James Camp on Buying vs Building Content Sites and The Future of Search with AI!

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Let's do this. Welcome to the Niche Website Builders Podcast. Today we have Jameson Camp, and this was one of the most insightful episodes that you'll listen to on the Niche Website Builders Podcast. And we go into a range of topics centered kind of around the beginner-intermediate niche website builder, more so the ideas of how and where to start, what you're looking for when buying a website. We dive deep into the AI debate, whether that's going to change industry or not, and what you can do to essentially make sure that you're not going to be left behind. And we go into a bunch of other things— newsletters, communities, diversifying your websites, different channels of traffic. I mean, even if you're not a beginner, you're going to learn something from this, from from this chat because we, we kind of go all over the place with this, and James is, is great at just rambling on about various different points and, uh, different tidbits and tips. So sit back and enjoy.

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Welcome to the Niche Website Builders Podcast. Today we have James Camp.

Welcome, James. I'm excited to be here. It's been a long time coming. It's been a long time coming.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Now we've got our basically 55 minutes to get in as much information as possible. So do you want to do a brief introduction about yourself and we'll go straight into it?

Sure. I'm James Camp. I am a serial entrepreneur, self-proclaimed like internet kid. I just sort of happened to serendipitously grow up at the rise of the internet. Started blogging when I was like 15. And sort of, uh, have ran the whole gamut of online businesses ranging from a whole bunch of niche sites to, uh, yeah, to owning a couple of DTC brands and doing strategy consulting for large Fortune 500 companies. And, and now I'm trying to be prolific on the internet and Twitter and, and here we are.

Well, you're pretty much there. You got like 70,000 followers.

I think 76. I think, I think 76.

Oh, okay. No, fair enough. But how the hell do you get into blogging at 15 years old?

I mean, I think—

That doesn't seem like a natural thing.

No. Well, in all fairness, I'm 34, so 15, I mean, this is 20 years ago, right? This was like really, at the time, I was probably just Googling how to make money on the internet. You know what I mean? Like, and that's just really probably, I think, probably how most people start, you know, down this path is Googling how do I make money on the internet? And I mean, I remember the days of like, I don't remember exactly how I got there, but it was, you know, I was building websites with, on like GeoCities and AngelFire, you know, which are just like, just a different, don't, I don't even think exist anymore. And yeah, I just, I mean, I had this epiphany moment. I've told this story a bunch, but I had a blog, it was called Gold Piece XL. I just wrote about sneakers and things I liked. And I would like, I was just spamming blogging communities. There used to be these blogging communities where it was just basically like social networks, right? And everyone would share their blogs.. And I would just go and like DM like 100, 200 people a day with like my articles and be like, I hope you read this article. I'd love to read yours, send it back over, you know? And, um, and it would like, I'd get like 20 or 30, you know, hits a day or uniques a day. And then, uh, one day I had 2 articles go viral. Um, oh, I had 2 articles on different days, but on StumbleUpon and Digg and made like $30 on AdSense. And which was for 15 years old or 16 years old, I don't remember the exact age. Pretty crazy. Especially with inflation, it's like probably $60 today. And by the way, at the time, 20 years ago, like internet money was really weird, right? People were like, what is this? You're selling drugs. I wish I was selling drugs on the internet. Well, I probably would've made a lot more money at 16. But either way, so yeah, so that was sort of how I like, that was, and then that was the impetus from there. It's been an exhaustingly amazing journey, but Yeah, I'm sure it started with a quick Google search on how to make money on the internet. I probably found like some internet marketing forums or something, I don't know, uh, which became a big part of my life later on.

So yeah, fair enough. And obviously you're a serial entrepreneur, but a serial buyer and seller of various businesses and websites. So I wanted to start this with buying a website or starting fresh. Maybe someone listening to this is more on the beginner side. And I guess what's your opinion or what's your take on buying something and running that or just starting fresh and kind of doing your own?

So my thoughts are that there's no clear-cut answer and the answer is individualistic, so to speak. And so what I mean by that is obviously we'll keep this sort of niche, you know, niche site related for this, for this podcast specifically. But I would say that anyone that is like at all internet savvy could could pretty easily learn to build and run a blog, right? For an authority site, content site, whatever. You know, these are all interchangeable terms essentially, right? Um, you know, it's basics of WordPress, basics of, of, of, of writing content. Um, and then link building. And to be honest with you, a lot of link building I've done has not been this like hyper-strategic link building. Um, that I think a lot of people think of it as. And so my biggest wins in the world, uh, SEO-wise were actually not like intentional SEO wins. And that's a whole different story. But starting from scratch, I would say that before anyone buys a business, buys a site, they should at least at a bare minimum go buy a domain name, set up hosting for it, and install WordPress and install some plugins to the theme and, and read an article. That, and you could get that done in an aggregate of 10 hours of work, right? Like, and it would, it would take you so beyond, uh, you know, where you were the prior to those 10 hours of work, you know, less than 10 hours you get there. Um, But yeah, my, my thesis is really sort of that in a vacuum, the most alpha that you'll ever get is starting from zero and building, right? Because you start from zero. There's no question that alpha being, you know, gain. Um, uh, but that most people, I'm a real advocate of real buying sites because that most people will not have the attrition. It's just a game of attrition, right? Like will not have the attrition to consistently work at something for 6+ months. And see zero results from it. And when we're talking SEO specifically, that's just a reality, right, of, of, of that game. 3 to 6 months before you start seeing any dividends of what you're doing, and then it's obviously compounding from there. So I think that it's often magical for people to be in a situation where day one they can get dopamine hits, right? Like day one they can see there's revenue, day one they can see there's traffic. And so that's, it really depends on the person. And the other thing I would say is that like, if you've got, if, you know, people DM me or email me all the time like, I need to make $1,000 to pay my rent or I need to do this. Like, don't— buying a site is not the path for you if you are really short on cash. It's just, it's just really not right. It's an investment in a microbusiness. It is not like a way to pay your bills quickly, right? Like if you're, you know, a $10,000 site gets you $300 a month in cash flow, right? So if it's your last $10,000 to your name, I would really recommend you don't go, you know what I mean? That you don't go turn it into $300 a month in cash flow. You know, that would just be a terrible idea. Now, if you have a job and are doing well and you've always wanted to be an entrepreneur and you have some money set aside and you've already invested and you have a home or what, you have a 401k, whatever it is, and you're interested in this, I think that buying a site is an insanely amazing path to skipping so much of the grind. Um, but again, that's very individualistic to the person.

