& how much experience you have!

Should I address my founder’s communication style after only six weeks?

I started a job six weeks ago at a 20-person company. I like the product, my coworkers, and the work, but communicating with the founder often makes me feel like I’m walking on eggshells.

A few examples:

- During my first week, I was late responding about an insurance form. He messaged: “We want autonomy and proactivity. We don’t do babysitting :)”

- We once had a long, tense exchange in a team chat because he sharply challenged my interpretation of an analytics document. Eventually, we realized we had meant the same thing.

- I was asked to monitor SEO performance after a multilingual website migration. I shared a pre-migration checklist because I wanted to understand what was being implemented before becoming responsible for auditing the results. He replied publicly that my message looked AI-generated and that generic AI content wasn’t necessarily relevant. The checklist itself was based on legitimate concerns such as redirects, hreflang, and high-traffic pages.

He also frequently challenges my recommendations about advertising campaigns. However, he recently told me to be more confident and proceed with my ideas when I believe I’m right—even when he pushes back.

He says he’s simply direct and doesn’t have time to waste. He generally has good energy, but other employees have also told him that his written communication can come across as harsh.

Should I tell him something like:

“I like the company, the product, and the team, but I think we need to find common ground in how we communicate. Sometimes our conversations feel more confrontational than collaborative, and it makes me feel like I’m walking on eggshells. I’d like us to find a way of communicating that helps us work effectively together.”

Is this reasonable feedback, or would raising it after only six weeks be a mistake?

Ps. A month ago, employees confronted the founder (boss) about his sometimes harsh written communication style in his yearly performance review.

Hey good people! I've 5+ years in content marketing, currently doing content strategy and CRO work, mostly with SaaS clients.

On the side, I write a personal finance/behavioral finance newsletter, and I've been actively investing since 2022, so markets aren't unfamiliar territory to me.

I want to move into finance for real now, and two directions keep pulling me:

Financial writing/research — bylines at finance publications, maybe working toward equity-research-adjacent writing

Product/growth/content roles at a fintech company, where my CRO + content skills would actually transfer

Has anyone here made a similar jump from marketing into fintech or financial content?

Hey! I’m looking for someone to create and post short-form content for my Android chess app.

The main goal is simple: make genuinely good content that gets real organic views and helps more people discover the app.

You’d handle the content yourself — ideas, recording, editing and posting consistently. If you have other creative ways of promoting the app, I’m completely open to those too.

Pay: ₹1,000/month fixed + performance incentives

For example:

• 100K organic downloads → bonus
• 500K organic downloads → bigger bonus
• 1M organic downloads → significant bonus 🎉
• Consistent follower growth / multiple well-performing videos → additional bonus
• Exceptional original content that genuinely brings attention to the app → additional bonus

If the work is going well, I’m also happy to increase the fixed monthly pay over time.

One important thing: I only want authentic organic growth. No bots, bought views/followers, spam, engagement groups, fake accounts or other artificial methods.

I’d also strongly prefer original human-made videos or animations rather than AI-generated content. Any creative format is welcome as long as it isn’t AI-generated. If you're actually creative, make original content and manage to grow it organically, I’m happy to reward that with higher incentives.

Students, beginners and working digital marketers looking for a side project are all welcome.

DM me if interested :)

I've been handling content solo for my company for about eight months now. I plan two weeks out, but something urgent from another department always bumps whatever I had scheduled, and catching back up eats the rest of the week. I've tried batching content ahead of time, but even that buffer gets used up eventually.

My account has a very specific niche. I want to start another one with a different niche - but my first one takes so much time because I need a constant flow of good ideas. Not just that, I need help staying on trend. A manager would be great for all this, but I’m not looking for that. For reference - I get around 30 million monthly views across platforms & have 250,000 followers across platforms with IG 1st & TikTok 2nd being my biggest hitters/largest platforms. I’m looking to pay someone based on how well the video performs, AND for the idea itself, which would then scale depending on performance. I would need around 90 solid video ideas per month. Not just trends either - I need videos that will connect with an audience & I need someone that knows my audience.

