Sometimes, you can just see the money fly by.
I’ve been thinking about, not seriously, but enough to have it rattling around in my brain, about writing an article about Patreon Alternatives. It would be a look at the best ways for someone wanting to do fundraising, or crowdfunding (or is it crowd funding?), who wanted to use something besides Patreon. In other words, alternatives to Patron that work just as well. (Oh, with deliberately misspelled Patron, because you know folks are going to get that wrong when they search…)
But, I haven’t written that article yet. No big deal. I have lot of ideas. As a freelance writer, I also have to crank out that professional writing work. At the end of the day, that is what the back burner is for, metaphorically speaking.
Patreon Screws Over Users and Creators
But, then, yesterday, Patreon announced some really unpopular changes to its fee structure that most Patreon users are very unhappy about. As a result, today there are probably tens of thousands (millions?) of searches flowing through Google looking for what to use instead of Patreaon. My search results as of two minutes ago looked like this:
Now, it CAN be hard to outrank Quora, though not always, especially if you have a nice, long-form, well-written article sitting out there with a little bit of age on it, and some incoming links, but those next two spots are easy pickings. Even better, there are a lot of people who don’t like Quora, so they wouldn’t even click on that first link. Spots #2 and #3 on this list are worth a nice chunk of change today.
Of course, getting an alternatives to Patreon article ranked now will take more effort. There are about a dozen websites with a head start, and they have various link building operations to fire up, and so on. Besides in a few days, this will all blow over and this search won’t be worth near as much money is it was yesterday, and today (and maybe tomorrow).
Check out this review of Acorns, the automatic money saving app.
The lament here is that IF I had actually gotten around to writing this article, chances are it would be sitting here on the front page of search results waiting for clicks from Patreon’s screw up. Trying to race out and publish something now (AHEM!) is probably not going to be worth much. That being said, I have 10 minutes before I need to head out, so here we go.
I don’t do a lot of SEO blogging because:
- a) It’s a super-saturated market
- b) The people who read that stuff are insufferable in comments and on Twitter
- c) Why give away the secrets if you actually know them
- d) Believe it or not, there isn’t much advertising revenue in SEO (there is probably good money in affiliate and in selling stuff, but that’s not my jam)
But, on a day like today, it’s hard to see the ball go sailing by. A solid article, and just the tiniest bit of SEO would have been worth hundreds, or even thousands with almost no effort. If only I had a time machine. (Of course, if I had a time machine there would be literally INFINITY ways to make more money easier than getting this article out last month.)