’s a few that I, you know, will sort of pay attention to there. , and then a lot of it’s just through my own trial and error, uh, as well that I’m seeing on my own sites.
pete: [00:10:14] let me give you like a little hypothetical here. I want to transition, uh, in just a few minutes to talk about buying and selling sites. And you also have like a new partnership or company or joint venture you mentioned off air. I want to dive into that a little bit too. But before we get there, I would be curious to hear some of your low hanging fruit SEO strategies.
If you were to pick up a new blog today, and let’s say the blogs about a year old, but it managed to generate some decent back links or referring domains, and it’s first year and it’s in a, it’s already in a niche that you kind of feel attracted to or you think has opportunity or something like that.
Let’s say you inherit that. Somebody just hands it to you one day and now you’re looking down the barrel of six months or a year, how, what are some of the things you would do to start building more links or start pumping out content? Or what were some of the standard SEO strategies you would do in that scenario?
spencer: [00:11:14] Great question. Uh, so the first thing I would do is look at the existing content and how it can be updated and improved. So before I’d go and order another 30 articles, I would first look at. What do they have written already on the site? And I would do an a, a complete audit. I would analyze which pages or keywords are ranking on the first page or the second page.
Uh, that’s primarily what I would focus is keywords that are already ranking on the first and second page, and how can I bump them up from position seven to number one or position. 13 to number one in Google. And there’s a lot of different tools that can help you analyze, like on page SEO. Uh, but when it comes down to it, I would look at how are the existing articles competing or compared, .
How, how, how do they compare to existing content out there? So do they need to do, do I need to add additional word count to the articles? Do I need to make them longer? Do I need to add more images? Do I need to include a keywords better in the H two tags? Uh, things like that. So I’d go in, I’d update the content to make it better, longer, and generally a more SEO optimized.
I’ve seen huge gains, , from doing that, , massive gains on articles that can, you know, double or triple the search engine traffic just by going in and adding a few hundred words and optimizing it better. So that would be step one. Step two, I would then look at the internal linking structure of the site.
I would look at, uh, are there well and, and very low hanging fruit is looking at orphan pages. Those are pages on your site that don’t have a single internal link pointing to them. , so I would go in, I’d look at every page that has zero internal links, and I’d make sure that it had at least one internal link.
, and a lot of cases, you know, you’d be able to add three or four or more, just depending on how much content is on the site, et cetera. So I would focus quite a bit of time on doing those two things. And then at that point, I would develop a broader keyword strategy. And start, you know, writing new content, et cetera.
But, but the on page SEO is definitely the low hanging fruit. I’d focus on
pete: [00:13:46] Okay. I’ve got a question. Let me backtrack for a second. So most of my, I love them dearly. Most of my SEO friends who work full time in SEO, they tend to look at tools like Yoast. And rightfully so, probably that didn’t look at Yoast and people, new bloggers, especially trying to get like the green bullets and EOS and trying to, you know, cut down on the yellows and reds and they talk about adding your keyword in the first sentence.
So the first paragraph or the first hundred words, and they talk about adding your keywords and and a bunch of different stuff like that. I would love to give your opinion, Spencer, like how important is. Maybe we could even just break down each of those right there, like do you, do you, do you think it’s still important in 2020 and beyond to include keywords like in the first hundred words or the first paragraph?
How about that one?
spencer: [00:14:38] I do. I still do that. you know, Google is still an algorithm and, they, they don’t read like humans, meaning that they don’t necessarily fully understand content. Right? They can matte, they, they can match based on keywords and perhaps synonyms. But they don’t truly, you know, read an article and understand, right?
They don’t read your best racquetball racquets article and, and truly understand that, you know, this brand is the best one per se. Right. Um, so, uh, I, I do, um, I do think that mentioning in the first a hundred words is important. So right off the bat, they know, okay, this is, this is a core topic of the article.
pete: [00:15:22] let me just curious, do you still use Yoast or do you use Yoast?
spencer: [00:15:26] I do use Yos. Yeah.
pete: [00:15:28] you, okay. All right. Fair enough. How concerned are you over the bullets? I know this is totally like random off topic, but I’m sincerely curious to hear it from different people.
spencer: [00:15:38] when I outsource, it’s a really easy box to check for my writers. Right. , so. I have that as a standard operating procedure that it needs, you know, the green, you know, uh, bullet points or whatever, right? It meets all the Yost criteria. Uh, so I make sure that my authors do that. So it is important. , but, , if there were articles that I was writing and sometimes I didn’t get the green Yoast, I wouldn’t be too concerned because I intuitively kind of understand.
