Johnathan Ward is no stranger to internet marketing. In fact, this entrepreneur has more than 20 years of experience and has experimented with almost every online business model.
In this interview, he talks about two of the platforms where he’s seeing the most success: Facebook and Pinterest.
On Facebook, he runs several pages, two of which have been invited to join the coveted Bonus Program. He’s achieved reach of 4 million in just 30 days on his most popular page.
Meanwhile, on Pinterest, he runs multiple accounts, one of which has achieved 3 million impressions over the period of one month.
In this interview, John talks sub-niches, automation, listicles, competitive analysis, and more as he shares the secrets to his $50k months.
Watch the Full Episode
John begins by sharing his experience in the internet marketing space, with display ads, lead gen, and affiliate marketing. He talks about the ups and downs he’s had in his career online, and he also shares some of his wins, including niche sites, Pinterest, and Facebook pages, at times earning up to $50k/month.
As for what’s working for him at the moment, he talks about the massive number of impressions and clicks he’s getting on Pinterest at the moment for one of his sites, and he talks about shifting his content from SEO to social platforms.
He talks about launching a new site covering multiple niches and driving traffic from Pinterest to his site to see which niche was most successful.
John shares his content creation and pinning processes, how many articles he creates a month, how many pins he creates per day, and how he uses the trends and analytics tools. He also offers some interesting ideas for getting new content ideas and testing them out.
He shares his thoughts on the best topics for Pinterest and how to find sub-niches that are trending. He also talks about seasonal content and when to post.
The conversation then shifts to John’s success on Facebook, where he has two pages in the Bonus Program. He shares his strategy for growing and his thoughts on getting into the program.
When ti comes to his current stats, John notes that some posts getting reach of up to 4 million, and talks about his specific strategies: his posting schedule, the content he’s posting, and how he’s been growing his likes and followers.
John offers a fascinating overview of how he automates his processes on Facebook, drawing on his software experience, and he talks about automating his content creation process as well. He ended up creating a tool called Content Goblin, which creates image-heavy listicles.
He talks about using AI for other content purposes, like creating faceless YouTube videos, and other projects he’s working on, like a free tool that help with competitive analysis and another for Facebook pages.
Lastly, Jared asks John to share some of his biggest failures, and also he talks about his day-to-day schedule and his future plans.
Links & Resources
Topics John Ward Talks About
- How he got started
- What types of projects he’s been successful with
- His success on Pinterest
- Launching a new multi-niche site
- Content creation for Pinterest
- His pinning strategy
- Best topics for Pinterest
- Sub-niches on Pinterest
- Creating his Facebook pages
- Getting into the Bonus Program
- Running his Facebook pages
- Growing his Facebook pages
- Running Facebook ads
- Automating workflows
- Creating his tool
- Using AI
- Other projects
- John’s failures
- His day-to-day schedule
- His future plans
Transcript
Jared: All right. Welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman. And today we are joined by John Ward. John, how you doing? Welcome on board.
John: I am doing great. I’m happy to be here. I’ve watched plenty of episodes, so, uh, I’m just happy to share my story.
Jared: I love it. When we get first time caller, long time listener kind of scenario here.
Uh, yeah, we were talking before we hit record how, you know, you’re like, I’m pretty familiar with how this works, so we can just go ahead and get started. Um, I I’m excited about today because I think your story in so many ways encapsulates so much of all of us. Listeners me as a host. Um, and just your story about where you’re at, where you’ve been.
Um, I don’t really have a good way to summarize it, so I’m not going to try to, I’m just going to say, let’s get into it. Why don’t you give us some backstory, catch us up to who you are, and then we’ll get into the, the, the meat and potatoes of today.
John: Yeah, sure. Yeah, I’ll go into it. So I’ve been kind of involved in the, I guess, internet marketing space for about 20 years, right?
So it’s kind of the business models have evolved over time. I started kind of with display ads and AdSense and then moved into affiliate marketing, um, moved into kind of like doing some lead gen also, um, now I’m building software. So I’ve kind of gone through all the different phases and kind of evolution of the whole internet space.
Right. Anyone trying to make money online knows it’s been kind of, uh, evolution and changing and, and you have to keep up with all the current trends. Right. Um, so I guess like one of the earliest things I have is, uh, I. One time I accidentally spent 20, 000 on my space ads when they launched and I woke up in the morning.
I was quite shocked, right? But I looked at the revenue and it was like 60, 000 in revenue. So, you know, it’s just like I kind of had these like ups and downs throughout my career online and I’ve learned quite a lot of. What works, what doesn’t work. And I kind of just have pivoted all the way along the time.
Jared: You talked about the evolution. I think you put it nicely. There’s many other more disparaging ways to talk about, you know, what this world has looked like the last couple of years, but at the same time, like that’s kind of how this world has been since the dawn of the internet, you know, um, ups, downs.
