Hey everyone, looking for some advice/perspective from fellow content strategists and marketers.

I’ve been in the content and marketing space for 8 years now. Started back in 2018 as an intern, then moved through roles like SaaS Writer, Tech Writer, SEO Writer, and eventually Content Team Lead (managing teams across B2B, B2C, legal, medical billing, etc.). I also did a 6-month stint in BD to learn the sales side of growth.

I recently joined a US-based startup (c2c software/app space in Sacramento focused on local community help and earning extra cash). I joined in early August as a content lead & strategist. The CEO loved my initial pitch and was really impressed with the comprehensive content strategy I put together for the upcoming product launch.

Fast forward 2 weeks after I joined, a new CMO comes on board (claims 6+ years of experience).

Here is where the problem starts:

She completely ignores my content strategy. Instead, she told me to just blindly follow the SEO guy's keyword list for all website copy and launch content.

The SEO strategy is almost entirely Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) transactional keywords. But we haven't even launched the site/app yet! Pushing pure transactional keywords before building brand positioning, local trust, or Top/Middle of Funnel awareness in a hyper-local C2C market makes zero sense right now.

I’ve gently brought this up to her multiple times, explaining that we need to build the messaging and trust funnel first for launch, then scale SEO. She just stares at me with a straight face and says nothing, then goes back to working exclusively with the SEO guy.

She treats me strictly like a junior executioner. My daily tasks have turned into "Write this tagline," "Change this sentence," "Build this raw page." No strategic involvement, no discussion on user journeys or storytelling.

I feel like she honestly has no idea how to leverage a senior content strategist and is just sticking to what she knows (basic SEO execution).

Since both of us are new to the company, I want to handle this diplomatically without starting unnecessary drama or running to the CEO to complain.

Questions for you guys:

How do you pivot a manager away from "micro-task execution" when you were hired for high-level strategy?

How do you bridge the gap with a boss who over-indexes on SEO at the expense of launch messaging and funnel building?

Has anyone dealt with a newly hired CMO who seems threatened by or ignores existing strategy work?

Would appreciate any advice on how to navigate this without burning bridges or losing my mind!

Long setup question incoming. But I hope you can give me your thoughts.

I'm a "recovering" content marketer, having been head of content at a small boutique agency that mostly did brand creative and some content. Prior to stepping into brand and content, I was a government communications manager who coordinated across a huge agency with multiple components.

One observations I made then, and again in my creative career, is that organizations are often either tactically-focused (building the plane while flying) or they're fractured and missing alignment (marketing vs. sales vs. development, etc.)

A few years ago, I stepped out of "marketing" and "content" to try to build a framework and model to help organizations lock in their core messaging beyond just the marketing stuff. I actually developed a card-game and gameshow-based workshop to make it fun and engaging.

This is far beyond the typical creative "What Hogwarts house are you?" sort of discovery to ground-truth technical details all the way up to Big Idea thematics.

It's been a pretty successful approach and I've done lots of consulting and mentoring on the topics. I've even written a book about it. (I'm being purposefully vague so I don't run afoul of the self-promotion rule).

I've recently started working on a software system for doing the "workshop" stuff and helping individuals and teams collect the core messaging and the stuff that goes unsaid and uncaptured. Early user looks and client feedback has been superb!

Part of the workshop process starts with collecting content from across their ecosystem (blogs, web pages, socials, etc.) and doing a cross-channel assessment against the framework. Prior to this, it's been pretty manual. But now that I have the software, I think I can assess the library pretty quickly.

The challenge has been getting the content INTO the platform. I DON'T want to be another CRM or a source of record. But I DO want to point to them and pull in artifacts and samples that can be A) assessed for initial messages and B) When messaging is established, compare against the core, first-principles standard.

I've been out of the tactical game long enough to know there are systems and tools that people are using that I'm not aware of. Question: What are you using and would something like this be useful to you in keeping a bird's eye view of your content and also making it more accessible to your partners?

