Jeremy Goodrich's Blog

Back in September, 2008 (roughly eight months ago now) some asshole decided to try to "anchor text spam" their site for our brand name. I just checked our stats & as their "quantified" I have a pretty good idea of their numbers:
Us - 3.7 million last month, this month, 4.7 million (wow).
Them - 1.7 million last month, this month, 1.7 million

Now when they did this, we were only slightly ahead of them...however, in the last eight months, we've opened a decided lead of this scumbag.

Why would I call them scum? Look: if you spend your limited resources on trying to acquire shit that's not yours (eg, crap on my brand, or another competitor's brand) it won't work. YOU aren't me, and I'm not YOU. Therefore, even if you succeeded, temporarily, at outranking some other brand in a search engine...wouldn't the searcher be the one who loses? You're not me, right? And I'm definitely not you.

There's a problem among business people I've seen in the US. Some are amazing, wonderful and I'd love to spend countless hours with them as they *get it* pure & simple. Justin Sanger, as an example, is one of the most amazing internet people I've met over the years. While I never did take the job offer in Chicago with him & his team, I do sometimes wonder what it would have been like to work with him, as we clicked, and I fully respect his business skills, leadership capability and vision.

On the other hand, there are the assholes, you know, scammers, spammers and one trick pony marketers who just think if they can only get that spark going, their going to make it...no, it doesn't work that way.

People need to *trust* you before they'll work with you. Look, I'm not perfect, I can post a list of my failures here (have been bankrupt not once, but twice and my first full time consulting business ended in flames. My second, I nearly ran into the ground which ended in a rebranding and my wife taking over. Thankfully, she's far better a person than I am and made the correct decisions I didn't have the insight or fortitude to make at the time.

What do I make of all this? I'm rambling, I know...however, at the end of the day, only you can do you, and only I can do me. So perhaps, just maybe, you should figure out if the you that you are, is willing to do you...if not, perhaps, you should figure out how to gain some trust to ensure that you can do you.