so for all of you who are here thank you for being here um and uh i just wanted to go live today just wanted to take some questions i do have some questions from the project 24 community that i want to start with but i'm going to be taking questions from the chat as well so uh thank you everybody okay here we are um my first question comes from uh project 24 community and uh asking for a detailed example of how to battleship an old post that's ranking between four and ten so when we say battleship just for some background here uh we have our battleship method we have a youtube video about it we're talking about taking content that's at least a year old and um what are we gonna do to improve it so for ranking between four and ten we actually have some pretty good potential to boost the traffic substantially articles ranking number four five six seven eight nine and ten uh get substantially less clicks than those ranking number one um and then two and then three it drops off um obviously so what are we gonna do the first thing i'm gonna do is i'm gonna go look at who is ranking number one two and three and try to figure out why now every article is potentially gonna rank for multiple different search queries so we're talking about the primary search query i'm going to go see who's ranking why they're ranking and this really is kind of independent of how long the article is what is the level of resource i may use this example again later with another question that's asked but i was just looking at an article yesterday that one of our writers wrote a while back it's not actually published yet for one of our sites turn up the pressure.com and as i looked through the article i was like yeah this is on par with the article that's currently ranking number one but it's insufficient the person who reads this article still needs to do more research before they can do the thing the article is teaching them how to do that's not good enough and i went through the article with just my personal knowledge of the subject and i i reworded a lot of stuff i basically kind of rewrote the whole thing um rewording a lot of things taking a couple things out that were inaccurate and adding a lot and i took a about a thousand ten word blog post and turn it into about a 1700 word blog post not just because the length matters but because now it's a complete resource with recommendations of exactly which products to use to do the thing that i'm teaching so sometimes it's going to look like doing more research providing you know better recommendations to people um as we do the research can we add some data some statistics can we add some some kind of scholarly information etc um but also just what is the resource i need um and so i'll try to provide some examples of that uh on the youtube channel um and definitely inside project 24 as time goes on but it just kind of varies so much from article to article the next question from project24 i'm um i am going to take your guys questions from uh from here as well but um we got a few here in project 24. this one is about how to level up outsourced content when we outsource content we always take a bit of a hit to quality it's just never going to be the same there there are some cases when you can get someone who does have expertise in in that niche to uh to be able to write high quality content um but it's it's usually not going to be of the same quality of what you're gonna expect one it's not their website it's yours it's your business and so you care about it more than anybody else and then so anyway that's number one number two is most people who are writing for a writing service don't have the level of expertise that you would like them to have so when we want to level up that content really the the question here actually includes some examples here but what i find is a lot of the time the content writers when they write the though even just the wording they use feels like it feels like a blogger not like a helpful person who's just trying to give me good information i don't i don't know how to better describe that other than to provide some examples and i want to make sure i get some more questions um so i am going to kind of change the voice a little bit and try to encourage my writers to look at the articles that i have reworked and try to match that a little bit and i think if we do that they're gonna they're gonna realize that i don't want anyway i don't want sort of that bloggy voice i want something that feels real um and i want specifics and so providing better feedback and better instruction i think is going to help a lot adding additional research adding data adding scholarly content and again encouraging them to do the same with our writers we do have a mandatory sort of research period and we often will provide them with specific ideas for um independent actual research before they are before they actually write the article so those kinds of things help as well okay um let's see i am going to go ahead and take a couple of questions here from the community casa ellen is asking about making a video about how to sell a website and i do actually think that's a good topic so i'm going to add that to my list how to sell a website is i mean it kind of depends on the size of the website but there are some really really good options here i just talked to a guy i was interviewed for a podcast the other day domain magnate is the name of the uh the podcast and their website and they buy big websites um and have sort of a um like a it's like a fund so right so people invest and they own shares in their business that owns and manages large websites pretty cool if you have a smaller site then there's a few different cool options so it's a good one and then another one i'm gonna take what word count feels too much even for a pillar post um there's not a specific word count but i do think that you know if you're getting above the 3 500 to 4 000 words in most cases that in that one article is probably getting to be much much more than anybody's going to sit down and read but it depends a little bit on what that resource is so in some cases people are going to only want a portion of that and so if you do a good job of making your article very scannable using good subheadings breaking it up often i don't mind an article being very long so it just kind of depends on what the purpose of that resource is if it's an article that you expect someone to sit down and read to learn the whole thing break it up into smaller chunks i think we don't normally do like a series of articles but i think that there are plenty of cases where breaking the topic down into smaller chunks interlinking not necessarily uh okay now for the next chunk of the article go here it's more like let's break the topic into smaller subtopics to write there you go and yes you can ask an seo question uh you're welcome to do that i'll try to get back to here i got a couple of more from project 24 i want to do as well okay this one's a fun one do i personally or others on the income school team use any seo tools like ahrefs sem rush etc which do we use and why um for me it it actually does vary a little bit so and then he asks as well what data is reliable which metrics are maybe less reliable search volume data is always questionable especially because a lot of us in the blogging space niche websites etc are looking for kind of long tail keywords well by very definition long tail keywords have fairly low search volume um they're the the kind of fringe topics right that other people aren't writing about well the lower the search volume the less represented or the more inaccurately represented those searches are going to be in a um in a survey in a subset of all of the search data on the web so it's it's the law of large numbers and small numbers and statistics if you take a sample those things that are more along the fringes are going to statistically be much more over or underrepresented and because of that we often write articles on quote zero search volume topics that end up driving plenty of traffic to our websites so i don't trust that data however many of these tools have some really neat features ahrefs has some good ones in terms of a paid tool i think