Niche Pursuits Podcast: Find Your Next "Niche" Business Idea!

Craig Hewitt is the founder of Castos, a popular podcasting platform. I met Craig 4 years ago at RhodiumWeekend.com when Craig ran the podcasting editing and service-based business, Podcast Motor, before he built Castos. Today, Podcast Motor and Castos have merged into a SaaS company for hosting and analytics for your podcast. They also still offer a complete podcast editing and transcription service. As we will dive into during the show, Craig also shares how he purchased the Seriously Simple Podcasting WordPress plugin before he ever started Castos with the idea that they could perhaps leverage it into a SaaS play one day. On the podcast, we talk about the new podcasting trends, the struggles of growing Castos, and how the Castos team used the Ahrefs course to train new employees on content marketing, and how those efforts are paying off.

In this Niche Pursuits podcast episode, we discover the key themes that made ConvertKit a success. ConvertKit is an email marketing platform started by Nathan Barry, a former designer and author, in 2012. The software is now generating $2.1M monthly revenue, has been listed on the INC 5000 numerous times, and founder Nathan Barry recently invested in an actual Ghost Town.

Today, I'm excited to share an interview I conducted with Jared Bauman, a long time Niche Pursuits reader. Jared and I sat down to discuss a recent site he purchased and how he grew it 5x in just 7 months. He took the site from earning around $200 a month to now over $1,000 a month! Jared's website purchase criteria: 1. Ranking Articles 2. Consistent Revenue 3. No Backlink Profile 4. Monthly Traffic over 3,000 Pageviews 5. No Premium Ad Network How to Grow a Purchased Site 1. Site Audit and Repairs 2. Add Buy Buttons and Tables 3. Keyword Research 4. Hire a Writer 5. Publish New Content 6. Build Links 7. Add Internal Links

In 2010, I launched Long Tail Pro, a keyword research software tool. Over the next 5 years, I grew the company from 0 to about $1 million in revenue per year. I sold that company in 2016. Today, I share the "untold" story of Long Tail Pro and what has happened since I sold the company, along with some of the valuable lessons learned along the way.

Today, I brought Mark Mark from Niche Website Builders onto the show to discuss my recent order of a Skyscraper link building campaign for one of my niche sites. We dive into how they started their agency (Niche Website Builders), what types of services they offer, and more. Then we spend time looking behind the scenes of what happens when they create a link building campaign, how they do outreach, and everything that is involved.

Over the last little while, I've come to the realization that I need to make a major shift in how I blog. All thanks to Google.

Unlimited WordPress development? WPTangerine is a service I had never heard of until recently. I was a bit surprised when I heard they had been around since 2015 and came highly recommended by someone in my network. In my podcast, I interviewed Marcus, the co-founder of WP Tangerine. We dive in and talk about how he built his business and how WPTangerine has grown to nearly 600 paying clients with 60 full-time employees.

I started a case study to try and revive a dead email list of about 20,000 subscribers. However, it turns out my domain reputation is bad for this particular domain (my other email sending domains are excellent). So, my emails have primarily been going to people's junk folders, leading to terrible open rates. As a result, I'm PAUSING this email case study UNTIL I can improve the domain reputation. I'm working with an email expert and using a tool called "Mail Warm" that will likely take 2 to 3 months to show significant improvements to my domain reputation. However, there is a silver lining! My highest open rate (of 14%) was an email related to side hustles / making money online. This shows me that this audience might be very interested in much more than coupons and discount codes. I think I have a clear path to monetization moving forward. But, I want to do it right. I need to take the extra 2 to 3 months to stop sending email broadcasts to the list, so that I can systematically improve the domain reputation. Give me another 3 months or so, and I'll be back sharing updates.

MarketMuse uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze content, suggest topics to cover, and create better content. It works best for SEO writers who want to develop highly effective content marketing strategies not based on gut instinct. I've also recently been hearing all the news about GPT-3, robots writing articles, and wondering how all of this will impact content generation for bloggers and SEO's in the future. I wanted to dive more into the subject and could not think of a better person than Jeff Coyle to explain what's going on. I'm excited to share this interview I did with Jeff to get his take on artificial intelligence as it relates to SEO, how these changes will impact us humans, and the latest advancements that Market Muse has made in machine learning for content creators.

Learn why Bart MacDonald of BloomVP.com left the previous company that he founded and raised $10 million for. + Bart previously founded and help raise funding for the SaaS company, Sapling HR. However, he recently stepped down from the CEO role at Sapling to found Bloom VP, a venture firm focused on SaaS. Listen in to hear Bart's strategies and why he is so bullish on SaaS.