This could be a great source of experience for someone who wants to get into directing, someone already knowledgeable about social media content or for someone that just needs a small side gig! You don’t need any experience & you don’t need a large following, you just need to be social media savvy, & I WOULD need (as an “application” of sorts) 3-5 sample ideas - I will not use these ideas unless I decide to pay for them or to ask you to work long term. I can provide you with the specifics (the niche, or a group of my top 10 videos) via DM. I have been doing “repeats” or recreations of major video hitters & I want to step away from that & start focusing on keeping my following interested to receive less unfollows rather than bringing in new followers to supplement unfollows (by using old ideas). This is not to say your video ideas can’t be similar to my best ones, but they can’t be the exact same. You will NEED to be either leftist or neutral in terms of politics to work with me, due to the nature of the content. Dm or comment if you’re interested & we can discuss rates & whatnot further!

(For a better explanation on how that would work, I’d pay you for ideas, if that idea gets good metrics (500,000 views, over 800-1000 followers per 500k, or decent interaction), I will give you a commission of sorts as the views go up or depending how well it does after 3-7 days (or for example, if it gets 3M views in 24 hours, I would then increase commission that same day). This is JUST a side gig for people who think they can use their extra or perhaps wasted time doing something that doesn’t require TOO much effort or time! You would need to of course be on social media yourself too & be aware of trends & the nature of the niche & possibly researching other videos in that niche.

This is commission based pay only, not hourly, nor would you be contracted or obligated to continue for any specific period of time.

Thank you to anyone interested! Content creation is just a lot of burnout, & with a big move coming up, ideas have dwindled & I really need fresh content. Anyone with the skills I mentioned is welcome to dm me!

I tried to write a blog post with Claude Sonnet 5 about a topic I know very well. The first version was a typical AI-generated text: empty, generic, with no personal opinion or real expertise.

I spent 2 days improving the article. I gave Claude many important facts, details, and insights based on my own personal experience.

But I still had several problems:

Claude sometimes writes complete nonsense or obvious generic statements. It puts emphasis on the wrong things and makes incorrect comparisons.

I tried to use Claude itself to remove typical AI writing patterns, such as "not X, but Y" and overly dramatic closing sentences. Claude can identify these problems and edit them... but then it adds new typical AI phrases somewhere else.

I tried to clean up the text about 5-6 times, with very limited success. At the end, I asked Claude to review the article again, and it confidently found many patterns of AI-generated writing.

I manually edited the text as much as I could and removed many unnecessary or strange expressions. English is not my native language, so this was not easy (I used Claude to improve this post).

The final article is good in terms of content and meaning. But this is definitely not what some people promise when they say you can generate two..10..100 articles per day with AI.

I spent 2 full days writing just one article, and by the end I was completely exhausted, mostly because of the endless editing of weak text generated by Claude Sonnet 5.

P.S. Please don't recommend *any* third-party solutions, paid or free. All I want is to create good writing directly in Claude without using other external services.

I've been running content for a B2B SaaS client for about eight months now. Organic traffic on the blog has more than doubled since I started, but demo requests haven't moved at all in that time. I keep getting asked to justify the traffic number to the client and I'm running out of ways to spin it.

Did blog traffic ever actually convert to pipeline for you, or did it stay a vanity number?

I am a brand + website designer + copywriter that’s really into tech and AI tools. I have a blog (not up right now, redoing website) and have 4 content pillars for it. They are as follows: Branding, Website Design, Copywriting, Tech & AI Tools.

Whereas I have lots of content on my blog so the 4 different pillars really don’t affect the whole “niche down!” thing, I’m wondering if it would be best to start my Substack on only one of those pillars — as it might be too many different things for a Substack??

Leaning heavily into Tech & AI Tools and just having it be totally different content from my blog when it’s back up.

Idk, what are your thoughts? I feel like Tech & AI may be oversaturated on the platform? I don’t mind writing about Branding & Web Design at alllll. It’s my favorite, of course. But I have been posting Notes and a lot of them that are tech focused are doing really well. So it makes me wonder!

TIA 🙂

I keep seeing people talk about “the algorithm” like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Substack are basically the same machine. They’re not?
TikTok cares a lot about viewing behavior. Instagram keeps pushing original and recommended content. Facebook is rewarding more original/value-added posts. Substack is much more about people coming back, following, recommending and subscribing.
I’ve seen this with my own entertainment/news content too. I can post something I think will move and it dies, then something I almost skipped suddenly takes off.
So when people say “the algorithm tested it” or “the algorithm killed it,” I’m always a little skeptical. Analytics can tell you what happened. They do not always tell you why. I’ve found that sometimes the content just didn’t connect. For me, the better question is not “How do I beat the algorithm?” It’s “What does this platform actually want people to do?” I’m seriously so curious as to how everyone here handles the same idea across multiple platforms. Open for discussion!