that's my favorite there you go i'm telling you i i think that's my favorite in terms of the paid tool however for most bloggers until you're actually really making money from your blog paying like a hundred dollars a month for ahrefs is is unnecessary and it's an expense that i mean it could stop you from proceeding right so um there are a lot of free options out there if you're looking for ideas of just topics you know keywords quote there are tons of options that are totally free answer the public is a good one still you can go in there you can just type in a word that's maybe it's the main sort of topic of your site but maybe it's break it down and it's it's a subtopic somewhere on you know further down you know if we had camper report i could type in camper right i could but i could also go much further niche down and i could say generator for camper and i could type that in and just see what i get and i'm going to get a list of things that people actually search on the web related to with those words in it it's not complete there are um all of the tools are going to be kind of like that they're not going to give you sort of a complete thing they're going to rely on those specific words and so um from there we just have to use our brain okay um akv in the youtube asks what is the best wordpress theme in 2021 um the best again it just depends so much on what your purpose is i have come to i've started using um i've been testing out one called cadence it's become really popular it's also um if you use the full paid everything it's also pretty fairly expensive but i do like it it you can use kind of the do the default gutenberg editor but it just adds all these other blocks that allows you to make your site look however you want but it's they've managed to make it very light and very fast and so um i can do pretty much anything that i want to do with a website using cadence and so for something that you want to be very customizable i like cadence i still like divi they are doing a lot of work to speed up websites but again for customization i've come to know it really well and it's it's really cool it doesn't use gutenberg's block editor they have their own page builder um but again they're they're doing some work to speed up the page loads um but there are some other great themes out there that are very light very fast obviously i'm going to pitch acubato aquabot is a good theme if you are not super tech savvy you just want to get your website set up you don't want to have to fool with like building a custom page and filling it in with all sorts of stuff you just want to get up and going so it kind of depends a little bit on what you're going for um okay i'm going to come back to the youtube in just a minute i'm going to go back to project 24. how you so here it says um they want to know if we've done any recent examples tests if we have any data with um siloing topic clustering and then as well as how do we manage interlinking when we have a lot of outsourced content i haven't done a specific like case study using specifically just the siloing structure or the new the kind of the topic cluster structure that is something i'm actually working on now and so i will have some good data and some good examples for you hopefully in the not too distant future but it does take time obviously to build up sites that are following anything regimented i have been doing a lot of studying up on what other people are teaching in these spaces um and i and i do have some hypotheses that i want to test out and it's essentially in the end that's going to impact the way that we do search analysis things that we find that work better we're going to incorporate into what we teach and so that's some something that i'm really taking very seriously right now and then um how do we manage interlinking with so with a lot of outsourced content it is tough especially if you're getting content in very quickly if you order like 50 or 100 articles how do you now manage interlinking and i think the thing that helps me the most is structuring my website knowing kind of you know these are my categories and my subcategories here's how each topic fits into it they're all listed out on a spreadsheet by category i can group them together and then within each category i might internally even if i never put these on the site like as categories or subcategories i might internally have subcategories where i can group articles by five or ten that are really highly relevant to each other then i go through those articles one by one um and you know as a group right and then add those links to the others within that cluster that sort of makes sense so i think that's the approach that i'll take to it uh it does mean going in and doing extra work after the article has already been written the next one again from project 24 if we want to take a site from 4 000 a month to 40 000 a month what's the game plan now in this case this is a person who's in a country where selling an info product is tough most of the payment processors and stuff um just aren't that you can't use them in that country and so you know how do we do this when really we're relying on ads and affiliate so if we're just relying on ads and affiliate a couple things i'm gonna do one obviously more content is gonna help but only to a point unless we're actually broadening the niche and covering even more and more and more ground if we just write more articles but kind of stay within the same niche at some point each article adds less and less value to the niche and so um you do sort of hit a plateau if we're not if we're not careful there and we don't plan for that and so just adding more content isn't the only answer i would definitely be trying to optimize um ads and affiliate 90 of this person's traffic that er revenue they say comes from ads and only 10 from affiliate we need to look for some more affiliate opportunities here um and and we need to work on optimizing those opportunities with ads you know what's your epmv if it's you know ten dollars how do we work on getting that up to forty dollars do we implement some video ads do we uh you know do we start to morph our content to be a little bit more um just high value content for advertisers etc the problem with relying on only one or two sources of income is i have another question here actually asking about my thoughts about you know some of the privacy you know google's changes the cookies etc and how that's going to impact you know third-party ads and such you know there's a lot of things like that that are totally outside of our control as bloggers and so if we rely on any one or even two of those things you know amazon cuts commissions by half in your industry and your income gets cut in half that's that's it and so um we do need to try to diversify and so for most people i'm gonna say we need to find another monetization route where maybe there's a really good affiliate program that we can really partner with maybe a small business where we can you know create an affiliate program and partner with them and just you know make a lot of money through one affiliate program i've seen people do that very effectively because they're more than just a one-off affiliate they're more like a partner um you know for most people i'm gonna say an info product is gonna be a great idea can we again within the niche like we just need to figure out what's the right monetization it could be that you start selling physical products and you use um you know if you know stripe and stuff aren't don't work in your country is there something else you could use um we're just gonna have to start getting creative at that point i see a lot of people getting to those higher five figures numbers to 30 and 40 thousand dollars a month and usually they have a blog oftentimes youtube channel as well but also in most cases they have some sort of a course or something of higher value oftentimes it's not the totally passive sort of ads based website um let's see okay there's one more i want to take here real quick and then i'll come back to the you guys on youtube sorry um the next one is thoughts on cloudways you i mentioned um i've mentioned in a recent video cloudways hosting i really