463: Crazy Rich Poets! How Will Green Gets 3M Visits/Month On His Poetry Analysis Website

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You’re listening to the My Wife, Quit or Drop podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. today I have my friend Will Green on the show, and Will is the owner of poemanalysis.com, where he gets millions of visitors per month and makes nearly seven figures analyzing poems for a living. Will’s story just goes to show that you can literally monetize any subject online as long as you follow through. In this episode, we analyze exactly how he does it.

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But before we begin, want to thank Jeff Oxford of 180marketing.com for sponsoring this episode. 180marketing.com is an agency that specializes in helping e-commerce stores boost their search engine traffic. In the past, I’ve used Jeff and his firm and he managed to grow my search traffic by 4x in just six months. In fact, 180marketing is one of a handful of SEO agencies that I trust 100%. For more information, go to 180marketing.com or just email Jeff at 180marketing.com.

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the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife, Cooler Job podcast. Today I’m really happy to have William Green on the show. William is a member of a mastermind group that I’m in and he is killing it online. William runs poemanalysis.com, which is a site that analyzes poetry. Poetry, but get this, he gets over three million visits per month and makes hundreds of thousands of dollars every year from poetry. So for everyone out there who is skeptical,

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about creating content for something that they’re interested in. William is the perfect example of someone who has managed to monetize his interests. Now, in this episode, we’re gonna break down how William has managed to create such a popular poetry site and how he monetizes the traffic. And with that, welcome to the show, William. How you doing? I’m very good, thank you. How’s it going? Good. I hope I got those numbers right. I knew they were kind of insane, but I guess millions of visits.

02:59
Right, per month. Yeah, it’s the right ballpark figure. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of fluctuations throughout the year, depending on when students are in school and out of school, but on average, yeah, that’s where we’re currently at anyway. Yeah, crazy. And I know we’re in the same mastermind group, but I actually don’t know anything about your background. Like, how did you get into this? What did you used to do? What did you major in? Yeah, this is a really interesting story. So…

03:26
I actually came up with the idea when I was at school when I was about 15 or 16 and I created a website where I uploaded all my revision material for school subjects and after about three or four years it turned out that the articles that did the best were always the poetry analysis followed by certain other subjects as well. So that was kind of the light bulb idea of oh I should really give this a go you know ten years ago.

03:51
But my whole life has been engineering. I did a master’s degree in automotive engineering with motorsport. After that, I went on to work for McLaren, helping to test our supercars, believe it Wow, that’s awesome. Yeah, it’s quite weird. then COVID hit. I left McLaren, went to another consultancy. COVID hit. Things got a bit shaky in the kind of engineering, automotive sector. And I had this kind of opportunity to be like, should I grind it out?

04:21
for continuing this career in engineering or should I give it a go with the website? And I remember I did a talk once in London for Ezoic, PopTelegen as it was, and a guy came up to me from Google and said, you’re clavish, no, stupidest, clavish person I know. Why are you working 40, 50 hours from McLaren when you could be sitting on this gold mine of an idea? And it kept on playing around this idea. And, you know, during COVID, I gave it a go and it’s kind of been growing ever since.

04:50
So yeah. That’s not so who told you this? Because if someone went up to me and said, hey, I want to create this poetry site, I wouldn’t have thought that it would be a gold mine, to be honest with you. I mean, at the time I was on a panel with two other people and at the end of this questions, I was obviously quite young compared to other people who were like in their mid 30s or 40s. And people said, oh, what traffic do you get? And this one person said, yeah, I get about

05:16
half a million and I’ve got about 20 people working for me and they’re like, oh, okay, that’s interesting. And the next lady said, yes, I’ve got about 800,000 and I’ve got about 15 people working for me. And I said, actually, I’ve had to take the day off my full-time job. I’ve been doing this by myself with one or two other people when I get about 1.5 million and everyone’s kind of just just dropped. And at that point, that’s when I realized, okay, maybe I haven’t been taking this seriously. I should really put more time into it almost, you know? So you’re an engineer, you were an engineer.

