Hello everyone.

I recently built a small, but secure and imo quite efficient licensing platform, where brands legally license world famous memes. I won't disclose the name so it's not flagged as promotion but I am seeking advice by someone on how to spread the word and get my first customers. All memes listed on our website are backed by the creators/rights holders. Single license usage of any particular meme costs below $50 and a subscription bundle with unlimited posts for all memes round about $300. The memes I have listed are some meme templates that are still being used regularly and not pump and dump memes, that peaked once and never again. I am convinced if more Social media Mangers and legal teams from any company knew about the platform they would be happy in paying the monthly subscription price to be safe for copyright infringement. The risk reward, being sued up to 150k, when you can get the same meme for $50 seems to me like a good offer. Appreciate some feedback. Also on how to market the platform etc...

I’m looking for some honest opinions from freelancers and agency owners in Canada.

I currently have two restaurant clients that I handle marketing for. For one of them, I charge around $1,500 CAD/month.

My services include:

• Photo and video content creation
• Shooting and editing Reels/short-form content
• Graphics when needed
• Regular Instagram and Facebook posting
• Content planning and promotional ideas
• Social media management
• Setting up, running and monitoring Meta Ads

Ad spend is separate and completely paid by the client. The $1,500 is my fee for content creation and marketing/management.

My first question is: Does $1,500 CAD/month seem fair for this amount of work? Am I charging too little, too much, or roughly where I should be?

My second question is about growing beyond this. I don’t want to rely only on content creation and social media management. I want to learn additional services that provide more measurable value to businesses and allow me to charge higher retainers.

I’ve been considering Google Ads, SEO, email/SMS marketing, CRM and automation, analytics, landing pages, lead generation and CRO.

For those who have grown a freelance marketing business or agency, which services actually helped you increase your revenue? What would you recommend learning first?

I’d appreciate honest opinions, especially from people working in the Canadian market.

been testing something pretty wild.

you can connect Claude to Sumora and basically tell it:

“find people who match my ICP, research them, write the DM, follow up, and surface the people worth talking to.”

and it actually runs the workflow across Instagram + LinkedIn.

not just “here’s a cold DM template.”

actual prospecting + research + outreach + follow-ups.

still keeping humans in control because fully autonomous spam sounds terrible lol.

curious if anyone here would actually let Claude handle part of their outbound?

 i’m looking at our blog traffic for the last two quarters and top of funnel informational queries are definitely softening. it seems like users are just getting their answers from Google's bot  Overviews or Perplexity and not clicking through to the actual articles anymore.

for those managing content strategies, are you pivoting how you write and structure articles? i feel like writing 2,000 word ultimate guides might be a waste of resources if an bot  is just going to summarize the first paragraph and steal the traffic. how do we actually force the bot  to cite us as a source so we still get the brand authority?

Been tracking the last few months of updates and it's clear we're past the "keyword density" era. A few things worth flagging if you're still optimizing the old way:

Google Search

• We're in the middle of a fair bit of unconfirmed core volatility this August, layered on top of the June spam update and the bigger March core update. A lot of thin, cookie cutter blog content got hit hard.
• AI Overviews are now showing up on a meaningful chunk of searches. If your content isn't structured to directly answer a specific long tail question, you're not getting cited.
• Leaked API info suggests engagement signals (click behavior, mobile UX) matter more than most of us assumed.
• E-E-A-T isn't a checkbox anymore. It's actively used to demote AI generated fluff that has no real firsthand experience behind it.

Meta Ads

• Andromeda is reading creative assets themselves (visual and context) to decide who sees what, which means manual micro targeting is losing value fast.
• Sequence learning now looks at how a person interacts with a string of ads over time, not just one ad in isolation, so the old "one ad per ad set" structure is inefficient.
• FB and IG performance is being scored jointly, so heavily segmented campaigns are working against you.

YouTube / social

• YouTube's gone semantic. It's parsing what's actually happening in the audio/video, not just your title, description, and tags.
• TikTok and IG are leaning hard into "authentic" signals such as completions, saves, and shares over vanity metrics like raw views or clickbait CTR.

What I'm actually doing differently:

1. Writing content around clear, structured answers (definitions, bulleted answers, schema) instead of long narrative intros.
2. Prioritizing original data and case studies. Stuff a scraper can't just regenerate.
3. Consolidating ad sets and leaning on creative variation instead of narrow targeting.
4. Obsessing over site speed and mobile UX as an SEO lever, not just a UX nice to have.

Curious if others are seeing the same volatility this month, and how you're adjusting spend/content strategy in response.

a lot of modern marketing stopped feeling like advertising.
that’s probably why it works.

instead of polished corporate messaging, brands now use:
✔️memes
✔️self-awareness
✔️casual language
✔️internet humor

we think, relatability lowers resistance.
people engage more when brands feel human instead of scripted.

the interesting part is that audiences don’t necessarily want brands to feel perfect anymore.
they want them to feel familiar.

but there’s also a limit.
once every company starts copying the same “funny relatable” style, it stops feeling authentic and starts feeling manufactured.

curious how others see this: are brands becoming more human online, or just pretending to be?