like it so far i've tried it out i haven't moved everything over or anything like that in this case they're considering moving from wpx which is one we used to recommend over to cloudways most of my sites are still on big scoots which i really like a lot of our small sites are still on bluehost which works fine for a little site but what i'm finding is like with cloudways you don't have to pay for a year upfront like you do like on bluehost um you can start at like 10 bucks a month and you can do multiple sites on that and you're probably not going to have to upgrade anything for a while with cloudways you're going to have a lot more opportunity to scale up and down and just pay for what you need as opposed to you know moving up to a whole new level or you know it's it just works differently you can just spin up another server and boom we got more space and we got more uh more bandwidth so i do really like that about cloudways should you move from wpx to cloudways i find that you know wpx uh even big scoots if you're on a plan that says well you can have up to 10 or 20 websites on this plan the more websites you put on it and the more bandwidth it starts to use up it does slow it down like everybody kind of has their limit and so like on each of those platforms for you to be able to get more bandwidth it's like okay now we got to go to the next tier and so your cost goes from whatever 30 a month to a hundred dollars a month or from a hundred dollars a month to 250 a month um and that's doesn't make a ton of sense when on cloud ways it's like okay let me just move up let you know i'm just gonna buy a little bit more more memory or i'm gonna buy another server and you're good and so i do think it's it's a really good fit if you're having those scaling issues so there you go there's my thoughts on cloudways okay i'm back to uh questions from youtube um let's see how many posts do i have to write in a micro niche blog the number of posts you should write on a website it's it's not just about niche micro niche like we we can kind of break things into those classifications um but every niche is a little bit different so let's say we pick something that's very niche down it's like a micro niche and you really do cover everything anybody would need to know in 30 blog posts that's how many blog posts you should write uh that's you know you're good but there may be another quote micro niche where after 30 blog posts you're like actually the more i write about this and the more i research about it the more i find there's other spaces there's other things that people need there's some adjacent things or maybe i want to build onto this and so now you end up with 50 blog posts and then you realize oh you know what i want to expand outward a little bit because this is working really well and so i'm going to kind of move up in the niche and and across and spread out a little bit and cover more adjacent topics and so now you know i could write hundreds of blog posts before i'm out and so i wouldn't necessarily i don't really treat a website as like done ever there's always you know you reach a point where it's like okay now i'm gonna go evaluate my content see what did well i'm gonna battleship it i'm gonna optimize a bit sometimes you'll reach a point where you say okay i'm ready to expand there are times where i say okay you know what i'm i'm done with this website so i'm gonna hold it i'm gonna let it earn some money for a little while maybe eventually sell it because now i'm more interested in focusing on something else maybe a different one so there you go um i really like i really do appreciate everyone kind comments uh you guys there's a lot of there's a lot of nice stuff in here so um okay would you recommend having my website on bing when i when you write content and put it on a website like i don't block any search engine um we get articles ranking on bing all the time when we write content we we often do it with google in mind because google's the biggest search engine but when we write content that's optimized for search the other search engines tend to pick it up and oftentimes they pick it up faster should you go set up what is being called it's like i think it's just being webmaster tools and go you know make sure that you're set up in there just like you would in google search console i think that that's perfectly fine to do it's not something i do for all of our sites they rank on being just fine without it just like they've always ranked just fine on google even without setting up google search console again we kind of emphasize google a bit and we focus on making sure our websites are compatible and compliant with all of google's requirements but in doing so they tend to be very compliant with all the others uh so it you're going to have them on being i guess that's kind of my point um in terms of taking the time to do that i think it's perfectly fine if you want to do it but often times it's easy to get hung up doing those things and not focusing and spending your time on doing the things that move the needle the most which is creating content so just be careful about that a project 24 member asked if i would be doing more website reviews and if they could put this forward for anybody who is interested in having their website reviewed on the channel or another form of content i'm just starting i just recorded one the other day is a specific article review where i looked at somebody's a blog post somebody wrote and critiqued that um if you have something like that that you'd like to submit in the description of my videos i've been including a link to a little feedback form i have a spot there where you can provide feedback on the channel request a video um maybe provide an idea for a video but also for you to be able to submit a specific website or article and provide some information around it if you want to get something reviewed make sure that you provide me like enough information around around that for it to really be worth my time it's got to stand out a little bit because i get quite a few of those but absolutely i'm happy to review websites i think that a lot of people like to see that i think it's really valuable um another question about silo structure what are my thoughts on the silo structure i'm you know um i'm curious i want to try some things people have been siloing for years now and there's you know topic clusters and all that and there's definitely something to that to building up enough content on one sort of category on one sort of cluster of content or one silo and building up enough content within that specific topic to have some authoritativeness there i think there's really something to that and i think we should be as we do our search analysis um thinking more about kind of how our site is going to be structured and building at least a critical mass of content around each sort of pocket of information now with siloing a lot of people what they'll say is you don't interlink between silos ever they're almost like unique sets of information on each site i don't i don't really know i i don't quite understand the reasoning why that would be i i get that in general you want them to link mostly to each other because they're they support each other so much but it seems like if within one silo it would benefit the the reader would benefit from a piece of content that's in another silo that's just it's related but it's just not the same silo why would i not link to that uh that doesn't make sense what i like to do is think from the perspective of a user would this be helpful to a user to link to this other piece of content and google kind of follows suit they're they're getting smarter all the time the algorithm is and so i don't think that messes up their their you know authority screen and you know um it's just i haven't found that to be an issue we've built lots and lots of successful websites project 24 members have built lots and lots of successful websites with many times very little concern for the structure of the content and what links point to what etc it's not necessary but i do think that there's some value in making sure that we do have a fair amount of content that's all related and then all links to