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<title>SEO – Michel Fortin</title>
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<title>SEO – Michel Fortin</title>
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<title>How I Learned the Hard Way That Real Business Is Built on Service, Not Snake Oil</title>
<link>https://michelfortin.com/career-story/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michel Fortin]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sat, 07 Mar 2026 19:52:32 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Personal Story]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Career]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Copywriting]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Growth Strategy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Integrity]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Lessons Learned]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Marketing]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Revenue Architecture]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[SEO]]></category>
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<description><![CDATA[From bankruptcy at 21 to fractional C-suite executive. The career story behind how I developed my approach to revenue architecture, and the losses that shaped it.]]></description>
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<h2 id="article-summary" class="wp-block-heading">Article Summary</h2>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Michel Fortin’s path from bankruptcy at 21 to fractional CMO/CRO spans direct response copywriting, early internet marketing, and nearly a decade of personal loss. The through-line is a single conviction: real business serves people rather than exploiting them. That principle shaped his departure from the internet marketing pitchfest era and now drives his revenue architecture work with growth-stage firms.</p>
</div></div>
<div role="navigation" aria-label="Table of Contents" class="simpletoc wp-block-simpletoc-toc"><h2 class="simpletoc-title">Table of Contents</h2>
<ul class="simpletoc-list">
<li><a href="#article-summary">Article Summary</a>
</li>
<li><a href="#bankruptcy-at-21-taught-me-more-than-any-course">Bankruptcy at 21 Taught Me More Than Any Course</a>
</li>
<li><a href="#from-insurance-to-infomercials">From Insurance to Infomercials</a>
</li>
<li><a href="#the-accidental-career">The Accidental Career</a>
</li>
<li><a href="#the-seedy-side-i-didnt-see-coming">The Seedy Side I Didn’t See Coming</a>
</li>
<li><a href="#when-the-world-turned-upside-down">When the World Turned Upside Down</a>
</li>
<li><a href="#the-losses-that-shaped-everything">The Losses That Shaped Everything</a>
</li>
<li><a href="#what-i-actually-believe-about-growth">What I Actually Believe About Growth</a>
</li>
<li><a href="#the-pattern-ive-spent-35-years-documenting">The Pattern I’ve Spent 35 Years Documenting</a>
</li>
<li><a href="#frequently-asked-questions">Frequently Asked Questions</a>
</li></ul></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">I got married at 19. My wife, who was a little older than me, had a two-year-old daughter, and I essentially adopted her. She’s 40 years old now and still calls me Dad.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">I was young but I also wanted to be a father, and a better father than mine. My father was an alcoholic who abused me when I was young. After my mother left him, the state institutionalized him. He had Korsakov’s Syndrome, a degenerative brain condition caused by years of alcohol abuse.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">I carried that weight for most of my life before I understood what it actually was. That context matters because it drove everything that came next.</p>
<h2 id="bankruptcy-at-21-taught-me-more-than-any-course" class="wp-block-heading">Bankruptcy at 21 Taught Me More Than Any Course</h2>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Wanting to fight my fear of rejection, I went into sales. Insurance, specifically. It seemed like the right kind of exposure therapy. And of course, I failed, spectacularly. Working on straight commission in a rural territory where I knew no one, I accumulated debt on eight credit cards just to buy groceries. So I declared bankruptcy at 21. Young, foolish, desperate to provide.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">But failure has a way of making you resourceful. Instead of cold calling doors that slammed in my face, I tried something different. I wrote a letter and mailed it. A simple offer: a free policy audit. Only a few people called. But those calls didn’t feel like rejection. They felt like permission.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That year, I became the top salesperson in my district, then in all of Canada. It didn’t last long. But something had clicked. Copywriting, writing words that move people to act, piqued my interest in a way that nothing else had.</p>
