I don't particularly enjoy these articles, but they're hardly unethical. Saying you make X/month is very similar to splashing company logos on your homepage. Service companies typically want to try to demonstrate that they're successful to attract more clients.
With startups/apps it's now popular to brag about your revenue. Keep in mind, this isn't profit, so I find the articles pretty useless. I could start a million dollar revenue company by losing money on each unit sold, but what's the point in that? (unless I'm VC-backed and have a long-term strategy for growth)
When someone writes an article about how much profit they've made per month, then I'll take notice.
Why do people need to know about this magical thing?
Isn't that enough if you solve a problem? Interested people will look for solution and find your magical thing, no need to add to the general cancerous spam of "hey, I'm sure you're going to find that thing awesome, even if you don't need it"
If this is true, why is it so easy to name genuinely good products that failed because of lack of visibility? How do you differentiate your product from that of competitors? How do you get seen in the first place unless you own a very good domain/have a massive sales force?
>I put out several long reads. It helped us to improve our SEO and led decent traffic to our blog on Medium. Overall, my posts received 150k views in 2017.
My takeaway is that it helps people find the "magical thing" in the first place, especially the people who didn't know they were looking for the magical thing.
Of course someone with an existing problem is most likely seeking a solution, but not everyone realizes there is a problem (especially if the existing solution works) until a better solution is shown to them.
How about how we conduct business:
Face to face meetings -> phone/mail -> email -> online meetings, for instance. I'm sure people thought during their time periods that there could be better ways to do this, but they need to see the solution before they jump on board.
Write meaningful / in depth content that is valuable to someone? It worked for Joel on software and 37signals.
It's hard and can be a larger investment, but seems that writing spam content and then spending day/days on optimize ways to spam it through different channels is not that great way to spend your time.
Google should have a better spam filter. Basically all "content marketing" should be classified by Google as spam and get trashed on search results.
After that, perhaps people would learn to search for stuff they need, and find what you built.
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OR: We could have trusted people who analyze tools that exist and recommend those, not based on who paid more to them or their personal preference, but based on its suitability for such and such tasks.
I mean you have to let people know about this magical thing you've built somehow.