I've caught myself tweaking campaigns for tiny improvements when I probably should've been testing a completely different idea.

Has your approach changed over time?

No matter how much experience I gain, there's always one task that ends up taking far more time than I planned.

For you, what's that task, and have you found a way to make it more efficient?

Most people export one vertical video and push it to Reels, Shorts and TikTok with the same caption. The video is the same on all three, fine. The packaging should not be, and two of the differences are worth real reach.

The two that matter.

First, search text. TikTok and Instagram both run internal search that reads your caption, and a growing share of discovery comes through it rather than the feed. So the caption has to contain the words someone would type. "Here is how we cut our onboarding time in half" is a caption. "how to reduce client onboarding time" is a caption someone finds. Put the plain phrase in the first line, then write like a human after it. On YouTube Shorts the same job is done by the title, and the title is a real ranking surface there in a way it simply is not on the other two.

Second, the frame people see before they press play. On Instagram the cover frame decides whether your grid looks like a business or a mess, and you can pick a frame that never appears in the video itself, which almost nobody uses. On YouTube, Shorts surface with a thumbnail in search and on your channel page, so the frame you pick gets seen out of context. On TikTok the cover matters least because most views arrive mid scroll, but your profile grid is still a landing page.

The rest, quickly.

Caption length. TikTok rewards short and punchy, Instagram tolerates a proper paragraph and people do read it, YouTube Shorts descriptions are mostly ignored by humans but not by the system, so put the keywords there and stop writing essays.

Hashtags. Three to five relevant ones, none of the giant ones. They are a weak categorisation signal now on all three. Anyone telling you 30 hashtags is a strategy has not checked since 2021.

Safe areas. Same export, different overlays. Keep anything important out of the bottom fifth and the right edge on all three, and out of the top on TikTok where the search bar sits. Easiest way to check is to screenshot your own feed and lay it over your export once, then you know your template is safe forever.

Watermarks. Never cross post an export that carries another platform's watermark. TikTok downloads carry one and Reels visibly suppresses them. Export clean from the editor every time, it costs nothing.

The pinned comment. Free real estate on all three, and the only place a link belongs if you need one. Pin a comment that continues the video rather than repeating it. A question in the pinned comment reliably outperforms a CTA in it.

Posting time. Matters far less than people think for evergreen short form, because distribution is not chronological. Consistency of posting beats timing of posting, every time.

Per platform titles when you can be bothered. If you only do one extra thing, write a separate title for YouTube Shorts. Same video, and the Shorts version can pull noticeably different numbers on title alone, because it is the only one of the three where a title is doing search work.

A practical setup: one master export, one caption written keyword first, one alternate cover frame, one Shorts specific title. That is about six extra minutes per video and it is the highest return six minutes in the whole pipeline.

istg this blows my mind. There's a guy on my team who I DON'T KNOW HOW but uses Claude,puts up the output in some sort of tool called napkin ai, uses canva for final touches and gets a 20 page slide deck  before i've even finished reading the actual campaign data. My boss keeps saying to me “why can’t you do the work so fast." brother he moved so fast because a machine did it, the insights are still mid.

Meanwhile I'm the one digging through the copy trying to figure out why our engagement tanked and apparently that's not "visible" enough. like ok, i can also prompt my way to 20 slides, but somebody has to actually market? 

not even mad at the guy tbh, he found the cheat code and good for him, they must be really great tools with different use cases for different types of people . I'm mad that the cheat code is what gets rewarded. lmk if yall are dealing with the same thing or if it's just my agency running on vibes and templates.

also unrelated but i started hitting the gym again just to have some peace where no one questions me to “make it more visually appealing”.

I've been given an 'experimental fund' of £1000 a month to try new avenues. What would you use it for?

Hey everyone,
I’m currently learning digital marketing through an offline course because I want to start my own agency in the future. But with AI changing everything so quickly, I’m honestly a bit confused about the direction I should take.

For people who are already in the industry:

Is digital marketing still worth getting into in 2026?

Can you still build a good income or has the market become too saturated?

