463: Crazy Rich Poets! How Will Green Gets 3M Visits/Month On His Poetry Analysis Website
You're listening to the MyWipe Quitter job podcast.
The place where I bring on successful bootstrap business
owners until deeply into the strategies
they use to go to their businesses.
Now, today I have my friend Will Greene on the show.
And Will is the owner of poemanalysis.com,
where he gets millions of visitors per month
and makes nearly seven figures analyzing poems for a living.
Will's story just goes to show that you can literally
monetize any subject online as long as you follow through.
In this episode, we analyze exactly how he does it.
But before we begin, I want to thank Jeff Oxford
of 180marketing.com for sponsoring this episode.
180marketing.com is an agency that specializes
in helping e-commerce stores boost their search engine
traffic.
In the past, I've used Jeff and his firm,
and he managed to grow my search traffic by 4x in just 6 months.
In fact, 180marketing is one of a handful of SEO agencies
that I trust 100%.
From our information, go to 180marketing.com,
or just email Jeff at 180marketing.com.
I also want to thank Sellerboard for sponsoring this episode.
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Then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast
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where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs
and e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast
covers all things related to content creation
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No topic is off the table, and we tell it like how it is
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So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast
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Now onto the show.
Welcome to the Mywifequitterjob podcast.
Today, I'm really happy to have William Green
on the show.
Now, William is a member of a mastermind group
that I'm in, and he is killing it online.
William runs poemanalysis.com,
which is a site that analyzes poetry.
Poetry.
But get this.
He gets over three million visits per month.
It makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year
from poetry.
So for everyone out there who is skeptical
about creating content for something
that they're interested in,
William is the perfect example of someone
who has managed to monetize his interests.
Now, in this episode, we're gonna break down
how William has managed to create such a popular poetry site
and how he monetizes the traffic.
And with that, welcome to the show, William.
How you doing?
I'm very good.
Thank you.
How's it going?
Good.
I hope I got those numbers right.
I knew they were kind of insane,
but I just millions of visits per month.
Yeah, it's the right ballpark figure.
As you can imagine, there's a lot of fluctuations
throughout the year, and depending on when students
are in school, and after school,
about on average, yeah, that's where we currently at anyway.
Yeah, crazy.
And I know we're in the same mastermind group,
but I actually don't know anything about your background.
How did you get into this?
What did you use to do?
What did you major in?
Yeah, this is a really interesting story.
So I actually came up with the idea
when I was at school, when I was about 15 or 16,
and I created a website where I uploaded
all my revision material for school subjects.
And after about three or four years,
it turned out that the articles that did the best
were always the poetry analysis,
followed by certain other subjects as well.
So that was kind of the light bulb idea
of, oh, I should really give this a go, you know,
10 years ago.
But my whole life has been engineering.
I did a master's degree in automotive engineering
with motorsport.
After that, I went on to work from McLaren
helping to test out super cars, believe it or not.
Wow, that's awesome.
Yeah, it's quite weird.
And then COVID here, I left McLaren,
went to another consultancy.
COVID here, things got a bit shaky
in the kind of engineering automotive sectors.
And I had this kind of opportunity to be like,
should I grind it out for continuing
this crew in engineering?
Or should I give it a go with the website?
And I remember I did a talk once in London
for Izoic pop television, as it was.
And the guy came up to me from Google,
I said, you're the cleverest, no stupidest,
cleverest person I know.
Why are you working 40, 50 hours from McLaren
when you could be sitting on this gold mine of an idea?
And it kept on playing around this idea.
And during COVID, I gave it go
and it's kind of been growing ever since.
So yeah, that's nuts.
So who told you this?
Because if someone went up to me and said,
hey, I want to create this poetry site,
I wouldn't have thought that it would be a gold mine
to be honest with you.
I mean, at a time, I was on a panel with two other people.
And at the end of this question,
I was obviously quite young compared to other people
who were like mid-30s or falsies.
And people said, what traffic do you get?
And this one person said, yeah, I get about half a million
and I've got about 20 people working for me.
And I'm like, oh, okay, that's interesting.
And the next lady said, yes, I've got about 800,000
and I've got about 15 people working for me.
And I said, actually, I've had to take it a day off
my full-time job.
I've been doing this by myself with one or two other people
when I get about 1.5 million.
And everyone's kind of just just drunk.
And that's when I realized, okay,
maybe I haven't been taking this seriously.
I've really put more time into it almost, you know?
So you're an engineer.
You were an engineer.
Were you in, like was poetry one of your passions or would?
It was all stemmed from learning from school.
