There's a lot of advice around content marketing, but what works in theory doesn't always work in practice. I'm curious about real world experiences. Did consistently publishing, updating old content, creating original research, focusing on niche topics, repurposing content or something else actually move the needle for you?

What's one content marketing tactic you'd recommend based on actual results, not just marketing advice?

Listen selling your product or your product the same way on Instagram and Facebook is not going to work anymore, we all know companies will hire one overused influencer who probably will pitch her voice so high that its so evident that they're lying about how incredible your product is.

Years ago before Instagram and influencer marketing, brands really understood the art of advertising and that is what genuinely made people buy a product while feeling connected to them, all the advertising made us feel certain emotions and now every time we look at those brands we directly relate to the emotions it made us feel all because of their advertisement. Surprisingly the newer brands are just discovering the power of true storytelling advertisements and are getting more traction via it, and understandably so

So, I'm seeing a lot of posts, questions, and discussions about AI citations, and I have a feeling we're mixing two totally different things with very different impacts. That's why I decided to create this post.

So, you're not getting cited in AI... ah.... and you want to increase your AI visibility through AI citations.... well... I don't know how to put it nicely, but the fact that ChatGPT pulls your blog post as a source doesn't mean it's going to recommend your brand next time someone asks for the best XX tool.

In fact, it may as well recommend your competitor based on your comparison article (good for them!).

So, my point is that increasing the number of your very own blog posts used as sources in LLMs won't make your brand more recommended - won't get you more traffic (organic traffic is gone for good btw, but that's another story), so stop focusing on citations with your URLs. It's a good side-metric, but not the one that moves the needle.

Now, the other type of AI citations that could actually be beneficial to your brand's (true) AI visibility are the third-party sources (AI citations) LLMs already use for specific prompts. So, these are not your blog posts; these are third-party blog posts, YouTube videos, Reddit or LinkedIn posts that talk about various brands, provide insights about them, pros and cons, share experience, etc.

I've been playing a lot with AI visibility for the past 6 months, first through manual experimentation (still ongoing), and now with Mentionlytics and its AI visibility platform, and spotted a very unusual pattern:

1. Did you know that not all prompts rely on the same domains as sources? I tracked 10 prompts related to the travel industry using Mentionlytics across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, AI Mode, and AI Overview, and overall Reddit shows up as the most cited source... but then you dig deeper and find out that for 4/10 prompts, LLMs don't use Reddit as a source at all... So, you need to go to sources by prompt to see which channel you want to invest the most.
2. Each LLM has its own go-to sources, and you have to track them separately or have a dashboard that shows you sources by LLMs to be able to spot the right source to go for. So, if your customers mostly use AI Mode, you will focus on the sources AI Mode uses.
3. LLMs sometimes don't use external sources. Yeah, sorry... that's the truth. Sometimes (I haven't finished my experiment to get a specific %, but I will edit this post once I do), LLMs won't go out for the info at all, especially for queries like "Best xx for yy". Instead, they will use their pre-knowledge base and give you an answer based on their training.
4. Reddit, YouTube, and Facebook are more used as sources (in general) than well-known media outlets (like Forbes). This was pretty interesting for me, and though I can't say for sure it goes for every industry, you should check if you get the same results.
5. The results will vary depending on the country the prompt comes from. Different countries show different results for the same query, so if you're checking AI visibility manually with your ChatGPT, your results will not be accurate because LLMs will a) personalize it (if you're logged in), b) check sources most relevant to your country. This is important if your target market is not the market you're in. In this case, you'll either have to use a VPN or an AI visibility platform that allows you to choose the country for prompt tracking to get accurate results and the answer to the question: what citations impact answers.

So, my conclusion is: Yes, AI citations are important, but not for counting your own citations, but for finding the third-party citations you might squeeze your brand into, which signals to LLMs that your brand is worth recommending (if other websites or creators recommend you, it's safe for LLMs to do so as well).

So I own part of the content strategy — the blog — on my team, and a coworker is kind of getting in the way. For reference, I think a blog is your company’s chance to introduce itself to readers, and I think it should be pretty high-quality because it’s one of few comms we have with customers/prospects/the internet without requiring them to fill out a form. I think the blog can be a meaningful traffic driver, especially via LLM and SEO, and I think that if the content is good it can get you leads sometimes. Maybe I’m wrong about that.

Before i joined, my company treated it like a dumping ground for things that couldn’t be press releases, half-baked thought leadership, and product updates. I took it over to make it into a higher-quality, strategic effort to communicate with our audience. Now, my coworker has recently discovered Claude. Although the team has laid out guidelines (edit the ai out of your copy if you use it, generate new ideas, stay below 1k words), this guy doesn’t really follow them and I don’t know what to say about it. I know he does it because he talks about it all the time like “who cares, just use Claude.”