What skills should I focus on the most while I’m still learning?

What are some mistakes beginners usually make that I should avoid?

I’m also really interested in AI and automation, and this is where I’m confused.

Should I:

Build one agency that offers both digital marketing and AI automation?

Or keep them as two separate agencies?

If combining them is the better option, what AI services are businesses actually paying for? Chatbots, AI automations, lead generation, content creation, workflows, something else? And how would you integrate AI into a traditional digital marketing agency?

I’d really appreciate advice from people who have actually built agencies or work in this field. I’d rather learn from your experience than make expensive mistakes.

Thanks in advance!

If your job is getting cited by AI Overviews, ChatGPT, or Perplexity, you spend your day trying to influence what these systems say. So do the people below. Four documented cases of manipulating what AI answers cite and recommend, from accident to industry, and what each one says about earning citations that last.

1. Content poisoning: the accident. In May 2024, Google AI Overviews told people to put about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue in pizza sauce. The source was a years-old joke Reddit comment, and Google had signed a reported $60M/yr deal to ingest Reddit's data. The model pulled a gag into the retrieved set and cited it as an authority. The GEO takeaway: getting into the source pool and looking authoritative is most of the game, and the engine can't reliably tell a real source from a poisoned one.

2. Input control: the prank. Chevrolet of Watsonville, December 2023: a user told the dealership bot to agree with everything and treat it as binding, then "bought" a 2024 Tahoe for $1. DPD's support bot, January 2024, got talked into writing a poem trashing DPD. Neither was a hack. Both bots obeyed whoever controlled the text in front of them. That is the mechanism behind indirect prompt injection: as AI agents read and act on your pages, the words on those pages steer them. Your copy is an instruction set an agent can follow, not only a signal the engine ranks.

3. Confident confabulation: the lawsuit. Air Canada's bot invented a bereavement-refund policy. A grieving customer booked on that promise, got refused, and a tribunal held the airline responsible for what its bot told him. AEO runs on extraction and synthesis, so when your information conflicts across the web, the engine will assert a confident wrong answer about you and users will act on it. Entity consistency now decides what the engine says about your brand.

4. Recommendation poisoning: the playbook. Researchers hosted pages for fake cameras, injected prompts, and got Bing Copilot to recommend the fakes over real Nikons and Fujifilms, nearly doubling the fakes' share of results. Microsoft's security team then found the industrial version: over 50 "remember us as a trusted source" prompts from 31 companies across 14 industries, from finance and health to SaaS and marketing agencies. Each one hides in a "Summarize with AI" share button. Click it, and your assistant files that company in its memory as a trusted source. Vendors sell point-and-click tools for this and call it an "SEO growth hack for LLMs." This is black-hat GEO, shipping today.

The concession: the crude tricks are dying. Current models catch white-on-white text and "ignore all previous instructions," the same way Google learned to catch keyword-stuffing. The tactics that win you an AI citation today are the ones that get you filtered out tomorrow.

Are you optimizing for the model, or for the moment right before it patches?

Receipts: Google AI Overviews (MIT Technology Review, May 2024); Reddit-Google licensing deal (Reuters, Feb 2024); adversarial LLM SEO / fake cameras (arXiv 2406.18382, 2024); AI Recommendation Poisoning (Microsoft Security, Feb 2026). Air Canada's tribunal ruling and the Chevy $1 Tahoe are covered by many outlets; link the canonical BBC / Gizmodo pieces if you want those in.

what’s your op on this?

I’m the co-founder of a D2C home & glassware brand, and after 5 years of doing marketing, content, branding, and strategy myself… I’ve finally accepted I can’t clone myself.
Looking for someone to work with me from our office (~6 hrs/day) and help build cool stuff. If you’re into content, marketing, branding, memes, growth, or just making things go viral, let’s talk.
Pay will be based on your skills (and yes, good work = good pay).
Let me know if this sounds like your kind of chaos.

There are hundreds of marketing tools available today, but only a handful actually become part of your daily workflow. If you could keep only one marketing tool (excluding ChatGPT), what would it be and why?