05:45
Were you in, like was poetry one of your passions or? It was all stemmed from learning from school. So I have an appreciation for it. I definitely have this growing want for poetry, but I wouldn’t say I am super involved with it, but my writers and my team are. So that’s where I can almost differentiate and let them create the great content. And I do everything else regarding the website. So it kind of is a bit split in that sense. But in the very beginning,

06:13
Were you doing your own poem analyses? Yeah. Yeah. So I was, I did all the poetry analysis, got great feedback. I actually quite enjoyed it as well. But as you can imagine, upscaling is quite difficult. So now the website has about 4,300 poems. So if I obviously wrote all that content, I would be there forever. So that was kind of where I diverged and went towards the kind of technical SEO side of the website. Walk me through the beginning. So you’re working at McLaren, presumably 40 to 60 hours. I don’t know. That’s what an engineer typically works.

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And so you get home and you start writing these poetry analysis. When did you, like how long did it take before you saw any traction? That’s a really good question. So I started the website before McLaren. So I actually started it halfway through my degree. I had this kind of honestly, a light bulb idea. I’ve never experienced it, but this was like a light bulb idea. then basically every part-time job would help me pay for people to help me write and grow the website.

07:14
When it came to McLaren, yeah, was obviously it’s easier when you’re doing a degree. Well, it’s not easier still full-time job a degree But it was easier to make time to do the work But when I was at McLaren, I’ll be getting home at about six o’clock half six and then Sticking another couple of hours every night to it pretty much, but it wasn’t a chore It was enjoyable work. So I wouldn’t think of it as work in that sense and then Presumably it wasn’t making money for a while. Were you hiring writers before it was making any money?

07:44
Yes, and I think that’s always been the case with all of my websites. I think most websites. I would say it took about a year and a half, two years before it became break even. And then it kind of just kept on growing. But the real growth came when I was able to put full all of my time to the website rather than just two hours here, two hours there per day or week. That really surprised me with exactly what that Google guy says.

08:14
Yes, you can grow a website part-time, but if you stick all your time to it, blimey, it just rockets because you can put more time to the things you always want. I’ve got about 20 different ideas I want to do the website and I still can’t do it full-time. So you just keep bringing up new great ideas all the time as you put more time into it, if that makes sense. So walk me through this because I know if I was like a new entrepreneur and I’m starting a content set about poetry, I’d be…

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pretty reluctant to hire writers. Did you know that this was going to make money at some point? Were you confident in the beginning? Yes. I think I saw enough with this revision website that this was worth pursuing. And then I believe with websites you get nuggets of feedback, which you should take note of in particular of this article is done well or this poet’s done well or this or whatever it is with a website. There is data that’s giving you feedback all the time.

09:13
and the feedback was always positive and every time I changed and improved it, the feedback would almost be exponentially positive. at the same time, just for the record, I had about three four other websites I was trying at the same time and all of them failed and each one of them brought brilliant lessons I learned to poem analysis. I have this theory that I want to fail almost more than I succeed because that allows me to realize where I’ve gone wrong.

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and how to better myself. Whereas if I just keep growing, you can’t say if you’re, what you’re doing is really, really good or really good, if that makes sense. And I want to really know when I’m doing things wrong and when I’m doing things right and to what extent they’re right isn’t as important for me just as long as it’s right or wrong. Does that make sense? Yeah. Were those other sites that failed, they content sites also? Yes, in different niches and each of them has very obvious reasons.

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for their failures, sometimes not obvious actually, but all of them life lessons have been kind of ingrained into my head and helped me to kind of build up the website portfolio I have now to where it currently is. Before we move on to like how you grew poem analysis, I’m curious what those failures were and what were the obvious reasons why those other ones failed? Okay, okay. I had a website about Twitter tips about optimizing Twitter.

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And I just wasn’t an expert in it, I believe at the time. I was wanting to learn about it. I wasn’t an expert. So the content wasn’t very good. I had a few tweets that was articles that would go viral, but it wasn’t very good. Another one was about educating financial tips such as like it was in this style of Tinder. So you swipe right. If the tip was good, swipe left. If it’s not good. And then my website would showcase the better tips to people on the homepage. But the issue of that was the

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word count for each of these tips was like 200 words. So it was very difficult to index and get traffic from Google. It wasn’t exactly super valuable content. was just a great user experience, but not good for SEO traffic. And then there was one about a tech website to do with the iPad, because I was a massive fan of the iPad when it came out. And again, I was probably copying too much content, not really understanding what I was trying to do in that website. And the last one was a website to do with Steam engines, believe it or not, which

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is something I’m keen on actually, despite sheer coincidence. I have a book on Steam engines as well and but what I found was that was the first time I had people really giving me feedback in the comments and contact forms about the website, about how I was writing the content, how it could be better. So almost before Google told people categorically this is how you should write the content, I was almost getting that feedback from these real interested readers about Steam engines. So that was

12:08
what I kind of bought into prime analysis as well. Interesting. Okay, so it sounds like one, you learn that you shouldn’t write about stuff that you don’t know that much about. And two, SEO matters in your case. And then three, if you’re getting a lot of feedback from actual readers, that’s a good sign that you’re onto something. Yes, I would go down the route of if you can’t write about it as an expert, get someone else to, and it’s fine to outsource it to someone else.

