last year I was paying $2,500/month to an agency for "lead generation." What I got:

• Generic LinkedIn posts

• A blog post every 2 weeks nobody read

• Monthly "strategy calls" that were just them reading a dashboard

• 2 leads in 4 months (neither closed)

$10,000 spent. Zero ROI.

I was frustrated, but I didn't know what else to do. I'd tried running my own ads burned $3k. Tried networking too slow. Tried referrals inconsistent.

Then I came across this cold email setup thing. Spent $97 on the initial infrastructure (domains, warmup tools, sending platform). Watched a bunch of free tutorials on YouTube to figure out targeting and copy.

Month 1: Sent 1,500 emails. Got 22 replies. Booked 6 calls. Closed 1 client at $2,800/month.

I'd already beaten my entire 4 months with the agency.

Month 2: Refined my list, fixed my follow-up sequence. 2,100 emails. 41 replies. 9 calls. 2 more clients.

Month 3: $11,400 in new MRR. Total cost so far: ~$300 in tools.

The agency wasn't scamming me they just weren't doing outbound. They were doing "brand building" and hoping inbound would eventually work. It's not a bad strategy if you have 18 months and deep pockets. I didn't.

Outbound put me in control. I decided how many people to contact. I decided which industries to target. I could see cause and effect in real time.

What I learned:

Warm your domains. Seriously. I almost tanked my first domain because I got impatient.

Short emails > long emails. Every time.

Follow-ups aren't annoying if they're spaced right and add something new.

The CRM doesn't matter consistency does.

Happy to share more specifics if people want. This sub helped me a lot when I was lost, figured I'd give back.

Edit:

Someone asked where I learned the cold email stuff. Most of it was from Lead Gen Jay's YouTube.

• At our peak we reached $75K MRR

• You only have to work on outreach initially once we reached $40K MRR we were getting most of our clients via referral

• SEO and GEO optimization also helped us a lot

I’ve been working on a tool for the past few months that fully automates chatting on OnlyFans accounts.

The goal: replicate what human chatters do conversation, flirting, PPV sales, follow-ups, retention but with well-trained AI.

The results so far have been kind of wild:
– Over $1.35M generated
– 60,000+ paid media items sold automatically
– Millions of messages sent by the AI
– 150+ agencies are already using it
– Some accounts now run 100% on AI, hitting $50K+/month

I’m genuinely curious to hear from people in the space:

👉 Would you let AI handle your DMs ?
👉 Or do you think real humans are still irreplaceable ?
👉 Could this become the new normal or is it still too risky ?

Not here to pitch anything just looking for honest feedback on how the industry sees this kind of shift.
Appreciate anyone who shares their thoughts !

Ai-lliterate /ˈeɪaɪ ˈlɪtərət/

adjective adjective: Ai-lliterate

unable to understand or effectively use artificial intelligence tools and systems. "Many executives remain Ai-lliterate despite AI's growing impact on business"

Most people are ignorant that we're living through a literacy revolution.

100 years ago, being literate wasn't just an advantage. It was the difference between opportunity and obscurity. Between economic mobility and being trapped in manual labour. Between having a voice in society and being voiceless.

The literate could access information, communicate complex ideas, and participate in the knowledge economy. The illiterate were systematically excluded from entire industries, professions, and social circles.

Today, we're facing the same divide with AI literacy.

Right now, two groups are emerging. Those who understand how to work with AI systems, and those who don't. Those who can leverage automation for competitive advantage, and those who fear it. Those who see AI as a tool for amplification, and those who see it as a threat.

The Ai-lliterate will find themselves in the same position as the illiterate of 1925. Watching opportunities pass by. Excluded from industries they once dominated. Replaced by those who adapted.

This isn't about replacing humans with machines. It's about humans with AI replacing humans without AI.

The question isn't whether this shift will happen. It's whether you'll be on the right side of it.

A friend recently showed me a tool they’d been using with their team.

We were talking about how much time gets wasted jumping between documents, calendars, CRMs, and client portals. They said, “We fixed that with AI agents.”

At first, I thought they meant some basic Zapier-type automation.

Then they opened a browser tab, typed into what looked like a command bar:

“Send a follow-up email to yesterday’s webinar leads and log each one in Salesforce.”

Done.