Yeah, that's good advice. And it reminds me of, I think I read a stat on, I think it was on one of the Reddit sub forums on podcasts. So I think it's like you've got to publish over just over 30 episodes and then you're in the top 1% of podcasts in the whole world. And as you mentioned, the consistency is just a war of attrition, right? It's how consistent can you be and just publishing and just outlasting everyone else.

That's the real answer. I mean, I hate to make it sound so dumb and so simple, but You know, candidly, from when I talk to people that are looking at starting from scratch, it's very often just beginners on online businesses and they're trying to figure out which path to go with. Right. And so I think that content sites is a fantastic one and we can dive into AI maybe a little bit and sort of say, talk about where I think that's going. But the reality is people like, oh, should I start an agency? Should I become a media buyer? Should I become a copywriter? Should I start a content site? Like the answer is that every one of these models works. 100% equivalently. What's best? I don't know. It depends on who you are and what path you're going to follow. You know, the truth is like building a portfolio of content sites, 100% works. If you want to see it scale, go check out Red Ventures. You know what I mean? You go check out TPG, go check out some of the stuff Chernin owns, right? Like you can have a billion-dollar content site portfolio that exists, right? And, um, same thing with the agency world. Go check out TBWA or BBDO or any of these massive agency holdings companies. My point is every single thing we're talking about, if you're like just starting on the internet, like where do I go make money? How do I build a business online? They, the paths all work. I happen to think that content sites are probably one of the lowest barriers to entry of paths and are the clo— I don't believe in passive income. If you want passive income, I would go and, and invest in AT&T stock and get dividends at 6% a year. Um, but for some pretty close to passive income after you put in some work, you can go get 25, 30% on a content site. And then so I think that it's a real sweet spot there for a lot of operators that niche sites are really the answer for.

Yeah. And obviously you brought up the dirty word of AI and we can't do a podcast without AI coming up. So yeah, there's obviously a lot of, there's actually, I've heard of a few people almost sitting on the sidelines a little, just waiting to see what happens before they, you know, continue what they're doing or really going all in. I guess what's your take on, on the future there? And is that something you would look to do or you just like, ah, fuck it.

It's funny, man, because I also, I like, as soon as I said it, I just said it cause I know I thought it was gonna come up. You know what I mean? It's one of those things that's like, I was just writing my newsletter like before this and like, you know, the first, you know, the first paragraph is like the hot topic right now is AI. I repeat it again, in my opinion. And you know, it's just, it's unavoidable at this point, especially when you're talking about the niche site world. You just have to, you know, it's just a reality. Um, and I, I link actually to a thread that I'm sure, you know, Dom, Dom Wells just posted about doing 500 AI articles from—

just talk to him.

Uh, so he's, I would love to actually should, I should email him and catch up because really curious sort of his thoughts on some of it as well. He has a public company that's essentially a portfolio of content sites, right? Um, on the NASDAQ. Um, another example of how it can scale into, you know, people say how big can content sites get? Well, you can go to the NASDAQ with Dear. Um, but, uh, my thought is this to sum it up is that AI for now, I don't, I can't like tell you where I think we're going to be in 10 years. And I think that anyone who does tell you that is just a futurist and is like, as futurists are traditionally wrong, right? Like that's just a very common thing. And then way further later, like science fiction becomes reality, right? Like all this stuff from Star Trek from like the '80s, like became reality today. Right. But futurists were not right about what they thought the world would be. So anyway, um, I don't know where we're at 10 years out. I think that AI is in a moment of bubble of hot topics, sort of in the way crypto had a couple bubbles and tech had a massive bubble. AI is 100% the future. AI is 100% changing the world. Half the companies that are saying they are real AI right now are not really AI companies. Right. Um, candidly, when we talk about Google and AI, Google already uses AI algorithms that learn our AI. I mean, that is literally what Google Search is, an algorithm that learns from behavior that people click through of how to re-rank content and stuff. So I'm not overly worried. And let's, for niche sites in terms of Google Search, and I think that's the hot topic for AI specifically here in my world. Yeah. Certain key, I think in the next 12 to 24 months, we are going to see certain keywords lose good chunks of traffic. I do not think we are going to watch in the next 12 to 24 months. I can't promise you in 5 to 10 years. I do not think in the next 12 to 24 months we're gonna watch an entirely seismic shift in the fundamental way that people find information on the internet. I don't, and I could be completely, completely wrong, and I've been wrong before. I'm open to being wrong again, but that's just not where I see it going. I, everyone freaked out about featured snippets, featured snippets. Actually, now everyone wants to win a featured snippet cuz they get more traffic from it. Um, I think, uh, it's a reminder of, I've been doing this for 20 years. The thesis has always been better content. That has always been what all, every algo update has ever essentially been. And this seems to be the most modern and largest take on it in a while, but just a reality. And, you know, it used to be that you could just buy an EMD. We called them exact match domains and you'd automatically be number one in Google. You could then just keyword stuff at the bottom of the page. You would write write what you would write white text on top of a white background underneath your content and just keyword stuff it and you'd rack and rank at the top of Google. That was the most rudimentary discovery of, of, of how to, to, to, to sort of beat the algo. And now it's just a, a, a, the newest iteration of that. And that is create really phenomenal content that comes from an expert that is full of videos and is useful. And some searches will be easily answered through AI. Um, and the last piece I'll say about this to go with this is that the part that I think that people don't think about often a lot of people and you're in my space and I think about a lot, um, because I'm not just an, you know, like I'm not, I'm not the best SEO on the planet. I'm not the best niche site guy on the planet. I'm this like sort of weird entrepreneur who like tries to buy and sell businesses and mostly plays in that space. But is that there's a lot of legal issues that come with AI for Google and Bing in any search, especially Google. And I think that Google's biggest enemy is the US government. And antitrust laws. And, and I think that the concept, the moment that the US government sees that one of the largest companies on the planet is taking creators' content, monetizing it, rewriting it, and monetizing it on its, on its own, and then impeding on that small business creator, whatever, ability to function as a business, that really, really starts, I think, opening a scary door for Google in where the government says you can't do that., right? Forget copyright. We're already watching with the image space of AI, Getty Images suing everyone because clearly Getty has been— their images pulled and turned into AI images. And you can even see on some of them like little white boxes that said Getty initially, right? So yes, certain things will go. Um, but my overall overarching thesis is that like the world changing is, is your opportunity. It's always changed. And, and as if you want to be an entrepreneur that sort of That's the risk and bet that you're making is that you move and pivot. And that often, you know, the Industrial Revolution destroyed many jobs. It also made the richest people on the planet exist. Right. And so I think there's going to be a lot of opportunity using AI as a tool instead. It'll replace us, but not in the next 10 years. I'm not worried about our entire lives being taken over by computers in the next decade. Who knows? But anyway, that's my rant. That was a long rant. I apologize.

