Visibility Is No
Longer Optional

Chapter 26

They Liked Me

They liked me. They just did not think I was very good at my job.

That is the honest summary of a couple of years of my life, and I have made peace with it, mostly.

The company had roughly a hundred franchise locations. Each of them had a Google Business Profile, which is the listing that appears when somebody searches for a local business: the map pin, the hours, the phone number, the reviews. For a local service business it is not a marketing asset. It is the front door.

Profiles kept getting suspended.

Sometimes it was a content mismatch, where what Google understood about the business and what the listing said did not line up. Sometimes an office moved, legitimately, the way offices do, and the move itself triggered a suspension. Sometimes there was no discernible reason at all.

A suspended profile does not just stop bringing in customers. It removes the place where a satisfied customer would have vouched for you. Somebody finishes a job, is genuinely happy, goes to leave a review, and there is nowhere to leave it. You cannot build trust in a location that has been switched off.

And there was nobody to call.

That is the part people who have not lived it find hard to believe. There were once actual humans at Google you could reach, and by this point there were not, not for a business of that size. You submitted a form into a system and waited. Sometimes it came back reinstated with no explanation. Sometimes it came back rejected with no explanation. Some locations stayed suspended for more than seven months.

I was the expert in the room. I was the person whose job it was to solve exactly this, and I could not solve it. So I got yelled at, in meetings and outside them, by franchise owners who were losing real money while I explained again that we had submitted the appeal and were waiting.

It would be easy to write this as a story about being wronged.

They were not wrong to want results. Every one of those people had bought a business and been told marketing was handled, and from where they were sitting the marketing person was producing explanations instead of listings. If I had been them I would have been angry too, and I would probably have been less polite about it than they were.

It became one of the biggest reasons the company changed agencies. And I will tell you what happened next, because it is the only part that lets me off the hook and it took years to arrive.

The new agency could not fix it either.

This was not a small firm. It was one of the largest and best regarded agencies in franchise marketing, with resources I did not have and relationships I did not have. Locations stayed suspended for months under their watch too.

So the problem was never that I was bad at my job, although I spent a long time assuming it was. The problem was structural, and it is the point of this chapter.

We did not control the platform through which our customers were trying to verify that we were real.

Google was not the villain here. A platform that hosts business listings has to fight fraud constantly, at a scale I do not think most people appreciate, and a system that never suspends anybody would be worthless. The enforcement is going to be automated, and automated enforcement is going to be wrong sometimes, and when it is wrong about you there is no room to argue in.

There is no conspiracy in any of that. It is simply the arrangement now, and the arrangement is not going to change back.

Chapter 27

What That Means for a Business

Your visibility lives in places you do not own, and it can be interrupted without warning, without explanation, and without anybody to appeal to.

You cannot prevent that. What you can do is notice it fast, and have more than one place where you exist.

The businesses that got hurt worst were the ones for whom the profile was the entire front door. When it went dark, they went dark. The ones with a real website that ranked on its own, an actual body of content answering the questions customers ask, reviews in more than one location, and consistent information wherever a machine might look, lost a channel instead of losing everything.

I would not have described that as resilience at the time. I would have described it as good marketing. It is resilience, and I think about it that way now.

The other half is noticing. For months, nobody had a reliable picture of how many locations were suspended at any given moment, because the answer changed constantly and no single person was looking. Somebody has to be watching the places where your business is represented, because when one of them stops representing you correctly, nobody is coming to tell you.

Something I did not understand until I watched it happen to individual operators: the cost of a dark listing is not evenly spread.

A franchise owner in a large market with an established book of business loses inbound inquiries and feels it as a slow month. A newer operator, whose whole pipeline is people finding them and checking whether they look legitimate, loses close to everything, and loses it during the period where they have the least cash to absorb it. Same suspension, same brand, completely different consequence.

That is worth saying because of how these decisions get made centrally. When the report says inquiries are down some percentage across the network, the number is an average and averages hide the people it is actually happening to. The operators shouting at me in those meetings were not the ones with the biggest losses in absolute terms. They were the ones for whom the loss was the difference between continuing and not.

I did not weight it that way at the time. I treated it as one problem affecting a hundred locations, because that is how the dashboard presented it.

What I would do differently

I would have stopped defending my competence and started describing the mechanism, much earlier.