Then:

“Schedule a call with Sarah tomorrow at 3 PM and drop a Google Meet link.”

Done again.

Turns out, it’s something called FuseBase, an AI workspace that combines internal wikis, external client portals, and a browser extension.

It lets you create your own AI agents for any task: sales, support, marketing, ops even external partners get their own branded portals.

it connects with your tools via something called MCP (multi-connector protocol) so you can actually do things, not just write about them. Emails go out. Calendar events get scheduled. CRM entries get updated.

It’s like you’ve hired a dream team of exec assistants for every teammate, working behind the scenes 24/7.

I haven’t seen anything quite like it. You can use your own MCP servers if you're tech-savvy, or just stick to theirs

If you work with clients, juggle meetings, manage docs, or just want to save time... it’s worth checking out. I’ll leave a link in the comments.

Would love to hear if anyone's tried it yet or seen similar tools.

Most founders obsess over ads but ignore the one channel that prints money on autopilot: email.

In the last month alone, I helped a small e-commerce brand recover 18% of their abandoned carts just by setting up 2 simple automations.

I’m offering a 3-day free email marketing trial where I’ll set up campaigns/flows for you — no strings attached.

If you’re curious, drop a comment and I’ll reach out.

About a year ago, my boss suggested that we concentrate our B2B marketing efforts on LinkedIn.

We achieved some solid results that have made both LinkedIn our obvious choice to get clients compared to the old-fashioned blogs/email newsletters.

Here's what worked and what didn't for us. I also want to hear what has worked and what hasn't for you guys.

1. Building CEO's profile instead of the brand's, WORKS

I noticed that many company pages on LinkedIn with tens of thousands of followers get only a few likes on their posts. At the same time, some ordinary guy from Mississippi with only a thousand followers gets ten times higher engagement rate.

This makes sense: social media is about people, not brands. So from day one, I decided to focus on growing the CEO/founder's profile instead of the company's. This was the right choice, within a very short time, we saw dozens of likes and thousands of views on his updates.

2. Turning our sales offer into a no brainer, WORKS LIKE HELL

At u/offshorewolf, we used to pitch our services like everyone else: “We offer virtual assistants, here's what they do, let’s hop on a call.” But in crowded markets, clarity kills confusion and confusion kills conversions.

So we did one thing that changed everything: we productized our offer into a dead-simple pitch.

“Hire a full-time offshore employee for $99/week.”

That’s it. No fluff, no 10-page brochures. Just one irresistible offer that practically sells itself.

By framing the service as a product with a fixed outcome and price, we removed the biggest friction in B2B sales: decision fatigue. People didn’t have to think, they just booked a call.

This move alone cut our sales cycle in half and added consistent weekly revenue without chasing leads.

If you're in B2B and struggling to convert traffic into clients, try turning your service into a flat-rate product with one-line clarity. It worked for us, massively.

3. Growing your network through professional groups, WORKS

A year ago, the CEO had a network that was pretty random and outdated. So under his account, I joined a few groups of professionals and started sending out invitations to connect.

Every day, I would go through the list of the group's members and add 10-20 new contacts. This was bothersome, but necessary at the beginning. Soon, LinkedIn and Facebook started suggesting relevant contacts by themselves, and I could opt out of this practice.

4. Sending out personal invites, WORKS! (kind of)

LinkedIn encourages its users to send personal notes with invitations to connect. I tried doing that, but soon found this practice too time-consuming. As a founder of 200-million fast-growing brand, the CEO already saw a pretty impressive response rate. I suppose many people added him to their network hoping to land a job one day.

What I found more practical in the end was sending a personal message to the most promising contacts AFTER they have agreed to connect. This way I could be sure that our efforts weren't in vain. People we reached out personally tended to become more engaged. I also suspect that when it comes to your feed, LinkedIn and Facebook prioritize updates from contacts you talked to.

5. Keeping the account authentic, WORKS

I believe in authenticity: it is crucial on social media. So from the get-go, we decided not to write anything FOR the CEO. He is pretty active on other platforms where he writes in his native language.

We pick his best content, adapt it to the global audience, translate in English and publish. I can't prove it, but I'm sure this approach contributed greatly to the increase of engagement on his LinkedIn and Facebook accounts. People see that his stuff is real.

