🔮 Perception vs Reality

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Hey there!

You’re getting this a day later than normal because yesterday I was out at what I thought was going to be a nice lunch at a fancy wine bar.

Rolled up and the outside of the building was dumpy, got ignored upon arrival, they would only let people sit on the open patio (it was 108F in Vegas yesterday…and I wore nice slacks cause fancy restaurant=no shorts), and the restaurant was filthy (so many cobwebs everywhere).

Food was not great either. Yet, this place has a reputation (and reviews to back it up) as a chic French bistro that cannot be missed.

The reality? It’s located in one of the more expensive areas of Vegas where they have these man-made lakes for the residents. So, the perception is that it’s a fancy place to dine.

Perception doesn’t always equal reality, right? Let’s look at that through the niche site lens.

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It Looks Like An Ecommerce Site….

Reality is that it is not.

I’m not the first person to say that appearing to be an ecommerce site sends positive signals to Google that helps you out with that stupid HCU classifier.

I’ve even told you about using the Shopify Starter plan for $5/month to embed real POD products on the homepage to send ecomm signals.

Well, much like how I felt after paying $60 to eat crappy food in a dingy restaurant yesterday, you’re going to be pissed off about what I’m about to reveal.

In March, after I had 19 sites get deindexed, I took one of them and just straight up copied the content to several different domains for testing purposes.

Google had loved that content for years, so I knew it would rank but I wanted to see what would happen with aged vs fresh domains as well as sending different signals: service-based business, ecommerce, digital products, and consulting.

To send these different signals, I used the Kadence Pro theme and it’s AI starter site builder. Let me tell you, I fucking love this AI starter site builder.

You tell it about your business and it creates some amazing shit, or bullshit in my case.

Anyways, I did the bare minimum here and got the theme up with the content and never went back to the site.

It’s got lorem ipsum text on the footer and homepage…and contact page, and shipping policies page and return policy page.

It’s got a dummy address like 1234 Main Street, Anytown USA. I shit you not that is on the footer and contact page.

Homepage and about page have a collection of fake logos in a “featured on” section. There’s some fake awards listed on the homepage. Tons of buttons that go nowhere. An empty “Store” page with dummy lorem ipsum products.

This is a fresh domain with zero backlinks and just under 200 posts all published at once after importing them.

A few days ago I noticed this in Ahrefs…

So, I looked in Analytics and it’s an even bigger growth.

And yes, this is infuriating. So infuriating.

But I’m curious to see if it continues to grow during the spam update that’s rolling out. So, I’m not changing a thing on the site.

FINAL DAYS!!

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Our summer sale runs through my birthday - the 22nd.

If you end up spending at least $5,000, I’ll give you an additional 10% discount with code SUMMERBONUS

Week 9 of Local Newsletter Life Coming To A Close

Closing in on the end of week #9 of doing a local newsletter on Beehiiv.

We’re currently just a few subscribers over 2,000, which means we’ve crushed another goal.

In terms of monetization, still nothing to report but have a chat with a potential advertiser early next week.

We’ve also been asked to expand to another area by a reader, so I consider that a good sign.

This week we decided to build out the blog of our site, like 6AM City does with theirs, and start selling sponsored posts on the site. Hopefully that will end up being a good revenue stream in the future.

Reminder: I'm writing updates about my local newsletter on Twitter here and doing a more detailed case study in my private forum.

Next Time…

We’ll finally get around to how things are going with my Facebook and Pinterest alternative traffic streams project.

We’ll talk about how the earnings are going with the Beehiiv Ads that I’ll be giving away. Spoiler alert: it’s over $100 now!

And, this is your reminder that tomorrow is the last day for the Growth Cupid sale.

Stay awesome,

Shawna

P.S. A reader got a KILLER $1/mo offer after completing the Post Planner free trial. Give it a try if you're building up a Facebook page. The longer I use it, the more I love it.

🚨 🚨 P.P.S. Don’t sleep on this Growth Cupid sale - it ends on Saturday! 🚨 🚨

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