Marketing Letter - 📧 Go Email or Go Home

GM nerds,
​
Welcome back to the newsletter that helps you decipher the satire from the stupidity of what’s real, even in these trying times:

Believe it or not, this one’s satire.

Here’s what’s good this week:

→ Everything You Need to Know About the Google Update(s) 👀

→ What Jobs is AI Actually Replacing?🤔

→ Using AI to Define Your ICP🤖

→ Go Email or Go Home 📧

→ more, obviously

But first…

Link Building in 2024 Is Changing 🔗 We’ve all seen the massive shift in Google - page one is now only full of super high authority sites. Giant brands, massive media portfolios, and VC funded startups. This means that you need stronger backlinks than ever before to have a chance to compete. Your typical guest post farms have almost all been devalued and do literally nothing. Enter Smash Digital. We help brands build high-end backlinks on real sites using value driven outreach and our vast network of connections. ​👉Click here to see if your site is a fit.

​This Week's Pod 🗣️🎙️​

In EP65 of TWIDM, Sammie Ellard-King opens up about skyrocketing Instagram growth, digital product mastery, and the ins and outs of his revenue streams. Tune in.

​YouTube​

​Apple Podcast​

​Google Podcast​

​Spotify​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ Google update(s) just dropped, and everybody’s talking about it. The expectation from inside? To reduce “low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%.” Don’t worry— I know how this works. You come for the whole range of takes, I provide them:

- Ars Technica explains how Google’s claim to be targeting sites "created for search engines instead of people" is an attempt to “close Pandora’s box” and fight AI-powered search spam.

- @hridoyreh explains why Expired Domain Abuse Owners, Programmatic SEO Website Owners, and Parasite SEO Website Owners are most likely to be hit by this dual update

- Some site owners are wondering if they’re experiencing a “dead cat bounce” or if genuine recoveries are already happening?

- Looks like the Reddit issue won’t be addressed “since Google doesn’t identify Reddit itself as spam.” This would mean that “Reddit will continue to get spammed and Google will continue to rank it.”

- Gael Breton suggests that the HCU “may indeed turn into a page level signal” after Google went site-wide in 2022.
- Barry Schwartz goes deep, as always.

→ In other news, Google Ads just dropped a new tool that’ll generate performance reports automatically, which can be easily customized.

AI Insight 🤖

→ If you’re looking for data-backed analysis of what jobs AI is actually replacing, this is a great report. We’re looking at a whopping -33% decrease in writing jobs, -16% in customer service, and -19% in translation were all pretty predictable. What's interesting, though, is that video editing & production, graphic and web design, and both frontend and backend development jobs have all seen spikes in the ChatGPT era, rather than dips.

→ If you’re wondering how many news websites block AI crawlers from tech giants like OpenAI and Google, and how those trends have developed, check this.

→ This free playbook by MarketingDive & Terminus walks you through using AI to define your Ideal Customer Profile, guiding you on how to prepare for the process, design the right prompts to use, integrate compliance checks and privacy measures, avoid AI bias, and regularly test for the purposes of ongoing monitoring.

→ OpenAI is firing back at the Elon Musk lawsuit: “Since its inception in 2015, [OpenAI] has raised less than $45 million from Musk, despite his initial commitment to provide as much as $1 billion in funding.”

→ Claude is making its presence known in the AI wars once again, with some buzz around Claude 3 having “near-human” abilities.

→ How bad are ChatGPT’s copyright infringement issues? Patronus AI released its CopyrightCatcher and reports that GPT-4 produced copyrighted content on 44% of prompts, while Mistral's Mixtral, Llama 2, and Claude 2.1 ranged from 8%-22%. So… much worse.

Social Media Round-up 📲

→ TikTok is making some shifts in order to comply with the Digital Markets Act, rolling out a new Data Portability API that gives users enhanced data control and grants more choice in how the platform handles their data (profile information, posts information, followers & following lists, DMs, etc.) with regards to third-party apps

→ Threads continues its slow climb to relevance as post-scheduling is finally a thing, and reply moderation and analytics insights capabilities are coming soon, too.

→ If you’re using YouTube Shorts as part of your marketing strategy, you’ve got a new measurement option for your campaigns. Comscore just dropped an expansion of its YouTube measurement capabilities and now you can measure the success of YouTube Shorts.

Tip of the Week: Go Email or Go Home

Here’s where I come through your inbox to remind you that email marketing works. In this piece, Rand Fishkin argues “Email is the Most Consistent, Reliable Marketing Channel on the Web and I Can Prove It” and his proof is rock solid.

To put it in terms of the email vs. social media value exchange: “Statistically it’s better to trade 1,000 new followers for a single email subscriber.”

Dang.

Jacky Chou​
Founder of Indexsy
hello@indexsy.com
Let's Connect on Twitter👇

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