No, that was good. That's good. Now, I also think as, as I guess as a user of search engines and whatnot, like when I search something, I want to know who's giving me the information. So if Google's just, if Google's giving me information, I'm like, do I, do I even trust, like, who's this from?

You know, what's— immensely. And to go along with that, you are in, but you, you deal with this for a living, right? So you're very inquisitive about that kind of stuff. But it starts to really open up all the really, all the hearings that are happening with Twitter right now, where they're looking at sort of the suppression of information and stuff, because really, really, really scary world, the idea that one person is the source, or one entity is the source of all infallible truth. Right. And there also are just lots of things that aren't absolute truths. Right. Like, and, and, and that's a real problem as well. Right. So that, so it just means that inevitably not all search is going to disappear. I just don't believe so. Um, I'm excited to see where it goes. I tweeted something like 10 minutes ago, which is a real reality, which is that like some of the smartest and hardest working people I know in the world are not Americans. That's for sure. In fact, Americans, as, as, as an American who is fundamentally lazy and like just above average or of average intelligence, like the whole world would eat me alive if they had access to the world I have access to. Right. And so I think that we're going to watch what I tweeted was I said, who, and someone sent me a link to one, it's called like Sensei or something or Sensei, but whoever creates the AI model that allows me to speak in Hindi, for example, right. And have it translate in real time into perfect English and then type in whatever my native language is as well and have it translate in real time. Is going to fundamentally change the way that US corporate structure works. Because I can tell you that when you have— intellect has nothing to do with where you're born, and, and your ability to work hard has nothing to do— it's actually probably more cultural. And I think a lot of Americans are particularly lazy culturally compared to other parts of the world. So if I can go hire someone in overseas who now can all of a sudden articulate themselves with the same complexity and a high level that I can as a native American for US I don't know why half of the US talent jobs that are remote don't fully get outsourced to overseas. Like, it just doesn't seem to be a reason to me at all, right? And so, for example, I have a VA, Dasha. She's fantastic. She's from Ukraine. But part of the problem that— part of my struggle is I often have to like rewrite her emails for her, right? But that changes when it can automatically be done, right? And so anyway, that's where I see really interesting AI stuff happening. Pretty soon.

Well, slightly related. Have you seen like the deepfake advertising videos people have been making? I saw one someone did, Leonardo DiCaprio advertising their thing. Like, and I was like, how?

So we're going to have government regulation.

How you going to—

So government regulation is going to have to come in, right? You know, and there's always going to be black hat people in terms of like— and so black hat for everyone who doesn't know, who's newer to this, like in the SEO world, white hat, black hat. White hat being sort of what follows the guidelines of Google and everyone agrees with black hat being sort of what breaks the rules and is not illegal but breaks terms of service, right? And can include some illegal stuff. There'll always be black hat SEOs. I used to run Black Hat World. I was a black hat SEO. Just, I mean, anyone who's buying links is technically a black hat SEO, right? Like in terms of Google's, but here's the dirty secret of the SEO industry. Everyone buys links. Um, so what I was going to say though, to go along with that is that like, There will have to be government regulation that comes in. I mean, you know, it's been a long time where you're taking, you know, celebrities' images and, um, and pretending that they are sponsoring your product. I've seen that forever. It's been happening with Shark Tank ads, fake products from like Alibaba and, and using Shark Tank stuff, uh, clips for a long time now. They'll get shut down though eventually. Um, but the deepfake stuff gets really sketchy. And by the way, the deepfake stuff that you and I are seeing in those ads is really crappy deepfake. That like, that like, that sketchy marketers have access to, right? Not like very high quality deepfake. I'm sure like, I'm sure that someone who's actually like a VFX person could really, really make things indistinguishable. And we're only, we're only a little ways away from that happening fully for everyone. But there's going to have to be regulation. And even as someone who's like pretty into small government, there's going to have to be regulation that comes in around this space. And it's going to be interesting to see what plays out. It's going to be consumer protection laws and the FTC is going to come around and start shutting stuff down and suing people. And so we'll find out, finding people, we'll find out.

Yeah, for sure. And I want to jump into buying, buying businesses as well. So obviously with, with AI going on and you've mentioned, you know, in the next 10 years or so you don't see huge, huge changes and it doesn't affect your business too much. So you're still looking to buy content sites, I'm assuming, along with e-com and potentially SaaS. But you want to maybe dive into what you're looking for when you're buying or acquiring these sites to— I'm assuming you want to flip.