So I have an appreciation for it.
I definitely have this growing
want for poetry, but I wouldn't say I am super involved
with it, but my rights as a my team are.
So that's where I can almost differentiate
and let them create the great content.
And I do everything else regarding the website.
So it kind of is a bit split in that sense.
But in the very beginning,
were you doing your own poem analyses?
Yeah, yeah.
So I did all the poetry analysis.
Got great feedback.
I actually quite enjoyed it as well,
but as you can imagine upscaling is quite difficult.
So now the website has about 4,300 poems.
So if I obviously wrote all that content,
I would be there forever.
So that was kind of where I diverged
and went towards a kind of technical SEO side of the website.
Walk me through the beginning.
So you're working on with Claren, presumably 40 to 60 hours.
I don't know.
That's what an engineer typically works.
And so you get home and you start writing
these poetry analyses.
When did you account on your tape
before you saw any traction?
That's a really good question.
So I started the website before my current.
So I actually started there halfway through my debris.
Okay.
I had this kind of honestly, I like Bobo idea.
I've never experienced it, but this was like a light
Bobo idea.
I then basically every part time job
would help me pay for people to help me write
and grow the website.
When it came to Claren, yeah, I would obviously,
it's easier when you're doing a degree.
Well, it's not easy.
It's still a full time job of degree,
but it was easier to make time to do the work.
But when I was at McClaren,
I began home at about six o'clock, half six,
and then sticking another couple of hours every night
to it pretty much.
But it wasn't a choice.
It was enjoyable work.
So I wouldn't think of it as work in that sense.
And then presumably it wasn't making money for a while.
Were you hiring writers before it was making any money?
Yes.
And I think that's always been the case
with all of my websites and I think most websites.
I would say it took about a year and a half, two years
before it became breakeven.
And then it kind of just kept on growing.
But the real growth came when I was able
to put all of my time to the website
rather than just two hours here, two hours there per day or week.
That really surprised me with exactly what that Google Guy says.
Yes, you can grow a website part time,
but if you stick all your time to it,
rely on me, it just rockets,
because you can put more time to the things you always want.
I've got about 20 different ideas I want to do the website,
and I still can't do it full time.
So you just keep bringing up new great ideas all the time
as you put more time into it
if that makes sense.
So walk me through this,
because I know if I was like a new entrepreneur
and I'm starting a content set about poetry,
I'd be pretty reluctant to hire writers.
Did you know that this was gonna make money at some point?
Like, were you confident in the beginning?
Yes, I think I saw enough with this revision website
that this was worth pursuing.
And then I believe with websites,
you get nuggets of feedback,
which you should take note of, in particular,
of this articles down the way,
or this poets down the way,
or this, this, or whatever it is with a website,
it was data that's giving you feedback all the time.
And the feedback was always positive,
and every time I change and improved it,
the feedback would almost be exponentially positive.
So, at the same time, just for the record,
I had about three or four other websites
I was trying at the same time,
and all of them failed.
And each one of them brought brilliant lessons
that I learned to the poem and ask this.
So, I have this theory that I want to fail almost more
than I succeed, because that allows me to realize
where I've gone wrong, and how to better myself,
whereas if I just keep growing,
you can't say if you're, what you're doing is really,
really good, or really good, if that makes sense.
And I want to really know when I'm doing things wrong,
and when I'm doing things right,
and to what extent that right isn't as important for me,
just as long as it's right or wrong, does that make sense?
Yeah, were there other sites that failed
with the content sites also?
Yes, in different niches, and each of them
has very obvious reasons for their failures,
and sometimes not obvious, actually,
but all of them life lessons have been kind of
ingrained into my head and helped me to kind of build up
the website portfolio I have now,
so where it currently is.
Before we move on to how you grew poem analysis,
I'm curious what those failures were.
What were the obvious reasons
why there's other ones failed?
Okay, so, okay.
I had a website about Twitter tips about optimizing Twitter,
and I just wasn't an expert in it, I believe, at the time.
I was wanting to learn about it.
I wasn't an expert, so the content wasn't very good.
I had a few tweets articles that would go viral,
but it wasn't very good.
Another one was about educating financial tips,
such as like, it was in this style of Tinder,
so you swipe right if the tip was good,
swipe left if it's not good,
and then my website was showcased the better tips
to people on the homepage,
but the issue of that was the work count for each
of these tips was like 200 words,
so it was very difficult indexing,
get traffic from Google,
it wasn't exactly super valuable content,
it was just a great user experience,
but not good for SEO traffic.