<h2 id="from-insurance-to-infomercials" class="wp-block-heading">From Insurance to Infomercials</h2>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">I left insurance and took a job at a hair replacement clinic, working on commission again but in a growing industry. I wasn’t satisfied with the volume of leads coming in. So I quietly took over the clinic’s marketing. I wrote the newspaper display ads, the direct mail pieces, and the scripts for their late-night TV infomercials. Bookings skyrocketed. I was 22 and making more money than I ever had in my life.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">When the clinic expanded to multiple locations across Canada and the US, I handled marketing, copywriting, advertising, and training their sales and marketing staff. That’s also when I built their first website in 1992, applying the same direct response principles I had been using offline.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">What I had figured out, without anyone telling me, was that the Internet was just mail-order marketing in a faster medium. The channel changes. The human psychology underneath it does not.</p>
<h2 id="the-accidental-career" class="wp-block-heading">The Accidental Career</h2>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">None of this was planned. After spending so much time building marketing systems for other clinics and neglecting my own commissions, my income dropped. So I did the logical thing and hung out my own shingle as an independent marketing consultant.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">In the early 90s, I put together a booklet called <em><a href="https://michelfortin.com/power-positioning-pillars/" data-type="post" data-id="414">The 10 Commandments of Power Positioning</a></em>. It was originally a marketing tool for my services. By the mid-90s, I split it into standalone articles and submitted them to online publications. One caught the attention of The Internet Marketing Chronicles, and they hired me as their editor and main writer. At its peak, the newsletter had 120,000 subscribers.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The late Corey Rudl, who owned The Internet Marketing Center, eventually acquired the magazine. He kept me on as editor and hired me to write his marketing materials, website content, and an autobiography as a ghostwriter. That opened the floodgates.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">I incorporated as The Success Doctor, Inc. in 1997. Speaking gigs followed, from a few hundred people in New Zealand to 10,000 in the UK. I shared stages with Dan Kennedy, Jay Abraham, Gary Halbert, Jay Conrad Levinson, Russell Brunson, and many others.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">And that’s where things started to go sideways.</p>
<h2 id="the-seedy-side-i-didnt-see-coming" class="wp-block-heading">The Seedy Side I Didn’t See Coming</h2>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">To understand this part of the story, you need to understand what the “internet marketing” world was in the late 90s and early 2000s. It wasn’t what most corporate professionals would recognize as digital marketing today. It was a parallel ecosystem, largely built around direct response copywriting, email marketing, and live seminars.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Some of it was brilliant, led by people who deeply understood persuasion, positioning, and conversion at a level most agencies still haven’t caught up to. And some of it was predatory.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The seminar circuit looked like education. But it was mostly a pitchfest in disguise. Speakers sold courses on how to make money. Some were legitimate. However, a growing number were packaging business opportunity schemes, “businesses in a box” that essentially taught people to replicate the same scheme they had just bought. Pyramid schemes dressed up as education. Snake oil wrapped in testimonials.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">I was young, naive, and broke enough to find it all exciting at first. I wrote salesletters for some of these promoters. I spoke at these events. I was part of the machine without fully understanding what the machine was.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The first time I spoke at one of these seminars, I didn’t know I was supposed to sell something from the stage. The promoter took a 50% cut of speaker sales. I made nothing for him that day. Other speakers criticized me for it, some teased me for years afterward. With ADHD comes <a href="https://michelfortin.com/adhd/" data-type="link" data-id="https://michelfortin.com/adhd/">rejection-sensitive dysphoria</a>, and the pain of that public humiliation was real and lasting.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">But a few years later, the same promoter gave me a second chance. I came back prepared. I broke the event’s sales record and was named the top speaker. My pitch was for a copywriting critique course. Genuine education, real skills, real delivery.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The difference between embarrassing failure and success is often just deciding to try again when the fear is loudest. That distinction would matter more to me later.</p>