each other and i think that that does build up authority faster so those are my thoughts so far i'm going to be i'm definitely testing and learning because i want to make sure that we incorporate incorporate more of that stuff as we find real value in what's being taught um i'm going to take this one from thomas delgarde clausen how's it going being the only one left in charge at income school and i really enjoy the content you're putting out by the way thank you i it's actually going really well i have a really good team here and uh it's never at income school bin that any one person has all the ideas i mean this isn't me saying anything negative about anybody uh it's never been that one person like drives everything uh it's always been a very collaborative thing from the beginning uh jim and i working together to make each other's ideas better and everybody here has different strengths and so you know with jim gone we lost some strengths that he has that i don't however the reason that that works is because the other people here have other complementary strengths some of them that overlap with gyms and so i have a great group of people to bounce ideas off of i have a great group of people helping me with ideas and we just work together you know just if you want to see a little behind the scenes um i i spend a lot of time with nate uh any of you guys who are into the youtube stuff watching channel makers he's a smart guy and he's testing all sorts of things and um you know in in the youtube space and so when i have questions about how to make better video how to write better titles um for my videos everything that is here on this youtube channel he and i spend a lot of time working together on it and as he's working through some things for how to teach youtube better he comes to me to bounce ideas off of and so having somebody to work with in that way it's extremely beneficial likewise when it comes to you know anything blogging related and stuff nathan and anna and i are just working together all the time we've got andrea over there who's uh editing video but really doing all of our creative stuff who just is fantastic so it's actually going really well i will say it's been very busy uh just kind of taking that on but it's kind of always been busy here so i'm kind of working on kind of how to make that a little bit more sustainable but thanks for the question um let's see um i am going to take another question from project24 real quick this is one about they're in google search console looking at their crawl statistics and settings and they notice that um they have some 404 errors and when they look at it it's because um there's some some media urls images that they replaced and so they deleted the old one and um put a new image there well google had previously called all the crawled all those urls indexed them and so now google looks at those and says hey there's 404 errors there so they're asking what should they do about it technically the best thing to do when you get rid of one url is to create a redirect now if that's not something that you know how to do if it's not something that you're that you would think to do or if it's going to take a lot of time um you know it's not good to have a lot of broken links absolutely but i it's another one of those places where it's like how important is this for seo um you know is it one of those things where it's like an seo best practice yeah so but is it one of those things that really makes an impact not really for it's not how much is it going to hurt your other content on the website that an image link that you used to have is no longer there google will de-index that over time and you're good um your site map i mean how many people were entering the site through that url right through a search that led them to that image now if you have a site that's like very heavy in image search and that's part of like what you rank then it becomes more important but for most of us that's not the case one way to get around that is to just not have your media urls indexed acabato now has that setting there's just a checkbox where you can have the uh you know any media url attachments just redirect to the content and so that's um i think that's a better approach if you're not in accubatto that's fine um seo plugins are going to be able to do that you know a ranked math or a yoast or something like that have that option if if you're not trying to specifically rank an image search then why why have those images those image urls crawled and indexed and so it's actually going to be better for you for indexing on your site if you've not um have those indexed um another one here an example of second stage search analysis so um you know what you know how does that change to find the more the next pocket of it of uh topics that are maybe a little bit more competitive for me the search analysis process looks very similar uh it's pretty much the same as the first time through it which is you know i'm i'm just looking for topics as we do our competition analysis as we do as we try to estimate you know what the search volume is likely to be etc now i'm just i'm just going to be able to pick up more of those that have competition and actually write them so really it's less about in the search analysis it's less about the finding of the ideas that changes it's more that as the competition's higher i don't i don't treat it as extreme competition i don't treat it as very hard i treat it more as like oh this is doable for me and so that might impact the way that you rate it and so therefore it'll impact sort of you know the output that the search analysis tool gives you which is um telling you what your highest and lowest priority articles are to write so really i'm just more likely to write the articles now that i wouldn't have been likely to write before the other thing that it's going to impact is when i am looking for ideas you know if i find that there are certain you know silos or categories or whatever that are working really well on my site then i'm going to potentially look for some more there if i find that there's maybe some adjacent areas that i haven't branched out to but some articles that kind of touch on those things are working better than maybe some of my other main content well now i i'm going to do search analysis more in that phase so i'll give you an example on patent rebel um and we have a youtube video coming out soon uh talking about this in more detail but on patent rebel we found that like you know we're ranking really well for a lot of search terms around patents and the search volume just seems to be pretty low because the traffic isn't very high but there's some there's some articles that touch on other forms of intellectual property that are doing fairly well even though that's not even what they were written for they're bringing in a fair amount of traffic even though they don't rank for those specific search terms in that other type of intellectual property and and it's the other types of intellectual property are used by way more people and so probably search way more often so why would we not expand in those directions and so as we do search analysis in this case i'm going to start pushing in that direction so it's going to change maybe some of the search terms that i start with as i look for more and more ideas the next one here and i think this is another important one if you're blogging um but you want to be able to spend time with your family like you're blogging now so that when you go full time you'll have tons of time with your family right um how do you find the balance to live that dream today even though you're working extra hard most of us that are blogging until you until you're making enough to like quit your job you're doing the blogging and a job it's a lot to do and so how do you find that balance and i think each person kind of needs to figure out what works for them i find that oftentimes quality time with my family is more important than quantity time i mean that really is key if i spend 10 minutes with one of my kids one-on-one on the thing that they care about talking to them and mostly listening to them um and when they say hey i want to learn how to do