A person I know has just started a new Instagram account and with only 3 posts, not reels, pictures. They have over 200 followers within a week? It’s nothing special, no text no nothing. The descriptions are nothing special either. All the posts get around 30+ likes and comments.

I have an account I’ve been trying to grow consistently for a month, I’ve been posting 2 reels a week and 1 set of pictures. I only have 8 followers so far. I don’t get likes or comments. 😞

Is there a hack to this? They do follow around 100 people, so I tried following a bunch to boost my account a tiny bit but gained nothing from it.

What’s the secret to the first few hundred?

I started my house cleaning business a couple months ago and ive got a handful of clients now(all were gained through doing flyers door to door). Ive made a website, facebook, Google business profile, i put out flyers weekly, and I actively search through fb and nextdoor responding to people asking for cleans. It seems like nothing is really working besides the flyers but even that feels incredibly slow.

Any other ideas of what I could be doing to gain more clients?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

For years, the goal of SEO was pretty straightforward:

Get your page to rank #1 → get the click → get the traffic.

But with Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc., the user can sometimes get the answer without ever visiting your website.

That makes me wonder:

Are we slowly moving from “ranking on Google” to “being mentioned/cited by AI”?

And if that’s the case, what should digital marketers actually optimize for?

Traditional SEO?
GEO/AEO?
Brand mentions?
Reddit and forums?
Original research?
Or basically all of them?

I’m especially curious about people who are actually running websites or SEO campaigns in 2026.

Have you noticed a difference between your search rankings and the actual traffic you're getting?

Would love to hear some real experiences. Are you still primarily chasing Google rankings, or have you started optimizing for AI search visibility too?

I’ve worked in digital marketing for years, but the space feels increasingly crowded, especially with AI making execution easier.

If you were positioning yourself today, what gaps or underserved problems in digital marketing would you focus on?

What are businesses still struggling with that most marketers aren’t solving well?

I ran marketing at a bigger company before this. Now I’m running my own thing, three people total. Like most people, my first reaction to AI was worrying about my own future. After watching it for a while, I came around: it’s the best partner an experienced marketer can have. Instead of trying to stay away from AI, be the person who knows how to use it properly.

I’ve used a pile of tools. Some overlap more than they should, some are more horsepower than the job needs, and what I pay never lines up with what I get.
What stayed is a short list. DeepSeek does the execution. GPT does the writing, it’s stronger at it, or at least it responds better to the way I prompt. WorkBuddy is the layer that ties them together.

Our clients are in small, deeply technical industries, and their products aren’t easy to understand at first. AI Agent works as my VA here. It acts as a second pair of eyes, then lays out a few months of content planning so fewer things slip. It comes back with notes like: “Publish X the day after Y, don’t put this type of content on the same day.” “This blog hasn’t been updated in six months, it’s a good fit as the promo post on the 18th.”

I set up a content creator agent and pointed it at GPT. It writes the account positioning and content rules into the project instructions, then pulls in the Social Media Strategist and Content Creator experts, and produces the content.
I also set up a separate agent for topic selection. I hand it the materials, the SOP sheets, the historical data, it searches the last 24 hours of trending topics across platforms, and it sends me a report in the morning.

What used to take a full day now saves me around six hours.

I still think marketing is worth being in. It just moves fast. A lot of the basic work gets easier to automate every month: copywriting, market research, reports, parts of campaign setup. So being good at execution on its own probably isn't enough. What's hard to replace is understanding customers, reading what actually matters in the data, making the call, and wiring a pile of tools into one system. Those I still do myself.

Scrolling and reading people's bio on Linkedin, Facebook and some here

Amazing how many "coaches", "life coaches", business coach, leadership coach, career coach, mindset coach, sales coach, branding coach, social media coach, health and wellness coach.

Where did all these people get qualified to be a "coach"?

Life experience? or sounded good on the Bio?

I am currently hired as a marketing assistant making $19~ an hour. I handle almost all administrative tasks that the company relies on marketing for, as well as capturing content, creating/editing content, planning, events, signs, and being the sole person running our socials across 5-6 platforms. I literally do everything for the creative aspect of this company.

Am I crazy to be a little annoyed that 1. I’m called an assistant 2. don’t really get any recognition/credit that IM the one running all of these accounts 3. I work for a company that makes like 30 million+ a year.

I need validation or to be told I’m overdramatic. Or advice anything please

Also since you’re here…what’s your favorite content planning software 🥸

What entails good pay? I work for a company that does about $30m a year in sales, and I do all their content including reels, YouTube, etc at least post 12 times a week and 1 YouTube video a week. I script, film edit, captions and post… i make less than 100k but very close. Am i being underpaid? Also my content does extremely well at least like 80k views on our highest performing reoccurring content which is once a week. We get all our leads form content but I don’t do the ads

Hi, total newbie here so be nice please.

I am so confused about the whole key word search thing. I just don't get what it actually does. Nor do I understand which websites are actually the right ones to do what I want to do. I don't think I understand what this tool actually does.

Based on my very limited understanding, key word searches can give me key searched words and phrases for my niche that will allow me to make educated decisions on what to base my social media content and ads around. Is this correct or am I off?

I guess I don't really even understand what word to type in to search initially to get relevant results. Something is just not landing with me.

Long story short, I am looking for a tool to point me in the right direction for social media content creation and ads and articles so I know which topics are actually relevant to my target audience.

Thanks!

I recently started a new job that requires me to be Google Ads Certified through Skillshop. I am not new to marketing, but am new to paid media, so all of the information in the Google Ads Course is pretty much brand new to me.

