eCommerce Marketing For Dopamine Addicts

Recently one of my freelance clients got me onto their SEMRush account. It’s a nice tool, it has its place in Search Engine Marketing. But it’s also important to remember, behind those numbers and algorithms, that there are people behind those screens. I try to always look behind the SEO to figure out what motivates the users in the first place.

Hot new acronym to play with: E-A-T

SEMRush has its own blog to help with content marketing. In their obligatory end-of-year post looking ahead into 2020, they bring up E-A-T a lot. E-A-T stands for “Expertise, Authority, and Trust,” and it’s the latest Google indexing bugaboo which everybody is struggling to ascertain. What everybody forgets is that behind the numbers and algorithms, Google cares about what motivates people too.

Turning to SearchEngineJournal, E-A-T is a human-driven link quality control method, where Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines is “used by humans to assign quality scores to search results for specified queries… In other words, pages that would receive high-quality ratings from raters applying these guidelines are the kinds of pages Google wants to rank well.”

And then those pages, in turn, get stamped with the “Expertise Authority Trustworthiness” seal of approval. That doesn’t change the algorithms directly; instead it guides the engineers in adjusting those algorithms to bring up those pages more often.

The bottom line: Users – the humans behind those queries – want to see results that are actually helpful, engaging, and informative. That’s as opposed to mechanical SEO content churned out to appease the algorithm gods. Now that I’ve humanized the mechanical search process, watch as I mechanize the human angle all over again:

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New at GeekyDomain: Hearthstone Guides!

I never seem to get caught up around here lately, but the holidays will do that to you. I’ve picked up a new gig at GeekyDomain, whose site focus is self-explanatory. For a few opening posts, we’ve decided to make guides for my favorite digital collectible trading card game. There’s a guide to the standard Hearthstone meta post Descent of Dragons, and the first half of my extensive, book-length guide to Hearthstone Battlegrounds format, covering the heroes. In the second half, I offer a guide to Hearthstone Battlegrounds minions – when to go for tribal, when to settle for goodstuff, and why demons are underrated.

The Battlegrounds one is something I’ve been itching to take on for awhile, because no guides out there I saw were up to date. Or else, the rankings for the heroes was done by somebody who obviously hadn’t played more than a few games on day one. We’re going to make an effort to keep the 2-part guide updated, because it’s basically the only complete strategy guide to Hearthstone‘s Battlegrounds format on the web.

Stay tuned, and welcome my new host GeekyDomain to the Penguin Pete fold. My influence spreads like Cthulhu’s tentacles! Oh, by the way, did you know I also blogged about Game of Thrones there?

She’s cute, but she’s never going to break tier 3.

For your Christmas catching-up: The Impeachment of Donald J. Trump

Here it is Christmas Eve, and I’ve JUST NOW shoveled my way out from under my workload to pay attention to my own site for a change.

I know most of you want to think about this like you need a hole in your mistletoe, but I promise it’s funny and enlightening. The Impeachment of Donald J. Trump examines where we are, how we got here, where we might be going, and – are you sitting down for this? It actually explains things so they make *some* sense!

It’s a defining Christmas for the Trumpster. Lots of soul-searching is due (though we may be sure none will be undertaken). If ghosts of Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and John McCain visited him tonight, that would be most fitting.

eCommerce Marketing: How We Misread the Internet Audience

By now the Internet has chewed up and masticated the infamous Peloton exercise bike ad. For you people in the future visiting to soberly learn the lessons from the Ghosts of Christmas Ads Past, here’s what that was all about:

The Internet reaction to this ad is a textbook case of unexpected backlash

Everybody mocked it. And lest you be tempted to think “there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” Peloton’s stock actually fell 10% due to bad press from the ad.

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Christmas Gift Shopping With Penguin Pete

So it’s the holiday season and I’ve actually taken a break from my usual Scroogy behavior to go Black Friday shopping last week. This is the first time I’ve ever done that! Normally I stay in, safe from getting trampled. But the kids were in town to visit this last Thanksgiving weekend, and we don’t get to see them that often these days, so I suggested we stampede Historic Valley Junction. And man did we have a blast! Black Friday isn’t as crowded as it used to be.

Of course, I turned it into a client post too. Everybody else runs around Valley Junction taking selfies with everything, so why not join in and be able to monetize it too? That link you will find is also an eccentric gift idea guide.

What didn’t make it into that post: We ate lunch at Heavenly, an Asian restaurant where they know what a bowl of hot ‘n’ sour soup is and set the table with chopsticks in mind first. They have this awesome mural behind the bar there:

mural at Heavenly cuisine in Valley Junction

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An Online Freelancer Breaks Down the UpWork Top 100

UpWork, which is pretty much the definitive online freelancing platform now, just gave us all a great resource that I think hasn’t gotten enough buzz. I’m talking about the UpWork Top 100. It’s a ranking of the top 100 skills that clients seek in the freelance field.

