My neurodivergent brain added up every LinkedIn impression from the last 12 months. Mine and my clients’, around 27 million impressions total. The biggest thing they all had in common? Personality-first content. And no, not the “here’s what my toddler’s blowout taught me about leadership” kind.

It’s probably the biggest misconception about personality-first content. People hear “add personality” and think “trauma dump.” It has nothing to do with that.

Underneath my personality-first engine, the foundation of my personality-to-demand method, there are three personality levers: scars and stripes, stance and style.

So let me walk you through each one, plus exactly how to apply it. Save it, work through it, come back to it.

Lever 1: Scars and Stripes

This one’s about your expertise and how you got here, aka your receipts. And they come in two halves: scars and stripes.

Scars are the painful stuff that rewired how you work. Stripes are the results and the reps that prove you know what you’re doing:

• Scar stories: burnout, underpricing, masking, nightmare clients, failed launches.

• The lesson: what snapped in your brain so you’ll never do X again.

• Stripes: case studies, receipts, “I’ve seen this in 50+ creators.”

And when you turn that into content, it sounds like this:

• “The year I tried to be professional and nearly killed my business.”

• “Three times I ignored my gut on a client, and what I changed after.”

• “What 100+ brand founders taught me about pricing yourself.”

I bundle the two on purpose, by the way. Because most people only show one side, and it’s almost always the stripes. No one wants to share the ugly middle, whichI think is a shame.

But see, scars and stripes are the same story from both ends. The scar earns the trust, the stripe earns the authority. Put them together and they say the one thing your reader needs to hear: I’ve stood exactly where you’re standing, and I’ve done this enough times to know the way out.

How to apply Scars and Stripes

1. Write down 5 hell moments.
List five times work genuinely put you through hell. I’m talking burnout, a client from hell, the launch that flopped hard, the time you caved and dropped your rates. Just write down the discomfort, don’t dress it up.

Here’s one of my scars::

2. Pull a rule out of every scar.
For each one, write a single line: “Because of that, I now always / never...” That rule becomes a non-negotiable in your content. The scar is the story, but without the rule, it’s just a trauma dump ( which is what you’re trying to avoid). Here’s how I turned one of my biggest scars into a non-negotiable:

3. Turn each scar into a post.
Keep the structure simple:

• Hook: name the moment.

• Story: what happened.

• Lesson: what you realized or what changed

• Rule: how you work now.

• CTA: “If this sounds familiar, here’s what to change.”

Before you hit post, ask yourself: “Could this be anyone’s?” .Add numbers, scenes, a scrap of dialogue, the weird little details. Get as specific as you can, since that’s what makes it impossible to copy.

4. Map out your stripes.
Now the brag list, which is honestly harder than the scars for most people. Projects, numbers, client results, the patterns you solve over and over. Ask yourself: “Where have I seen this ten times or more?” That’s where your authority comes in.

5. Turn your stripes into “I’ve seen this movie before” posts.
Write things like:

• “Across 30+ creator businesses, I keep seeing the same three mistakes in their offers.”

• “What 100+ brand founders taught me about pricing yourself.”

Lever 2: Stance

Your beliefs, your judgments, your non-negotiables. This is where you pick a side and stay on it.

Think of it as your voice of authority. People follow you here even when they don’t fully agree, and honestly, a spine is rare enough that they can feel one from a mile off.

What lives here:

• Opinions on your niche: what works, what’s harmful, what’s a waste of time.

• Red lines: what you refuse to teach, promise, or tolerate in clients.

• Values in action: how you choose, who you say no to, what you call out.

Example angles:

• “I don’t work with people who want content without opinions.”

• “If your brand hides your personality, you’re building someone else’s audience.”

• “Three things I’ll never tell my clients, even if it would sell more.”

A brand that tries to stand for everyone ends up standing for no one. So stance is how you pull the right people in and push the wrong ones out, on purpose.

How to apply Stance

1. List what annoys you in your niche. No filter. Pricing advice you hate. Content clichés. “Best practices” that are actually lazy. Performative values. Fake vulnerability. Get it all out on the page.

2. Turn annoyances into “I believe / I refuse” lines. For each item, write:

• “I believe...”

• “I refuse to...”

• “I don’t work with people who...”

3. Turn three of those into hero stance posts. Structure:

• Hook: the thing you’re against or for.

• Why: a story, data, or pattern.

• How: what you do instead.

• Line: your non-negotiable.

Fun fact: the post in the top left made Justin Welsh show up in the comments. I wrote about it here.

4. Add stance to your headline, About, and offer pages.

• Headline: “Personal brand strategist for people who refuse to post boring content.”

• About: “I don’t help you sound professional. I help you sound like yourself and get paid for it.”

• Offer page: add a “Who this is not for” section, pulled straight from your stance posts so your content and your sales copy say the same thing.

This is one of my community members, and she’s currently CRUSHING it on LinkedIn. I helped her optimize her profile and turn “ship in public” into her statement tagline, a play on “building in public.”

5. Audit for generic stances. Go through your posts. Anything like “authenticity is key” or “add value” gets rewritten with a concrete scenario, a specific target, and a real alternative. A stance nobody could disagree with is not a stance.

Of course there’s a Claude Cowork prompt for this:

You are auditing my LinkedIn posts for generic stances. A generic stance is any claim that nobody could reasonably disagree with. If the opposite of the statement sounds absurd, it’s not a stance, it’s a platitude.

Examples of generic stances to hunt for:

- “Authenticity is key”

- “Add value to your audience”

- “Consistency matters”

- “Know your audience”

- “Content is king”

- “Engagement is everything”

- “Show up every day”

- Any sentence that could appear in literally any creator’s post, in any niche, unchanged

TASK:

1. Go through every post I give you (I’ll paste them or point you to a file/folder).

2. Flag every sentence or claim that qualifies as a generic stance using the test above: “Could someone reasonably argue the opposite?” If not, flag it.

3. For each flagged line, rewrite it into a real stance using this structure:

   - CONCRETE SCENARIO: a specific, recognizable situation (not “when posting on LinkedIn” but “when you post a client win with zero context on a Tuesday morning”)

   - SPECIFIC TARGET: who exactly this applies to (not “creators” but “coaches with under 5K followers trying to sell a $2K offer”)

   - REAL ALTERNATIVE: what most people do instead, so the disagreement is visible (e.g. “most people would tell you to post the win and let the results speak. I think that’s lazy positioning.”)

4. Output a table with four columns: Original line | Why it’s generic | Rewritten stance | What someone could disagree with.

5. After the table, give me a summary count: total posts audited, number of generic stances found, and which post had the most.

RULES:

- Do not soften the rewritten stances to make them “more agreeable.” The goal is disagreement, not agreement.

- If a post has zero generic stances, say so explicitly. Don’t force a rewrite where none is needed.

- Match my voice: direct, specific, sharp opinions, short sentences, no corporate language, no “not just X, but Y.”

- If you’re unsure whether a line is generic or just concise, flag it as borderline and explain the ambiguity rather than guessing.

INPUT: [paste posts here, or reference the Notion/file source]

Lever 3: Style

The way all of that shows up in the feed? That’s what I call Style. It’s how your personality gets packaged. And if I read three of your posts with your name cropped out and still knew it was you, your style is doing its job.

Style comes down to three things:

• Visual: your photo, banner, colors, layout, screenshots, how your posts look on the scroll.

• Voice: sentence length, rhythm, how much you swear, how direct you are, your humor.

• Behavior: how you comment, how you reply to DMs, how you handle someone coming at you.

How to apply Style

1. Decide how you want people to feel after your content. Pick 3 to 5 words. In my case, it’s:

• Challenged

• Seen

• Amused

• Energized

• Called out

• Reassured

Those feelings guide your tone and your visuals.

