2022-12-04

Fluff post (do not read!)

WARNING: This page contains shameless advertising for my own company. I'm going to try to teach at least something in here, but this page is definitely what I'd call a "fluff post." 

Have you ever noticed how it seems like every website now requires a username and password just to browse cheap merchandise? And they all have a strangely-heavily-populated blog. Who would ever want to read a weekly blog about off-road rollerblade wheels anyway? Not this guy. It's like they all want to be some sort of social media site where their users will "connect," or they think that you'll care about "earning points" (1 point always equals approximately $0.0001), or that you want their newsletter or blog, or that it's so important to password-protect your one-time purchase of some $5 knick-knack. 

It's downright annoying. Not to mention that I now have 1,000,000 passwords (I counted) for websites I'll never visit again. And rest assured-- if I ever did want to visit one of them again, it'd be a 30 minute ordeal just to recover that stupid password.

So why all the hullaballoo? 

Since building websites for my own company (TRR Designs) and brands (Ensemble Interactives, Stately Ceramics, and Well Stated Clothing), I've gotten to see a bit under the hood of website development, structure, and advertising. In a word (well, two), the reason for all websites going down this annoying route is: advertising and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This page is an example of what I call a "fluff post," meaning that the main purpose was for me to insert those links to my other websites. So if you clicked on this page just because it said "do not read!" then you've now seen the rub. My thoughts on each of these 3 conspiracies follow.

Advertising

The user account requirement is easy to explain: advertising. With the exception of a few larger website you use regularly (e.g. Amazon), I'm sure you-- like me-- have next to zero interest in having a user account on every website. The reason they all make you create an account is so they can keep track of your email and browsing, and send you tactical, psychological advertisement campaigns statistically guaranteed to generate some sales for them. Just launch an "e-commerce" website (jargon for "a website that sells something"), and wait to get inundated with ads and spam mail about softwares, tactics, and gurus for "growing your user base," "collecting emails," and "targeted email campaigns" or "marketing funnels." The latter two refer to long-game strategies salesmen have developed to "funnel" site browsers into paying customers; accomplished by sending a structured series of psychologically-tuned emails to whet your purchasing appetite, "funneling" you toward the e-cash registers. Sounds conspiratorial? See for yourself!

And the more email addresses you can collect, the better. When you're dealing with tens of thousands of potential viewers of your ads or emails, you as a seller can start making statistical assumptions (or at least experiments) about how many sales you can get without trying too hard. For example, let's suppose just 1% of website visitors make a purchase, and just 1% of people shown an ad actually visit the website. (Fairly conservative estimates.) This means that each sale required 100 x 100 = 10,000 pairs of eyeballs be shown the ad/email/whatever. Sounds like you'd need boo-koos of people interested in your stuff just to get a single sale? I now get regularly offered to pay (only a modest fee) to access lists of 200 million plus email addresses. (Wonder where they got all those? Just think.) And [200,000,000 leads] / [10,000 leads per sale] = 20,000 sales!

SEO

SEO mainly refers to the tactics you employ in the structure of, and data in your website, causing your listing to become "optimized" within the "search engine" (viz. Google, because let's not pretend anyone uses Bing). By "optimized," folks usually mean that their site appears high (ideally, first) in a Google search of any terms related to their site/content/data/products/etc. In other words, catering to "The Algorithm" of Google. And if you create your own website, you'll get dozens of solicitations from SEO gurus in addition to your healthy dose of email campaign managers. (All part of this complete breakfast!) Known methods of optimizing your website include: 

• Having an HTTPS (secure protocol) instead of HTTP website: Google prefers to show you HTTPS sites because these use encrypted communication, and are therefore more hacker-proof. You can (partially) thank Edward Snowden for pushing for the widespread adoption of internet encryption. (I read Snowden's book.)

• Custom meta-data: mostly refers to the stuff that would appear if you searched for the website of interest, as opposed to typed in the correct URL directly. For example, if I Google "stately ceramics" instead of navigated directly to www.statelyceramics.com, here's the meta-data I see:

• Backlinks: Links to your website from other websites. These make Google think that your site/content must be important/search-worthy, since others are linking your pages. The SEO gurus in my inbox all offer to create backlinks for my sites by creating rubbish webpages on rubbish websites, needlessly inflating the internet with pages that will dilute future search results, all in hopes of landing 1 stop higher in the (ever-changing) Google priority algorithm. Backlinks do have a place: but the number of backlinks to a given site/webpage are only a valuable measure of that content's keyword fidelity when real people create the backlinks organically. Change my mind.

• More pages per website (senseless blog posts): Similarly to backlinks, the idea behind adding more pages to your website is to make Google think that you must be an authority on [the topic] and rank you higher in search results, since you have such a big collection of words/pages incorporating the (keywords of that) topic. Enter blog posts on every website. Seriously, Kevin, I just want to buy my replacement off-road rollerblade wheels as quickly and easily as possible, and get back to work. Never will I ever re-visit your website expressly to view your blog. Since I fundamentally detest this idea, I've had SEO gurus tell me that I should have a [blog] to add pages to my sites, but I could just hide them from the site's navigation if I didn't want visitors/customers to focus on them. 

Fluff Posts

So there you have it: more and more web pages these days seem to be fluff posts-- created only to house backlinks or big word counts. I've semi-vowed to myself not to resort to fluff posts on my own e-commerce sites; but couldn't resist the opportunity to make my own fluffy page on my own site. 

No one's reading this anyway... right?

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