So far, I have WordPress (RSS and sitemaps are easy), BlueSky/Mastodon, Meta stuff (coming), and working on Sanity and Beehiv.

What am I missing?

Hello everyone! This is my first post here and I think I need your help! I manage content for a staffing and recruiting company that connects businesses with remote talent, and I inherited a pretty difficult LinkedIn audience problem when I joined.

Because of the nature of the business, we naturally communicate with two very different audiences: on one side, founders and decision-makers looking to hire; on the other, remote professionals looking for job opportunities.

When I joined, the company already had one established LinkedIn page that had historically been used to communicate with both audiences.

The decision was then made to split them into two separate pages. The existing, larger page would become fully B2B and target founders/decision-makers, while a new page would be created specifically for talent.

I actually raised a concern at the time that the existing page's audience might make that transition difficult, since most of its followers had originally come from the talent/job-seeker side. My recommendation was to take that audience history into account when deciding which page should become B2B, but ultimately the company decided to move forward with the existing page as the B2B account.

So that's the setup I've been working with since.

What's interesting now is that we can see a pretty clear difference between the two pages.

The newer talent-focused account started from zero with a clearly defined audience, and the content, positioning and followers have been aligned from the beginning. Overall, it's performing pretty normally: it's growing steadily, engagement makes sense for its size, and the audience seems to be developing in the direction we'd expect.

The main B2B page is much harder.

We're now publishing content specifically for founders and decision-makers, but the majority of the existing follower base is still made up of remote professionals/job seekers who followed the page because of what it used to publish.

Not surprisingly, engagement is low, and building meaningful B2B organic reach from that starting point has been difficult.

If you inherited an established company page where most of the existing audience no longer matched the people the content needed to reach, how would you approach fixing it?

I'm especially interested in whether you'd actively try to rebuild/retrain the audience over time, change the role the company page plays in the content strategy, reduce expectations around its organic performance, or approach the problem some other way.

Would love to hear from anyone who's dealt with a similar repositioning or audience-reset problem.

Quick context: I run growth at a small B2B SaaS in a pretty niche corner of AI (qualitative research analysis, think tools for UX researchers and market research teams). Not a mass-market product.

Been digging into our Search Console data and something's bugging me. Some real numbers:

• One of our comparison posts ranks position #5.4 for its main keyword — should be pulling a solid CTR. It's getting 0.32%.
• Another ranks position #3 for a good buyer-intent term. Zero clicks.
• Our worst page gets 7,500+ impressions and a 0.09% CTR.

For context, "normal" CTR at position 5 is supposed to be somewhere around 6%. We're running like 15-20x below that across the board on non-branded content. Branded search (people searching our company name directly) looks totally fine, it's just anything topical/comparison-based that's tanking.

So a few honest questions for anyone who's been here:

1. Is this actually as bad as it looks, or is this normal in 2026 with AI Overviews eating clicks before people even scroll to results?
2. We write a lot of "Best [Competitor] Alternatives" posts, anyone found title/format tweaks that meaningfully moved the needle on CTR specifically (not rankings)?
3. Bigger question - how do you actually prove blog ROI? We can see clicks and impressions, but nothing connects "blog visit" to "sales call booked." Some leads tell our sales team they found us through search, but it's not showing up cleanly anywhere. If you've solved this, what does your setup look like?
4. Since we're in such a narrow niche (not enough search volume to just "SEO our way" to scale) - what other channels have actually worked for you selling into a small, specific professional community? Communities, newsletters, partnerships, anything?

Not looking for a magic answer, just curious what's worked (or clearly hasn't) for people in a similar spot. Thanks for reading this far 🙏

Write a message…

I recently worked on a completely new domain and got it to around 10k organic traffic in roughly 45 - 50 days. The client wasn't ready to spend much on backlinks or PR.

But we made it. obviously 10k is not some massive SEO success story, but for a new domain with basically no authority, we felt it's a big thing.

Let me share that two things worked surprisingly well for me.