And then there was one about a site to do with the iPad,
because I was a massive fan of the iPad when it came out,
and again, I was probably copying too much content,
not really understanding what I was trying to do in that website.
And the last one was a website to do a steaming,
let's believe it or not,
which is something I'm keen on, actually,
just by sheer coincidence.
I have a book on steam engines as well,
and but what I found was that was the first time
I had people really giving me feedback in the comments
and contact forms about the website,
about how I was writing the content,
how could be better?
So almost before Google told people categorically,
this is how you should write the content,
I was almost getting that feedback from these real
interested readers about steam engines,
so that was what I kind of bought into Permanence as well.
Interesting, okay, so it sounds like one,
you learn that you shouldn't write about stuff
that you don't know that much about,
and two, SEO matters in your case,
and then three, if you're getting a lot of feedback
from actual readers, that's a good sign
that you're under something.
Yes, I would go down the route of,
if you can't write about it as an expert,
get someone else to, and it's fine to outsource it
to someone else, and I think, yeah,
what you said is pretty much bang on, I'd say,
the only thing I would say is each one of these
had very obvious reasons for failing,
and I should have noticed it sooner maybe,
but yeah, the feedback is, this is even now,
I get quite a lot of comments on the website per day,
and I almost sift for the negative comments
because they're the ones that are really people
that are passionate, that are almost unknowingly
want to help me by showing me where I'm going wrong,
so that's, even to this day, that's a real key
kind of feedback loop I use to kind of grow the website
and help deliver the best user experience.
What's funny is, I feel like Bladcoming is pretty dead,
where are these people leaving their comments?
Not if they've got questions, it depends on the context,
so with poem analysis, a lot of people have questions
about the poetry that might not be answered
in the analysis, and they sometimes
are very specific questions, sometimes not,
and you do find the more niche you go,
the more niche questions you get,
and sometimes they're quite beneficial
to include as FAQ scheme or something,
so it's almost like that feedback loop of,
they can ask me a question, okay, I'll answer it,
but I'll answer it as an FAQ, that's something I do
with a lot of the websites that start to get more traffic,
but it has to, I'd say it doesn't always work,
some of my websites don't have comments in enable,
but the ones that do tend to give really good feedback.
OK, all right, so I teach a class, like building an audience,
and if someone came up to me and said,
hey, I want to do a certain poetry, I would probably say,
okay, you can probably get traffic and build an audience,
but how the heck would you monetize that,
and I'd ask them to think about that?
So William, how do you monetize this site?
That's a really good question.
I do it currently, 100% ad revenue,
so my objectives is as much traffic as possible,
as much ad revenue, but recently I started to realize,
ad revenue is probably the worst way of monetizing a website,
so this is where I'm starting to look into product services
and other ventures, which really enough
is what all my competitors are doing,
so I'm not really sure if I haven't taken a note of it,
but that's kind of the area I'm going into now anyway.
So can you give the listeners an idea of,
like how much ads pay out on like a poetry site?
Not very high, so it depends on the ad network you're with,
so I was with Zoek for a long time,
and they sometimes didn't provide the best RPMs,
or EPMVs, what they call it,
only as per million thousand visitors,
so with them and the price of their premium service.
Can you give us a bar of glory?
Like, yeah, what was Zoek paying at the time
and then the different ad networks that you've used
and how the payout had increased?
Zoek during COVID was terrible,
it was actually net negative for one or two days,
but I would say about $7 RPM is a ballpot figure.
For ad frifes, it's up in with them,
you're looking at around 12 to 15, I'd say.
Okay, so just for the audience,
that's 12 to $15 per a thousand impressions, right?
Yes, okay.
And I don't actually have ads on my site
because I want people to sign up for my email list
and whatnot, but how do you balance
like not turning your poetry site into just like one big ad page?
Like, what are your limits?
Where do you place your ads?
What's the optimal placement?
So back when I was with Zoek,
they was doing quite a lot.
I then went to ad fri, but there wasn't as much,
but for my general consensus and my,
from work with the companies,
it's difficult to do too little
because it's always if you add 5% more ad per,
you might get 5% more revenue.
So right now, I'm probably at a point
where I've got two million ads on the website,
which is also a good incentive for people
to buy ad fri experience,
but typically I'd go with the Google guidelines.
So in content, you'd probably aim for about 20 to 25% coverage.
You don't really want any adverts above the folds,
so you kind of push the content down.
And maybe one or two sticky adverts
being at the bottom of the website or in the sidebar,
but that's quite intrusive.
I admit that it's not a perfect kind of monetization strategy.
It's kind of a concession,
and that's kind of why products and services
is probably a better way to go.
