Jeremy Pepper is writing again, which means all the pretenders and charlatans in the social marketing world should be clutching their pearls. Here’s the part that spoke to something I’ve been struggling with recently:

There are a lot of things I see out there that make me scratch my head and wonder why we are seeing and writing about the same crap, the same issues, for the past 10-plus years. Friends joke that I should just republish old posts, because I wrote what is being said now by others … but five-plus years ago.

As I pass near the nine month mark of my unemployment, I’ve had plenty of time to consider my career path to date. Sometimes I think about those who were coming up in the blogging world at the same time I was and how many of them have gone on to success as consultants and speakers and influencers and everything else while I, to date, hove not. So I look around and see what they’re doing to try and get some ideas.

And I’m aghast. Many of their blogs show the same kind and level of thinking that was on display back in 2006. They’re still sharing the same kinds of “Top Eight Blog Headline Hacks” and “Ways To Be a Superstar Guest Blogger” tips that have been around for over a decade.

Pepper’s not wrong when he says, half tongue-in-cheek, that he could republish old posts today and no one would know the difference. That’s where we’re at and it’s disturbing.

The problem is not that the industry hasn’t evolved. It has, to incorporate more complex thinking and to solve deeper problems that are more intrinsic to achieving actual business results. But those don’t generate good SEO results for the writers and so aren’t topics that are well-represented on their sites or in their presentations.

If not writing and rewriting this crap is what’s been holding my career back, I’m kind of OK with that. I’d rather succeed based on my own skills, which are substantial, than play to the lowest common denominator over and over again and loathe myself.