👋 Hi everyone! We're back for another week of what’s what in the marketing world.

First, a bit of Forgematic news. Thank you to everyone who has been reading along, supporting with coffee, and just reaching out about Forgematic in general the past six months. I’m up for a creator grant which, if I get it, would give me a bit of runway to be able to take this thing full time and start building out our community. The grant is from the software company we use for the job board, which is a great example of the universe just doing its thing.

Outside the grant, I have some other ideas to take this full time — more on that next week.

Ok! On to this week’s news and jobs (plus a special section about the future of marketing)

Social Media and the creator economy

• This week, Twitter introduced a new-ish version of its block button called “Remove Follower.” The difference in the new version is the person has no idea you blocked them — they can still see your tweets.
• Facebook finally rolled out its Clubhouse copycat feature, “Live Audio.” Now you can host a room with all of your aunties who believe the vax puts a chip inside you.
• The Facebook Files revealed that Instagram is harmful to the mental health of teenagers. So, Instagram is trying to save face with a new “take a break” feature, which can also warn you to stay away from harmful content. Why do we only get these positive features after a full-on company meltdown?
• The rise of the Vtuber is here. Crunchyroll is turning its mascot into a Vtuber this week, which cements the trend as breaking into mainstream. “What the hell is a Vtuber?” is probably something you just uttered. It’s basically a virtual or drawn content creator. In this case, it’s an anime character. What a time to be alive.
• Twitter wants more of us to use Spaces, and is willing to pay creators $2,500 per month to host conversations 2x per week. Get the details and apply here!
• Instagram Stories Link Stickers launched recently, and if you’ve been wondering how to make the most of this new feature, then check out Later’s guide.
• Remember the days before algorithms sorted our feeds and everything was in chronological order? Twitter is testing an option in the feed that allows users to switch their timeline to chronological. Time is a flat circle.
• Twitter also released paid ticketing to their Spaces feature to Android users as well as all iOS users this week (it was previously in beta for iOS)

Future of Marketing

• The internet is having a Kodak moment. With the foundations of web3 being built before our eyes, it’s a good time to be in marketing. This article serves as a look at the previous and current iterations of the internet, and shows us what to look forward to.
• Part two of the above: Creating the new frontier. Especially useful breakdowns of terms you’ve seen floating around the internet like the metaverse, NFTs, DeFi, and DAOs.
• One piece to understand all of this further: How Axie Infinity is turning gaming on its head. Axie Infinity is a game that is essentially like Pokémon, but based on the blockchain. Players are making thousands of dollars per month playing this game. 25% of the players never even had a bank before. This could be the future of finance disguised. Don’t be shocked when you read about companies buying virtual billboards in this game (it already happens in Roblox, for example).
• Why does all of this matter to marketing? All the other things we write about here like social media and SEO were once brand-new things that few understood. Imagine if by the time companies were like “we should do SEO” you were already well-versed and ahead of the game. I think this stuff is really exciting, and so much of the future of marketing will be about mastering the art of community and weaving in and out of social spaces full of people from every corner of the world.

SEO & Content Marketing

• Google is starting to show TikTok and IG videos in search results. You might see a new carousel called “short videos” which feature those types of videos when it's appropriate for the query.
• The speed of your website matters more than ever for SEO, especially since the rollout of Core Web Vitals. Websites hosted on WordPress have been getting slower over the years, and now WordPress wants to do something about that. They’re aiming to form a performance team to focus on making WordPress sites faster. In that announcement, they showcase the speed gap between WordPress and other platforms.
• Enterprise SEO is hard, and you usually need not only a strong content marketing team, but people with solid technical foundations as well. The team at iPullrank recently hosted a 1-hour enterprise SEO deep dive that is worth the time to check out.
• Google isn’t the only search engine we optimize for as marketers, with Amazon being another huge search engine that brings in big $$ when done correctly. In a new report by Reuters, it was revealed that Amazon rigged search results to promote their brands. Oof. Even bigger oof: the search campaigns favor products Amazon has knowingly knocked off.
• Here are 10 blogging tips to capture the right audience, and how to keep that audience, too. This is a good breakdown on how content and SEO work together to serve customer acquisition.
• Google is introducing continuous scrolling for search results pages on mobile. You’ll no longer need to tap “next page” and instead the next page will load automatically. Apparently, users look at up to four pages of search results when searching for something — I don’t remember the last time I went past page two, tbh.

Jobs

• Director, Demand Generation — B2B @ Calm. Mental health for employees is a growing trend, and looks like Calm wants to capitalize on that. You can lead the charge!
• Product Marketing Coordinator @ Night Media. If you thrive on the intersection of the creator economy and the actual creators, this would be a pretty sweet gig.

Brand, Ads, and Psychology

• If you want to sell online, especially on a marketplace like eBay, you should make sure your name is short. Why? Short, easy names, are seen as more trustworthy.
• Higher ad prices are making us all rethink our digital ad strategy, and our marketing strategy as a whole. For example, the CPC (cost per click) on Google is up 23% from pre-pandemic times.
• Like it or not, Google Ads are moving more and more towards automation. Now is the time to learn how to get this automation to work for you, not against you. Google put together this handy guide to help you out.
• It seems like every other week we mentioned an international brand getting into the merch game. Ever wonder why?

Fun

• Google rolled out a guitar tuner that you can access simply by searching for “Google tuner.” Check it out the next time you need to tune a guitar.
• Mailchimp recently exited for a grand sum of $12B. But every story like that started somewhere, and here’s how the first version of Mailchimp was designed twenty years ago. I felt old just typing that.

Woo! You made it to the end! Thank you so much for reading along this week. If you’re enjoying the newsletter, you can help me grow it by:

• Sharing it with a friend
• Buying me a coffee to keep the writing going.

Thank you again for being here, and see you all next week!

Forge