2. Pick your sentence rules. Decide: short or long, direct or padded, swears or no swears. Write them down: “My tone of voice rules: short, sharp, no bullsh*t, opinion first, context second.” Then rewrite one LinkedIn-y post in that voice, like you’re talking to a friend. Shorter, messier, more you.

These are some of my rules:

• Short, concrete sentences and everyday words

• If it can be cut without losing info, cut it.

• Swearing is calibrated, never random

• If you wouldn’t say it to a friend’s face without flinching, it doesn’t go on the internet.

3. Fix your visual basics.

• A profile photo that looks like you, shot against a colored background so it pops in the feed.

• A banner that clearly shows who you help and how.

• Pick a consistent feel, text-heavy or screenshot-heavy, lo-fi or slick, so people recognize you at a glance.

4. Comment in your real voice. Stop flipping to buttoned-up mode the second you hit the comments. Reply the way you talk to people in real life. Direct, human, stance still visible (crazy, I know).

5. Do a recognizability check. Scroll your last ten posts. Ask: “If my name and photo were gone, could someone still tell this is me?” If the answer’s no, turn it up. More voice, more visual consistency, more you.

Pull all three and here’s what changes

Scars and stripes give people a reason to trust you. Stance gives them a reason to remember you. And style makes you the one they’d spot in a lineup.

Most creators only build one, and that’s why they sound like everyone else. All expertise, no stance, borrowed style. Easy to swap out for the next person. Yikes.

You didn’t get this good to read like a template, did you?

So pick one lever this week. Run its 5 steps. Then watch what happens when your content stops being about your niche and 5 being about you.

If you made it this far, you clearly have taste. Subscribe and let’s keep it that way.

Subscribe now

“Of course your LinkedIn is crushing it. You’re a good writer.”

I don’t buy that bullsh*t. Pun intended.

I get some version of that every week, in the comments and my DMs, from people who watched a post of mine pull in clients and decided the reason was talent.

A gift I was handed. Something they were not.

It is a comforting little story, because it lets them off the hook. If it is talent, they never stood a chance, so why bother trying.

I believe my content works for a boring, learnable reason. Buyer psychology and emotional storytelling, aimed at a specific human with a specific wound. Personality-first, if you want the label. Not a gift, but a freaking method.

So I did the thing my brain does whether I ask it to or not. I took my posts apart. Not the way an AI skims for patterns. My autistic, ADHD brain sat down with my best posts and my clients’ best posts and asked the same question on a loop: why did this one work.

Twelve answers came back. Grouped, they collapse into four moves anyone can run, as long as they bring their own truth to fill them. So here’s my feed, taken apart by me, handed to you.

Move #1: make them feel seen

The first three triggers do one job. They make a specific person feel like you reached into their chest and named the thing they have been carrying.

1. Targeted vulnerability. Not “I struggled once.” A precise wound aimed at a precise reader. The mechanism is the self-reference effect: the brain locks onto anything that feels like it is about you. When I write that I sat alone at the lunch table all through high school, I am not fishing for sympathy. I am calling one kind of person, the one who felt invisible for years and now wants to be seen without admitting it out loud. The wound is the targeting system. If it hits everyone, it hits no one. So I get specific. The lunch table. Not “loneliness.”

2. Enemy naming is another one. People do not only buy solutions, they buy a side. The textbook name is in-group bias, straight out of social identity theory: us versus them builds the tribe faster than any value proposition. So I name what my reader already resents but has not put words to yet.

   • The LinkedIn coach who tells you to open with “I help founders scale.”

   • The AI slop doing your thinking for you.

   When I name it, I am telling my reader we are not those people. That belonging happens before anyone pays a cent.

3. Tension before resolution is the last trigger here. Psychologists filed it under fear-then-relief: the drop in tension is what opens people up. I make the problem hurt in your body before I hand you the fix. “Structuring a post that lands is hard AF” comes before “so I built the stupidest simple framework.” No ache, no relief. If I skip the ache and go straight to the solution, the solution feels like nothing, because you never felt the weight it was meant to lift.

Three triggers, one move: name the buried thing so clearly the right reader thinks, wait, how does she know me. Steal this prompt:

Here is my reader: [one specific person, their job, the moment they feel stuck]. 

Give me three options for each of these: one precise wound they carry but would not say out loud, one enemy they already resent but have not named, and the ache I should make them sit in before I hand over any fix. 

No generic “they struggle with X.” 

Make every line specific enough that this one reader thinks I have been reading their mind. I

f my description is too thin to get specific, ask me two questions about my reader before you write anything.

Move #2: prove you dug yourself out

Feeling seen is not enough. Now you have to earn the right to be believed. The next three triggers are how you prove you climbed out of the hole you named, without sounding like a billboard.

4. The pratfall effect, the flaw beside the flex. Competence plus a visible crack makes you more likable and more believable, not less. Flawless reads as fake. So I never let a win stand alone. “88% close rate” sits next to “my website has been dead since 1995.” The crack is not weakness. It is proof I am a person and not a landing page.

5. Specificity as proof, because vague numbers signal you made them up. Researchers call it the precision effect. “A high close rate” is something anyone can type. “88%” is something you measured. I never round. Round numbers feel invented, odd ones feel tracked. Timeframes do the same work. “Last August” beats “recently” every time, because a real memory has a date on it.

6. Social proof as scenery, receipts dropped like gossip instead of stacked like a testimonial wall. “Jacob taught me this offer doc.” “My ex-Google client landed ten leads.” I slide the receipts into the middle of a story, not into a shiny block at the end. A testimonial section reads as an ad. A name dropped mid-sentence reads as a thing you overheard. People trust what they overhear, and researchers proved it back in the sixties under the name overheard persuasion: a message not aimed at you lands harder, because nobody overhears a sales pitch.

Together these say: I felt what you feel, and here is the dated, cracked, specific evidence that I got out. The prompt for this move:

Here is my win: [your claim or result]. 

Pair it with a real flaw or embarrassing detail from my own life so it does not read like a billboard. 

Rewrite any vague number into an exact figure with a date on it. 

Then show me one spot where I can drop a name or a receipt inside the story instead of parking it in a testimonial block at the end.

Move #3: hand them the shovel

A lot of personal brands stop here, right after “look what I did.” That is a mistake. If you only prove yourself, you built a monument. The next three triggers turn your story into something the reader can use tonight.

7. Give them the template, filled in. Not “position yourself better.” An actual fill-in-the-blank they can steal in ten seconds. “{role} in {size} {industry}.” Then my own version, completed, so they see it work before they try it. A small win with your structure builds more trust than any claim, because they felt it happen in their own hands. It is also why The Content Miner exists, a Claude skill that turns your own week into a 7-day content calendar. Template gifting, productized. Yes, I am running the trigger on you right now.

8. Grant permission out loud. Half your readers are frozen on one question: am I allowed to do this. They are waiting for someone with a bit of authority to say yes. So I say it. “Steal my angles. Use them for every post. I do not care.” I remove the guilt before they even feel it. Researchers call this the “but you are free” effect, and across dozens of studies, naming someone’s freedom to refuse roughly doubled the yes. Permission works best after you have handed over the goods, not before, because now it feels like generosity instead of a sales move.

9. Identity over outcome: sell who they become, not what they get. The research name is identity-based motivation, we act like the person we believe we are becoming. “More leads” is table stakes. “Stop begging for clients” is the real purchase. People do not buy the framework, they buy the version of themselves on the other side of it. So I name the identity they are escaping, invisible, chasing, and the one they are walking toward, booked, paid for being themselves. The framework is the car. The identity is the address.

This move separates a creator people admire from one people learn from. You made them feel seen, you proved you got out, now you put the shovel in their hand.