Totally. Well, I mean, here's the real reality. So, you know, shout out to listeners. I just bought last year the domain onlineacquisitions.com, and NanoFlips is actually inevitably going to just become part of onlineacquisitions.com. And that's partially because I— every business has an exit. Every business in the history of all time has— every founder has an exit, whether their choice or not. So, um, no matter what, if you want to win with the business, I— your options as a business owner are three: run it till you die, it goes out of business, or you sell it. Those are the three options. And since my time horizon is not until I die in terms of my ability to pay attention to things, um, and because I prefer for things to not go out of business, I think inevitably the often the route to go is to, to sell it. Right. Um, and so, um, I'll, I'll, now I'll go into buying. Um, I am, if the right content site came across my plate today, I would 100% buy it. I would immediately be starting to think about how to build email lists and communities around it. I would no longer, there's a world that I won't play in anymore, which I used to play in, which was like the, um, sort of EMD single product review websites that I just won't touch that one anymore, probably until I at least see how this all shakes out. Right. But like the, like topairfryerreview.com, I'm, I'm a, I'm not a buyer of that one.

Dude, there's so many air fryer websites now.

I know, I know. There's so many. Um, but so I'm probably not a, a buyer of those anymore. Right. Like now, if it was like, and recipes is not the greatest example, cause I'm a little dubious of where recipes go. Um, but let's, let's stay on the food topic to keep it easy. Like I'm much more interested in like, You know, healthy food for millennials, even that's way too long of a, of a URL, but you get my point, right? Like I'm much more interested in the healthy food for millennials niche than the name of the top air fryer review niche. Now with that said, the top air fryer review niche is probably much easier to monetize day one, right? Like in affiliate commissions. I just think that that's where things start getting sketchy, what may disappear. And there's no community to be built, built off that very easily. Right. There's no retention models to keep, but top. Healthy food for millennials, you know, yeah, like, could I build a newsletter or could I build a Discord or could I build a Facebook group around that? And then, and, and could I create really compelling, interesting content for social media around that? 100%. And so that sort of mitigates a lot, half of the risk I see in the next 5 years with AI. Like, the biggest risk I see with AI for online businesses is search related. For now, right? Like the video models are off. No one's replacing this podcast for a while. Do you know what I'm saying? Like that, like that's very, very, very different. Um, and so it's going to become more, I'm more interested in communities and creator-focused businesses. I'm really, really, really interested in, and, and, and working on kind of working on a stealth startup in the background. I say that because nothing's signed yet, but we have a lot of talks about building, taking an online education play in the space. Um, but in general, uh, still buying. I just want the right ones for content. And I, it's also a good reminder to me. I had leaned back into content. I sold a hearing aid company in, in early last year, and I basically spent the entire last 12 months only thinking about content sites. I bought one new one, sold one, and I've been looking at new ones. And then it was a, this has been a fresh reminder that online businesses expand. People say, how do I get into e-commerce? I say, well, remove the E and ask yourself the same question. See how silly it is. Right? Like you just mean, how do you get into making money on the internet? When you ask me how to get into e-commerce, how do you get into commerce? I don't know in what regard, right? It's just a ridiculous, ridiculous question. So I'm still a buyer. I'm much more interested in high-quality websites that hobbyists, passionate hobbyists have built around a niche that then you can build community and retention tools around. And when I say retention tools, newsletters or online communities, um, and by the way, that's what you should be doing anyway., but now it's just like a flashing sign in my face. It's a reminder again that like, okay, we need to mitigate risk just from search, right? It's just platform risk. You see creators do it with, with, with TikTok or Instagram. If all of your traffic is only coming from Google search, it's been a really fun 15 years. And, um, and I think that probably you'll be fine over the next 5 years, but I would start to think about where are there Facebook groups or subreddits or Quora answers that you can answer? And is there a newsletter that you can build around this space? Are there theme pages in your niche that you can acquire and, and, uh, from like social media, like an Instagram page or a TikTok page to go along with it? Um, I, one thing I'm looking at doing right now today, I own a website in the sports and it's about a certain sport. It's about soccer. It's about football. We'll leave it at that. And I've been looking at buying a 250,000 person Instagram page in the space, right? Packaging those together. The IG page grows organically, sends, sends con— sends traffic to the content site. The content site creates creates content that we post on the IG page. Then it's like, okay, now I've got 250,000 followers I know that love football or soccer, right? Depending where you are in the world, it's soccer for me. Um, let's say— well, I'll just keep saying soccer, it's easier. Then they'll love soccer. Okay, so now I can run ads against that audience. I can probably acquire an email subscriber list very cheaply by running retargeting ads predicated on the traffic to the website and engagers on that page, right? So now I'm gonna So it's like, so now you want to build a little— it used to be that content sites, niche sites, to me, to me were just like the single vertical. And then I had 2020, this changed for me when I sold the portfolio of them. There was this recognition that the value was not just in a singular site, it was like building like a little media company. And so I think that if operators start thinking about building little media companies that have social channels and email lists and possibly communities for the right ones and their own products, maybe even that they sort of you sort of defeat this and it makes it infinitely more easy for you to pivot and stay alive no matter what happens in with AI or Google or Bing or any of that. Yeah.

So yeah, I've, I've, I've gone down that, that road. I've, I have two paid communities as part of my two sites and things like that. And man, it's, it's, it's damn hard work doing that compared to just letting things run. So I actually wanted to ask you, you mentioned about creating like, like a free Facebook group or community or whatever. How do you go from doing something free like that to turning into something like a paid membership? What, what are you offering that's that's different because it's— yeah, finding that balance.

