The Empire Podcast #23: Niche Site Newsletters with Matt Paulson

Welcome to the AdSense Flippers podcast. Are you sick and tired of gurus who have plenty of ideas but are short on substance? Worried that ebook you bought for $17.95 won't bring you the personal and financial freedom you long for? Hey, you're not alone. Join thousands of others in their pursuit of niche profits without the bullshit straight from your hosts, Justin and Joe of Adsense Flippers.

Welcome to episode 23 of the AdSense Flippers podcast. I'm your host, just here with the champ, Joe Magnotti. What's going on? Hot money.

Oh, yeah, buddy.

Dude, we had a fantastic weekend. I would say this event was one of those, like, you know, things I'll remember for the rest of my life. It was awesome.

Yeah, I was a little bit worried about how it was gonna come together, but the crew really picked it up at the last minute, got everything done and hey, I won the fight, the

kapow in Davao, buddy. Yeah, we probably had, I don't know, 1200 people there for the main event or something.

Yeah, I got a little bit of a shiner too going on today, but other than that, I feel pretty good.

FHM girl for one of the ring girls. Dude, that was awesome, man. It was really exciting. Glad we had our sponsors. We had premier, we had a condom sponsor here in the Philippines. That's pretty insane.

Yeah, it is. Because condoms are not looked on too highly in a Catholic country like the Philippines.

Yeah, they're not so great on birth control here, but yeah, we had a condom company sponsoring. It was pretty cool. We raised some money for charity. That was really sweet. So we're going to be doing an awarding here in about a week. I think we're going to get you and the other boxer, Daniel. We're gonna get you guys to go in gloves and shorts and go say hi to the kids, give them some high fives and punches in the air, that kind of thing.

Yeah, that would be fun. And you know, a lot of amateur fighters got to showcase their skills in front of a crowd. So I think that was cool. I mean, all the way from 10 years, all the way up to 18 years old. So that was kind of cool. I mean, it was a legitimate boxing event and it was a great thing to be part of.

Dude, it was a full on event. Big thanks to Ina Gay and AIZA for putting it on. It was fantastic.

Yeah, you girls did a great job. Thanks.

So let's get right into this. I mean, we're talking about niche site, premium newsletters in the heart of this week's episode. Before we even do that, let's do some other updates, news and info. First thing is we have an itunes review giveaway going on right now. Basically, here's the deal. Log into itunes, give us a review. If you do that before June 30th, all the way to June 30th, 2012, we're gonna give away a free niche sites and be to one of the people that give us a review. So. So don't miss out on that. We've already got a ton of reviews out of it, man.

Yeah, it's gotta be from what, the usa, England or Australia, right?

Yeah, or Canada as well.

So any of those would work.

I guess that's because we can only speak English, so that's the only way we know if it's a good review.

Yeah, hard to really know. So basically we've been bribing people to give us reviews, but man, it's worked, buddy. So we've got someone actually thatsbadass.com told us listen, learn, practice and share. We've got Steven Said, so helpful and honest. Great job by Jadi Music. We've got Web for food, five stars, baby. We've got ton of reviews, man. Mary Kate said the only niche site podcast you need out of film said, is this legal? The amount of quality information that Justin and Joe are giving away for free should be illegal. Definitely not illegal. I wish more people would do it. We're really excited to continue to do so. I love the podcast and we'll be continuing as is.

Yeah, and I love hearing from people all around the world listening to our podcast.

Yeah, we've got more reviews. We'll get into more later. But yeah, leave us a review. You got a chance to win a free niche site from us after the end of June. Next update, buddy. What you got?

I'm working on a first page evaluation tool. So, you know, you and I have tons of data and tons of experience with this, but we always say, you know, it's kind of subjective, right. We look at these objective parameters, number of links, title match, URL match, are there top level domains. And we put that all together in some algorithm in our head and we come up whether it's going to be easy to rank on the first page or difficult. And I think if we approach it more scientifically and we actually use a tool to organize this stuff and we show other people what we're doing, it'll make more sense.