What Yoast is trying to achieve. It’s hard to teach a writer that, Hey, it doesn’t necessarily mean just because the readability isn’t green like I, you know, maybe don’t be too concerned about that. Just generally, these are great guidelines.
pete: [00:16:28] So I actually wrote down on my notes here. Ordering articles. You even said that earlier. I know we’re jumping around quite a bit and I, I apologize, but as somebody who is looking to outsource a few tasks, even in the next like month or two, I’m actually starting with podcasting, outsourcing and editor and so forth, but also SEO and content.
I would be curious, and I don’t know, this is a tough question. I want to ask so many questions, but.
Where do you find your writers, I guess would be a good question. And, or
I’m sure you’ve been doing this for quite a while now. Do you have like a full team of writers or do you still going to like Upwork or are you looking at like the pro blogger job board or still finding people?
What does your team look like there.
spencer: [00:17:18] Yeah. So I do have a team of about five writers right now. , and I found them. You already named it. , Upwork. Pro blogger job boards. I think I’m three or four from the pro blogger job boards. One is from Upwork, I think right now. And then a one is just personal contacts. it’s actually my sister, but I’ve, I’ve found writers through, personal, personal contacts, friends, family, acquaintances over the years, you know, randomly as well.
So.
pete: [00:17:51] A podcast repeats brain is like delayed like two and a half minutes today. Apparently. I’m still tired, I guess, but I’ve found the perfect question to ask you about writers. Now. I should have asked you two minutes ago, but now I’m going to ask you anyways, so. I just explained to you that I’m probably going to be looking for a few contributors in the next month or two for do you even blog and another site, my first niche site in years actually, and
the question is, what advice would you give me?
I haven’t hired a writer. I’m pretty sure ever. I’ve had some contributors, but I haven’t actually hired a writer from any of those places you just mentioned forever. What would be like the top tip or the top couple of tips that you would give me? Just starting out.
spencer: [00:18:33] So I really like, especially for budget options. and somebody. Yeah, that’s the, that’s maybe just getting started out. I found success going to Upwork and hiring an hourly person. it’s very common to hire a writer, you know, on a per work basis. And what you’ll find is that if you’re paying 3 cents, 4 cents, 5 cents a word, you actually end up overpaying a lot of times, because if you can get a writer that, and, and you can find good writers, honestly, for 10 to 15 or $20 an hour.
So let’s say you find somebody $15 an hour, it takes them, you know, call it two hours to write a 2000 word article. Right? That’s $30. Whereas if you know, it’s pretty common to pay four or 5 cents a word, so let’s say 4 cents a word, that would be $80 for that exact same 2000 word article. So you just saved yourself $50, on a piece of content.
And so my advice would go, and maybe I didn’t clarify. Another point is ask for beginners. in the job post, say, I want to beginner, I do not want an SEO expert. If you even mention SEO, I’m not going to consider you. so what you want is somebody like perfect people are college students and stay at home moms, people that are willing to work, you know, for 15 bucks an hour and don’t have a lot of SEO experience or writing experience.
You want to have them follow your SLPs, your standard operating procedures, right? You don’t want him to come in with any preconceived notion of how to rank in Google, et cetera. You just want them to be smart. Writers, you just want them to come in and be able to write, and then they follow your procedures for mentioned the keyword in the first hundred words, or, et cetera, et cetera.
So try to look for beginners and hire hourly instead of per word. That would be my advice.
pete: [00:20:40] It’s so interesting. First of all, I’m gonna let me comment on that. So that’s counterintuitive. I was thinking that’s odd. I would be afraid of the quality that they would give me. But then again, I’ve never done this before. And then I thought about, excuse me, and then I thought about the people who I have worked with.
Again, I haven’t hired a whole bunch of writers, but I, I’ve kind of done that. I’ve found writers to write for me and some freelance clients, and they’ve all been. Experienced SEO literate and I haven’t been entirely pleased, at least from an SEO content perspective. So now I’m like, well, wait, what are my preconceived notions here?