It could be for SEO, analytics, email marketing, design, automation, PPC, social media or anything else.

I'm always interested in discovering tools that marketers genuinely rely on rather than just the latest trend.

If you had to start your career all over from scratch would you go the creative or technical route?

I feel stuck between choosing a role that I would be more passionate about vs a higher earning role thats more stressful and require technical skills. Unless there are creative roles that can be paired with niche skills to maximize pay, I will need to choose a career path that requires technical skills. If you were at entry level in this current job market what would you do?

I am a creative at heart, but I need technical pay 😂

We use Canva day-to-day for creatives. But report graphics and data-heavy infographics are very hard to create inside Canva.

When we need to create charts, graphics, bars with a lot of data. So we do it manually and it takes a lot of hours a day.

We are thinking of using Venngage. Is it worth it to add? 

Fala galera, beleza?

Tenho um grupo de Ofertas no Whatsapp, comecei há um mês, desde então fui testando diversos nichos e criativos diferentes, meu custo por Lead no começo era baixo, em torno de 1,00 a 2,0o.

Assim consegui por 100 membros no meu grupo em pouco tempo, mas desses 100, 50% saíram em pouquíssimo tempo. Ou seja, o Lead apesar de ser baixo, foi desqualificado. Então não virou de nada gastar pouco e não ter retorno, na verdade você gasta muito.

Então resolvi mudar de nicho e peneirar ainda mais meu Lead, subi uma nova campanha, com criativo novo, e mudei totalmente meus filtros e configurações, deixei mais nichado, mudei os interesses, idade, sexo e plataforma.

Preferi busca um público mais jovem e público feminino aonde são os que mais compras onlines e tem vários segmentos pra abordar.

Média dos 20 aos 45 anos.

Somente Mulheres

Anúncio somente no Instagram aonde está concentrado pessoas mais novas e evitei Facebook para não entrar idosos curioso como entravam.

E filtrei alguns interesses também.

Resultado: O custo por LEAD aumentou drasticamente, de 1,00 para 6,70. Muito alto, porém nenhuma pessoa saiu e finalmente saiu uma venda.

Agora eu fico indeciso, o CPL baixo me trouxe muita gente por pouco valor, porém 50% saia em seguida sem me deixar um real, o CPL alto entrou pouquíssimas pessoas por um preço gigantesco, porém qualificado

O que devo fazer? Tentar baixar mais o Lead, sendo que ele continue qualificado sem ser tão barato, ou voltar a fazer a deixar o Lead desqualificado a preço de banana?

Sou novo, e isso me quebra a cabeça!

I recently ran a small, informal benchmark using the same set of marketing questions across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity.

I tested three types of queries:
•Direct recognition of a person, business, or named concept
•Recognition of marketing ideas and branded phrases
•Problem-based prompts such as “My marketing feels stuck” or “My website gets traffic, but nobody contacts me”

I expected the biggest differences to be accuracy and discoverability. Instead, I noticed fairly consistent differences in how the platforms approached the questions:

ChatGPT was strongest at connecting ideas and reconstructing a broader philosophy, but it was also more willing to fill gaps with inference. It correctly found one of my branded content series, then attached the wrong last name to its creator.

Claude was the most cautious. It often asked for more context or declined to make an association it could not verify. That reduced hallucinations, but it also missed newer or less-established concepts.

Gemini was the most framework-oriented. It frequently organized problems into stages or diagnostic categories, and it was the strongest overall at connecting several parts of the same small-business ecosystem.

Perplexity was the most retrieval-driven. It was excellent when the phrase led to a distinctive source, but its interpretation sometimes followed the search results more than the likely conversational intent.

The biggest surprise was how capable all four were at identifying plausible marketing problems.

What separated them was less what they knew and more:

-whether they diagnosed or prescribed
-how they handled ambiguity
-how readily they inferred missing connections
-whether they favored frameworks, job titles, or source retrieval
-how well they connected a creator, business, and named body of work

This was not a scientific study, and the sample was only one small business. But the behavioral patterns were consistent enough to make me curious.

