#Search Engine Marketing Toronto

[mycrusadestranger]

Free Mind Marketing: Engineering Digital Growth for the Modern Enterprise

In an era where digital presence dictates market relevance, businesses need more than just marketing—they need intelligent, integrated strategies that scale with ambition and evolve with markets. Free Mind Marketing stands at the forefront of this transformation, delivering premium digital solutions that empower brands to thrive in competitive, digitally driven environments.

Combining strategic clarity with creative innovation and technical precision, Free Mind Marketing is not just a service provider—it's a growth partner for future-focused businesses.

Who We Are

Free Mind Marketing is a full-service digital marketing agency committed to delivering data-driven, performance-oriented, and brand-centric solutions. With an expert team spanning strategists, designers, developers, content creators, and performance marketers, we serve as a one-stop hub for organizations seeking to build, scale, and sustain meaningful digital impact.

From enterprise-level SEO strategies to complete digital branding ecosystems, Free Mind Marketing helps companies convert digital complexity into strategic clarity—and results.

Comprehensive Solutions for Every Stage of Digital Growth

At Free Mind Marketing, our services are designed to address every facet of digital transformation. Each solution is tailored to your unique business goals, market positioning, and industry dynamics.

1. Strategic SEO & Paid Search (SEM)

Your visibility on search engines directly impacts your brand's accessibility and trust. We deliver integrated SEO and SEM strategies that drive high-quality traffic, enhance visibility, and optimize user acquisition.

SEO Services:

Full-site audits and technical remediation

Keyword strategy and semantic content development

On-page and off-page optimization

Local SEO and citation management

Link-building and authority development

Monthly performance dashboards and analytics

SEM Services:

Google Ads and Bing Ads campaign architecture

Smart bidding strategies and conversion tracking

Retargeting funnels and geo-targeted campaigns

Landing page creation and CRO testing

Budget optimization and ROI reporting

2. Web Design, Development & Optimization

Your website is your digital headquarters. We design and develop high-performing websites that blend brand storytelling with exceptional functionality—engineered to convert.

Capabilities:

Custom UX/UI design aligned with brand identity

Responsive development across all browsers/devices

CMS development (WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, custom platforms)

E-commerce integration and checkout optimization

Performance tuning, SEO-readiness, and mobile optimization

Ongoing technical support and security upgrades

3. Social Media Strategy & Management

We translate your brand’s essence into consistent, compelling social presence across platforms—fueling engagement, trust, and advocacy.

Our Approach:

Content planning driven by audience intelligence

Platform-optimized creatives: reels, graphics, carousels

Paid campaigns (Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, X)

Community management and influencer partnerships

Engagement tracking, sentiment analysis, and monthly reporting

4. Brand Strategy & Identity Development

Your brand is your promise—visually, verbally, and emotionally. We build cohesive brand systems that differentiate and endure.

Our Branding Services:

Brand discovery and positioning frameworks

Logo design and brand architecture

Color palettes, typography systems, and visual consistency

Voice and tone development for internal and external messaging

Brand guidelines and cross-platform application

5. Email Marketing & Lifecycle Automation

From lead nurturing to customer retention, our email marketing solutions are crafted to deliver timely, personalized, and conversion-ready messages.

What We Deliver:

Segmentation and behavior-based targeting

Branded, responsive templates

Automation flows: welcome series, abandonment recovery, reactivation

CRM integrations (Klaviyo, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp)

A/B testing and performance analytics

6. Influencer Marketing & UGC Campaigns

We connect brands with influential voices and creators who authentically engage with your ideal audience—boosting reach, relevance, and credibility.

Influencer Services:

Talent scouting and vetting based on verticals

Campaign coordination and content approvals

Long-term ambassador programs

UGC licensing for extended brand use

KPI tracking: reach, engagement, conversions

7. E-Commerce Growth Solutions

For product-based businesses, we offer scalable e-commerce strategies that increase traffic, optimize UX, and maximize conversions across digital storefronts.