Paste this into your AI:

Here is what I teach: [your method, tip, or framework]. 

Turn it into a fill-in-the-blank template my reader can use in ten seconds, and fill in my own example underneath so they see it work first. 

Write one line that gives them permission to steal it with zero guilt. 

Then reframe the outcome as the person they get to become, not the result they walk away with.

Move #4: get out of the way

The last three triggers are about the ask, and they are where people get it most wrong, because they confuse wanting with chasing.

10. Reverse scarcity. Anti-urgency. This is reactance theory run in reverse: push people and they push back, shrug and there is nothing to push against. Urgency itself is not the problem, I use it, sparingly, when a deadline is real. The problem is urgency as a default setting. When every post screams “only three spots left,” the reader learns you always need them to buy today, and that neediness is what reads as low status. So my default is the shrug. “Or don’t. I’m not your mom.” Because I hold the pressure back for the rare moment it is true, the yes feels safe the rest of the year. The CTA lives in a silent P.S., never in the body.

11. The loop to the wound. The Zeigarnik effect in action: an open loop nags the brain until it closes. I open in the pain and I close by circling straight back to it. Start at the lunch table, end with “if you are still sitting alone, hang on, your turn is coming.” The loop makes the piece feel whole instead of a pitch that ran out of gas. You started in the hole, you ended standing next to it looking down.

12. Cohort amplification, or in plain words: the friends. I tag allies, feature their DMs, speak at their events, comment early and for real on their work. Their audience meets me, mine meets them, and the halo effect does the lifting: trust in someone rubs off on whoever stands next to them. It is not a pod, because the relationships are real and you cannot fake real over time. “He came to me” will always beat “I pitched him.”

That is the ask, done without desperation. You want them in. You are not going to grovel for it.

And the last one, for the close:

Here is my post: [paste it]. 

Write me a closing P.S. call to action with zero urgency, a shrug instead of a countdown. 

Loop my final line back to the wound or the image I opened with so the piece feels whole. 

And if a peer belongs in this story, show me where a real “they came to me” line would sit stronger than a testimonial.

All twelve, on one screen (screenshot this)

Subscribe now

So no, it isn’t (just) the writing

Twelve triggers, and not one of them asked me to be a good writer. They asked me to be a true one. The flaw disarms because it is real. My numbers land because I tracked them. The wound finds the right reader because I lived in it. That is material, not prose.

Paste this whole piece into your AI and ask it to run all twelve on your next post. You will get cardboard, because the machine has no lunch table it sat at, no number it earned the hard way. Structure without source.

What no one can copy is what happened to you. Your scars, your real enemies, your exact numbers, the five-second moments you would rather not admit. Steal the four moves, bring your own truth, and do not fake a wound to fill a slot. The reader smells it, and a fake scar costs more than an empty slot ever would.

The method is free, the material is you. Always was.

Want the triggers working for you instead of on you? The Obvious Yes is open. A private room for solopreneurs who are done blending in and ready to become the obvious choice. The people inside are already crushing it on LinkedIn.

Join The Obvious Yes

Two weeks ago, I ran a workshop breaking down the three LinkedIn posts that made me €28k. Then I broke down too. Live, in front of 100 people.

I wasn’t nervous. An artist I looked up to had died the month before, a man who built a career on being unapologetically himself. Every euro from the workshop went to his foundation. So I opened my mouth to start, my voice cracked, and nothing came out. I sobbed.

And then I did the thing I tell every client never to do. I apologized. For crying. At my own damn workshop. (Coach of the year, ladies and gentlemen.)

The second I closed the call, my brain reached for the flattering version. You know it. Where my mascara stays intact on the page.

Something like this. “Crying during a workshop isn’t weakness. It shows vulnerability, and in the age of AI, vulnerability is your greatest asset.”

Read it back. Dead on arrival. Any of the 50,000 consultants in my feed could have written it, probably ending on 'Agree?. It holds the reader at arm’s length instead of pulling them in, because the moment got surgically removed. Strip out the date, the Google room, the cracked voice and the 100 people staring back at me, and what’s left is a lesson floating in space.

The true line is the one I nearly deleted. I cried in front of 100 people, apologized for it, and got empathy back instead of the judgment I braced for.

See it? One is a lesson. The other is a day I lived through, snot and all. And that distinction, right there, splits how I used to make content from how I make it now.

The number that rewired the work

Somewhere past 11 million impressions, I stopped treating content like a well I had to keep refilling by hand.

For years I thought the job was to invent things to say. Sit down, glare at the cursor, ask the question every creator asks. What can I write about today?

That question is a trap, babes. It points you at a topic, a topic is abstract, and abstract is where your voice goes to die. So I flipped it. I stopped asking what I could write about and started asking what happened last week.

That one flip is the engine. Everything below is the machine I built around it.

I’ll take mining over brainstorming any day

Brainstorming asks your brain to invent. Mining asks it to remember.

When I run a room now, my first instruction is blunt. Give me moments in the chat. Do not give me a single topic.

People fight me on this. They type “consulting for SaaS founders.” I hand them nothing back, because a category is not a moment. Bold of you to think a niche label stops a single thumb.

Then someone drops, “a man slid into my DMs to ask if I was really 100% lesbian.”

Now we’re cooking. Only one human on earth gets to file that report, because it happened to her and nobody else.

Every post has to survive one test. Swap my name for someone else’s. Does the piece stay intact? If yes, it was never a post. It was make-believe.

Mining passes by default, because nobody counterfeits your life. Not even the guy selling €27 prompt packs.

Six steps carry a raw moment from your week to a line that stops the scroll. Let me walk you through them.

Step 1. Find the moment, refuse the topic

Picture a friend asking what you did last week. You don’t answer with “I provide strategic advisory services.” You lean in and go, “you will not believe what happened at this hotel.”

The moments already sit inside your week. You stopped clocking them as material, that’s all.

A few of mine, lately.

Not one of those is a topic. Every single one is a doorway.

And when someone freezes at the blank page, my instruction never changes.

Quit trying to sound smart, bestie. AI read the whole internet, you’re not winning that contest. Report what happened instead. Your feed is a diary, not a dissertation.

I use what I call The Content Miner for this. It’s a Claude skill I built. It digs through your week, drags the buried moment into the light, and hands it back as a post brief you can write in 20 minutes. Same job I’m walking you through here, done for you.

Step 2. Lock the single message before the first word

The fastest way to waste a good moment? Cram five ideas into it. Readers keep one thing per post. Give them five and they keep zero.

So before I build anything, I decide the one thing the reader keeps. A single message. My hill, no exceptions.

Because one moment seeds a dozen posts. It all depends on the message you hang from it.

I once watched a pigeon eat a cigarette butt on the pavement. That one grim little image became three separate posts. One on personal branding, one on positioning, one on content itself. Same pigeon, three messages, three pieces. (The pigeon was fine, by the way. Zero remorse. Icon.)

The moment is the ore. The message is the cut. Pick the cut first, then build the frame around it.

One more gate before you pick the cut. The message has to feed the topic authority your LinkedIn profile stands for. Mine says personal branding strategist, so the pigeon became branding and positioning posts, not productivity hacks, even though the pigeon clearly had hustle. Drift outside your lane often enough and readers stop knowing what you’re for. And a reader who has to guess what you do never becomes a client.

This is why I built The Profile Optimizer, a custom tool. It rebuilds your profile until your authority is impossible to miss, so every message you mine lands on ground you already own.

(You get it with The Content Miner and one more custom tool as a bundle now. More on the third one in a second)

Step 3. Decide the feeling before the words

I write in three registers, and each one exists to make the reader feel one exact thing.

• Life or personal posts travel wide. They make a stranger feel seen, which pulls in your peers.