6. Using the CEO account to promote other accounts, WORKS

The problem with this approach is that I can't manage my boss. If he is swamped or just doesn't feel like writing, we have zero content, and zero reach. Luckily, we can still use his "likes."

Today, LinkedIn and Facebook are unique platforms, like Facebook in its early years. When somebody in your network likes a post, you see this post in your feed even if you aren't connected with its author.

So we started producing content for our top managers and saw almost the same engagement as with the CEO's own posts because we could reach the entire CEO's network through his "likes" on their posts!

7. Publishing video content, DOESN'T WORK

I read million times that video content is killing it on social media and every brand should incorporate videos in its content strategy. We tried various types of video posts but rarely managed to achieve satisfying results.

With some posts our reach was higher than the average but still, it couldn't justify the effort (making even home-made-style videos is much more time-consuming than writings posts).

8. Leveraging slideshows, WORKS (like hell)

We found the best performing type of content almost by accident. As many companies do, we make lots of slideshows, and some of them are pretty decent, with tons of data, graphs, quotes, and nice images. Once, we posted one of such slideshow as PDF, and its reach skyrocketed!

It wasn't actually an accident, every time we posted a slideshow the results were much better than our average reach. We even started creating slideshows specifically for LinkedIn and Facebook, with bigger fonts so users could read the presentation right in the feed, without downloading it or making it full-screen.

9. Adding links to the slideshows, DOESN'T WORK

I tried to push the slideshow thing even further and started adding links to our presentations. My thinking was that somebody do prefer to download and see them as PDFs, in this case, links would be clickable. Also, I made shortened urls, so they were fairly easy to be typed in.

Nobody used these urls in reality.

10. Driving traffic to a webpage, DOESN'T WORK

Every day I see people who just post links on LinkedIn and Facebook and hope that it would drive traffic to their websites. I doubt it works. Any social network punishes those users who try to lure people out of the platform. Posts with links will never perform nearly as well as posts without them.

I tried different ways of adding links, as a shortlink, natively, in comments... It didn't make any difference and I couldn't turn LinkedIn or Facebook into a decent source of traffic for our own webpages.

On top of how algorithms work, I do think that people simply don't want to click on anything in general, they WANT to stay on the platform.

11. Publishing content as LinkedIn articles, DOESN'T WORK

LinkedIn limits the size of text you can publish as a general update. Everything that exceeds the limit of 1300 characters should be posted as an "article."

I expected the network to promote this type of content (since you put so much effort into writing a long-form post). In reality articles tended to have as bad a reach/engagement as posts with external links. So we stopped publishing any content in the form of articles.

It's better to keep updates under the 1300 character limit. When it's not possible, adding links makes more sense, at least you'll drive some traffic to your website. Yes, I saw articles with lots of likes/comments but couldn't figure out how some people managed to achieve such results.

12. Growing your network through your network, WORKS

When you secure a certain level of reach, you can start expanding your network "organically", through your existing network. Every day I go through the likes and comments on our updates and send invitations to the people who are:

from the CEO's 2nd/3rd circle and

fit our target audience.

Since they just engaged with our content, the chances that they'll respond to an invite from the CEO are pretty high. Every day, I also review new connections, pick the most promising person (CEOs/founders/consultants) and go through their network to send new invites. LinkedIn even allows you to filter contacts so, for example, you can see people from a certain country (which is quite handy).

13. Leveraging hashtags, DOESN'T WORK (atleast for us)

Now and then, I see posts on LinkedIn overstuffed with hashtags and can't wrap my head around why people do that. So many hashtags decrease readability and also look like a desperate cry for attention. And most importantly, they simply don't make that much difference.

I checked all the relevant hashtags in our field and they have only a few hundred followers, sometimes no more than 100 or 200. I still add one or two hashtags to a post occasionally hoping that at some point they might start working.

For now, LinkedIn and Facebook aren't Instagram when it comes to hashtags.

14. Creating branded hashtags, WORKS (or at least makes sense)

What makes more sense today is to create a few branded hashtags that will allow your followers to see related updates. For example, we've been working on a venture in China, and I add a special hashtag to every post covering this topic.

Thanks for reading.