Core Offerings:

Shopify, WooCommerce, and custom store builds

Product page design and SEO-friendly content

Shopping campaigns, retargeting, and cart recovery

Integration of loyalty, reviews, and referral systems

Advanced analytics and performance optimization

8. Creative & Graphic Design Services

Our design team crafts brand-aligned visuals that communicate value and drive action—across print, digital, and motion.

Creative Capabilities:

Social graphics, web banners, infographics

Corporate brochures, decks, and event assets

Motion graphics and animated explainers

Packaging design and retail branding elements

9. Photography & Video Production

We produce high-quality visual content that captures your brand's narrative, product value, and people—essential assets in a visual-first digital world.

Production Services:

Lifestyle, product, and corporate photography

Brand story videos and promotional reels

Event videography and documentation

Post-production, editing, and distribution formatting

10. Full-Funnel Marketing Strategy & Analytics

We design and manage entire marketing ecosystems, aligning touchpoints across the funnel for maximum conversion efficiency.

Strategic Services:

Persona development and customer journey mapping

Funnel design (top-funnel to loyalty stages)

Campaign orchestration across channels

KPI planning and data governance

Reporting dashboards and agile performance optimization

Industries We Serve

Free Mind Marketing has delivered measurable results across sectors such as:

E-Commerce & DTC

Technology & SaaS

Real Estate & Construction

Healthcare & Wellness

Professional Services (Legal, Financial, Education)

Hospitality & Travel

Our experience allows us to adapt strategy, language, and creative to each industry's specific audience expectations and compliance requirements.

Why Free Mind Marketing?

✔️ End-to-End Service Suite: All your digital needs under one expert roof ✔️ Strategic Execution: Every tactic is mapped to business objectives and KPIs ✔️ Cross-Industry Agility: Deep domain knowledge across verticals ✔️ Performance Transparency: Full visibility into metrics, deliverables, and ROI ✔️ Client-Centric Collaboration: Dedicated success teams and agile workflows

Conclusion: Your Growth is Our Mission

In the age of digital acceleration, sustained growth depends on how well your brand adapts, engages, and delivers online. Free Mind Marketing brings the foresight, technical know-how, and creative sophistication needed to help brands not only compete—but lead.

Whether launching a new business or transforming an established one, Free Mind Marketing offers the strategic partnership to turn your digital goals into measurable outcomes.

[queen-street-news]

Directories USA

Directories “Your Online Directory score is based on the number of places in which your listings are present and contain consistent information such as business name, and phone number.” There are a number of sites that will auto update or sync your info to theses directories. Here’s a list Synced as of AUG 2023 America’s Best…

[stochastique-blog]

Here we go

New Post has been published on https://gettingfound.ca/google-web-index-tool/

Google Web Index Tool

Google Web Index Tool

There is a relationship between how many pages on your website is indexed by google (google takes a picture) and if you show up in the front page. In order for google to make search result available they need to keep of copy of your site on google site.

In the browser CHROME put the follow search in

site:dbsduplication.com – you should get this about 500 pages in the index. 

In the browser CHROME put the follow search in

CD DUPLICATION TORONTO – we are looking for “dbsduplication.com” You should get this

dbsduplication.com should be on the first page

use site:dbsduplication.com but use your site

[fyntix]

Top Digital Marketing Agency in Toronto

[web-designing-toronto]

The Ingenious Tango Of Seo And Ppc: The Most Effective Customer Engagement And Generation Tactic

Are you a business owner looking to boost your website's traffic and outshine your competitors? The key might lie in combining #SEO and pay-per-click (#PPC) #advertising strategies.

These two approaches, while distinct, work hand-in-hand to increase your chances of appearing in search engine results. By using both, you can reach a wider audience and gain a better understanding of your customers and their needs.

If you're not already using both SEO and PPC, it's time to start. It's cost-effective and can improve your brand's visibility and control in the market. Learn more about it here at https://bit.ly/48O7ein

And if managing both strategies feels overwhelming, consider reaching out to a #digital #marketing #agency like Continuum Digital. Our team of Digital Marketing Experts can create a customized plan for your business. Contact us today to get started!

[welovedigitalmarketing]

Understand the role of breadcrumbs in enhancing SEO and guiding users seamlessly through your website. Get started with breadcrumbs today!