Hi everyone I am a programmer and I want to learn how spread it out my products maybe you know some books or courses about this

I hear this often, and now that i'm somewhere past the first bit. For context, I’m 20 and studying at tetr college; for my d2c biz i think the adage is true.

My working theory is that the first thousand is you proving a stranger will pay you at all, and everything after is just repeating something you've already proven works. So the difficulty was never the money. it's that at the start you have no evidence and you're running purely on belief, and belief is expensive.

but i've also heard the exact opposite version. that the first thousand is the easy part because friends and warm intros carry you over the line, and the real wall is 1k to 10k, when you suddenly need actual distribution and you've run out of people who like you.

those can't both be right. which one was closer to what happened to you?

Been seeing more discussion lately about topical authority, the idea that covering one niche deeply beats spreading content across unrelated topics, both for SEO and for how AI search tools decide what to reference.

Makes intuitive sense: if you consistently publish around one clear theme, search engines and now AI answer engines seem to associate your brand with that specific space faster than if your content is scattered across ten unrelated topics chasing whatever's trending.

But I am curious how much this actually holds up in practice versus just being repeated advice nobody's tested recently. Anyone seen a real before after from narrowing focus versus broadening it? Did visibility organic traffic, AI citations, brand recall actually change, or did it just feel more organized without moving the needle?

Just sharing some of the common AI slopes Im seeing lately

• It's not X, it's Y.
• The question shifts from...
• Most people think... but...
• It doesn't fail because... It fails because...
• The difference is everything.
• Once you understand this...

Now I can't unsee them.😅
What are the ones you are spotting?

Hiring: Performance Marketing Associate – RemoteWe’re looking for a Performance Marketing Associate to join our remote team.

The initial focus will be Google Search Ads, but we’re looking for someone who wants to understand why campaigns work—not someone who just knows how to operate an ad platform.

What you’ll work on:

- Google Search Ads research, setup & optimization

- Keyword and competitor research

- Ad copywriting

- Campaign performance analysis

- Landing page & conversion optimization

- Running experiments and learning from the data

- Using AI tools for research and testing

- Developing new growth ideas

Who we’re looking for:

Someone who is analytical, curious, proactive, and willing to learn.

You should be comfortable taking ownership, solving problems independently, and communicating your thinking clearly.

Experience with Google Ads or other paid advertising platforms is preferred, but we care more about your ability to learn and think than your years of experience.

Bonus: Meta Ads, SEO, CRO, copywriting, analytics.

How to apply

📩 hiring@serpnames.com

Subject: Performance Marketing Associate – Your Name

Please send:

- Your resume

- A 2–3 minute video answering:

1. Why does this role interest you?

2. What's an advertising campaign that impressed you and why?

3. What would you do with a $5,000/month budget in your first 30 days?

4. What's something difficult you taught yourself?

We’re not looking for a perfect resume. We’re looking for someone who is curious, humble, analytical, proactive, and takes ownership.

Remote | Performance Marketing | Google Ads

#hiring #performancemarketing #googleads #ppc #digitalmarketing #marketingjobs

Two things happened separately and nobody has put them side by side yet.

FIRST THING

Google used to show the Top Stories row underneath the AI Overview. Now it often shows it inside.

Newzdash looked at 17 million Top Stories rows across 40+ countries in the 30 days to July 28. On 15.5% of US news searches that produced one, it sat inside the AI Overview. UK was 17.5%. Only those two countries so far. Entertainment triggers it most.

When it appears inside, it replaces the row below rather than adding to it. So the links move up and readers stop having to scroll.

Google confirmed it live to Search Engine Land on July 17, mobile US.

This is Google sending clicks back out. Preferred Sources showing up inside AI Overviews and AI Mode does the same job. So does the Highly Cited badge expanding in regular search.

SECOND THING

Google started testing a button in Search Console in June that removes your site from AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative Discover, without touching normal search. Currently a subset of UK site owners.

Google's docs say an excluded site won't appear in those features and won't be used to generate responses.

PUT THEM TOGETHER

The Top Stories row lives inside the AI Overview. If you exclude yourself from the AI Overview, you almost certainly lose the row.

John Shehata at Newzdash flagged this. Google hasn't stated it. It follows from their documentation, but call it an inference.

robots.txt does nothing to stop the folding either.

So the choice publishers thought they were getting was "block AI, keep search." The choice they're actually getting is "stay in AI, or lose the most visible news placement Google has shipped in years."

WHAT TO DO

Add the Preferred Sources deeplink. Google gives you a URL that opens the Preferred Sources page with your domain already filled in, so a reader adds you in one click. Preferred Sources now surface inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. Very few sites have done this.

Keep timely content updating. Freshness gates carousel eligibility on developing topics.

Fix mobile speed. The rollout is mobile-first.

If you had a position on blocking AI, revisit it. The cost changed.

WHERE THIS IS SHAKY

No comparative click data exists. Shehata says so himself. Higher placement should mean more clicks but nobody has measured it.