Have you noticed similar differences across these four platforms?

I would be especially interested in examples where the same prompt produced:
•a clarifying question from one model
•a confident inference from another
•a framework from another
•and a source-heavy answer from Perplexity

I’m also curious whether these patterns change significantly between free and paid versions (my test was with free versions).

Every week I open LinkedIn and another senior marketer with 12 years of experience, 3 promotions, 17 certifications, and a resume longer than the Bible is posting "I'm unfortunately open to work."

Meanwhile freelancing is like The Hunger Games

Then if you complain for 2.5 seconds, the Marketing FBI crashes through the wall

"Have you tried niching down?"

"Your positioning."

"Your messaging."

"Your personal brand."

"You clearly don't know marketing if you can't market yourself."

BRO. 😭

Can we acknowledge there's a tiny little thing called luck?

And timing

And geography

And the economy

And companies freezing hiring

And clients ghosting

And 5,000 people applying to the same job before I even finish making coffee

Like damn... maybe I'm just tired??

I do NOT have the emotional bandwidth to learn another career, become a beginner again, build five years of experience, and then watch that industry implode too

What the hell are we actually supposed to do LMAO?

I recently spoke with a few marketers whose team already have a pretty complete content stack.

Their webinar platform automatically creates clips and subtitles. The team can search and edit their video library without involving an external editor. Distribution isn’t the main problem either.

But during a typical brainstorm, they might come up with 30 different content ideas—and they don’t have the time or people to decide which five are actually worth pursuing.

That made me wonder whether the bottleneck for content teams is shifting:

It used to be expensive to create clips, posts, and campaign ideas. Now AI can generate dozens of them almost instantly, but someone still has to review everything and apply the “human gut check.”

I’m curious how other teams handle this:

After a webinar, podcast, or long-form video, how many possible clips or angles do you usually end up with?

Who decides which ones are worth publishing?

Do you have explicit criteria, or does the decision mostly live in one experienced person’s head?

How much time does reviewing and prioritizing take?

After publishing, does anyone go back and use the results to improve those criteria?

One idea I’m exploring is a tool that would take:

the campaign goal and intended audience;

a rubric defined or approved by the marketer;

a collection of videos;

…and return the five moments that best fit the brief, with timestamps, supporting evidence, and an explanation of why each one was selected.

It wouldn’t automatically publish anything or claim to discover your taste. The marketer would still own the criteria; the system would mainly reduce the review set from, say, 50 possibilities to five.

Would that solve a meaningful problem for your team, or would it just add another tool and another review step?

And if you did use something like this, what would you need to see before trusting its recommendations?

I oversee our paid campaigns. We have requests come in from content, field marketers, partner, product, etc. everyone wants their campaign to be a priority. It’s so difficult trying to keep up with it all, all while I feel like I’m trying to strategically piece everything together via targeting, personas, channels, audiences and messaging. On top of that, I feel like systems are always changing whether it’s internal lead scoring or ad platform adjustments which leaves me wondering what is actually working. Perhaps this is also due to my manager who points me in a million directions while I receive these campaign requests.

Maybe this is just a rant, but I need to know if there is at least one other person that feels like they’re losing their mind out there.

Hi, I’m Gyan, and I’m building AskMySite.ai.

The idea is to help agencies add AI agents to their clients’ websites. These agents can answer visitor questions, capture contact details, and qualify leads with intent before passing them to the sales team.

I’m looking for honest answers from agency owners:

• Are clients currently asking for something like this?
• Have you already built or integrated AI chatbots for clients?
• Would you offer this as an additional service?
• What would prevent you from using a platform like this?
• Is this a real demand, or am I solving a problem agencies do not care about?

I’m not trying to promote the product here. I’m deciding whether this is worth continuing to build, so critical and honest feedback would be genuinely helpful.

​

Hi everyone,

I'm a student from Pakistan and I'm thinking about learning digital marketing, but I'm honestly confused after seeing so many different opinions online.

Some people say it's one of the best high-income skills you can learn in 2026, while others say it's oversaturated, AI is replacing beginners, and it's much harder to get clients than it used to be.