[cubicdigitalinc]

Boost Your Business with Top SEM Services Today!

Unlock the full potential of your business with our professional SEM Services at Cubic Digital! As a leading Search Engine Marketing Company, we specialize in creating targeted campaigns that drive traffic and increase conversions. Our SEM Agency in Toronto uses cutting-edge strategies to ensure your brand stands out in search results. We offer comprehensive Search Engine Marketing Services tailored to your unique goals, whether you need pay-per-click advertising or in-depth keyword research. Let our experienced SEM Company help you maximize your ROI and reach your audience effectively. Contact us today to start your SEM journey!

[seorecovery]

Website optimization services refer to the systematic process of enhancing various elements of a website to improve its performance, usability, and visibility in search engine results. These services typically include SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies to increase organic traffic by optimizing content, keywords, and technical aspects like site speed and mobile responsiveness.

[dotitioo]

https://www.dotit.io/post/small-website-development-costs-in-canada

[aaksconsulting]

Search Engine Optimization in Canada

Stay ahead of the competition with Aaks Consultant Inc.'s advanced SEO strategies!  From on-page optimization to link building, we'll tailor our approach to meet your business goals and drive sustainable growth. Let's dominate the search results together! More Visit Us: https://www.aaks.ca/ Call: 1 416-827-2594 #SearchEngineOptimization#DigitalMarketing#OnlineVisibility#GoogleRanking#KeywordOptimization#OrganicTraffic#SERP#Backlinks#ContentOptimization#SEOStrategy#WebsiteRanking#AaksConsultantInc

[rheemax1014]

In today's digital landscape, local SEO is essential for businesses looking to improve their online visibility and attract more customers. Whether you're a small local shop or a large enterprise, optimizing your website for local search can make a significant difference in your bottom line.

[dot-h-digital]

SEO Expert

SEO is about building and optimizing websites that appear in the top results of a search engine and are easily accessible by the users. Our SEO experts pay attention to every detail needed to diagnose and resolve challenges that local businesses face on local rankings or provide visibility to international enterprises.

Call Us Now!

For more information:

Visit us https://dothdigital.com/search-engine-optimization/

Email: info@dothdigital.com

Call Now: (289) 800-7112

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The moral injury of having your work enshittified

This Monday (November 27), I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

This week, I wrote about how the Great Enshittening – in which all the digital services we rely on become unusable, extractive piles of shit – did not result from the decay of the morals of tech company leadership, but rather, from the collapse of the forces that discipline corporate wrongdoing:

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/

The failure to enforce competition law allowed a few companies to buy out their rivals, or sell goods below cost until their rivals collapsed, or bribe key parts of their supply chain not to allow rivals to participate:

https://www.engadget.com/google-reportedly-pays-apple-36-percent-of-ad-search-revenues-from-safari-191730783.html

The resulting concentration of the tech sector meant that the surviving firms were stupendously wealthy, and cozy enough that they could agree on a common legislative agenda. That regulatory capture has allowed tech companies to violate labor, privacy and consumer protection laws by arguing that the law doesn't apply when you use an app to violate it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But the regulatory capture isn't just about preventing regulation: it's also about creating regulation – laws that make it illegal to reverse-engineer, scrape, and otherwise mod, hack or reconfigure existing services to claw back value that has been taken away from users and business customers. This gives rise to Jay Freeman's perfectly named doctrine of "felony contempt of business-model," in which it is illegal to use your own property in ways that anger the shareholders of the company that sold it to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Undisciplined by the threat of competition, regulation, or unilateral modification by users, companies are free to enshittify their products. But what does that actually look like? I say that enshittification is always precipitated by a lost argument.

It starts when someone around a board-room table proposes doing something that's bad for users but good for the company. If the company faces the discipline of competition, regulation or self-help measures, then the workers who are disgusted by this course of action can say, "I think doing this would be gross, and what's more, it's going to make the company poorer," and so they win the argument.

But when you take away that discipline, the argument gets reduced to, "Don't do this because it would make me ashamed to work here, even though it will make the company richer." Money talks, bullshit walks. Let the enshittification begin!

