Newsletter: A $3,800 directory with zero keyword research (plus Google's new ranking button)


n8n for pennies, Facebook ads on autopilot, and the Google update that just halved a 14-million-click site.

If having trouble with any links, you can read the online version here

Hey Guys,

Look, let me cut to the chase. Two of today's videos point at the same Google search results page, and both say the money is on page 2.

One guy uses page 2 to find contractors who'll pay $200 a lead. Another just watched a site with 150,000 indexed pages drop off page 1 entirely. Same page. Very different outcomes.

10 videos below. All of them practical, most of them doable today.


Before we get into today's signals, a quick one.

Hannan built an unlimited rank tracker. Unlimited sites, unlimited keywords, no credits, no API keys, and a lifetime plan at $147 one-time. I recorded a 15-minute demo with him so you can see it before you decide.

Watch the demo: CLICK HERE
Get lifetime access: CLICK HERE


TL;DR

  • Jay AI Automation deploys n8n on a cheap VPS by letting Claude Code type the Linux commands. Saves the $20/month cloud fee.
  • Grant built a Christian homeschool directory in Lovable, posted in Facebook groups, and hit $600 MRR in 2 months. No keyword tools.
  • WordsAtScale finds rank-and-rent buyers on page 2 of Google, then checks the Ads Transparency Center to see who's already spending.
  • Cody Schneider runs Facebook ads through an agent: test 5 ads per ad set, trim losers, promote winners, remix. Cost per lead went from $100 to $53.
  • Edward Sturm: Google's Preferred Sources became a global signal on 1 May. Add the button to your site today.
  • William Fitzpatrick's 4 writing frameworks explain why some paragraphs feel like flow and others feel like fog.
  • Nick Saraev on making $10k in 48 hours: sell to current buyers, then past buyers, then cold with a hard guarantee.
  • Awa K. Penn edits a full video inside ChatGPT with the ChatCut plugin. 6 steps, no timeline.
  • Google's August spam update crushed scaled content and rewarded short bottom-of-funnel SaaS pages.
  • Dr Kriukow's "write like a human" prompt got ChatGPT to 0% on Copyleaks. Claude scored 100%.

➡️ Your Complete Implementation Guide

Not got time to watch the videos? Grab the resources (Summary, Insights & Checklist) for each video from this Google doc

👉 ​Access Your Complete Implementation Guide Here


1. Run n8n for the price of a cheap VPS, with Claude Code doing the typing

n8n Cloud costs about $20/month. Jay AI Automation's workaround: rent a VPS, install Claude Code on it, and paste one master prompt. Claude handles Docker, Nginx and the HTTPS certificate while you watch.

What you'll discover:

  • The exact sequence: SSH into the server, update packages, install Claude Code, switch to auto mode, paste the prompt (no domain? sslip.io gives you a free one)
  • How to enable n8n's instance-level MCP and hand Claude the access token, so it builds workflows directly inside your instance
  • The "daily content idea generator" he builds live: 7am trigger, Google News RSS, Claude writes the scripts, Discord gets the output, then it's published on creators.n8n.io

🎥 Watch here


2. A $3,800 directory built from a Facebook group, not a keyword tool

Grant homeschools 4 kids in Arizona and couldn't find a decent list of Christian ESA-eligible programs. So he built one in Lovable, posted it in local Facebook groups, and got 70 sign-ups on day 1. Two months later: $600 MRR and $3,800 total, on a search term no tool would flag as promising.

What you'll discover:

  • The pricing ladder: free listings for everyone, featured listings at $179/year or $20/month (he started at $99 and a rival directory owner told him to raise it), plus category sponsorships around $100/month
  • Why his traffic is 80% social and 20% organic, and how he's earning links with PR Log press releases and "featured on" badges from vendors
  • The upsell call that works: "10 people visited your site from our directory this week. Want a featured listing?" (one tutor got 4 students, roughly $3,000/month, from a single listing)

🎥 Watch here


3. Find rank-and-rent buyers on page 2 in under 7 minutes

WordsAtScale just sold another Ohio lead for $200. His prospecting filter is 2 questions: are they on page 2 or beyond for the seed term, and are they already paying for ads? Yes to both means they've proven they'll spend.