12:38
And I think, yeah, what you said is pretty much bang on, I’d say. The only thing I would say is each one of these had very obvious reasons for failing and I should have noticed it sooner maybe. But yeah, the feedback is okay even now. I get quite a lot of comments on the website per day and I almost sift for the negative comments because they’re the ones that are really people that are passionate, that really almost…

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unknowingly want to help me by showing me where I’m going wrong. even to this day, that’s a real key kind of feedback loop I use to kind of grow the website and help deliver the best user experience. What’s funny is I feel like blog commenting is pretty dead. Where are these people leaving their comments? Not if they’ve got questions. It depends on the context. So with poem analysis, a lot people have questions about the poetry that might not be answered in the analysis.

13:36
and they sometimes are very specific questions, sometimes not and you do find the more niche you go, the more niche questions you get and sometimes they’re quite beneficial to include as FAQ scheme or something so it’s almost like that feedback loop of they’re gonna ask me a question, okay I’ll answer it but I’ll answer it as an FAQ that’s something I do with a lot of the websites as it starts to get more traffic but it has to, I’d say you have to, it doesn’t always work some of my websites don’t have commenting enabled but the ones that do

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tend to give really good feedback. Okay. All right. So if someone, so I teach a class on like building an audience and if someone came up to me and said, Hey, I want to do a set on poetry. I would probably say, okay, uh, you can probably get traffic and build an audience, but how the heck would you monetize that? And I’d ask them to think about that. So William, how do you monetize this site? That’s a really good question. Uh, I do it currently a hundred percent ad revenue.

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So my objectives is as much traffic as possible, as much ad revenue. But recently I started to realize ad revenue is probably the worst way of monetizing a website. So this is where I’m starting to look into products, services and other ventures, which weirdly enough is what all my competitors are doing. So I’m not really sure why I haven’t taken note of it, but that’s kind of the area I’m going into now anyway. So can you give the listeners an idea of

15:05
Like how much ads pay out on like a poetry site? Not very high. So it depends on the ad network you’re with. So I was with Ezoic for a long time and they sometimes didn’t provide the best RPMs or EPMVs, what they call it, earnings per million thousand visitors. So with them and the price of their premium services… Can you give us a bit of a part like, what was Ezoic paying at the time and then the different ad networks that you’ve used and how the payouts had increased?

15:36
Izoic during COVID was terrible. was actually net negative for one or two days, but I would say about $7 RPM is a ballpark figure. For AdFribe, since I’ve been with them, you’re looking at around 12 to 15, I’d say. Okay. So just for the audience, that’s 12 to $15 per thousand impressions, right? Yes. Okay. And…

16:05
I don’t actually have ads on my site because I want people to sign up for my email list and whatnot, but how do you balance not turning your poetry site into just one big ad page? What are your limits? Where do you place your ads? What’s the optimal placement? So back when I was with Azote, they was doing quite a lot. I then went to ad fry, but it wasn’t as much. from my general consensus and from working with the companies,

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It’s difficult to do too little because it’s always if you add 5 % more adverts, you might get 5 % more revenue. So right now, I’m probably at a point where I’ve got too many adverts on the website, which is also a good incentive for people to buy an ad for experience. But typically, I’d go with the Google guidelines. So in content, you’d probably aim for about 20 to 25 % coverage.

17:00
You don’t really want any adverts above the folds, so it kind of pushes the content down. And maybe one or two sticky adverts being at the bottom of the website or in the sidebar. But that’s quite intrusive. I admit that. It’s not perfect kind of monetization strategy. It’s kind of a concession. And that’s kind of why products and services is probably a better way to go. Because the third example, I guarantee and know that if I turn off the adverts for one week,

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my traffic would just shoot because it’s a better use experience, but then I’m also not making money. So there’s a kind of strenuous effect of better use experience, but also monetizing the traffic as best as possible. Cause I know like if I click on something and sometimes I end up clicking on, you know, some of those articles, uh, like at the bottom of websites where it takes into, it’s obviously like an ad driven site.