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/22/who-wins-the-argument/#corporations-are-people-my-friend

But why do workers care at all? That's where phrases like "don't be evil" come into the picture. Until very recently, tech workers participated in one of history's tightest labor markets, in which multiple companies with gigantic war-chests bid on their labor. Even low-level employees routinely fielded calls from recruiters who dangled offers of higher salaries and larger stock grants if they would jump ship for a company's rival.

Employers built "campuses" filled with lavish perks: massages, sports facilities, daycare, gourmet cafeterias. They offered workers generous benefit packages, including exotic health benefits like having your eggs frozen so you could delay fertility while offsetting the risks normally associated with conceiving at a later age.

But all of this was a transparent ruse: the business-case for free meals, gyms, dry-cleaning, catering and massages was to keep workers at their laptops for 10, 12, or even 16 hours per day. That egg-freezing perk wasn't about helping workers plan their families: it was about thumbing the scales in favor of working through your entire twenties and thirties without taking any parental leave.

In other words, tech employers valued their employees as a means to an end: they wanted to get the best geeks on the payroll and then work them like government mules. The perks and pay weren't the result of comradeship between management and labor: they were the result of the discipline of competition for labor.

This wasn't really a secret, of course. Big Tech workers are split into two camps: blue badges (salaried employees) and green badges (contractors). Whenever there is a slack labor market for a specific job or skill, it is converted from a blue badge job to a green badge job. Green badges don't get the food or the massages or the kombucha. They don't get stock or daycare. They don't get to freeze their eggs. They also work long hours, but they are incentivized by the fear of poverty.

Tech giants went to great lengths to shield blue badges from green badges – at some Google campuses, these workforces actually used different entrances and worked in different facilities or on different floors. Sometimes, green badge working hours would be staggered so that the armies of ragged clickworkers would not be lined up to badge in when their social betters swanned off the luxury bus and into their airy adult kindergartens.

But Big Tech worked hard to convince those blue badges that they were truly valued. Companies hosted regular town halls where employees could ask impertinent questions of their CEOs. They maintained freewheeling internal social media sites where techies could rail against corporate foolishness and make Dilbert references.

And they came up with mottoes.

Apple told its employees it was a sound environmental steward that cared about privacy. Apple also deliberately turned old devices into e-waste by shredding them to ensure that they wouldn't be repaired and compete with new devices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

And even as they were blocking Facebook's surveillance tools, they quietly built their own nonconsensual mass surveillance program and lied to customers about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Facebook told employees they were on a "mission to connect every person in the world," but instead deliberately sowed discontent among its users and trapped them in silos that meant that anyone who left Facebook lost all their friends:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

And Google promised its employees that they would not "be evil" if they worked at Google. For many googlers, that mattered. They wanted to do something good with their lives, and they had a choice about who they would work for. What's more, they did make things that were good. At their high points, Google Maps, Google Mail, and of course, Google Search were incredible.

My own life was totally transformed by Maps: I have very poor spatial sense, need to actually stop and think to tell my right from my left, and I spent more of my life at least a little lost and often very lost. Google Maps is the cognitive prosthesis I needed to become someone who can go anywhere. I'm profoundly grateful to the people who built that service.

There's a name for phenomenon in which you care so much about your job that you endure poor conditions and abuse: it's called "vocational awe," as coined by Fobazi Ettarh:

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

Ettarh uses the term to apply to traditionally low-waged workers like librarians, teachers and nurses. In our book Chokepoint Capitalism, Rebecca Giblin and I talked about how it applies to artists and other creative workers, too:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

But vocational awe is also omnipresent in tech. The grandiose claims to be on a mission to make the world a better place are not just puffery – they're a vital means of motivating workers who can easily quit their jobs and find a new one to put in 16-hour days. The massages and kombucha and egg-freezing are not framed as perks, but as logistical supports, provided so that techies on an important mission can pursue a shared social goal without being distracted by their balky, inconvenient meatsuits.

Steve Jobs was a master of instilling vocational awe. He was full of aphorisms like "we're here to make a dent in the universe, otherwise why even be here?" Or his infamous line to John Sculley, whom he lured away from Pepsi: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?"

