Stop being a loser

“You should be winning, not losing.”

I went to get coffee this morning with an eCom founder, and this is a direct quote that I said to him as we sipped on $8 lattes.

Though I didn’t give the barista the satisfaction of a 20% tip when they flipped the iPad around me.

Nevertheless, he explained to me all the SEO tactics that he had tried to implement over the last 12 months.

Here’s what he tried:

• paying human writers $0.25/word for high-quality SEO content — that’s about $375 per 1500-word article.
  

• paying subject matter experts $150 for an author byline to establish EEAT — think doctors & physical therapists.
  

• building infographics in the hopes that a website would link to him out of the kindness of their hearts — this is the equivalent of hoping your celebrity crush DMs you on Instagram even though she has no idea who you are.
  

• joining hundreds of Facebook groups to set up link exchanges — truthfully, not the worst thing he tried, just not how I’d have done it.

There were several more bad ideas, but I don’t have the time (or patience) to recap all of them.

I may have been a bit too harsh on him, but he’s a big boy — he can handle it.

And he spent the last 12 months wasting money, he wanted to start printing it instead.

But I didn’t just say that the ideas sucked — that wouldn’t be helpful.

For each bad idea, I provided him an alternative good idea.

First, I told him to never pay a human writer again, especially since he had no money left to do so anyways. Instead, he should use one of the many AI writing tools and then he (or another human) could edit it afterwards — this would cut this cost by over 50%, probably closer to 75%.

Second, never spend money on another author byline again. EEAT is not established by adding a “Written & Reviewed by Dr. Joe Shmoe.” I have never spent a single dollar on any bylines like this, and even better, I consistently outrank these types of content.

Third, building infographics is the least effective link building tactic alive. It’s not even link building, it’s link hoping. People won’t even move over when you walk past them on the sidewalk, do you really think they’ll link to you out of the kindness of their hearts? Absolutely not. Pay for links.

Fourth, link exchanges aren’t the worst idea, but you will have a limited choice of sites, and most of them will have just been hit by a Google update or be entirely unrelated to your niche. Again, pay for links.

If this sounds like you, please take some risks.

Google is not coming for you — stop overpaying for content and use that money to buy backlinks instead.

See you on Friday.

Kai