🤓 Thoughts

Before we get into it, the podcast I did with Doug Cunnington is live on his channel now. Listen/watch it here.

Lots going on that I have thoughts on. But due to lots going on in my personal life, I’ve not had time to write.

More on that in moment…

…

It’s Day ??? of me making a real effort to scale Growth Cupid. Still focusing on social. (If you want more details, I’m going a bit more in depth in my Skool community.)

(Quick reminder - you can see my recent emails in the archive here)

All the things

One thing I’ve been watching with interest is what seems to be HCU for YouTube. Have you see any of this?

It’s been going on for about a month now. Mass terminations of accounts and when people file for a review they get an automated email within minutes that the decision stands.

Seems to me this is the exact playbook from niche site HCU.

Too much AI being used for faceless channels (like niche site), so Google doesn’t know how to control that (like with AI content on niche sites), so they use AI to terminate a fuckload of channels.

Oh, the irony of using AI to go after AI. Loling about that never gets old.

If you’re curious about what’s going on, there’s a lot of talk about it on Twitter/X these days. And yes, it’s still happening to creators on YouTube.

There’s also a guy who got terminated like a year ago, sued YouTube in EU courts and he won! Seems like all he wanted was his channel reinstated.

YouTube is ignoring the ruling.

Speaking of YouTube…

I’ve been using the best tool for scripts for my Faceless channels.

It’s Subscribr and I highly recommend it.

And here’s my secret for getting lots of scripts without paying for one of the higher plans or extra credits -

Get the cheapest plan that offers:
-long-form scripts
-Detailed script outlines
-Competitor analysis (channel intel)

I can’t remember how the pricing works exactly cause there’s a 7-day free trial.

Anyways, I only get a limited number of long-form scripts each month - but there’s ZERO limit on the script outlines and those suckers are AMAZING.

So, I’m taking those outlines and using Claude or Gemini to write scripts from the outlines and they are just as good as the ones in Subscribr.

Honestly, between the script outlines and the channel intel, this tool is so freaking good.

You can literally find a channel you like and get it to give you a list of video ideas similar to that channel. I just wish I’d found this tool sooner.

For me, getting the images/video is the only remaining bottleneck in my process. Yeah, I could outsource it but I’m enjoying doing it myself for now.

Switching gears to my Pinterest test site…

I decided to focus on seasonal stuff, which means the first round of content I created + pinned was focused on Thanksgiving.

Was getting over 100 PVs daily and now that’s died down to like 15 PVs daily.

Yes, the drop sucks but I was curious what kind of numbers you could get by chasing seasonal trends. I didn’t even get up that much content. Pretty good test, eh?

While I am mixing in some evergreen content, my playbook now is to focus mostly on seasonal stuff to see if I can regularly get spikes.

No revenue though as I’ve only got AdSense on the site and apparently this audience doesn’t like to click on ads. Once traffic stabilizes (and grows a bit), I’ll try to get the site on Journey or Ezoic for impression-based ads.

Actually the no revenue thing isn’t 100% correct. I took the most clicked from Pinterest post and moved it to one of my sites that’s monetized by Raptive to see if that would kill clicks. It didn’t and I made a few bucks.

Speaking of Ezoic…

They be clowning lately. Changed the domain for an Ezoic-approved site, and now they are saying the content doesn’t meet their standards. Sure.

And for a different site, they stopped the ads for invalid traffic…but didn’t notify me.

The only good news here is that ad income is really such a teensy part of the monies I earn so it’s not a big loss. Mostly it’s just annoying.

Now an update on agency stuff…

A recent talk with a successful agency owner got me to thinking about spinning off hyper niched-down agencies. So, I thought, what the hell, why not?

And I took Growth Cupid’s current most popular service spun up a new agency site.

It’s a Reddit agency. The nice thing is it allows me to offer other Reddit core services that we’ve done but don’t officially offer at GC since not many local businesses need them.

Will be interesting to look back in a few months and see if more revenue comes from the niched-down agency or the original one.

Other things …

Been getting up evergreen books on Amazon. I thought I started early enough, but with having to prepare for my move out of Vegas, I did not.

So, likely won’t see the results I want but it’s a good start. Still using Bookbeam for this in terms of niche finding and I think that’s the only reason I’ve seen some early sales.

Also thinking about opening up an Etsy store to go with a POD store/website that I created.

You been doing anything interesting?

Coming up…

More on what I’m working on and how it’s going.

Stay awesome,

Shawna

P.S. If you or someone you know needs local SEO help, I do pay for referrals to Growth Cupid. So reach out to me!

Some links may be affiliate links. I 💖 you if you use one!