SEO and the Curse of Boredom

I know a lot of smart SEO's doing a lot of non-SEO stuff these days. For me it was taking search to a new arena and disrupting an older industry with it. I've also been spending a lot of time with leaders in other facets of marketing learning new ways to drive traffic, online and offline. I've also been playing a shitload of golf, buying racecars, and adding college chicks to my Myspace page. You doing that, too? Maybe that's just my "turning 30" crisis...

The guy, doing the boring accountant's job, who wanted to be a lion tamer!

John, you are so right!

I found new challenges in learning to be a manager and trying to grow a company. It's completely different than working on your own. I'm deciding now if I really want to take things to a new level that way.

The good thing about doing something like this is you can still use all the knowledge and wisdom you have gained, but teach it to others while spending your time learning new (management) skills. I think I've recently read just about every leadership book out there!

I loved "managing" (or more specifically employee development in my case) but my analytical skills led me to the "root cause" of the issues I was charged with managing, and (you guessed it) they were not pretty. Maybe someday over a beer we'll chat about that but management is not a draw for me anymore. I can't stand to waste good brain cells on intractable problems. I think the baseball bat and megaphone are tools for use in the boardroom, not in the crowd.

I feel sorta the same way.

As for charging, a trip to Amsterdam helps...maybe traveling a bunch, learning new languages and cultures could provide entertainment and excitement for a while?

Could always pull a Shak and head to China :)

I too cringe at the thought of management. I worked with too many lazy people in the Navy to where it permanently warped my view of work ethics. I am typically shocked / perplexed / surprised when I hear of a person who loves their job if they are doing anything other than working for themselves.

But that's what makes it such a challenge!

Amen. I don't know what to do about it, but sitting around thinking/talking/breathing/sh*tting Google and *yawn* all the rest is boring me to tears. It's not just search and SEO, I think a lot of the web has gotten boring: it's harder to find truly creative sites anymore.

I do know that:

1. Building something well, even if only for yourself, is better than destroying.

2. There are times where we all need to step out of our comfort zone and take a risk.

3. Marketing (all of it) is a lot more fun than SEO in a Google monoculture.

4. PPC even more boring than watching cement set.

I think we all get management confused with leadership and vise-versa. Leadership is getting other people to willingly do what you want them to do. Management is about objects and people are not objects.

Then I meant leadership, not management.

Ditto here, Brad, and thanks for clarifying. I skipped right over the idea of "managing" (even though I did that, too... budgets, projects, staffing, etc) because I assumed Jill meant the staff development kind of management position (leadership, in your words). But in the boardroom, I can't agree more if you are suggesting that they view management as stock boy for the people department. Keep the shelves full, all in a row, labels facing front, move the older stuff out first (rotate the stock). Yup.

Just the *idea* of PPC is anathema to me. Like roulette -- it's a game, see, but the odds are all fixed, see, and they are all fixed in our favor, see, so yes you can play, and we will try a little to make it seem like you have some influence in the outcome, but never forget we have cameras everywhere, and we are watching every penny with a continuous tally, so we will make sure you never really win, ok?

I decided to take on some different work. It's a competitive arena, which is good, but short deadline to some results. Lo 'n behold the drudgery is worse than I ever expected. Nothing clever at all, just wiki spam, blog spam, low-quality consumer deceptions, and splog after splog after splog. Now I know why I stayed out of Viagra. Is this interesting to you guys? Really?

I'm thinking I need a boiler room or two of monkeys to be an "SEO agency" today. Where can I go to hire wanna be keyboard monkeys for $7/hour, and promote one to run it? Not that I want to. Hey Jill, is that what you meant by moving into "management" ?

Yeah I know, there's an innovation just waiting to be executed. Yawn. This is getting ugly.

Heh...not really!

I'm sure you'll find something you like. Me, I'm still looking too.

John,

Try face to face sales. Dealing directly with people means every encounter is a challenge. Try something where you don't have to maintain the account after you make the sale. Maintaining stuff puts you into a rut.

