A couple days ago, I spent the afternoon building a fun little online tool.

Here it is: https://aestheticfontgenerator.com/

The tool transforms your text into unicode characters that you can copy and paste to use anywhere online, 𝕝𝕚𝕜𝕖 𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕤 (you can’t type these characters with your keyboard).

As you can see, I built the site on an exact match domain, which also happens to be an expired domain with a domain authority of 7 and a few (albeit low quality) backlinks.

“aesthetic font generator” has a monthly US search volume of 3,300 and a traffic potential of 35,000 according to Ahrefs.

So the fact that the .com EMD was available was pretty exciting. The DA of 7 was icing on the cake.

By the way, this is the type of domain I share with Gold-level subscribers of my other newsletter, EMD Gold. For example, I recently shared that zvaluecalculator .com was available. “z value calculator” has a US search volume of 3,500 and traffic potential of 78,000!!

Needless to say, zvaluecalculator .com was quickly snatched up.

If you want immediate access to 1,000+ valuable (yet available) EMDs the 1st of every month, subscribe to EMD Gold (the Gold plan). Ridiculous value for the price, especially if you’re a domain investor.

Anyway, back to my site.

The “aesthetic fonts” niche is massive, which is another reason I built the site. For example, the super simple 1-page site igfonts.io gets 614,000 visitors per month according to Ahrefs, and 1.4 million according to SimilarWeb. It mainly ranks for “instagram font”-related keywords.

And it’s absolutely plastered with ads. Probably makes very good revenue with that many visitors!

IG Fonts has the exact same functionality my site does, but with just a single page, so it’s even simpler! The only other difference is that it targets “instagram font”-related keywords. Pretty crazy.

Once you start going down the rabbit hole a bit, you’ll be flabbergasted by the potential in the unicode text niche.

Like, uh…

And now:

How I built the site (without knowing code)

I built the actual site using WordPress (with the Kadence theme). For the text transformation functionality, I used ChatGPT. I think any of the major LLMs would work, but I just used ChatGPT.

My initial prompt was a screenshot of one of the aesthetic font generator sites, accompanied by the prompt:

“I want to create a similar site where users can type anything in a text field, and a bunch of different "fonts" will appear. See the attached screenshot. Please provide the necessary code to do this using WordPress.”

ChatGPT told me to create a page template, but that gets messy with certain themes. And, WP updates can break a lot of things. So I asked ChatGPT to provide the solution as a plugin.

It did, but still was based around page templates. So I asked ChatGPT to use another approach.

This time, it made the plugin with shortcode functionality, so I could place the user text input field anywhere on the site with the shortcode “[font_generator]”.

ChatGPT also explained how to prepare and ZIP the plugin files so I could upload them to WordPress.

The plugin worked, but the generated characters were not unicode, they were Chinese.

I showed ChatGPT a screenshot of that, and it changed the code to include exact mappings for every character:

I also had ChatGPT include a shortcode for each type of text transformation. That way, I could have a dedicated page for each style.

Once the plugin was done, I had ChatGPT generate relevant content for each page. See the upside-down text generator page for an example.

Start to finish, it took about 5 hours to build the site.

I can always have ChatGPT add more text styles to the plugin if I decide I want more than the 16 currently on the site.

Updating the plugin is very easy. I just copy and paste the code back into ChatGPT, tell it what I want to change/add, and it’ll do it! I then need to re-ZIP the plugin files, delete the old plugin from my site, and upload the updated plugin.

If any of that is confusing, just ask ChatGPT to walk you through it step-by-step. That’s what I do!

My site is already getting traffic!

I checked analytics yesterday, expecting to see nothing but my own visits to the site. To my surprise, there were several direct visits that were not me.

Then last night, I decided to post about the site on Hacker News. So far, that’s resulted in 30 unique visitors (despite my post having no upvotes).

Aside from getting a few visitors, posting on HN is a great way to pick up some weak syndicated backlinks (at worst) and potentially some powerful links (if your post gets good traction).

Links are incredibly important, especially for online tool sites where the functionality is basically the same across competitors.

And there you have it. Hope you got some value or inspiration out of this email!

Thanks for reading,

Ian

P.S.

Reminder that the lifetime plan for Site Stats Database is going away soon. If you want perpetual access, now’s the time to buy.

Also, the major update (100K+ new sites, and better, monthly traffic data) is nearing completion. SSDB is already crazy useful. This update will make it even more so!

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