Vocational awe cuts both ways. If your workforce actually believes in all that high-minded stuff, if they actually sacrifice their health, family lives and self-care to further the mission, they will defend it. That brings me back to enshittification, and the argument: "If we do this bad thing to the product I work on, it will make me hate myself."

The decline in market discipline for large tech companies has been accompanied by a decline in labor discipline, as the market for technical work grew less and less competitive. Since the dotcom collapse, the ability of tech giants to starve new entrants of market oxygen has shrunk techies' dreams.

Tech workers once dreamed of working for a big, unwieldy firm for a few years before setting out on their own to topple it with a startup. Then, the dream shrank: work for that big, clumsy firm for a few years, then do a fake startup that makes a fake product that is acquihired by your old employer, as an incredibly inefficient and roundabout way to get a raise and a bonus.

Then the dream shrank again: work for a big, ugly firm for life, but get those perks, the massages and the kombucha and the stock options and the gourmet cafeteria and the egg-freezing. Then it shrank again: work for Google for a while, but then get laid off along with 12,000 co-workers, just months after the company does a stock buyback that would cover all those salaries for the next 27 years:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

Tech workers' power was fundamentally individual. In a tight labor market, tech workers could personally stand up to their bosses. They got "workplace democracy" by mouthing off at town hall meetings. They didn't have a union, and they thought they didn't need one. Of course, they did need one, because there were limits to individual power, even for the most in-demand workers, especially when it came to ghastly, long-running sexual abuse from high-ranking executives:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html

Today, atomized tech workers who are ordered to enshittify the products they take pride in are losing the argument. Workers who put in long hours, missed funerals and school plays and little league games and anniversaries and family vacations are being ordered to flush that sacrifice down the toilet to grind out a few basis points towards a KPI.

It's a form of moral injury, and it's palpable in the first-person accounts of former workers who've exited these large firms or the entire field. The viral "Reflecting on 18 years at Google," written by Ian Hixie, vibrates with it:

https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373

Hixie describes the sense of mission he brought to his job, the workplace democracy he experienced as employees' views were both solicited and heeded. He describes the positive contributions he was able to make to a commons of technical standards that rippled out beyond Google – and then, he says, "Google's culture eroded":

Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.

In other words, techies started losing the argument. Layoffs weakened worker power – not just to defend their own interest, but to defend the users interests. Worker power is always about more than workers – think of how the 2019 LA teachers' strike won greenspace for every school, a ban on immigration sweeps of students' parents at the school gates and other community benefits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Hixie attributes the changes to a change in leadership, but I respectfully disagree. Hixie points to the original shareholder letter from the Google founders, in which they informed investors contemplating their IPO that they were retaining a controlling interest in the company's governance so that they could ignore their shareholders' priorities in favor of a vision of Google as a positive force in the world:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/

Hixie says that the leadership that succeeded the founders lost sight of this vision – but the whole point of that letter is that the founders never fully ceded control to subsequent executive teams. Yes, those executive teams were accountable to the shareholders, but the largest block of voting shares were retained by the founders.

I don't think the enshittification of Google was due to a change in leadership – I think it was due to a change in discipline, the discipline imposed by competition, regulation and the threat of self-help measures. Take ads: when Google had to contend with one-click adblocker installation, it had to constantly balance the risk of making users so fed up that they googled "how do I block ads?" and then never saw another ad ever again.

But once Google seized the majority of the mobile market, it was able to funnel users into apps, and reverse-engineering an app is a felony (felony contempt of business-model) under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to install an ad-blocker.

And as Google acquired control over the browser market, it was likewise able to reduce the self-help measures available to browser users who found ads sufficiently obnoxious to trigger googling "how do I block ads?" The apotheosis of this is the yearslong campaign to block adblockers in Chrome, which the company has sworn it will finally do this coming June:

https://www.tumblr.com/tevruden/734352367416410112/you-have-until-june-to-dump-chrome

My contention here is not that Google's enshittification was precipitated by a change in personnel via the promotion of managers who have shitty ideas. Google's enshittification was precipitated by a change in discipline, as the negative consequences of heeding those shitty ideas were abolished thanks to monopoly.

