Posted by Joshua Tyler | Updated
Independent Publishers helped build the Internet. Once we make it good and everyone wants to jump on the Internet, other forces just hijack it, taking advantage of the work done by freelancers. Independent Publishers have been in a huge battle for survival ever since, and they are losing.
Who or what is the Independent against? You’re about to find out.
What Is an Independent Publisher Anyway?
Independent Publishers take many approaches. It can be an organization dedicated to testing and updating air filters. Or you can find a bunch of guys playing classic video games. It could be a travel guide, a series of fitness tips, a fan site dedicated to the love of pencils, a site full of DIY home improvement ideas, or a blog that pokes fun at bad celebrity photos. It could be a site with a silly name like Giant Freakin Robot. The title doesn’t matter.
An Independent Publisher is a website or group of websites that creates content of any kind. The site must have one owner, and that one owner must be heavily involved in day-to-day operations. They cannot be part of or connected to a large company or conglomerate.
That means there are no investors buying a website and sitting back for cash while other people do all the work. There are no golf marketers who spend their days partying and socializing to get deals or investors for their “product”.
That doesn’t mean the site owner has to do all the work himself. An Independent Publisher cannot have employees or principals. The size of the publisher doesn’t matter; what matters is who they see and what their purpose is.
Intention is key. Are you trying to build a real publication with real readers? Or is this a ploy to pull in as much traffic and money as quickly as possible before ditching the site and starting another? Independent Publishers are in it for the long haul, with a site or sites they own. No folding and burning.
What makes a publisher Independent is the ability to come up with their own ideas. The Independent does not use an algorithm to determine everything it publishes. They don’t base their business on copying what other publishers are doing in a ridiculous attempt to steal their traffic. They are not out to hunt for the perfect keyword or to set up some method of using parasite SEO to suck people off the internet and into their wallets.
Above all, being an Independent Publisher means owning your own yours opinions. They and their team (if they have one) should express themselves in any way they see fit.
Enemies of Independent Publishers
Now that you know what they are, you should know that Independent Publishers are disappearing. They will go out of business by the hundreds, and for good reason. They have enemies. This is who those enemies are.
Large platforms
There was a time when Independent Publishers and large online platforms had common goals and worked in a symbiotic relationship.
When social media first appeared, it was independent publishers who promoted it, driving their loyal readers to sign up for their social media pages. Unfortunately, when the social media has grown enough and has all its readers, they stop distributing the posts of Independents and instead send their readers to Big Brand X.
Now the same thing happened with Google. I have written a lot about it, if you want to read that go here.
Niche Sites
Calling something a “niche site” was originally intended to indicate that it was an Independent Publisher with a site that focused narrowly on one small topic. Gone are those days. The term has been co-opted by churn and burn spammers who use the “niche area” to legitimize themselves. Real niche sites are their victims and should stick to calling themselves “Independent Publishers” from now on.
These site parasites make a living by stealing ideas from publishers and flooding the internet with black hat tricks to garner their traffic. They build dozens, sometimes huge, generic sites, burn them, absorb as much money from the Internet as possible. When one of their locations is occupied, they discard it like a used Kleenex and move on to another.
It’s all done while posing as Independent Publishers and niche content creators to fool both readers and Google into thinking their niche site is legitimate. That’s not the case. They are destroying the Internet using the power and ideas stolen from independent publishers.
Big Brands
Niche spammers have created a lot of confusion as a way to make money. Big Brands have positioned themselves as the solution to that confusion if all platforms would allow them to own the entire Internet.
I recently wrote a detailed guide explaining how Big Brands are working to destroy independents. Read it and prepare for their attack.
The SEO industry
Search Engine Professionals make a living by calling themselves the Freelance Publisher’s best friend. When a publisher runs into trouble, he’s always there to lend a hand… as long as you’re willing to pay him.
Except they’re not your friends. Their industry only exists as long as Google is viewed as a playground. When people find out that this is not the case, they will also realize that SEO work is a scam.
The main job of SEO is to protect Google’s reputation, their entire business depends on it. Whether they actually help you is irrelevant because all SEOs make clients pay upfront and often make them sign disclaimers admitting that what the SEO does may not be helpful.
Does SEO work? There are several legitimate SEOs that help local small businesses figure out how to get their sites listed on Google Maps. These SEOs are to be commended if they really help your local grandma’s clothing store get customers while charging a very reasonable rate with guaranteed results. But then again, your grandma probably hired a web developer to build her a WordPress website and install a plugin that would do the same thing.
Most SEOs don’t help your grandmother. Many SEOs target online publishers with scams, rip them off, and discredit those same publishers by getting in Google’s way. Maybe what they’re doing was actually important a few years ago, but there’s a strong case to be made that, for many websites, SEO is gone and Google has adjusted its algorithm to ignore it. SEOs are no better than soothsayers (some of whom really believe they can predict the future) and should probably have a few more useful things to do that web developers handle.
If SEO works on a site and that site increases its traffic, SEOs say that their optimization was responsible.
If SEO works on a site and traffic drops, they blame the site and leave.
They have no way of knowing what is coming and what is not. The discovery of the site they are taking may have happened without their intervention. Since there are no identical copies of the same site at the same time with the same conditions, nothing can serve as a control, so there is no way to test or verify any of their claims.
OFFICIAL FREAKIN A ROBOT has been banned by Google four times in the last two years. Now it has also recovered four times. In all four cases, no changes of any kind were made to the site prior to recovery.
If an SEO had been hired and made changes, they would have taken credit for those four acquisitions. How could anyone know the difference?
The SEO industry takes money from independent publishers and gives nothing back. They are a huge force in the field and often the people behind the spammy niche sites I warned you about earlier. They use your data to help Big Companies steal your traffic, your energy, and your ideas. He always pretends to be your best friend.
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