I tried to be clever. That was the whole practice.
I cooked up the title, Is the Virgo Monthly Horoscope December 2018 Merry? A look at your holiday season!, not because I cared about stars or Virgos or 2018, but because I was trying to game the system. My first step in this whole failed content experiment was to drill down into an ultra-specific, non-seasonal query to see if it could still pull traffic from Google. I figured a hyper-niche, slightly historical post might get picked up by long-tail SEO. I decided to spend a week on this one piece of content, treating it like a technical challenge, not an astrological one.
The Setup: Building the Fake Merry Season
First, I opened my ancient, cheap text editor, not some fancy content platform. I wanted zero distractions. My process was never about the ‘reading’ of the stars; it was about the construction of the narrative. I had to make December 2018 look like it mattered.
My method broke down into four simple, cynical steps:
- Step One: The Vague Anchor. I searched for the actual major planetary movements for December 2018. It took me all of thirty seconds. I grabbed “Mercury Retrogade in Sagittarius” and “Jupiter moving into a new position” – those are safe bets. Nobody remembers exactly where Jupiter was, but everyone knows Jupiter is “big good news.” I slapped those two vague concepts onto the screen.
- Step Two: The Emotional Hammer. I knew the target audience was looking for validation, not prediction. So I focused on the feeling of the holiday season. I used strong verbs: Reflect, Re-examine, Re-align. The text wasn’t about what will happen; it was about what you should be doing to make it merry. I wrote paragraphs about “tying up loose ends” at work.
- Step Three: The Triple Check. This is the most important part of content farming. I pulled up three competitor sites. I read their 2019-era horoscopes. I made sure my ‘2018 reflection’ didn’t contradict their 2019 predictions. I had to thread the needle so my retrospective piece looked consistent with the general, always-optimistic narrative of the whole field. If they were predicting a great 2019, my December 2018 had to be the tough, grounding period before the payoff.
- Step Four: The SEO Polish. I shoved in the phrase “holiday season” four times and “Merry” three times, making the post easy to scan and highly clickbait-y. I called it done.
I spent twelve hours doing all this. I published the post and set up the analytics tracking. And then I waited. And the traffic was terrible. Absolutely terrible. Why did I even bother with this ultra-specific, dated nonsense?
This is where the real story begins.
The Reality: Why I Was Trawling for Old Keywords
I know all this ridiculous content creation effort because, just like the story you read about the guy messing around with Go and tech stacks, my ‘practice’ was born out of complete desperation and a sudden, sharp, unexpected cut. Why would a grown man with a decade of actual, serious corporate experience sit around analyzing whether the Virgos of 2018 were feeling cheery?
It was because I was completely, utterly grounded. Just a month before I started this stupid horoscope project, I watched my entire career evaporate. I had been a Senior Operations Manager at a logistics company—steady pay, great benefits, the whole package. One Tuesday morning, I walked into the office, and a security guard I didn’t recognize stopped me at the door. He handed me an envelope. Inside, it said the company was “streamlining operations.”
I called my boss. No answer. I called HR. They just directed me to an automated number that played elevator music and eventually hung up on me. Just like that. After ten years, I was locked out of my email, my accounts were disabled, and the only communication I got was a stiff, impersonal letter tossed through my letterbox the next day.
I sat at my kitchen table for two weeks, just staring at the ceiling. The bills kept coming. My savings were okay for a while, but the anxiety was crushing. My wife was worried. We needed money fast. That’s why I turned to content creation—the lowest barrier to entry. I threw myself into anything I could do to generate any kind of income. This horoscope junk, SEO keyword research, listicles about “Top 10 Office Plants”—I did it all. I tried to find the one small, ignored corner of the internet where I could make ten bucks. That December 2018 Virgo post was just another throw of the dice, another desperate attempt to make the rent.
My ‘practice record’ isn’t about astrology. It’s about a man trying to survive a corporate ghosting by typing vague, meaningless reassurance into a content management system. The practice was painful, but it taught me that relying on gimmicks and old keywords will never beat having a stable base. I found a new, much more solid role eventually, and I shut down the horoscope side projects. I sold the domain for $50. But I’ll always remember the absolute focus and energy I had to invest in writing that one piece of historical, irrelevant fluff, just to feel like I was getting somewhere during my personal holiday season crisis. It wasn’t merry, but it made me move.