1) First, answer a question no one else is answering, or pick the angle everyone else misses. If you search for a question, simple example, something like ...XYZ explained.... look at the first 10 results.

Most of them are usually high-authority domains, and most are talking about almost the same thing.

Now ask yourself: what are they missing? This is where I think curiosity and empathy matter the most as a content marketer.

Find that gap and write around it. Out of 100 people searching, maybe only 4-5 are looking for that missing angle, but those people will find you, read the page, spend time on it, maybe explore another page. Those are good signals. You don’t need to beat every high-authority site for the biggest keyword from day one, you need to give some searchers something they couldn’t find in the other results.

2) Second thing is distribution. I didn’t just publish and wait for Google to figure out whether the site was good. I approached some people on Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Facebook groups etc who already had an audience in that niche and shared the content where it actually made sense. We spent 40000 INR for that. I believe, don't invest on those backlinks scams, focus on niche influencers, get backlinks through their Linkedin/Twitter.

Some posts got picked up, some didn't. But the ones that did brought real people to a domain that otherwise had almost no traffic.

And tbh I also looked at distribution as validation. If I share an article with the exact audience it was written for and nobody clicks, reads, comments, shares or cares about it, maybe the problem isn't Google. Maybe the content just isn't that interesting.

There were obviously all the normal SEO things underneath this too, decent internal linking, indexing, site structure, matching search intent etc. I'm not saying those don't matter. But those weren't really the reason I think the site moved that quickly.

Also not saying this is some formula where every new domain will hit 10k in 45 days. Different niche, competition and search volume can completely change the result. We did this for a client who offer AI clipping tool. We got some true nich questions and angles many missed.

But if I had to start another domain from zero tomorrow, I would probably do these same two things before worrying about publishing 200 articles.

Love to hear what strategies do you folks follow for new domains.

Senior strategist at a performance agency serving local-services clients, sincere and anti-guru, and the thing that took me years to accept is that for these businesses, the content that converts is the least clever content we make.

The clever stuff, the polished brand pieces, the creative campaigns, the things that win the agency respect, do very little for a local plumber or clinic or shop. What actually converts for them is boringly practical. The genuine answer to the exact question their customer is asking right before they buy. The specific, plain explanation of what to expect, what it costs, why it is worth it. The honest FAQ. The real customer story in plain words.

Because a local-services customer is not looking to be dazzled, they are looking to be reassured, to trust that this business will do the job right, and reassurance comes from specific, plain, useful content, not from clever, and clever can actively hurt because it reads as marketing, which lowers trust.

So the content that grows these clients is the content the agency finds least exciting to make, the practical, boring, genuinely-useful stuff, and the creative work that we are proud of mostly serves the agency's ego, not the client's revenue.

The unglamorous, reassuring, specific content wins for local businesses, and it is the opposite of what wins awards.

the unglamorous, reassuring, specific content wins for local businesses, and it is the exact opposite of what wins awards.

I write for a B2B software client and I took us from four posts a month down to one longer piece back in March. I assumed the thin stuff wasn't earning anything anyway and that consolidating would push whatever authority those pages had into the ones that already rank. I'm about six months in with sessions down roughly 35%, and I know that's a short window and AI overviews are chewing the top of the funnel regardless, but the one piece a month isn't covering the gap.

How long did yours stay down after you made the same cut?

Alright so I've been with HubSpot for 3 years and just got our renewal quote. They want to bump us from like 800/mo to 1400/mo for teh same seats. No new features we'd use, just "platform improvements" they say. My boss is already asking why were paying so much for a CRM we barely use half of.

Started shopping around and tested Pipedrive, monday crm, and close. Pipedrive feels the most similar to HubSpots workflow but without the bloat. Thier automation builder is pretty solid and the mobile app actually works. Close is good if your heavy on calling but felt too sales-focused for our mixed sales/CS team.

Also grabbed a Prospeo account to compare data enrichment quality since we burn through a lot of enrichment credits on HubSpot. Been catching companies we totally missed before which is nice. Still evaluating everthing but leaning toward Pipedrive + keeping Prospeo for the data side.