That’s, that’s a bit of what we all signed up for. What are some of your big wins throughout the years? I mean, you know, where have you kind of found your success throughout the years?
John: Yeah, I mean, early on, it was all the affiliate marketing stuff, right? So the MySpace thing I talked about, I also did, if you remember, stumble upon the product where you would give you basically a random web page.
When you went to it, uh, they had an ad network. I did really well there with gaming ads. So sending people to web games. I mean, I had like a 70, 000 a month in revenue with that. Um, so I did that also back, uh, quite a while ago. Uh, Facebook ads to things like dating or maybe like diet offers, things like that did really well for me.
Um, and then like a lot of people, I kind of pivoted to a niche sites and I was doing pretty well with some of my niche sites and then, uh, you know, Google has made several changes, um, over the last couple of years and those kind of went downhill. So I’ve pivoted more into like social traffic right now.
So I’m doing pretty well with Pinterest and I’m doing, um, also growing some Facebook pages right now.
Jared: I think I just wanted to make sure to kind of encapsulate this idea that like you’ve had these months in the past through a lot of different things, affiliate marketing, um, uh, ad monetization. Um, you talked about social traffic, niche sites.
I mean, you know, in, in the notes before, and you were saying that at times you’ve made 30, 40, 50, 000 a month. Had those fail, started something new, worked that up to something large, had that go down. Um, I guess from a high level, why, and we’ll get into the tactics of what you’re doing right now, but from a high level, I’m just curious, what keeps you coming back?
You know, what keeps you coming back to the table? Yeah,
John: I don’t know. I think I just have this drive to want to want to kind of make something work on my own. And as things, you know, either work or don’t work, I learned what, what works, what doesn’t, I think there’s a, a, um, good, a good thing to, to learn is when you should cut things off.
Right? So like, if something’s not working, I try not to stay with it too long and I try to pivot to something that I know is working and then double down on that. So I’ve always just had this kind of like entrepreneurial drive to do my own thing, websites and now I’m getting into products. So. Kind of like kind of that reasoning, I would say
Jared: you talk about the changes over the last couple of years.
I’m sure a lot of people listening to feel that way as well, maybe had a project hit or two. I know I have, uh, and so where are we at now? What are you working on from a high level now? And then we’re going to get into kind of what’s working for you today. And I think you have a lot of tactics that people are going to get a lot out of.
John: Yeah. Yeah. Um, so basically. The niche sites were doing really well for a while they got destroyed by Google, but I was able to kind of pivot into Pinterest, like many other, probably of your listeners diving into Pinterest and Facebook traffic. But with Pinterest, I’m hitting about, um, like 3 million impressions.
I’m hitting, uh, 20, 000 clicks. I think per month right now, just from Pinterest. Uh, it’s just the one site. I have several different sites, but I’m basically doing that. I’m monetizing it with display ads right now. And I’ve kind of shifted my content strategy around because what you’ll find is. A lot of the, the content that really worked for SEO purposes doesn’t really fit in the social, uh, platforms.
Well, uh, the users are looking for different things than what they’re looking for when they’re searching on Google, right? So it does take a different approach to content to make things work on, on Pinterest.
Jared: Pinterest is where a lot of people have shifted. Did you pivot one of the sites that you had that was getting organic traffic prior, or did you start something totally new?
With this Pinterest project,
John: so I guess I could talk about one of the failures here. So the initial site that was doing really well with, um, Google traffic, right. I decided, Hey, I’m going to pivot that to Pinterest. Right. And then what I initially did was I was just posting kind of like the featured image, the same blog post that I already had.
Right. And I realized this isn’t really working for, for Pinterest. That’s when I realized you need to make a special kind of content for each platform. So, you know, the SEO heavy content just didn’t work. Uh, at that point I decided I wanted to go in a different direction because the, I didn’t really like the niche.
It was kind of a dying niche. So I decided to go into something that was more like visual and inspiring, right? Cause that’s kind of like what hits with Pinterest audience. Um, things like, I don’t know, like you get like recipes, you get home decor, you get fashion, uh, I don’t know, nails, things like that.
Right. So there’s, there’s a lot of people on Pinterest searching for inspiration for things they could do in creativity. So I created a new site that basically focused on a lot of those different niches and I use it to test out different ideas. It’s not really. It’s not really focused on one specific area.
So I kind of use it to just test out what will work and then find out what my audience likes. And then I kind of doubled down on that.
Jared: If you had to say what’s making this one successful on Pinterest, what is it about it? Because it’s certainly broad. It sounds like you’re in a whole, a whole host of niches.
Um, what’s what, like what was making it successful so far?
John: Yeah, I think. Um, what kind of has made it successful is I focused specifically mostly on listicle type content where it’s visual. So there’s like. Really good images to go with the content, right? So let’s say we were doing like home decor, right?
