Wrapping up first project for an enterprise client at the moment. In less than three months we've created a fully autonomous, on-brand, compliance-eval'd content system that operates 0.1% of their web pages and will bring in about 5% of their web traffic and proportionate signups (est) over the next 12 months.

It's also boosted their presence in LLMs, improved their relative rankings vs competitors, and opened the team to new ways of working they can expand in the future.

Currently I'm looking to speak to 1-2 more companies who need help showing up beyond their website - if this is you, shoot me a message 📩

GF saw someone else in her profession with a personal site and asked me to help her make one. (What am I a talking website monkey?)

Anyway now she has one too and I am subtly making sure it's better in every single aspect

Thoughts/questions/observations from 6 months of doing tonnes of SEO work:

- search is dead (properly dead as in it's a 0, not in a "search is dead -> AEO" type way). might take 10 years but it's done; free channels are kinda gone/ done with it.
- google and chatgpt et al are boxes for serving ads (probably still some value in gaming the models but its like putting a sign outside your cafe)
- AEO roles likewise are cooked, they turn into either "unique destination makers" (unique data etc) for distributing in other channels OR into like bdr/PR/creator type outreach for getting offsite coverage
- value of text going down (obvi), switchover from text to video (obvi), but value of video ALSO going down bc saturation; i don't think people recognise this about video yet; it's like video games in 2020
- signalling cost is everything; if you put enough effort and quality into anything you can still get traction in (any?) channels that you want

I don't fully understand the implications yet but i suspect

- you need to participate in more channels for same result.
- slower / harder to grow organically
- higher quality/brand/uniqueness/effort etc requirements on what you do produce
- consistency increasingly important (signalling cost), you must decide what you're going to stand on/ own and really stand on it

Mate runs a blue collar service business, word of mouth acquisition. he complained about something on his site (a trash WP one), I looked and noticed he wasn't appearing in search for his area either

anyway 2hrs later he's got a new website and will be #1 in search fairly soon

As part of handover to client this week I left them with a very serious security warning. 3 of their team will have access to the system I made. As part of the briefing, I took everyone aside individually:

You have a write token to prod. DO NOT *ever* yell at Claude when it is on high effort and you're editing. It will go off and fix and/or delete fifteen things without your input.

"Wow thanks for the warning Sean, you're so clever, how did you know to watch for that?" Oh you know, no particular reason. I just divined it with my superior insight

had my first referral to Fireside from slack today!

would love to know what that message looked like

I wrote something on Firmus

Wow you watched a video where they sliced potatoes and fried them in a pan? And it was really cool? Intriguing

Hmm?? Do I what- No. Absolutely not, under no circumstances

If I wanted a mental illness I'd take up drinking

People who don't understand money meet people who don't understand creativity; a tale as old as time

Creative-led cannot survive the pressure of a public listing. In the future, listed IP's will be multiverse-esque megatitles, and everything creative will be privately owned

This also tells you exactly when to sell CDPR

Preparing a summary of this project for the client I'm wrapping up with today and holy hell I've outdone myself.

There's the project scope (1 page) and then all of the extra stuff I've done above and beyond - 3 pages of single line bullets

Locked in

This is top secret and you musn't tell anyone, but I set the slackbot I built for client to have a gigantic, outrageously happy clifford as the profile picture.

so every week they'll have a little something-something from me to brighten up their monday

👈🏾 have a free slot for lunch tomorrow if you're around Martin place / pitt st area.

Had handover team lunch with main client today instead, so I will have some time. DM?

After extensive testing of 5.5 I still reckon sonnet 4.6 is the best anthropic model for scaled content tasks.

Don't give me any of this "reasoning" and "combobulating" brother, just put the tokens in the bag please

Small win with new client overnight. We'd initially talked about content automation but when I looked at their site it was a bit of a mess...unclear info everywhere, search returning similarly named UK and US companies instead of them (in Australia!) etc

It was bad enough they'd written an article "who is [our company]?", which helped, but google stopped indexing it after the new algo updates.

Two days of absolute slog last week to tidy things up and disambiguate, and search now returns them first every time, and stopped them showing for a bunch of unrelated queries that drive no traffic

Ranking on their brand search also improved 20% (although I don't think these matters anymore - story for another time..)

I also gave it two big fireside threads that are like six weeks of work but didn't pan out and have just been kinda hanging around while I decide

I said idk what to do I'm blocked can you sort it out. It read all the old convos and proposed very thoughtful solutions; all done

Had my first serious "oh yeah maybe everyone does lose their job" moment last night.

I pointed chad at an n64 game and told it to remake it for me. Anyway in about 2 hours it extracted the assets and started stitching them together to make levels in a new engine

Chatgpt has added a completely unmuteable ping sound to both it's web and desktop apps?

Why the hell would you involuntarily inflict the slack notification sound on people

Wucking forking today, and not in the good way.

Tidying up for a handover on Wednesday.

Fixing half complete documentation clanker wrote and making it actually explain stuff