Well, here's the deal. It's such a subjective process, right? Like the Way I analyze the first page is different from the way you

analyze the first page.

So the idea is, is we have a tool, we have over 12,000 keywords we've researched overall. So what we can do is we can apply the different parameters, we can kind of like work our way through it and then backdate that to all the keywords researched before and see how effectively it pulls out the winners. So if it was able to find our sites that performed well, 70% of the time, 80% of the time, and it doesn't pick a lot of the losers, that's fantastic. We can then kind of like tweak it until it gets to the highest percentage possible and then apply that tool on any new sites we build. So we now have an objective test we can use to pick out new niche sites.

Yeah, we're really early on in the development stages here, but I do have a good guy I'm working with on oDesk. The UI looks promising. It's very rough right now, but we're moving along quickly and I think we could have something up in just a few months.

Yeah, it's ugly right now, but it's getting us the data, right? I mean, that's the most important part. Make sure it's working, make sure it's tweakable. We can make it pretty later.

So we're still working on the theme too. Good old Intella theme, that's what it's going to be called. And we're working on the logo right now. So that's going to be kind of cool. This auto adjusting theme that will adapt based on clicks, be able to measure these kind of things and see what's the best preset, what's the best layout for your site is something we're using internally. So we're in the first round of alpha testing right now. I would expect in a couple of months that we'd be available for at least a public beta and with a release, you know, before the end of the year.

Yeah, I had a lot of people asking about it. The name is intellitheme. So yeah, it's looking pretty good, man. The functionality is in place and we're starting to track some of the data on a few of our sites and we should have a bit more in about a week and have an idea on kind of like what it looks like and what. I don't know, man, it's pretty exciting. It's really starting to come together. That's pretty sweet.

Again, another development project and I like getting involved in these projects because this is more my style, you know, I like engineering. I'm the nerdy kind of guy. And it's fun to work with programmers and coders and really design stuff the way we want it designed.

Well, here's the cool thing about intellitheme. I think it's the only smart theme I've seen. Right? I mean, no one else is doing that, seriously. So a theme that will automatically and adapt and adjust and not just track which layout or preset is doing better, but start heading toward that layout or preset, depending on how well the click through rate is and that type of thing. I mean, if one particular niche, this preset's better, it'll lean toward that one, it'll make you more money. If there's a different niche and it has a different, totally different preset that makes more money, it'll lean toward that one. So you earn the maximum amount per niche. That is awesome.

Yeah. And John the intern is doing a super job heading this project up. We couldn't do it without him because honestly, a lot of the HTML, a lot of the coding, a lot of the PHP work would be totally over my head.

Yeah, I love how it's going. You know, I can't wait to get to release that at least public beta. I know we've had a lot of requests for it, a lot of questions about it, so it'd be cool to get that out there and really get some feedback from users. I mean, we're kind of dorked out in our little bubble, so it'd be nice to see what other people think. But we'll have that out soon. Last update, we've got niche sitegold.com so we sent out our second newsletter and it was a hit, man. We finally figured out how to, you know, set inventory in PayPal and we were selling a couple of the keywords. So, you know, we had newly researched keywords. We gave the reasons on why we would pick them, another one on why we wouldn't because it was like poorly worded. But if you're at all interested in like why, how we determine, you know, which keywords we go after and which ones we wouldn't make sure to sign up for the newsletter@niche sitegold.com we're really using that. I really like it. I think it's working out pretty well.

Yeah, and we don't have to worry about the buying domains twice kind of thing. Like you said, we got the inventory control thing under control using PayPal, so that all works out now. And if it's available. If you click on the link and the domain is available, PayPal will allow

you to buy it.