For a long time my answer to the suspensions was that we had appealed and were waiting, which is true and useless. What I should have said, on day one, is that we do not own this channel, we cannot compel a decision on it, here is what we are doing anyway, and here is what we are building so that when it happens again we are not entirely dependent on it. That is a worse answer emotionally and a much better one strategically, and people can act on it.

I would also have built the noticing first. We spent months without a reliable count of how many locations were suspended at any given moment, and you cannot manage something you have to reassemble by hand every time somebody asks.

And I would have owned the parts we could own harder and earlier. The website, the content, the review systems, the consistency of our information everywhere a machine might read it. None of that is glamorous and all of it is yours in a way a platform listing never is.

The general version is this. Find the parts of your visibility that somebody else controls, assume each of them will fail at the worst possible moment, and make sure that when one does you lose a channel instead of a business.

Chapter 28

The Day I Scored 100%

Some years later, working on my own company, I was measuring how well we owned particular ideas. Not keywords in the old sense, but territory: the concepts and questions and phrases that a market eventually associates with a business. If somebody asks a machine about a subject, whose language does it use.

One of our terms came back at 100%.

I would like to tell you I was immediately suspicious. I was not. For a good few minutes I thought we had won something.

Then I looked at which term it was, and the reason we owned it completely became obvious. Nobody else wanted it. It was a phrase precise enough that we were essentially the only people using it, and the reason we were the only people using it is that almost nobody was searching for it or arguing about it or building anything on it.

We owned an empty room, and the scoreboard was congratulating us for it.

Meanwhile the term that actually mattered commercially, the one attached to what we sell and how we describe the work, was hard. Competitors. Definitions that drift depending on who is talking. Weak association with us. That number was uncomfortable and it was the real one.

A green number can measure irrelevance perfectly.

I have since become suspicious of any metric I have not personally tried to break, and we have not always got that right. There is a longer version of this story where chasing a score actively cost us something. I come back to it in Part Six, because it happened with an AI in the loop and it deserves the room.

Chapter 29

The Button Sold the Wrong Product

Somebody completed the evaluation on our own diagnostic, read the result, trusted it, clicked the button we had put there, and the site handed them a different product.

I want to walk through that slowly, because every individual piece of it worked.

The evaluation ran correctly. It measured what it was supposed to measure and produced a genuine result. The result recommended a specific membership, which was the right recommendation for that business. The call to action underneath it was the correct call to action. The link even carried the right membership in the address, so the intent was still intact at the moment of the click.

Then the join page loaded, and it loaded the cheaper plan.

Nobody would have found that by looking at the marketing. The copy was fine. The design was fine. Traffic was fine. If you had asked me that week what our biggest conversion problem was, I would have given you a thoughtful answer about positioning, and I would have been wrong, because the actual problem was a customer who had already decided to buy being handed the wrong thing at the last step.

This is the part of the work that almost nobody looks at, and I include myself for years.

An enormous amount of marketing attention goes to the top of the process. Getting found, getting attention, getting the click. Comparatively little goes to what happens in the four seconds after somebody decides they are interested, which is where the actual money is either collected or lost.

The reason is not stupidity. It is that the top of the process is where the impressive numbers live. You can put traffic on a chart and it looks like progress. A handoff failure between two pages does not appear on any chart at all, because from the outside it looks like somebody browsed and did not buy, which is the most ordinary thing in the world.

I have a rule now and it costs almost nothing. Once a quarter, somebody goes and buys from us. Not tests, buys. All the way through, on a phone, on the connection a normal person has, with the card. It takes twenty minutes and it has found more real problems than any audit I have paid for.

Marketing does not end at the click. Intent has to survive every handoff, and every handoff is a place where it can quietly die.

Chapter 30

Just Stop and Think

Johnny Karls left the film and television industry to shoot a documentary with Francis Chan called Just Stop and Think. I built the website, ran the DVD sales and ran the YouTube.

That was about twenty years ago and it is still running.

I mention it because of what people assume about me, which is that I came to content and distribution recently, through marketing, as a discipline. I did not. I ran a large distribution operation before that was a job title, at a point where there was no established way to do any of it and nothing to buy off a shelf.

I went and counted it properly while writing this, because I did not want to put a vague word like large in a book that has a chapter about unsourced numbers.

At least 2,644,962 documented views, across twelve uploads I could quantify, in four languages.

