Cannabis SEO in 2025 | Return of the Penguin

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”:

no AI allowed

AI is forbidden

everybody hates ChatGPT

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

a top=secret envelope to indicate discreet smoking gear

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!

 

The Great eCommerce Recession

Nobody else wants to call it. Calling it doesn’t solve anything. But it does help the millions (now) of individual freelance contractors understand what’s going on.

The inexperienced reader will glance at the title and suspect me of hyperbole. The veteran readers, who have been following my work since the turn of the century, will appreciate that this is 20+ years of exclusive work as an eCommerce contractor talking.

Freelancing, so that we suffer no crisis of clarity, is fucked.

 

And to be more clear: I speak of eCommerce as the vast majority of online-only businesses; websites and channels supported by ad revenue, referral links, subscriptions, etc. From 20 years back until just a few years ago, you could set up a web domain, plug in a CMS, plaster it with ads, and make money provided your content wasn’t just useless spam. None of this applies to brick-and-mortar commerce, nor to selling physical products or paid services. THOSE markets are all doing fine, albeit with their own hangups.

But – eCommerce as in BLOGS, and the blogging bloggers who write them, are dead and buried. Not only do I feel confident that eCommerce as a stand-alone industry is in recession, but it might be in depression or even killed entirely and only come back in some other form someday – perhaps subscription services will take hold in its place.

The eCommerce recession, as I’m calling it while summoning all my remaining optimism, was the result of a perfect storm of clashing catastrophes, and indeed, the global market isn’t looking that much better. Just rest assured, Work-From-Home / remote job seekers / freelancer veterans: You’re not going crazy. It isn’t just UpWork or Fiverr or Linked-In or Indeed or whatever. It’s EVERYTHING! Nobody is getting any work, no money to spend to hire, no work to do.

After the jump: The Perfect Storm that Recession’ed eCommerce:

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Who’s Afraid of Elon Musk? | A Penguin Pete’s Halloween Special!

Ooooooooh! Elon Musk! Elon Muuuuuuuuusk! He comes like a towering Godzilla of Capitalism, like the old Sim City game punishing you for your economy running too hot.

Elon-Musk-GodzillaIt’s like if you took every evil adjective of every Bond villain, ran it through a Warner Brothers’ cartoon filter, had Mel Brooks direct, and… fudge, there’s no use comparing this self-digesting multimedia fireball of midlife crisis frenzy. YOU explain Elon Musk? I dunno, “lovechild of Cthulhu and Mammon?” “The business news world’s equivalent of ___ye West?”

Here it is, Halloween 2022, and the scariest recent event that anyone can think of is that the Musk-Twitter deal went through. People bailing, mass panic. Yet it has been a few days, and Twitter is not, to me, noticeably worse than it has been over the 13 years I’ve been there.

This is precisely what I predicted would happen up to now. And now, speaking from my experience in media science studies in the context of eCommerce marketing, I will walk you through the logic of How I Knew That – and how I know the ways this social media storm is likely to abate.

elon-musk-terminator

I don’t blame anybody for bailing right now. Yes, the big stomping global gazillianaire muppet monster towering down Fifth Avenue is an impressive public spectacle which the media likes to follow around like puppies being fed a trail of breadcrumb treats. Join me after the jump, I promise you that once again, it’s not the end of the world…

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My Latest Multimedia Productions…

(*blowing dust off WordPress*)

Jesus holy mother of peasants and pumpkins hail Mary! HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN? March 2022, right when Putin invaded Ukraine. Since then, I’ve shifted gears a lot in my freelance livin’ work. It’s kept me THAT busy, so that is the excuse slip I have for not blogging on my own site for 5 months.

OTOH, I have always said that you should know me by my work, with my domain only functioning as a central hub. Judge me not by my poor stats at penguinpetes.com, but by my freelance work over on a YouTube channel with 3.5K subscribers.

Aw, what’s that, you say? You want to see some of Unca Pete’s video reviews for the $25 billion cannabis industry? Right this way, and be sure to stay tuned for more podcast news following…

69 views nice

nice…

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From the Trenches of #2022 : Your War Blogger

Good morning, and how are all my cosmic blueberries? Here, if you need a mood fix, there’s a gallery of hippie New Age good vibes I threw together on an old IMGUR post.

Sorry for not catching up more, but things have been busy. Blah blah blah, Pete doesn’t blog enough, blah blah, I don’t have time to boost my own site because I’m too busy boosting my clients’ sites.

I’ve also been hypnotized by the endless Doomscrolling feed of world news like the rest of you. Ukraine Putin Russia COVID climate change. Bad news all around. I’ve been telling you all it would get this bad years ago.

I Predicted Everything!

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how much of the year 2022 I prophesied, years and years ago. I’ve been tracing this line between Trump and Putin since Sally Yates got fired – yes, remember her, New Years’ Eve, 2017?

Trump-fires-Yates

Oh, I am sure that we are all shocked at Vladimir’s Putin’s INSANE and senseless massacre of Ukraine, as well as his own soldiers, citizens, economy, etc. But, boys and girls, I have been following this yellow brick road a long ol’ time. Won’t you join me on my adventures?

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Having a Boom! With the Holidays

Who the bananas has time to blog on their own site this time of year? In between tying off the big holiday rush and jamming out my vanity projects, any non-compulsory work falls behind in priority after my dedicated #GenX slacker lifestyle.

Yeah, right. Actually, folks, in the content marketing / online blogging business, I type all day and all night until I fall asleep with my beak on the keyboard typing “zzzzzz” and then my adorable wife drags me to bed, from whence I spring into action hours later to gargle espresso and run back to the keyboard. How can you turn down extra money this time of year?

