This week I’ve been learning SEO and suddenly a lot of Google’s search results make sense. A lot of the hollow content that feels extremely shallow makes sense.

It’s all SEO optimized.

This is a massive industry. And why so? Because traffic = page impressions and page impressions = advertising revenue. And the internet is very good at ad delivery.

This isn’t new to me, I always knew there was a major industry here, but I’d avoided it. Until now.

The reason is, suprise, I haven’t been able to drive traffic to https://divide.cash. Faced with the options of going out and getting customer 1 by 1, or via campaigns or other content marketing, I thought why not aim for something as passive as possible.

But as I started down this road, it got me thinking, search results are an incredibly valuable resource. Its a stream of consciousness of the general public.

If you’re having trouble finding demand for your product, maybe you should have built for demand instead. That’s way easier.

1. Very hard: create a new product for a future where you expect demand (ai, crypto).
2. Hard: create a product based on your own needs, then go and market it to some other people who might have it.
3. Moderate: create a product based on someone else’s needs, preferably a professional context or something that requires unique domain knowledge.
4. Easy: Find demand through the global stream of consciousness that is search enginer keywords, and build for it.

Judging by all the SEO optimization out there, I may be the last one to internalize this, but I can attack from a different angle.

I’m a builder. I can build just about whatever. Most are stuck executing content strategies to rank higher on search.

That’s what I’ll be trying next. Build for demand first.