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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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.

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Work From Home Freelance Writers: How Much To Charge?

Work From Home is the new hot trend in the COVID era. After my 20+ years in freelancing over the Internet, you’re all finally catching up to me. Good (at least I think so)! For freelancer content writers who are just starting out, the #1 most common question I see asked is about how to set rates.

I’m going to try to tell you in the clearest possible way how to set your rates as a freelance writer.

freelance-writing-rate-charge

How Much To Charge For Freelance Content Writing? (short answer)

The short answer to how much to charge is a simple formula:

  • a: Your rate per word
  • b: How many words you can write per hour (reasonably)

If A x B = a decent hourly wage for where you live, that’s a reasonable rate to charge. As a basic rule of thumb.

There’s a lot of fudge factors that affect this number, however. The content you will be writing may be faster or slower going due to the need for extensive research. The amount of non-writing effort you have to put into the project (spreadsheets, managing WordPress, communicating with the client’s team, etc.) may take up some time worth billing for too.

If I’m just raw typing on a subject I already know pretty well, I can easily do 500 words per hour. Nitpicky research, needing to format things in HTML, having to provide images, those slow me down to an average of about ~200 wph. By that point, I tend to bill by the hour instead.

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Belief in “Gatekeeping” is a Paranoid Delusion

So I’m a cultural muckraker, and consider it my station in life to slaughter sacred cows, shatter illusions, bring illumination to our dark world, and correct common misconceptions. My popularity in this regard varies depending on the target. I can savage organized religion, Wall Street, Republicans, Nickelback, whatever is the acceptable target, and then you all love me. Because you are the choir I preach to.

I could publish a recipe for BBQ Jeff Bezos right now and probably get a ticker-tape parade for it. But then, if all I did was knock down straw men all day, I’d be fat ‘n’ lazy. Instead, I choose a more difficult topic, which will make me a lot less popular.

Today, I am going to tell YOU, yes YOU READING THIS, why YOU do a bad, damaging thing on social media, and why YOU need to stop it. In fact, I am going to beat this lesson into your backside with a belt and squat you in the corner afterwards to think about what you’ve done. I do it because I love you.

I’m not very popular when I do this. There will be no ticker tape parade for me for this post, but I am OK with that. Because doing things means more to me than validation.

What is this “Gatekeeping”?

Not to single out this particular person or account or even instance, but the lesson demands a random example:

Millennials

This gem is a perfect example of the “gatekeeping” delusion. It hits all the woke buzzwords. And it shows a nasty mental virus that infests the “writing” community.

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Anatomy of a Scam Link-Building Spammer Service

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…

write_for_Dab_Connection-640x360
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Unprecedented Times: Don’t Underestimate the Impact of the Pandemic

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.

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