Remaking it would be easy

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Years ago, after we had finished a huge project, someone asked us why it took so long by saying “I could have done that in a week”. They were correct, but also very mistaken.

The output of most creative work takes a long time to achieve. Logos take many sketches and revisions. Headlines require research and interviews. Layouts require planning and thought. Once it’s done, though, it’s easy for someone else to do it again.

In a recent post, Seth Godin shares a few examples of that such as:

  • A novel might take five years to write. Retyping it takes a day.
  • A company could easily expend 10,000 hours of effort before launching a new logo. Drawing the logo takes four minutes.

More importantly, he shares the reason why:

The first time, we’re not only wayfaring, we’re asking, arguing, compromising, re-working, re-starting and exploring. The second time, we have a map and we’re ready to go.

This is the danger in tools like Squarespace that let you just pick a layout and go. It can be a good solution in a pinch, but a “pretty design” isn’t likely to be effective without some thought and research behind it.

I could retype your book today, but that doesn’t diminish the years that it took you to write it the first time.

Google only uses 20% of your links

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When Google first came on the scene back in 1998, their big innovation that changed the world was simply looking at website links. If a site had more links pointing toward it, then Google gave it more credit and it ranked higher. It was a simple but brilliant insight that made Google search far better than any of their competitors.

As a result, though, companies quickly started trying to game the system and get more links pointing to their site. I’ve shared thoughts on links going back almost 17 years (like this), but things have changed a lot since then.

In a recent episode of the Duct Tape Marketing show, they had Bruce Clay (the “Father of Search Engine Optimization”) on to discuss the state of SEO and AI here in 2025. Bruce had a lot of great insights, but one thing really stood out to me. To paraphrase what he said:

“Google only counts your best links, so getting more links is usually a waste. I think that Google only uses 20% of your links.”

These are merely guesses from Bruce, but I suspect that Bruce would be able to guess that type of thing more accurately than virtually anyone.

The lesson is pretty simple — don’t waste your time building links. Our agency had a service to help clients gain links a long time ago, but we stopped that practice many years back. Producing great content is always one of the best things you can do, and spending time to be where your clients are (often on social media) should be right up there as well.

As for link building, it’s time to give that up and focus on what really matters. Check out that full podcast episode for more.

Duplicate content is a good thing

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Around a decade ago, I shared some thoughts on how Google handles duplicate content. In short, while duplicate content generally wasn’t really a good thing, there wasn’t a penalty associated with it or anything. We encouraged people to avoid publishing duplicate content, but it wasn’t a huge deal.

These days things have flipped, and duplicate content can be very helpful.

This video from Rand Fishkin explains what I mean. He shares how he frequently uses the same chunk of text along with the name of his company, and as a result the AI tools are always surfacing his company for that very specific phrase.

In particular, he points out his profile on his website, and how when he speaks at events he always encourages those events to use this profile word-for-word. Included in it is a little blurb about his company, including the words “SparkToro, makers of fine audience research software“. Sure enough, if you go to your AI tool of choice and search for things related to finding “audience research software”, SparkToro usually comes up.

Here’s what I see in ChatGPT:

As Rand points out, though, if you search for phrases around “audience research tools” (which is essentially the same phrase), he doesn’t come up at all. AI tools don’t care as much about synonyms as Google does, and they’re just pattern matching words. This means two things:

  • The specific words that you use to describe your company are very important.
  • Once you’ve decided on the words, getting that text published far and wide will be of great benefit to you.

The second bullet is much easier said than done. Publish blog posts, repost on other platforms like Substack and Medium, share frequently on social media, appear on podcasts, use a PR firm to help get published in other places, etc. The more you get it out there, the more the AI tools will pick up on it.

Then, when people are using those AI tools to do research about companies like yours, you just might be the result that is shown.

Check out Rand’s full (3 minute) video for more.

Unsolicited Response Rate

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Jay Acunzo recently shared a great new marketing metric that I want find a way to measure. How often do people reach out to you, unsolicited, because of something that you wrote or said?

Worded a bit better, from Jay:

Without gaming it, without asking for it, once you “get in front of” others, do your ideas COMPEL a response? Not hate or snark, and again, not the gamed approaches I see used here to trigger a reply (“Comment WANT to get my…”). No, the question is, are your ideas valuable enough, original enough, HIGH-IMPACT enough to compel an unsolicited response?

It’s brilliant, and very hard to achieve.