17:52
because there’s ads everywhere and then it shifts the page up and down and everything, so you accidentally click on the ad. I know that when I land on one of those, it actually diminishes the quality of that site in my mind. And I’m just curious how you balance all that. I actually, I went on your site, it didn’t seem that intrusive until you scrolled down a little bit and sometimes there’s like a big ad and sometimes there’s like these little mini video ads, I don’t know if they’re gifs or videos. And you mentioned that

18:20
If you took those off, you would see traffic shoot through the roof. I’m just curious, is your goal 100 % right now to get as many impressions or is email part of your strategy? What is the thought process? Since I’ve done websites, there’s always been traffic. And I think that’s the way most publishers go. They go, I get more traffic, I get more ad revenue. It’s a one-to-one relation, but…

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When you get to a certain level, and I can’t say for what industries you should get to in terms of impressions per month, but when you get to a certain level, I think the objective should move massively away from ad revenue and traffic, and which will also help with any drops in traffic, be it SEO or seasonality, and then move towards monetization with other methods. And I think that’s the best way to go about this type of industry, maybe because ultimately it’s difficult. I think it’s…

19:17
having a product and service is a real good niche and a great thing to have, but it also takes a lot of time. So getting enough traffic is what I tend to do with my website. And now I’m starting to think, okay, once I’ve got to that level, can I better monetize the traffic? So it’s not actually dropping, but it’s actually improving the website even further. So do you think that advertising has harmed your rankings in Google? Yes, I think it definitely has. There’s a lot of factors that will negatively

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Influence a web user and how they browse a article bounce rates I get a lot of feedback for people with the adverse and they hate the adverts as well, which I completely agree with a Lot of the competitors. I even see some maybe testing of some people Removing adverts on some web pages and see some it’s seen it shoot up as well It makes sense. It’s not kind of rocket science if you’ve got someone come to a

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webpage to read content and they’re getting on farther with adverts in between the content, it’s not going to improve, make them want to stay on the website, it’s not going to help the core web vitals as well, you know, it’s still not helping the SEO impact of the website.

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22:04
And,

22:34
You have all these ads, the user experience isn’t that great, yet you’re still getting millions of hits every month. Clearly you’re doing something right. Can we just- I will- one of the reasons that it’s doing well is because a lot of websites that offer educational content for especially students in schools offer it behind a paywall and I’m ethically against that. I don’t think you should have to pay to get education. So even with the ads, it’s better than paying for the content and-

23:02
That will always be the case, I believe. I’ve seen a lot of my competitors that even didn’t have a paywall, never went to a paywall, and their conversion rate improved greatly for whatever service they were offering in terms of paying to see the content, to the point that they could almost lose 80 % of their traffic and still be making more money from these memberships and premium services. But with a paywall, the SEO tanks as well, completely. Their website just crashes, and it’s still crashing for a few competitors, unfortunately.

23:32
So yeah, I think they’re of niche USP that I have with my content on all my websites that I don’t offer a limited experience. I offer the full experience, not as nice UX as it would be if it was ad free. Interesting. So with that philosophy then, that precludes you from selling products, right? Info products? It makes it more difficult, but then what I would be looking at is

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not just given them the content, but in a better format that they can understand better. then extras on top of that, because a lot of websites, they offer something for free and then cut back almost a bit like Twitter. Twitter, believe it was a free service and now they’re making you pay. Paying for something that was previously free is never going to go down well. So whatever I choose to do in terms of products or service needs to kind of add to the free experience, not subtract from it. Got it. Okay. I understand. I understand. Yeah. So you just…

24:31
You’re going to keep the free stuff the way it is, but then you’ll add value and charge for that. Okay. Makes sense. Yeah. You’re just, you’re not against like just charging for education period. So you mentioned something key there. You said that a lot of your competitors have it behind a paywall. Has that allowed you to track a lot of links from like.edu organizations? I do get a lot of links from.edu. It’s a massive benefit.

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It does seem like it does follow in terms of the backlink juice as well, even though sometimes they’re behind closed doors. But yeah, I’ve noticed a few times where links have popped up on the website and there’s a increase in domain authority in AHRES or Moz or have you within a few days. So it’s not ideal, but having it behind walls, but I do still see benefits from them links as well.

