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Welcome to this week’s edition of The Small Business Corner newsletter!
When Google first launched publicly in 1998, it was not clear how it would change the search engine scene.
Two decades later, many businesses depend on search engines like Google to drive traffic to their websites to increase their sales and grow their businesses.
Over the years, Google as a company and its powerful search engine tool have become essential for professional and personal use.
Have a question? Google it! Want to fix something? Google it! Are you looking for an Italian restaurant? Google it!
So much so that we've already incorporated the verb "google it," and it's even used metaphorically.
The way search engines work is changing with the rise of powerful AI and LLM tools. These tools can process the data and directly answer specific questions instead of providing website links through which you have to navigate.
Of course, garbage in, garbage out. Meaning that if the AI and LLM models are trained on incorrect data, the results will be equally erroneous.
With time, this problem may be solved, just like Google’s algorithm ranks websites based on several factors, including backlinks, the quality of the content, website speed, the structure of the website, etc.
Given all the above, the topic I’ve been thinking and reading about over the past few weeks is how these developments will affect the way we interact with search engines, AI software like GPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and the like, and the way we generate content.
Yes, content is king. Yes, content needs to be of high quality so Google and AI software recognise what you’re producing and cite it as a credible source on a particular topic.
What will this content look like? It’s easier than ever before to produce SEO content programmatically, generating endless articles like paper mills, videos, and other formats flooding the web with more and more content. But the market will be saturated if it isn’t already.
You can then look for a very niche topic to write about, but everyone else will be doing the exact same thing.
You can even start sharing all kinds of data and statistics, generate calculators and tools, and produce a variety of things that anyone else can do by simply prompting GPT or Perplexity.
I would be lying if I said I had a clear answer to this question. I’m not looking at this problem as an existentially threatening one. It’s a question well worth contemplating.
I can, for example, ask GPT and Perplexity this question and see what they say, but for now, I would rather not. Here’s an interesting perspective I stumbled across in a YouTube video. The title of the video, which I’ll share below, was ‘SEO Is a Waste of Time in 2024.’ The guy suggests that if you want to grow your business, your best bet nowadays is to create YouTube videos.
I don’t think I completely agree with the diagnosis or the proposed solution. It’s a curious take either way.
Do we even need content if we can upload the articles to AI software and have it summed up in no time? Anyone can do data crunching too.
Could it be that from here onwards storytelling and fiction will become more popular?
While I’m writing this brief reflection, I can’t help but think that maybe moving forward, any content that you want to put out there to build an audience, gain credibility, and grow your business can be one of the following - and I’m only referring to text format here:
Philosophers have always obsessed over the concept of authenticity. When you’re living an authentic life or writing an authentic piece, you’re being true to yourself.
Maybe from here onwards, people will seek more authenticity? This isn’t to say that AI is bad. On the contrary, given that these new search engine software powered by AI and LLMs can do a good job answering questions, maybe good content will be more focused on unique stories, experiences, and reflections.
When 100+ articles can be quickly put up comparing the features of two different products, what high-quality content would look like in this case? Will you be fighting (paper) mills like Don Quijote, or will you be summoning the Steven Pressfield muses to craft compelling stories and content that people would want to consume?
“The popular mythology about the breakout growth of these companies is that they simply came up with a business idea that was “lightning in a bottle”—one idea that was so brilliant and transformative that it took the market by storm. Yet that version of history is patently false. Mass adoption was achieved neither quickly nor easily for all of these powerhouses; far from it. It wasn’t the immaculate conception of a world-changing product nor any single insight, lucky break, or stroke of genius that rocketed these companies to success. In reality, their success was driven by the methodical, rapid-fire generation and testing of new ideas for product development and marketing, and the use of data on user behavior to find the winning ideas that drove growth.” — Sean Ellis
How Albert Camus Found Solace in the Absurdity of Football
"When you’re playing well, your perception is distilled down to vision and reaction, and the hot lens of awareness is made the plaything of other forces: muscles, flesh, the lungs, those older parts of us that evolved long before the cortex with its unending, corrosive commentary."
This week, I would like to share two super interesting and compelling videos. If, like me, you are wondering what the hell was going on last week when over 8 million window screens went blue, who CrowdStrike is, what a computer kernel means, and why everything was shut down for several hours on July 19th, then I invite you to watch the following videos presented by Dave Plummer, a retired Microsoft software engineer. He does a particularly wonderful job of explaining, for the non-developers like myself, what the issue was, and in the follow-up video, he expands on the initial explanation, gives an overview of the latest news, and offers some speculation about what could have caused the huge outage.
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As the name suggests, The Small Business Corner focuses on starting, managing, and running a small business. Hosted by the Xiva team, we also develop an app that simplifies business management and payments for small businesses and the self-employed. Here, you will find articles on managing and marketing a business, industry updates, tech trends, and in-depth analyses of lifestyle design, work-life balance, and small business communities. Join us as we support each other in learning and growth.
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