Super tough. And so that really just has to do with niche, right? It has to do with the niche you're in, to be really, really, really candid. Like, and I— sorry, I switched back between niche and niche because I say both. I know people pronounce them both ways, and if you Google it, it is pronounced both ways, and it's not a French word. People just say niche as well. It's not like it's, oh, for— this is niche, you know. Anyway, um, anyway, uh, it really has to do with the niche that you're in immensely, um, and what value you can bring. And, you know, can you bring expert insight? Can you bring opinion? Can you bring something that's different? Um, I think that for me, for example, with, with, with, with my newsletter NanoFlips, you know, one thing I've thought about doing— we've sold a course in the past, there's course opportunities. We do a lot of buy-side M&A advisory advising on people buying businesses. But the other side of it is like, okay, I've thought about like, can we do like a paid newsletter, right? And, and a paid newsletter and community, the only difference is there's a place for everyone to aggregate and you have to manage that, right? But in that, it's like, I've thought like, okay, we're already doing this with a free weekly newsletter. What if we added in a second one that was a more in-depth deep dive, interviews with experts specifically. We went through like live Q&As, right? Podcast being asynchronous essentially between you and the, and the, and the, and the listener versus like a live Q&A, right? Where it's like, okay, the two Jamesons get together and you can come and ask us whatever you want once a week for an hour, right? Yeah. Um, so they obviously have to be an expert in that space. Um, in the sports one, for example, with me, I don't think that, like, I can, I could get nefarious. The obvious one is betting. I, I, it's not the direction I would go with paid community for it because I'd require you to sort of be choosing the picks for people, and I'm not really into the sports picking world. But that sort of, I think, brings me into a better conversation, which is, or not better, but a tangential about this, is that it's just about figuring out what the best way to monetize that audience is, right? So for me, one of the bets I'm making is that sports betting in the United States is the next Domino to fall. Most of the states are doing it and soon it's going to be like fully legal in every state. And so then it's like, if I had a community, if I knew, or had a newsletter, it's like making a phone call to DraftKings. It's like making a phone call to Barstool, right? And saying like, hey, do you want to sponsor this? Because there's clearly more LTV for you and these customers than there is in me using programmatic display advertising.

Right.

In which, you know, um, so, uh, it's tough. The community, to answer your question, sorry, I went on a rant. It's tough. It has to be for the right niche. That you can build a paid community around. Otherwise, the value in the community is just that you own that, that audience. Right. And like, that's really important to remember. What I tell people all the time is that when you have a niche site that just ranks in Google, you are a bridge. That is all you are. You are a connector between a searcher and that's, that's doing affiliate stuff, for example, is what I mean. Sorry. You're a connector between someone who wants something and you're getting paid to create content around an affiliate product that somebody else gets the backend when they sell. That product, right? There's a reason you get a commission. It's because they made more money than you did, and they can pay you to, to bring— whatever you're getting in commission, the person who paid you made more money, otherwise they wouldn't have given you that commission, right? So, but you don't own that. You have no reason for that customer to come back to you. There's no brand loyalty for you. Bestairfryer.com isn't getting people to come back to it 20 times again and again and again, but Healthy Millennial Foods is, right? And by the way, I can still tell you the best air fryers inside Healthy Millennial Foods right? So anyway, it just really depends, I think, on the niche, on where you can find a paid community. But I still think there's value in a free community, immense, immense value.

Yeah, I made a huge mistake when I first launched my community because I already had training programs. So fitness, generally fitness, so I had training programs and I had courses. I was like, okay, I'm going to do a paid community, which is going to be separate, and then that stuff will be still one-off buys and they'll be discounted if you're part of the community and stuff. And that just flopped hard because who wants to pay just to be in a bloody—

Sure.

So then I pivoted and just made, okay, everything's part of the one subscription.

And then yeah, yeah. I mean, that's, that's the magic, man. No, no, totally. I mean, I think that's sort of when we think about paid communities and it's, and again, it has to, the education space is where there's a huge opportunity for paid, for paid communities. Right. And that's just like, for me, for example, if we did, if I did a paid version on NanoFlips, which again, I've thought about a lot. As like a monthly paid newsletter community. Live Q&A, new trainings put in pretty regularly, you know what I mean? Like, you— and so I think that's— you need to have exclusive content to said community, right? Um, that's at least free once you're in the community. And by the way, we could get into all education space. Anyone's in a paid community, there's massive opportunities for strong upsells. It's a pretty strong tripwire for sort of actual one-on-one help. Right? Like, if that's what you want to do, like, if you had a paid community where everyone's paying $100 a month to learn, to like in a group learn X, I promise you, post in that community who wants one-on-one help and you'll pull another, you know, 20 clients that want to pay $5,000 for a year or whatever, you know, $2,000 a month for one-on-one help. I'm just making these numbers up at the time, but you know, but yeah.

So, but how would you scale something like that then? Because if you post about one-on-one, that's more of your time, right? Are you out or are you saying That would be outstanding.

It depends. I mean, really, here's the question, and then this depends on who's listening, right? And who this is for, because for me, yeah, you're right. I want to build very scalable large businesses, but I think for a lot of people, especially most people I know that get into niche websites, if they can make $400,000 a year from a laptop, they would be like ecstatic to the moon. Right. And I think that like from that point, it's like, yeah, if you have 10,000 people paying $20 a month, you're at a quarter million dollars a year there. Right? And that's a one-to-many scenario. And then you add in, maybe you're taking another 20 clients a year at $5,000, that adds another $100,000. You're right, you are capped out time-wise, but now you're making $350,000 a year talking about and doing things that you love from your, from your home computer that you can do anywhere in a bit on your own time. So again, that is different to your point than running a $100 million business or 10 or 20. But like for solopreneur, a lot of time freedom, and doing things you like and are an expert at, I think that you can find a sweet spot, like $200,000 to $500,000 a year. That is like the core of it can be like a niche site. Like I do genuinely, genuinely believe that.