Because at the fourth example, I guarantee and know that
if I turn off the adverts for one week,
my traffic would just shoot
because it's a better use experience,
but then I'm also not making money.
So there's a kind of steep softwares
or best use experience,
but also monetizing the traffic as best as possible.
Because I know if I click on something,
and sometimes I end up clicking on,
some of those articles at the bottom of websites
where it takes them to,
it's obviously an ad driven site.
Because there's ads everywhere,
and then it shifts the page up and down,
and everything, so you accidentally click on the ad.
I know that when I land on one of those,
it actually diminishes the quality of that site in my mind.
And I'm just curious how you balance all that.
I actually, I went on your site,
it didn't seem that intrusive until you scroll down a little bit,
and sometimes there's like a big ad,
and sometimes there's like these little mini video ads,
I don't know if they're giving or videos.
And you mentioned that if you took those off,
you would see traffic shoot through the roof.
I'm just curious, is your goal 100% right now
to get as many impressions,
or is email part of your strategy?
What is the thought process?
Since I've done websites, there's always been traffic,
and I think that's the way most publishers go.
They go, I get more traffic, I get more ad revenue.
It's a one-to-one relation,
but when you get to a certain level,
and I can't say for what industries
you should get to in terms of impressions per month,
but when you get to a certain level,
I think the objective should move massively away
from ad revenue and traffic,
and which will also help with any drops in traffic,
the SEO or seasonality,
and it moved towards monetization with other methods,
and I feel that's the best way
to go about this type of industry,
maybe because it's difficult.
I think having a product in service
is a real good niche and a great thing to have,
but it also takes a lot of time,
so getting enough traffic is what I tend to do
with my websites, and now I'm starting to think,
okay, once I've got to that level,
can I better monetize the traffic?
So it's not actually dropping,
but it's actually improving the website even further.
So do you think that advertising has harmed your rankings
in Google?
Yes, I think it definitely has.
There's a lot of factors that will negatively influence
a web user and how they browse a article, bounce rights.
I get a lot of feedback for people
with the adverts and they hate the adverts as well,
which I completely agree with.
A lot of the competitors, I even see some maybe testing
of some people removing adverts from some web page
isn't seeing it shoot up as well.
It makes sense, it's not kind of rocket science.
If you've got someone come to a web page to recontent,
and they get an unbounded web adverts in between the content,
it's not going to improve,
make them want to send the website,
it's not going to help the call web slideshow as well.
You know, it's still not helping the SEO impact of the website.
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Now back to the show.
And, but clearly, what you're doing is working
despite the ads.
Actually, let's let's back up.
What are your primary traffic sources?
Google Bing Yahoo second-ass burden.
And then I say about 10% direct traffic.
So yeah, I'll teach it to 90 search engines.
Okay, wow.
All right, so all search engines.
And let's, I guess, let's dive into that then.
So you have all these ads.
The user experience isn't that great.
Yet you're still getting millions of hits every month.
Clearly, you're doing something right.
Can we do something in a while with your process?
I will say one of the reasons that is doing well
is because a lot of websites that offer educational content
for especially students in schools
offer it behind a paywall.
And I'm effortfully against that.
I don't think you should have to pay to get education.
So even with the ads, it's better than paying for the content.
And that will always be the case, I believe.
I've seen a lot of my competitors that even
didn't have a paywall, never went to a paywall.
And their conversion rate improved greatly
for whatever service they were offering
in terms of paying to see the content.
To the point that they could almost
like lose 80% of the traffic
and still be making more money
from these memberships and premium services.
But with a paywall, the SEO tanks as well,
but completely their website just crashes
and it's still crashing for a few competitors unfortunately.
So yeah, I think they're kind of niche USB
that I have with my content on all my websites
that I don't offer a limited experience.
I offer the full experience all bit,
not as nice UX as it would be if it was ad-free.
Interesting.
So without philosophy then,
they'd preclude you from selling products, right?
Infill products.
It makes it more difficult,
but then what I would be looking at is
not just given them the content,
but in a better format
that they can understand better
and then extras on top of that.
Because a lot of websites,
they obviously make them free and then cut back.
Almost a bit like Twitter,
the Twitter believe was a free service
and now that making you pay pain for something
that was previously free
is never going to go down well.
So whatever I choose to do
in some of your products on service
needs to kind of add to the free experience,
not subtracts from it.
Got it.
Okay, I understand, I understand.
Yeah, so you're just,
you're going to keep the free stuff the way it is,
but then you'll add value and charge for that.
Okay, makes sense.