25:27
Can you just walk me through your process? Like you’re going to do a poem. Like how do you get so much traffic off of one of these? Like what’s your process for research? Presumably there’s careful consideration before you write any piece of content, right? Yeah. So some of this is poetry specific. I think some of it can be, you know, be used throughout different niches and categories for websites. I would typically do

25:56
And SEMrush keyword research, AHRF as well. I use both because they are slightly dissimilar in how they show the results. Use keywords such as poem, poetry, blah, blah, that type of thing and see what’s ranking well for that. Look at competitors, see what their top posts are and see what is working for them and basically do the same but make it better. So it’s not just copying or the same content but it’s actually improving the content for that keyword.

26:23
There’s a lot of listicles on best poems, books on poetry, there’s educational syllabuses on poetry which is going be great for students. So there’s a lot of resources where I can get lists of what poems people care about because especially with educational syllabuses, excuse me, you tend to find that the SEM rushes and AH refs don’t really showcase what’s popular because it’s going to be popular for the coming year for the educational syllabus. So that’s where you have to more rely on.

26:53
research offline books and or even Google trace to some extent as well. So they’re kind of the main core ways of doing research and just by doing that you get hundreds of ideas even thousands. So that kind of has kept me quite busy with my team.

27:12
Interesting. So does that mean you have people on the ground at schools to know what the upcoming curriculum is?

27:20
No, so a lot of the examining boards in different countries, mostly US, UK and India have everything online as PDFs so that teachers can take it away and learn how to best approach the new syllabus. So we would basically have a list of these all of the different examining bodies in the US, in the States, in the UK, in India, whatsoever countries we want to target and then go to town and basically add them where we can. And the great thing with these type of

27:49
target team which is something I would recommend people do is you create your content for each of the poems or each of the mini topics but then you then create it into a listicle so people can see the complete educational syllabus in an article and they’re the articles that tend to get really good backlinks from kind of educational websites and stuff so that’s what I would tend to do I would make these separate poetry articles or my team words and then we’ve congregated into these articles that are specifically aiming at certain

28:16
demographic of people, students that are wanting to study this specific examination so that when they go, ah, I’ve got a full list here, I can send it to my teacher, send it to my school, send it to a forum, and then that’s where the backlist can kind of be generated as well.

28:31
Give me an example. So for example, in the UK, we have a Xanon ball called AQA. They have, think, can’t say off the top of my head, about 20 poems in a anthology called A Power and Conflict. And each of these poems needs to be analyzed. So I would get my team to say, OK, these are the 20 poems that need to be analyzed. Go ahead. Let’s analyze them individually as one article per poem.

28:57
And then we then make another article that says, this is the list of the AQA poems that you need to analyze for these years. And it’s that article because you’re in a title, you’ve got the examiner body, the year that it’s been analyzed, and other examinational kind of keywords that ranks really high for students trying to analyze them. And then that’s where them links then get sent around to different .edu websites.

29:24
Interesting. So you’re putting together essentially like a curriculum and then you’re sending them out to the EDU sites as like study guides. Is that accurate? I would say reference guides of here’s the poem that you need to analyze with links to them. That’s why I would put it. Yeah. And then earlier, this is just for my own curiosity. You said you use SCMrush and Ahrefs.

29:51
Just curious what your take is on the difference between those tools. Because I couldn’t really find a big difference that would warrant me signing up for both. Yeah, so AHRFs I find is really good for… Well, the first thing is I tend to look at them on a daily basis to see what percentage increase or decreases my competitors and myself have had in terms of SEM rush. But AHRFs has something similar. So if I see SEM rush has a 10 % drop in their predicted organic…

30:19
traffic, I’d want to double check that against Ahrefs and if that says a 10 % drop, I would then start to worry but sometimes you’ll find one goes 10 % down, one goes 5 % up, so it’s like okay, that’s their own tools and algorithms that is making them changes. I find with Ahrefs, I prefer the keyword research and I think with SEMrush, it’s good for the site audits but it’s very good also for certain keyword researches where they

30:48
Introduced something that I tested with them called user intent was so it’ll tell you is it a commercial intent? Is it a brand intent? Is it? informational intent and then understanding the intent behind the keywords is something that I find is quite useful So I tend to use ah refs if I really want to go hard with a keyword on then use SEM rush But the other thing with SEM rush, which is a bit of a USP is click potential It’s something that I think they’re starting to roll out and I did a bit of recent testing with them on

31:15
where it will tell you for certain keywords what percentage click potential will you get for that keyword. For example, if I say how old is Barack Obama, it’s a zero click search term because you’ll see his whatever age he is. But if there’s one that says, what are the themes and the structural form of this poem, people are more likely to click onto the first result and not see a rich snippet. So then the click potential is higher. So it’s also a good way of

31:41
seeing not just which keywords to go for based on search volume and traffic, search volume sorry and keyword difficulty but also on click potential as well.

