Note: This chapter is being built in public, one brick at a time — just like we do for clients through the Authority Chapter Plan™. Welcome to Chapter Three. Read the entire Authority Philosophy book here.
If you’ve ever tried to market your law firm, medical practice, consulting firm, or expert business, you’ve already touched sludge. You just didn’t have a name for it. Sludge Mountain is the name I give to it. And it’s the first thing you must escape if you want real authority.
If You've Ever Looked into Professional Marketing Today, Then You Know Sludge Mountain
Sludge mountain is not just a place, it is a state of mind. One of homogeneity, and confusion. A crowded, Blade Runner like dystopia filled with dark alleys, making replicants of all hardworking professionals who wish to “be visible.”
It’s impossible to be seen over that towering mountain.
There’s so much sludge many professionals can no longer determine between gunk and gold. When I pitch our authority first services, many professionals’ first reaction is to panic. They are so used to a diet of sludge, that real nutrition makes them nauseous. The way my body used to react in law school when eating a kale shake after a few weeks of coffee and pizza during finals.
Perhaps sludge mountain’s greatest crime against professionals is this: it tries to make them into commodities.
When everyone has the same type of social media presence, reels, recycled blog posts, braindead PPC campaigns, and SEO, either aimed at cheap visibility or gaming algorithms, what you get is sludge.
Fast + Empty + Undifferentiated = Sludge.
(It also equals commodification.)
As I wrote about in my book The AI Content Paradox, commodification is the worst thing for professionals, as you need to stand out. In the future, AI content sludge will soon be punished by both humans and AI alike.
Carl's Law Dictionary: Definition of Sludge
Ready to Escape Sludge Mountain?
Sludge is when your marketing is treated the same as if you are a grifter. Sludge is when you’re being marketed the same way the marketing sludge providers market themselves: chasing as many eyes as possible with no substance. Finding anyone with a pulse, regardless of fit.
Sure, they may say your Facebook ads are targeted to certain demographics, and that is likely to be true, but people are more than just demographics. What you really want is people who both need your services, and are a good fit. Authority assets help attract the right clients and repel the wrong ones. Most professional service marketing just wants to make your phone ring, while ignoring who is on the other side of that call.
The standard sludge marketing techniques include the following:
PPC Campaigns
You’re probably already familiar with this, and it may even be an effective way (if targeted correctly) to get your phone to ring. Although the anticipated ROI has decreased over time for most PPC campaigns, it’s not the current king of sludge mountain for nothing.
What do professionals love about this alpha sludge contender? It’s fast! You can outsource the PPC campaign to someone else who claims to be an expert in PPC, and there is a promise that you will start receiving leads immediately.
The downsides are as follows: unless you take the time to become knowledgeable in PPC you must pay for both the ad spend (such as to Google) plus the vendor’s price, which is often higher per hour than what you charge your own clients. Many unscrupulous vendors do not include their own costs in the ROI they quote.
Another issue: there is a change of a negative ROI. That means you will spend money for nothing, because PPC does not create real authority. PPC is like a child with a butterfly net. Once they tucker out with no butterflies, there is nothing to show for the effort. Authority assets are giving that same child an encyclopedia of butterflies, something they can take home and study with lasting impact.
Another issue with PPC campaigns is that it’s flooded. Almost everyone is using this one sludge trick because it’s fast, and it promises a lot without much input, and because it gives the illusion of action. Which most professionals find very appealing, because they are so busy.
Finally, PPC campaigns are about to get upended by the AI revolution. Those who go all in on PPC, and stay all in are about to face a rude awakening in the coming years as people shift away from legacy search engines to chat based platforms. I predict a rise in paid AI at that time, but as Gordon Gecko once said in the movie Wall Street, “that’s just a dog with different fleas.”
Fair enough, Carl, you may be thinking. But surely SEO solves most of these issues. There is lasting rather than ephemeral impact, after all. Surely you wouldn’t put good old, venerable SEO on sludge mountain?
Sludge Mountain is Littered With Broken Promises and the Foul Scent of Desperation
SEO
If PPC is the head, SEO is the heart of sludge mountain. If sludge mountain can be said to have a heart at all.
Search engine optimization makes a great deal of sense, in theory. It helps build up the authority of your website, so surely you must think that I, the Authority Architect, am all in on SEO.
The truth is I have one foot out the door.
SEO is an important tool, but an unnecessary crutch that is far too often overused and oversold. Here’s what SEO can do:
Help you to define an authority strategy that involves guest blogging, being active on other sites, pushing traffic back to your own website. These are all cousins of my own authority strategy, and like any cousins I cannot totally disown them for we share too much DNA.
But here’s where SEO gets it wrong: it values algorithm over human.
SEO has ruined the web, and you’re not going to convince me otherwise. When we take a human medium, such as websites, and instead translate it into language most palatable to machines, then we strip the soul of the whole enterprise. Not to mention the ability to teach, entertain, or truly help our clients or prospective clients.
Think about the type of keyword stuff that has gone on the past decade plus, and continues to occur today. Your website homepage should be warm and inviting to your potential clients, instead it’s a keyword stuffed albatross: “Personal Injury Lawyer in Chicago Practicing Personal Injury in Midland and Chicago and Personal Injury Lawyering.”
Huh?
There is no sense of narrative, no welcome, warm enticing language to draw anyone in. And this is easier for the SEO “gurus,” because many of them cannot write engaging website copy anyway. And they can say it works because unsophisticated search engines did partially reward such SEO tactics, and besides it’s the lowest hanging fruit.
But what Google really rewards is engagement. Stickiness. The more people who visit your website, and engage with it, and return, the more Google trusts you. Google is in the trust game. And deep trust is always better in shallow trust, even when it comes to web crawlers.