this and i say okay we're going to do that my son wants to learn more about well he wants to use a pocket knife and whittle and learn how to carve and stuff and i'm like well i got to spend some time like teaching you how to safely use a pocket knife when can we do that dad well you know what let's put it on the calendar for saturday it's on my calendar it's going to happen and we're going to spend an hour maybe um but if i hadn't put on my calendar it's not going it wasn't going to happen and as it is tomorrow i'm going to be spending an hour or so with my son teaching him how to safely use a pocket knife so he can whittle and kind of setting the rules and etc um and i i think that's kind of how it needs to be sometimes we need to schedule things sometimes we just need to kind of set the expectation you know what when i was in business school and starting blogging and working a full-time job that's how i got home from work every day and by the way at the time i was training for a half marathon so i was running for like an hour a day and it was just normal like dad comes home from work and goes running for an hour he gets home we have dinner and then i have whatever a certain amount of time with my family that was very intensely focused family time and then it was okay well now dad's got to go to class uh and then once class is over and most people are going to bed he's going to write a blog post that that was my life for a while um but it worked because i was able to when i was with family focus on family i think today it's actually a little harder for me because the work that i do i i enjoy it enough that when i am home it's hard to shut it off in my mind and so i think that's the key is focused focus time for family okay um it's funny the you know the chat it jumps so fast that sometimes i can't even read a question before it's gone so there's a lot of questions in here about specific niches and whether or not they're too broad or etc so here's one like is homemaking decluttering too broad or too popular all of homemaking and decluttering it might be kind of big for a blog but i wouldn't steer away necessarily from choosing a domain name that's kind of along those lines but then starting with just maybe two or three categories of content so decluttering kind of is one category and maybe even starting even more specifically so decluttering may be a category on your site but under decluttering it might be that i literally just focus on decluttering kids bedrooms you know um i might focus a little bit on uh you know maybe there's maybe i'm also getting so i'm gonna do kids bedrooms i'm gonna do decluttering the garage at slash just home storage and i might pick one that's in a different category altogether that's just maybe around you know meal planning for families it's something like that now is it too popular i there is a lot of content around each of those things and so what you're going to have to do is start doing some search analysis and just try to find some spaces where not that nobody's written about but that the competition that's actually ranking doesn't look very high what that often means is like you know if somebody's asking a question around decluttering and you're finding that the only search results are forums that's that's often a good sign forums are a really good search result when the search intent is like i want 100 people's opinion about this but when it's like i want someone to teach me how to do this thing then a forum isn't very good and so you know just consider that and try to find if you can find just even just a few little cracks where there's just not very helpful information yet that's a really good sign uh and to me that means i'm really good to go i'm gonna be able to find a lot more if i just keep looking so um and i think that goes for a really um really like any of these things uh any of these niches is you we just have to do some analysis and figure out even if the main niche that i want to go after does seem either really broad or really competitive can i start with a subset of that content with a specific category within it and then over time maybe i can expand out and become more of an authority in the broader space talking about uh affiliate networks for physical products there are um a lot of good affiliate networks um avant link is a good one for physical products um share sale has a lot of uh of um physical products a lot of stores that your regular retails your walmarts your lows a lot of them are on impact um so there's just multiple networks i think those three are three pretty big ones that i would go after for physical products i think a lot of the brands that you're used to that have an affiliate program are going to find themselves in those networks something i heard somebody say the other day that i totally agree with is we're reaching a point where the network matters a lot less than the program the actual store the actual brand um if somebody wants to be an affiliate for a specific product they're just going to find wherever it's being sold by the way there's some that are a little bit more industry specific that are really good i know some of the top affiliates um out there outside of amazon which is um also just i mean the top affiliate network um but outside of amazon there's some big ones if you're if you're in the electronic space best buy has a pretty good program it's not that it pays a lot more you know than amazon or anything like that but it's one of the top programs outside of amazon especially in that space be an h photo for if you're doing any sort of like camera photography videography gear is a good program they sell a lot of good products online and anybody that's in that space is familiar with buying products from there and so um the other thing that i find to be really effective oftentimes is to provide links to multiple stores if it's being sold in multiple places so i might have a link to amazon and another link to b h photo for the same product and i would just specify this one's on amazon this one's on b h photo especially if you're doing like a product review so you do have like a button like a you know go check out the price i'm gonna have one for amazon and one for b h photo right beside it amazon tends to convert better but a lot of the other programs have a little bit higher payouts um let's see i'm back into the project 24 community i'm not going to be able to get to all the questions even in there um and so uh some of these i think are nice big topics for full videos um but also i'm gonna try to address them in other ways as well uh my thoughts on the changes being brought about by google cookies etc and how does that impact our websites with ads on them um there's a lot of privacy stuff going on you know apple with giving users the choice to whether or not they want to allow apps to track their activity across other apps i think that's great i think people should have control over their privacy however it means advertisers have less data about specific users is that going to impact ad values to some extent yes i think that what we're going to see is maybe as more and more users do kind of hide their personal information and and don't agree to be tracked by the way a lot of people still just agree to be tracked for convenience sake and so um whether it's in ios or whether it's on google they're still kind of allowing that they're choosing to allow that for convenience sake but as more as more and more we see privacy being an issue i think what we're going to see is advertisers who are focused more on paying for high quality ads in very real on very relevant sites so it'll be less i think it'll be less about the individual user and a little bit more about which sites are the best fit and so if we build content that's really advertiser friendly if we pick niches where there are you know high value things that people pay for so like you know there may be some niches where the products that you might recommend as an affiliate aren't that expensive but there are services that companies offer in that niche that you couldn't be an affiliate for but that are high value enough that they pay a lot to advertise for uh um there's probably plenty i mean i'm