spilling the secrets of the girl boss dark web

don't tell on me, K?

At some point, I decided to sell online classes to finance my fiction writing. I released a single class with no launch, no lead-up, and no plan whatsoever, and was miffed when nobody signed up (except for one miracle human who somehow found my site — Jack, you’re the tops).

And thus began my long slog through the labyrinth of articles and tips and Medium screeds about how to get an audience to buy your stuff. I’ve been wandering in these woods for the last three years, and in that time, I’ve tried most of the strategies — the same strategies that will be thrust at you any time you want to grow an audience, whether that’s in the service of your business or your first book or your creepy ambitions as a thought leader: content creation.

What this means is pumping out articles, text, videos, podcasts, and whatever tangential to your business to establish you as a leader in your field. You’re supposed to “give value” and “serve” because, after a certain point, the reader is so beholden to you for your generosity that they simply have to return the favor by buying your thing.

“Content” is such a generic, flabby term. It means … what exactly? “That which is contained,” according to Oxford Etymology Online. Still vague! Contained by what?

In autopsies, the coroner notes the contents of the deceased’s stomach. In the frontmatter of a book, the index notes the contents of the chapters within, whether it’s a fly fishing how-to or an Alan Watts book. That’s because content just means “stuff that’s in something.” When you become a content creator, you’re no longer a writer, you’re a filler-upper. You’re that metal tube at Build-a-Bear that stuffs batting into the plush skin of a soon-to-be teddy. Your words are reduced to stuff.

But of course it isn’t just words. It’s also Instagram and TikTok and just about anything that you make in conjunction with a social media platform of some kind. Why? It becomes much clearer if you examine the food chain you’ve opted into. When you’re using a social media platform to gain an audience, the platform is also using you: the more numbing or compelling or polarizing your content, the longer they can keep us captive and ad-watching.

I want to draw a clear distinction between content creation and occasional writing, writing in marginalia, and the documentation of a life’s miniutae — all of which are neutral and necessary parts of the creative process. In some ways, the Instagram caption and the tweet have become literary forms, and there’s something wonderful about the flexibility of those spaces. Notes, fragments, and letters are documents that exist in and around humans regardless of media type, and they’re just as ineffable and valuable now as they ever were. Some writers and artists (sighswoon comes to mind) are doing incredible, nuanced work in the received forms of the internet.

But if you’re primarily trying to manipulate your reader or follower by breadcrumbing them with fluffy listicles and calculated vulnerability, you are pumping out nonsense jizzle jazzle to fill the troughs of the internet.

To understand this, you need to know what “content marketing” and “permission marketing” are.

In former days, if you wanted to make consumers aware of your product, you would make an advertisement. “Spleen brand toothbrushes! Now with 80% more scrub!” etc. “Broussard’s Bookkeeping School: 95% of our graduates are hired within a month!” etc. You would use words and images to get the attention of people who might buy your stuff and place your ads where your ideal customer might find them. As people are increasingly bombarded with advertisements, the techniques which used to get someone’s attention don’t work anymore. The visual vernacular of ads becomes a joke. We’re too smart for them. We resist and ironize them.

So, if you’re trying to sell something to a distracted/savvy consumer, what do you do?

Make it look like you’re not selling anything at all.

NO

No, no, you’re trying to be helpful! You put up articles called “What I Wish I Knew Before Starting Bookkeeping School” and “Bookkeeping School Gave Me a Reason To Live” and “I Felt Like My Life Was a Patternless Expanse of Wasted Opportunity Until I Learned Basic Accounting” or whatever. A person considering bookkeeping school will probably find these because they are SEO bait for any old Jonny Donuts googling something like “how to choose bookkeeping school” or “should I go to bookkeeping school” or even, yikes, “my life is a patternless expanse of wasted opportunity what should I do.”

Jonny Donuts will read all of your articles—so helpful! They create a wave of excitement and optimism. (It just so happens that Jonny has been feeling adrift. Maybe bookkeeping is what he’s been looking for all along.) At the bottom of one of these articles there will be a link that says “Sign up for my mailing list and I’ll send you a free guide to the best bookkeeping programs.” So helpful! Jonny Donuts will sign up—it’s free, after all—and at that point, he will enter the sales funnel.

A sales funnel is a sequence of emails which continue building this excitement and optimism, with the obvious eventual conclusion that you will buy whatever product is being sold. It’s also sometimes called a “nurture sequence.” These emails have been crafted to speak to the insecurities which sent you searching for this information in the first place. Don’t you hate being a broke piece of shit, Jonny Donuts? Aren’t you tired of being aimless? Wouldn’t it be very cool and satisfying to learn basic bookkeeping?

It’s a funnel because it swirls you from hope to angst and back again, spinning in ever tighter circles, until it drops you right onto the sales page for Broussard’s Bookkeeping School, which will just happen to give you a sweet deal if you sign up in the next ten minutes.

It’s called “permission marketing” because you have given your email address willingly. But how willing can you be if you genuinely think that you’re going to get helpful information instead of a sales pitch? It’s called “content marketing” because there’s no ad to be seen—that is, until you’ve taken in dozens of articles and listicles and TikTok videos that have convinced you that you need and want whatever you’re being sold.

Ta-da, I just saved you $50, $150, $500—the formula stated above is exactly what every so-called business coach teaches, and they charge thousands of dollars for this exact information. Literally. Like, literally literally. They will sometimes change the names of the terms or put a spin on the information, but the formula is always the same.

If you look around, you will see content marketing everywhere. That’s because it is everywhere. Aside from, idk, Supreme billboards, it’s the dominant advertising mode of our time. Influencers are permission marketers. You must have wanted to hear about their favorite brand of colon blaster, because you followed them, didn’t you?