• Expertise or proof posts show you do the work. They make the reader feel “I could do this too,” which pulls in your peers and your buyer at once.

• Business or promo posts push the reader to act now, and they convert your buyer. Mind you, even my most shameless sales post comes wrapped in a story. I am never out here going, “I do this, here’s a link, byeee.” The moment earns the ask.

So before you touch the keyboard, ask yourself: what do I want them feeling when they hit the end? Can’t name it? Then the post has nowhere to go.

One warning before you write a word. Register is not a disguise. Whatever feeling you pick, the post still has to sound like you, or the feeling never lands.

A proof post with zero personality reads like a case study your lawyer approved. So before anything ships, I run it through The Personality-First Auditor, the third tool in my bundle. It tells me whether a post carries my voice or whether any of those 50,000 consultants could have signed it.

Step 4. Build the body on STORM

Once I hold the moment, the message, and the feeling, I pour them into a five-beat frame. Stuck, Thirst, Obstacle, Reveal, Mirror.

Here’s one of mine, built exactly on it.

“Last six months, I made 26.08k. Every month felt like winning. Then my dad turned 70, and all I feel is how much I’m about to lose.”

A real moment. I remember the call on June 8th, his birthday. I’m addicted to wordplay, to shoving two loaded words up against each other. Winning. Losing. The tension does the work so I don’t have to. (Lazy? I prefer efficient.)

STORM keeps a moment from collapsing into a diary entry with no point.

One paragraph per beat, and the post formats itself. You never start from nothing. You fill five boxes.

Step 5. Write the hook on PLACE

The hook is your only shot at pulling the reader in. Blow the hook and nothing behind it gets read. Nothing.

I build every hook on PLACE. Person, Location, Action, Cost, Era. Use at least three, and one has to be Cost, because cost is what arrests the thumb.

Two that worked.

“Fifteen years ago, a director shamelessly made this offer.”

A direct quote from a real room, fifteen years back. The scroll halts because your brain has to know what the offer was.

“Last year, my boss screamed, when will you learn to shut up. Funny you ask.”

That one tells you who I am before I explain a thing. I don’t beat around the bush to tell the truth. People who work with me already know this. People who don’t will find out real quick.

I’ll rewrite a hook a hundred times, and it almost always opens on a specific moment, some version of “last week, this happened.” Never a claim. Always a scene.

Step 6. Close on one line, and let it scare you

The ending is where everyone scatters. They bolt on a question, a statement, a soft nudge, and a hard ask, all at once. It’s a closer, not a buffet. Pick one.

A statement when you want authority. A question when you want the comments. A soft or hard call to action when you want to sell.

And here’s the gate every piece passes before it ships. If the thing I’m about to publish doesn’t make me slightly nauseous, I don’t publish it. When you feel nothing writing it, you risked nothing, and a post with no risk in it makes nobody feel a thing. Every post that made me real money came with a side of nausea.

The crying post? Full-on seasick. Which is exactly how I knew.

What I did not see coming

The six steps are mechanics. You can teach them, you can drill them, you can hand them to someone else. And still, they’re not the reason this works.

So what is? Personal branding runs deeper than posts and hooks. It’s identity work. The more you write about who you are, the more you become that person.

I learned this at the workshop, mid-sob, snot and all. I braced for people to look away. Instead I got empathy. One woman told me her own feed blew up after she posted her diagnosis at 60. Another said the space to be honest helped her find herself again.

The trust came because of the ugly crying, not despite it.

The three posts I broke down at that workshop earned 28k. My three most honest posts, nowhere near my cleverest or my most produced. The PTSD post drew leads while my pretty infographics drew crickets. The dad-turns-70 post won a 1:1 client who told me she felt she already knew me. The performance-review post pulled 200 comments and sent three people into the community.

And thinking harder produced none of it. Noticing did. I looked at what already happened and refused to sand it smooth.

Post the buried thing enough times and the mask becomes the face.

Subscribe now

How I mine, on a boring week

You think you need a big dramatic life for this? Mine is more boring than yours, I promise. Last week my material was a pile of unfolded laundry, a chair holding a full week of clothes in existential limbo, and a stranger asking if I wanted to be LinkedIn famous. The habit underneath is dead simple.

• I keep a diary. Not for the audience, for the catch. At the end of a day I write down what happened in the flattest words I’ve got. Yesterday, 100 people watched me cry. Yesterday, I made €7k from one product while picking wedding flowers. No lesson attached yet. The lesson shows up later, at the desk.

• I mine the places moments hide. Client calls. My inbox. Voice notes to myself. The comment that annoyed me. The DM from hell that made me laugh. The raw material already sits in your week, in writing. You stopped reading it as content, that’s all.

• Then I run one moment through the three registers and watch it split. The crying workshop becomes a personal post about identity, a proof post about what honesty does to trust, and a promo post for the newsletter breaking down the three €28k pieces. Same moment, three cuts. A week of content from one afternoon of my real life.

One version is a well you refill by hand until your arms give out. The other runs on your life without asking. Nothing to invent. You notice, then you dress up what you noticed.

Your life is the one asset nobody copies

AI writes a clean paragraph in your niche in four seconds flat. But AI will never have your life.

AI wasn’t in the room when your boss screamed at you to shut up. It never got the DM from hell. And it didn’t sell 10k from a sun lounger, let alone crack mid-sentence in front of 100 people at a workshop you built with your own hands.

That’s your unfair advantage. Expertise stopped being one, everyone holds expertise now, Claude hands it out for free and asks if you’d like a summary. Your specific, slightly embarrassing week is the one thing left nobody fakes.

So tomorrow, don’t sit down asking what you should post about.

Open your notes instead. Scroll back through the last seven days. What’s the one moment you’d tell a friend before you’d ever tell an audience?

You already know the one. Start there. Mine it.

And if you want backup down in the mine, the three tools from this piece, The Content Miner, The Profile Optimizer, and The Personality-First Auditor, now live together in one bundle. I named it the Bum on the Beach Bundle, after the sun lounger where I sold 10k doing nothing. They dig, you write.

Grab it here

Your best post already happened. You just didn’t write it down yet. ✌️

Your buyer has a question. And they don’t type it into Google anymore. They open Claude and ask straight. “Who’s good at this.” “What’s the best tool for X.” “Which consultant should I trust.”

Claude answers confidently. With names. And there’s a real chance the answer was shaped by a LinkedIn post.

Which means the only question that matters is, whose post?

So I spent the last few days buried in two studies.

• Semrush analyzed 89,000 LinkedIn URLs cited across ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode.

• Scrunch pulled apart 12,000 posts AI had considered as sources, then tested what got them picked.

And the data flipped almost everything we tell ourselves about who wins here.

Fair warning: it’s going to feel personal if you’ve been hiding behind “I don’t have a big audience yet.”

First, the cold numbers

LinkedIn is now the second most cited source in AI search. Number two behind Reddit, ahead of everyone else you’d expect. Around 11% of AI answers reference it on average. On ChatGPT Search, 14.3%. On Google AI Mode, 13.5%.

So in plain language: more than 1 in 8 answers your buyer reads right now was shaped by a LinkedIn post. The kind somebody writes in five minutes between meetings, now sitting inside the answer that decides whether your buyer trusts you.

This already happened. AI is in your buyer’s pocket, answering questions about your industry, with or without you in the answer.

And almost nobody I talk to has noticed.

Your favorite excuse just died

You’ve been telling yourself you can’t win on LinkedIn because your follower count is small. Your posts get 12 likes and a comment from your mum. The big accounts have it locked.

The data killed that excuse.

Reaction count has near-zero effect on whether AI cites you. A post with 100 reactions gets cited at the same rate as one with 10,000. The median cited post has 15 to 25 reactions and 1 comment. That’s the resume for ya.