thinking about like health and beauty right um yeah like makeup and stuff can cost quite a bit but think about all of the procedures that people go to have done that are expensive um and people wanting to advertise for those so i think they're i would think maybe that direction it's an example of something that's not totally in our control so we just have to do the best we can um this one here is about eat is it okay to have some blog post where there's no author at all now i don't usually have a byline in my blog post it won't say like here's the title and then by so and so published on this date i often remove that data um mostly because my content is usually fairly evergreen and so i don't necessarily want the user to be like oh this is a five-year-old blog post i'd rather it just didn't say you can also just either use a plug-in or this is built into aquabotto as well where you can have the most recently modified when the when the post was most recently modified uh that can be the date that shows up but we still have the author box at the bottom uh and i think that's generally a good thing i think it's important in a lot of niches that there's an author because it's going to play into the eat the authoritativeness not just of the site but the author matters for getting your content to rank especially in competitive and very important niches where you know accuracy of content is important however there are a lot of niches like a lot that are in hobby spaces and stuff where the writer doesn't really matter um and i think you could get away with that now i don't see anything wrong with using a pseudonym oftentimes i'm happy with my face being the face of a site or just you know taking pictures that are obviously like real like pictures taken by the real person but not necessarily showing their face um you know on about page if i had a boating website and i took a picture of my boat on the lake um like and it wasn't like a super professional looking photo that people might think was a stock photo and the same boat shows up over and over on the site and then i just say you know hey guys this is jack you know that's the name that i go by and you know that happens to be my middle name or whatever and or i just choose a different name altogether it's a pseudonym but it's still based in like the it's still based in truth it's still based in fact that's my preferred way to go about it but again there are a lot of niches where maybe it just doesn't matter and then a follow-up question from another user on the same topic of eat is you know if i'm making two websites and i have an about page on each one and it's me on both sites should the about pages be the same or is that duplicate content does that matter um duplicate content is something that bloggers worry about way more than we should um duplicate content is not usually penalized by google oftentimes a scraping a site that scrapes other people's sites ends up ranking just as well sometimes outranking the original site which is very frustrating to me by the way um and so you know is google penalizing people for duplicate content no not as much as maybe they should also duplicate content is more of a problem when it's in the substantive content within an article or um you know on a website your about page is not that substantive it's not the main content of the website and so having the same about info show up in multiple places or even a few paragraphs be the same that's not going to hurt the seo of your websites now if the two websites are not in like very very similar niches like within the same industry i definitely would tailor each one to the topic of the website you know i'm not i may not reference my mba on a site about pressure washers it's just not important i may not reference there's a lot of things like on the about page on income school that i wouldn't need to put on a pressure washer website and so i'm i'm going to make the about page content relevant to that particular website um okay oh i was about to answer your question benno um all right a little bit upset that i didn't answer his question um here david update says you guys mentioned that adding more articles doesn't work as well as it used to can you elaborate on that i don't think it's that it doesn't well doesn't work as well as it used to i think it's more like at some point you've written so much content on your website that the new articles are almost competing with some of the other articles for the same searches on camper report for example the first hundred articles did really well and then we had our writers write a whole bunch of other content that was maybe a little bit more specific um look you know almost niching down a little bit and we we realized that they weren't expanding enough into different enough searches that really what happened was google could take their pick which of these five articles do you want to show for this particular search query like so only one of those articles gets the benefit from that search when for a lot of bloggers like they've only written one article that is even relevant to that search and so we've written five articles and we've really guaranteed a good spot on that serp fantastic but it took five articles like we don't get very much benefit for the additional four as long as the first one was good and so having 300 articles on that site versus 100 articles did very little however if we had branched out and covered different topics rather than kind of hammering on more specific aspects of the same topics we probably would have done better had we battleship some of that original content that didn't do as well and figured out how to improve upon it that probably would have been more helpful than just adding 200 more blog posts to the website that's kind of what i mean there so you know at some point your site's going to plateau unless you're able to expand to really rank for just a lot more search queries and i'll give another kind of example of this like if we wrote an article right now that could potentially rank for five search queries and it does it ranks number one for the main one and it ranks number three for most of the others on average let's say well now i go write a specific article for each of those other search queries well great now i've written five more articles that basically just take me from number three to number one on those other search queries it increased my traffic but not that much because the first article was already ranking for a wide range of search queries because it was a more thorough article so if you ever find yourself kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel when you're looking for ideas then it's either time to expand the niche broaden maybe move up a little bit um well i keep saying move up move down and stuff we've got some youtube videos coming out soon that talk a little bit about that sort of structuring that that we're talking about um and i think that'll clarify that a little bit but you'll reach a point where it's time to broaden um or to kind of move into an adjacent space otherwise your the expansion the additional content just doesn't do that much for you um okay let's see the question should i flush my website and create a new one that i get that a lot people are just like i've put so much into this and maybe it's time to move on every single time that's just going to be kind of a personal question i think there is a lot of feeling that i don't want to throw away something i put so much work into and so there's it's it's a sunk cost trap that we fall into some it's a mental trap where it's like i put a lot into this i can't just throw it away i'm sure i can make it work on the other hand a lot of times people give up on a site way too early before they they've really given it a chance if you've written a bunch of content and you have you've learned everything you can learn you know that the articles are written really well they're even potentially ranking well but there's just no traffic coming in okay it's probably and you've given yourself you know plenty of time they are ranking well it's just not getting the traffic then okay yeah maybe it is time to pick a different niche or to at least expand into