Here are our thoughts there, guys too, on why we did it. I mean, you know, partially we did it because we wanted to make a little bit of money. We figured, oh, we can sell the domains for like 50 bucks, right? Which we bought them for eight or nine or whatever and we did the research, you can buy them from us for 50 bucks. So anyone who wants to do that can do that. We also thought we come across some domains that are like really good for authority sites, get a ton of searches, but they're just too hard for our niche sites to get ranked. We figured we can sell those for maybe a hundred bucks, 150 bucks, 200 bucks or something on the list and just have them available if people are interested in them. I don't know how successful that will be, but the real thing is we were planning on setting that up as kind of a siphoning for our first page evaluation tool. Right. The people that are interested in that would be the people that would be most likely in checking out the evaluation tool when that comes out in a couple of months. So it's really good for, I think, sectioning off our audience that's interested in our first page evaluation and then having a great team to beta with and get an idea on their feedback based on what we've done over the last couple of months.

Exactly.

Alright buddy. Well, let's get right into the heart of this week's episode. It's with Matt Paulson from mattpulsen.com he's done something that was really interesting. He was on the Foolish Adventure podcast and I heard him talking about niche sites and like premium newsletters, how he's able to charge a monthly fee with the newsletters. And I really want to talk to him a little bit about niche sites, authority sites, and kind of get a feel for the newsletter process. I mean, we're doing that with niche site Gold as a free newsletter, but I like the newsletter idea and the subscription model, so I really want to find out a little bit more about that. Let's have at it.

The AdSense Flippers podcast.

We've got a really exciting interview for

you today with Matt Paulson. Matt is a newsletter guy. He's been killing it with newsletters, doing a lot of other podcasts here over the last couple of months. We wanted to have him on the show specifically to talk about newsletters and how it relates to niche sites. So welcome to the Adsense Flippers podcast. Matt how are you doing, buddy? Good.

How are you guys?

Good. Let's get started by just telling us a little bit about yourself, kind of how you got into Internet marketing and your journey to today.

Sure. So I started my company in 2006. I started out writing a couple of blogs that were on personal finance. I did okay. I sold some advertisements. I made a little bit of money through AdSense. I had a little bit of affiliate money coming in. It was a couple grand a month. And I just came to realize that, you know, I really didn't want to spend my days writing blog posts. So I hired some writers to take care of those websites and I expanded into some other areas. I started some news websites. I started doing some more affiliate stuff, you know, about a year and a half ago. I started my email newsletter. Doing some smartphone apps now and, you know, I do some web development work on the side. So got a lot going on. I've had some pretty good success. You know, make a couple hundred grand a year doing this and I'm having fun. Don't hope to stop anytime soon.

That's awesome, Matt. Well, welcome on the show and it's good to hear that you have a history of making money online. But tell us, is this the only thing you're doing to make money right now, or have you done other stuff? Have you tried and failed? Give us a little background.

Sure. So my main money maker right now is some of my content websites that get traffic from the new search engines and kind of in a finance niche. So I get some traffic from like the Yahoo Finance message board and like Bing News and Google News and topics, even Ask.com's new search engine. So those indexes send traffic to my news websites and make money from AdSense and then kind of vibrant media as the second way around. My number two moneymaker right now, a newsletter, maybe three grand a month from that. So we'll talk about that more in a bit. I actually make some pretty good money licensing the content that my writers write on my news website. There's a company called Newstex and apparently that gets into LexisNext and some other things. I make, you know, a grand or two a month doing that. I have some old personal finance sites floating out there. I still sell direct ads in them to SEO people that want to buy links. And I make a grand or two a month doing that. I have a couple of web developing clients from way back in the day that I do work for. I don't do any new stuff, but there are a couple people I like that. I take care of their website and they pay me pretty well for that.

What kills me with this, Matt, is that you're doing all this and you have a full time job and you're taking classes right now. Is that right?

True.

That's crazy, man. So, I mean, really exciting though, that you're able to diversify your income through all these different revenue streams.

You know, it seems like, you know,

with your newsletters, with your sites, you're pretty heavily invested in the finance niche. Why did you get into that? I mean, do you have any experience in finance? Was it like a personal passion of yours or did you see the financial opportunity and go for it?

Sure, I think it was the perfect mix of passion and opportunity. I mean, I have an interest in finance, but I don't think I would have ever pursued it if the money weren't there. You know, finance is one of the consistently, it's like one of the highest pace niches, you know, on the ad network, just because there's strong interest from people that are selling, you know, say, investment products and finance, you know, debt products. You know, I get emails just about every week from, you know, companies that want to advertise on my site in, you know, one way or another. So that's. There's definitely the money there and then interested in it. So it's good both ways.