<h2 id="when-the-world-turned-upside-down" class="wp-block-heading">When the World Turned Upside Down</h2>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">In 2003, I met my second wife. She was running a customer support business that served many of the same clients I did. We merged our businesses, and eventually, our lives.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Then, shortly before our wedding in 2006, she was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. Over the next nine years, her disease became the center of our lives. We stopped speaking at seminars, stopped attending, stepped back from the industry entirely.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">What I saw from the outside, once I stepped back, was disturbing. We were hearing more and more stories of people refinancing their homes to buy $20,000 “coaching programs” that delivered nothing. Boilerroom telemarketers were closing deals using whatever credit remained on a card. Some of the very people I had worked with were being investigated by the FTC for deceptive practices.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">And when my wife was in the middle of chemotherapy, a handful of these same marketers hounded her with pitches for “natural cures” and pseudo-scientific nonsense. One accused me of being a shill for Big Pharma for supporting her medical treatment.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That was the last straw. My wife wrote a report called Internet Marketing Sins. It made us enemies. We stopped receiving speaking invitations and affiliate partnership offers. We were completely fine with that.</p>
<h2 id="the-losses-that-shaped-everything" class="wp-block-heading">The Losses That Shaped Everything</h2>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">In 2008, my mother was diagnosed with the same disease as my wife. Breast cancer. She became terminal in 2011. We set up a hospice in our home. She died the morning after my birthday.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Just a few months later, my wife’s cancer returned and spread to every major organ. Just a month before she passed in early 2015, my father died in his sleep at the institution. His heart had weakened from the same disease that had destroyed his mind decades before.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">2015 was the worst year of my life.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Two years later, my sister, my only sibling, who had struggled with multiple health conditions her entire life, also died in her sleep.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">I’ve done grief in a lot of ways. The one that works best for me involves a drum kit. I’ve played drums since I was young, and for the past several years I’ve been playing with a band on a regular basis. It’s not a metaphor or a productivity hack. It’s just the thing that quiets the noise.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">I didn’t have the headspace or motivation to return to freelancing after all of that. I took a position at a digital marketing agency as SEO manager and director of marketing communications, working with a team of content writers and developers at a Google Premier Partner shop.</p>
<h2 id="what-i-actually-believe-about-growth" class="wp-block-heading">What I Actually Believe About Growth</h2>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Grief changes your relationship to work. It clarified mine.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">I no longer believe in teaching people how to make money. Not directly. Money is a byproduct of running a business, serving a customer, and solving a real problem. The business opportunity industry had it backwards. It sold the byproduct as the product, and charged people dearly for the privilege of chasing it.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The quote from my late wife’s report still guides how I think about this: “Make money at the service of others, not at the expense of others.” That principle is the foundation of everything I now do as a revenue strategist.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">SEO, it turns out, is not so different from copywriting. Both are about understanding your market, identifying the problems they face, and answering their questions as clearly and credibly as possible. The channel changes. The medium changes. The underlying discipline does not.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">David Garfinkel once asked me on his Copywriters Podcast, “What topic makes your heart beat a tad faster these days?” My answer was SEO. It surprised him. I think it would still surprise some people.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">But the discipline itself never surprised me. It felt like the natural next chapter. Know your market. Know their problems. Know how they talk about those problems. Answer them better than anyone else. That’s copywriting. That’s SEO. That’s content strategy. And done at the C-suite level, that’s <a href="/revenue-architecture/">revenue architecture</a>.</p>
<h2 id="the-pattern-ive-spent-35-years-documenting" class="wp-block-heading">The Pattern I’ve Spent 35 Years Documenting</h2>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">After remarrying and returning to independent consulting, I went back to my roots in working with service businesses and professional practices. I added fractional executive work, stepping into <a href="/fractional-cmo/">CMO</a>, <a href="/fractional-cro/">CRO</a>, and <a href="/fractional-cso/">CSO</a> roles for growth-stage firms that needed the strategy without the full-time overhead.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">What I keep seeing, in every engagement, is the same pattern the internet marketing industry had in a more refined form: businesses investing heavily in tactics without a system, chasing short-term conversions without building long-term authority, and measuring success by metrics that don’t connect to revenue.