Nice. And obviously you mentioned you've been talking a lot about newsletters and I think more and more niche website owners are kind of cottoning on to growing their email list, especially with just the volatility of Google updates and the AI stuff we've talked about. But you obviously mentioned you're retargeting visitors or retargeting Instagram subscribers and things like that. Where are you doing the retargeting and what are you offering as part of that retargeting to be on your list? Do you have a lead magnet or—

So I haven't done it. So I haven't done it in a few years. So, so, so take— so everyone listening, take this with a giant grain of salt because this is like an entirely— and this is really important for people to know is like this whole world is ever-changing and ever-evolving. And like, you know, the way that I would run ads 2 years ago, it might not be the way someone run ads today. Right. So, so take it with a grain of salt. But I can tell you that, you know, with IG, for example, engagers in a trailing 90 days are like hyper ready to, to get more information from you. Right? So people that have liked or commented your content in the trailing 90 days on an Instagram account are easy to sign up for something. Let's say we're talking about soccer again, right? Like it could be a newsletter on just sports scores or takes of, you know what I mean? Like it could be an aggregator newsletter. That's easy. Um, now I'd say that the retargeting of I would, you'd have to go paid social is probably the easiest route. Um, the Google retargeting with like display using like GDN in, in exchange for like visitor to your site for a newsletter is not gonna be the, the, the, the lowest cost acquisition model you can run, I don't think. Mm-hmm. Um, but I think, let's talk about AI in this scenario, cuz this is perfect. Okay. You've got 10 pages.

Yeah.

This is a perfect one. The best way to capture emails is with a lead magnet. Unequivocally, right? Hyper-targeted lead magnets. The problem is people don't have the time to create all these different lead magnets. They make one normally and it goes across their entire site. Let's say I had a recipe website about air fryers. If I could create a lead magnet for every single page that was unique to each page, best 10 best recipes for fish, 10 best recipes for vegans, 10 best recipes for keto diets, right? Well, I could use AI to make those lead magnets really easily. Right? I could spend a weekend and make 30 different lead magnets. I'd tell you it would convert way better than just one vague sign up for our updates. Right? And that's where I think there might be some really magical stuff with AI and content is not in the really efficacious complex training and learning, right? Like for, for higher, higher end stuff. But like lead magnets, definitely. Like free content, like, and especially if you as an expert can then look over it afterwards, edit it and add your flavor to it. I think that like there's some great opportunity to build like 50 lead, 50 lead magnets that are all bespoke to each page. And again, I have not done, I have not done this. You guys, this is just, this is just like, again, I'm coming from, but I will say when my biggest site, we sold in 2020, it actually was 100% percent bespoke lead magnets. And it was just the lead magnet was because it was a, it was a website about financial news. It was about stocks. And so every page that was about a stock or about news on a company, the pop-up would say, for more updates on this company, right? This company's name, right? And then you end up with these segmented lists that are massive, but they all go into your main list as well. Because they're clearly, if you're interested in, in, in fish recipes, you might just be interested in air fryer recipes in general, right? So anyway, does that sort of give a, I think that's an interesting way people think about AI and content sites and great opportunity right now.

That's something I have been doing too. So for example, all my pages about getting big legs or whatever, my lead magnet is that. And then same thing, getting big shoulders, my lead magnet's about training to get big shoulders or whatever. Except the only problem is my damn, the API between MetaLite and Thrive Themes somehow changed and when people sign up, they don't go into my account. So I'm like, so I'm like, dude, I was going to split test like all these new lead magnets and create all these new lead magnets and it doesn't work. I'm like, cool. So now I'm going to go into MailerLite and make different—

Well, this is, by the way, this is why you do what you do and this is why I do what I do, because you are frustrated, but you're going to do it right. And so I think like, like I think that there are often when I talk about online businesses and niche sites or DTC brands or any of these things, is that what I will tell you is that to circle back to what we said initially, it's a game of attrition. It is. You have to just keep at it and you have to be willing to pivot. And, and I know this sounds so cheesy, but like, you have to put in the work. You just have to do the actual work, right? And by the way, luckily this work, you get to also like talk to your friends on a podcast and like take care of a baby. And you know what I mean? Like, and do— and you don't have to be in someone's You know, it's just a different— I just— the idea— I've had people come to me and be like, oh, like, I listened to what you said and I bought a site and like, now it's not doing well. I was like, oh. And then I've also had a million people say, oh, like, dude, I have a text from someone here that says they're going to 20x their money on a site they bought. You know, I was like, yesterday, like, it's so sick. But listen, these are businesses. You build a content site or buy a content site. These are businesses. They're small businesses, many of them. Some of them are massive. But for most of you, it's going to be small, but someone has to run them. And in the same way that if I had a brick and mortar deli on my corner, I can't tell you what's going to happen, you know, in my neighborhood or tax-wise with the government. Like things are going to change all the time. The difference is that luckily with these online businesses, we have the opportunity to truly pivot in a very different way than my, than the laundromat that takes quarters 2 blocks from me does. You know, what's the pivot there? You know what I mean? It's not as good.

So anyway.

Yeah, no, for sure.

I'm with you on that. I mean, I bought one of my sites I bought for $7.5K near the end of 2021. Now it would be worth over $50K if I was going to sell it now. But there's no way. There's so much room to grow, like just unbelievable. And that's just, I mean, this morning I spent 5 hours at the car dealership getting the car serviced and I wrote 2 articles while I was there. Yeah.

It's magic, man. It's magic. And so for me, and to be honest with you, I'll give you an example of a site. I bought a site for like $11,000 that I posted the GSC screenshot of it today on my Twitter because it's been like crushing, crushing, crushing, disappear from SERPs, not certain keywords, every keyword, like, like destroyed, then back, back, back, gone, gone, gone, back, back, back. I've never seen anything like this in my life. But you know what's interesting is that first of all, that's just Google. I'm actually getting a good amount of traffic from Bing as well. And we get some, some, some, some referral traffic. Um, but not only that is that like, let's say what I love about these businesses is that if you are in the right financial situation and you can build it or buy one, you end up in a situation where like in general you're looking at like 30% cash on cash return unlevered when you buy one of these businesses, right? So for $10,000, I'm making— I paid $11,000, $10,500 for, um, a website making like $300 a month. Okay. Let's just say, first of all, I've had it for 6 months now, so I've earned back $1,800 of that, right? But, oh, well, it's been up and down. But my point is, let's just say you lose half that. Let's just say you lose half your rankings. Because here's the thing people always say to me about search, like, oh, one algo update and you're done. Okay, well, first of all, to go back to everything else, one government update, one, one change in technology— this is just entrepreneurship and the reality of business. This, if that's not for you, then, then, and you know, people like, oh, there's risk in business. Well, If you believe that there's risk in business, then there's also risk in your job because your job is at somebody else's business. Let's just be abundantly clear.