Boom 1968 screenshot

Video Review Debut: Boom! (1968)

When last we joined my escapades, I was as amazed as everyone else to have pulled off my first video review for 366 Weird Movies, with Legacy of Satan. Well, hold your horses, because I videoed again this month with a video review of Boom! (yes, it’s spelled with an exclamation point, like Yahoo!) (1968), Liz Taylor and Rich Burton.

Because those 2 movies will totally have fan overlap, right? Don’t leave now, I have done much more than this in the past month, after the jump.

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Announcing the First 366 Weird Movies Video Reviews

Howdy gremlins and goblins! Just a minute while I talk to some old people:

(This domain goes back to 2006, and I still get fanmail from my old material, so I know some old-timers have followed on. You folks know that my longest-continuous blogging gig is 366WeirdMovies. So if you know my review history, you must be on pins and needles wondering which film I selected for the very first video review. (Actually I know you all are wondering, I’m just stalling for the suspense.)

Anyway, for the rest of you: Hey kids I video-reviewed an old horror movie! It’s 1974’s Legacy of Satan, a movie not quite weird enough to be honored on The List, but worth an eyeball that seeks out weirdness. Made in partnership with some colleagues of mine from there, Giles Edwards and Greg Smalley.

But let me back up a bit here while the piano player warms up the lounge for me, because the story of how this project came together is gonna blow the training wheels right off your unicycle…

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Why I Am Not Watching Squid Game

It’s impossible to avoid now, but for future generations: Squid Game was a TV series on Netflix. It got a viral marketing boost and now all of social media is teeming with foaming-mouthed fanatics insisting that everybody MUST WATCH this show immediately or there will be consequences.

Now I will tell you why, not only am I not watching Squid Game, but you should not watch Squid Game either.

metropolis

We’ve seen enough class-struggle dystopian sci-fi

The first 10 times I saw a class-struggle-based dystopian sci-fi movie, I thought, “Yeah, great socio-political commentary!” The next 50 class-struggle-based dystopian sci-fi movies I saw, I thought, huh, neat take, but it’s been done. After that, every class-struggle-based dystopian sci-fi movie gives me the kind of heartburn you get from too much grease and not enough substance.

I’ve seen Snowpiercer, The Platform, and High-Rise. Somebody else already pointed out that they are exactly the same movie. I’ve also seen The Hunger Games, and Squid Game is literally the exact same premise. I’ve seen The Purge, Elysium, They Live, The Running Man, Freejack, Soylent Green, and V for Vendetta. Not to mention, as the above image forecasts, that Metropolis fits in this category too; the very first sci-fi movie ever made.

Let me save you some time and tell you all about every single one of the above movies. This is the entire point:

karl-marx-quote

“Proletariat vs Bourgeoisie”

  • There are RICH PEOPLE, and they are EVIL for the sake of being EVIL!
  • There are POOR PEOPLE who suffer because they are POOR!
  • The RICH stay RICH by exploiting the POOR people and keeping them POOR!
  • Nobody can seem to do anything effective about it.
  • You should be MAD about this! MAD MAD MAD!

That’s all this is. A class-struggle sci-fi movie is not inspirational or instructive or educational or witty or original. It is not deep or profound. It’s not even a story. The entire point is to invoke the Krodha rasa and turn the viewer into the Incredible Hulk. Hulk hate rich people now!

Not only that, but we have a whole wing of literature devoted to the exact same effect, called dystopian literature. They include The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Brave New World, all of which are at the top of the list of most recommended books for required reading in school. I’ve written this same blog post about why force-feeding students these novels is a crime against intellect.

But we’ll go over it again, this time with movies and TV, because what I am saying really IS an original thought which is currently absent from all of world culture.

Continue reading “Why I Am Not Watching Squid Game”

My latest adventures in Content Marketing…

Blah blah blah Pete doesn’t post often enough, blah blah blah I’m too busy working for clients to look into my own website. My own site is so neglected it’s a wonder they haven’t opened a Spirit Halloween here yet. Blah blah blah there I’m blogging now.

I see tweets like this all the time:

Except I’m a BLOGGER, so while everybody else posts a onesie-twosie WIP, I’m seeing my projects go by in a blur. Today is October 12th.

Here’s a round-up of everything I’ve been busy as a bee with in just this past month, right after the jump.

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How To Work From Home : A Survival Guide For The Hardwood Jungle

Forgive me, I should have written this guide sooner in the pandemic. Just didn’t think it would really be needed. But now that the global pandemic is a permanent thing for a while, and so many of you are clamoring for some of my work-from-home magic, I will share my tricks of the trade.

While a 9-5 job wage-slave working remotely can benefit from some of these tips anyway, this guide is written for the freelance / professional point of view.

toddler-on-phone

[1] I’m sorry, you need self-discipline.

Do me a favor: Take a deep breath and then scream “GATEKEEPER!” at me as loud as you can. Now that we have that out of the way, I’m sorry, but nature imposes this gate, not me. Either you are a self-starter and able to discipline yourself, or you will fail. If you say, “I can’t self-dicipline,” make yourself do it. Learn how. Give yourself a new chance, maybe things have changed.

Of course, there’s days when I don’t want to work, there’s tasks I dread, there’s deadlines that I procrastinate because, to be frank, it’s fun and I perform amazing under pressure. But I get the thing done! It always eventually comes down to “it is time to sit down and plow through this unpleasant task.” There are no shortcuts, no tricks. Just start doing the work and let the momentum carry you. Really, you were doing the same thing for a boss when you worked 9-to-5. Now you get to reap the full spoils of your labor, so that’s even more motivation, right?

Wanting to work from home without self-discipline is like wanting to be a lifeguard without learning to swim.

Continue reading “How To Work From Home : A Survival Guide For The Hardwood Jungle”