You’d have like, uh, best colonial kitchens or top 10 colonial kitchens. Right. And then you’d have, you know, an image of each, each, uh, design, some description of that and, you know, in a list format, and then you could take each one of those images and pin them to Pinterest and give it a different title description, and those tend to do really well on platform like Pinterest.
Then I also will take. And, um, take some of those images and I’ll use Canva maybe to, uh, create different templates for those. Um, I’ve used some tools to help like automate that. So one’s called blog to pin and one’s called pin generator that I’m sure some of your listeners are familiar with, but, uh, basically, um, kind of taking the same content that I have generated specifically for Pinterest and then posting it in different ways with different images and different texts and things like that.
Um, so I would say don’t just post it one time. Um, You know, do different iterations and see what works.
Jared: How, like, I know people are going to be asking the comments. So I have to ask this sort of thing. I know anytime I ever post about anything Pinterest related, people are really interested in like the specific, the day to day, how many, um, how many articles are you creating for this site?
We’ll call it maybe per week, per month. And then how many times are you pinning per week, per month? Um, and again, people are going to ask me, so I might as well ask you.
John: Yeah, I, um, I don’t tend to generate that many articles. Uh, kind of comes in spurts when I, when I feel inspiration. Right. So, um, I’ll do maybe, I don’t know, like between like maybe 10 to 15 articles per month.
And then when I, when I set those up, I’ll post those articles. Plus some of my older articles, I’ll recycle those. I might do like 20 to 30 pins a day. Um, Try not to go a little bit too crazy because I don’t want to, you know, trigger some kind of spam filter or something like that. But so far for me, 20 to 30 pins per day has been working and I try to vary the, um, the type of content, right?
I don’t just post like 30 pins with the same URL every day.
Jared: What’s been the most unique thing you’ve learned about Pinterest this year? You know, because Pinterest has been around for a while. I can see in the notes, you’ve done Pinterest in the past. Like what’s kind of stood out to you this year? That’s unique about either your process, what’s working, what you’re seeing.
Anything.
John: Well, for me, when I initially started, I was doing everything manually. Um, posting basically like one pin per article per day. And it just wasn’t really working that well for me. I think I learned that it does take a little bit of scale right now to, uh, capture some attention from the Pinterest audience.
The other thing I like to do is investigate the trends tool and the analytics tool. And I think a lot of people know the trends tool, right? You can go ahead and type in different topics and you can find the trending topics on Pinterest, how they’re growing or not growing and things like that. The other tool that not as many people I think use is the analytics tool that tells you more about the users that like your page and your content, right?
So like, if you have, like, I keep talking about the home decor, right? But if you have a home decor audience, um, you can go into the. Analytics, and you can find kind of like crossover topics that your audience is interested in. That isn’t necessarily your core topic, and you can start trying some content in those areas just to see if it works or not.
And if it does work, I kind of tend to start pushing some more of that type of content. If it doesn’t, I kind of.
Jared: I was going to ask you next where you get your topics, you know, in the olden days, we call this keyword research. I guess, I suppose we call it topical research here inside of Pinterest. What topics have you found tend to hit the best? Is there a trend line there? Is it really random? Is it somehow tied to seasonality?
John: Some of it is seasonal. Um, so I’ll say I’ve done some recipes that are seasonal, right? So, you know, Thanksgiving has just happened, right? And I had a leftover. Um, like a turkey soup recipe, right? And that just really crushed it there for a couple of days. Uh, and then, you know, those, those kind of seasonal ones, they just, they really hit really hard, drive a lot of traffic and then they kind of die off right each season, but, so I kind of mix it up with the seasonal stuff.
And the kind of more evergreen content that could be used year round. Um, I’ve found certain types of, um, sub niches, I would say, start to trend in different areas, right? So you could think about like in the recipe niche, maybe like the Mediterranean diet starts trending, right? So you can like tackle that or, or vegan or, um, keto, keto diet, right?
The low carb diet. That one is, Trending the wrong way right now. So maybe you wouldn’t want to target that type of content. So, um, I used, I also use Google trends just to get a general idea of what people are thinking, but I mainly rely on coming up with ideas, looking at them in the trends tool. I definitely rely on chat GPT to help me come up with ideas now.
So. That’s kind of like my approach to it.
Jared: How far ahead are you posting this kind of stuff? You know, like this podcast will go live. I don’t know. End of December, early January. I don’t even know what holiday is coming up, but like, I guess get that kind of thing. Like how far ahead are you posting these topics, these seasonal topics that you’re, that you’re looking towards?
John: I try to stay with the seasonal topics. I feel like there’s a little bit of a, like a sandbox on Pinterest. Almost. It takes a little bit of time before they start to get impressions. So I try to tend to start maybe like six weeks or two months ahead. So if we’re talking about now, uh, when this pod comes out, I would probably be focusing on.