What's everyone else moving to? Trying to make a call before our HubSpot contract auto-renews in like 6 weeks.

Hi everyone, sorry if this is a dumb question. I'm genuinely trying to understand if I'm looking at this the wrong way.

I'm currently in an entry-level Content Creator role, but like many entry-level positions, I’m basically doing 4 jobs at once.

At my company, we're expected to have our content planning/bitácoras done every 15 days, and all the content for the following month prepared within the remaining two weeks.

The problem is that the designer and I have so many other tasks that we constantly have to prioritize whatever is urgent or has a deadline that week. Because of that, we haven't been able to consistently have the entire month's content ready in advance.

Recently, our deadlines started overlapping, our boss called us out on it, and now it's being treated as an organization/time-management problem rather than a workload problem.

So I'm wondering: is it really that bad for a content team not to have an entire month's content completed before the month starts?

I completely understand needing content planned and prepared ahead of time. If we're consistently one week behind, I can see how that could cause problems. But expecting the entire month to be finished in advance while simultaneously assigning a bunch of other urgent tasks seems unrealistic to me.

Content needs some flexibility too. Trends change, priorities change, and sometimes you need to react to what's happening that week.

I'm not saying deadlines aren't important. They are. I'm just wondering whether this is actually a standard expectation in content marketing, or if our workload/organization is the bigger issue here.

I'd genuinely like to hear from people who work in content/marketing: how far ahead is your content normally planned and produced?

I run free giveaways for legit nothing but people ask whats the catch when I post it how do I word it that I want nothing

Alright so I’ve been with HubSpot for 3 years and just got our renewal quote. They want to bump us from like 800/mo to 1400/mo for teh same seats. No new features we’d use, just “platform improvements” they say. My boss is already asking why were paying so much for a CRM we barely use half of. Started shopping around and tested Pipedrive, monday crm, and close. Pipedrive feels the most similar to HubSpots workflow but without the bloat. Thier automation builder is pretty solid and the mobile app actually works. Close is good if your heavy on calling but felt too sales-focused for our mixed sales/CS team.
Also grabbed a Prospeo account to compare data enrichment quality since we burn through a lot of enrichment credits on HubSpot. Been catching companies we totally missed before which is nice. Still evaluating everthing but leaning toward Pipedrive + keeping Prospeo for the data side.
What’s everyone else moving to? Trying to make a call before our HubSpot contract auto-renews in like 6 weeks.

I built a system that can run short-form AI content.

I've been building an automated short-form content pipeline and I'm trying to figure out whether I've built something commercially useful or just an impressive automation project.

At this point the system can basically handle the entire workflow:

• generate the story/script
• generate natural voiceover in any language
• generate consistent keyframes/visuals
• generate a 20–30 second video
• create the thumbnail
• upscale/render it
• automatically publish to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube

For the time-being I optimized everything around the price, to keep it as low as possible, and create videos as high quality as possible.

What would a customer pay for the followings?

Just to give you something tangible as well -
- With 4 accounts (which they have couple hundred followers already)  and posting 7-8 times a day across all platform, I managed to get 100k views within 24 hours...

Not selling anything here — I'm trying to decide whether it's worth turning the infrastructure I've already built into an actual business.

One of my videos hit 3000 views and 70% of the demographic are Indian.

How do I get past this?! I live in the UK so I don’t understand why this is happening?! Do I start a new account??

& how much experience you have!

I hit 80k followers on short-form content and thought brand sponsorships would follow, but the few inbound offers I've received haven't been worth taking.

I'm considering hiring an agency to handle sponsorships, but I want to be realistic first.

Is 80k still too small for consistent paid deals, or is it just a lack of active outbound pitching? If I do hire help, what deliverables should I actually expect—media kits, brand prospecting, contract negotiations, usage rights, or reporting?

Looking for a realistic check on whether outsourcing this makes sense right now.

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)⁠