We got asked what marketing advice sounded amazing in theory but just didn’t hold up once we actually tried it. Honestly a lot of advice depends heavily on your industry, your audience, your specific goals – what works for one business flops for another. But the one that stands out most right now is all this “just let AI run your entire marketing” advice that’s flooding every corner of the internet.
You know the ads I’m talking about. Some Gen Z guy sitting at his desk, another dude walks up and goes “hey how do you optimize SEO for your clients?” and he’s like “oh I just click a couple buttons and AI does the rest.” It generates the content, it builds the whole website, it basically runs your entire business apparently. These ads make it look like the ultimate magic bullet that never runs out.
Except heres the reality – SEO is built to run on original, organic content. If you actually think about it from the search engine’s perspective, you’re feeding Google and the other engines rich unique content so they can keep growing and refining their algorithm. Which means they are actively working to reject and demote AI generated slop. So if you try to run your entire marketing operation off AI content generation, you’re basically setting yourself up to get delisted or buried in the rankings.
I’ve literally watched this happen to people. They get excited, fire their SEO specialist, replace the whole workflow with AI tools, and at first it feels great because yeah, it does produce stuff. But the second something is available to literally anyone with the click of a button, everyone starts doing the exact same thing, and it becomes instantly saturated. There’s no edge left because the barrier to entry basically disappeared.
This actually ties into a bigger point about underrated skills – I genuinely think writing is about to become an extremely high value skill again. So many people can barely compose a coherent email anymore, let alone write a comprehensive, well structured article. If you fast forward five or ten years, being someone who can actually write well is going to set you apart in a big way. Might even go the other direction and society just collectively loses the ability to read and write properly, who knows. But either way, that skill isn’t going anywhere anytime soon in terms of value.
The whole “I built this entire business with Claude in five seconds” narrative online is just misleading people. It makes it look like you can skip literal tens of hours of real work and just sit back and binge your shows while the AI handles everything. Then reality hits – what actually got generated is a pile of generic, low effort content that tanks your website rankings, and suddenly nobody’s finding you on Google anymore. All that time “saved” gets erased and then some, because now you’re digging out of an SEO hole instead of just doing the work properly the first time.
I guess the lesson here, and its kind of a cliche but its true, is that nothing worthwhile ever comes easy. If a piece of advice sounds like it lets you skip all the actual effort and just push a button, be really skeptical of it. AI is a genuinely useful tool when it supports actual strategy and actual human input, but treating it as a full replacement for the work is advice that sounds great in a 30 second ad and falls apart the second you try to build a real business on top of it.
