I really need to get up one of those Hunter S. Thompson disguises one of these days, if I’m going on to write posts like these. That’s what the heyday of my blogging within the cannabis / psychedelics / entheogens verticals felt like. Just less Johnny Depp, not that anybody but him should have played Hunter.
Like that guy, I blogged a lot in the cannabis sphere, getting paid to write about weed. No, scratch that, getting paid to sample commercial and legally available weed (and other) products, to then write about. Better than Hunter S. Thompson’s experience, I had no fear of the law. If only he’d lived to see such times.
AI is Not the End of the World
Let me start there: round about 2022, cannabis & hemp blogging suffered the same setback that all Google-approved SEO suffered: the AI Winter.
The problem is not AI itself. The problem is how the public reacts to AI. ChatGPT is nothing but a word calculator. I’ve played with the base technology myself back in the day; look up the history of chatbots starting with Eliza sometime. AI chatbots were in business three years before I was born.
The fallout from ChatGPT, however, is that it empowered spammers like never before, forcing Google to cut the throat of the paid online content market. It’s been hard times for tech workers of every stripe ever since, but again: This is the reaction. As soon as we’re done worshiping the chatbot like the stone head from Zardoz, we can get back to business again.
Good, valuable content is in more demand than ever. Both end users and B2B business alike is starting to learn how to filter out chatterbot spam. Go to submit a manuscript anywhere online and look at all the publishers yelling “no AI”:
Everybody hates ChatGPT slop. The slop will not improve. AI is useful as hell at some limited tasks, but it’s not time to bring in the marching androids to replace humans at every single job in the world. If only the market would quit gyrating in fits and settle down about this, however, we would be doing better business right now.
You people watch too much science fiction. He said, self-righteously.
Cannabis Industry Backlinks are Selling for $125 a Pop!
That’s the facts in 2025. Cannabis is a very small niche relative to other industries, so marketing opportunities are just closed off to us. Blogs, as in eCommerce/ commercial blogs, are dying in the tar pits. Five years ago, top-ranking websites handed out backlinks like candy, because they had a blog rolling. Google has had to duck around the volume of AI-spam online, devaluing B2B text that was both necessary and useful for small business.
Long story short: Blogs are rare now. About 80% of the old blog-based web has gone dark, with owners no longer able to afford the server bill on small-change sites. People who have been in business for twenty years and more, pulling the plug. Between this and the COVID economic wave – which we’re still feeling now, don’t forget – business in general is down now.
Those few publications left, available for guest posting and a side order of do-follow backlink, are charging for the privilege. There are even agencies that charge far higher fees “guaranteeing” you “quality” backlink placement, but I wouldn’t hand over large amounts of money without seeing the host domains.
I’m not kidding about the $125 part: That’s the base for listing a product or item for sale on Cannabis Tech, a site upon whose blog my writing will be appearing soon. That’s their base listing for the marketplace – but bear in mind, said marketplace includes facilities and properties, along with industrial-scale cannabis industry equipment for processing, growing, extraction, packaging, and more. Price tags on this stuff run into the 2.5-million range, at which point a $125 listing fee is a mere transactional fee.
Still, that’s not really a “backlink.” They do offer sponsored posts too, tucked away in a blog category listing, for another fee.
What if Anything Will Tariffs Do?
Tariffs between the US and China, currently on-again/off-again as negotiations wobble, coudl impact the cannabis industry. Most notably, we have a pain point with hardware, because al the cartridges, vapes, eRigs, and more are all made in China.
I can at least imagine that simple things like glass-blown bongs are still made in the US of A. As for cannabis itself, gosh, that’s a native US crop so hardy that it was among the first crops cultivated by European settlers in the New World. Cannabis itself isn’t touched by tariffs.
It is Still Possible for Content Marketing to Save Cannabis SEO
Slithering into marketing mode, I will helpfully point out that I still blog for Dab Connection, which can still afford to stay open as long as the content goes on somebody else’s dime. This makes my home stomping grounds one of the few surviving cannabis industry blogs on the web!
Just recently I posted there about DiscreetSmoker.com, an “online headshop” which persevered the economic shockwaves in this industry. Selling consumer-focused cannabis gear – as long as you offer hardware / gear only – are doing quite well still, especially if they have a brick-and-mortar presence linked to a Google Business listing.
Discreet Smoker has an excellent niche carved out: as the name suggests, they specialize in discreet gear for consuming cannabis and hemp without the whole wide world having to know about it. Just remembered, in my list of super-discreet vaporizers that actually disguise themselves as something else, I forgot to mention the Puffco Cupsy, a dry herb vaporizer camouflaged as an ordinary coffee cup. For $59.99, that’s almost unbeatable.
Like I say, find a niche and fill it.
Find More of me on Medium!
The very same rib-tickling, mind-expanding, horrifyingly hilarious insights from the web’s most zealous agnostic prophet is now appearing at Medium. That’s the other end of the blog market: paid content on a subscription-walled site is where most of the money’s at for plain, honest, journal-style blogging. The opposite of Google’s SEO ratrace, Medium is the place for professional authors, reporters, poets, and essayists to get together and celebrate human writing for a human audience.
It’s sad to see that kind of content disappear from the free-with-ads web, but I didn’t make the rules here. A penguin’s gotta keep an igloo over his head, yah know? Anyway a Medium subscription only costs $5 all-you-can-read. Most of you are spending that much on My Little Pony skins for your Steam profile.
If you’re just too strapped (you probably work in the US cannabis industry), here’s a Medium post I specifically made free reading, with yet more of my sage advice on the cannabis industry in 2025.
Peace and love and buds be with you all!