The job is the biggest risk in my experience.

Yeah. Yeah. And to be completely candid with you, like, you— I've had to fire people before, right? There's a point. It's not like your paycheck just comes forever in perpetuity. If business goes poorly for me as the business owner, eventually you get fired, right? Like, and I figure out how to pivot my business, right? And how to make it more efficient and make more money. Um, but, uh, let's say you lose half of that, right? Okay. So now you're at 15% cash-on-cash return on your investment. Uh, okay. You still beat historically the S&P 500 by a multiple of 2. You're 100% better than the average market return over the past 100 years. Right. And then the last piece I'll say is that when it comes to search, and obviously this may change if we have a, if we have a language learning model that answers our questions for search, but for now, The way that search is, is that it is zero-sum. And what I mean by that is everyone said, what if I lose my rankings? Well, you lost your rankings because somebody else got your rankings. It's not like they just disappeared. Somebody else is ranking number one for that keyword. So what does that mean? That means to me that an algo update also means that you can become number one, right? Like everyone's like, oh, what happens if you get an algo update? And okay, well, an algorithm update will maybe do nothing for you. Maybe you lose your rankings, or maybe if you've been building great content and following the guidelines, boost you in rankings, right? And you'll get even way more traffic. The, the, unless you are running a shitty website, excuse my language, unless you are really being bad at this and actively going against it, there's inevitably always risk. But the, the odds of you being hit negatively are just as big as the odds of you being hit positively. In fact, smaller than the odds of you hit positively if you are doing great and creating great content that Google loves. Like they want to give good content to people. So anyway, I think it's important people recognize that because everyone's always afraid of a Google update, but like that update, if you lose, somebody else wins. So hopefully you're just following enough guidelines and being good enough that you win, right? As opposed to, as opposed to lose. So that's a rant, but it's important to me that people know that.

What's your take on starting in a saturated market?

So I think that it's interesting. I think that when it comes to, I think saturation in general is just false. And, and that's my overall vibe on it. Of course, I can give you outliers of markets I would not dive into because of oversaturation, but I just think that in general, when people like— yeah, like, I would not try and— I wouldn't try and be like— I'm, you know, YMYL stuff is— you gotta be careful with, right? Like, Your Money Your Life stuff. Like, I would say, like, I'd be really careful. I wouldn't be trying to beat Healthline on medical stuff, you know what I mean? And WebMD and Mayo Clinic, I think you're like in a losing game. I wouldn't try to be ranking for very specific gambling terms because they're just hard to rank for, you know, or like online pharmacies, you know, these things that are like, you know, are tough. Um, with that said, the most money is in those niches as well because they're so tough. Um, but oversaturation, I believe, is overly, in general, is false. Um, and then in you, if you niche down, there's always opportunity, right? And so like, yeah, I wouldn't want to rank for mattresses. I wouldn't be trying to rank necessarily for best direct-to-consumer foam mattress. Have fun, you know, in that world. But I bet that like you and I are skilled enough at keyword research that if we put our brains together for an hour, we could even find some nice long tail in obscure mattress niches. You know what I mean? Like, you know, um, so in general, there are some major ones I wouldn't mess with. But then I also find that in the big ones, like my biggest site was in the finance niche. It was. And if you ask me, should you go into writing about stocks? I'd be like, have fun fighting Bloomberg. With that said, we just did it with pot stocks, with cannabis investing, which was very new and nascent. And a lot of the fucking— excuse me, sorry, I curse so much. A lot of the financial news players in the space wouldn't talk about pot stocks. They didn't want to talk about it, right? Federally legal drugs in the United States. They couldn't even be on a big exchange. They still can't be on a big exchange. Right. So there becomes opportunity that you can find. Um, yes, there are some broad overarching mega niches that I would try and not compete in if it's your first time out of the gate. Um, but in general, I think that you can, especially when we start talking about not just using search as a channel, that there is always opportunity, right? There's always opportunity. We found a lot of, and I don't know if it still would work today, but a few years back we were getting obscene amounts of traffic from Facebook. Groups, like obscene amounts of traffic from Facebook groups. Um, and so what I'd like to say is that your audience is already gathered somewhere that, you know, it's, it's easier. And when it comes to Google, you're basically trying to tap into latent demand as opposed to create demand. The demand's already there. They're searching for it. You're just hoping to sort of find them on their search. So there are two big lessons are that like, you know, it's easier to tap into latent demand than to create demand and that your audience is already gathered somewhere on the internet in 2020. 2023. Maybe they're in a subreddit together, maybe they're in Quora answers together, maybe they're in Facebook groups, maybe they're in a money Twitter or niche site Twitter, right? But they're there. Someone— they've already aggregated and found themselves in one space together. So if you can become a useful part of that community, you can also, you know, get them to read your website, you know. And if you create great content, people like— oh, don't spam communities. Duh, don't spam communities. Be, you know, I have NanoFlips, 15,000 readers. And I have 76,000 followers, and that's become from— because I share lots of interesting and useful content for that community. If I had just come in and been like, sign up for Nanoflips, sign up for Nanoflips, sign up for Nanoflips, no one would have signed up for it, right? But because I like actually share stuff for free and try and create value and an active participant in this community, no one gets angry when I say, by the way, I have a free newsletter. If you want to read it, you can read it too. Right. And so that's the trick, I think, for, for, for sharing content for any niche site owner in communities is like to actually be useful and be part of the community. And then people won't get angry. But when you spam just your stuff all the time, yeah, they're going to kick you out. Yeah.