Let's back up just a second. You have A Site Analyst, ratings.net Now you have a free newsletter there that goes out to people that are looking at stock picks and that type of thing. And you get them to sign up for the free newsletter first, right?

Yep, that's how it goes.

And then there's a premium section where they can pay you a monthly fee or they can cut off a couple of months and pay you annually. And they'll get that information earlier in the day and they'll get it also at the end of the day, right?

Yeah. And they get more information that's not in a free newsletter.

Okay. So it's better information, more premium information, and then they get it more often. Now this is data that's compiled from multiple sources and sent out to them. Do you have any actual content writing for that? Do you have content writers?

I do have content writers, but not for the newsletter. Everything that happens in the newsletter is kind of brought together from different data providers, sent out automatically.

Cool.

Okay. And then you work on converting those free newsletter subscribers to the premium newsletter. Do you know approximately what percentage of those have converted a premium?

Yep, it's a little bit over 2%.

That's a good stat to know. I mean, once you have that, then it's all about gaining the traffic. Was this your first attempt at premium newsletters or did you have any failures before? Did you try other niches, that kind of thing?

No, it was, this is really the only attempt. And I think I did it in such a way that it was going to work regardless because I started the free newsletter first and then once I had a few thousand people on it, I said, hey, you know, I'm thinking about making a premium version of this. What would you want to see in it? And because, you know, I built a product that the people wanted, you know, they bought right away.

Right.

Did you do the free newsletter knowing that you were eventually going to take it to a premium, or were you thinking, let me get the users first and then I'll figure out how to monetize later?

You know, I always thought that the premium newsletter was the way to go. I think when I started, you know, that was right when, you know, Jason Calacantis was starting to talk about like Letter Ly and some of those services and Tiny Letter that, you know, doesn't do, you know, paid newsletters anymore. But you know, kind of when those services came out, I got the idea, you know, to give it a try.

Cool.

You know, you're all about the finance niche right now, but do you have any premium news newsletters and some other niches or do you think it would work for other industries outside of finance?

I don't have any others. I have a free newsletter on peer to peer lending, but there's just, that's just big enough of a niche to do, you know, what I'm doing with my AR and Daily One? I think it would work outside other industries. I think people are just willing to pay for information that solves their problems or makes them money. Whether it's a membership site or an email newsletter, the delivery mechanism matters less than whether or not there's a value proposition there.

It's interesting because it could be even outside of business. You could have it on poker, right? You could have it on the horse races. You could have it on any number of things that people have an interest in. So what's interesting about this is appealing or it's potentially appealing to people that maybe they're not business people yet, but they do have passions that they can apply this to. I think that's pretty cool.

The actual collection of the data from various sources is that code that you wrote yourself. Do you want to License that. I mean, that seems to be an interesting technology.

Yeah, it's all ASP NET code that I wrote. Basically we pull it from our data providers or I do into my, you know, it's a SQL database and from that I generate the newsletter. There's nothing too fancy about it. It's just pulling an XML and sticking it in the database and you know, doing some writing out out of that. Kind of follows the same format every day. So it's, it's not as complicated as you think it might be.

Well, it's something that I couldn't do just coding in my free time for. Sure, sure. So tell me, how do you get the traffic for these signups? I know you have some sites feeding into your newsletter, but you know, where is this coming from? Is this organic paid traffic? Word of mouth?

Sure. So there are several kind of sources that I get. You know, I get traffic. You know, people sign ups for my news websites. I've done some SEO for AnalystRatings.net so when people type in, say analyst upgrades or downgrades, you know, I'll get that traffic. I've done a few joint ventures. I did one last week and I got 400 new sign up some NAT. So basically we traded our list with each other and just said, you know, sent out a marketing email to each other's list and I got, you know, 400 people from Nat. I had a VA come up with a kind of a list of newsletters and I emailed all those people and I found a few and I probably got maybe a thousand new subscribers from, you know, three of those. So that worked out pretty well. I did some AdWords stuff a few months ago, but I'm finding that the people that you know, are signing up were mostly from strange countries that, you know, probably won't be customers from. So I stopped that for now and trying to figure out how to do that better.