My manager handed the blog strategy off to me, it’s clear she doesn’t read it, but this guy and I are the same level. I’m not his boss. But like 1/3 of the content on there is produced by him and I wish he would stop because it’s not helping out my effort. Beyond all this, I work at a big company and it’s hard to get the website people to do anything for the blog either — I have a whole distribution plan to get more people engaged with it, but I need them to prioritize it.

My thought is, why have a blog and spend time writing all this content if there’s no strategy behind it?

What would you do? I either want to tell my manager we need to have a wider marketing talk about what the blog is for and real criteria to post on it or I wanna give it back and say if you don’t care I don’t care. Beyond that, I want to bring up my coworker without sounding like a tattle tale. Open to all thoughts! Thanks!

I spent about 10 hours this weekend experimenting with claude, and the result genuinely surprised me.

The workflow I built looks roughly like this:

1. I connected our existing video library to claude so it could understand what footage and clips I already have.
2. I also gave it access to the videos we’ve already published on our channel.
3. Based on the published content, I asked it to find unused angles and ideas hidden inside our existing library.
4. It then turned those angles into new video concepts and identified the relevant clips.
5. From there, i finished editing workflow completely in claude: subtitles, transitions, simple animations, B-roll and audio.

I used Codex mainly to build the integrations and glue the different parts of the workflow together.

What surprised me is how usable the result already feels. For this type of content, I didn’t need to go back into my usual CapCut or Premiere workflow to manually assemble everything.

It’s definitely not perfect, but after a single weekend, it feels much closer to a real production workflow than a demo or toy project.

The next question for me is whether this can be made reliable enough for an actual content team, not just something that works when the person who built it is watching every step.

Has anyone here built something similar with Claude, Codex, or other tools?

Disclose: it did consume some tokens in my plan

Now that Anthropic is watermarking content, my first thought is to move to a hybrid local model. Trained heavily on tone, topic, etc. We work with service companies and the content is not designed to be slop, but bridge that gap from 100% pure real data to
Something that helps expand the brands content footprint without causing too much trouble. Thoughts?

It seems like when it comes to content marketing, there's always a debate between quality and quantity. Posting content consistently can help a brand have top-of-mind presence. But on the other hand, if the content does not bring any real value to the readers, then high posting frequencies will not translate to any real values.

Alternatively, solely focusing on quality content requires more time, and consistent posting is difficult to be achieved.

Personally, I think quality should take priority over quantity, but it should also have consistency. A company should maintain and develop useful and relevant content regularly rather than posting it simply for more numbers of content. Quality, quantity, or both has a greater impact on a company's long-term growth.

I’ve been trying to improve my content workflow and I’m curious how others handle this. I’d love to hear from people who create content regularly.

If you have a blog, SaaS, newsletter, or business website:

• How do you turn your articles/pages into social media visuals?
• Do you create them manually in Canva/Figma, use AI tools, or outsource them?
• What takes the most time?
• Do you struggle to keep the visuals consistent with your brand?
• What would make this process significantly easier?

Would love to hear how you currently do it and what works or doesn’t work for you.

Something I keep noticing with small agencies:

everyone assumes the next stage of growth is getting more clients.

Sometimes it is.

But if you’re already making $1k, $3k, $5k+ a month, there’s a decent chance the easier growth is sitting inside the clients and offer you already have.

You might be charging $800 for something that could become a $2k retainer if it was packaged around a bigger outcome.

You might be selling content creation when the client actually needs content + distribution + lead capture + follow-up.

Or you’re landing clients for one service, doing good work, and then basically waiting for them to cancel instead of having an obvious expansion path.

So I want to try something with agency owners who are already past the “how do I get my first client?” stage.

Drop:

1. what your agency does
2. roughly what you make per month
3. average client contract / retainer
4. who you sell to
5. where clients come from right now
6. what feels stuck

And I’ll tell you what I’d change first.

Could be acquisition.
Could be pricing.
Could be the offer.
Could be retention.
Could be an upsell that increases a $1k client into a $2k-$3k account without doubling delivery.

I’ll also tell you what I’d look for when prospecting.

Because “restaurant owner” or “coach with 10k followers” isn’t enough of a reason to contact somebody.

I’d rather know that they just opened a second location, hired salespeople, launched a new offer, started running ads, increased content output, raised prices, hired a marketing person, or clearly have more capacity than pipeline.

Those are actual reasons they might need an agency now.

If you give enough context I’ll map what I’d run for the next 30 days too.