What am I missing? There’s something, right? I’m going to try it this now. Spitzer, I wrote it on my notes. I’m actually gonna do exactly what you said.
spencer: [00:21:28] Yeah. And it is important that you have the, the procedures for them though. Right? So that’s the other piece is you need to think through, and here’s the six or seven steps you need to follow when you write this article. And you need to have that for your writers. Uh, so they can come in and, and mostly just worry about writing, but then they can go through that six or seven checkpoints and make sure they do it according to how you want it done.
pete: [00:21:52] Curious, are your SOPs public information, do you have those anywhere on niche pursuits or otherwise?
spencer: [00:21:59] I, I don’t, , I, yeah, I, I included them in a course that I once taught that I’ve, I’ve shut down and, you know, I’m not selling online courses anymore. Um, but other than that, yeah, they’re just private to me.
pete: [00:22:11] What’s the big deal? There is an article out there I found, I have a book somewhere. I didn’t remember what site it was on, to be honest with you. It was something like how to create. Standard operating procedures for your online business, and it was very helpful. I’ll see if I can like drum that up for the show notes or something.
Okay. Let’s transition a little bit into buying and selling before I ask. So first of all, people listening to this primarily don’t buy and sell blogs, which is interesting, but I’ve heard from a lot of people that they’re, they’re interested in it. that like 0.2% of my audience has probably bought.
A existing site or a sold, there’s probably a few more that have sold their sites, but in general, people are kind of interested in this topic. So before we get into that, give me like a 62nd elevator pitch on your new business. I know you want to talk about it. I, I’m curious to ask you questions about it, but like give us the name, the URL where can find it and w and what does it, what does this do?
Venture. You have
spencer: [00:24:43] All right. 62nd elevator pitch.
pete: [00:24:46] ready, set, go. I’m putting my timer on.
spencer: [00:24:49] It is. So much easier to buy an existing business that’s already making money than it is to start something from scratch. So you could go and buy a blog that’s making $500 a month right now and tomorrow you could be making, you know, $500 a month. A lot of people starting a blog, it might take them a year, two years or longer to get to the $500 a month Mark.
So it, it’s, um. Incredibly advantageous to get into blogging by buying a blog. , it’ll cost you probably less money and less time. Uh, so that’s the reason why you might want to do it now. Motion invest. So motion invest.com is a service, a business that I started with a couple of co-founders where we are buying and selling online.
Businesses on websites, blogs, niche sites, , and so we, so there’s two sides of it. If you are looking to sell, uh, we are a great option because we don’t charge any fees. We will buy directly from you. Uh, we will send you cash quite quickly, right? So it’s fast, close, no fees. Et cetera. We want to buy, we are looking to buy.
, but the other thing, if you are interested in buying a blog, it’s say making $500 a month. You can come to motion, invest.com and we are selling some of our portfolio. Uh, you know, we are constantly buying and selling new properties. So every week we have new listings. You can come and you can buy a site again, no fees, you buying from us directly.
You’re not buying from somebody else. , and so hopefully we’re trustworthy enough that, you know, Hey, we’re going to deliver, uh, et cetera. , and so that’s, yeah, that’s, that’s the quick pitch. If you want to either buy or sell an existing blog motion, invest is a great place to go.
pete: [00:26:52] so let’s talk about multiples as in, usually if somebody is looking to sell their blog and they’re making $500 a month, there is a. Multiple that will determine like the price they can’t get. Sometimes I don’t, I don’t know. Is it like a year, two years? We’ll specifically talk about selling for a second and somebody wants to sell
a, this is, this is tricky because your, your business is built on kind of flipping, but the people out there who want to sell and want to get the best price, obviously, what’s, what’s a reasonable multiple they should expect or they could expect.
spencer: [00:27:27] Yeah, so right around probably two and a half years of earnings, or which equates to 30 times, uh, monthly earnings. Right. That’s, that’s, that’s pretty close. If you were to go to a typical brokerage or something like that, that that’s pretty close to what you could get is take your monthly net income, multiply that by 30.
