Tag: business

I For One Welcome Our Visigoth Overlords

You can’t deny that 2021 is shaping up to be a different year from 2020. We have the same ol’ virus, but we threw out everything else we can get our hands on. The smell of revolution is in the air, and it smells like a new generation wrestling the wealth away from the old, and new culture bumping off the old guard. Finally.

At request of my handlers at 123ish.com, I plunged again into the Gamestop stock short raid and modern Bitcoin millionaires, and pointed out that this, at last, is the proverbial sacking of Rome writ in modern times and the movement of wealth from dusty old guys in suits to bright young kids who approach investing the way they do a World of Warcraft raid.

WallStreetWoW

Speaking of Bitcoin, JWZ, one of my old-skool-hacker idols, has lately become the Al Gore of cryptocurrency mining, yelling that we’re heating the Earth with our greed and we’re all doomed, doomed, DOOMED! He has headlines like “Bitcoin mine cargo container literally incinerating planet,” and more on his dunning-krugerrands tag.

Meanwhile I follow Satan on Twitter (don’t ask, it’s a long story), and come to find out Hell has its own cryptocurrency now. Because of course it does.

I think Satan and JWZ should meet, and possibly have a no-holds-barred brawl in the DNA Lounge for the destiny of this planet. Wouldn’t that be exciting, boys and girls?

Want to see what other cultural rat-traps I have been poking my battered nose into lately? Right this way…

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Quality SEO Backlinks : The Only Trick That Actually Works

Hi, I’m “Penguin” Pete Trbovich, and YOU overthink SEO!

This time, I want you to take protective measures. Wear a hockey mask and catcher’s mitt, or at least have a pillow handy. This is because I’m about to tell you an SEO trick that is so BLINDING obvious and yet nobody ever, ever thinks of it.

Backlinks, backlinks, backlinks, everybody wants backlinks! To quote Moz.com: “Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent a ‘vote of confidence’ from one site to another.” But they just talk about how important quality backlinks are, not how to get them. Many sites out there pay lip service to this concept, but are vague on how to get backlinks.

I will not be vague. I will be very specific. This blog post is over 2K words long, relax.

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You Can’t Say That In a Digital Ad Anymore

See, my freelance career revolves around content creation for the web. And a lot of my clients run ads on their site, either as their main revenue or just a sidecar profit stream. A bunch of them also advertise themselves. Generally speaking, I get to work with ad-based content a lot, either taking or giving.

What a lot of people don’t realize is how many kinds of restricted content there are in the world of online advertising. Most ad networks are highly conservative about the kinds of ads they will run. Since we’ve all seen some questionable ads, it makes you wonder about the kind they turn down.

Prohibitions against alcohol, tobacco, and firearms are a given, as well as adult / mature content, content harmful to minors, hate speech, etc. You’ll be happy to know that most major ad networks ban illegal and fraudulent content. These make sense, but there’s others that you’d never think of.

One of my gigs is the cannabis industry, for example, which cannot advertise through regular networks, full stop. Companies that make not just cannabis products, but even accessories, have to turn to specialized ad networks and affiliate programs that cater to their niche. While I was pitching in for the research on that post (I’m also chief site editor there), I came across some of the restrictions, and they remind me of the old “wacky laws” lists that used to post around the old web.

So here we go…

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How To Make Freelance Writers Barf With Just One Job Listing

I am here today to speak on behalf of all keyboard hacks everywhere. From the lowest SEO rat off Fiverr to the most successful content marketing guru. Every single one of us is sick of flowery writing gig ads.

Let me save you time: If you really want to attract top talent that will actually work for you, the golden ad formula is this:

Hiring-Writers

How Your “Help Wanted” Ad For A Writer Should Look:

  • PAY – MENTION! THIS! FIRST!
  • Schedule – Being as flexible as possible helps us cram your project into that five-hour gap in our week.
  • Topic – WHAT will I be writing? If there’s more to it than just writing, mention duties i.e. editing, social media management, WordPress plug-in slingin’, etc.
  • Company – WHAT is your business model? What is your mission statement? Essentially, how is my writing supposed to make you money?
  • Target audience – WHOM will I be writing for? Are they old fuddie-duddies who still own black-and-white TVs? Are they young hip teens? Working-class moms? Entrepreneurs?

