Scaled 6 brands to 100,000+ organics/month. Biggest grew 0 to 1.5m/month & drove 100k paid customers. Join 11k marketers in the #1 Content Ops community. 👇
Seattle
Joined April 2009
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I grew Doggypedia(.)org from 0 to 116,000 organics/month (DR9) in about 13 months.
I did it to sharpen my axe, create a case study for my agency, and maybe turn it into a business.
I also wanted a platform to learn other marketing skills, getting 3,400,000 views on YouTube
Nick Jordan retweeted
bro think about it, women are the original VCs
- believe in you pre-revenue
- come in for the seed
- encourage you to raise your burn and increase headcount
Nick Jordan retweeted
Interesting - but not surprising - to see people on LinkedIn sharing their stories of losing all search visibility (sometimes overnight) after an aggressive AI content strategy.
Even less surprising, given how many people are suddenly self-proclaimed “experts” in AI search, without having the necessary context about search algorithms and spam policies.
With all the latest hype about AI and automation, of course it’s easy to take things too far with scaling content quickly - and there are countless new articles proclaiming how “search engines can’t detect AI content” or “AI content ranks just fine” or “Google said it’s ok to use AI content.”
I’d be a bit more cautious than to use this guidance as a free pass to scale AI content without oversight. Just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. And of course companies like Google are going to say “AI content is ok,” especially given that they are in the business of promoting generative AI tools.
But for those of us dealing with companies affected by core updates and manual actions (for years), the same patterns are true over and over. Scaling content with little to no original insights, unique information that hasn’t already been written about (which btw is the definition of AI content), lots of pages that are quite literally generated for SEO/AEO purposes but not super helpful for users… all these things can and will get your site in trouble, it’s just a matter of when.
Just because it’s easy/free to automate content creation doesn’t mean you always should. In many cases, it’s playing with fire.
Nick Jordan retweeted
In the middle of a "forcing party" where friends and I are forcing one another to do the things that we've been avoiding
So far:
• A passport has been filed for
• An inbox has been zero'd
• A personal website has been created
&more
I recommend this format!
Nick Jordan retweeted
A month ago, Hubsbot started a new experiment on its blog.
It's a big bet. We must observe this test very carefully.
In short, Hubspot tests blocking access to content for humans while keeping it accessible for Google and AI chats.
HOW HUBSPOT THINKS (my assumption)
"We know exactly that traffic to our blog will decrease by 30-50% in the near future because of the AI chats adoption and AI overviews implementation by Google.
However, blocking AI chats from accessing our content doesn't solve the problem. In this case, we'll lose 100% of traffic, and people will never look for our guide only.
Let's compensate traffic drop with a conversion growth. From most of our blog readers, we want only an email. We can't sell them the platform immediately.
Let's add a client-side overlay (gate) that hides part of the content visually but doesn’t remove it from the DOM (Document Object Model).
Our content will be mentioned in AI chats, and half of the people will visit the blog, and they are ready to leave emails because it's important to work with the source of the data for them.
Google isn't our friend anymore. We switch our focus to growing owned media".
WHY IS THIS A BIG BET
If it works for Hubspot, more and more brands will try this approach.
And it can change the overall user journey on the web.
- People will be subscribed to more newsletters.
- People will consume more content by reading newsletters, rather than using Google.
This sounds too unusual. But if I know that Google can give only some high-level summary, and I can't read anything deep by links from AI overviews, I will use Google less.
Do you agree?
Nick Jordan retweeted
Cloudflare to block AI crawlers by default and offer a new Pay Per Crawl pricing method to compensate content creators (@Cloudflare powers ~20% of the web) seroundtable.com/cloudflare-…
I built an Applicant Tracking System.
Candidates hit us up all the time asking for jobs.
Woke up to this support request today.
Nick Jordan retweeted
Is Miami a good or bad startup ecosystem? Yes.
Is Chicago way behind or doing better across startups? Yes.
Smaller startup ecosystems will never show up well if you take all VC money as baseline, because they don't have massive late-stage rounds.
Split by stage to see trends
I've lived in a lot of cities, and Barcelona is the only city I bump into people I know fairly regularly.
A big part of the reason I'm a founder is my ADHD
I'm a great learner, but school was a soul crushing experience. I knew I couldn't survive a 9-5 for 50 years.
I saw being a Founder as the way to escape the system.
It worked
- Live in Barcelona
- Wake up without an alarm clock
- Go to the gym at 11am
- Less than 10 meetings per week
- Recognized as a high performer by my peers
- Delegated all of the work I don't enjoy
- Hitting solid financial milestones
Nick Jordan retweeted
Everyone says they’d pay more for “Made in the USA.”
I tested it.
We make a $129 filtered showerhead manufactured in China. With tariffs surging to 170%, we explored reshoring. We found a U.S. supplier. Our costs nearly tripled.
I ran a clean A/B test:
👇
My agency is incubating a new internal project
- Launched on April 3rd
- 5 purchases
- $650 in revenue
I am SUPER excited, because:
- SEO is the biggest acquisition channel
- It's B2C which means it doesn't leverage my personal brand *AT ALL*
- I get to learn Google Adwords, YouTube, Pinterest, and TikTok
- AI can't disrupt it, in fact, the need for the service will increase as AI becomes more widespread
- Enough operational friction to dissuade internet marketers from competing
Nick Jordan retweeted
Hot take: SEO is better than it’s ever been.
Why? Because 90% of your competitors just gave up.
-Google’s chaotic.
-AI is everywhere.
-Traffic’s harder to win.
But if you know how to build a brand, trust, and velocity—you’re playing on easy mode.