Okay.
pete: [00:27:49] I’m curious. I have to ask the question. When you guys buy sites, are you doing any work to them? Like you’re trying to like just monetize as best you can so you can increase that multiple for yourself before you sell? Is that what you guys are doing? If you don’t mind me asking.
spencer: [00:28:05] Uh, sometimes, uh, it kind of is a case by case basis. For the most part, we are turning around and selling them quickly.
pete: [00:28:15] Okay, so let’s say. For the people listening to this who might want to buy a blog, what are some things they would look for? They would either go on motion, invest, or if they’re reaching out to friends they have in the community or something. Is there like a timeframe, like this blog has been active for like at least six months, but less than like five years or is all revenue focused or traffic like are you looking for a minimum?
Must have at least. 5,000 page views a month or something like that, or is it just like a gut feeling? Different niches? What are some of the guidelines for buying a blog that then you can monetize better? Or in your case flip,
who won’t be flipping, like monetize that and create opportunity there.
Does that make
spencer: [00:29:02] right? Yeah. So typically the longer the age, the better. Right? So if you can buy a blog that’s 10 years old, that’s, that’s great. Right? So, so age is usually great. And the reason for that is typically authority. So the other thing you want to look at is, , uh, link authority or domain authority. You know, so how strong is the domain?
What type of links does it have pointing to it? If it’s got a lot of powerful links pointing to it, that’s a really good thing. So, look at, back when we profiled domain authority, age and then revenue is a big one, right? How much is the site making every month? And what are the revenue sources? , and there there’s, you know.
Several other points they might look at as well, like how concentrated is the traffic on one particular page? Is 90% of the traffic coming to one article or is it spread out, you know, pretty well. If it’s all coming to one article, that’s, that’s not a good thing. Right. , you know, going back to links, are there spammy links pointing to the website already?
, so you want something that has a clean. Backlink profile. Hopefully a lot of domain authority, uh, is a consistent earner. Right? It’s been earning money, , for, you know, over six months. Uh, would, would be great. And then, then trends, you want to look at traffic trends, earning trends. Is it going up?
Is it going down? , yeah, things like that.
pete: [00:30:30] Okay. It’s such an interesting prospect. Part of me is like, well,
it depends. It would have to be, it would have to appear to be under monetized. I guess I’m thinking personally here, by the way, if I were
spencer: [00:30:42] Right, right.
pete: [00:30:43] a side, I would think like, and these would be under monetized. Elsa is going to take me 30 months to earn that money back.
I need to be able to like leverage that and increase it.
Okay. All right.
spencer: [00:30:53] Yeah. I mean, just, just to give you an example, a concrete example, right, so I’m doing, as you mentioned, my niche site project for on niche pursuits.com it’s a public project where I built a niche site from scratch. It’s been a year and four months, I think since I started it. Uh, the site last month did really well.
It earned $2,300, uh, last month, but that was because of Christmas. If I were to look at the average earnings over the last six months, you know, it’d be closer to maybe $1,200. Okay. Something like that. So if I were, if we take my 30, multiple, $1,200 times 30 is $36,000. Okay. So I could buy a site today making $1,200 a month for $36,000 I can tell you that I’ve spent right around $36,000 to build my niche site from the ground up.
So if I’ve invested, let’s call it essentially the exact same dollar amount, but the difference is. I’ve, you could, I’m putting air quotes wasted. I’ve wasted a year and four months of my time. And so what would have happened if I had bought a year and four months ago spent $36,000, , I would’ve been making $1,200 a month during that year and four months, right?
So what is that 16 months? That’s an addition. So basically I lost out on $19,200 because. For the first year it was making almost nothing.
pete: [00:32:31] I like that. That makes more sense. I like it when you put it in that perspective. That’s a good pitch.
spencer: [00:32:36] So I, I’m not saying it’s forever, like I still just built a site from scratch. Sometimes that’s, that’s a great option to go, but it’s worth considering looking at buying as well. It all depends.
pete: [00:32:49] I tell people this all the time. Part of the reason I started podcast was to get like. Free consulting like other, I was like, send Spencer an email and be like, Hey, can I have an hour of your time just to like pick your brain?