Yeah. Your stock example reminds me of, I think people had pretty successful crypto sites because they would cover like new coins or new tokens that would come out, come out every damn day. And obviously there's a little bit of search volume for each one.

Totally. So when we talk about Sports, for example, right? We talk about an industry like soccer again, like we're talking about US soccer. Let's talk about like soccer in Ghana or something. I'm just like trying to think of like not a massive market, right? Like, yeah, you want to go write about the best players in Premier League, have fun. I'm sure it's very, very difficult to, except for your specific opinion, but to rank for any sort of big Premier League player, right? But find it. Do you see what I'm saying? I'm sure we could find. Threads of smaller markets that you could easily own. Right. And so that I would, I think that's probably true by any niche, you know, like, um, and I just think it's important for people to remember, obviously don't go compete against behemoths. You're being an idiot if you're, if you think you're going to all of a sudden, perfect example, I probably wouldn't compete with the Points Guy. There's one. I probably would not compete in the credit card affiliate space for travel hacking. I wouldn't. There's, there's a lot of players. I think it'd be really tough.

Although, unless you did it on YouTube, right? Because at least then you have kind of—

I was going to say there's— yeah, there's some interesting ways that you could go about it. I bet you could crush on TikTok, right? And then you could be sending that traffic to your niche site. I bet you could crush on YouTube and send traffic, you know what I mean? Like there's, there's always ways to look at it. So anyway.

Yeah, no, that, that's a good point because people will be like, people will get stuck in the idea. Okay. It's saturated niche on Google, but. As we talked about there, like YouTube, TikTok, other socials, there are other ways to grow an online business than just having a website that trying to get SEO Google traffic. Like, like I'm, I'm leverage, trying to leverage YouTube more and more and more for my sites now to diversify. And I mean, it converts better because it's a face-to-face thing too. And it's the barrier to entry is way higher. That's it, dude.

That is it. It's the barrier to entry. And so I'll tell you right now, so me in the in the buy-side and the buy-side advisory space for online businesses sub-$20 million, there's only like really like 4 or 5 players in the space. You know what my moat is? Is I will fucking make the corniest TikToks on the planet. That's my moat. It's cheesy, but the moat is that you are willing to do what your competitors are not, right? And the reality is a lot of my competitors, even if they knew what to do— I also am just really good at organic social. Like, I did 8,000 followers TikTok the past 4 days or 3 days. Like, I, this is just like something I get. I know how to do it, but not only am I good at it, but more importantly, like success hap— when it comes to video, success happens at peak cringe. You gotta get real cringey and you gotta be really comfortable. And that's the reality. And so for me, like my moat is that my competitors are too worried about their ego to go and make 6 TikToks a day and have no one look at them and then have some, you know what I mean? Have some blow up and then have. All the negative comments when we make a really polarizing broad stroke statement that clearly is nuanced and can be defeated in, in a nuanced argument. But because the way to go viral on an organic social is to make broad strokes, like definitive statements, you have to be prepared to have, you know, the video that, that, that blew up for me on TikTok last week is 800,000 views, 40,000 saves. Um, and like 4,000 sends, people sending it to each other. I also have like 100 comments of people being— it literally is anyone could buy an online business and they might put them— be able to put themselves in a better situation than if they are their 9-to-5 job, which is in most likely scenario just a rat race in which you'll never get rich. And you could do it at Flippa, Empire Flippers, MicroQuart— I just named a bunch, you know. Inevitably there are 100 people that say like, this guy has— is so disconnected, he doesn't understand, he's so wrong. Okay. That's just the reality of, of, of when you reach vast swathes of humanity. Right. I also had an epiphany once where it's like, I have 75,000 followers on Twitter. I'm sure a few hundred of them like truly despise me, like with every fiber of their being, but they follow me out of hate. I mean, some of them I knew were at one point, you know, and we have each other blocked now. Um, but also you end up with like just a reality when you have a niche site and I want to bring it back to some of that. Stuff, stuff here. Yeah. Obviously when we have a niche site or large social and you, let's say you get 100,000 visits a month, you have to be aware that you are looking at a 100,000 slice person slice of humanity. And then if we talk about statistical likelihoods of schizophrenia or depression or any of these things that just, you're going to find people that are angry or sad or hurt or upset. And it's just the reality. And if that's something you can't handle, then, then that's, you know, probably not for you. Right? Like there are going to be people that hate your newsletter. They're going to be people that hate your blog. They're going to be people that hate your TikTok. And that's, and that's, that's just the reality. Ego is the enemy. Success happens at peak cringe. I truly believe both those things.

Nice. I know we're coming up to your— you got a little deadline here because you got to go. I got a ton more questions, everything, but we're going to have to stop it there. So if anyone wants to find you, Jameson Camp, and follow you and, and listen to your content, where do they find it?

I am on Twitter and TikTok as Jameson Camp or Jameson Camp. Um, you could probably just look up James Camp on LinkedIn and find me there. Um, on YouTube, I've taken a small crack at YouTube. I'd like to, apropos of everything that's happening, I'd like to take a much more aggressive crack at it soon. Um, so yeah, Jameson Camp on most social. Uh, nanoflips.com is my, is my newsletter. And I don't know, just around. I'm like somehow just around the internet, like Just creeping, just, just out here. Just a virus.

I'm just, I'm invading.

I'm a mind virus. I'm invading your mind. I'm a mind virus. But yeah, hopefully people can find me there.

Oh, perfect.

Yeah.

Awesome. We'll link all that up in the description too for everyone listening, but thanks for coming on.

I appreciate you having me.

Thanks for tuning in and I hope you enjoyed the show. Don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you are listening.

Until the next episode, goodbye.