What you'll discover:

  • Why he never pitches page 1 (A1 Concrete, huge company, no point) and goes straight to page 2 looking for local operators like TK Concrete Lifting
  • The free check: paste the business name into adstransparency.google.com, set it to United States, confirm the domain matches
  • The handoff: route calls through a virtual number with a short audio tag ("this lead was generated by Concrete Leveling Colorado Springs") so they hear where the business comes from, then pitch once the leads stack up

🎥 Watch here


4. The Facebook ads agent that cut cost per lead from $100 to $53

Cody Schneider has run Facebook ads through Claude Code for 4 months. The core idea: since the Andromeda update, the ad creative is the targeting. So you make more ads, let Facebook find the winners, trim the rest, and remix what worked. This is a 90-minute class, so it's dense.

What you'll discover:

  • The campaign structure: a testing campaign with 5 ads per ad set fighting for budget, a separate winners campaign, and a remix loop that feeds winners back into testing
  • Why you use the Marketing API for uploading and managing only, never for analysis (bulk API calls can get your account banned), and pipe data into a warehouse instead (Airbyte plus ClickHouse if you build it yourself)
  • Budget guidance from his accounts: $30/day for a local business, $100/day if you're going national, and expect 2 weeks to see signal

🎥 Watch here


5. Google handed you a ranking button. Add it this week.

As of 1 May, Google's Preferred Sources is a global signal. When a reader adds you as a preferred source, Google shows you more in Top Stories, AI Overviews and AI Mode, and probably Discover too. Edward Sturm spent hours styling his buttons and thinks most webmasters won't notice this for years.

What you'll discover:

  • Where he placed the buttons: footer ("Make me preferred on Google"), end of every blog post, and right after any paragraph that lands hard
  • The new pop-up version, so readers add you without leaving the page (copy Google's documentation page, paste it into Claude, tell it your CMS, get styled buttons back)
  • The eligibility rule: domains and subdomains only, subdirectories excluded, and any company blog with a posting cadence qualifies

🎥 Watch here


If you're doing Parasite SEO, this one's for you.

I asked Hannan whether Rank Trackr could follow Medium posts, LinkedIn articles and YouTube videos. It can. Any URL that ranks on Google. That solves a problem most trackers ignore, and it's all unlimited so you can track every post you've ever published.

See it in the walkthrough: CLICK HERE
Grab it here: CLICK HERE


6. 4 sentence patterns that make writing feel easy to read

William Fitzpatrick, English professor, rewrites a Csikszentmihalyi passage badly and shows why it fails: the topic keeps changing at the front of each sentence. The fix is organisation, not grammar. Familiar stuff goes first, new stuff goes last. He calls the topic a doorstep and the comment the room you step into.

What you'll discover:

  • Pattern 1 (anchored topic) keeps one subject in front of every clause, perfect for describing something, though it can feel static
  • Pattern 2 (linking) picks up the end of one sentence as the start of the next, which builds momentum but runs off the rails unless you loop back (his Portland coffee example goes from espresso machines to a creative writing professor in 5 sentences)
  • Patterns 3 and 4: name the umbrella category first so the parts snap into place, and preview your themes A, B, C then repeat the exact same words when you develop each one

🎥 Watch here


7. $10k in 48 hours with no audience: the order you sell in

Nick Saraev's business did $500k last month, and this daily update answers one question well: if your back's against the wall and you need $8k to $10k in 2 days, who do you call? His answer is a ranking, and cold outreach comes last.

