Bothering Construction Workers is An Integral Part of My Content Strategy

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Bothering Construction Workers

Earlier this week, I walked two miles across town, confidently strode into the “Contractors” entrance of a local restaurant under construction, and asked a construction worker on a smoke break “So, when is this place going to open?”

At first, he looked surprised. Then, he glanced around at the exposed beams and men with blueprints standing around him and said “At least two months.”

The restaurant was originally slated to open in about 2 weeks. Now, I had something that both readers and Google’s algorithms absolutely love: unique, original information.

My story about the restaurant’s current status ending up doing extremely well in Google Discover. And increasingly, I’m seeing that getting unique, original information from the real world is table stakes to rank on Google.

Why? AI content is drowning the Internet. It often looks human written. But the actual information in it is—necessarily—just regurgitating facts that are already known.

The writing can be snazzy. But the “information gain” is zero—AI doesn’t add anything new beyond what’s already known about a given topic.

Secrets gleaned from construction workers? That’s information gain gold.

As AI continues to dominate the content world, I suspect that Google and others will begin to combat it by focusing much more aggressively on information gain.

For creators, that means the game has changed under our feet. Some people feel betrayed. Jared and I discussed that—as well as Midjourney v7 and my timeline for bringing a chicken onto the show—in our most recent Niche Pursuits podcast episode.

ps Jared talks more about Information Gain here on Medium.