July 2021 - Penguin Pete's Greatest Hits

Dear website maintainers, editors, and eCommerce entrepreneurs:

Want a successful business? Then you’d better not deal with SubmitCore! They advertise themselves as a link-building service. I explain what a link-building service is about here, and also tell you how to do it yourself for free.

Just to reiterate, the whole point of guest-posting is to have your fine article hosted on an established website, while also linking back to your own website. Google sees the high-ranking authority site with a link to you and awards your site Pageranking points. But to be successful, your copy must be not just non-spammy, not just competent, but really great! Here is a knock-out article on Guest-Posting 101.

But some people would rather go through a paid service, and I have no truck with them. There are some good guest-posting services out there, and it is a legitimate business if done right. But don’t rely on Submit Core. I award them zero out of infinity stars, no points, last place in any contest that matters.

Now, I have not actually done business with SubmitCore. Instead, they tried to do business with me… if there is any “they” there and the whole thing isn’t just a bot. So let’s back up and I’ll share the whole story…

Continue reading “Anatomy of a Scam Link-Building Spammer Service”

UPDATE 12/22/2021: Unbeknownst to me at the time I first wrote this,
Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, stated that the impact of COVID-19 would be so great that the world requires “a Great Reset.” He makes many arguments similar to mine here. I didn’t know this existed when I wrote this post in July 2021.

In my freelance blogging business, I deal with mostly online entrepreneurs who have a website-driven business model. Ever since the pandemic hit, all my clients have been taken off-guard by the fallout. It’s not just that all the numbers in online business go down; some numbers go up too. The one consistent pattern is that nobody can predict what’s going on, and everybody wants answers.

For those of you in eCommerce who are also wondering what’s going on, I can provide some clues. I can’t provide definitive answers, and part of the clues will point out why. My purpose here is to lay out the mind-boggling scope of the pandemic’s impact on business.

The bottom line is that the economy is largely a chaos system. Chaos systems are huge, complex systems where small changes can cause huge ripple effects. The mark of chaos systems is that it is very difficult to predict what effect a given stimulus would have. Meanwhile, a global pandemic is also a chaos system, as natural phenomena with worldwide reach are wont to be. The result: The economy interacting with the pandemic is the front between two chaos systems, not just one!

But in the first place, there are not only people missing from the work force, but people missing from the mall. They are not shopping, or what shopping they are doing is bare necessities, not discretionary spending. They are not traveling, they are not buying tickets to anything, they are not being busy. So they are not stimulating business.

Continue reading “Unprecedented Times: Don’t Underestimate the Impact of the Pandemic”