I hate when people use those words and most everybody would say like, no, have zero interest, but started podcasts and like develop some sort of audience and now like, Oh, this is cool. I get to ask questions, learn about Spencer’s new business, and also satisfy some of my own, like,
spencer: [00:33:14] Hundred percent
pete: [00:33:15] yeah, so I’ll tell you what to wind down here. Let’s talk about link. Whisper. Wait. It’s not link whisper or I always want to say that, but it’s the link whisper. There’ll be like the dog whisperer. But with internal links,
spencer: [00:33:28] Just link. Whisper. Yup.
pete: [00:33:30] link whisper.
spencer: [00:33:32] when I first built it, I had just hired a freelance developer to get the initial version up and out the door. Right. So somebody part time, uh, contract work to get the initial version. , and then a couple of months after launching when I saw there was traction.
And it looked like the market was responding that yeah, people like link whisper. They think it’s a good idea. Then I went ahead and I hired a full time developer.
pete: [00:33:57] So. Do you have any, you have any case studies or like success stories? I know it’s a good product. I installed it. We emailed back and forth like a couple of months ago and I, I, I put it on my site. I’ve already optimized a few links because it’s pretty, it’s pretty slick actually, especially with somebody already armed with the knowledge, who knows what orphan content is and knows roughly.
, what their anchor text should be like, where their, what an internal linking structure is, especially somebody armed with that minimum amount of knowledge. Uh, I think it can be extremely powerful. But do you have any like success stories? Did you put this on the niche project? , when it first came out, like th the current project you just released an update on in December.
spencer: [00:34:43] Yeah. You know, I do have, uh, some case studies, uh, definitely some examples of, , sites where I’ve built internal links and it’s, it’s, , seen, uh, big results. One of those is niche pursuits.com. , just generally speaking, you know, I went through several articles. And I, I mean, I could share, you know, 10 different articles I went through and they just saw big jumps just by adding internal links.
, and it’s funny you should ask because just in the last, uh, week, I’ve been, um, updating my niche site project foresight, which is own the yard.com people can go check it out. It’s public, , so own the yard.com. I’ve, in the last week I’ve been. Internal linking. I’ve been using link whisper. So what I did is I opened up link whisper.
I went to the report so I could see which articles didn’t have any links, right? Because authors have been writing a lot of articles over the last couple of months. And I wanted to make sure that all of them had at least one internal link pointing to them. And, , so over the last week I’ve been adding, uh, internal links to those pages.
And I was just, this morning. Looking at my rank tracker, because I tracked my ranks. , this article, one of these articles just jumped 31 positions in Google. It was ranked 32 yesterday and I, I built, a couple of internal links yesterday. Today it’s number one in Google. and then there is a, another one.
That, a month ago, it was ranked 70 in Google. And I, and I built the internal links to this one a couple of weeks ago. that’s why I’m showing you a month ago, but a, a month ago was ranked 70. And today it’s number two in Google. And so, and I, and I have several other examples of just building one or two internal links really can make a difference.
pete: [00:36:38] link was dot com people can check that out. I’ll put, Hey, I have an affiliate link. I’ll put my affiliate link in the show notes too. There you go.
spencer: [00:36:44] Yeah. Do it.
pete: [00:36:46] That’s all I got. Let me ask you one more question that I asked to almost every guest on this show, Spencer, what is one thing you wish other bloggers would stop doing immediately?
spencer: [00:37:00] I think that too many times bloggers will say that, , you know, this strategy is the only way to go, and, and this is what you have to do. And you know. They come off as a little bit arrogant and as though they know everything, I do my best, uh, believe it or not, uh, through niche pursuits to share both my successes and my failures, I try to be pretty open about what doesn’t work.
And so I think that, , bloggers too often just cherry pick and share the good news and don’t share the bad news as well. And so I think that bloggers did a little more of sharing some of the bad news or just. Honestly presenting themselves as, as a real person, I think people can connect and they’ll do a little bit better.
pete: [00:37:46] I love that.
That’s pretty much what I’ve built my brand on. For the most part. I’m banking on you being right, so, yeah, I hope you’re right. Cool. Well. Motion, invest.com link was for.com ms pursues.com is there any place you would prefer people follow you? Social, Instagram, Twitter, anything like that?
spencer: [00:38:06] you know, I am on Twitter, , but probably my private Facebook group. Uh, then private niche pursuits, Facebook group is probably the best place to, um, get my attention. And it also just, there’s a lot of great discussion going on there.
pete: [00:38:22] Alright, Spencer, buddy, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate your time and good luck with your current projects, man.
spencer: [00:38:30] Thank you so much. It’s a, it’s been great being on the podcast, Pete. Appreciate it.