31:51
Ahrefs has had that for a long time. had no idea about that. thank you for letting me know. I’ll make a note to look into that. I had no idea. And ever since they introduced their plugin, like the Chrome plugin that a lot of people are using now, they have even more clickstream data than ever before. I personally give Ahrefs the leg up just because I feel like they’re investing a lot of resources in crawling. They have the plugin and they

32:21
They get that click data like you’re talking about. SEMrush looks nicer though. Like the UI just is prettier. yeah. Okay, so let’s dig a little deeper. Yeah. Sorry, I was gonna say the thing I find interesting as well is when you get down to the below 200 search traffic, the numbers can vary quite considerably. And I tend to find a address is a little bit more accurate from where I see my Google Search Console to how much traffic.

32:50
Ahrefs is predicting so that’s something that I find quite good if you got very niche terms, they’re probably a better one to go for

32:59
Okay, so one thing that we had talked about in the mastermind group is schema and markup. So one, would you mind defining for the audience what that is? And two, how did you even discover this was important in the first place?

33:19
So schema markup is a way of structuring data and content that you have on your website into a format that Google can read very precisely and effectively that they can then translate into a good user experience snippet or a rich snippet at the top of Google search results. ultimately, Google’s aim is to satisfy the user as quickly as possible. And I don’t think that’s going to change for years and years.

33:46
And the quicker they can do that, the better the UX, the more money they are probably going to make. And so the idea that you are getting a positive SEO by changing and formatting your content to have schema markup enables you to be more eligible for this rich snippet at the top of Google. And obviously, if you’re at the top of Google, you’re going to probably get more clicks, even if it is zero clicks. So that’s kind of the methodology of schema markup. There’s many different types.

34:16
which ones you use can have good consequences. Some might be better than others. It’s probably a niche thing as well. For example, if I have a recipe scheme on my website, it’s not going to work very well. Or if it’s on a food website, it’s going to work very well. So yeah, there’s loads of different markups. think finding out which ones are best for your niche and basically pushing them across your whole content is really going to help in the best of ways.

34:43
So you mentioned like the snippet at the top of the search results. Which schema is conducive to that on your site? Is it the FAQ markup or is it just answering the question succinctly? What’s your tactic for getting that? So the thing with the, so for example, I have FAQ and I rolled that out quite considerably about a year ago and I found with that, you would see the FAQ questions underneath too randomly selected. Well, it’s not random, but it’s chosen the

35:12
chosen selected questions from Google underneath the search result and that increases the space that you have on search results. And although the click-through rate does decrease having that, the impression you get on Google massively increases, which gives you a net gain ultimately. But in terms of the actual rich snippet at the top of the page, I tend to find that you don’t actually have to have any specific schema markup to achieve that.

35:41
You just need to make sure your content is as formatted as possible in a way that Google can really understand it. So one of the best experiments I did on this, which I haven’t seen replicated anywhere else, comes with my other website, OceanInfo.com, where I did a listicle on dangerous rivers. And the way I did this listicle, which I believe 100 % any listicle should have the same structure, is you have an introduction. You then list out the item, be it a H2 heading.

36:08
one to two points as to why it’s dangerous or whatever you’re talking about in the listicle, an image or a video of it, and then the content underneath it. And with the images, I had a caption for each of the images that said, why was the river dangerous? And Google, because I structured that article so well, and it was very clear that each caption answered the question of why that river was dangerous, they actually used it as a list, as a rich snippet list. They took each of the captions out and used it as a rich snippet. So it kind of…

36:36
homed into me that yes, can add FAQ schema, can add breadcrumb schema, but ultimately the biggest thing you can do is just structure your article as regimented as possible and as easy to understand as possible. Both to user on a crawl robot and then the rich snippets will naturally come your way anyway. Okay. So walk me through that again, cause I missed it. So intro and then an intro to the listicle and then

37:03
list all the things in the list, but you sit in the image, all tags, what do you do? So I would have each of the list of call items, I’d have the H2 heading up, whatever it is in that list of call, um, article, and then have two points under and underneath it, of, of where it’s located, why it’s dangerous. And that would change. For example, if you’re doing the top soccer players ever to live, you might say how many goals they scored, um, what teams did they play for? It doesn’t matter. It’s just two things about that list of call item that relates to the article.

