Musk, Blogging, and Social Media

Welcome to Issue #46 of Playing in the Pocket.

Photo by Snapwire

For the past several months, I've been learning SEO strategies that help niche sites rank quickly on Google. Once you know the secrets, SEO is easier than it's often made out to be.

As with most things, once you know, you know.

I've learned some shortcuts to find hidden keywords that are proving effective.

My other online business, a niche website, is demanding my attention, so this will be the last Playing in the Pocket for a while. I might drop in here when I have something to say about politics and culture, but it won't be consistent.

I'm just not gaining followers here, and my Medium audience hasn't converted to Substack.

The website I'm writing has nothing to do with writing or the creator economy, or I'd share it here.

It can make passive income if I give it the time and attention it requires on the front end. It has a ton of potential if I work on it non-stop. So, I need to clear my plate.

Getting off social media platforms is the goal.

One of the main reasons I want to monetize niche sites to sell is I'm sick of being at the mercy of social media platforms.

I want to be anonymous, the person behind the company, and not have my name and face online, just my business name. I'm a private person and never felt comfortable sharing my life on Medium, Substack, and Twitter.

Good SEO strategies eliminate the need to share on social media platforms.

The thought of not needing Twitter, BitClout, Medium, Instagram, Pinterest, et al. to "pitch" my writing or to make an income is freeing.

Niche sites can grow traffic without social media platforms. Using on-page and off-page SEO to please the Google algorithm can grow a blog and generate income.

I want off Twitter for obvious reasons.

Since Musk bought Twitter at the end of October, the collective IQ of Twitter has plummeted dramatically.

More offensive to me than Musk calling on his followers to vote Republican is how ignorant Musk is about free speech and politics. The more he tweets, the more obvious it becomes that he has huge gaps of knowledge on many subjects. He has been radicalized on the very site he offered to buy as a joke. He's red-pilled himself.

It's offensive to me how stupid he is. About a lot of things.

He has the vocabulary of a ten-year-old when talking about free speech issues and has put as much thought into the first amendment debate as a ten-year-old child. His arguments are less mature and nuanced than my teenager's regarding the first amendment. He has hermetically sealed himself in a red hat bubble, seemingly out of spite.

Even if it's a little fun and cathartic to watch the left annihilate Musk with pointed, witty responses to his tweets (many of which are bald-faced lies), calling out his hypocrisy and making him look like an ass every single day, I just can't stomach seeing the decade-long work of content moderation being rolled back in real-time in less than a month, making Twitter the hell-scape it is now.

Czar Musk decides who is in and who is out.

Even worse, his decisions are not based on logic or consistency.

Musk *is* the sole content moderator. It took him one month to realize content moderation was Twitter's greatest asset.

How stupid can one be?

Last week, Musk suspended Ye's (Kanye West) account after Ye shared an image of a swastika combined with the Star of David. Hello? Idiot! Suspending Ye's account is content moderation.

But Musk isn't consistent.

There are swastikas all over Twitter. Why is just Ye's account suspended and not all the other neo-Nazis Musk onboarded to Twitter in the last two weeks? Why isn't that one dude from North Carolina who posted a swastika suspended as well, or all the other bigots from all the other red states who post swastikas and the like?

Because Musk is in over his head, he fired all the content moderators and doesn't know what the f*ck he is doing. Nor does he care.

He is a bigot.

A rich bigot who owns the company that makes my favorite car, but a bigot no less.

Some liberal offended him once upon a time with his wokeness; now it's Musk’s mission to own the libs and tweet all day.

It's disappointing, to say the least.

Watching the left tear into this one-person shit show has its laughs. However, that, too, is getting old. It's just too easy to make Musk look bad because he’s doing most of that for us.

I no longer want to rely on these sites as part of a business strategy.

Especially Twitter and Facebook.

The next two months

My goal is 50,000 words in two months for one website I've designed.

That may sound like a lot. But it's doable.

For a good year, I published at least 1,500 words on Medium seven days a week. 50,000 words in two months equals 33 1,500-word or 16 3,000-word blog posts.

Once a site has at least that many words, 50K (using hidden keyword strategies), Google starts to flirt with you a bit and sends traffic your way.

Do not listen to anyone who says blogging is dead. It's not.

Google is king, and solid SEO strategies make a website queen.

Once my website is running smoothly, I may come back to writing about the creator economy, writing, blogging, and current events, but for now, I'm focusing on two websites that will bring passive income once they have enough traffic for me to join Mediavine.

After that, I may create a course on how to blog successfully using SEO which may force me back onto social media to hawk it, which is fine. As long as only part of my income is dependent on social media and not all of it. Diversification is critical when you're working in the creator economy.

But right now, I need a break from the chaos of social media.

Thanks for reading.

Reading:

No, You Do Not Have a Constitutional Right to Post Hunter Biden’s Dick Pic on Twitter by Tim Miller

Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson Don’t Understand the First Amendment by David French