Valentine’s day type content. Right. So that would probably be the next holiday. I think that would be coming up. Good point.
Jared: Um, Pinterest is not all you put your time towards. I know you’re also succeeding on Facebook. Can we, um, if it’s, if it’s good with you, can we transition into what you’re doing on Facebook successfully?
John: Yeah, yeah. Let’s talk about Facebook. So Facebook is another area I kind of tried to shift to with the pivot of Google. Um, and I have, I have about like five or six pages. I was just trying out like different topic ideas on Facebook. I managed to get two of the pages into the Facebook bonus program, which if your users don’t know, um, Basically, they just pay you to keep people on Facebook.
Um, you know, they pay you for the post you make. Um, so what I did was I took a couple of topics I found basically by just browsing around and seeing what is popular and what type of content does well on Facebook, which I Um, interestingly enough, it’s very different than Pinterest too, even though they’re both social networks, the types of content that tend to do well on each are very different.
Um, so, you know, I, I pick a niche on Facebook, I dive into it. I drive, uh, page likes with paid ads, and then I tend to post, uh, all kinds of different types of content to see what works, so, um, The, uh, you know, the Facebook algorithm has been changing over time and you kind of have to get a feel for what’s working right now and what’s not.
Jared: So Spencer’s talked about this before as well. Um, how topically specific are these Facebook pages? How broad, like which ones are, are the ones you got into the Facebook bonus program and maybe share some of the numbers behind that. I know a lot of people. We’ll always ask when they first hear about the bonus program is, well, how many followers did it take for your page to get in?
Was there a crazy engagement? Like what, what’s it, what let’s maybe zero in on those two that are succeeding on the bonus program and kind of what were the numbers and the metrics behind them? How broad or how narrow were the topics when it was accepted into the bonus program?
John: Yeah. So interestingly enough, um, the one page that got accepted had a pretty low follower account in my opinion.
So it was around like. 10, 000 followers. Right. And I got invited and it also wasn’t really getting that much reach when I got invited, which was kind of surprising to me because some of the other pages were getting much better reach, but that one for some reason was invited to the bonus program. Um, so I kind of think it’s very hard to understand what criteria they use to kind of determine which sites go into the program and which don’t the other page.
I grew kind of to about 60, 000 likes. Um, so I was kind of not as surprised that that one got into the bonus program and it was getting some traction, you know, getting some impressions. The one thing about that one is, um, it’s the only page I’ve ever taken and completely pivoted the topic. So it wasn’t working in the initial niche that it was in.
I got it into the bonus program somehow with that niche, but the impressions in the, the reach wasn’t really working. So I pivoted to a completely different niche and then it kind of started taking off a little bit more, which
Jared: I don’t
John: know if many people have actually tried that.
Jared: No, I was going to say, how did you pull that off?
John: Um, yeah, it’s kind of, I wasn’t really sure if it was gonna work or not. Right. Um, you’re allowed to change your page name, I think every three months or something like that. So I basically went in, changed my page name, changed the branding. Um, I went and removed all, a lot of the older posts and then just started posting the new content.
And I started building more followers that were interested in that type of content. The ads program.
Jared: So basically the idea there is instead of starting over, you’re hoping to port some of the, the, the Facebook pages, um, you know, follower traction, history, that sort of thing. Is that the reason you don’t just start over topically?
John: Uh, I guess the main reason I didn’t start, or I didn’t start, Um, completely over with a new page is the fact that it was invited to the bonus program. So I think that’s kind of like a key. Yeah. If you have a page in the bonus program, there’s gotta be some way to make it work. I feel like,
Jared: um, no, that makes sense.
So let’s talk about, um, God, that’s fascinating that the numbers were so different. There’s nothing you can do to get invited, right? You just. It just shows up one day in your account. Is there anything? Yeah, it
John: just kind of shows up and I think I didn’t even get emails. I probably was invited for a while and I didn’t even know it until I went into the monetization section and said, Oh, you’re like eligible for the bonus program.
Jared: So
John: yeah,
Jared: you’re not the first person who said that. Check your monetization section. Um, cause you never know. You’re right. Especially with emails. A lot of those emails go to the wrong folder and stuff. So, um, yeah. Okay. So where, uh, let’s get a high level overview. Where is that at right now in terms of, you know, whatever you’re comfortable sharing, because you have two pages in the bonus program, tell us, you know, kind of some high level kind of, uh, numbers around that.
John: Yeah. I mean, the, the two pages in the bonus program, they’re not quite doing as well as some of the other pages I’m working on. They do get reach in like the hundreds of thousands. Uh, but like I have another page that I’m trying to get into the bonus program. It’s getting like 4 million reach on posts, but it hasn’t been invited yet.