This should be easy stuff. You sell something to somebody and now you want a content marketer, don’t you? One of the biggest things that will make us freelance writers skip your ad is if you sound like you have no clue as to any of the above points.

But in the first, most essential place, please spare us these sugary funeral eulogies like this one somebody pitched at me on Linked-In. This is not to reflect on the company. This is just an education in what writers actually think about when they read your ad.

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Now My Other Gigs Are Infected With Occult Influence

You could say the same for every day of the cursed year of 2020, but my timeline seems to have been particularly dark since reviewing – and being bit by – Cultist Simulator. It was indeed a fit spooky choice for October, which dragged me through the month as I’ve tried to keep up my horror viewing in the middle of everything else.

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Is Ignite Cannabis Co. trying to tell us something?

At my stoner DabConnection gig, we’ve become the freelance police of the cannabis industry busting fake brands of THC vape cartridges left and right. But this time I got interested in a real brand managed by an Instagram influencer Dan Bilzerian, though “real” and “managed” are both up for debate. The brand has raised millions in investor funding and squandered millions more with Bilzerian apparently going through the most hysterical public midlife-crisis ever. We’re talking $50 million in 2019 alone!

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The Invisible Nation

As the United States witnessed firsthand in the 2016 election, technology is now as good as the prime mover in US politics. From the flap over Clinton’s emails to Trump’s impulsive Twitter rants in the wee hours of the night, and from the Facebook ecology of political posts in the months leading up to November 8th, 2016, to the self-organizing flash mobs of protesters and rioters that emerged after the fact, that election was shaped by electronic communication more than any election before it.

We’ve become more aware of that in the past four years, but it was creeping up on us then.

Which raises a very pertinent question: Just how much is high-tech media going to shape the world? Will we become a race of hyper-sentient empaths? Are we all merging into a hivemind?

group-hive-think

When anybody in the world can transmit any amount of information to anybody else in the world in a split second, all barriers have been lifted. There’s really no practical difference between the average person now and an omniscient being, at least as far as an ancient Biblical author would have conceived it. Each of us carries in our pocket a device granting us powers that, one hundred years ago, would have been seen as nigh on godly.

But that’s the trouble with a planet full of omniscient gods: They become a royal pain to boss around. Yet we need to regulate this space now, right now!

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I Investigate Some Anti-Pot Propaganda Billboards

In this Monday’s edition of my weekly exploration log, I got curious about marijuana propaganda and decided to dig into who is behind all the billboards popping up in weed-legal states. The answers, as you might expect, range from complete mysteries to right-wing muscle groups to hair-raising teen-torture scared-straight camps. JWZ, world’s biggest fan of They Live(1988), would have been proud of me. I felt just like this:

one_that_can_see

Anti-Drug billboards sponsored by Straight Incorporated founders

And seriously, I’m not kidding about teen-torture camps. Some of them are sponsored by “Drug Free America Foundation,” no surprise, but that foundation was founded by the same husband and wife team behind Straight Incorporated. Sample review:

“Straight, Incorporated was a very destructive, highly controversial and extremely abusive cult that shamelessly and dishonestly, masqueraded as a drug rehab for teenagers in several parts of the United States from 1976 to 1993.”

“These teenagers who were incarcerated in all of these savage Straight locations usually ranged in age from 13 to 20 years of age. The Straight cult had these Warehouse type facilities which operated in states such as California, Virginia, Texas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Georgia, Maryland, Ohio and Florida. Contrary to the mythology and propaganda endlessly perpetuated by Straight, these kids were not clients! These teenagers were hostages. While on First Phase they were imprisoned and held against their will physically,emotionally and psychologically (and sadly in so many cases, all three,) at the Straight Facility during the day and at night they were shuttled and transported (against their will) to various foster homes where they were held against their will there as well.”