something adjacent broaden it out a little bit or just move over um on the other hand if you have written and you know your content's really good but the competition is so high you can't get anything to rank at all again there's an option to either kind of pivot or to just say hey this niche it's not working for me i need to go start with something easier maybe i can come back to this niche that i'm passionate about someday but not until i'm a lot better at this and i know it works so there are times when it makes more sense to give up i just think that giving up before you've really given it a chance you've given your content long enough to rank um and you've verified you know kind of what the traffic potential is because you do have some ranking content i think i think most people just give up too early um let's see i'll take another one here from project 24. um okay this is a question i get a lot uh you know it's a nine month old website they're starting to get a lot of organic backlinks but quite a few of them look pretty spammy should they be worried should they do anything about it should they disavow them i think most of the time it's not something i worry about most backlinks that show up on any of our sites look fairly spammy some look really good a lot of them are just kind of mediocre and then there's always like this flood of kind of spam comments i don't worry too much about them unless it does seem to start impacting my seo so if you're in search console and you're seeing like some really sketchy looking sites um you know things you know adult websites that kind of thing where there's a lot of links coming from that that could be someone trying to actively harm your site that doesn't happen to most of us you know the negative seo where people try to build links from you know really questionable sites to make your seo worse it's just i think google's getting a lot better at identifying that sort of behavior but we also just don't see it happening that often um and so most of the time i don't worry about it unless it starts to really become an issue most sites their backlink profile is not going to look only high quality sites backlink to me that's just not not usually how it looks um all right i'm going to come back here to you guys um okay caesar 94 usc says hey ricky i got rejected by zoex saying my content is automatic generated do you have any advice um yeah i one is i would take a look at the content and does it is it is it actually auto-generated does it look auto-generated um i don't uh i whenever you get rejected by like an advertiser or something like that it's always like hard to take that and be like well no it's not it's not auto generated or my content isn't spun content or i mean they'll they'll often reject sites because they say well the content looks scraped it looks similar to other things that are out there really what's going on with the zoic is they they kind of they start with google standards so if you wouldn't get accepted by like adsense you're probably not going to get accepted by them now that doesn't mean if you've been uh let's say like if if adsense has blacklisted you that doesn't mean you can't get on a zoic but the way it works is the the main the first ad network you can get on at azoik is google ad exchange it's different from adsense so if you've ever been blacklisted by adsense it doesn't mean you can't get on google ad exchange um you may be able to do that but again just like don't screw up make sure you do everything right this time because those like bands from google are often for life so um don't don't mess up um and so don't look at it that way but but rather when you look at google's advertising policies make sure your site like fits all that make sure you are creating original high quality content um and if you are it could just be that you know they review a lot of sites and they looked at it quickly and they got it wrong and so you know what you can also do is try to reach out reply to them submit a ticket something like that and just just try to find out i know a lot of times they they won't give specific reasons but but maybe replying and saying hey you know i work really hard on creating original content i'm sure they hear that kind of stuff all the time too from people um and i i i'm having a hard time understanding like what of my content makes you think that you know like a lot of big companies um they get a lot of garbage i'm sure they get so many sites every single day that are not the quality sites you guys are trying to build that are applying and so um as they're kind of shuffling through all that just just know that it's not it's not uncommon that there's gonna be a mistake made also um i do find that if somebody gets rejected by ads by zoic there's a pretty good chance that even as the site gets bigger they're not going to get accepted by like a media vine or an ad thrive or one of those big bigger you know not bigger companies but rather those networks that even have higher standards for what they'll allow in so i would just work on the content make sure the site looks good and looks really presentable really advertiser friendly there's some questions here about sharing your content on like medium or linkedin etc is that a duplicate content issue is it a good practice a bad practice uh i think it's okay just know that if you i mean sharing it or like even posting it on linkedin in the archives and stuff i think that's fine i would link to the original article um just have like a sentence that says this article originally posted on and then your website like on medium or something the the downside of that is it could end up outranking you there and so instead of getting the traffic to your site it's getting the traffic to medium i generally don't i generally just like try to build up my own authoritativeness on my own site over time and uh and get the traffic directly however it is a place that you can maybe start to get noticed and so if you do have a few pieces of content i might even create like original content for medium and use that to interlink to similar or adjacent content on my own site that way um you know i'm not competing with myself in the rankings but i am getting that that notice and when i link back to the original site uh i'm linking them to a piece of content that adds additional benefit as opposed to oh here's the same article you're reading here but you can go read it on my site too if that makes sense i think that's probably the way i would go about it oh wow so many um let's see can you talk about how to combine small topics into longer blog posts you know what i'm going to take this question i'm like out of time but um let's see i'm gonna take that question and another one here in project 24 and then one more question from youtube um what was the question oh combining smaller topics into longer blog posts so here's the way i look at it i do want every blog post to have at least kind of one primary search query that it's written for but that doesn't mean that it won't rank it can't rank for other search queries or cover kind of multiple small topics uh as long as those small topics are extremely relevant to each other so um i'll give you an example i was writing a blog post about using a pressure washer but using like water like from a lake or something so it's not pressurized water that's going to be a how-to blog post about how to do it but also i'm going to answer the question can you do it i'm also you know going to answer numerous questions about just like you know filtering water that goes into your pressure washer there's a lot of kind of questions being answered that it could potentially rank for but primarily it's ranking for either can you use lake water in a pressure washer or how do you use lake water in a pressure washer i hope that makes sense so really it's kind of one topic but it's written in a way that various questions surrounding that can will all be answered within the blog post and they'll be answered in a very succinct way to where i could even potentially win the snippet for multiple things now would i take like multiple topics around pressure washers like can you pressure washer or can you use lake water in a