Internet advice goes stale. Don’t trust it.

Internet advice goes stale, but that doesn’t mean it goes away. You could be following advice that worked great 5 years ago, but it’s no longer working.

This is something I find frequently in my work as a marketer. Because I’m in the trenches, testing tactics, I can see what’s failing during a hype cycle.

I was in a private community recently, sharing my dissatisfaction with webinars. During the pandemic, webinars were great, and I based my business on them. (You can watch replays of my marketing webinars and virtual event webinars, if you like.)

But this year, it’s been really hard to get people to attend virtual events.

I have some thoughts on why this is happening:

• People are hungry for in-person events
• Webinars have over-saturated the market, because they are so easy to produce
• Most hosts are not skilled at earning attention during webinars
• Many webinars are bland and boring and long
• Short-form video content (TikTok, Reels, etc) delivers more actionable information with a lower burden of time invested

After sharing this perspective in a community, a member forwarded me an email from another marketer, who was singing the praises of webinars.

He has a course, of course, that teaches you how to produce your own webinars. This promotional email (sent last month) was full of reasons why webinars are the best way to grow your business right now.

This is the tail end of every Internet hype cycle: marketers are selling techniques that have already become ineffective.

Anatomy of a Hype Cycle

New bloggers will write blog posts about blogging, because in order to master something, it’s very helpful to teach it to others.

This means that many of the marketers marketing about marketing are newbies recycling what they have read elsewhere. (I am guilty of this, like every marketer in the world.)

Because I wrote a post five years ago with regurgitated advice, search engines will rank that post higher in their results than newer advice.

This means:

The worst advice could have the best SEO.