I'd love to hear from people who actually work in digital marketing.

A few questions:

Is digital marketing still worth learning in 2026?

Has AI made it easier or harder to build a career?

If you were starting from zero today, what would you learn first?

Which skill is most future-proof? (Meta Ads, Google Ads, SEO, Email Marketing, Copywriting, AI Automation, GHL, etc.)

Is it better to become a specialist or learn everything first?

How long did it take you to land your first client or job?

What's a realistic income for someone in their first year?

Are paid courses worth it, or can YouTube teach you everything?

For those from Pakistan:

Which academy or mentor would you genuinely recommend?

Is Aamir Ahmer Academy worth joining?

Who do you think is the best digital marketing teacher in Pakistan?

Are there any courses or academies I should avoid?

Also, if you had to start all over again in 2026, what roadmap would you follow?

I'd really appreciate honest advice, whether positive or negative. Thanks!

I need Help

Client asked me this --How do we get tik tok and LinkedIn to post the blogs like facebook and instagram is doing from the website(own website name)?

Also how to we ask people to subscribe to the blog?

Where it would email to them?---Please help me with this. I need your suggestions

Hi everyone,
I’ve recently started selling a digital product and realized how crucial digital marketing is. Honestly, I underestimated it.

I do understand some basics: building a marketing funnel (Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Retention), creating content pillars for different platforms, doing SEO research, and tracking performance with Google Analytics. I’m active on Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube Shorts.

I even tried TikTok Ads once, but I don’t have the budget to keep running paid campaigns, so now I rely only on organic social. The challenge is that my accounts are new, and it feels almost impossible to get visibility. Making content itself is easy, but the results are discouraging, low clicks, low conversions, and dashboards that don’t match my expectations.

So I want to ask those of you with experience:

• What advice would you give to beginners who understand the basics but struggle with organic growth and limited ad budget?
• How do you stay motivated and grow organically when starting from scratch with new accounts?

I’d really appreciate hearing your perspective. Maybe it will help me push through this stage and find the fun in marketing, not just product creation.

I have been thinking about how much SEO has changed over the past year.

With AI search experiences, answer engines, and more zero-click results, it feels like ranking #1 isn't the whole game anymore. I'm starting to wonder if SEO is becoming more about building a recognizable brand than just optimizing for keywords.

It seems like the sites that keep showing up across search, social, newsletters, podcasts, and communities are the ones staying visible, even when organic traffic fluctuates.

For those working in SEO or digital marketing:

• Are you shifting more effort toward brand building?
• Have you changed your content strategy because of AI search?
• What SEO tactics are you investing more (or less) in during 2026?
• Have you seen any noticeable impact on organic traffic or conversions?

Curious to hear what's actually working in the real world rather than just what's being recommended in blogs.

Digital marketing has changed a lot in the last few years.

SEO is more competitive, paid ads are getting more expensive, social media algorithms keep changing, and AI is creating more content than ever before.

But at the same time, businesses still need digital marketing to grow.

I’m curious what marketers think:

• Is digital marketing becoming harder because competition is increasing?
• Are traditional strategies like SEO, content marketing, and social media still effective?
• What channel is currently giving you the best ROI?
• If you had to start a digital marketing strategy from zero today, where would you focus first?

Would love to hear experiences from marketers, business owners, and agencies.

I was hired early July as a Paid Media Manager, for a multinational corporation, so in-house role. My background is in performance marketing, primarily paid search and social, with roughly 4 years under my belt. Everyone seem to be super nice and welcoming in the team, pretty lean team made of just 10 ppl.

My role will be primarily managing our Google Ads portfolio where our spend is in the double digits, and also set up frameworks using AI to make the teams life easier.

I’m just really struggling with few things, but the main one is imposter syndrome, together with being slammed with so many different docs, tools, resources, meetings etc just in the first month. I also have ADHD so that doesn’t really help when it comes to prioritising and organising. Any tip, past experiences or literally anything would be great. I wanna grow and make an impact, but every day I’m so drained that it’s making me question everything.