So it’s another kind of. How do they, how do they determine what gets invited? So
Jared: you’ve got five or six pages you’re working on for the Facebook for Facebook. We’ll just keep it that, uh, two of them are the bonus program, both wildly different numbers in terms of what got invited. And yet these aren’t even your two, I’ll say most popular Facebook pages, right?
You have ones that are getting 4 million reach. Haven’t been invited to the bonus program. Is it driving other benefit traffic? Uh, other things that you’re benefiting from?
John: So for right now, I’ve just basically been focused on driving reach and follows to try to get into the bonus program. I am doing occasional link posts out to a website, but it’s not really being monetized yet.
And I’m trying to focus more on keeping people on platform to just try to get in that bonus program.
Jared: What are some tips that you’ve seen by working on five or six pages that consistently lead to good results that consistently get engagement and grow reach? Um, you’ve done this across five or six, you’ve got, again, a wide array of, Of success in terms of your reach.
Like, what are some of the things you can draw conclusions on that have worked consistently?
John: So I think, like I said, the Facebook audience is a little bit different than like Pinterest or Google. I would say for Facebook, you’re looking for more kind of shocking, interesting kind of click baity type content.
Um, almost like, uh, images. It’ll stop the scroll, right? When you’re going through your feed and you’re like, Oh, what is that? And you have to stop and look at it. I think that kind of content really does well on Facebook versus kind of the more inspirational kind of like basic photos that you can get, uh, traffic with on Pinterest.
Uh, so that’s probably the, the one thing I would say you, you want to focus on for reach. Like I’ve seen crazy pages, right? Like, um, I’m sure you’ve seen like blow up cat furniture, right? And it gets like a hundred thousand likes. Um, it’s Facebook, the more kind of ridiculous and almost the more. The image looks like it was generated by AI.
It tends to do better with that audience for some reason. I don’t really know why, but that’s the way it seems to work for me.
Jared: How often are you posting to these Facebook pages and what kind of content or what’s the structure like for what you’re posting?
John: Yeah, so I’m doing a lot of automation with that and I kind of, I’m basically posting like from 7 a.
m. to 11 p. m. every two hours with, with the pages, um, the content varies in format. It could be just an image to drive engagement. It could be an image with a link into the description or a link in the comments. Right? So I’m just really right now testing out what, what is going to drive the most engagement.
And then also will it drive, uh, offsite kind of. Basically just people to view the page and that can get some monetization through display ads. I’ve also done, um, I’ve done a little bit of video. I haven’t really put too much focus on the video, but they do tend to get quite a, quite a bit of engagement, like on the reels and things like that.
I
Jared: think you mentioned at the outset of Facebook that you were, um, uh, using ad revenue or using ads to drive, um, growth in terms of the followers for these channels. Did I get that right? And if so, like,
John: that’s
Jared: right. What’s working there. You know, um, there’s a variety of strategies from just pressing a button and letting Facebook figure it all out to kind of getting more in the weeds on it.
What are you doing?
John: Yeah. So the one thing about Facebook is you do need a following to kind of get Get traction. The easiest way to do that is buying page like ads. And the way that I do page like ads, the way I approach it, there’s really, um, something I’ve kind of narrowed down to driving low cost page likes is the creative, uh, basically the ad image.
Um, and my biggest tip there, find something that is interesting to your audience. Something that might be a scroll stopper, right? Like we talked about before. And then basically my format text at the top, if you love this niche at the bottom, like our page. And then in the bottom right corner, the very important part, have something pointing to the bottom right corner.
Uh, I’ll use a hand, I’ll use an arrow, something like that, because. When these ads appear on Facebook, there’s a post like button and a page like button. And what you want to do is drive the users to the page like button because then they’ll get all of your content. Well, not all of it, but they’ll get more of your content, um, in their feed.
And what I found is on the desktop, the button appears in the bottom, right? On mobile, it kind of just appears below the post. It’s like a big wide button, but if you put that arrow in that bottom right corner, it points to both of them and it tends to drive page likes and it’s driven by. My cost per like down from like 15, 20 cents to two or three cents.
And this is on like us traffic.
Jared: And so for these pages that you did get, except for the bonus program, it sounds like a lot of that growth just came from, um, uh, throwing ad dollars at getting page likes.
John: Yeah. I start with the page like ads until I get to a point where I think I’m ready to kind of turn it off and let the reach and the organic growth kind of carry the page.
Um, and then if it doesn’t pick up, like, um, I’ll, I’ll start running some ads again. I also would. Recommend if you’re going to run some ads, do it with a really low budget. Um, I wouldn’t, I don’t go like above 10 a day and I do it with a lot of different images, so I’ll test 10 to 20 images. I’ll figure out which ones drive the lowest cost per leg and I’ll disable the other ones.
Um, I’ve even gone as low as like 2 per day, because if you start getting your budget too high, it increases your bidding for cost per leg.
