An unexpected benefit of writing a daily blog has been that I automatically keep track of which TV shows have good writing. Usually, if I get one or two quotes from a season, I already consider myself lucky. But after finishing the second part of the Star Wars prequel show Andor, I wrote 4 posts about it. That’s a lot!
There was, however, one more post that eluded me. While reviewing the episode titles, a phrase jumped out at me: “I have friends everywhere.” It’s the rebels’ secret identification phrase, allowing them to reveal themselves without alerting the Galactic Empire’s many spies. I saw it and thought: “Oh, that’s bound to be a popular quote down the line.”
I remembered getting extra lucky once before: A post about a quote from The Rings of Power I had written had ended up in the top results on Google. Could I replicate this success, I wondered? I opened a draft, typed the quote as the headline, and let the idea sit.
Days went by. I wrote all the other posts about Andor that I had taken notes on. I turned the phrase over in my head time and again. “I have friends everywhere.” Today was the time to finally sit down and write it. Once I did, however, I realized: I don’t have anything else to say about this phrase. At least not right now. So I’m not going to write about it purely in hopes of getting more eyeballs to my blog.
I used to do this thing called Search Engine Optimization, or “SEO” for short. When I started with it in 2015, it basically meant making a few small tweaks to your articles in order to make them more understandable for Google’s and potentially other search engines. The reason I liked it is that, one, it worked—Four Minute Books received 600,000 visitors per month at its peak, 95% coming from Google—and two, it was marketing I didn’t have to bend over backwards for. I didn’t have to mutilate my ideas in order to sell them. I could just write what I wanted to write, optimize a few components, like the headline, subheads, adding an image, and so on, and that was good enough.
After years of being the most reliable marketing channel, however, in 2023, everything changed. Google pivoted its algorithm towards big brands. Chatbots started siphoning away millions of users. And even Google now showed AI-generated results right on its search page, sending clicks to websites off a cliff. My website lost 90% of its traffic, and I haven’t bothered with SEO since.
With an entire marketing industry in shambles, I soon decided to focus on the upside: Now I get to art. The only kind of SEO I want to be doing is Self-Expression Optimization. I want to say what I believe, write about what I care about, and make only the art I’m genuinely excited by when I first imagine it. So far, it’s going well. I haven’t done any try-hard marketing for the blog, or tried much at all for that matter. I haven’t checked my analytics all year. And instead of covering a quote I have few thoughts on to get views, I’m now telling you this story.
Have a little faith. As long as you stay genuine, eventually, the world will come to you. It might not be the whole world, but that’s okay. With our without fame, there’ll always be more cool shows to synthesize in your writing—and being excited about both your inputs and outputs is what art is all about.