And people with under 500 followers get cited at the same rate as the big accounts. Sometimes more.

So read that again. It dismantles the entire story you’ve been telling yourself.

Your content is the gate. Always was.

So what gets you cited?

And here’s what made me sit up. They’re the exact three things I’ve preached for two years, except now I’ve got robots backing me up instead of just my own stubbornness.

I - Technical details → +77% citation rate

The single biggest factor, and it’s not close. Specifics. Numbers. Tools. Real data from real work.

• Weak: “Personal branding is so important for consultants right now.”

• Strong: “I rewrote 14 consultant LinkedIn profiles in Q1. The three lines that doubled inbound were a specific client outcome with a number, a named industry, and one sentence of opinion most people are too scared to write.”

One gets cited as a source. The other gets blended into mush.

And the sneaky thing: technical detail does almost nothing to your reactions. It won’t make you go viral, but it won’t hurt you either. Free visibility with AI, zero downside with humans.

II - Named entities → +33% citation rate, +5% reactions

Naming specific companies, products, people, tools. In plain text. You don’t have to tag anyone. AI reads the words of your post, not the mention graph. So you just type the names.

• Weak: “There are some great tools for this.”

• Strong: “Notion vs Linear vs Asana, and which one holds up once your team passes 50 people.”

And this one helps both sides, because people search for names too.

III - Topic specificity → +18% citation rate, +13% reactions

The sweet spot, because it lifts AI and people equally. Niche beats broad every time.

• Weak: “The future of marketing is exciting.”

• Strong: “Why personality-first positioning outperforms credential-stacking for neurodivergent consultants who hate selling.”

The narrower you go, the more matchable your post is to the exact question a buyer typed into Claude.

The keyword piece

Here’s the mechanism under all three.

AI cites you because the words in your post match the words in your buyer’s question. That’s the game.

Ask Claude “best onboarding consultant for B2B SaaS” and the machine hunts for content with those exact words. But if your post says “I help companies with their people journey,” you match nothing. Nobody types “people journey” into an AI. So you wrote yourself out of the answer.

This is keywords. The honest kind, where you write in the exact language your buyer uses to describe their problem.

So before your next post:

• Write down the literal question your buyer would ask an AI. Word for word. “How do I get speaking gigs without a big following?”

• Use their words. They say “speaking gigs,” you say “thought leadership engagements.” They win. Match them.

• Put the keyword phrase in the first two lines and once more in the body.

• Name the specific niche, tool, or industry. “B2B SaaS.” “Notion.” “battery safety.” Those are keywords too, with almost no competition.

Most consultants and solo operators write in the language that impresses their peers instead of the language their buyer types. And impressive language is all abstraction. So it’s invisible.

If you want to be in the answer, write in the words of the question.

Meet the battery safety consultant

Posts thermal runaway test data. About as technical and niche as content gets. There’s no giant following. Just specifics nobody else is brave enough to publish.

An agency found her through AI search and asked her to train their team. A real paid project, traced back to one post AI could cite.

She didn’t have a big account. She had specifics. That was her differentiator.

So forget reach. Write down the things you’re all slightly too scared to put in plain text.

Two things are killing your odds

And one of these will annoy you, because you’ve probably been doing it on purpose.

I - Unicode formatting → −58% citation rate

Those fancy bold and italic characters people paste in to make text pop? They’re math symbols dressed up as letters. So to a retriever, “𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿 at ACME” reads as a string no human will query and no AI can cleanly parse.

A caveat, because I check these things before I scare you: this was measured hardest on ChatGPT’s retriever. But the logic should stop you anyway. You’re formatting your name, headline, and About section in characters machines struggle to read, at the exact moment machines decide whether your buyer ever hears your name.

Bad trade. Stop making it.

Go look right now. Check your headline. Check your About. If any of it is fake-bold, retype it in plain text. Two minutes. I’ll wait.

II - Link in comments → −31% citation rate for your post

“Link’s in the comments” turns your post into a signpost instead of a source. AI reads a signpost and walks past.

But a twist worth knowing: the URL in the comments gets cited 47% of the time, roughly double the baseline. So link-in-comments is a trade. You sacrifice your post’s odds to boost the linked source.

If your goal is sending AI to your own site, that trade can be worth it. Just know which game you’re playing.

The move almost nobody is making

Everything above was feed posts. But the Semrush data shows that’s not even where most citation volume lives.

LinkedIn articles, the long-form ones, account for 50 to 66% of all cited LinkedIn content.

Say that out loud please. Articles get cited far more than feed posts. The sweet spot is 500 to 2,000 words. Original only.

The reason is structural. An article is long, indexable, full of clear answers AI can lift straight out. A feed post stays fragmented. An article reads like a source.

And here’s the runway. Almost no founder publishes them. They write a blog. They post on LinkedIn. But they never copy the blog into a LinkedIn article. Which is the entire opportunity sitting there untouched.

Same content. Two surfaces. One feeds Google, the other feeds AI search. So you get paid twice for work you already did.

Twenty minutes of copy-paste, a few edits, citation rates that double or triple your feed posts. That’s the move. Almost nobody is making it.

Where this gets personal

Look at what gets cited. Specifics. Named names. Real numbers. Niche over broad. The buyer’s own keywords. Plain, honest language a machine can read.

That’s an AI study handing me the exact thing I’ve been saying about personality-first since the day I rebuilt my business from zero.

For two years I’ve made the same argument: when AI commoditizes expertise, personality becomes the thing they can’t copy. But I framed it as a differentiation thing. How you stand out to a human scrolling the feed.

This data adds what I couldn’t prove before. AI didn’t just flatten expertise. It became the place your buyer goes to decide who to trust. And what it pulls out is specifics, named names, niche, lived detail. The texture of a real person writing from real experience. So generic expertise in corporate language matches nothing, and gets retrieved by nobody.

So personality became the thing that gets you found. Here’s the chain:

Personality makes you specific → Specific makes you citable → Citable makes you the answer.

Being the answer makes you the call that lands in your inbox. That’s what I mean by turning personality into demand. Except now there’s an AI in the middle, doing the matching for you.

So the people who sound safe and professional? They’re invisible twice. To humans, because they blend into the crowd. To machines, because there’s nothing concrete to grab. The “too much” specificity I keep pushing you toward is the one thing both can read.

A buyer asks ChatGPT who to hire. ChatGPT hands back the most specific, most named, most niche post in your space. That’s you. No follower count in the equation.

That’s demand without an audience. The exact thing that took me from 30K to 50K a month in 10 months, and now the machine is doing the introductions.

Precision builds trust. Vagueness builds skepticism. The robots just made it literal.

Vagueness doesn’t only bore a human now. It makes you invisible to the machine your buyer is asking for a recommendation.

The thing you were scared to be specific about was always the feature.

Your list (do these this week, not someday)

• Strip the Unicode from your profile and posts. Plain text.

• Rewrite your headline in plain words. What you do, who you do it for.

• Write in your buyer’s keywords. The literal words they’d type into an AI.

• Add real detail to every post. Names, numbers, tools, methods.

• Name specific companies, people, and tools in plain text.

• Write about one narrow thing. Narrow is matchable.

The founders who figure this out in the next twelve months will look up in 2027 with a head start they didn’t pay for. The people who ignore it pay for that distribution later. With ad spend. Or by being absent from the answer their buyer already trusts.

The runway is wide open. But it won’t stay that way.

So this week, pick one thing and do it. Strip your Unicode. Name three real tools in a post. Publish the article you’ve been sitting on.

What’s the one specific thing you’ve been too scared to write down in plain text? That’s probably your next post. ✌️

I give credit where credit is due. This video helped me a great deal writing this article.

