Why Is SEO Marketing For Media Topics So Hard?

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

You have a great idea for a moneymaking website: You’re going to write a fandom blog for your favorite media, be it movies, TV shows, music, video games, books, comics, manga, anime, whatever. And then you’re going to post affiliate links from your site to Amazon, etc., so that fans will read about this stuff and hopefully buy some of it with a commission for you.

What a “passive-income” prospect! All we need is some content marketing, and the rest takes care of itself. People Google for this stuff all the time, so you know it’s a popular topic space.

What fandom do we pick to write about first?

Star Wars is popular, we can cash in on that fandom! Let’s see how competitive writing about Star Wars is:

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New at GeekyDomain: Geek Nostalgia

Had a heck of a week over at my GeekyDomain gig.

First there was 80s action figures. All the top action figure franchises launched with their own cartoon, back when toys were cool. I dunno what happened to toys now. Tell me something named “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” would have made it if they came out in the 2010s. Most people never even know that they were originally done as a parody of comic book franchises. To see more of the action figure 80s including the really arcane stuff, see my IMGUR gallery.

But then, as if that weren’t enough geek nostalgia, I noticed that Radio Shack / Tandy post-mortems were all over the web… but they only told half the story. As a Generation Xer, I have a duty to document my unique observation point of view in history, so I made the most definitive retrospective on Radio Shack’s rise and fall you’ll ever see online. With a gallery of Tandy handheld electronic games!

I got around to ramblin’ about the legendary Trash-80 as part of that, so for those of you looking for a broader gallery of computer nostalgia, I also did an IMGUR dump of computing history focusing on the home desktop revolution.

You see, we Gen-Xers are a sparse lot, wedged in between the teeming masses of the Boomers on one end and the Mills on the other. Gen X is the only generation with a point of view bridging the period in between. Historians decades from now are going to be pawing through records trying to find Gen-Xers, who aren’t always marked by their appreciation of prosperity.

New at Geeky Domain: Collectible Guides For Marvel Figures and Star Wars Funko Pops

You get a 2-parter here because I’m too busy to break it up into individual posts and God knows when I get back in here. Two recent product lists to announce:

An Infinity of Collectible Marvel Figures – Come see Ant-Man swipe the Incredible Hulk’s can of Coke, then browse our selection for the best current Marvel universe figurines. We went with aesthetic appeal over most popular character, plus I get to pour my heart out for underrated B-list Marvel characters.
These Are The Star Wars Funko Pops You’re Looking For! – What could be more self-explanatory than “Star Wars Funko Pops”? But my twist is that I delve into the background on these characters, the actors who play them, their position in the ‘verse, and why they’re the definitive characters to collect for any Star Wars fan.

What else? I didn’t even mention it back during Christmas, but my first post at Geeky Domain we ginned up a quick and sloppy Christmas gift guide for Yoda fans based off The Mandalorian! Since most Baby Yoda merch doesn;t even ship until spring and is available for pre-order only, I figure it will be more useful next year than this year.

Is there anybody who has blogged more about Star Wars at this point than I have? I mean I can’t prove it – Half the stuff I’ve ever written for the web is now found only on the Internet Archive, if that. I was nattering about Star Wars back on the BBS era, before the World Wide Web, before Google, before AOL. I suppose people who write for Wookiepedia and the like can claim more Star Wars blogging than I, but that’s the people who specialize. And I don’t even count myself as a big fan of the series!

I figure these two posts go together because they’re the only choice left in geek cinema fandom now. You’re either a Marvel fan or a Star Wars fan. All the other franchises are extinct in American cinema. And they’re both owned by Disney, the mouse that frikkin’ roared, God help us all!

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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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.

New at 123ish: Items of Devotion for Alternative Religion + Join My Cult!

So this was a weird experimental post based on my starting an argument in which I held the position that you can make an Amazon product list out of anything. “Anything?” they said. “Anything, just pick something,” I said. So they said “something for the spiritual category.” And then I was naming the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Bob J.R. Dobbs and they went “Wait a minute, maybe this isn’t such a good idea.” But I said “Too late! Things have been set in motion which cannot be undone!”

And that’s how we got a list of Best Devotional Items For Alternative Religions. With a bonus section where I introduce my own alternative religion: the Cult of the Temponaut! I hope one day to have my cult grow to a world-wide viral phenomenon, just like all the wacky cults we deal with already. I mean, mine is mostly benevolent and nobody can get hurt in it, right? Ah well, we’ll find out, omelets and eggs.

Just remember, physicists have reversed time already using a quantum computer. That’s how you get Temponauts! Start showing them respect before you have to deal with them all at once.

New at 123ish: The Biggest and Best Lego Sets Ever

Hey, I never did get around to writing about Legos! I loved them, my kids loved them, and there’s a nice wholesome culture of Lego hobbyists and collectors out there. So I thought I’d round up the most impressive sets released in Lego history and blog about them. Good luck tracking them down, some of these are highly sought-after collector’s items!

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A Magic: The Gathering shopper’s guide

Conventional wisdom among spike tournament players is that you NEVER, ever ever buy boxed MTG products or even booster packs. Yeah, but like all absolutes, isn’t that not always true? Here, I define some of the typical boxed products that at least come close to a decent value for the money, pointing out the “Best Magic! the Gathering Sealed Products.”

And I’m of course speaking as a collector and player myself. Strategic MTG investment has worked almost like a second career with me over the years. Keeping an eye out for good value purchases I can break up and sell for individual value helps me stay in the game, even on my pauper-level freelancer budget!

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IMGUR posts: 1980s Action Figures and Vintage Pulp Novel Cover Art

So you all might be noticing by now, I’ve been tinkering around with IMGUR a lot lately. I can’t help getting hold of a social media platform and eventually experimenting with it to see what kinds of nifty posts I can make in that medium. The IMGUR format is underappreciated; it’s more like a super-Tumblr since you can post any amount of text appended to images and chain images together into albums. Not bad for a site that originally started as a side-feature for Reddit.

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Geek Gifts Lists: Valentine’s Ideas

So it’s almost Valentine’s Day here, and you know we’re all about the geek love at Penguin Pete’s! I don’t usually do this kind of thing, but conveniently one of my gigs is at Krononaut, which curates lists of cool stuff we find on Amazon.

What’s the difference between that and the zillion other Amazon list blogs out there? Well, we make sure the product is in stock, has a price range in the median of ~$40 for a comfortable disposable income budget, and we organize things by theme. If you happened to be looking for a certain niche item, you can search Amazon and wade through pages of irrelevant results, or grab one of our lists and have a concise assortment between six and ten items long that’s targeted exactly at what you were shopping for. Sound nifty? You’ve no idea!

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