These Times They Are A Changin'
... and how the 'old-school' mindset needs to move on.
Listen up close. The goldfish-attention, swipe-right universe, just put a bullet through your old-school marketing brain. The money-sucking, lead-pumping, four-step funnel that built half the gurus you follow is deader than last week’s fish.
Google’s stealing two-thirds of your clicks, Facebook wants you chained inside its feed, organic reach on the platform is a rounding error at 3-4 percent, Apple kneecapped your email metrics, and a sea of AI slop is choking every platform your prospects touch. Hell, a lot of people are not even going to Google anymore, me included, instead, they head on over to their AI of choice and are asking to slurp on its font of knowledge.
Customer acquisition costs didn’t just creep up, they exploded 222 percent in eight years, so every “new customer” now walks off with $29 of your money tucked in their back pocket.
For organic reach, your blogs are now in Zero-Click purgatory. 65% of Google searches end without a single off-site click, your once-dependable SEO blog is now a ghost town.
Mobile is everything. 90%-plus of traffic is on a phone. Your desktop-styled PDFs and hour-long webinars? Dinosaur bait.
The funnel is broken. Social apps punish any link that tries to drag users away from their precious territory. Result: a yawning “Middle-of-Funnel” gap where customer journeys go to die.
Data is everything. Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon have gone full “Berlin Wall” with their user data meaning targeting stinks, and forcing you to ‘accept’ that using their AI to buy ads for you means you are spending way more to get much less.
Even I, the person who generates almost all of his income from email is constantly looking over his shoulder for the grim reaper. People’s inboxes are bloated, and over-zealously managed by machines whose only interest is to slurp their data (yes you Gmail), and they don’t really care about your marketing message or ‘update’ getting in-front of their precious ‘training platform’.
This is the real state of the internet in 2025. Everything has changed.
All of this however is a good thing.
The funnel isn’t broken; the world it was built for no longer exists. Leave everyone else who doesn’t get it, to fight over the algorithm crumbs.
Ignore all those guru’s telling you that you can use AI to write 30 days of social media posts with ChatGPT. Every guru out there is selling you a tool that uses AI for sales letters, email sequences, video scripts etc.
… and you know what.
They all produce the same slop.
And your audience knows it.
We have been perceiving the internet from our generations point of view, but in reality everyone under the age of 30 assumes that everything online is fake, or some sort of scam.
Feed your 1,000 true fans with something no bot can counterfeit, and they’ll feed you for life. Craft one, hand-written story a week, and it may feel like you are running on slow, but your bank balance will say otherwise.
Stay tuned.
Dan
It's certainly a mine field compared to when we were starting out. We've found free communities are a wonderful 'crock pot' to presell people and 3 question Polls are a perfect sifting and sorting mechanism to pull out the mid to high ticket buyers.
" Craft one, hand-written story a week, and it may feel like you are running on slow, but your bank balance will say otherwise." This was actually my intention - I could say strategy, but I actually didn't think things through as strategy. All I ever wanted to do was write stories and get people to read them.
I got caught up in the whole Internet Marketing world and tried to learn from all the gurus and adjust to all the changes. Then recently, this Youtube thing popped up, and the research says its possible to make money making videos, and you can have AI help you. I have a YT channel with 95 videos of which 80 have been seen less than 5 times.
A week or so ago, I saw a notice that YouTube is revising its policies, and it got me thinking about how Google ruined so many busineses every time it changed an algorithm. So I decided then to unsubscribe from all the mail lists of all the software developers and all the marketing course developers, and all the personal development experts too.
I decided to go back to basics - loading up content to my websites. The "Make Money" gurus tell you to load up your website with articles related to your niche. Then they show you short cuts to article writing. Now, of course, everybody says you can have AI write your articles. And I say, "Screw all that."
I started taking down generic articles I had put up on my websites. In their place I am publishing short stories related to the niche. I just began using Substack, and I'm planning a free newsletter with stories about my niche, and links to my website. Chat GPT and Gemini have been helping me with story ideas and images to go along with the stories.
I don't know if I'll make money doing this. I haven't made money using any other method. With my new plan, whether I make money or not, at least i get satisfaction from crafting my own stories.