That figure is a floor and not a ceiling. I found two further copies and deliberately left them out rather than estimate them, which is the same rule this whole book runs on. The domain is gone: it was hacked repeatedly and became too expensive to defend, so we let it go. The DVDs stopped years ago. The YouTube footprint is what continued, and it continued without anybody maintaining it.

Two things I learned there that I have never stopped using.

The first is that scale is mostly logistics and almost never inspiration. Everybody wants to talk about the idea. The work is fulfillment, hosting, payments, the copies that arrive damaged, and answering the same eleven questions for years.

The second took longer and it is the reason there is another chapter immediately after this one.

Chapter 31

We Could Never Get the Branded Page to Outrank It

Here is the part of that number I did not tell you.

Sixty one percent of it is not on our channel.

A man who loved Francis Chan uploaded the film to his own channel. He was not a pirate and he was not a competitor. He told us he was helping, and I believe he meant it, and for a while it looked like a nice problem to have.

Then he stopped replying.

I told him it could hurt the church, and possibly its nonprofit status, and that Johnny's credit was wrong in his description. Nothing came back. The copy stayed up. It ran ads. It earned him money. And the official page, the one belonging to the people who actually made the film, could never outrank it.

That is my first-hand account of what I watched happen, not a finding anybody adjudicated. I am not naming the channel. He is a private person, the story does not need him identified, and identifying him now would be a strange kind of revenge twenty years late.

What I need you to notice is the shape of it.

The damage did not come from an enemy. It came from a supporter, which is exactly why nobody stopped it early. You do not send a legal letter to a fan in week one. You send a friendly message, and then a slightly less friendly one, and by the time you have decided this is actually a problem, the copy has been up for two years, it has the watch history, it has the signals, and the algorithm has decided which version of your own work is the real one.

And it could not be fixed by explaining, because explaining assumes somebody is listening.

This is the failure my company now exists to prevent, and I lived it twenty years before the company existed. It took me most of that time to understand what I had actually seen. I thought at the time that we had a copyright problem. We did not. We had a problem where the market, and then the machines, had formed a view about who owned something, and our being correct had no mechanism by which to reach them.

The owner of the work could not make the owner's page the answer.

If you take one sentence out of this book, that is a reasonable candidate.

Chapter 32

It Is Happening To Me Now

I need to add something to that chapter, because while I was writing this book it started happening to me.

Digilu's own Google Business Profile is suspended. It has been suspended for more than five months.

I am the person who spent years unable to fix exactly this for other people. There is an obvious joke available here, and it is not funny when it is your listing.

I did not do anything to cause it. More precisely: nothing about how the profile was set up changed, no policy I can identify was violated, and the suspension arrived as a policy action rather than as a response to anything I submitted. That is my account of it and I cannot prove it to you, which is itself part of the problem I am describing.

Here is what five months of trying to get a listing reinstated actually looks like, in case you have never been through it.

I bought business cards. Not for clients. For the appeal.

I had car magnets made.

I have recorded and submitted video after video, walking through the office, showing signage, showing the space, showing that a real company operates from a real place, over and over, because each submission is either rejected or ignored and each rejection carries no explanation you can act on. You cannot ask a follow up question. There is no thread. You submit into a form and then you wait, and when the answer comes back it does not tell you which part was wrong.

I have one appeal route left open. I am going to use it carefully, because it is the last one.

Now hold that next to the earlier chapter, where a hundred franchise owners were furious with me because their listings were suspended and I could not get them back. I understood their anger at the time. I did not feel it.

I feel it now.

And this is the part that belongs in a book rather than in a complaint. Nothing about my expertise helped. I know more about this specific problem than almost anybody, I have the relationships, I have the tools, I have written about it, and I am in exactly the same queue as a plumber in Ohio with no marketing department at all. The queue does not know who I am and there is nobody in it to tell.

That is not a platform being unfair. It is a platform operating at a scale where individual judgment is not available, which is a different thing and a permanent one.

So the argument I made earlier stands and I have now paid for it twice. Your visibility lives in places you do not own. Own more of it than feels necessary, notice fast when a channel goes dark, and build the rest of your presence so that losing one of them costs you a channel instead of a business.

I am living inside my own chapter. It is not enjoyable and it is very good evidence.

Chapter 33

Three People With the Same Problem

I am helping three people with their personal brands, and I have known all three of them for a very long time.