But what I found most personally abhorrent about standard SEO advice is that it goes hand-in-hand with my personal Kryptonite:
Recycled Blog Posts
Why must everyone’s blog posts be the same, boring drivel? “Signs your divorcing a narcissist,” “Seven Things to Say if a Cop Pulls You Over,” “Before You Speak With Your Insurance Adjust, What to Know.”
Who is writing these things? What type of soulless, hypocritical monster would even agree to write something like this, assuming it is human written at all?
(Sheepishly raises hand.)
Yes, it is true, during the pandemic when I was moving with my family I took a job working at one of the big legal marketing companies. They were so happy to have a real life attorney working in their content department, and I was…excited to work remotely and collect a paycheck during the pandemic while in between things. Besides, I thought, I love the law and I love writing, perfect fit.
This was at one of the biggest and best, so they actually had real editors and a real writing team. Many of the writers were burned out paralegals or young college grads. I was a middle aged man with over a decade of legal experience. I figured the job would a synch, even if they wanted me to write about eight blog posts a day to start. And even if I did not get to choose the topics.
My daily assignment might read: (1) Write a 1,000 word blog post for a Florida bankruptcy attorney about Chapter Thirteen bankruptcies, (2) Write a 1,000 word blog post for a California personal injury attorney about motorcycle accidents, (3) Write a 1,000 word blog post for a New York divorce attorney about why uncontested divorces can create better results, (4) Write a 1,000 word blog post for an alarm company about why security is important in developments.
And so on. And yes, sometimes I would be asked to write across different verticals.
This was all done on U.S. soil and I doubt there is a better company at creating mass blog content than this, but can you imagine how easy it is to make mistakes for anyone trying to write at volume about so many different topics each day?
Worse yet, even though I could churn these posts out pretty fast, with decent legal research (i.e. I wasn’t just copying other blog posts from Google). I felt pretty good about myself. I mean, no I actually felt horrible but hey I was just looking for a soft landing during the pandemic, so be it. Jack Torrence just needed a bit of time at a hotel to relax and work on that novel, and I was doing the same in my spare time.
Then came the feedback: “great writing, but you need to focus more on the SEO.” I wrote for humans, SEO was all about writing for machines. I did the best I could do integrate the two, but eventually realized I needed to resign.
And that is how I got to see how the sausage was made. And man, did it ever stink.
I will say that most of the people I worked with were displaced creatives, and that the company I worked for treated me fairly. But I would never hire them for my own law firm, and I do not believe volume blog posts are the way to go unless you’re the special kind of insane that I am where you just can’t help but be writing all the time anyway.
But that was the near best case scenario of volume blog SEO. Let’s talk about the reality for most professionals who receive such “services.”
The blog posts they receive are churned out by AI, or in mills overseas, or are lightly “borrowed” from other sources on the web, or are recycled from other clients’ posts.
Most professional service blogs take the golden calf and turn it into ground beef. Homogenous, stale, and as likely to do as much harm as good with humans and machines alike.
In the next chapter we will delve into the alternatives, which include our own Authority Chapter Plan, what I hold up as the antidote to sludge, where we help professionals create sparkling blog posts that come together to form a full book. The very same process by which I am writing this book right now.
The techniques we use to market Books for Experts are the exact same ones we implement for our clients. Ask the captains of sludge mountain if they can say the same.
Paid Referrals
We’re really getting into the marshy underbelly of sludge mountain now, thick in the shade. Hold your nose and let’s try to get through this section quickly.
Paid referral sources are an ethical landmine for most professionals like lawyers, whose rules of responsibility often cite you cannot pay others for referrals unless they are certified lawyers in your state. There may be some workarounds here as the bar has become more lax over the years, but do you really want to risk it? Outsource your marketing, outsource your ethics and you can be certain blaming your marketer is not going to go far in convincing your licensing body not to take their pound of flesh from you.
Plus, there is a great inefficiency of scale here. These agencies are really just using other techniques like paid search and then turning around and charging you even more than they paid. They are slimy middlemen, thick there in the middle of sludge mountain. If you’re going to go with one of these then just go up to the head of sludge mountain and work on your PPC and SEO, but if you’re looking for an even better way, the path to true authority through authority assets, then we hope you’ll give us a call.
I don’t think I need to waste more ink on such unscrupulous referral engines. The bad news is we’re going to head even lower on sludge mountain, down to its sinewy sludgy feet. The good news is we’re almost off the mountain and back to real terra firma.
Buying Awards
Not much to say here other than: don’t! Why are you giving your hard earned money away to companies that create fake awards to feed your ego. If your goal is to trick your clients then get out of the game or find a better way. What are we, animals? No, we’re professionals. And that means no shortcuts. Because when you’re a professional almost “Shortcut” is actually a trap door.
Social Media Embarrassments
Now we are down to the dancing feet of sludge mountain. The frivolity, the reels, the “me, me, me” desperation wafting through as firm owners make their poor associates do the Macarena to try and capture eyeballs and everything is as fake and plastic as an actor over fifty still getting work as the leading man.
There is good cause to use social media if you like it. The best reason is to push out knowledge about your authority assets. The CLEs you are putting on, your latest article in a major publication, the book you’re about to publish.
But if you use social media as most professionals do, as either a way to get visibility by doing something cringey or by barking out your own existence to a bored audience, then you’re not gaining authority. You’re simply painting with a white crayon. Screaming into the void with all the madness of the masses.
Stop.
And if you can, then you have safely made your way down from sludge mountain.
Now it’s time to erect your own mountain based on platinum promises and flawless, real delivery.
That’s what we do. Work with us to see how we build platinum-level trust from the ground up.
Sludge mountain is not just a marketing problem, it’s a soul problem. A philosophy authority problem. And if you don’t climb down now, you may forget there was ever solid ground to begin with.