Jon Gruden

3 years ago Jon Gruden was the head coach of the Raiders.

Then someone ruined his career.

Someone leaked some of his private emails, where he said some not-politically-correct things.

There was a huge scandal. He had to resign.

He hasn’t had a full-time job since.

Media pundits wrote about how he would never get another chance in the NFL again. He was considered untouchable.

Even 6 months ago, people were saying the same thing. “Jon Gruden will never be a head coach again.”

Fast forward to today. Media reports say that multiple teams are doing “extensive homework” on hiring Jon Gruden as their head coach.

So what happened in the past 6 months?

Here’s what happened: Jon Gruden started a YouTube channel.

He made videos of himself previewing games, interviewing star players, and talking about what was going on around the NFL.

And then Gruden’s reputation changed, almost overnight. He isn’t the guy with the bad emails anymore. Now he’s the guy with the YouTube channel.

The point of this email is, you can change your reputation — or build one — by making content.

Put yourself out there, say something useful, and people will start to know, like, and trust you a lot more.

The more content you make, the more of an “expert” you become.

And the more clients you get.

-Theo

P.S. If you want help making email content, check this out:

Theoseeds.com/brandvoice

Is SEO dying?

I’ve talked to 3 people in the past month who built SEO businesses.

None of them are happy.

Here’s what they had to say:

“I’m really pessimistic about the future of SEO.”

“I’m gonna have to change how I do everything.”

And the third put it bluntly. “Google search is dead.”

Some of these people built their whole businesses off of showing up in Google search results. Now Google isn’t showing them to anyone anymore. They’re showing weird AI summaries, or click-farm blog articles, or Reddit posts, or Quora threads.

4+ years of SEO, gone. Poof. In an instant.

Even if you’ve never written a blog article in your life, this matters to you. Because chances are, you get your traffic from somewhere — Google, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, wherever.

If the people who run your favorite traffic platform change their algorithm, your whole business can go up in smoke. All it takes is one board meeting at Facebook, Google, ByteDance, or whoever runs the platform you get your leads from… and you’re toast.

Your source of leads dries up and your business goes to zero.

That’s why you need to get your audience on an email list as soon as you can!

Once you get people on an email list, they’re yours.

Keep sending them good content, and some of them will stick around for years. And a few of them will buy every single course you sell and every single program you make.

That way your business lasts, instead of going up in smoke.

Best,

Theo

P.S. If you need some help writing good content emails that your audience enjoys, engages with, and buys from, check this out:

Theoseeds.com/brandvoice

Neil Strauss

Neil Strauss is best known as a pickup artist.

He wrote a book called The Game which is about him learning how to seduce women.

He’s less well known as a ghostwriter of celebrity autobiographies. Before he wrote his own books, he co-wrote books for Motley Crue, Jenna Jameson, and Marilyn Manson.

He also turned down a chance to do a book with Britney Spears. (Even though it would mean lots of money and lots of exposure.)

Why’d he turn it down? Because Britney’s PR people didn’t want to tell Britney’s dirty little secrets. They wanted the book to make Britney look good.

If you read Strauss’s other autobiographies, they talk about some deep, personal stuff. In the Jenna Jameson biography, she admits to being raped twice when she was a teenager, which she had never talked about publicly before.

And Strauss does this in his own books, too. In The Game he talks about not being able to get an erection.

He knows that if a book is just a bunch of PR fluff, then no one’s gonna buy it, and it’s not gonna be a very good book.

A lot of people write their content that way. They hype themselves up, they only show their wins, and they try to make themselves look crisp and perfect and professional.

The problem with that is that it doesn’t seem human. If you only show your good side, people will know something’s missing.

So you have to talk about your failures. You have to tell embarrassing stories. That’s the stuff people actually want to see.

This will make you very uncomfortable, and you probably won’t want to do it, but that’s okay. There’s strength in showing your human side. There’s strength in showing your vulnerabilities.