What you'll discover:

  • The 3-tier order: people buying from you now (sell them more), people who bought before (you've already got their card and their trust), then strangers
  • The cold offer if you must: guarantee $20,000/month within 60 days, charge $3,000, refund if you miss (roughly 7x ROI on paper), sold through Upwork first, then cold email and DMs
  • His fix for the moving-company automation pitch: drop "speed to lead" and say "you're leaving $20,000 a month on the table", and take a fixed fee before you try to sell a retainer

🎥 Watch here


8. Edit a whole video by typing instructions into ChatGPT

Awa K. Penn walks through ChatGPT's Codex plus a free plugin called ChatCut. You upload raw footage, type what you want, and it builds the timeline, captions and motion graphics for you. You'll need the desktop app and a Plus or Pro account.

What you'll discover:

  • The install line to paste into a Codex chat: readchatcut.io/chatgpt (if it doesn't show up, quit the app fully and open a new Codex chat)
  • What to upload beyond the main clip: b-roll, logo, music, sound effects, voiceover, since more assets means a better cut
  • The instruction set he uses: cut silent gaps and mistakes, animated captions synced to voice, b-roll where it fits, music balanced under the voice, then "export as high-quality MP4" reshaped for TikTok, Reels, Shorts or LinkedIn

🎥 Watch here


9. Google's August spam update: who got hit, who got paid

The update launched 18 August and finished 21 August. Edward Sturm's read: scaled content got sanded down, SaaS sites with short bottom-of-funnel pages went up, and a few false positives recovered. One Redditor was publishing 1,000 pages a day and lost most of a 300-clicks-a-day site in 48 hours.

What you'll discover:

  • The Guru99 pattern: 14 million clicks a month in 2021, 108,000 this July, 50,000 now, with organic page count climbing the whole time (Mike King's explanation: Google reads human bounce signals, not AI detection)
  • The winners: Edward's own vibe-coded SaaS, and EasyChats going from 7 to 51 clicks a month with short landing pages linked from the footer
  • Why he thinks a core update might follow (March had the same volatility, then a fast spam update, then a core update the next day)

🎥 Watch here


10. The prompt that got ChatGPT to 0% on Copyleaks

Dr Kriukow shares a "write like a human" prompt built for academic text, then runs the same brief through Claude and ChatGPT and puts both outputs through 5 detectors. ChatGPT won, and he's not entirely sure why (he suspects the short length helped).

What you'll discover:

  • The rules inside the prompt: mix long and short sentences, alternate passive and active, no lists of 3, no "it wasn't X, it was Y" drama, no metaphors, no inflated intros, and vary paragraph length
  • The scores: Scribbr 29% (Claude) vs 19% (ChatGPT), Copyleaks 100% vs 0%, Winston 100% vs 50%, Originality 0% for both
  • How to make it permanent: a ChatGPT project with the prompt saved as a source, or a Claude skill you call with a slash command

🎥 Watch here


Last mention on Rank Trackr.

Monthly is $47, yearly is $97, lifetime is $147. So lifetime costs are about three months of monthly, then you never pay again. That's the whole decision.

Buy through my link and send your receipt to support@anthonyhayes.me for a matching $147 bonus, your pick from tools I haven't released yet.

Demo: CLICK HERE
Lifetime access: CLICK HERE


Talk soon,

- Tony

P.S. The Preferred Sources button (video 5) has been a global signal since 1 May and hardly anyone's added it yet. Paste Google's docs into Claude tonight, tell it your CMS, and you'll have it live before most of your competitors know it exists.

Tony Hayes Daily Growth Signals Newsletter

Every day we handpick the top 20 marketing tips, insights, case studies, methods, workflows, and free trials we've spotted on Twitter (X) and YouTube. It's completely free and lands in your inbox 6 days a week. No fluff, just the good stuff that's actually working right now. Creator of NicheBlasta, LeadBlasta, Viral Content Pilot, and many more innovative marketing automation tools. I build and release new tools every week built with no code platforms and run a WhatsApp group and the 'Unshackled' product creation bootcamp.

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