Yeah, you're just,
you're not against like just charging
for education period.
So you mentioned something key there.
You said that a lot of your competitors
have it behind a paywall.
Has that allowed you to track a lot of links
from like .edu organizations?
I do get to lots of links from .edu.
And it's a massive benefit.
It does seem like it does follow
inside of the backlink juice as well,
even though sometimes they're behind closed doors.
But yeah, I've noticed a few times
where links have popped up on the website
and there's a increase in the main authority
in a HRS or Moz or have you within a few days.
So it's, it's not ideal,
but having it behind walls,
but I do still see benefits from them links as well.
So can you just walk me through your process?
Like you're going to do a poem.
Like how do you get so much traffic off of one of these?
Like what's your process for research?
Presumably, there's careful consideration
before you write any piece of content, right?
Yes.
Some of this is poetry specific.
I think some of it can be, you know,
be used for out different niches
and categories for websites.
I would typically do an SCM rush keyword research.
They hey, HRS as well.
I use both because they are slightly similar
in how they expose the results.
Use keywords such as poem, poetry, blah, blah, blah,
that type of thing and see what's ranking well for that.
A little bit competitive to see what the top posts are
and see what is working for them
and basically do the same but make it better.
So it's not just copying or the same content
was actually improving the content for that keyword.
There's a lot of listicles on best poems,
books on poetry, there's educational syllabuses
on poetry which is gonna be great for students.
So there's a lot of results as well.
I can get lists of what poems people care about
because especially with educational syllabuses, excuse me,
you tend to find that the SCM rushes and AHRFs
don't really showcase what's popular
because it's going to be popular for the coming year
for the educational syllabus.
So that's where you have to more rely on research
offline books and or even Google trace
to some extent as well.
So they're kind of the main core ways of doing research
and just by doing that you get hundreds of ideas,
even thousands.
So that kind of has kept me quite busy with my team.
Interesting.
Does that mean you have people on the ground
at schools to know what the upcoming curriculum is?
No, so lots of the examinant boards
in different countries, mostly US, UK and India
have everything online as PDFs so that teachers
can take it away and learn how to best approach
the new syllabus.
So we would basically have a list of these order
to do different examinant bodies in the US,
in the States, in the UK, in India,
whatsoever countries will want to target it
and then go to town and basically add them where we can.
And the great thing with these type of target team
which is something I would recommend people do
is you create your content for each of the poems
or many topics, but then you then create into a listicle
so people can see the complete educational syllabus
in an article and there the articles
that tend to get really good backlinks
from kind of educational websites and stuff.
So that's what I would tend to do.
I would make these separate poetry articles
or my team words and then we'd congregate it
into these articles that are specifically aiming
at certain demographic of people, students
that are wanting to study this specific examination
so that when they go, ah, I've got a full list here,
I can send it to my teacher, send it to my school,
send it to a forum and then that's where the backlinks
can kind of be generated as well.
Give me an example.
So, for example, in the UK,
we have a examinant board called AQA.
They have, I think, I can't have the talk on my head
about 20 poems in a anthology called A Power and Conflict
and each of these poems needs to be analysed.
So I would get my team to say,
these are the 20 poems that need to be analysed.
Go ahead, let's analyse them individually
as one of the articles per poem
and then we then make another article that says,
this is the list of the AQA poems
that you need to analyse for these years
and it's that article because,
because you're in a title,
you've got the examinant body,
the year that it's been analysed,
another examination or kind of keywords
that ranks really high for that for students trying to analyse them
and then that's where them links
and then get sense for hours
to different.edu websites.
Interesting. So you're putting together,
essentially a good curriculum
and then you're sending them out to the EDU sites
as like study guides, is that accurate?
I would say restaurant skies of his,
the poem that you need to analyse with links to them.
That's why I would put that, yeah.
And then earlier, this is just from my own curiosity,
you said you used SCM rush and AHS,
just curious what your take is on the difference
between those tools,
because I couldn't really find a big difference
that would warrant me selling it for both.
Yeah, so AH for F's,
I find it really good for,
well, the first thing is,
I tend to look at them on a daily basis
to see what percentage increase or decrease is.
My competitors and myself have had in terms of SM rush,
but AH for F's has something similar.
So if I see SCM rush,
I've had a 10% drop in there that predicted organic traffic.
I'd want to double check that against AH for F's,
and if that says a 10% drop, I wouldn't start to worry,
but sometimes you'll find one goes 10% down,
one goes 5% out, so it's like, okay,
that's their own tools and algorithms
that are making them changes.
I find AH for F's,
I prefer the keyword that's research.
