Written by Joshua Tyler | Updated
Independent publishers helped build the Internet. Once we made it cool and everyone wanted to be online, other forces immediately snatched it up, taking advantage of the work freelancers did. Independent publishers have been fighting a desperate battle for survival ever since, and they are losing.
Who or what do freelancers face? You’re about to find out.
What is an independent publisher anyway?
Independent publishers take many forms. It may be an organization dedicated to Test and review air filters. Or you might find a group of men Enjoy classic video games. It could be Travel guidea series of Fitness tipsA fan site dedicated to the love of pencils, a site full of DIY home improvement ideasOr a blog that makes fun of ugly photos of celebrities. It might be a site with a very silly name like Giant Freakin Robot. The topic doesn’t matter.
An independent publisher is a website or group of websites that creates content of any type. The site must have a sole owner, and this sole owner must be heavily involved in the day-to-day operations. They cannot be part of or connected to a large company or conglomerate.
This means no investors are unable to buy a website and then sit around raising money while others do all the work. There are no golf salesmen who spend their days networking and networking to find deals or investors for their “brand.”
This does not mean that the site owner must do all the work himself. An independent publisher cannot have a staff of hundreds. The size of the publisher does not matter; What matters is who they owe it to and what their intention is.
Intention is key. Are you trying to build a real publication with real readers? Or is this a smash-and-grab operation to grab as much traffic and money as quickly as possible before scrapping the site and starting another? Independent publishers are in it for the long term, with the site or sites they own. No violence and burning.
What makes a publisher truly independent is the ability to come up with their own ideas. A freelancer doesn’t use an algorithm to determine everything they publish. They don’t base their business on copying what other publishers do in a cynical attempt to steal their traffic. They’re not looking for the perfect keyword or planning to set up some way to use parasitic SEO to drive people off the internet and into their coffers.
More than anything else, being an independent publisher means having king ideas. They and their team (if they have a team) should express them in any way they see fit.
Enemies of independent publishers
Now that you know what they are, you should know that independent publishers are on the way out. They’ve gone out of business by the hundreds, and there’s a reason. They have enemies. This is who these enemies are.
Great platforms
There was a time when independent publishers and large online platforms had the same goals and worked in a symbiotic relationship.
When social media first emerged, it was independent publishers who promoted it, driving their most loyal readers to subscribe to their social pages. Unfortunately, once social media got big enough and had all of its readers, it stopped distributing freelance flyers and sent its readers to Big Brand X instead.
Now something similar has happened with Google. I’ve already written a lot about that, if you want to read that, go here.
Specialized sites
Calling something a “niche site” was initially meant to indicate that it was an independent publisher with a site narrowly focused on one smaller topic. Those days are over. This term has been co-opted by spammers who use the “niche site” to disguise themselves as legitimate. The real niche sites are their victims and should probably stick to calling themselves “independent publishers” from now on.
These niche site parasites make their living by stealing ideas from publishers and then flooding the Internet with black hat tactics to co-opt their traffic. They create dozens, sometimes hundreds, of small public sites, which they burn, sucking as much money out of the Internet as possible. When one of their sites is discovered, they dispose of it like used tissues and move on to another site.
This is all done while pretending to be independent publishers and niche content creators so they can trick readers and Google into thinking their niche site is legitimate. not so. They are destroying the Internet using energy and ideas stolen from independent publishers.
Big brands
Dedicated spammers have created mass confusion as a money-making tactic. Big brands have positioned themselves as the solution to this confusion if only all platforms would let them own the entire internet.
I recently wrote a detailed guide explaining how big brands are destroying freelancers. Read them and be prepared for their attacks.
Search engine optimization industry
SEO experts make their living by describing themselves as an independent publisher’s best friend. When a publisher has a problem, they’re always there to help… as long as you’re willing to pay them.
Except they are not your friend. Their industry only exists as long as Google is seen as a level playing field. When people find out that this is not the case, they will also realize that the SEO profession is a scam.
The main task of SEO is to protect Google’s reputation, as their entire business depends on it. Whether they actually help you or not is irrelevant since all SEOs make clients pay upfront and usually make them sign a disclaimer admitting that what the SEO does may not help at all.
Does SEO work? There are a few legitimate SEOs that help local small businesses figure out how to get their location listed on Google Maps. These SEOs should be commended if they really help your grandmother’s local clothing store find customers while charging a very reasonable price with guaranteed results. But also, maybe your grandmother could hire a web developer to set up a WordPress site for her and install a plugin that would do the same thing.
Most SEO doesn’t help your grandmother. Most SEOs target online publishers with scams, scam them, and then disparage those same publishers because they stand in Google’s way. What they do may have actually mattered a few years ago, but there’s a strong argument that for most websites SEO doesn’t exist anymore, and Google has tweaked its algorithm to ignore it. SEOs are no better than fortune tellers (some of whom actually believe they can predict the future) and they probably have some useful things going for them as web developers.
If an SEO is working on a site and that site increases traffic, the SEO claims that the fixes they made are responsible.
If an SEO is working on a site and traffic drops, they blame the site and walk away.
They have no way of knowing what helps and what doesn’t. The site they took credit for might have been recovered without their intervention. Since there are no identical copies of the exact same site at the same time and under the same conditions, there is nothing to use as a control, and therefore no way to test or confirm any of their claims.
giant strange Robot It has been banned by Google four times in the past two years. He has now also recovered four times. In all four cases, no changes of any kind were made to this site prior to recovery.
If an SEO had been hired and had made changes, they would have taken credit for these four recoveries. How can anyone tell the difference?
The SEO industry takes money from independent publishers and gives nothing in return. They are big enablers of the platform and are also usually the people behind the spammy niche sites I warned you about earlier. They use your data to help big brands steal your traffic, energy, and ideas. All while pretending to be your best friend.