The hair-raising tales of torture, rape, brainwashing, and even deaths in these American teen-torture camps rival many a horror story from the Holocaust, and it’s going on right under our noses right now, nobody knows. Start digging here, and here, and here. Bring your barf bag. This industry has gone on with no oversight, no regulation, for decades now, without once breaking the news. Remember when Mitt Romney was running against Obama? He was financed by WWASP. The teen torture industry has some deep ties to US religions that have an unusual interest in UFOs, which might explain why the closer to Utah you go, the creepier the anti-marijuana billboards get.

And speaking of UFOs (he said provocatively)…

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Gen Z Parents : Help Us, You’re Our Only Hope!

The editorial powers that be asked me to throw together a resource for parents facing “back to school” in the post-COVID-19 world. This is a post on home-schooling and remote education resources for parents raising mostly K-12 kids. It’s not much, but it’s what little I can do.

Parents should take education into their own hands, even before COVID-19

Even though we sent our kids through public school, we homeschooled them as if they weren’t attending. That’s because the public school system in the US is so gutted, so hostile to intelligence, such a Babylon of pseudo-learning idolatry, that I have to wonder if it does more harm than good.

MAPS_highest_paid_public_professions_US

I dunno, it’s like US schools had some other focus besides learning. I can’t quite put my finger on it though. It’s on the tip of my tongue.

life_support_for_football

Maybe I’ll recall what it is…

In case you missed it (because who even checks by this dead blog to begin with?), I also covered freelance writing in a post-COVID-19 world. So there, you have your school covered and your work covered, all off-grid. Call us when we get a government that’s interested in doing anything for people again.

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I Am Now A Documented Nunsploitation Watcher

Cthulhu give me strength, my review of Satanico Pandemonium : La Sexorcista (1975) is now live over at my 366WeirdMovies gig. There’s no taking it back now. What’s worse, I actually half-liked it. It’s got great locations and cinematography, and moves at a brisk enough clip that the batty plot will fly right by you without too much grief.

Oh, and here’s a film still that didn’t make the review’s cut:

Satanico_Pandemonium slasher nun

My clients get a little squeamish about posting borderline images, but here in the gutter on my own site I put on no airs of propriety. You’re already reading a post with “Nunsploitation” in the title; it’s a little late to pretend you have standards now.

Of course, I’ve been up to a lot more film-related devilment lately…

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You Overthink SEO – Ongoing Series

Over at 123ish.com, my client has commissioned a series tapping my 20+ years experience in content marketing. I’ve dispensed some hard-won SEO and online marketing wisdom in a steady trickle over there. Here’s a list:

Top SEO Factors BESIDES Keywords – For those website owners who pay all the attention to SEO keywords and no attention to anything else, including whether Google’s crawlers can index the page with all that great content on it in the first place. Yes, I have had to patiently explain to generations of clients that Google needs to FIND the page first, then worry about the keywords.

Amazing New SEO Method Discovered : Write Like A Human Being! – Busting a mass of myths about actual text content in relation to how Google sees and ranks your site. The problem with this field is that 90% of the knowledge about textual SEO you’ll find on the web is either outdated, or was outrageous nonsense in the first place.

The Top SEO Tools For Content Marketing – I just want to point out that I was not compensated nor paid by any of the companies whose software I mention here. Yes, SEMRush is expensive, but it’s such a power-tool that it’s ridiculous not to mention it.

Social Media Optimization – The Other Digital Marketing – Along with SEO, nobody thinks about this other sphere of online content marketing: social media. Yet “influencers” pull down up to seven figures, so there must be something to it, no?

I put these posts up partly for the education of the general public, and partly with a self-serving mission because I’m sick to death of explaining the same thing to client after client over and over and over… This isn’t going to help much, but it’s something.

Of course, watch my own space here as I also post under the category You Overthink SEO, just some addendum thoughts and my snarkier, less marketable thoughts on the matter.