37:33
You then have the image and I make the captions and the alt tags exactly the same and make sure that the alt tag and caption answers the question regarding that list of quits and so if it was Ronaldo in this football soccer example I’d say Ronaldo is one of the best players ever because he scored this many goals as the caption and the alt tag for that image and then have underneath that a paragraph you know 150 words 200 words which will go into more detail and that

38:01
Caption in this ocean info example that the domain authority of the website when this happened was zero It was two months old or something and it was beating everyone. It was beating National Geographic It was beaten DA’s of up to 80 on exactly the same keywords articles and I genuinely believe it was just because it was so well Formatted the structure structure that Google couldn’t not use as a rich snippet And I think the idea as well you can look at it from a Google perspective, but you can also look at it from a user expect perspective

38:30
The way I always try to think of things is how many different ways can the reader read your content? Traditionally, if you just got a massive paragraph, that’s one way. If you have H2 headings, that’s a second way. If you’ve got images, that’s a third way. If you have bullet points underneath the heading, two bullet points of why it’s whatever it is or just a bit more data such as Ronaldo scored this many goals, he plays for these teams, that’s the fourth way. If you have content underneath the image, that’s the fifth way. If you’ve got good captions, that’s the sixth way.

38:59
And I find the more different ways of digesting the content, the better SEO than articles tend to get. So that example you just gave, are you implying that you answer the question in the H2 tag or in the caption for the image in your Ronaldo? The H2 tag would be Cristiano Ronaldo. So you’d want to say who are the list, who are the items in this listicle? And then the images would kind of relate that list item to the

39:28
the question that you’re trying to answer being who’s the best footballers, what are the most dangerous rivers or what have you. So if you are answering the question in the caption for an image, that implies then that it’s not a keyword that you’re using for the tag for the image. It’s actually a sentence. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. Interesting. Okay. I’ve never thought to do that. My alternate typically just, yeah. Yeah. I tend to find that something that I

39:57
Categorically believe works. I do it with all my little calls now on any website and it really does work But the only time I’ve ever seen as a rich snippet was on this one example of dangerous rivers, but I never thought of the alt tags or the captions as being something that could be turned into a rich snippet But if they kind of relate back to the core topic where whatever that article is about Yeah, I can see how Google would use it because it’s something that’s repeatable that they can clearly extract from the article with every alt tag or caption

40:26
is answering a question in a way that could be turned into Rich Knippet, of course they would probably like to use it. So let me just summarize everything that you just said that we just talked about here. Okay, so you have the H2 tag, Cristiano Ronaldo. Then you have an image that answers the question, he scored this many goals and whatever. And then you might have a couple of points that say the same thing, this guy scored that many goals and whatnot. Not quite, not quite. I’d have the H2 of Cristiano Ronaldo. Underneath that, I’d have two bold point statistics.

40:56
family goals he scored, what teams he might have played for, a statistical point that emphasizes why he’s one of the best strikers in the world or whatever you’re talking about. You then have the image which would then answer in a different way with different information why he’s the best striker or footballer. And then the content would go and take all that information, add more to it, stuff that’s probably not related to why he’s the best footballer and just give you a better overview of who that player is.

41:25
or whatever that listicle item is. Okay, I like it. Okay, so it’s not the same verbiage. It’s reworded to answer the question, maybe in a different way. Got it. Okay. That’s amazing. Okay, that’s great. And so that’s listicles. So how does that relate to poems? Poems aren’t as factual as that, right? Do you do it in a similar fashion? And do you use images actually for your poem analysis? I tend to find that images are a USP that I like to…

41:54
Expand out to as many poems as possible because a lot of people struggle to visualize and understand what poetry is about so having some sort of featured image or an image of some kind that really homes in what the kind of vibe and what the Poetry is about helps understand the poem and it also helps you X as well But with the listicles is is this the great thing about what I just said is is can be transferred to any industry so for poetry I might have the top 10 best love poems and

42:24
and then have Sonnet 52 by William Shakespeare and then say what is it about, what themes does it include, love, relationships, blah blah blah and then have the image of whatever I have as a representation of it. I might even not choose an image and choose a different type of content such as a quote from the poem. That’s the most important part of the poem, quoted. I can then say why it’s…

42:50
a really good love poem and just repeat that again. the image isn’t something that might always work in each industry, but the H2, one or two bullet point reasons, some sort of content being an image video for me, for poetry is quotes and then the content underneath it is, yeah, it just works really, really well. Amazing. Okay. And then we didn’t even touch on, you know, how you run your team and whatnot, but what are your, clearly what you’re doing is working.