All right, well, let me ask you this. I mean, everyone should definitely take a look@ analystratings.net, it's an interesting site, but there's not much to it. And so my question is, do you think people sign up for the newsletter based on your funnel? Is it based on the authority of the site?

So I think the website analyst, ratings.net is not the key to signups. It's most of the people that sign up never even make it to that website. A lot of that happens in other places. So they go on the list and then kind of that website is kind of just kind of a landing place. For people that are already on their newsletter to get more information or to sign up for the premium newsletter or download the app that I made.

Great. Okay, you have some sites that are listed in Google News and you get a good portion of your traffic from there, right?

Yeah, I mean, it's Google News, it's Bing News, it's topics, it's even apps.com news. It's not just Google News, but there's news. Search engines in general can be a great way to get traffic.

Interesting, interesting. Relating this kind of back to what Justin and I have, obviously we have this army of micro niche sites and Justin and I were talking about building some sort of newsletter and premium newsletter around some related sites. Do you think that's possible with a group of related micro niche, five page kind of websites?

The key with getting newsletter signups is traffic that for every hundred people that you get to your website, about three of them will sign up for the newsletter. And out of those, 2% of those might actually pay you. So it's really a numbers game. You need to get a lot of traffic. And I'm not sure that niche sites are the way to go. I think you guys would have say, more success in taking your existing brand ads and flippers and niche site gold and say, hey, here's my newsletter with say, 10 premium keywords that people that aren't paying don't get.

Yeah, that's interesting. You know, Matt, that's one of the things we're thinking about doing with niche site Gold. It's a free newsletter and we're thinking about adding a premium piece to it where we give a lot more keywords and, you know, a whole selection that people can choose from and buy on their own. So that's something we wanted to try. And I actually got that from your interview on the Foolish Adventure podcast. I was listening to you and going, wow, the newsletter idea is pretty slick. I like that. So that's definitely something we're going to be exploring here soon.

So can you guys share how many people you've got signed up for Nichite Gold so far?

Yeah, we've got just over 600. Just over 600 for niche site gold. So, you know, actually the email I just sent out the first email to Niche site Gold, I also sent to the AdSense Flippers email list which has like, I don't know, 42, 4300 email subscribers and we got some complaints. I saw our aweber notice go up there. We got a little yellow there. So apparently I probably should have stuck with A niche site, gold email only. But I want to give it out once to add that to kind of show people an idea on what it is we're going to be sharing, you know what I mean?

Sure. Yeah. That's definitely a big enough community to do something that's paid, especially with a podcast and a website. You guys, I think, are probably at the point of critical mass when you could get away with doing something and have a good number of people sign up for it.

Cool, man. Yeah, we're definitely working on that. We've got some tools and some stuff planned that's coming out in the future that I think will be really cool. We want to test it out on what we have right now. We have a great testing platform with all these sites, so we can test improvements. And if these tools work for us, if they can work for others, then we can offer that and know that we're offering something really valuable. Absolutely. With your list now, you said you get about a 2% conversion from free to premium on the newsletter. Have you tested out any other monetization with your free newsletter? I mean, have you done any affiliate offers to that list? It must be a pretty large list if you're only converting 2%, and those 2% are paying you thousands of dollars every month.

Yep. The list is about 15,000 people right now, and then the paid list is maybe 330, I think. So with the free list, I've tried placing some affiliate ads in it. Those haven't really done anything. I've done some direct ads, you know, kind of email pitches to the list for specific affiliate products, and those worked a little bit well. But it's none of it's money that's worth writing home about. So I'm not sure how to do that successfully yet if it can be done.

So you're still working on that. Do you think there'd be any value for you in setting up a membership site for this kind of thing?

