Greatest Hit : Why Would You Want To Do That?

The below is a post from November 6th, 2011. NINE YEARS AGO AS OF THIS POSTING. It was posted on my old open source blog and got popular enough to get passed around most of the very news sites I talked about in there. Much water has gone under the bridge since then.

I STILL want Dillo! I just gave up and use Lynx for that function now. I couldn’t get Dillo to even compile on a modern system without maintaining it myself. There are thousands of journalists out there that struggle with this same problem every day; they need to get the facts, and all the facts are behind either paywalls or a million popups and autoplaying videos. I wish we just had a blogger’s equivalent of a Press Pass.

I also no longer run any of the below Linux distros. I’m on the Mint bandwagon now. It’s been the default “works out of the box” Linux distro for a few years, but God knows what I’ll have to resort to if Mint gronks.

Anyway, I’m reposting this NINE YEAR OLD post because people loved it and linked to it. Do not be surprised if it is out of date, because it is an old post. Got that?

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My 123ish Posts : An Updated Link List

One of my clients, 123ish.com, is an international platform which has been gracefully accepting some of my most maddened rants over the years. Sadly, they do not have a way to link to an author’s page using their set-up. So from here on out, I will maintain this specific blog post and link it from this site’s front page, serving as a pseudo-directory to my work over there.

Links to all my 123ish.com posts in chronological order (bottom = newest) after the jump:

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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.

A Content Marketing Career: Expectations vs Reality

Over at 123ish.com, my satellite client, I’ve been asked to start talking about my own line of work. So I detailed how I accidentally became a content marketer for the web starting from a childhood spent reading books. Then I tackled a detail within content marketing for the web, with the top SEO factors that have nothing to do with the content.

Media changed everything over the last two decades, and it’s still changing everything faster than we can track it. In another century, I might have been a journalist, a historian, a columnist, or a hack scrivener for pulp fiction rags. I kind of regret missing the boat on that last one. But I am in this century, and so I am a content marketer.

That SEO post fits into my grand scheme of blog-rant TED-talks about how everyone overthinks SEO. Expect more to come, because there is no end of delusions about this pursuit.

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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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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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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How I Became A Detective Tracking Down Poison THC Vape Cartridges

I’m Just As Surprised As You Are!

Somewhere in my online journalism career, winging into its third decade, I must have come to think of myself as a member of the counterculture. Certainly, the “geek culture” beat I’ve been pounding on is no longer underground, but part of the mainstream and transformed into a hyperthyroid monster of its own. So much so that we enablers sometimes wish we’d saved the cork to the genie’s bottle in case it gets out of control. Ever since undertaking to branch out into swampier horizons, I’ve sought new catacombs of popular culture. There has to be a skull or spiderweb or two here sufficiently gruesome to hold aloft and fascinate some of you.

And then they legalized weed.

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New 123ish Post: The International ECommerce Guide To American Holidays

Every year during the holidays, when dealing with clients from all over the world and having to explain to my fifth Australian what Thanksgiving is and why my whole family’s visiting for it, I vow to write this guide someday. Thanks to the marvelous venue that 123ish.com has turned into, I finally got it done!

So: The International ECommerce Guide To American Holidays. Find out why Groundhog Day is so weird, why we can’t predict when Easter will strike, and why your American team-mates might even need October 30th off. Even if you’re native, you’ll still learn something because I’ve tucked away some little-known chestnuts about the origins of the colored-in days on the United States calendar.

If anybody else has a similar guide for another country, I’d love to find out about it. In fact, if you’re not from the United States, why not write an international guide for your country’s holidays? I, myself, would like more insight on what, for example, a “boxing day” is.

That Time My Pan Review Got Quoted On A Movie Poster

It’s scary how fame works. You can strive for it all your life and die forgotten. Or you can live in the Information Age, when you get suddenly famous at a moment when your guard was at its lowest. Here’s to all the people out there who are frantically grappling with a problem and looking to others for help, but all they see are people pointing phones at them.

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