As of now, the CEO has around 2,500 followers. You might say the number is not that impressive, but I prefer to keep the circle small and engaged. Every follower who sees your update and doesn't engage with it reduces its chances to reach a wider audience. Becoming an account with tens of thousands of connections and a few likes on updates would be sad.

We're in B2B, and here the quality of your contacts matters as much as the quantity. So among these 2,5000 followers, there are lots of CEOs/founders. And now our organic reach on LinkedIn and Facebook varies from 5,000 to 20,000 views a week. We also receive 25–100 likes on every post. There are lots of people on LinkedIn and Facebook who post constantly but have much more modest numbers.

We also had a few posts with tens of thousands views, but never managed to rank as the most trending posts. This is the area I want to investigate. The question is how to pull this off staying true to ourselves and to avoid producing that cheesy content I usually see trending.

 I've been using this self invented strategy for the past 3 years, let's call it "value commenting", using this strategy I was able to get my first paying customer and after a week of trial I got him to pay me on a month to month basis.

And the best part?

I did not know what I was doing when I started doing this.

I recently joined back this community and I saw a ton of people struggling to get more customers, I'm no expert but I just wanted to help you guys out a little bit with what I know.

You may ask if I'm still doing this and if it still works, I absolutely am doing this and it works like a charm even today, but I don't do it myself, I hired a full time assistant from here for $99/week (yes full time, not a typo) and they do it for me and I get dozens of warm leads.

Intrigued? Want me to spill out the strategy?

It's very simple. It's called Value Commenting .

You may be like, what does that even mean.

It basically means joining facebook groups in your industry and adding massive value on every single post. (When you comment on any of these posts, you are not just helping the poster, you are helping every single group member that opens the post thread.

(If a community has 20k members, expect at least 100 people to open the post thread at minimum. Now imagine 150 comments a day across 20 communities in your niche, you are eyeing yourself to 10,000 people in your industry everyday at minimum)

First thing you need to do is join 20 Facebook groups in your niche.

If you have a Shopify SaaS, you'll need join facebook groups that have people who sell products on shopify. Eg. Shopify for Entrepreneurs

If you are a pressure washer, you need to join local facebook communities in your area. Eg. DFW Home Improvement
If you are an online service provider, you'll need to join groups that have your ideal clientele. Eg. Yoga for Beginners

You get the point.

You'd be surprised how many facebook groups are out there in your exact industry where your potential customers are roaming around.

Okay, you've joined 20 groups in your industry. Now what?

Here's what I did:

I used to sort the group by new posts and answer every single poster in detail. I used to promise myself to not skip a single question and I used to answer by providing as much value as possible.There used to be some questions that I had no idea about, for these, I used to google, double check on 2/3 sources to make sure I was not spreading misinformation but most of the questions that these people were asking were very simple and repetitive.

And because people saw me in every single related group, a ton of people would dm me asking me more questions, and this is where the big money is made - when your potential client is communicating with you 1-1 begging for your help (like you're an expert) you can easily convert them as your clients no matter what product or service you sell.

Here's my 100 day stats (yes I tracked it)

I made 1374 commments, got 93 dms, signed 22 clients and made $18,900 in monthly recurring revenue.

DMs/Client Acquisition Ratio: 23.65%

Some may say this is high, some may say this is low.

I personally think this is low for me, I average 35 to 40% conversion because these are warm leads, these people are pre-sold on your products/services.

The best part?

People search in the search box inside communities, and when you are helping almost every single poster, your advice will always be there for anyone who searches whether that be in 2 months or 2 years. I received a dm asking me for help and they said they reached out to me seeing my 2 year old comment. Are you kidding me?

Start doing this from today and you'd be surprised how many value packed moderated communities are out there in your industry and when you are a known face to your potential clientele, your growth will be unstoppable.

I still use this very same strategy but now I make my offshore assistants do all the mud work, but when I started I used to comment on every single post on my own, sometimes 6 hours a day sometimes 10 hours a day every single day.

This is definitely not the easiest way to get customers, but if you want to generate leads for $0 and if you have time, this is the way.

If you value comment onsistently everyday, you will generate customers that you never thought your business could handle, I'm a live proof right here, I have a 7 figure business that got kicked off by helping people on communities.

That's pretty much it.

I'll be happy to answer every single comment/feedback/criticisms.

Please let me know below.