You know, I thought about it. There's a lot of them out there already. I think that one of the key values with what I do is on a premium list is people can basically enter in all their stocks, and I send them everything they kind of need to know about their stock in a given day. And it's kind of a convenience thing, so people don't have to go out to, you know, five or six different websites. They just get it all in their inbox.

Yeah, I like a lot. That's kind of like what we're trying to do at Adsense Flippers is sell people tools to help them with their passion, which is making money online and in your case, which is, you know, finance and researching stocks. So if you could sell them a tool to help them do that better, then, yeah, they're obviously going to buy that from you.

We had a client we worked for with tribpl at one point where their goal was to consolidate a bunch of foreclosure data that's all free. That's all handed out for free, county by county. The problem is it's really hard to search. Right. You have to go to the specific county and look up the information. And so they were using backend agents to kind of consolidate that and push that to their list. So, I mean, yeah, there's lots of other niches this could be used in, for sure. Anytime where you're consolidating data that's kind of hard to get and providing it easily for your end users, that's a fantastic model.

Absolutely.

So let me ask you really quick. If you had to do this over, if you're starting your newsletter from scratch, we're talking day one, what would you do differently with regard to your free and premium newsletters?

So probably two things. One, I started the newsletter off as kind of a. Not as a separate brand, but it's part of one of my websites. And I definitely would have started it off as a separate brand because I used more than just that website to promote it. And the other thing was everything I have on a technical basis is C code that I wrote from scratch. I think that if I were to do it again, if I were starting again, I probably wouldn't have put in all that work. I might use mailchimp or something like that for the free newsletter, and then for the paid newsletter, I might use my custom stuff. So I don't think that, you know, the right way to go is necessarily do what I did and do everything the hard way.

I like the idea of using systems that are already in place. Why not use a mailchimp? Why not use an aweber something that's, you know, why try to recreate the wheel there, right? The uses that are already in place. I think that's a good bit of advice. If someone, you know, had an idea they already had some subscribers and we're building an email list, what advice would you give them to, like, grow it? How did you get traffic initially? Get new signups initially to get to that point where it started to become valuable? How do you get from zero premium subscribers to your first.

So I think the key Is you start with a decent sized audience, about 5,000 people is the right number on your free list to thinking about doing something premium. Unless you have a super engaged list, then maybe the input could be smaller. But you know, really the key is to ask people what they want and say, you know, I'm thinking about, you know, making a premium version of this list that would have some stuff that's, you know, not in the free list. Here are some things that I'm thinking about, including, you know, is this interesting to you? What do you think would be interesting in a premium version of, you know, the newsletter? And really getting that feedback ahead of time is probably, you know, one of the keys.

Interesting, you know, because we want to take some of that advice ourselves. We're just getting into like the newsletter business with niche site gold. So thanks for that. What would you say, though are some warning signs that the newsletter is not working and you need to either, you know, pivot and change direction or maybe to change the content, you know, build a more audience? You know, what are some signs of that?

Sure.

I think if, you know, for you guys, I would say that if you're not getting a ton of signups, well, that, you size of your audience, that would be a red flag. If people are unsubscribing after a week or two, that's also a red flag. You know, once you make your product, if nobody's giving you money, obviously that's a problem. I don't know if there's any really obvious red flags. You know, I would guess that if you guys sent out an email to your niche site gold list and asked for some feedback and nobody at all got back to you, that would be a sign.

Yeah, that would be kind of a bad sign.

When did you first realize that? Okay, I've got these free newsletter subscribers. I got several thousand of them. I'm going to convert some of them to premium. When did you know that this would be something that you would continue to roll out?

Well, last May when I launched the newsletter, I did a series of email and I got 30 people to sign up the first month at about 100 bucks each for the year. That was a pretty good sign. Over the summer, people pay attention to stocks and that kind of thing, so that gets kind of dry. But it picked up again in the fall and, and had some really good success this spring. So now I'm consistently making three grand a month from it. So I'm pretty happy with that.

Do you ever get emails where people feel like they are getting to Know you a bit. Is it a more personal kind of thing or is it just give me the numbers, give me the numbers.