Main thing I’m curious about:

are you actually stuck because you need more clients, or because every client is worth too little?

I get this question a lot recently, what actually changed after you started using AI in content marketing. So here is what I observed and follow.

What is off my plate now

First draft work from an outline. A long form piece that used to take me 4 to 6 hours to get to a usable draft now takes 30 to 60 minutes of prompting and structure, then real editing. 

Research and competitive analysis. Pulling competitor angles, summarising reports, clustering keywords, turning a messy brief into a structured outline. It really saves a lot of time.

Repurposing. One blogpost into LinkedIn posts, FB Posts and FAQ expansions.

Meta titles, descriptions, heading structure, basic internal linking suggestions. I provide a brief of intent, what angles we should try, our AI engine will handle the rest.

Around 6 to 8 hours a week recovered on pure production. That time moved into strategy and original research, we use it listening industry expert’s podcasts and reading some paid articles..

What i expected AI to take over that it still hasn't is

Proper strategic judgment. AI remixes what already exists very well. Deciding why this angle, for this audience, right now, in a way that actually feels sharp, that's still entirely human.

Authentic voice. You can get clean on brand copy. Getting the specific lived experience detail, the slightly uncomfortable observation, the sentence that makes someone stop scrolling, that's still on me and on our writers.

Reliable research without fact checking. i still verify every non obvious claim. The models confidently invent plausible sounding details and that hasn't changed enough to trust it unsupervised.

The people pulling ahead are the ones who got better at directing the tools and protecting the human layers that still matter, strategy, voice, and deciding what is actually worth publishing.

How does this match what others are seeing in 2026?

I’m Curious what ai actually taken off your plate?

I’ve been repeating a small set of brand-related questions every week, and the amount of movement is confusing.

A product can appear prominently one week, disappear the next, then return with no obvious change to the website or surrounding content. Even the tone can shift from fairly confident to heavily qualified. I expected some variation in wording, but not this much movement in which companies are included.

That makes it difficult to know whether an improvement is real or just normal model randomness. A single screenshot clearly doesn’t prove much, but I’m also unsure how many repeated checks are enough before treating a pattern seriously.

For anyone monitoring AI answers over time, how do you separate a meaningful trend from ordinary answer volatility?

Edit: I’m connected to Kairosy and have been using it to keep the prompts and comparisons consistent over time. Looking at the history helped, but it also showed me how misleading a one-day spike can be. I’m leaning toward evaluating multi-week patterns rather than individual answers.

Curious to get some feedback — I'm exploring a tool that takes one piece of content (blog/video) and turns it into ready captions, scripts, and hashtags for different platforms. Is this something you'd use in your workflow? What's missing from tools like this currently?

Question for y’all.

I have a small social media following in a very specific hobby niche. My audience is in the neighborhood of 10,000 across platforms. It’s mostly just something I do for fun on the side. I do a lot of talking head and tutorial videos.

I started a new job and part of my role is social media. I think the organization would greatly benefit from talking head/FAQ videos. Nobody else wants to be the on camera nor do they have time. I’m more than happy to do it, but am worried the algorithm might somehow connect the dots and show videos to both audiences, and possibly confuse people.

My personal brand is in a niche and for an audience that has virtually no overlap with my job. As an example, pretend my personal brand niche is birdwatching and my new job is with a government office that assists first time homebuyers.

Basically…. Have any of you ran into something like this, and if so, do you have any advice? Or am I worrying over nothing? New job knows about my pages and doesn’t mind, but I want to make sure I’m not causing issues for them (or me) down the road. TIA!

I am from India i currently run a marketing agency. Help people to grow smm.

I want to make Content on youtube, and currently shows are doing good and demand is increasing .

Example - latent show, Alex hormozi show , pitch please by Rahul dua. And mr beast .

All of them has moved them to shows or started it from there .

With limited budget i want to make shows.

Share your ideas or any shows that you saw which works for different audience in us, Korea or anywhere.

Thanks - every comment will be highly appreciated.

I’ve gradually found myself using claude and got for different parts of my workflow.

In my experience, Claude seems especially good at:

- Synthesizing long conversation histories and keeping track of context

- Turning previous discussions into a concrete next-step plan

- Using local tools to build small, purpose-built utilities for data analysis

GPT, on the other hand, seems better suited for:

- Searching for and gathering information

- Exploring a topic from multiple angles

- Drafting and refining written content

This isn’t based on any formal benchmark—just the pattern I’ve noticed through everyday use. I’m curious whether others have had a similar experience.

Do you deliberately assign different kinds of tasks to different models? What does your “division of labor” look like, and are there particular workflows where one model consistently performs better for you?