And I think with SCM rush,
it's good for the site audience,
but it's very good also for certain keyword research
is where they introduce something
that I tested with them called user intent,
but so it'll tell you,
is it a commercial intent,
is it a brand intent,
is it information intent,
and understanding the intent behind the keywords
is something that I find is quite useful.
So I tend to use AH for F's,
if I really want to go hard with a keyword,
I'll then use SCM rush,
but the other thing with SCM rush,
which is a bit of a USP is click potential,
is something that I think that's starting to roll out,
and I did a bit of recent testing with them on,
where it'll tell you for a certain keyword,
what percentage click potential will you get
for that keyword, for example,
if I say our old is Brock Obama,
it's a zero click search term
because you'll see his whatever age he is,
but if there's one that says,
what are the themes and the structural form of this podium,
people are more likely to click onto the first result,
and not see a rich snippet,
so then the click potential is higher.
So it's also a good way of seeing,
with not just which keywords to go for,
based on such volume and traffic,
I'm such volume, sorry, in,
keyword difficulty,
but also click potential as well.
Hey, Truss has had that for a long time.
I had no idea about that,
so thank you for that,
I know, make a nice look at that.
I had not yet.
And ever since they introduced their plugin,
like the Chrome plugin,
that a lot of people are using now,
they have even more click stream data than ever before.
I personally give a trust to the leg up,
just because I feel like they're investing
a lot of resources in crawling, they have the plugin,
and they get that click data like you're talking about.
SCM rush looks nicer though,
like the UI just is prettier.
So yeah.
Okay, so look a little deeper.
Yeah.
Sorry, I was gonna say the thing I find interesting as well
is when you get down to the,
below 200s search traffic,
the numbers can vary quite strategically,
and I tend to find AHS is a little bit more accurate
from where I see my Google search console,
to how much traffic AHS is predicting.
So that's something that I find quite good
is if you've got very niche terms,
they're probably the best ones to go for.
Okay.
So one thing that we had talked about
in the mastermind group is schema and markup.
So one, would you mind defining for the audience,
what that is?
And two, how did you even discover
that this was important in the first place?
So schema and markup is a way of structuring data
and content that you have on your website
into a format that Google can read very precisely
and effectively that they can then translate
into a good user experience,
snip it or a rich snip it at the top of Google search results.
So ultimately, Google's aim is to satisfy the users
quickly as possible.
And I don't think that's gonna change for years and years.
And the quicker they can do that,
the better the UX, the more money they are
probably going to make.
So the idea that you are getting positive SEO
by changing and formatting your content
to have schema markup enables you to be more eligible
for this rich snip it at the top of Google.
And obviously, if you're at the top of Google,
you're gonna probably get more clicks
even if it is the rich clicks.
So that's kind of the method,
the deal schema markup.
And there's many different types
and which ones you use can have good consequences.
Some might be better than others.
It's probably a niche thing as well.
For example, if I have a recipe schema on my website,
it's not gonna work very well.
Or if it's on a food website, it's gonna work very well.
So yeah, there's loads of different markups.
And I think finding out which ones are better for your niche
and basically pushing across your whole content
is really gonna help in the best of ways.
So you mentioned like the snippet
at the top of the search results.
Which schema is conducive to that on your site?
Is it the FAQ markup or is it just answering
the questions succinctly?
What's your tactic for getting that?
So the thing with the, so for example,
I have FAQ and I rolled that cloud quite considerably
about a year ago and I found that you would see
the FAQ questions underneath to randomly select it.
Well, it's not random, but it's chosen,
chosen, selected questions from Google
underneath the search result.
And that increases the space that you have on search results.
And although the click-through rate
does decrease having that, the impression you get on Google
massively increases, which gives you a net gain ultimately.
But in terms of the actual rich snippet at the top of the page,
I tend to find that you don't actually have to have
any specific schema markup to achieve that.
You just need to make sure your content is as formatted
as possible in a way that Google can really understand it.
So one of the best experiments I did on this,
which I haven't seen replicated anywhere else,
comes with my other website, oceanimpro.com,
where I did a listicle on dangerous rivers
and the way I did this listicle,
which I believe any listicle should have the same structure,
is you have an introduction,
you then list out the item, be it a H2 heading,
one to two points as to white's dangerous
or whatever you're talking about in the listicle,
and the image or a video of it,
and in the content underneath it.
And with the images, I had a caption for each of the images
that said why was the river dangerous?
And Google, because I structured that article so well,
and it was very clear that each caption
answered the question of why that river was dangerous,
they actually used it as a list, as a rich snippet list.