With some people it is, you know, people that have customer service issues and aren't getting your email or whatever, and I fix it for them, they're actually pretty happy. You know, there's a couple of people I talk back and forth with, but, you know, that's probably 10% of the people on the list, if that interesting.

One quick question here, Matt. Did you see any of your sites get affected negatively or even positively from the Panda penguin fiasco going out there right now?

Last spring when Panda first rolled around, might have been January or February, but whatever it was, I had an affiliate thing with Audible going on. I took a big hit with that. But other than that, you know, the Penguin update, not so much. But the Panda thing was like almost 18 months ago now. So that's ancient history in the Internet world.

Yeah, it's funny. Funny how time flies, Matt.

Well, I just want to thank you

for being on the Adsors podcast. It's been fantastic. If any of our readers, listeners want to get in touch with you, where should they go?

Okay, my blog is mattpulson.com Paulson is P A U O S O N and my email is Matt. Matt Paulson.com and my Twitter is MatthewDP.

Nice plug, buddy. Well, hey, it's been great having you on the show. Anything else you want to say?

Nope.

All right, buddy. Well, thanks for being on the AdSense Flippers podcast. We appreciate it.

All right, I'll see you guys later.

All right, Matt, thanks a lot. I really appreciate it.

The AdSense Flippers podcast continues.

So, Joe, I gotta say, man, I really like this interview with Matt Paulson. What do you think?

Yeah, I think he's cool. And he's done a lot of statistical analysis too, so that's kind of nice thing. He's a numbers guy like me. Puts it all on a spreadsheet, gets it all arranged. You know, he has that stuff down to his science.

I'm interested in the premium newsletter idea. I mean, you know me. I love recurring models.

Right.

You know, however, you can get paid on a monthly basis for a low dollar amount and get that for a longer period of time. I think that's fantastic. If you're able to do that with niche sites, like if you're targeting annuities, you're targeting something else, whatever, right? You're able to build up a nice little email list and then convert those to premium. Now, I think that's fantastic. You know, I don't think we have it on our plate right now. I don't think we can fit that in, but I know it's kind of exciting. I'd like to know if anyone else does decide to follow up on this idea and they do get some ideas, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you. Make sure to check out mattpulson.com get in contact with him if you have any questions. Questions. He's a great guy. Be more than willing to help, but I'd really like to hear how that kind of works out.

Yeah. And also I would say you'd probably need some, especially if you have really micro niche sites. You need some around the same subject matter. But if you have that and you have even a little bit of traffic, this kind of method might really get you some more money than over just a normal adsense kind of approach.

Yeah, I don't know if he's listening, but Mike from Maine, he has like 400 niche sites. I mean, if he has any that are around a particular niche that this would be good for, it might be worth him checking out or somebody else. But anyway, if you do end up checking it out, let us know. We'd love to hear from you because I'm intrigued by the model. I think it could be good. Let's get right into the ninja. Marketing tips, tricks and our plans for the future.

So the first one I got here is a little bit of a training exercise tip if you want to buy something for me for Christmas. As you know, I'm really into fitness, especially last like year and a half, two years. There's this new thing called the Fitbit Aria, which is a wireless scale that actually connects to the cloud. And every time you weigh yourself, it sends a little electronic pulse through your body and measures your BMI and logs it all at the Fitbit website. Really cool interactive pieces technology. I mean more about the connected home kind of thing where all your toys around the home connect to the Internet. And this can just be another one

of those things that's cool. So it'll track it over time and you can kind of see like where you're going. If you're getting bigger, you're getting smaller, it'll let you know.

Right, right. And they have another.

Can you graph it out?

Yeah, they have.

It's perfect for fitness and dorks. Right. You put fitness and dorks together, they're all over it.

Yeah, right, right, right. And they have another product too that also measures, measures your, like how much exercise you do what's your sleep schedule like and all that kind of thing? It's a little thing you wear on your waistband and it can measure how far you walk. That kind of thing.

Is it an app, like an Android app or iPhone app or something?

Yeah, it goes along with an Android app or an iPhone app, but it's a little device that you wear on yourself.