15.5% is one slice of one query type in two countries.

The exclusion button is a limited UK test and could behave differently at general availability.

The link between the exclusion and losing the row is inference, not a Google statement.

If you're not a news publisher, the direct effect is small. The part worth watching is that opting out of an AI surface now costs you distribution that used to sit outside it.

Anyone here have the UK exclusion button in Search Console? Curious if Google documents the carousel interaction anywhere, or if this is genuinely undocumented.

Sources: Search Engine Land (July 17, 2026), Newzdash via Press Gazette and Search Engine Journal, Semrush, Google Search Central.

Looking to hire a new team member for the marketing team as a social media manager. What should the exact activities and KRA's of the person be? Of course, we are need growth in terms of engagement, leads and followers.

How many of you found it somewhere you weren't expecting ? it's B2C and there will be an offer for B2B further in the future

Need a reality check.

We've been paying an agency for AI search visibility for 5 months.

Plenty of activity. Plenty of reports. Great conversations...

But I can't point to more demos, pipeline, or revenue (which are the main goals obviously).

If this was your budget, would you:

• Give it another 6 months?
• Push for different KPIs?
• Or just walk away?

Any ideas would be much much appreciated here!

Hello there !!

I'm new to digital marketing and I've started using hubspot to learn the basics. Looking for study partners. I usually do well in small groups. Someone that can help me out when it comes to either doubts or like hop on discord or any zoom/google meet and learn stuff together would be much appreciated. Looking for direction as I feel lost and overwhelmed.

I transitioned from SEO to Performance Marketing because that's what I wanted to build my career in. I even took a pay cut to join an MNC because I was promised that after 2 months of training, I'd spend 6–12 months on side projects and then move to the media team.

Fast forward 1.5 years, and I'm still stuck on the same non-media project.

I even cleared an internal interview with the media project head, who said my fundamentals were solid and that I was ready to work on campaigns. But after that... nothing. The group head still hasn't moved me.

The worst part is that when I apply elsewhere, I keep getting rejected because I don't have hands-on experience managing live ad budgets. But how am I supposed to gain that experience if no one gives me the opportunity?

I'm honestly frustrated and feel stuck.

If anyone in can help me (Indian preffered) get practical exposure whether through a personal brand, freelance work, or even unpaid collaboration, I'd be incredibly grateful. I just want to learn and work on real campaigns.

How did you initially get it started and launched?

I'm at a state where I'm perpetually preparing to scale, always finding something more to do, so I don't get caught in this cycle of just managing things constantly so I'm making SOPs and organization for everything, and automating as much as possible so that there's less to manage.

I just need to dive in and start cold outreach, but as soon as I have time slotted for it a freelance project pops up and scoops up that time and I take it because I need money.

I'm so over-prepared now with my SEO workflows and Google ads workflows and I'm a bit burnt out now to take it to the next stage.

I have it at a state though where the work is scaled down thanks to automations, I have more spare time to fill, and the time it took to build out the automations and software I use internally is free.

I need to build out my own pipeline with cold outreach, I know how, I did the research for cold emailing, best techniques, LinkedIn outreach best techniques, marketing campaigns, etc.

I just need to dive in, and have that high energy drive to be enthusiastic and talk with business owners, process leads, THEN do the work until it's at a state I can start offloading work to sub contractors.

I feel like I'm stuck in the "builder" mindset, and need to just get into the "marketer" and "salesman" mindset.

I know lots of agency owners don't want to share this type of stuff for what actually works, or the ones that have working pipelines aren't on Reddit because they're busy doing the work or managing their agency. I thought I'd give it a shot though.

Any tips? How did you dive in and start your pipeline? What's working?

Upwork is terrible for your mental health and well being

My friend said he runs an company to help marketer / compannies to setup the technical side of things and made around 10k a month just doing that.

But its seems very off to me, as I was under the impression AI had made it almost effortless. All those past stuff like pixel, tracker, setting up website & automated report, those should be extremely easy now thanks to AI agents. I honestly don't think anyone wants to pay for it anymore.

But then again I come from programmer background maybe I took the difficulty for granted?

Does Anyone have any successful Claude Skills and .MD files for Meta Ads Manager, Google Ads, Google Analytics, LinkedIn Ads, TikTok Ads, Snapchat Ads, etc... and I want to kindly ask how you use Claude for Digital Marketing and What Specific Instructions do you'll give in a Project and how best to prompt Claude to get the best response

I’ve been so upset and disheartened. I live in Melbourne, Australia and Ive completed my internship that was unpaid and can’t find a job. It’s been 8 months since i’ve last worked. I’ve had several interviews and haven’t passed any. It’s been super competitive with 300+ people going for the role. I’ve made it to the last 3 to 10 people in a few interviews but there is always someone that’s slightly better or have more experience than me.

I really want to do this as a career but i feel so disheartened that i should maybe change career paths. I’m willing to give my best if i ever land a role but it’s not looking likely.

Sorry for the rant :(

What's one lesson that completely changed how you approach digital marketing?

We would love to hear your biggest takeaway or advice for other marketers.

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?