Jared: Yeah, I’ve heard that before. A lot of people will have a great campaign getting, you know, whatever X, um, X cents per lead. And then they’ll double it cause it’s working.
And all of a sudden their, um, their cost per lead skyrockets.
John: Yeah. Yeah.
Jared: Um, anything else on Facebook? Uh, I mean, I’m, I’m baffled by the fact that you have a page with 4 million, uh, with an engagement of 4 million, uh, and you have not got invited to the bonus program, but besides that, besides that one crazy fact, anything else on Facebook before, before we move
John: on that topic, uh, I think it’s Adam Mazari, um, the head of Instagram.
Um, he had made a comment one time that, um, we don’t want to pay for the kind of content people are going to share for free. Um, that I picked up in some interviews. So I’m wondering, does the niche really matter a lot for if you’re going to get invited to the bonus program or not? Right? Like if everybody is doing home decor.
Does Facebook need to pay people to do more home decor, right? Or do you need to find something kind of out of the ordinary to get invited to the bonus program? So that’s kind of one thought I have. I haven’t tested the theory yet, but something I picked up in an interview and I I’ve been thinking about.
Jared: You have teased multiple times already about, you know, the level of automation that you go through, your, um, your interest in, in AI and how that’s impacting things. I know on our agenda, we had. A whole section dedicated to automating workflows. I mean, I I’d love to get some tips from you on that. I know I could do a better job there.
It sounds like you’re able to do a lot with your time. You’ve got Pinterest accounts, Facebook accounts. I’m sure there’s a lot more you’re doing, but where does automating your workflows come into play? And maybe let’s roll up our sleeves on that and share some tips we can all learn from.
John: Yeah. So, um, I kind of, I’m kind of like an idea person, right?
As I work through these things, I think, you know, I’m doing this over and over again. How can I automate that away? And what many people do is they’ll hire a VA, right. And they’ll have a team of VAs doing the work, uh, for me, because I had a little bit of, um, software experience, I tend to try to automate the process, uh, versus hiring somebody to do it.
So for example, With the Facebook pages, all of the posts are scheduled automatically every two hours throughout the day. The way I do that is I give it my sitemap or I’ll give it a group of URLs and then I’ll have this tool go out, scrape the images from the page. Um, send the images to open a I and have open a I write a description that is related to that image and then I’ll plop the link in somewhere.
Right? So, um, it’ll do that for 30 days worth of content to our every two hours per day. Um, and it will do all the different post types I mentioned earlier with the images and the links and the comment and things like that. Some of them are just images to drive engagement. Um, all of that is basically a one click process for me now.
Um, so that’s kind of my approach to automation. Um, It I’m testing it, whether or not it really will work versus having a human decide what to post. But so far it’s been working pretty well.
Jared: That’s really intriguing. And so I guess it would, it’s, it’s vital that your posts on your website are pretty image rich and pretty image heavy.
Um, Uh, is, is that influence how you create content for your website, knowing that your tool, your script will end up using it in a certain way to then go to Facebook with it?
John: Yeah, it does. I also mentioned, I have another script that will just generate a bunch of images and post them that isn’t unrelated to my website content, but the website content itself, it’s kind of shifted to listicle type articles I’ve mentioned where you’re going to have multiple images and you’re going to be able to take different sections and post them, um, you know, the images separately and drive.
Links back to that same article, or at least just discuss that to drive engagement on Facebook, right? Drive comments and things like that.
Jared: So in essence, once you create the content, you’ve kind of created a script that, uh, makes the workflow to Facebook almost instantaneous for you without with very low effort.
John: Yeah, I just basically sit down like once a month. Um, Take any of my new pages, plop them into the tool and, um, some of the old pages mix them in and then I let it schedule out content for, for the next 30 days. Like right now I’ve hit one of my pages with a lot of Christmas heavy content, given the time of year.
Right. Um, the other pages more evergreen. So I kind of mixed it up. What the type of content that I post, but it’s pretty much fully automated. I don’t really do any manual posts anymore on Facebook. Um, basically because I just, I’m trying to. Save my time. Um, I do focus a little bit more on the Pinterest stuff, but I’m also building software and things like that.
So I kind of have to automate these things out of necessity.
Jared: What other automation, what are the, that’s a pretty good one right there. What other automation, uh, or workflow, um, uh, tips or kind of advancements that you have to share?
John: Yeah. So the one thing I was doing was. You know, I’ve shared like on the social side, how I was generating content.
Um, the one thing I’m doing is also generating the content on the website. So it started out basically just being like a image, heavy, um, listicle script that I ran locally. Um, since then, um, it started working for me on Pinterest, right. With all the visual heavy, um, posts. And then I said, you know what, I’m going to make this into a product and I’m going to allow other people to use it.
