Publish and they will come (from Bing)

I have a few little sites (traditional niche site style) I haven’t paid attention to for more than a year.

A couple of them consistently get 40-70 visitors a day. All from Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo. Almost no traffic from Google.

I saw this tweet recently which inspired me to put a little more effort into these “Bing niche sites”:

What’s held me back is the time it takes to create content. Even 100% AI content takes time and I always felt my time was better spent elsewhere. So those sites have been on the back burner.

Until last week, when I finally sat down to figure out how to automate the content part while maintaining the level of quality and control I want (I always review AI content manually and often edit it before publishing).

In my head, I had three choices:

1. Set up an n8n workflow to automate content creation

2. Use an AI writing tool that fits my very specific content format

3. Create my own AI writing tool perfectly customized to my needs

Of course, I chose the third option. I didn’t feel like setting up an n8n workflow and either paying for n8n or self hosting with docker. I’ve dabbled in it already and yeah, it’s powerful, but I also find it confusing and too hands-on.

As for using an existing AI tool, none that I’m aware of are fully customizable, plus, they’re super expensive compared to building my own.

So, last week, I started building a tool where I can create fully customizable AI agents that write articles and automatically publish or schedule them to WordPress.

And as of today, the site I’ve been testing this on has already hit a traffic record and the day isn’t even close to over yet:

It might be hard to see, but yesterday was a record day too.

Based on this trajectory and the amount of articles I have lined up and ready to publish, I think there’s a good chance this site will go from less than 2,000 monthly visitors to 20,000+/mo in a month or two.

Feels like the good ‘ol niche site days of 2018 where you just target easy keywords and traffic starts pouring in. But even easier since it can be automated with AI.

Boy do I love Bing/DDG/Yahoo 🙂 

By the way, this site has been around for a little over 2 years and already has good rankings in Bing (but not many articles, hence the low traffic). I don’t think a brand new site would do this well!

The craziest thing to me is how quickly the articles are ranking. Multiple articles were published today, and many of them went straight to the first page of Bing. One of them is the featured snippet for a 8,100 monthly search volume keyword (in Google, so the volume in Bing is lower - but still, these aren’t obscure keywords)!

This is the most fun I’ve had building niche sites since pre-HCU.

If you’re curious about the tool I built to automate content (and how I built it), keep reading. There’s no sales pitch as the tool isn’t even public.

My nifty little vibe-coded AI content tool

It’s super simple, yet 100% customizable so it’s incredibly powerful.

It’s got a real looker of a homepage:

I used Claude Code in Cursor to build this. Core functionality was done in an hour. Since then I’ve made a few updates to fix various bugs I ran into, which has probably taken a total of 4-5 hours.

The tool is quite simple.

I connect a WordPress site (I can add however many I want).

Clicking a site takes me to the Agents page, where I can create a new agent or view/edit an existing agent.

I can fully customize an agent to write whatever type of article in whatever format I want. Then I can add keywords to the agent, with per-keyword instructions (added to the agent prompt).

I even integrated Perplexity search so if I toggle that on, it’ll search the web for my keyword and use the context it finds when writing the article. I can even tell it how to use the context.

I can also schedule the articles to be published at whatever interval I want. For the site I showed the traffic graph of, I set the interval to one article per hour lol.

Clicking an agent takes me to the Jobs page where I can click “Run now” and it’ll begin writing and scheduling the articles. I’ve been running a large batch all day, and it’s almost done (23 left out of 414):

That’s basically it!

And in case you’re wondering, it cost me 78 cents to generate all those articles (primarily using the gpt-4o-mini model). A typical AI blog writer tool would charge anywhere from $39 to $199 for the same amount of content lol.

I’ll keep you posted on how this project goes. You’ll definitely hear if I hit 20,000+ visitors/mo like I believe is possible, or if it completely fails, I’ll share that as well (and hopefully have insights on why).

If you have any questions, reply and I’ll do my best to answer!

Thanks for reading,

Ian

P.S. I plan on writing more frequent newsletters like this where I talk about something I’m working on. I have a few other interesting projects in the works, so stay tuned!

P.P.S. Should I make the AI content agent tool I built public? I wasn’t planning to, but I realized I’m probably not the only person who needs fully customizable AI writing agents.

P.P.S. Want to find easy keywords you can rank for? Or hard keywords you probably can’t rank for? The world’s most powerful keyword research tool, ClearSERP, starts at just $19. Go check it out!