This is bad news for people like me, who rely on services like Google Maps as cognitive prostheses. Elizabeth Laraki, one of the original Google Maps designers, has published a scorching critique of the latest GMaps design:

https://twitter.com/elizlaraki/status/1727351922254852182

Laraki calls out numerous enshittificatory design-choices that have left Maps screens covered in "crud" – multiple revenue-maximizing elements that come at the expense of usability, shifting value from users to Google.

What Laraki doesn't say is that these UI elements are auctioned off to merchants, which means that the business that gives Google the most money gets the greatest prominence in Maps, even if it's not the best merchant. That's a recurring motif in enshittified tech platforms, most notoriously Amazon, which makes $31b/year auctioning off top search placement to companies whose products aren't relevant enough to your query to command that position on their own:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

Enshittification begets enshittification. To succeed on Amazon, you must divert funds from product quality to auction placement, which means that the top results are the worst products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

The exception is searches for Apple products: Apple and Amazon have a cozy arrangement that means that searches for Apple products are a timewarp back to the pre-enshittification Amazon, when the company worried enough about losing your business to heed the employees who objected to sacrificing search quality as part of a merchant extortion racket:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-gives-apple-special-treatment-while-others-suffer-junk-ads-2023-11

Not every tech worker is a tech bro, in other words. Many workers care deeply about making your life better. But the microeconomics of the boardroom in a monopolized tech sector rewards the worst people and continuously promotes them. Forget the Peter Principle: tech is ruled by the Sam Principle.

As OpenAI went through four CEOs in a single week, lots of commentators remarked on Sam Altman's rise and fall and rise, but I only found one commentator who really had Altman's number. Writing in Today in Tabs, Rusty Foster nailed Altman to the wall:

https://www.todayintabs.com/p/defective-accelerationism

Altman's history goes like this: first, he founded a useless startup that raised $30m, only to be acquired and shuttered. Then Altman got a job running Y Combinator, where he somehow failed at taking huge tranches of equity from "every Stanford dropout with an idea for software to replace something Mommy used to do." After that, he founded OpenAI, a company that he claims to believe presents an existential risk to the entire human risk – which he structured so incompetently that he was then forced out of it.

His reward for this string of farcical, mounting failures? He was put back in charge of the company he mis-structured despite his claimed belief that it will destroy the human race if not properly managed.

Altman's been around for a long time. He founded his startup in 2005. There've always been Sams – of both the Bankman-Fried varietal and the Altman genus – in tech. But they didn't get to run amok. They were disciplined by their competitors, regulators, users and workers. The collapse of competition led to an across-the-board collapse in all of those forms of discipline, revealing the executives for the mediocre sociopaths they always were, and exposing tech workers' vocational awe for the shabby trick it was from the start.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

[manetsgarden]

The Directioner to marketing exec pipeline

For my fellow 2012-2014 Tumblr obsessives. A heartfelt tribute to the band, the years spent together online, and the many wonderful friends and life I made along the way. /

A few weeks ago it was my friend’s birthday. Six years ago, almost to the day, she and I met at a cupcake cafe, and bonded over the years we spent on Tumblr and Twitter as ultimate 1D girlies while we ate our cupcakes. We laughed about how we got follows from celebrities, or replies from the band, and how we spent every waking moment online, obsessed by different YouTubers, bands, and TV shows.

When I think about the string that lead me to that cafe in Edinburgh, it starts with Harry Potter. I was six years old in Orlando, Florida, and my parents took us to see the Philosopher’s Stone. In the rest of the pictures of our holiday, I have gigantic, frizzy hair because I begged my mom to braid it every night so I could look like Hermione. Six years old, but I knew how to immediately decide to devote myself to obsession.

Less than ten years later, I was watching trailers of movies on YouTube. At that point, I already had accounts on Twitter and Tumblr, but I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to do with them. From the moment I clicked on the “What Makes You Beautiful” Youtube video, everything became second nature.

There was no call to action at the end of that video saying “now pick your favourite and love them forever.” There was no need: we watched it and knew immediately what our job was. I wasn’t even halfway through before I knew exactly which one was mine (and I’ve never wavered). Credit is due to the YouTube algorithm for filling my recommended videos with content from their X Factor days, because I spent the rest of that night watching the videos of them on the stairs, searching them on Tumblr, and falling down the 1D rabbit hole.

