A city full of millions of people living their lives. Photo: CC-0

Michael Lynch wrote an excellent and thought-provoking article yesterday titled Why I Stopped “Creating Content”. In this article he discusses a lot of the mentality that motivates the mainstream web these days which is worth discussing a bit more.

Industry Speak

I started encountering a lot of the industry speak when I found my way into the bowels of the SEO industry some years back. At the time I just accepted that terms like “funnel,” “conversion,” “landing page,” “content,” and “traffic” had meaning. After all, these were the people that were making a lot of money, and getting a lot of eyes on their websites, right?

Turns out, no, they weren't. I've known a few people who have been engaged in the drop-shipping industry for a while now. Basically, they use as many tricks of technology and marketing as possible in order to sell (often dubious) products at a substantial markup for profitability. Basically a “passive income” type of scheme. These are the kind of people that think of customers as “traffic”. They don't care about their customers, they are only interested in chasing the dollars, pounds, or whatever currency…

When my eyes were truly opened about what the SEO world was really about, I was completely repulsed. I found the whole thing repugnant. And, while I've never mentioned it before, this was another black mark on Google's reputation as far as I was concerned. Why Google? Because they enable this industry. They actively engage with SEO marketers to make certain they understand the changes being made to their search engine.

Why would they do this? While I never had the time to dig into it deeper, I believe Google is profiting from SEO marketers. And, I believe that it's significantly profitable for Google. Why? If it wasn't profitable, why would Google directly engage with these marketers?

The thing I found disgusting about this is: Google has been actively distorting search results for a long time. If some SEO marketer's page can outrank bad review(s) of the same product, that likely means the SEO marketer had an upper-hand over the reviewer. At least that is what I keep seeing.

The Rise of Influencers

I don't know if anyone will be surprised reading this, but the people doing “influencer” marketing are just a subset of the SEO marketing crowd. As social media started becoming more influential, it was apparent to many of the SEO marketers that Google didn't represent the whole market anymore. So, they turned to “creators” to market their garbage.

What I think many don't realize is that when your favorite YouTuber, Instagram-er, (or whatever platform) takes a sponsorship they are subject to the same measurements SEO marketers use. They are seen as a “funnel” to “drive traffic.” The result is “conversion” to a “customer.” Many times their agreements depend on the “conversion rate” of their audience. Basically, it pulls you out of your role as an audience member, and makes you into a commoditize-able asset.

But who can blame the people who are creating the things you watch? They need some way to make money in order to keep making things for their audience. And that's what these marketers are preying on. They are living on the willingness of a person to turn their audience into “traffic” fodder.

Getting off the Roller Coaster

This entire thing is a big roller coaster. Once you are on it, it's hard to see where or when the ride is going to end. And I took a long ride on the SEO coaster, but I managed to jump off it a few years back. I had been trying to decide what to do with the rest of my life during the pandemic. Actually, I knew what I wanted to do, but I didn't know how I was going to do it.

The answer, of course, was writing. I t was the thing I've wanted to dedicate myself to since College. However, over the past few years I have been confronted with an old insecurity: would anyone be interested? It's the age-old question that confronts every writer: who is your audience. When you start any project, especially a creative endeavor, you have to wonder if there is any appeal to that project. So, of course, I started writing again. First with this very blog, and then I started a niche blog. The idea was to see if there was any interest. No sales, no marketing, just me writing.

And, of course, they failed. Why, I wondered? I found several reasons. First was the demotivation provided by WordPress. But, I didn't recognize that at the time. Instead, I turned to the SEO articles I had stashed away. I quickly found I was doing X wrong and Y wrong. I would never generate “traffic” unless I did Z instead.

This was when the proverbial light bulb went off in my mind. SEO was doing precisely the wrong thing. I was looking for answers from marketers. I was looking to generate numbers instead of considering the value of my work, and the value of those that would read my work. And that's when I put it together: what I really wanted was to build an audience instead of “followers” or generate “traffic”.

The Difference

Artists, especially performing artists, understand the difference. Audiences are not nameless, faceless masses being marketed to. An audience is a participant in the performance or presentation of a creation. You are a participating right now by reading these words on your screen. And, you can take your participation further by upvoting, or leaving feedback. But, that is for you to decide: that's the audience member role as a participant in this process.

Don't believe this? Let's try another example, music concerts. Have you been to a show that just felt different? That felt like it was something that was just more than you were expecting? Have you been to shows that were less than you expected, or shows that met your expectations? Now, have you ever heard about a band or an artist talk about a show that we extra special to them? This is because the audience is interacting with the band / artist. It's all about the mood, the reaction, and interaction between an artist and their audience.

So, that's the difference with the IndieWeb: we don't use SEO marketing speak, we don't think of people as “traffic” and more so, we aren't in competition with each other. We each decide who we are, what the want to present, and we find the best way to present that through writing, music, video, painting, drawing photography, whatever form works for you.

We don't use the tools of SEO marketers. We use aggregators like Bubbles to allow our audience to tell others what they might like. We use web rings and blog rolls to allow our audiences to find things that they like. Our audiences grow, shrink, change, and define their role in our work. This is exactly the opposite of what marketers do: they want their “traffic” to constantly increase so they can “convert” more of them.

Conclusion

The SEO marketing have done one thing correctly. They have provided us with some tools that are useful for making certain our blogs are set up in a technically correct manner. Beyond that, there's little else they can offer in terms of genuine communication. Nothing about their terminology: “content creator,” “traffic,” “conversion,” “funnel,” and so on treats people for who they are. People are just numbers to SEO marketers, just a faceless mass.

This is what we reject. We instead understand that people are authors, artists, musicians, painters, performers, poets, sculptors, or any of hundreds of other things they decide to be. We understand that people choose to make available the things they want other people to see, experience, and appreciate.

We understand that you are an audience. You are not a faceless, nameless mass. You are people who have feelings, thoughts, and experiences you bring to our works. Audiences grow, shrink, and change over time, you are not a monolithic group. It's through interaction that we learn to grow and change as persons. There is no place in SEO for that.

I would be remiss if I didn't point out at least a few of the interactions that have helped drive this point home to me. Michael Lynch is the very reason this article exists, he was the inspiration for it. Brennan Kenneth Brown was very humble in understanding my feedback on his work, as critical as I was. Gordon Mclean made a post that he thought was just a light little piece about Gravatar, my reaction surprised both him and me.

If it weren't for these, and other people on the IndieWeb, I would not be learning and growing as a person. And that, in the end, is what the IndieWeb is about for everyone. F*** the SEO marketers.

---

Categories: #Response Tags: #seo, #marketing, #promotion, #artists, #writers, #painters, #audience License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

	FediRing
◀️ Prev	Home	Next ▶️