Warning, if you start wearing loud plaid suits, quit go through sales detox and then back to SEO. ;)

Pick your lifestyle, assess what income it takes to keep the parts that you like, then look for Pareto's Principle, i.e., the 80/20 Rule ...Except I've found it's really more like 65/10 in the virtual world. Most (but not quite all) of what bored me was contained within the high side of that ratio, so I've worked to eliminate as many of them as possible. I'm in the tax bracket where every dollar I decide NOT to earn is really only a half-dollar lost out-of-pocket, so why deal with PITA 80% stuff for 50 cents on the dollar?

My best Super Affiliate advice would be to set up a bunch of websites in markets that keep you awake and then marry rich.

?I got bored with SEO a very very very long time ago, then I got fed up with it.

Just too many SEO wannabees, I remember a while back when I was moding for SearchGuild, we kept getting these assholes that already had SEO sites up and running that would come to SG and ask questions like, “What is PR?” and “How does PR work?” or other newbee questions like “What is Anchor Text?” or my favorite, “What is HyperText Markup?”.

These people already had SEO sites up and running that promised people top rankings (usually #1 spots) But they didn’t even know what or how google’s page rank worked... That was when I got fed up with SEO in general and stopped calling myself an “SEO”...

Added, please remember that this was when googles PR actually meant something...

I like that logic. For me, one of the most important reality checks these days is, "Am I enjoying this?"

For stuff where the answer is no, I look for ways to automate it, delegate it, or eliminate it. Life is getting better all the time!

eliminate it

I came to the web to escape and have some fun playing the Game. It has worked, but it truthfully was sometimes harder than you'd expect to avoid 'business as usual.' In 1996, I made 2 fundamental Rules of the Game; #1 - No payroll. Outsource it, script it, park it, dump it. Whatever it takes, NO payroll. #2 - No incoming phone calls. Period. You'd be surprised how hard that is to do. You'd also be surprised how it changes your work. I'm in the business of being virtual, if you can't handle email then you don't need to talk to me.

You're just so right on the money. I spent 20 years employing dozens of costly wankers. I couldn’t find the time to do my own work because of their myriad problems that had to be sorted out. Got out, dumped the lot, sold the business, let the property, moved into a spare bedroom, cut overheads to the bone, never gave my number to a soul, email only and it saves on arguments as you've got a foolproof record. Found out I was much happier without scores of clients who all wanted the dog, the skin, the bones and the bark.
Now I just please myself and that’s not so difficult.

Nothing personal, cabbage and rcjordan, but based *solely on my TW reading experience*, you two are among the cranky ones. Not that you can't enjoy life that way, but it doesnt usually signal a completely satisfying existence.

Now, back to the boredom bit, I agree "seo" in quotes is a good trade for the fiercely independent. But it's gd boring, ain't it?

me as ironic how many went online out of boredom, and now that boredom has hit again, still look online. How much of the boredom is due to having stopped thinking out of the box?

That sounds like too much work...

Yup....One Foot In The Grave.
John you're also right on the money in my case, but bored? Never, there's too much in this world to complain about.

>Now, back to the boredom bit,

In SEO that is not going to change until somebody lifts their head above the trenches and really comes up with a Google killer. Read: not changing any time soon.

So cut the SE's out.

If SEO is boring, which it is, and the search engines are boring, which they are, maybe the fun is in figuring out non-search engine ways to gain traffic and improve those so that one can gain more commercial levels of referrals? That is, try to cut the SE's out of the picture altogether.

Maybe Nick Wilson is on to something, because blogs and social networking sites have gotten people to surf the web again, and we were all taught that the SE's had killed that off. Obviously that is not true.

Traffic is still fun, I don't see why it has to be so dependent on the SE's.

I'm bored too, not that I don't have a lot to learn but guess I'm tired of constantly explaining to sales reps and other, seo wannabes, why I didn't put 16 links with the same anchor text on the same page or bold every occurence of the keyword they think would be perfect because they found it one day on wordtracker. "But it's searched on 5,000 times a day" or "I read in a forum.....", they whine. But then again I've got bills to pay so I'm not quite doing the Shak thing Aaron, tried it once but the wife says no mas. I am going to China at least once a year though. The whole thing is that I really enjoy getting together with the seo community at conferences and such so I guess I'm not that bored, just a little pissed off. /rant