That's cool. I mean, I think the problem, though is. Well, of course sticking with it, but that's the same thing with diet or exercise or anything. But, you know, adoption, right? Like, you might try it out a couple times and maybe you continue working out, but. But you just. You're like, ah, you know what?

I don't know.

Are you thinking about trying it out, buddy?

Yeah, it's not cheap. I mean, the scale is like 130 bucks. So, you know, that's what I'm saying. Anybody wants to buy me a nice summer gift, that would be my nice summer gift.

Hint, hint, hint.

But yeah, I think it would be cooler if they could make that stuff just directly in your phone. Like, I don't know if the phone has the right parts to be able to do something like that and measure that kind of stuff if it has the right technology. But it'd be cool if your phone just had that built in.

Yeah, buddy, that would be cool. Next one we got is the Ad Alert AdSense iPhone app from Spencer Niche Pursuits. I should say I haven't tried this because I don't have an iPhone, so I'm not. Not a big Apple guy. But I know that he just created this app for the iPhone. If you're looking for something with AdSense, I think it is a paid app. I don't know, a couple of bucks or whatever that, you know, the apps are, but it's available.

It's.

It has a little ka ching when you hit a certain dollar amount. So if your goal is to make it to 80 bucks a day or something, it's there for you and you should definitely check it out. I'll link to it in the show notes. What do you think, buddy?

Yeah, I think it has a lot of potential, and I definitely see the ability for him to expand it and support it in the future. So if you have an iPhone, download it and tell him to get an Android app, huh?

I know, man. Everyone leaves us out. I'm an Android guy, man.

Come on.

Come on, buddy. Spencer, give me some love, man. I was emailing or Skyping with him about it too, man. Come on, dude, what are you doing? Give Me some Android love.

Yeah, maybe he'll have ported over, but. Yeah, I think that's one of the best things about going with something that Spencer's making is, you know, he's going to support it long term. You know that this is just version 1.0. He's only going to add more features, more stuff, more tidbits, more easy ways to manage your AdSense account and look at the numbers from your phone.

I'll tell you, man, the app market scares the crazy crap out of me. I don't like it. I mean, there are so many losers, right? I mean, you know the iFarm app that Joel Kahn made, made millions of dollars or whatever, but for every one of those, there's a bunch of donkey apps that no one ever downloaded, paid any money for, or got any money from advertising. I don't know. You know, we were talking about doing one for adsense Flippers, doing like kind of a vanity app, right? An AdSense Flippers app where, you know, all of our content is in one nice neat place. And maybe some kind of alert on our buy our Sites page when we have sites up for sale. I know someone built a script, they built a script for themselves so they automatically get an alert when we put new sites on there. Something like that in an app I think would be cool, but I mean, we might sell it or something. But I think it'd be better free to kind of like, you know, get through our content and stuff.

Yeah, I definitely think it would be a free app. And honestly, it's so low down the totem pole of priorities right now that we just gotta focus on other stuff.

It's vanity. I mean, Pat did his for smart passive income and from what I hear, it's pretty cool. It's just a great way to get his content. Another way to go through it, which is cool, but it's not like, I don't know, I don't want to get into the app making business for a living, man.

Yeah, we know some people that are in the app making business and it's a tough market, it's a tough way to make a buck. So last reminder here, don't forget, we get a free niche site drawing for any itunes reviewers from now until June 30th.

Yeah, buddy. So someone is gonna win. We're gonna be handing over that site. Probably the more reviews we get, the nicer the site we'll put up there available. So love to see the reviews. Remember, Australia, uk, Canada and the US are eligible. Go ahead and put your reviews and we will have a winner in the very near future. Well, that's it for episode 23 of the AdSense Flippers podcast. Thanks for being with us. If you want to check us out on Twitter, you can check us out. Adsense Flippers. We'd love to hear from you.

Bye bye, everybody.

You've been listening to the AdSense Flippers podcast with Justin and Joe. Be sure to hit up adsenseflippers.com for more. That's adsenseflippers.com thanks for listening.