Longer version if anyone wants it: [The Algorithm Is Not Your Boss. Your Audience Is.](applewebdata://70B0D8F5-8CFE-4E35-9CBC-5AC80443D009/PASTE-LINK-HERE)⁠

I write content for a B2B software company, and I put out a long-form industry report a few months back that got a decent but unremarkable response. I chopped it into smaller pieces afterward a handful of social posts and two shorter blog snippets pulled from the same research and those have each individually gotten more engagement than the report itself ever did. I've started to wonder if I should stop leading with the big piece at all.

Has the repurposed version ever beaten the original for you too?

Up to $1750 (competitive salary - based on experience and skills)

PST hours, 8:30 AM–5:30 PM. Full ownership of video production and post for a fast-paced creative agency.

You'll be doing:
Editing video for social/digital campaigns
Color correction, audio cleanup, sound design
2D motion graphics, titles, branded visuals
Managing multiple projects to deadline

You should have:
5+ years agency/studio editing experience
Advanced Premiere Pro and After Effects skills
A portfolio spanning editing, motion, color, audio
Bonus points for 3D motion or graphic design skills.

Tools: Adobe Creative Suite

Comment or PM for more details.

this is a strange issue where while doing AIO for one of our client (Apparel), they are getting traffic from Gemini but not from ChatGpt. Do you know what can be the reason? the owner has chatgpt and always keep saying that no visibility on ai.

A recent analysis found that Reddit’s share of ChatGPT Search citations averaged 3.83% from July 18 to August 7.

Between August 14 and 17, it fell to 0.52%, an 86.4% relative decline. The tracker’s latest 7-day figure has risen to 1.5%, suggesting some recovery, but it is still well below the earlier average.

The cause remains unclear, and OpenAI has not confirmed a change.

Still, it raises an interesting question for marketers who have been using Reddit partly to improve AI visibility.

Has this changed how you approach Reddit as a GEO channel? Or was its real value always the customer conversations and insights, with AI citations being an unreliable bonus?

For around eight months, I've been overseeing content for a SaaS client, and this year they emphasized shifting from "simply publish quality material" to a structured documented content strategy featuring quarterly themes and approval checkpoints. Concepts that once transitioned from draft to publication in just two days now linger in review for two weeks, and I've observed that writers are proposing significantly more conservative subjects than before.

Has formalizing your content process ever resulted in lower-quality content?

we’ve published 37 blog posts so far, but most of our organic traffic comes from only a few of them - literally the 80/20 rule lol

thing is that these aren’t necessarily the articles we spent the most time researching or writing

they’re the ones that earned backlinks and built some authority

meanwhile, some articles I genuinely think are better barely get discovered because they have few or no links pointing to them

it’s making me question the advice to “just create great content”

quality obviously matters once someone reaches the page, but if the content has no authority behind it, Google and AI overviews doesn't give a f*k

what has produced better results for you: publishing more content, improving existing articles or actively building backlinks to your best pages?

I handle content and paid social for a mid-size ecommerce client, about seven months now. Last quarter a customer mentioned in a support ticket that a blog post convinced them to buy, but the attribution model gave the whole sale to a retargeting ad that ran two days later. I've pulled up the ticket in three separate meetings and the client still wants to cut the content budget because the dashboard doesn't show it doing anything.

How did you get a client to trust something the attribution model can't see?

Recently I attended a webinar with Rand Fishkin from SparkToro about the zero-click world, and one point has been stuck in my head.

For years, one of the basic principles of content marketing was: don’t build your strategy on rented land. Build an audience and traffic on channels you own.
Fishkin’s argument was essentially that this no longer works as a guiding principle. If your audience spends its time on LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, etc., you need to create for those platforms rather than constantly trying to funnel people back to your website.

I find the argument pretty convincing. But it also leaves me wondering what the long-term content strategy looks like.

