Man, 2019. That was a rough year for me just starting out with this whole online thing. My regular gigs—you know, the technical reviews and stuff—they were dead in the water. I was sweating my rent. I’d been working my butt off, trying to be a serious blogger, a subject matter expert, and getting maybe five clicks a day. Five! I was watching guys with zero expertise just posting pictures of their breakfast and somehow making bank.
I was done trying to be smart. I realized people weren’t looking for deep dives; they were looking for a life raft or maybe just a quick answer to a problem they didn’t even know how to phrase. I pivoted. I stopped writing what I thought they should read and started writing what I knew they were frantically typing into the search bar at 2 AM after a rotten day at work. And around late 2018, the signs were all there: the “New Year, New Me” rush combined with pure, unadulterated career panic.
The Trigger: Why Pisces 2019?
I searched around for the most generic, wishy-washy job advice out there. I noticed that the major horoscope sites always have a career section, right? But it’s always too vague. It’s like, “A great year for growth!” or “Be careful of new partnerships.” Useless. I decided I had to reverse-engineer the actual job search anxiety, not the cosmic predictions.
My entire practice was a test: Could I take the emotional pull of a specific, anxious-sounding query—like the Pisces 2019 career outlook—and fill it with actionable-sounding garbage that people wanted to hear? Why Pisces? Honestly, I looked at the traffic numbers from the previous two years for all the star signs, and Pisces was a consistent mid-performer, meaning less competition from the giant sites but still a dedicated crowd of folks who cared enough to look. It was the perfect guinea pig.
The Scramble: How I Built the “Advice”
I certainly wasn’t going to learn astrology. That wasn’t the point. The point was to mimic authority and spoon-feed people what they already suspected about their jobs. I got to work in early December 2018.
First, I spent about two days just crawling other sites. Not the deep-dive astrology ones, but the cheap news sites and the self-help forums. I compiled a massive, messy list of common career fears and hopes people were sharing.
I found the common themes kept popping up. I organized them like this:
- Money Talk: Is a raise coming? Should I ask for one?
- Boss Problems: Am I safe? Should I quit before I get fired?
- New Skills: Do I need to learn something new to survive?
- The Big Jump: Is 2019 the year to finally start my own thing?
I grabbed the five most generic astrological predictions I could find—things like “The influence of Jupiter on your Third House”—and then, for each one, I slammed one of those career fears right into it. I re-wrote the whole thing in a frantic, buddy-to-buddy tone. I added a ton of verbs: “You must negotiate,” “You should quit that dead-end job,” “You need to demand that promotion.” No wishy-washy stuff. Just straight-up commands disguised as cosmic advice.
I made sure to mix in a healthy dose of pure common sense, too. Like, “Mars is telling you to update your resume” (which everyone should do anyway) and “Saturn suggests focusing on long-term financial planning” (which means saving money, duh). It looked like a horoscope, but it read like a highly opinionated career coach who had too much coffee.
The Payoff: Getting the Clicks
I published the article on my little side blog on January 1st. I didn’t get a huge spike immediately—that would have been crazy. My little corner of the internet barely moved. My actual practice was in the distribution.
I went where the anxious people were. I sought out job forums, specific sub-sections of bigger discussion boards, and even random social media groups about career changes. I posted snippets or just teased the title, saying something like, “Look, I know this sounds nuts, but I read this 2019 Pisces thing and it totally described my situation.” I acted like a fellow stressed-out job-seeker who just stumbled upon some magical answer.
And that’s when it happened. The traffic didn’t just crawl, it exploded. The comments section filled up immediately. People weren’t debating the alignment of the stars; they were validating their decisions. Someone would say, “See? I KNEW I was meant to quit!” or “This confirms I need to learn Python this year!” They weren’t looking for a future; they were looking for a permission slip for the present.
I tracked the numbers for three months. That one goofy horoscope post outperformed every serious technical review I had ever written, combined. It drove traffic to my other, less-fluffy content, too. My entire mindset shifted based on this single, silly practice. It taught me that people don’t want the truth; they want their feelings reflected back to them in an authoritative wrapper. The horoscope was just the wrapper. The stuffing was just basic, panicky job advice.
It was a dirty trick, but it worked. I learned exactly what my audience really wanted, and it paid the rent for a solid six months while I figured out a more sustainable strategy. Never underestimate the career anxiety when a new year rolls around.