Subscribe now

Someone DM’d me last week: “AI ruined my content.”

No it didn’t, bestie.

You handed a skill you never built to a machine.

It gave you back the average of everyone else who never built it either.

Now you're blaming the robot. That's like blaming the calculator because you never learned to count.

I’ll say the thing nobody selling you prompt packs will say. Your content was already bland before AI existed. AI just gave you a faster way to publish nothing.

But “AI is killing originality” is a lovely story, isn’t it?

It lets you keep posting.

It lets you keep blaming the algorithm, the reach, the platform, the timing.

It hands you a villain that isn’t you.

I get the appeal. Spite is a perfectly valid fuel source and I use it daily.

But spite pointed at the wrong target keeps you exactly where you are.

The cost of believing the lie: you stay invisible.

You post five days a week. You hit every best-practice checkbox. And if I swapped your name for any other one person business in your niche, not one sentence would break.

You refined yourself out of your own content and called it a tool problem.

It looks a little something like this:

Garbage in, garbage out

Look, this isn’t a hot take. It’s how the thing works.

A language model predicts the most probable next word from everything it was trained on. It’s built to minimize surprise. So a blank prompt with nothing but a topic drags the output straight to the center of everything ever written on it. The safest word in the room, every time. You typed “write a LinkedIn post about differentiation,” and the machine handed you the most undifferentiated post possible.

And the scale is worse than you think too. Graphite ran 65,000 web pages from Common Crawl through a detector. In November 2024, AI-generated articles crossed 50% of all new web articles. They passed human writing for the first time.

So half of what you scroll past now is a machine. Trained to sound like the half before it.

But now the stat that should make you sit up.

Despite that flood, Graphite found 86% of the pages ranking on page one of Google are still human-written. Only 14% are AI. The slop is everywhere, and it loses. The reward still goes to the specific, the lived, the thing a machine can’t fake.

So the fake gets caught, by software and by people. Detectors like Originality.ai flag machine text at around 94% accuracy, not by magic, but because the writing is mathematically predictable. I’m talking little variation in sentence length, the same transitions on a loop, reused phrasing. Researchers call the missing ingredient burstiness, the natural unevenness of how a real person writes.

Your reader feels its absence before they can name it.

That flat, even hum is the sound of nobody home.

So no, everything doesn’t sound the same because people got lazy.

It sounds the same because almost everyone feeds the same tool the same nothing.

And the tool does precisely its job.

(I wrote the full breakdown of the mirror thing here, if you want to go deeper.)

The skills you skipped

You didn’t lose your content skill to AI. You never had it in the first place. You outsourced it and moved on.

Getting good at this has a sequence. I call it The Flop Loop.

It beats the Slop Loop you’re in now.

You sit with a blank doc and find the one real moment from your week. You form an opinion you’re slightly scared to publish. You say it anyway, watch it flop and figure out why.

Again and again and again. This is the apprenticeship. And it’s slow and uncomfortable and the entire job.

But you skipped it. AI showed up, promised to do the uncomfortable work, and you said yes before you knew what you were handing over.

Now you’ve got a calendar automated to the hour and not one post that sounds human.

AI didn’t make you lazy. It let you skip the one thing that was ever the point.

And a skill you never built can’t be taken from you. It can only be exposed.

So what is the skill you skipped? It comes down to two moves:

• Excavate. Dig through your actual week and find the concrete moment buried under “professional.” The conversation that annoyed you. The client win you almost didn’t post. The 5-second scene you could draw on paper. That raw material doesn’t live in training data. It lives in you.

• Correlate. Tie that moment to what you sell. Connect the thing that happened on Wednesday to the offer you make on Friday, so your content builds instead of scatters.

That’s it.

And it’s the one thing a machine can’t do for you. AI has never sat in a meeting watching its own idea get killed with four words. It’s never been owed €20K by a guy with more ego than euros. It has no week, no Tuesday where everything went wrong, no lived reality to write from.

So AI edits. It does not excavate. Get the order wrong and you get a well-structured post with nobody home.

How I use AI (because I do, every day)

I’m not anti-AI. I’ve built voice profiles, anti-AI filters, and Claude projects my clients run daily. A chunk of my income comes from teaching people to use these tools well.

The difference is the order. I excavate first.

Voice memo, messy journal, notes from a client call, whatever my brain coughs up. Then I correlate it against my positioning to find the angle. Only then does AI touch it, to sharpen what’s already there.

It tightens my phrasing after I write. It does not generate the thing itself.

I ran this by hand for years, until I got sick of doing the digging manually every week. So I built it into a tool that runs the first two moves for me.

And the receipts back it up.

Across analyses from Refine Labs, GaggleAMP, and DigitalApplied, personal profiles pull 5x to 8x the engagement of company pages for the same content. Refine Labs clocked 2.75x the impressions and 5x the engagement. LinkedIn’s own data shows people are 3x more likely to trust a post from a human than from a brand.

People follow human. That distance is a fingerprint, measured. But something worse is happening underneath.

The internet is starting to eat itself. When AI trains on AI output, the diversity of language thins with every cycle. Shumailov and his team published this in Nature in 2024 and called it model collapse. They fed a model its own output across generations, and by the ninth round a passage about medieval architecture had degraded into a list of jackrabbits.

So the rare stuff vanishes first. The odd phrasing, the strange word, the specific. The very things you own.

Which means your first-hand, experience-based content gets rarer and more valuable by the month.

Facts are free now. Anyone can generate them in 30 seconds.

Perspective is the only product left. People want yours.

The only skill you need right now

That skill is The Content Miner (you can grab it here). It excavates and correlates for you, every damn week.

You dump your raw week into it. Notes, a win, a frustrating conversation, a voice memo.

It digs (excavate) until it hits the moment worth posting about, then it builds you a 7-day calendar where every brief is tied to a real moment and pointed at what you sell (correlate).

Post briefs, not generic topic lists. Each one about 20 minutes to write. Or tell it to write the full posts if you’d rather.

Grab the Claude skill

If you want more than the tool, two other doors:

• The Content to Gigs Community. Daily access to me and a room full of people writing their way into paid clients. Join here.

• 1:1 with me. We turn your positioning and voice into a content engine built entirely from your lived experience. A few spots, because I only do it properly. Apply here.

The machine was never the problem. It just held up a mirror and showed you what was already there.

So go excavate something. Your mess is best the material. ✌️

Tell me: when does AI enter your content process? Before you’ve written a word, or after? Hit reply, I read every one.

Leave a comment

Two weeks ago I told an AI consultant to delete Claude from her content workflow. Not tweak it. Not “use it less.” Delete it.She looked at me like I’d asked her to set her laptop on fire.

This woman had been stuck in the same loop for months.

Write a post with Claude > Publish > Watch it pull 200 impressions > Blame the algorithm.

Open Claude again.

She was posting daily. Saying the right things. Hitting every “best practice” checkbox on the list. And her content was invisible.

On our call, I scrolled her last 20 posts out loud. Every one was structured. Competent. Polite.

And if you swapped her name for any other AI consultant on the platform, nothing would break. Not one sentence carried a fingerprint.

She’d refined herself out of her own content.

The loop you’re probably in too

If you’re reading this thinking “that’s not me,” let me describe what I see in 80% of the profiles I audit.

You open Claude or ChatGPT. You type “write a LinkedIn post about differentiation in my niche.” You get the output. You change two words, add a line break, hit publish.

The post gets a polite like from your mom and 189 impressions. If you’re lucky.

So you go back to Claude, because obviously the problem is the prompt. You refine the instructions. You add context. You build a voice file. The output gets smoother.

And your reach stays flat. Because smoother is the problem, not the fix.