We all see the posts that he’s referring to where people play games to create engagement. That’s not always bad, but it’s not real engagement. What does it look like when people really resonate with and respond to what you put out into the world?

In our case, I often see a lot of this after we host a Meetup. While we usually have time for Q&A during the Meetup, it’s the responses that come in later that are so rewarding. Having people reach out after just to tell us that they found it to be informative and worthwhile is a great sign that we’re doing the right thing.

As more and more people play silly games to try to boost fake engagement, how can you show up in the world today in an authentic way that inspires people to respond?

Jay’s post goes deeper into the details of how he sees this happening, and I encourage you to check out his full post for more.

Weighing your words against the labor of ink

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I recently listened to the “Shell Game” podcast series, hosted by Evan Ratliff. He describes the show like this:

What would happen if you created a digital copy of yourself, powered by AI, and set it loose in the world? Evan Ratliff, longtime tech journalist, decided to find out. He combined a clone of his voice, an AI chatbot, and a phone line—many phone lines, actually—into what are called “voice agents.” Then for the six months, he sent them out… as himself.

It was a fascinating show, and I highly recommend that you give it a listen.

In the final episode of the show, Evan references a 100-year-old article in the New York Times (view on NYT, or view Google Doc) about a shopkeeper who resisted getting a telephone for as long as he could, but he finally relented. It’s not a long article, at right around 1,500 words, so it’s worth giving it a read.

The focus of the article is about keeping humanity in business and “who are in revolt against the mechanisms of the city“. In the article they share a bit about why the slower pace can be advantageous, saying:

“If you use machines, you write a hundred letters where one will do, but not if each word is weighed against the labor of spreading out a drop of ink.”

It feels like something I say a lot on here (such as these thoughts from Blaise Pascal and Woodrow Wilson), though I’ll admit that the concept of a daily blog largely runs counter to that idea. If I were hand-writing all of these posts, they’d certainly come out a bit differently. Even so, I work hard to keep my thoughts concise and I weigh them carefully against the time needed to read them.

I may not always succeed, but keeping in mind the “labor of spreading out a drop of ink” is a valuable idea for all of us.

Short emails are a good thing

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There may be rare circumstances where a flowery email is appropriate, but 99% of the time you’re better off just getting to the point. Thanks to AI, many people are writing a short email and then using AI to unnecessarily expand it to make it more “professional”.

On the receiving side, more and more people are using AI to “summarize this email into bullet points”. Its reminds of this comic from Tom Fishburne, which is becoming shockingly accurate.

The end result is wasted effort on both sides, and likely a degree of miscommunication. It’s kind of like using Google Translate to translate from text from English to German, and then translate it back again. It’s likely going to have the same overall sentiment, but some things may get lost in translation.

Don’t be curt with your colleagues, but don’t feel the need to make emails unnecessarily long. Share what you need and move on. Short emails can be a great thing.

Jab, Jab, Jab

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12 years ago, Gary Vaynerchuk wrote an excellent book called “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook“. The idea was pretty simple: your social media content should consist primarily of “jabs”, where you’re sharing value-added content to make life better for your followers, with just the occasional “right hook” thrown in with your call-to-action.

Lately, it seems most people are either all jabs or all right hooks.

All Jabs

All jabs isn’t a bad place to be. If you’re solely providing great content to your followers, you’ll end up in a great place. That’s essentially how we ended up as clients of the CPA firm that we use, and we essentially produce content the same way.

All Right Hooks

The problem I’m seeing is too many right hooks. No jabs, just sales. There are the pure spammers of course, but that’s not what I’m referring to here. These are all people I know, that have chosen not to engage in any meaningful way online, and only show up when they need something.

For example, here’s I guy I know that I hadn’t talked to in a while. I reached out to see how he was doing, and he never replied, but four months later he reached out to me with a direct pitch.

Another friend has literally never posted on LinkedIn, and their first (and only!) post was looking for a job. That’s understandable, but should be followed up with other content that might be useful for potential employers. Instead, it’s just the one post on their feed and nothing else. I suspect it won’t go well.

A different friend has taken a similar tact. I know they’ve been struggling to get clients for their solo practice, and yet his last two posts have been:

  • 5 months ago: “I’m looking for work”
  • 1 year ago: “Here’s why you should hire me”

There are no posts showing his viewpoints, or tech stories that interest him, or resources for others to use. There is nothing that shows anyone why you would actually want to hire him.

Jabs Win

Social media isn’t the answer for everything, for sure, but if you’re going to spend a little time to post on there, throw a few jabs while you’re logged in.