They said they took each of the captions out
and used it as a rich snippet.
So it kind of honed in to me that yes,
you can add if it used to be like,
you can add brick on schema,
but ultimately the biggest thing you can do
is just structure your article as regimen to this possible
and as easy to understand as possible,
both to use it on a crawl robot,
and then the rich snippets will naturally come your way anyway.
Okay, so walk me through that again,
because I missed it.
Intro, and then an intro to the listicle,
and then list all the things in the list,
but you sit in the image, all tags, what do you do?
So I would have each of the listicle items,
I would have the H2 heading up,
whatever it is in that listicle article,
and then have two points underneath it
of where it's located, what's dangerous,
and that would change, for example,
if you're doing the top soccer players ever to live,
you might say, how many goals they scored,
what teams did they play for?
It doesn't matter, just two things about that listicle item
that relates to the article.
You then have the image, and I'd make the captions
and the alt tags exactly the same,
and I'd make sure that the alt tag and caption
answers the question regarding that listicle item.
So if it was Ronaldo in this football soccer example,
I'd say, Ronaldo is one of the best players ever,
because he scored this many goals as the caption
and the alt tag for that image.
And then have underneath that,
an paragraph, 150 words, 200 words,
which would go into more detail.
And that caption, in this ocean info example,
the main authority of the website, when it happened, zero,
it was two months old or something,
and it was beating everyone,
it was beating National Geographic,
it was beating DA's of up to 80,
on exactly the same keywords, articles,
and I genuinely believe it was just because
it was so well formatted in the structure,
that Google couldn't not use it as a rich snippet.
And I think the idea as well,
you can look at it from a Google perspective,
but you can also look at it from a user perspective.
The way I try to think of things is,
how many different ways can the reader read your content?
Traditionally, if you've just got a massive paragraph,
that's one way.
If you have H2 headings, that's the second way.
If you've got images, that's the third way.
If you have bullet points underneath the hidden,
two bullet points of why it's whatever it is,
or just a bit more data,
such as Ronaldo scored this many goals,
he plays for these teams, that's the fourth way.
If you have content underneath the image,
that's the fifth way.
If you've got good captions, that's the sixth way.
And I find the more different ways of digesting the content,
the better SEO than articles tend to get.
So the example you just gave,
are you implying that you answer the question
in the H2 tag or in the caption for the image?
In your Ronaldo, the H2 tag would be Christiana Ronaldo.
So you'd want to say who are the items in this listicle?
And then the images would kind of relate that list item
to the question that you're trying out.
So I'll be in who's the best for those.
Well, they're most dangerous rivers or what have you?
So if you are answering the question in the caption
for an image, that implies then that it's not a keyword
that you're using for the tag for the image.
It's actually a sentence, is that correct?
Yes.
Okay, interesting.
Okay, I've never thought to do that.
My alternative, typically just, yeah.
Yeah, I tend to find that something that I categorically believe works.
I do it with all my listicles now on any website
and it really does work.
But the only time I've ever seen it as a rich snippet
was on this one example of dangerous rivers.
But I never thought of the alt tags or the captions
as being something that could be turned into a rich snippet.
But if they kind of relate back to the core topic
or whatever that article was about,
yeah, I can see how Google would use it
because it's something that's repeatable
that they can clearly extract from the article
with every type of an alt tag or caption
is answering a question in a way
that could be turned into a rich snippet.
Of course, they would probably like to use it.
So let me just summarize everything
that you just said that we just talked about here.
Okay, so you have the H2 tag, Christiano Ronaldo.
Then you have an image that answers the question,
he scored this many goals and whatever.
And then you might have a couple ball of points
that say the same thing.
This guy scored that many goals and whatnot.
Then you're not quite, no, not quite.
So I'd have the H2 of Christiano Ronaldo
underneath that I'd have two old points statistics.
I've had how many goals he scored,
what teams he might have played for.
Something, a statistical point that emphasizes
why he's one of the best strikers in the world
or whatever you're talking about.
You then have the image, which would then answer
in a different way with different information
why he's the best striker or footballer.
And then the content would go and take all that information
and add more to it, stuff that's probably not
relating to why the best footballer
and just give you a better overview of who that player is
or whatever that list of quite some is.
Okay, I like it.
Okay, so it's not the same verb age.
It's reverted to Andy and the question
maybe in a different way, got it.
Okay, that's amazing.
Okay, that's great.
And so that's listicles.
So how does that relate to poems?
Poems aren't as factual as that, right?
Do you do it the similar in a similar fashion
and do you use images actually for your poem analysis?