43:20
I’m just curious what’s stopping you from hiring more writers and really blowing this up and just scaling this even more? Or is that something you’re trying to do? think, yes, it’s something I’m trying to do, but it’s very difficult. And I think Elon Musk put it very well that anyone can create a prototype car, but mass scaling it and manufacturing it is a whole different question. And it’s the same, I feel, with anything upscaling. So I…

43:48
It’s difficult finding the right talent and people that you can trust because like you probably know, you can press the wrong button and then everything goes wrong. You don’t really want to entrust someone that might not know what they’re doing in that sense. But it’s also having the right processes ready to upscale. So I might have been working in Trello where people can pick the poetry that you want to write and so forth. Now I’m looking to move to programs such as ClickUp, using Loom to kind of give visual video

44:17
kind of lessons of how to do this, this and this. Hiring one or two people just to help with the management of the writers and to make sure everyone’s happy and do the commenting and that type of thing. So yeah, it’s difficult to do. There’s not a silver bullet answer I could give, but yeah, it’s something I’m still learning to be fair. Well, let me ask you this. Are you, do you personally read all the pieces of content that

44:47
get posted on your site today? Yeah. Every single article on any website I’ve read. I don’t always read it methodically, but I’ll go over it Grammarly. I’ll make sure the SEO is good. I’ll read sections just to make sure it makes sense, but not all of it. Just kind of a skim read. Right. Okay. So that means that you have editors that are kind of editing everything. And so you’re just kind of doing the final pass at this point.

45:15
I train the writers to be the editors. I don’t really see the benefit of having someone go over the content. I know a lot of people do that, but I would rather just let the writers do the optimizations so that when a new talk comes out, such as a set for SEO or topic SEO, I can train the writers and not have the editor do it as well. Cool. William, this is pretty enlightening. Where can the listeners find all the various websites? I know you have a poetry one, you have a book one.

45:44
And the most recently you have an Ocean website, right? Yes. So, ProAnalysis.com is the ProHT1 and the sister website, BookAnalysis, is BookAnalysis.com and the Ocean website is OceanInfo.com. I maybe will have you back on once you’ve monetized it with your own products. I’m very curious how that compares to like your ad revenue and do you plan on removing or reducing the ads once you have products?

46:14
Yeah, I would say part of my strategy, I think that also works well just on a side note, is I always have about 10 to 20 experiments going on and seeing which ones work, which ones don’t work. So I can see in the future, reducing the ads for certain categories, for example, seeing how that plays for an SEO gains and what RPM differences there’ll be. But the membership which I’m currently working on will include ad for experience. So it’s almost kind of incentivizing.

46:43
people to have a membership if there are ads on the website. So I wouldn’t want to reduce it too much, but yeah, I’ll be experimenting all the time anyway. I know that works for me. There’s this place where I watch anime called Crunchyroll. And if you don’t, like you can watch them for free, but there’s like an ad like every five minutes, it bothers me to no end. And you just pay like, you know, a little bit of money and you get those ads removed. So the model is proven and it works. I’m just kind of curious when you implement it.

47:13
how well it’ll do, I’m very curious. So keep me posted. I will do, yeah, sounds good. So thanks a lot for coming on the show, William, appreciate it. No worries, thank you for having me.

47:25
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now if there is a topic that you are interested in, then there’s no harm in just documenting it online. And who knows, your content site might replace your day job someday. more information, go to mywebquitterjob.com slash episode 463. And once again, I want to thank Sellerboard, which is the Amazon profit software that I recommend for Amazon sellers. By going to mywebquitterjob.com slash Sellerboard, you can get 30 days for free.

47:51
Once again, that’s mywifecouterjob.com slash S-E-L-L-E-R-B-O-A-R-D. I also want to thank 180marketing.com for sponsoring this episode. 180 Marketing is the agency that I use to grow my search traffic by 4x in just six months. For more information, email jeff at 180marketing.com. Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifecouterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course.

48:19
Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.