I point people to the CPA firm that we use quite often because they do it right. Here are Jason’s last six posts on LinkedIn as of the time I’m building this post:

  • Shared a recent podcast episode of theirs.
  • Shared an episode from a different podcast of theirs.
  • Shared a recent post from Gary Vaynerchuk about having purpose in your work.
  • Shared a bit about their firm.
  • Shared a tax reminder for small businesses.
  • Shared a helpful product that one of their clients is offering to litigators.

He throws in some soft Right Hooks from time to time, but I love following his content because of the great insights and resources that he shares.

Throw an occasional Right Hook from time to time if you want, but pepper the internet with Jabs and things will tend to work out great for you!

You can make any kind of art

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I’ve long been thankful for the time in history in which I’ve grown up. We got an early computer when I was young (a Commodore 64), then I got to grow up through an amazing generation of video game systems, and now we have stunningly powerful machines, AI, and so much great stuff.

While I’m sad that I won’t be around to see what things are like hundreds of years from now, being around for these pivotal moments has been amazing.

Growing up, I thought about this a lot in regards to my grandfather Vic (who I shared a bit about here). Given how he worked and thought, I really think he would have loved computing but he was simply too early in history to catch much of it. That said, he was able to take his skills and use them with technology of his time (woodworking and gadgets and such) with great success.

We’re the same way; we’re born with our desires, and then we manifest them through the technology that our place in history allows. From Seth Godin’s book “Linchpin“, he shares the same idea. First, he talks about “art” being potentially many different things. In my case, my “art” is this blog (and not design-related), and I’m pleased with that. From his book:

“You can be an artist who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances. An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it personally.”

He also digs into the “time in history” part of this discussion, saying:

“I don’t believe that you are born to do a certain kind of art, mainly because your genes have no idea what technology is going to be available to you. Cave painters, stone carvers, playwrights, chemists, quantum-mechanic mechanics—people do their art where they find it, not the other way around.”

You may love the power you get with a tool like Photoshop, but you also likely would have loved painting by hand a century ago, or would love the crazy new AI/AR/VR/Whatever tools that will come along decades from now.

As Seth said, art can be about many different things, but it’s really about intent and not substances. Use what you have the best you can, because we’re all lucky to be around at this moment in time.

We control the means of production

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For nearly all of human history, a select few controlled the means of production. A handful of people owned the factories, the facilities, and the raw materials, and there wasn’t much that the other people could do about it.

Thankfully, we’re a place now where that’s no longer true. The device that you’re reading this on has all of the capability that anyone else on the planet has; you can can capture images, write content, create videos, and do more than people could have imagined just a few decades ago.

Some people choose not to take advantage of it. From his book “Linchpin“, Seth Godin explains his frustration with folks like that:

“I’m always amazed when I meet a writer who can’t use a computer, or a lawyer who’s uncomfortable with LexisNexis, or an executive who needs a corporate IT person to help him navigate an e-mail system.”

Or put more succinctly:

“The world just gave you control over the means of production. Not to master them is a sin.”

The counter to this idea is to say “No, we don’t. Google controls the search engine, Facebook controls social media, and we’re just cogs in their systems.” It’s not wrong, but it’s a lazy argument.

You can own your content and own the algorithms. There is a good chance that you’re reading this because you’ve subscribed to get these posts by email. There’s no search engine, no social media, and no algorithms involved. I own the site and I own the email list, and it costs essentially nothing for both of them.

You can choose to ignore the technology like Seth shared, or you can give up because “they” control everything, or you can just grab control for yourself. The means of production are in your hands, so use them.

Where do your customers form their opinions?

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Google is increasingly becoming a place where people go to find a specific website or company, but not where their journey really begins — it’s more often where their journey ends. However, the data can make this seem a little confusing.

As shared by Rand Fishkin, this chart shows which sites drive the most traffic on the web:

Looking at that, it seems that you should really be investing in getting more traffic from Google. However, that chart is a bit misleading because it simply shows where people come from, but not what motivated the words in their search.

Rand goes on to share this chart, which shows where people spend their time online:

You can see that search is just a tiny piece of that (10.25%). Your customers are on those other sites, where they learn about you and your industry, read reviews, talk with others, and form their opinion on next steps. Once that opinion is formed, they often head to Google to navigate to your website (or the site of your competitor).

Google shouldn’t be ignored, but the data you see for traffic coming to your site likely isn’t really showing what leads people to find you in the first place.