I tend to find that images are a USB that I like
to expand out to as many poems as possible
because a lot of people struggle to visualize
and understand what poetry is about.
So having some sort of feature image
or an image of some kind that really homes in
and what they're kind of vibe and what the poetry is about
helps understand a poem and it also helps UX as well.
But with the listicles, it's the great thing
about what I just said is can be transferred
to any industry.
So for poetry, I might have the top 10 best love poems
and then have Summit 52 by William Shakespeare
and then say, what is it about?
Why, what themes does it include?
Love, relationship, love, love.
And then have the image or whatever I have
as a representation of it.
I might even not choose an image
and choose a different type of content
which is a quote from the poem.
That's the most important part of the poem quoted.
I can then say why it's a really good love poem
and just repeat that again.
So the image isn't something that might always work
in each industry, but the H2 wild two bullet point reasons,
some sort of content being an image video
for me for poetry is quotes
and then the content underneath it is, yeah,
it just works really, really well.
Amazing.
Okay, and then we didn't even touch on
how you run your team and whatnot,
but clearly what you're doing is working,
I'm just curious what's stopping you
from hiring more writers and really blowing this up
and just scaling this even more.
Or is that something you're trying to do?
I think, yes, it's something I'm trying to do,
but it's very difficult.
And I think Elon Musk did it very well
that anyone can create a project like car
but mass scaling it and manufacturing it
is a whole different question.
And it's the same I feel with anything up scaling.
So I, it's difficult finding the right talent
and people that you can trust
because like you probably know,
you can press the wrong button
and everything goes wrong.
You don't really want to interest them
and that might not know what they're doing in that sense,
but it's also having their right processes ready to upscale.
So I might have been working in Tredo
where people can pick the poetry that you want to write
and so forth.
Now I'm looking to move to programs such as ClickUp,
using Loom to kind of give visual,
video kind of lessons of how to do this and this.
Hiring one or two people just to help with the management
of the writers and to make sure everyone's happy
and do the comedy and that type of thing.
So yeah, it's difficult to do.
There's not a silver bullet answer I could give,
but yeah, it's something I'm still learning to be fair.
Well, let me ask you this.
Are you, do you personally read all the pieces of content
that get posted on your site today?
Yeah, every single article on any website I've read.
I don't always read it methodically,
but I'll go over it with a grammarly.
I'll make sure the SEO is good.
I'll read sections just to make sure I make sense,
but not all of it, you know,
just kind of a skim read.
Right. Okay.
So that means that you have editors
that are kind of editing everything.
And so you're just kind of doing the final pass at this point.
The I train the writers to be the editors.
I don't really see the benefit of having someone
go over the content.
I know a lot of people do that,
but I would rather just let the writers do the optimizations
so that when a new talk comes out such as a Seth Ressio
or topic SEO, I can train the writers
and not have the editors to do it as well.
Cool. William, this was pretty enlightening.
Working the listeners find all the various websites.
I know you have a poetry one, you have a book one.
And the most recently you have an ocean website, right?
Yes.
So primary.
Paramonassist.com is the poetry one.
And the sister website book analysis is bookonassist.com.
And the ocean website is oceaninfo.com.
And I maybe we'll have you back on
once you've monetized it with your own products.
I'm very curious how that compares to your ad revenue.
And do you plan on removing or reducing the ads
once you have products?
Yes.
So I would say,
I'm part of my strategy.
I think that also works well just on the side note
is I always have about 10 to 20 experiments growing on
and seeing which ones work, which ones don't work.
So I can see in the future,
reducing the ads for certain categories, for example,
seeing how that place for SEO gains
and what opium differences there'll be.
But the membership, which I'm currently working on,
will include that for experience.
So it's almost kind of incentivizing people
to have the membership if there are ads on the website.
So I wouldn't want to reduce it too much,
but yeah, I'll be experimenting all the time anyway.
I know that works for me.
There's this place where I watch anime called Crunchy Roll.
And if you don't, like you can watch them for free,
but there's like an ad like every five minutes,
it bothers me to no end.
And then you just pay like, you know,
a little bit of money and you get those ads removed.
So the model is proven and it works.
I'm just kind of curious.
When you implement it, how well it'll do.
I'm very curious.
So keep me posted.
Oh, yeah, sounds good.
So thanks a lot for coming on the show William.
Appreciate it.
Now, I always thank you for having me.
Hope you enjoyed that episode.
Now if there is a topic that you were interested in,
then there's no harm in just documenting it online.
And who knows?
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More information, go to mywifecutorjob.com,
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