Bryant Benitez and Jenysia I have known since they were in high school. Chris Simning I have known for more than twenty years.

Bryant writes children's books. Chris does pulpit supply and speaks at youth camps, and he has written a book called Scribbles. Jenysia is a singer and songwriter. Of the three, Chris is the furthest along.

None of them was ever a pitch. I have known them for decades, I watched each of them get good at something, and at some point it became obvious that the thing they were good at was invisible, and that this happens to be the one problem I know how to work on. So I started working on it. What it turned into afterward was a consequence rather than a plan.

Chris arrived as a lead, and where the lead came from is the part worth noticing. He came out of the Francis Chan work, which is the documentary a few chapters back: unpaid distribution work in the early two thousands that produced a working relationship in 2026. Nobody forecasts that.

The same thing happened at the church in 1989, and I have made my peace with the fact that it is how work starts for me. It is not a strategy and I do not recommend it as one.

Here is what all three have in common, and it is the reason they are in this book.

Each of them is good at the thing. That was never in question. What none of them had was any way for a stranger to find them, place them, and decide whether to trust them, in the small number of seconds a stranger gives you before moving on.

A children's author whose books are good and whose name returns nothing useful. A speaker who is excellent in the room and invisible outside it, which for somebody whose entire pipeline is being recommended and then looked up is not a small gap, and a book that almost nobody searching for him will ever find. A songwriter with the recordings done and nowhere for anybody to arrive.

If you have read this far you will recognize the shape, because it is the same shape as a hundred franchise locations with suspended listings and a cleaning company called Building Solutions. It is just smaller, and being smaller makes the mechanism easier to see rather than less important.

A personal brand is the hardest version of this, and I want to be precise about why.

With a company you can change the name. StratusClean is proof that you can, at real cost and over four years, but you can. With a person, the core is fixed. It is their name, their face, their actual work and their actual character, and none of it is available for repositioning. Everything you can change is downstream of something you cannot.

That sounds limiting. It is the opposite. It means there is no strategic escape hatch and no clever repositioning available, so the only work left is the honest work: make what is already true findable, legible and consistent, and then let it accumulate.

Which is the whole argument of this book with the shortcuts removed.

At this scale you cannot hide behind volume. There is no budget to spend, no channel mix to rearrange, no team to reorganize. There is a person, the thing they actually do, and the distance between the two.

Close that distance and there is nothing else to do.

Chapter 34

What I Got Wrong About Publishing

The other thing I had to unlearn is the assumption that publishing more is the same as building authority.

It is not, and the distinction turned out to have parts.

Publishing establishes history. It means something exists, under your name, dated, saying what you think. That is real and it is necessary and it is also the easy part now, which is exactly why it is worth less than it used to be.

Corroboration establishes credibility. Other people, in other places, saying compatible things about you. You do not control that and you cannot manufacture it without lying.

Indexation establishes discoverability. If systems cannot cleanly read and place what you published, it may as well not exist. This is the plumbing, and it is boring, and it is often the thing that is actually broken.

None of those on its own is authority. Authority is what happens when all of them accumulate in the same direction for long enough, and the ugly part is that it takes time you cannot compress by spending more.

We learned that the way most people learn it. We got better at producing and assumed the rest would follow, and it did not. More output against weak corroboration and broken indexation just produces more things nobody is going to read. Volume is not a strategy. It is a lever, and it only helps if the machine it is attached to is connected to anything.

Which brings me to the distinction I missed for a year, on my own account.

Presence is not the same as publishing.

My Reddit account was a year old and had earned a hundred and nineteen karma in that entire time. It had been posting. It had not been present. Eight days after I started actually turning up, commenting on other people's things, replying to the people who replied to me, it stood at five hundred and three.

None of that came from marketing communities, and I am not claiming it proved I had built authority anywhere. It came from the hobby end of the internet and nobody there is going to hire me.

What it proved is smaller and more useful. A system that publishes without a human being present produces a broadcast, and the platforms price a broadcast accordingly. The number did not move for a year and then moved by a factor of four in a week, and the only variable that changed was whether somebody with something at stake was actually in the room.

I find that uncomfortable, because almost everything I sell is a system, and the whole argument of my company is that things should not depend on one person being available. Both are true. The system makes the work repeatable and the presence makes it real, and being good at the first does not let you skip the second.

Publishing is still not authority. Neither is showing up. They are two different halves of the same missing thing.