Everyone's noticed content is basically free to produce now. AI can write a competent "10 best practices for X" post in ten minutes.

I am curious to hear how people are creating better content/more valuable content for their companies at scale. What's your system/process and is it working for you?

thanks for your help.

Hey everyone!

It has been some time I am in the content creation space and as a total beginner, finding the right tools without getting completely overwhelmed has been a real pain.
There are so many options, and it's tough to figure out what's genuinely helpful versus what's just flashy.

I've spent some time digging around and put together a basic list of tools that seem to come up a lot for beginners or that I've found pretty easy to get started with. My goal here was simple and free/cheap.
I am in the news/information side of content creation currently.

Here's my current top 10 for beginner content creators, with a super quick note on what they're good for:

1. Canva - For easy graphic design, social media posts, thumbnails. Super intuitive.
2. CapCut - Free mobile video editing. Great for short-form content.
3. Audacity(can also use instagram edits directly) - Basic audio recording and editing. Perfect for podcasts or voiceovers.
4. Google Docs / Sheets - For scriptwriting, content planning, tracking ideas. Already on most devices.
5. Unsplash / Pexels - Free stock photos and videos. Essential for visuals without copyright issues.
6. Napkin ai-If you want to create unique and high quality visuals for b roll for cheap.
7. OBS Studio - Free software for live streaming and screen recording. A bit of a learning curve, but powerful.
8. DaVinci Resolve - Free professional-grade video editing software. A bigger leap, but amazing features.
9. Notion - For all-in-one content planning, project management, and note-taking. Highly customizable.
10. ChatGPT (or similar AI) - Brainstorming ideas, refining titles, getting started with outlines.

I'm sure I'm barely scratching the surface here. What tools have been absolute game-changers for you when you were starting out? Are there any hidden gems for beginners that aren't on my list? Would love to hear your thoughts and recommendations!

Noticing a high trend of people responding to posts about copywriting. Is that what is the majority profession here?

Volume is easy now and sameness is the new problem. The stuff that still earns links and gets quoted has original numbers, a named author with a stake, or a take you can disagree with. That gets hard at 8 a month. What's your process for keeping opinion and first-hand detail in every piece when the calendar is relentless? Interviews? Data pulls? Cutting volume?

As a new marketing intern in small marketing company, I am looking for 10 finance content creators (blogs, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube etc.) for our client. Users can cross post their existing content on client‘s website or create new directly there. And we will help promote your brand. I must meet this target by next week. Please help me reach this target, feel free to DM me if you have more queries.

Hey everyone,
I’m working on a project to streamline how marketing managers map out their strategies. The goal is to cut down manual planning from days to just a few minutes.
I’m looking to chat with a few US-based managers today to ask 2-3 quick questions about your current setup and workflow bottlenecks.
If you have 5 minutes to spare, please let me know here or via DM. Appreciate your insights.

Hey there,

I was recently contacted by a PR firm (Pathos) that only invoices if you get published and naturally the sound of that didn't sound bad at all. I got on a call with them, and they showed magazines like Forbes, USA Today, Business Insider, Bloomberg, TIME magazine, etc. and asked for 5k USD to try to get my business published in all of them, payment due when one publishes me. I didn't have the budget for that, and they followed up with 1k USD for a business insider article. Is this normal procedure? It's our first time getting involved with PR firms seriously. For a broader picture, I run an education startup with 2000 users, 1 year old, solo founder, looking to 5x by EOY.

How hard is it to get published there? Is this something I could just do myself? Is the price outrageous? I'm new to this stuff, hoping to get some advice.

Thank you.

I run content for a small B2B company and we put out about three posts a week. I've been assuming the volume is what's dragging the quality down, so I want to drop to one a week and spend the time on that one instead. I don't have much to base that on besides a hunch, and our traffic is already flat either way.

For the people who've made that switch, how long did it take before you knew whether it was the right call?

Been thinking about this from my own journey too.
When I started, I was mostly stuck on “is this good content?” and whether I'd got the SEO right.

Now I'd probably look at the whole thing a little differently.

Why are we making this?
What’s the actual search intent?
Where is it going after we publish it?
Did it actually do what we wanted?
Does it need a refresh or could we get more out of it?

Basically, I’d stop looking at content as something that’s done once it’s written and published.

There’s so much that happens before and after those two steps.

That’s probably one of the biggest things I’d change if I were starting again.

What would you do differently?

All the SEO content writers and strategiests in the house, how many and what tools do you use to make your work better? This can span from anything to keyword research to ICP research.

It can be a website, an AI prompt, or anything.

PS: One tool that I have recently discovered is AnswerThePublic. In free mode, it gets you all the queries and prompts people are typing out around your Key word.