pressure washer can you use pond water in a pressure washer how to use a pressure washer with a generator i mean like what i take lots of queries that are similar but maybe a little bit further off the mark and combine them into one long blog post i think at some point it starts to get too unfocused and so i i would just be careful with that i do like answering multiple search queries but i really only want the article to be on really one topic i hope that makes sense uh another one here from project 24 thoughts on creating a separate site versus one large site so they have an idea on their site for one kind of cluster or one category that really could be its own site and might do a little better if it was on its own what do you think most of the time i find it's a lot easier once i have an established site that's got some credibility to add an additional piece of you know branch of content onto that one site i there may be some value into having your entire site be on that more focused smaller topic um from just an eat standpoint you know this on this site i'm really an authority in this this one thing this is what we focus on but i i think you can have similar authoritativeness within that topic cluster or within that you know silo of content on the bigger site uh i mean think about you know webmd where they have their authorities on like every disease you know you can absolutely do that and i find it's easier and faster to get that new sort of silo of content to rank on a site that's already established this is another way where i'm just like i don't totally silo things off from each other because it's like man if i have something that's closely related why wouldn't i link from an established successful piece of content to get people over to the new content and the new category um more quickly and get it to rank faster and potentially rank better and get more traffic like why wouldn't i do that anyway that's uh again my thought around that i know there there are reasons why people think that's a great idea and it maybe it is but it's not one that's been proven out to me well enough yet um anyway so in my case most of the time it's gonna be if it's closely related to the main topic of my original site i'm just gonna keep it on the same site okay um let's see back in here um and grav asking about silo yay or nay um i you know again i i don't know the jury for me is a little bit still out on siloing i do i do like the idea of having a good amount of content in any particular category or on any particular sub-topic for the website sub-niche within the site but whether or not i want to totally silo i'm not i'm not totally sold on that should i update the google search console sitemap after i add a new category to my site well probably not a bad idea i found that sometimes it will take google months i was in there recently and i was like uh you last looked at my site map like six months ago my content was still getting crawled the new stuff was but um but still like they said oh we haven't looked at this thing in like six months so i just went ahead and i updated it real quick it took me like five seconds and you know now they have the new one and they're looking at that so um maybe not a bad idea okay i said i was gonna take one more here um uh let's see i'm gonna pick a good one here all right some good tips this one i think has been asked a couple times throughout here so i'm going to go ahead and take it i'd love to answer all your guys questions so i'm sorry for any that i didn't get to what are some good tips for information based blogs no i would consider most of our blogs information based but in this case they're talking things like politics or history um something that's maybe just it's not like a hobby etc um you know i i think the difficulty with like history is we have to figure out what people are actually searching so for a history based blog you know what who's our target audience are we writing this blog for people doing reports and projects in high school and maybe college i think those are a lot of the primary searches that you're going to get for people searching about history and so if i if history is my thing it's the thing i love then i would want to make sure that i'm i'm writing articles that are highly relevant to today and that are based upon searches people are making today and that is i think where there's kind of a stretch i think it's kind of tough to do i do think that there's a lot of purpose for it but and there's a lot of value in that content i think it needs to be out there we just need to find a better way to market that content by using google and so we have to do that by putting ourselves in the mindset of who our target audience is who do you want to reach and what are they searching for if you can do that and then point it from there to history i think you're fine politics that one um i mean there's always highly relevant current information especially news related information and i think could you take sort of some of the headlines of today some of the things people are searching about and then use that to point them toward more political theory or more etc i think you could do that just know that you're competing with news sites in the politics space i think that's maybe the difficulty there and so if you want to do more of a deep dive on some topics that the news sites cover superficially maybe there's some potential there um but just know like we have to come back to that question what are people searching for who's my target audience who who do i think would want to read my content if they found it and then what are they looking for on the web i actually think that in a lot of cases if if we're providing information and want to provide it in a and we're good at providing it like in a interesting way that's highly relevant to today um if it's not very search related you're going to do better on youtube than in a blog the blog is a great supplement to youtube but youtube is where people find content it's just interesting and they want to watch it and learn i watch stuff on youtube that i didn't search for it it's just related to things that i have watched before on youtube and i end up following people um for a while like i'll go through a phase where i'm just watching someone's videos over and over and over like not the same video over and over but watching their videos as they come out because i find this relevant information to me but it's not something i would go to search for and so i think that's a real benefit that we have on youtube somebody asked earlier do we do youtube seo youtube is a different animal there there is some youtube like seo uh like using youtube to rank on google and in the serps and actually have a youtube com video coming out about that fairly soon but um but really uh there's there's youtube has its own algorithm and it behaves very differently and we do actually um learn and teach a lot about that in project 24. i don't talk about it as much on this channel youtube channel mostly because that's not what most of you came for and so um instead nate talks about it over on channel makers and that guy is spending all of his time learning how to do youtube there are a few other questions asked in the project 24 community that i wasn't able to get to i will try to cover them maybe in one of our podcasts or in a future video or something like that um so thanks to all of you who who participated and submitted questions and all of you here on youtube um who submitted your own questions thank you for participating um i do love doing this and i'm gonna try to do it more often probably at least once or twice a month and i think um nathan's actually really excited to jump in here and participate uh we'll we'll get more of the team on here on some of these youtube lives um so thank you all for participating today uh thanks for being here and um if you didn't catch all of it or or miss things there will be a replay i'm gonna do my best to timestamp it it takes as it takes a while to go through and timestamp each of the questions but i know it adds a lot of value so i'll try to make that easier for you as well so again thank you all for being here and we'll see you guys next time