So that’s when I created content goblin, which basically right now is, Produces those listicles with, um, heavy image articles and also recipes and things like that. So it’s going to keep evolving, but I basically, uh, work through the problems, find the pain points for me, and then try to solve them for other people
Jared: is launching tools, um, that you use is, is making them available to other people.
Is that like a business model for you going forward? Cause it seems like it’s something that you’re able to do over and over and over again internally.
John: Yeah, I think that’s probably, um, the business model I’m going to try to focus on. But the key thing for me, I think, is still doing the content because that’s how I find out what my users would like and where they’re stuck and kind of what would actually help the users versus being on the outside and trying to figure out what do people that post to Pinterest really want to do, right?
If I’m doing it, I can find and solve the problems.
Jared: How else are you using AI in all the different tasks that you’re that you’re going through per day?
John: Yeah. Um, mostly generation, content generation, um, you know, text, a lot of image generation. I’ve highly focused on image generation, given that I’m doing a lot of Pinterest and Facebook.
Um, I, I had some other ideas that I started working on. I guess we could just mention real quick. I found, um, YouTube channels. Where they’re kind of just doing these product reviews with images and there’s, they’re basically faceless, right? Faceless YouTube channels. I’m sure you’ve talked about it. Um, and I started working with some of these AI video tools.
Where you can kind of plug in the images, even if you just take like images from Amazon, plug them into a template and have, um, text to speech, talk over the video and you basically create the same type of videos that these faceless YouTube channels are doing. Um, so that’s like another kind of like awesome thing.
Way I might use AI and automation to kind of try to generate some revenue.
Jared: Do you have any other projects that you’ve started that are maybe starting to get traction? They’re not, you know, anything really noteworthy yet. They’re not maybe paying any bills yet, but they’re starting to get traction that you’re, you’re trying, you seem like a guy who’s trying almost everything.
So , it’s kind of why I ask.
John: Yeah, I do. Uh, I basically try everything, but most of the things lately I’ve been focusing are software type tools. So. I have one called journey by Mediavine Explorer. Right. So I know a lot of your listeners are probably trying to monetize sites with ad networks like journey.
Uh, basically just go through, see what sites are added every day and put them in a list. And then you can go look at those. And kind of use it for like competitive intelligence, I guess. Right. You can see what types of sites are getting invited to the program because there is a requirement, um, to get invited and you can see other sites.
Maybe they’re in your niche or try to find a new niche. So that’s one tool I have on my website for free. Um, I basically just use the tools right now for a lead magnet to drive my email list. So I let people use some of these tools for free. All I ask for is their email and they can, they can use that.
Um, another one I have is I call it post magic.
Jared: I’m looking at that one right now. It’s funny. Yeah.
John: So basically that’s the Facebook tool I made. And if you’re familiar with Facebook, you know that they have those text on background posts, right? Where it’s like a purple background with the text. I found that if you use those and you ask a question, it really drives good engagement because people tend to comment.
And then I found out that there’s this little kind of hack that you can do. You can only do it through the API, where you can post one of those text on background posts, and you can attach multiple images to it. So basically what you get is that text on background post, and then you have a collage of images.
And it takes up a ton of like vertical screen real estate. When you’re scrolling really makes it hard for the user to like pass up. Um, so that’s another kind of free tool I have on my website that you can use.
Jared: Interesting. I, um, I’ll be honest. I did not know about that. That’s fascinating. I didn’t know you could, cause you can do it natively inside of Facebook.
Right. But I didn’t know you could attach images on top of it. Yeah,
John: you can do, so you can do. The text on background
Jared: that you can do that, or you
John: can do multiple images natively in the UI. You can’t combine them in the
Jared: right. Exactly. I did not know that that was even possible, but in the API you can.
John: Yeah.
Yeah. Boy, how do you discover these things? Okay. Yeah. I just get random ideas. I don’t know.
Jared: It feels like a happy accident one day where you’re kind of messing around with the API. And all of a sudden you discover this, that you can do this. Um, I mean, you kind of almost are like a modern Renaissance man.
And I said at the outset, I think a lot of listeners are going to really hear a lot of themselves in what you’re doing and you were open about it in the buildup. As we were preparing for this, you were, you mentioned at the beginning, what are some areas that have gone terribly wrong that you’ve tried?
What are some failures you don’t mind sharing with people? Uh, you don’t want to spend a lot of time on it, but it’s always a bit comforting to hear other people. Kind of share about some things they tried. They thought we’re going to work really well. And for whatever reason, didn’t go the way they thought they were going to go.
John: You know, I’m, I’m pretty big on sharing my failures. I tend to share it with my email list because I think it’s a lot easier to learn from somebody else’s failure than it is for you to experience yourself. Um, so I guess one of those, uh, failures that I thought was going to be kind of like a big hit was, uh, it was basically a, it was another like keto diet website.