AI writes the average of its training data. Every word it picks is the statistically safest one in the room. Your specific phrasing, your rhythm, the opinion you’re scared to publish, your weird humor (the good kind), all of it gets sanded down to the version that offends no one and sticks with no one.

The more you refine, the more you disappear.

I wrote a full breakdown of this. Short version: AI mirrors your language. That’s a very different thing from knowing you. And the disconnect shows up in every post you publish.

What I taught her instead

I gave her three rules. She fought me on all of them. Then her content started working.

Subscribe now

Rule 1: Use your brain to master demand writing

Here’s what I mean by demand writing, because it’s not “posting tips” and it’s not “sharing value.”

• A tip post teaches someone something. They read it, nod, maybe hit save, forget it by lunch.

• A demand post makes someone think “I need what this person has.” They finish it and want to hire you, work with you, or keep following you just to figure out how your brain works.

The difference is story. But “tell stories” is useless advice on its own.

There’s no shortage of storytelling frameworks.

• Before-After-Bridge, where you show the old situation, paint the new one, point at the path between them.

• Zero to Hero, where you drag someone from rock bottom to a win.

• PAS, where you name the pain, twist the knife, then hand over the fix.

They all work. And you’re never going to learn them. Because you’re not a born storyteller. Or because AI made you lazy. Either way, sitting through a copywriting course on narrative arcs is not why you got into your business.

So I built a structure that sits underneath every one of those frameworks.

One skeleton you reuse for every demand post without studying story theory. I call it STORM.

Every post starts from lived reality, then turns to the reader last.

• S = STUCK (the hook). Lead with a real moment. A reveal, a contrarian take, your ICP’s pain. Drop them into a scene, mid-action, no throat-clearing.

• T = THIRST (the agitation). Show the cost and the before. Make the gap between where they are and where they want to be feel like a splinter they can’t ignore.

• O = OBSTACLE (the real block). Validate why they’re stuck. Not the surface problem. The deeper one. Get specific enough that they think “wait, how does she know that.”

• R = REVELATION (the turn). The moment something clicked. A conversation, a reframe, a slap of reality. Doesn’t need to be dramatic. Needs to be honest.

• M = MIRROR (the proof). Show the other side. Receipts. Outcomes. This is where you earn the right to make the claim.

When you tell a story with this structure (a real client moment, a real conversation, a decision that cost you something) the reader projects themselves into it. They feel the tension.

And when you resolve it with your take, your method, they don’t file it under “interesting.” They file it under “I need this person.”

My client’s old posts were all tips. “how to use Claude Code.” “How to automate your workflow.” Useful? Sure. Creating demand? Nope.

Nobody read those and thought “I have to hire her.”

So I asked her to write about a backend lead who killed a feature with four words in a meeting: “Please don’t add that.” Everyone else was debating how to build the thing. He was the only one asking whether it should exist. She framed it as the conversation every team using AI is about to have, whether they plan for it or not.

That post did something tips never do. People saw themselves in it. They reached out.

That’s demand writing for ya. AI doesn’t generate it, because AI has never sat in a meeting watching its own output get pushed back.

Rule 2: Write from your gut before AI touches a thing

Your first draft has to come from you. Voice memo, messy notes, a journal dump, whatever format your brain thinks in. The raw version is where the personality lives.

AI can’t generate signal. It can only smooth what’s already there. Start with AI and there’s nothing worth smoothing. You get a well-structured post with nobody home.

So I asked this client to do the thing she hated most.

Close Claude. Open a blank doc. Write one paragraph about something that happened that week that pissed her off.

She stared at the screen for like 90 seconds.

Then she wrote about a CTO who fired an engineer for shipping unreviewed AI code, and later posted a team policy treating AI quality issues as a performance matter. She shared how that incident, from a stranger on the other side of the planet, threw her back to a policy she was handed years ago at a different company on a different continent.

That paragraph had more personality than her last 20 posts combined.

Your weird phrasing, your specific sentence rhythm, your half-formed midnight thoughts, that’s the signal. A model trained on millions of writers averages all of it out. You have to put the signal in first.

Write ugly. Write fast. Write like you’re texting a friend who asked “how was your day.” That raw material is the one thing AI can’t manufacture.

Rule 3: Let drafts sit, come back, kill whatever feels off

This is the rule people skip the most and need the most.

Your brain needs distance to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s performance. When you finish a draft, every line feels sharp. Two hours later you read the same lines and half of them sound like you were trying way too hard.

So I told my client to wait at least two hours before touching a draft again.

When she came back, she could finally spot the sentences that sounded like a LinkedIn coach wrote them. Cut those. The sentences that sounded like something she’d say at dinner with a friend? Keep those.

That’s the entire editing system in a nutshell. Does it sound like you at dinner, or does it sound like a template wearing your name? Keep dinner. Cut template.

Why it matters this much: your judgment sharpens when your ego calms down.

The first draft is emotional. The second read is editorial.

You need both, and you need them to happen at different times.

What happened next

Her 28-day dashboard after the three rules: 274,984 impressions. Up 12,467.8%.

From a 1,200-follower account.

I assumed the first hit was a fluke. She assumed it was a fluke. LinkedIn is a slot machine, posts hit for no reason all the time, right?

Then one post pulled 86,000 impressions and 220 comments. Okay. Maybe not a fluke.

Then another. And another.

Every post she wrote with these rules beat everything she’d published in the previous six months. Combined. The numbers bounced around (because, LinkedIn) but the floor had moved. Her worst post after the switch would’ve been her best post before it.

This wasn’t one lucky break. It was a pattern. Same person, same 1,200 followers, nothing different but the words. This time they were HER words. And her audience responded the way they never once did to Claude's version of her.

But old habits are stubborn little gremlins.

The relapse

Remember that CTO post? The one she drafted from the gut. On publish day she got cold feet and let Claude write the hook. Just the hook.

It tanked harder than my faith in LinkedIn voice notes.

Twelve hours later she rewrote those two lines by hand. Same post. Same body copy she’d written from scratch. The only thing that changed was the first two lines. It hit 131,000 impressions and 283 engagements.

Claude wrote the hook, it died. She wrote the hook, it exploded.

Claude wrote the hook, it died. She wrote the hook, it exploded.

No AI would’ve caught that hook. Because AI doesn’t know what sounds like HER. It doesn’t know her frustration, her humor, her specific way of walking into a story. It knows what sounds acceptable. And acceptable is invisible on LinkedIn in 2026.

That relapse is the strongest proof I’ve got. It’s not theory. The second she broke the rules, the results broke too. The second she followed them again, the numbers came back.

She’s now averaging 270,000 weekly impressions. Her inbox is FLOODED with DMs from people who feel like they already know her before the first call.

The story you just read, in STORM

You felt the structure before I named it. Here’s how the client story maps to STORM:

That’s the skeleton behind every post I write. I don’t sit down and fill in a STORM template like a worksheet. I write from a real moment, then check whether the structure is there. If it is, the post works. If a piece is missing, I know exactly where to go back in.

How I use AI (because I do)

I’m not anti-AI. I use Claude every day. I’ve built voice profiles, anti-AI filters, content workflows, and Claude projects my clients use daily. A serious chunk of my business comes from helping people use these tools well.

The difference is the order.

I write the first draft by hand. Then I paste it into Claude with my positioning doc and vocabulary loaded. I ask it to pull angles I missed between my lived material and my positioning. I let it tighten my phrasing after I’ve written it, so it sharpens what’s already there. It doesn’t generate the thing worth sharpening.

I feed it my vocabulary so it knows my word choices. I run an anti-AI filter as the final pass to catch the words and patterns that make a reader’s brain go “a machine wrote this.”

Claude edits what I write. I write what I think. That line has never moved.

The order matters more than the tool.

