Industry as the term is broadly used has a problem which I call the “The Always Already New Problem.” What I mean by that is this: everything is yesterday’s news. And the “new” always remains ahead of you, a mirage we chase in the desert. It is also called planned obsolescence. Every brand launches with an eye on the horizon — how do we make more money by selling the new? So, the smart phone or the laptop you just bought is already on a tread. Many brands market something as new only as test and automatically turn it into yesterday’s relic by bringing out the ‘new’ model into which all the user data from earlier test version was input to make it ‘better.’ That is why brands are always ahead and the consumer always behind.
Digital technology has accelerated this process not only for the other industries that depend on them but for themselves, too. Affiliate marketing, for example, is an industry that sells digital products. It relies, in turn, on SEO, which itself is an industry in its own right.
One such brand is Surfer — let me come back to this shortly.
A Quick Recap
My last post was mostly about valuing one’s self-agency on the way to mastering long-form content creation. And, although AI is a good tool (mostly, as a research assistant), it is hardly a substitute for human subjectivity, consciousness, that is.
Well I stick by it — unless you sort yourself out and stop running after every shiny object that glints in your direction, you are likely to be left with nothing, except expenses. And, I stick by that, too.
Cultivate yourself before you cultivate technology.
Many of us may be inclined to start the other way around. That is the big fallacy I am against. Just buying the Nespresso machine will not make us George Clooney or impart us with that enviable baritone of his. (God knows I’ve tried)
Such is human frailty.
Now Let’s Go Surfing
While human agency is fine, I am no luddite either. I appreciate new developments but not the hype that often comes with it. We need to keep it in perspective — whatever we wish to adopt as technology. I am not against technology but against the hoopla often associated with it that drowns judgement.
Surfer — which I referred to earlier –is a platform which has many features that strike me as relevant to my recent posts, particularly the preceding one.
What’s The Attraction?
I would say that Surfer’s real strength lies in providing: advanced key word search; data-driven insights; competitor analysis; real-time, not retrospective content optimisation; more organic traffic (as opposed to paid traffic) by locating “high-intent” keywords indicative of buyers who are ready to be taken the “buy now button.”
Overall, the feature I find the most attractive in all this is scalability — start small, go big. It means you may be anywhere from a novice to a full fledged enterprise. They can fit you in.
Three adjectives to sum up Surfer . . .
Versatile. Multifunctional. Comprehensive.
How Does AI Content Generator Work
Let us imagine that you have decided that you want to use AI-generated content for your affiliate marketing project. But somehow you are concerned . . . because . . . let me quote from my previous post
Google, however, looks suspiciously at keyword-stuffed content and considers this as ranking manipulation . . . AI-detection tools deployed at the discretion of Google might reject our content.
Now here comes the kicker, Surfer has a specific feature for getting around this problem.
Oh, My Humanizer
This is new your digital friend, the Humanizer — it lives inside the Surfer.
It was designed essentially to impart a human voice to written content which these days in many if not most cases is AI-generated.
However, we can create that problem for ourselves manually, too, by getting overzealous with keywords that have been crammed into every nook and cranny of our content. Sentences formed this way can sound just as alien as AI-generated writing.
Problem solved: run your content through the Humanizer and it will render the non-human (I almost said “inhuman”) human.
Even more intriguing is that the Humanizer is capable of capturing the characteristics of your writing if you submit sample texts of your own. If something is solely AI-generated then it can be rendered in your own voice. So now AI-generated gobbledegook can be rinsed to sound exactly like your own prose.
Your unique rhetorical moves can now be replicated digitally to make any text your own.
So, Should You Use It?
That is entirely up to you — bearing in mind though that Google will not be sitting idle either. They may be working on it even as we speak.
There are some ethical issues, too. The Humanizer’s intent is to bypass checks for authenticity — this creates the potential for students to cheat, for example, by passing off AI-created content as their own for term papers and such like. Every author now comes under suspicion.
In affiliate marketing, however, this may be a different matter, especially if you use Surfer broadly to instigate not replace your own writing, as you would with Chatgpt or any other automation.
On A Positive Note
What I feel that Surfer can do for you is to move from inception to ranking faster than many others — provided of course you understand the nature of affiliate marketing properly. Just buying expensive gear does not allow us to win the slalom. We need to learn its rules. We need to learn its moves. Think before you invest.
Although it claims to be beginner-friendly (and, it might be), you still have to learn affiliate marketing.
Surfer specialises in SEO, scaling, competitor analysis and so on. It is mainly directed at content creation not affiliate marketing per se.
When you feel you have reached that stage in your project — when the training wheels are off — then Surfer might make more sense.
Please use ethically.