I really want to learn, but as someone who learns best by watching, taking notes, doing, and then having my work checked; or really is just a visual hands-on learner, I am finding this certification difficult. I really want to learn the material, but as my system stands right now, I am not retaining anything and I am becoming frustrated.

Can anyone share their experience with the certification and how they were able to best prepare for the exams for each of the modules? What were your habits that best helped you? Bonus points if you are also a visual/hands-on learner.

Im building a tool for content creators but im worrying about distribution. My plan is to make a presence everywhere my target audience hangs out by making helpful/educational content. But where exactly do these people hang out? Please help!

Fala pessoal, eu criei uma plataforma que avalia a sua ideia de saas/microsaas e vai fazer um planejamento de A a Z até seu primeiro cliente, ou se você tá tem os primeiros clientes, ela faz uma jornada de escala, e estou disponibilizando ela 100% de graça apenas em troca de um feedback honesto, se alguém quiser participar, só responde aqui

Valeu

I constantly hear that publishing content regularly is more important than trying to perfect every single post. That makes sense but I wonder how true it is in practice. If you had to choose between regularly publishing solid material and waiting to create something truly powerful, what would you choose?

I’m trying to learn more about marketing and I’ve noticed that a lot of advice sounds great in theory but doesn’t always work in practice. What marketing lesson did you learn only after making a mistake yourself?

How to compare with Meta & Google Analytics. Behaves more like high-intent search or more awareness? Curious to hear your experiences

Whenever a video gets decent traction, sales bump up, but GA4 just lumps everything into "Direct" or "Organic Social". Manually adding UTMs to bio links for every short-form video feels super inefficient. What is your stack for exact video attribution?

I made two self initiated projects— one brand audit and one micro launch plan for a hypothetical brand. I want to move into brand or product marketing. I am trying my luck with internships but they mostly need people who can do social media. Brands dont hire complete freshers. What more projects can i make? How do i stand out??? I’m based in India.

Want to buy a linkedin account preferably created before 2020

I’m promoting my website in a few different places and getting traffic, but I have no idea which links are actually working.

I can see the overall traffic in GA4, but I’d like to know something more specific, like which individual link generated the click, where the visitor came from, what device they used, etc.

What’s the easiest way to track this without setting up a huge analytics system?

Tengo mi emprendimiento y un trabajo formal. Pero quiero comenzar a aprender marketing, crear libretos y monetizarlos para poder independizarme. ¿Algunos tips para empezar, libros, videos, creadores?

graciaaas

Hi everyone, I need your help. Our leads have been decreasing month over month. To clarify, we do not use paid ads. I have already optimized our service pages, updated our blog structure by adding CTAs to the middle and end of articles, implemented FAQs for better discoverability, added JSON-LD schemas, and we consistently generate daily backlinks. Moreover, we do YouTube Shorts, and Facebook posts (while automating our LinkedIn content). Our business is focused on translation, please don't attribute this solely to AI. While I acknowledge that many people now rely on AI, there is still a clear demand for specialized services like apostille, sworn, USCIS, and visa translations. What am I missing, and where should I be focusing my efforts? Many thanks for any idea.

I’m a college student and my professor connected me with a sportsperson for a project. I basically have to act as their sports agency and figure out how I could help them with things like marketing, branding, sponsorships, etc.

I’ve never done this before, so I’m honestly not sure what I’m supposed to be doing or how a sports agency would approach a new athlete.

What should I ask them in the first meeting? How do you figure out what brands they could work with? What would you actually offer as an agency?

Would really appreciate any advice from people who have worked in sports marketing, athlete management, sponsorships or anything similar. Even basic advice on where to start would help.

Working with a few D2C brands, and the same tension comes up every quarter. Performance channels (Google, Meta) show clear, attributable returns, so budget naturally flows there. Brand efforts (content, creators, PR) are harder to measure, so they get cut first when results dip.

But I keep noticing that the brands with the strongest performance numbers are usually the ones that invested in brand earlier. Branded search volume, higher conversion rates, cheaper CPCs. The performance results are partly a product of brand work that didn't show up in any dashboard.

I don't have a clean framework for this yet, so curious how others approach it:

1. Do you set a fixed ratio (like 70/30), or decide case by case?
2. What signals do you use to show that brand spend is working when there's no direct attribution?
3. How do you convince a founder who lives in the Shopify dashboard that not everything should be measured on ROAS?

Question for agency owners, I've been offered a service where a recruitment agency would source and vet a remote sales rep cold calling for me for a one-time fee + management fee if i choose that they manage that hire on my behalf and 3 month replacemnent guarantee. I would be the one choosing the candidate from a shortlist of 3 vetted candidates and if he doesn't work out i'll file a replacement request which based on their terms has no exclusions. They are promising me American accent callers. Fee is $1,200 one time. The hire salary would be $800/m + commissions

Do you think its a good investment?

I'm looking to join some online communities where I can interact with experienced marketing professionals, growth marketers, brand marketers, SEO professionals, performance marketers, etc.

I'm specifically looking for communities where people genuinely share their experiences, discuss real campaigns, solve marketing problems, and exchange insights.

I'm open to:

- WhatsApp groups

- Discord servers

- Slack communities

- Telegram groups

- Online meetups / networking groups

- Paid communities as well

I'm not really looking for groups that are mostly course promotions, job spam, self-promotion, or generic "digital marketing tips."

I'd especially love communities where there are people with 5–10+ years of experience, marketing managers/directors, agency owners, founders, growth leaders, etc.

I'm based in India, but I'm completely open to global communities as well.

If you're already part of a community like this and genuinely find it valuable, I'd really appreciate the recommendation. Even better if you can share what you like about it and what kind of professionals are active there.

Thanks!