I’m sure you’ve seen them where it’s like, is Red Bull keto, right? It’s like a programmatic SEO play. And what I did was I found a database of like 300, 000 items. Um, and I built this application. It was a Ruby on rails application that kind of ingested all those items. Um, displayed it in a nice format where it had like different widgets, right?
Like, um, a meter that would say whether something was keto or not based on how many net carbs that have, if you’re familiar with the diet, I also ran a lot of the pages through GPT 3. 5 at the time because it was relatively cheap. So I could generate some content. I managed to get almost 300, 000 of those pages indexed by Google, um, using another kind of.
Uh, script that I wrote to use the indexing API. Um, so, you know, I got them indexed. I got all that stuff, but I never really got the traffic that I thought I would start getting. Um, I’m not sure. I think I kind of went overboard with the number of pages, to be honest. I think if I were to do it again, I would narrow down to maybe like a couple of hundred of like the main keywords.
Right. Because I had like. Is I don’t know, tropical flavored Red Bull, uh, you know, keto or like is tropical flavored Red Bull, 16. 9 ounces like keto. Right. I didn’t really like prune the content. Um, but I do know there’s sites out there still that are doing okay. Um, I also think though, those types of sites are most likely to get replaced by.
Things like AI overviews. So I don’t know if I would focus on those now, but it was kind of an idea I had back in the past. It kind of failed.
Jared: It’s interesting. Um, because you kind of check all the boxes of the program, the programmatic play, the long tail keywords, all that. And yet, yeah, you’re right. So much of that has gotten targeted of late.
Um, yeah, I mean, What, what, what is your day to day look like, especially going back to all the things you’re trying to focus more and more on software, the focus more and more on automation and tools, like what does a day look like for you and how do you structure that?
John: Yeah, um, I usually wake up in the morning pretty early.
I get up at like 5 a. m. Uh, and I tend to, if I have any support issues with my application, I tend to look at those first, um, try to get those out of the way. And then I usually work on thinking about or building new features for the applications that I have. Um, so, For example, like in content goblin, I’m working on right now.
I have a basic recipe generator, but I’m working on filling that out to, um, more of a full fledged article. Um, so, like, I would work on something like that in the morning. Um, usually, um, I do have a day job still. So I get on my day job and I work that from majority of the day. And then kind of like, after 5, 6 p.
m. I tend to work on my. Social like sites more where I’m like, you know, generating some content or posting it to Pinterest or spinning up those Facebook scripts to, to schedule things like that. So, uh, I keep my days pretty, pretty busy to be honest. Um, I kind of probably work a little bit too much with this stuff, but.
I just find it so interesting that it just doesn’t feel like work
Jared: all that and a day job. Um, what we touched on a bit, but going forward, um, what new projects do you want to try or are on your radar to try?
John: Well, I’m definitely going to expand the, the, the. The software I have right now, it’s going to have many more features, but I have so many other ideas that I just, I don’t really have the time to do right now.
So I’m going to focus on that software for a while, but I have some other ideas. I have a, um, an idea to kind of expand that, that journey Explorer I built to other ad networks and include some more data points and basically just make it like a competitive intelligence tool. Um, so that’s like one idea I have.
And then, um, I have some scripts that do, uh, search engine indexing and they work pretty well. So I had another idea to kind of offer that for a relatively cheap. I know a lot of the index tools that were out were kind of using Google’s index API and they’ve kind of, they’ve made some changes to where you can’t really submit quite as many pages through that API.
So I think, um, another, another idea is doing it through the tool I built because it doesn’t use that API. So. And those are kind of like some things that I’m kicking around. I’ll probably come up with a couple more free tools just to help drive my email list. But yeah, those are, those are it right now.
Jared: Well, John, I really appreciate you coming on and you know, sharing what’s working for you, sharing what isn’t working for you, sharing what you got success with, sharing where you’re getting success now. And again, all this with a full time job, all this. With all the changes that have happened in the, you know, kind of online and affiliate marketing world in the last couple of years, um, uh, you, like, like we talked about, you have a bunch of free tools that I would really encourage people to go play around with, but we’re like, where’s the best place for people to follow along with what you’re doing, where you’re going, all these free tools, that sort of thing.
John: Yeah. I’m, I’m probably most active on X, right? I have a hard time calling it X, but I’m most active on X. My name is John Ward here. Well, J O H N, um, and you can find basically my website from there. You can find the tools I’m working on from there. And, you know, you can join my mailing list. You can check out content, goblin.
ai for the software I’m working on. And, um, yeah, you can also find me at Jonathan ward. com.
Jared: Perfect, John. Thanks for coming on board. Uh, good, good luck in all your future projects. And, uh, I’m sure we’ll, we’ll, uh, we’ll be hearing about all the new things you’re working on as the time goes on, but I appreciate you coming on and sharing with us.
John: Yep. Thank you for having me.
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