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The reason I can spot this pattern quickly is that I’ve already lived through the extreme version of it. The internet marketing world was a laboratory for every growth mistake a business can make: overpromising, underdelivering, optimizing for the wrong metrics, and mistaking activity for progress. The companies I work with now aren’t running pitchfests. But the structural problems are the same. They just wear better suits.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The fix is not a new tactic. It’s a different way of thinking about growth, one that treats marketing and revenue generation as a single, integrated system rather than a collection of disconnected campaigns.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That’s what I built my career trying to articulate. And after everything it took to get here, I’m finally in a position to deliver it without compromise.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Lesson learned. And lesson earned.</p>
<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>
<h2 id="frequently-asked-questions" class="wp-block-heading">Frequently Asked Questions</h2>
<div class="wp-block-wpseopress-faq-block-v2 is-layout-flow wp-block-wpseopress-faq-block-v2-is-layout-flow">
<details id="how-did-michel-fortin-get-started-in-copywriting" class="wp-block-details is-layout-flow wp-block-details-is-layout-flow"><summary><strong>How did Michel Fortin get started in copywriting?</strong></summary>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">It started out of necessity. After declaring bankruptcy at 21 while selling insurance on straight commission, Michel switched from cold calls to a mailed letter offering free policy audits. The few people who responded were qualified and receptive. That year he became the top salesperson in Canada. The experience made clear that written words moving people to act was where his real aptitude lived.</p>
</details>
<details id="what-was-the-success-doctor" class="wp-block-details is-layout-flow wp-block-details-is-layout-flow"><summary><strong>What was The Success Doctor?</strong></summary>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The Success Doctor, Inc. was Michel’s consulting company, incorporated in 1997. It grew out of his work writing for major internet marketing publications and serving direct response clients. At its peak, the practice included speaking at events across the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand, sharing stages with figures like Dan Kennedy, Jay Abraham, and Gary Halbert, and producing copywriting and marketing systems for clients across dozens of industries.</p>
</details>
<details id="why-did-michel-fortin-leave-the-internet-marketing-seminar-world" class="wp-block-details is-layout-flow wp-block-details-is-layout-flow"><summary><strong>Why did Michel Fortin leave the internet marketing seminar world?</strong></summary>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The industry had shifted from genuine education toward predatory business opportunity schemes — courses that taught people to replicate the same schemes they’d just bought. When Michel’s second wife was diagnosed with cancer in 2006, they stepped back entirely. From the outside, the picture became undeniable: people refinancing homes for $20,000 coaching programs that delivered nothing, FTC investigations, and promoters pitching unproven “natural cures” to a woman in chemotherapy. His wife published a report called <em>Internet Marketing Sins</em>. They lost speaking invitations and affiliate partnerships. They were fine with that.</p>
</details>
<details id="what-principle-guides-michels-approach-to-revenue-and-growth" class="wp-block-details is-layout-flow wp-block-details-is-layout-flow"><summary><strong>What principle guides Michel’s approach to revenue and growth?</strong></summary>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The line from his late wife’s report: “Make money at the service of others, not at the expense of others.” The internet marketing industry had reversed this — selling the byproduct (money) as the product, charging people dearly to chase it. Michel’s work as a revenue strategist is built on the opposite premise: revenue is a result of genuinely serving customers and solving real problems, not a goal to optimize around directly.</p>
</details>
<details id="how-did-michels-background-in-copywriting-connect-to-his-later-work-in-seo-and-revenue-architecture" class="wp-block-details is-layout-flow wp-block-details-is-layout-flow"><summary><strong>How did Michel’s background in copywriting connect to his later work in SEO and revenue architecture?</strong></summary>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">He sees them as the same discipline at different scales. Copywriting requires understanding your market, identifying their problems, and answering their questions as clearly and credibly as possible. SEO requires the same. Content strategy requires the same. Revenue architecture at the C-suite level requires the same applied across an entire business system. The channel and medium change. The underlying discipline — know your market, meet them where they are, earn their trust — doesn’t.</p>
</details>
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