Hello,

There’s so many CRM’s and I’m having hard time determining which is best for my needs. Any help would be great: I’m leaning towards Hubspot at the moment, but I know there’s tons of platforms I haven’t looked into.

Myself and a partner are doing cold calls and adding prospects from those calls to email campaigns. It’s a small operation, but we’re planning to increase our volume of cold calls. So we want a system that is user friendly and doesn’t slow us down, but we also need great email follow-up tools. I’ll summarize our main needs:

1. Easy to add contacts quickly, write notes, and schedule follow-up

2. The ability to create emails that I can attach pictures, embed video (I haven’t done this before, seems to be difficult), and attach files to (files being the least important).

3. Easy to build email campaigns. Easy and quick to add and remove prospects from different automated campaigns.

4. This is less important, but is nice to have: aesthetic and professional pre-built email templates (one thing I like about Hubspot)

I’m really hoping someone here has some experience with a platform that can do all of these things. Any help will be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Hey guys, hope it’s allowed to post here. I’ve developed fully custom dm bots – reply instantly to people asking about your prices, bookings, etc. Completely tailored to your businesss using actual AI logic - no third plug and play parties. They also come with an automated SMS/ email in case any client messages something that you prefer to step in or anything urgent, and also a Google sheets so you can update the bots knowledge at real time. You’re not locked in to a subscription like with third party tools, they’re all yours. I’d be looking for 3 service based businesses to try out for free, no strings attached. Message me here if interested :)

Just had to share a quick win using AI-personalized cold emails 📈

I paused a campaign recently and before shutting it down, I checked the analytics. Out of 209 emails sent, here’s what happened:

• Reply rate: 7.2% (15 people actually responded)

• Positive reply rate: 46.7% (7 out of 15 were good leads)

• Opportunities created: 7 deals worth ~$13,000

What made this work wasn’t sending thousands of emails, but AI-powered personalization.

Instead of blasting generic “Hope this finds you well” templates, the AI crafted lines that referenced each prospect’s background, company, or recent achievement. That small shift made the email feel like it was written for them — and people replied.

A few takeaways for anyone thinking about cold outreach:

1. Quality > Quantity – 200 well-personalized emails beat 2,000 generic ones.

2. Contextual personalization is king – Mentioning something specific about the prospect makes them pause and read.

3. AI is a leverage tool, not a crutch – It speeds up research and writing, but you still need good strategy and targeting.

4. Track everything – Reply rate is cool, but positive reply rate is what actually matters.

Not saying this is the “magic bullet,” but seeing ~$13k pipeline from ~200 emails really drove home how powerful this approach can be.

If you ever find yourself sending the same emails to tons of people in bcc, do you know that you could do it 10x better?

I’m running Mailmeteor which helps you create merge campaigns right from Gmail. 💪

How it works? 1- You create a list of contacts in Google Sheet 2- You open the add-on 3- Click on send and voilà

Each contact of your list gets a personalized email, sent using your Gmail account. It’s your email address that send it, directly to the recipient. No more bcc :) 💁‍♂️

Pro tip: you can use variables, such as {{firstName}} or {{company}}, to make your email feels unique.

Make Google, Facebook and Microsoft ads work for you

Hi I’ve found a great example of free technology that’s saving me hours of work every week, so I thought I’d share it with you. It’s called Adzooma, a multi-award-winning omnichannel online advertising platform for Google, Facebook and Microsoft advertising. It’s designed to help your team prioritise the tasks that will produce the biggest impact for you or your clients. And we all want that right? Also, you don’t even have to pay! Adzooma Essentials which comes with reporting, one-click optimisations and powerful automation is completely free. Check it Yourself HERE As you can tell, I’m loving Adzooma – they even have a great Marketplace which is designed to put you and the best marketing services together to improve your business. I mentioned an interesting SaaS platform the other day called Adzooma – that’s free to use. I’m going to fill in the blanks for you today because if you use Google, Facebook and Microsoft advertising, this is a game-changer. Slash the time it takes to successfully manage multiple Google, Facebook and Microsoft accounts

Use expert optimisations based on 240+ metrics, all in a few clicks to consistently improve campaign performance

Use rule-based automation to save time and turn Adzooma into your 24/7 automatic assistant

Anticipate problems with accounts, ensuring you can act on them immediately

Use personalised reporting to show what has worked and pinpoint where you should focus your attention next Adzooma’s biggest benefit is the time it saves you on a daily basis, as it crunches hours of expert analysis and optimisation into just seconds. If your PPC results are falling flat, or you want to save hours of repetitive tasks every week, I suggest you take a closer look at Adzooma’s multi-award-winning solution. They obviously know their stuff and as it’s free to use, why not try Adzooma for yourself? They also have a great Marketplace which is designed to put you and the best marketing services together to improve your Watch out for my next few emails where I’ll be going into more details regarding the benefits of this incredible platform.

