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.