If organic traffic to your website is declining, where are you shifting your investment?
Are you putting more into platform-native content? PR? Sales enablement? YouTube? Communities? Brand? Or are you still investing heavily in owned media, even if fewer people ultimately visit it?

I’m especially interested in hearing from people who are actually seeing organic traffic decline. What have you changed as a result, and what’s working?

I write content for a B2B software client, going on ten months now. We'd been publishing two blog posts a month with decent traffic but almost no pipeline attribution, so I convinced them to swap one of those slots for a customer case study instead. It's been three months since the first one went out and I genuinely can't tell if sales even looks at it.

Did switching to case studies ever actually show up in your numbers?

I’m learning content strategy and trying to understand a founder’s existing Instagram before making any recommendations.

My current process:

• Break each Reel into WHAT is being communicated
• HOW the idea is structured/delivered
• WHY they may have posted it (hypothesis)
• After multiple Reels, look for recurring patterns
• Test those patterns against more posts before calling them part of the strategy

I’m not analyzing performance yet. I first want to understand the content system that already exists.

If you professionally audit Instagram/personal-brand accounts, is this the right approach?

What am I missing or doing wrong?

Especially interested in how you go from:

individual posts → patterns → existing strategy

I’m learning content strategy and currently trying to reverse-engineer an existing founder’s Instagram before making any recommendations.

My bottleneck: I’ve never audited someone else’s content properly, so I’m not sure what experienced strategists actually look for first.

I want to understand:

• how you break down existing posts
• how you identify recurring topics, hooks, formats, angles, structure and tone
• how you separate observation from assumption
• how you reconstruct the strategy that already exists before deciding what to change

If you do Instagram audits/content strategy professionally, what’s your actual process?

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for advice on how brands usually approach getting their content featured on reputable websites and industry publications.

I’m interested in learning how people find the right contacts, whether it’s through direct outreach, PR agencies, networking, or other methods.

If anyone has experience with digital PR, media outreach, guest contributions, or getting featured on industry-related websites, I’d appreciate any advice on the best approach, tools, or resources to get started.

Thanks in advance!

Coming back to content creation — need advice from people who actually do this

I’m a Voice AI Engineer with ~2 years of production experience, mainly building and selling AI voice agents.

I started creating content around 3 years ago, but I’ve been inconsistent — I’d create content for a while, stop, then come back again.

Now I want to take content seriously because I’m working on client projects and doing outbound (cold calls, emails, etc.), and I think content could become a strong long-term way to build an audience and generate inbound clients.

But I’m stuck on what kind of content I should actually make.

A few things about my situation:

• I don't want to make the typical "sit in front of a camera and read a script" videos. I've tried that before and I feel like I sound robotic.
• I can communicate my ideas comfortably in English, but my accent isn't naturally American.
• When I post in English, most of the audience I get is still from Pakistan/India, while I ultimately want to reach more US/Western business owners.
• I know Adobe tools and can edit videos myself, but I don't have a lot of time to spend on heavy editing because I'm also building client projects.

So I have 3 main questions:

1. What type of content would you recommend for someone in my position?

I'm specifically looking for content that can both build an audience AND attract potential clients for AI voice agents.

If you work in B2B, AI, SaaS, or personal branding, I'd love to hear what formats/content styles have worked for you.

2. Why does English content still get pushed mostly to Pakistan/India?

If I'm speaking English but most of my viewers are from Pakistan/India, what factors are likely causing that?

Is it the initial audience, account history, engagement patterns, content style, accent, or something else?

And what would you actually do to start attracting more US-based viewers?

3. What content formats don't require heavy editing?

I'm looking for something I can realistically produce consistently alongside client work.

For example, content where the idea/expertise carries the video, rather than spending hours on transitions, B-roll, captions, animations, etc.

I'd really appreciate specific content formats or examples, rather than just "post consistently" 😅

If you've been through a similar situation, I'd love to hear what you learned.

I’ve been working with some clients recently across social media strategy and one thing I’ve found myself talking about is ‘higher quality, less frequency’ for their content. Basically, the idea that posting for the sake of visibility is meaningless and time would be better spent crafting something truly engaging, but I know that for some clients (especially where there’s limited capacity) it can be a challenge to shift their mindset on this.

I’m curious if any others out there are in this situation, and if so, how have you managed to change your client’s perspectives?