What does it mean to me as a freelance writer? Not much at first glance – the web still needs content, I type content, there will always be a job for me. But secondary influences come into play here. My greedy little gold-plated heart wants to chase every market as it comes up. When cryptocurrency was big (the infamous BitCoin bubble of 2017), I blogged crypto. Now that legalized cannabis is hot, I’ve jumped into that market. I go where the money is.

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OK Millennial , Take It From Generation X : You Really DO Suck!

Before You Fall For This “OK Boomer” Nonsense, Read This

Let me ask you information-age savvy Millennials a real stumper: When was the last time you heard a Generation Xer complain? About ANYTHING?

Well, it’s about time you did. I’ve spent my whole life hearing from both Boomers and Millennials, while like a typical Gen Xer I’ve kept my head down and quietly stayed in my lane.

Because I’m a Gen-Xer and I’ll swear on my tattered Breakfast Club ticket stub that I never heard about a generation war until Millennials came along. Before that, generations were just one more arbitrary method of sorting demographics, useful to marketing executives and the occasional political survey, but otherwise unremarkable. I’ll put that up front, even though I’m about to talk about generations as if they meant something: Generations are nothing but what Papa Kurt Vonnegut dismissed as a granfalloon, a word we could stand to bring back for the label-happy modern media.

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Who Needs Halloween When You Have The Real Life Horror Of China?

Yeah, so there’s a new post up at 123ish.com, about the current situation with Hong Kong’s protests and China. It came onto our radar when it involved the gaming community via the Hearthstone fiasco, when a tournament player got suspended for making a little demonstration in support of Hong Kong’s struggle for liberation from China.

I went into covering that story intending it to be light-hearted satire, poking a jab at Blizzard Entertainment and making a few swipes at dictator Xi Jinping and his Winnie the Pooh resemblance. But once I started reading up on what the hell is really going on in China, the story got too grim. Be advised, that link goes to some stomach-churning stark reality. Hong Kong is protesting because it doesn’t want to be subject to Chinese control. After seeing just a taste of what’s going on there, can anyone blame them?

At the very least, China’s torture of Falun Gong members amounts to a modern-day Inquisition, except even Torquemada never got sadistic enough to harvest organs from subjects while they were still alive. The treatment of everybody else in China isn’t exactly winning any human rights pageants either. The continued censorship of most of the world by China through corporate proxies is added salt in the wound. We are all living under China’s bootheel already, whether we know it or not.

Xi Jinping is a modern-day Hitler, and in some ways he’s even worse. This is no laughing matter. China must be stopped now. Why is the rest of the world turning a blind eye?

Faster than I could post, new stories of horrors and atrocities are coming out of China by the day. Read well, because we can do something about China now, or we can all look forward to a “re-education camp” tomorrow.

I wasn’t taking boycotts against Blizzard and other companies seriously before. But now, I’m going to have to at least think it over. If the price of doing business in China is kowtowing to this savage, monstrous regime, then it is not worth it.

UPDATE: A Redditor explains the culture of fear inside mainland China. He, too, points out “Chinese government may be the most powerful totalitarian regime in human history.” and “The West has tolerated CCP for too long.”

UPDATE: NGO Human Rights Watch now declares China “a global threat to human rights.” HRW executive director Kenneth Roth states: “Beijing has long suppressed domestic critics. Now the Chinese government is trying to extend that censorship to the rest of the world. To protect everyone’s future, governments need to act together to resist Beijing’s assault on the international human rights system.”

Let’s Talk About Terpenes…

Let me give you one word for your future career, young people. (*Leans in with portentous whisper*): Terpenes.

Terpenes are going to be huge, folks. Have you accepted terpenes into your heart as your lord and savior? Over at my DabConnection gig, I’ve been talkin’ some serious terpene turkey. I started out trying to illuminate this curious corner of cannabis chemistry because I see a lot of questions about them, and not much answers. I ended up falling into a research rabbit hole and starting writing up encyclopedia-type entries on the top terpenes in cannabis. Meet some of nature’s most whimsical organic compounds, after the jump.

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New at 123ish: My Favorite Magic: the Gathering Commanders

Yes, it’s time once again for grandpa geek to neckbeard about my top MTG Commander EDH generals. These are the staples, the ones I rebuild and replay again and again, because they’re worth the time and trouble. I see players asking in the forums all the time, “What EDH deck should I build next?” Well, this is my attempt to answer that question with a list of those I propose will appeal to the widest possible base, regardless of budget, skill, or experience.

It’s also a LONG post, so bring your coffee.

UPDATE: But wait, there’s more! I later wrote “How to Enjoy Magic : The Gathering on a Poverty Budget,” full of thrifty tips for the defiantly budget hobbyist.