Google

Back to the Boardroom era?

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Last autumn, I was writing a few sales emails for an SEO agency. So I spent an hour on Google, trying to find stories of people who had been penalized, by Google, for doing shady SEO stuff.

And after an hour, I had little to nothing to show for it.

Not because such stories don’t exist or because people haven’t written about them online.

But because people’s actual stories have been crowded out by billions of SEO-optimized listicles with titles like “10 Google Penalties That May Be Affecting Your Site” and “The Complete list of Google Penalties and How to Recover.” ​​And then there’s worthless Medium, which showed up at no. 2 for a Google search on “Google penalty stories”:

The most insightful stories about Google Penalty – Medium
Read stories about Google Penalty on Medium. Discover smart, unique perspectives on Google Penalty and the topics that matter most to you like SEO, …

Page after page of Google results like this gave me no actual, credible, human info. And I guess it’s not just me that it’s happening to.

A recent article in the New Yorker talked about the growing mass realization that Google search sucks. Partly because Google as a company has decided to go fully evil. Partly because we have all started to rely so much on Google… that the Internet has warped itself to appeal to Google’s tastes and preferences.

The result is page after page of horrible, inhuman fluff, broken up perfectly with H1 and H2 headings, made up of regurgitated and repurposed low-quality information or even flat-out lies.

Which is something you can either be frustrated about…

Or if you’re like me, you might decide to see it as a business opportunity.

The tech nerds on Hacker News can try to come up with a new search engine to beat Google.

But this is a newsletter about marketing. So let me tell you it smells to me like we might be headed back to the days of Boardroom.

The past 15 or so years, coinciding with rise to monopoly of Google, have also seen a rise of personality-based marketing businesses.

Coaches, gurus, and experts of various stripes have been selling information at high prices — not based on the quality or quantity of the info — but based on their own perceived authority, trustworthiness, and the relationship they have built with their audience.

That was the only way you really could charge for information online.

The days of Boardroom — charging $39 for a book of tax-saving or health or consumer tips — without a face you could trust and a guru you could feel is your friend… why pay for that?

After all, it seemed that Google made that kind of information available for free.

Except again, we’re now in an age where there’s so much information, and so much bad information, all available for free, that there might be an opportunity to simply start a business curating good information and selling it online.

So if you’re looking for a side project, new business, or a way to help millions of people navigate their lives better, consider reviving Boardroom.

Bring together valuable, trustworthy information. Charge for it. Build a list. And then do it all over again.

You probably won’t ever be able to charge thousands of dollars for a single book or five-hour video course, the way you can if you are selling based on personality.

​​But you will be able to reach a much bigger pool of people — which creates valuable opportunities of its own.

Or you can watch me do it. I’m planning to take my own advice. I will write up the results in my email newsletter. You can sign up to join it here.

A current case of whale fall

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On May 17, I wrote about whale fall. That’s my term for how little businesses or even individuals can carve out a unique position for themselves in the marketplace, by feeding off the carcass of a dead or declining whale.

Today, I want to share a quick news bite with you regarding this:

Hey, a new email provider, is out there right now looking to replace the likes of Google’s Gmail.

“Gmail has basically frozen all innovation in email for a good decade,” said David Heinemeier Hansson, one of the guys behind Hey.

(Heinemeier Hansson is well-known in nerd circles, because he is one of the developers and co-founders of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp, and because he is an all-around loud guy.)

So Hey is reimagining email. Each new sender first has to get your consent, or they become ignored. Tracking pixels are automatically blocked. Hey doesn’t have an inbox, but it does have something called an “Imbox.”

As of now, you can only get on the waiting list for a Hey email account. And you have to write a haiku to do it. (I’m not kidding.) Once you are on the waiting list, if your haiku is approved, you then get the chance to pay Heinemeier Hansson $99 for a year of Hey email.

Pretty outrageous, right?

And yet, there is apparently a line of people, wrapping twice around the Internet, who have submitted their haikus and who are holding their $99 in hand, ready to hand it over.

I personally don’t think Hey will succeed long-term, at least as it currently stands. But I bring this story up for two reasons:

1. Even if Hey is not successful, it might have an impact on how promotional emails are handled.

There were already rumblings last summer that Apple was doing some anti-marketing email moves. Now, other tech whales might get in on it. If you are in marketing, it’s good to keep half an eye on these things so you don’t get blindsided.

2. The number one ideal of any whale is to get larger and to absorb more. Along the way, whales get sloppy. So if your primary concern is freedom rather than size, then you can follow your instincts and even make a good business out of it.

That’s the essence of whale fall, and that’s what Hey illustrates, even before it’s launched.

In other news, I just read that Google is facing a $5 billion lawsuit for tracking Chrome users in incognito mode. Maybe it’s time to reimagine how people access their porn? For the right person or small business, it could be a brand new whale fall opportunity.

In still other news, did you get that initial email I sent on May 17 about whale fall? If not, maybe it’s because you’re not subscribed to my email newsletter. Or you’ve got Hey, and you didn’t give your consent to receive my daily emails. In the second case, there’s not much I can do. But if the first case is the problem, here’s how to get on my newsletter list.

How to blend SEO and daily emails

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For the past yea​r and a half, after writing a daily email to my list, I’ve been going on this site and pasting up the email content as a blog post. ​​There are over 420 such posts by now.

These posts don’t have much value to me. Google doesn’t send truckloads of traffic to them… and the readers who do stumble in are very particular (mostly, they wanna read about Tom Selleck and his non-existent boner pill, as advertised in Newsmax, which I wrote about last February).

So from now on, I will try something different:

It’s a combination of what I was doing until now (pasting up emails as blog posts) and standard SEO (writing 2k-word articles and kowtowing to Google, which I don’t have the time or drive to do).

​​If you’re curious about how this will look, just sit tight. I’ll have the first of these “new SEO” posts ready in a couple of days, and I’ll share it with you then.

In the meantime…

My point is not just to announce that my website will soon look different (you probably don’t care). But I think this merger of SEO/daily emails is an illustration about something you might find valuable.

I’m talking about a fundamental insight about how to come up with new ideas, approaches, and solutions. You might call this creativity — but a better word might be connectivity. It’s a simple, light, almost mechanical process that a monkey can do. Here’s legendary copywriter Gene Schwartz on the topic:

“What is creation? Creation is a lousy word. It’s a lousy word that confuses what you really do to perform a simple little procedure. Creation means create something out of nothing. In the beginning, God created Heaven and Earth. Okay, only God can do that. We can’t do that: We’re human.

“​​So let’s throw creation out, and let’s talk about connectivity. What you are trying to do is connect things together. You’re trying to practice connectivity. You’re trying to get two ideas that were separate in your mind and culture before, and you are trying to put them together so they are now one thought. You want something new to come out, but new doesn’t mean it never existed before, it means never joined before. New – in every of discipline – means never joined before.”

BTW, all this means I won’t be pasting my daily emails on this site any more. But I will continue writing them and sending them to my newsletter subscribers. If you want to read these emails, you can subscribe for free here:

https://bejakovic.com/copywriters-hero/