It was as easy as breathing! There was no ‘how-to’ guide, the word ‘stan’ didn’t even exist yet. The way the internet let us collectively fawn over anything from a band, to a character in a book, to a random person on YouTube felt like a brave new world. I followed One Direction online alongside girls from the UK, Brazil, the Philippines, everywhere. I started my deep dives into other worlds with Harry Potter, but it was as a One Direction fan that I became embedded in the globalisation of the internet. I went from One Direction, to Zoella, to Sherlock, to Doctor Who, to 5SOS, and eventually I graduated from high school and got a life. By the time I did that though, I knew, fundamentally, how the internet worked.

In 2013, I was there as the Mischacopolypse started. I saw those first few posts trickle in. Later that year, I watched the full 7 hour 1D Day livestream. Year after year, I waited for the new Zoella Vlogmas intro like it was the lighting of the Rockefeller tree. Online content, I learned, was addicting because it was the ultimate way to connect with people. I made friends with girls in Toronto, Vancouver, North Carolina, and England. Not just “internet friends” but real, solid, sweet hearted friendship. I still watch their lives unfold on the internet with pride.

By 18 I had built my own website on Wordpress; I knew how to optimise my blogs for SEO, and set up a tripod with a ring light. I knew how to edit on iMovie and MovieMaker, how to find the latest trends, and even how to search engine optimise on YouTube. And, I leveraged it. I had not only a blog and a YouTube channel, and I tried every new thing. I got my first brand deals, and by 21, I got my first job as a Social Media and Web Coordinator for the uni newspaper. When I graduated, there was only one place to go: the home of all my teenage obsessions, and the reason I was who I was, the UK.

Before moving, I debated between Brighton (home of Zoella) and Edinburgh (home of Harry Potter), and it was really just fate that made me choose the latter. Immediately upon moving, I went back to my roots and got a job as a Harry Potter tour guide. I started creating like you wouldn’t believe. I got invited to events, and even more brand deals.

By this point I knew what sold: the person, the story, the personal connection. People needed to feel like they knew me in order to be invested, so I mined my life for content. Within a year, I got a job as a marketing exec, pointing to my blog and my work as a content creator to get me in. Five years later, I have two degrees in history, but a big girl job in content marketing.

Last weekend that same friend and I were driving home together, listening to One Direction and laughing about how we both ended up in marketing. Both confident there was no reason for it other than our obsession with 1D in our teenage years. At the same time, on different sides of the ocean, we fell in love with One Direction, learned Wordpress, obsessed over Zoella, created Instagram personalities, built our “brands”, and eventually, settled for jobs big girl jobs in marketing.

More than our jobs, we have six years of friendship built (from my side) on the trust that because we both know what 2013 Twitter was like as a One Direction fan, we just get each other. We’ve shared countless jokes about the old days, (remember the pandemonium when the pictures of Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, and baby Lux in Central Park dropped??!!!!), and looking forward to when we’re old and there’s inevitably a reunion tour. This was the norm, until she messaged our groupchat at 11:30pm on her birthday, and I only knew it was serious because she wouldn’t be so dramatic if it wasn’t. A quick Google search confirming the truth, one of the most jarring, official endings to anything so far in my life.

When you hear ‘stans’ say they owe their lives to a band or a celebrity, they don’t always mean it in a parasocial or ‘this song saved me when I had serious mental health problems’ sort of way. I was never that intensely obsessed with One Direction, but I wouldn’t have my career, I wouldn’t have met my friend, my husband, I wouldn’t have my home, or, god forbid, my cat(!) if I hadn’t clicked play on that video fifteen years ago.

It feels like a personal loss not because I have a parasocial relationship with Liam Payne, but because in my life there was a clear world before, with him in it, and now a world after, without. It is as simple as saying: it is hard to come to terms with a world without someone who completely created the world that you live in.

Support this essay on substack: https://atmydesk.substack.com/p/the-directioner-to-marketing-exec

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