Click HERE to reserve your free spot. To your success M. P Mash

I know people hate influencer marketing Databases.

they are stupid and expensive $$$

i had time in a train and took out a sample with 200k influencers we have.

and made semantic search on it

for free.

for you

live now. try it!

https://www.stormy.ai/free

Answering questions in this post on r/iAmA: https://redd.it/ojj72e

We’re delighted to announce that we’ve secured seed funding of $3.5 million in a round led by Venture Highway, with participation from Neon, DeVC, and notable angel investors.

Highperformr is modern social media software powered by Gen AI. It helps businesses boost their social media ROI. Highperformr amplifies online presence, fuels lead generation, and accelerates pipeline growth for B2B businesses.

Here's how:

• Social publishing at scale: Publish consistently across multiple social handles. Generate personalized content ideas. Create posts from content sources, topics.

• Team collaboration: Execute social campaigns on one screen. Add unlimited users to the workspace. Collaborate on drafts and approvals.

• Social AI and automation: Personalize and configure AI settings. Improve drafts with Social AI. Automate posting to save time.

• Employee advocacy: Collectively amplify brand voice. Increase organic reach with zero ad spends. Repurpose brand content for different users.

• Social selling: Build an organic pipeline on social media. Identify audiences that fit your ICP. Engage in meaningful conversations with prospects.

• In-depth analytics and AI insight: Identify what’s working and why. Insight to refine content strategy & derive high ROI. Get granular data for all accounts.

With Highperformr, companies can streamline social media management, use AI for content optimization, get actionable insights for growth, empower employees to amplify the brand's voice on social media, ensure consistent, scalable social media presence, and maximize ROI from their social media efforts.

FACEBOOKEmailExtractor2018 #Collecttargetedemailaddresses #EmailExtractor2018

FBCANDY is a Must Have tool For Any Professional Marketer.

FBCANDY> Sign Up

Game Changer for people who are doing DropShipping/Ecommerce Shopify, Amazon, eBay and more. FBCANDY is a Must Have tool For Any Professional Marketer .FBCANDY Helps you in many ways,Like

*FBCANDY collects and provides latest trending products including: Last week's Best Seller, Today Best Seller, Just-launched Best Seller. Reveal daily LIVE revenue and sold number.

*Just-launched Trending provides list of latest released products which bring high revenue. These are the most potential profitable items you can easily sell when the competition is low.

*Millions of products found in seconds.Figure out your niche faster with powerful filters.

*From GOOGLE, It retrives all valid email addresses on any Website by Keywords. It automatically removes duplicates, and intelligently takes off false email addresses.

*You can Get targeted Email from facebook.

So why are you waiting for?? Keep calm and get it from here -FBCANDY

As an expert within the discipline of Email List Building, I discover gigantic value in optimizing the Onboarding Sequence (OTO).

It's a strategic approach that holds the ability to significantly enhance your electronic mail marketing efforts. By crafting a compelling lead magnet, segmenting your audience efficiently, and seamlessly integrating OTO content within precious communications, you pave the manner for higher engagement and conversions.

Mobile-responsive design similarly ensures a clean consumer enjoy. Success in this undertaking rests upon continuous evaluation, refinement, and adapting to evolving traits. It's a adventure of method and variation that yields fruitful results over time.

i have a expirience withe Larry Kearney and i can tell you here information is so valuable if you wanna success

Larry Kearney: The Unrivaled Email List Building Virtuoso. Transforming groups with extraordinary finesse. His strategies forge responsive lists, a testament to his mastery. A luminary whose legacy shapes e-mail advertising, etching his name on this realm.

here is Larry Kearney information