This is a personality problem

AI is commoditizing expertise faster than you can finish reading this sentence. Every consultant, coach, and creator in your niche can generate competent content in 30 seconds flat. The supply is infinite.

Your personality is the one thing that can’t be generated at scale. Your specific experiences, your opinions, your rhythm, your humor, your scars. That’s what makes someone follow you instead of the other 400 people teaching the same topic.

My client didn’t need better prompts. She needed to stop outsourcing the one thing that made her worth following.

You might too.

The flaw is the feature. The mess is the material. And your weird is the entire point.

So tell me: what does your current content process look like, and when does AI enter the picture? Hit reply. I want to know. ✌️

Leave a comment

Want to work with me? Here are three ways:

1. The €29 Personality-First Auditor. Virtual me takes your profile and content apart and shows you exactly where the brand swallowed the human. Cheaper than therapy, faster than a fix-it call. Start here.

2. The Content to Gigs Community. Daily access to me, plus a room full of people writing their way into paid clients on LinkedIn. No lurking in silence. Join here.

3. 1:1 with me. Just you and me, turning your positioning and voice into a content engine built entirely from your lived experience. A few spots, because I only do this properly. Apply here.

I’ve always wanted to be special. So when Vince and I started working together two months ago, I refused to do what 90% of LinkedIn does:

• AI-generated infographics

• Recycled frameworks everyone has seen a thousand times

• Carousels that look like someone’s intern made them at gunpoint

• Hook templates copied from the same 5 viral accounts

We had no grand plan. I’d write a post, he’d animate the framework into a looping GIF, we’d publish it, see what happened.

Then something weird happened.

The animated infographics started outperforming some of my best personal posts of ALL TIME. Everything except the deeply personal stories that take a piece of me to publish.

One animated infographic pulled 2,262 saves, 102 sends, and 551 new followers. In two weeks. On a platform where 57% of posts are image posts and most of them get a polite like and disappear.

Of course my neurodivergent brain had to understand why.

So I pulled the data, cross-referenced it with Richard Van Der Blom’s 2026 Algorithm Insights Report and AuthoredUp’s 1.3M post regression model, and found something I didn’t expect.

We’d built the exact format the algorithm is optimized to reward. By accident.

The two signals that outrank everything in 2026

The distribution model changed. Likes used to be the primary engagement signal. Now two behaviors outrank them: saves and sends.

Saves mean “I need this again.” Sends mean “someone else needs to see this.”

• A post with 50 saves reaches more people than a post with 200 likes.

• A post that gets DM-forwarded to 10 people gets pushed wider than a post with 30 comments full of fire emojis.

One of our animated infographics got 2,228 saves and 69 sends.

That single post gained 386 followers.

Not from going viral in the traditional sense. From triggering the two signals the algorithm weights most.

So what makes someone hit save?

The post has to be specific enough to use later. A framework they’ll reference for a project next week. Numbers they want to check against their own results. A checklist they’ll screenshot for their team. A process they’ll pull up on a ra afternoon when they’re stuck.

If your infographic makes someone think “interesting” but they keep scrolling, the algorithm clocks that as low-intent engagement. If they save it to use later, that’s a quality signal, and your post gets resurfaced to people with similar interests.

Sends work the same way, plus relevance to someone else.

“My colleague needs to see this.”
“This is exactly what we talked about in the meeting.”

Both signals have the same trigger: pain. When your infographic names a specific problem your reader is living through right now, the save is automatic.

Your reader doesn't sit there weighing the pros and cons of tapping a bookmark icon. Their body says 'I need this' before their brain catches up.

The report’s clearest line on this: generic education is what audiences are tuning out in 2026. Posts featuring original evidence and specific outcomes outperform generic thought leadership by 45% on engagement. LinkedIn detects structurally generic content and down-ranks it. The anti-slop signal is an active distribution factor now.

Your “5 tips for better marketing” infographic? The algorithm sees a thousand of those a day. It’s bored of your tips. We all are.

But saves and sends only happen if someone stops long enough to process what they’re looking at. That’s dwell time. And that’s where animation enters the picture.

What animation does to dwell time

I went down the rabbit hole on this. Fair warning, I'm still in it.

Your brain is hardwired to notice movement. Motion-detection neurons fire before conscious thought kicks in. Your LinkedIn feed is all static images and text. One moving element breaks the pattern and forces a stop. You don’t choose to look. Your brain does it for you.

GIFs uploaded as images on LinkedIn autoplay and loop silently. No progress bar or play button here. They start moving the moment they hit the viewport. In a feed full of AI visuals and sloppy infographics? That’s a cheat code.

A static infographic gets glanced at. An animated one holds the eye through the full loop. TikTok’s data shows videos with fast motion in the first 2 seconds outperform others by up to 27% in engagement. Same principle applies in a feed. Except on LinkedIn, almost nobody is doing it. So the bar is on the floor.

And here’s where it gets interesting for the data nerds (hi, it’s me, I’m the data nerd).

• Dwell time is a distribution signal. The algorithm measures how long someone stays on your post before scrolling. An animated infographic looping for 8 to 12 seconds generates way more dwell time than a static image someone processes in 2. You’re buying yourself 4x the attention window without asking anyone’s permission.

• Completion matters even more than duration. The report says “shorter, tighter, and fully consumed always outperforms longer and half-read.” In the case of a carousel (not relevant for our format), a tight 8-slide deck where readers finish outperforms a 20-slider they abandon at slide 4. Sub-35% completion rate triggers an 80% visibility penalty. That’s a death sentence for your post.

Vince builds high-density infographics where every element earns its place. More value per pixel. People finish it because nothing is filler. They slow down because every line is worth reading. And the algorithm scores both behaviors.

What I personally didn’t know (and felt dumb about later): LinkedIn classifies GIFs as image posts. You start from the same baseline as any image post, the 20% reach bump and the extra engagement.

On paper, you’re posting an image. In practice, you’re generating video-level dwell time in a category where almost NOBODY else uses motion.

So yeah. Animation gets people to stop. Good writing is what makes them stay. And I do mean good writing. Not a Claude skill or some AI prompt, because your audience knows.

Write from your own experience, in your own voice.

What a personality-first hook does to distribution

Your hook is the only element the algorithm scores BEFORE anyone engages.

Kinda crazy, right? Before a single human being decides whether your post is worth reading, the algorithm already made a judgment call based on your first line.

LinkedIn evaluates your hook before deciding how many people to show it to. A weak hook means a smaller initial distribution batch. A strong hook means a wider one.

For the past 2 years, everyone has been recommending the same hooks:

• Does {popular belief}? I think not.

• You don’t have an A problem. You have a B problem.

• Here’s the truth nobody tells you about [topic].

• 5 things I wish I knew about [topic] sooner.

Sameness again. Don’t be that person. It’s your one-way ticket to forgettable city.

What works? Personal hooks grounded in lived experience. They outperform generic hooks by 3x. Format-independent. Whether it's a text post or an animated infographic, the hook multiplier holds.

Now, not everyone's a writer. Which is why I designed the PLACE framework, to give you a structure instead of a blank page. It stands for Person, Location, Action, Cost, Era. A good hook needs at least three of those five, plus tension. I wrote a full breakdown of how to apply it.

It's easy to tell the difference between a generic hook and one grounded in lived experience:

• Generic: “Here’s the truth about LinkedIn content strategy.”

• Lived experience: “I spent 3 months rebuilding a client’s brand from scratch. Here’s the 5-step framework that came out of it, with the numbers.”

That specificity earns a wider initial distribution batch because the algorithm reads it as original, not templated.

You’re basically telling the system: this is a real person with a real story, not another prompt-generated post.

When you pair a personality-first hook with an animated visual, you stack two signals:

• Your hook earns a wider initial distribution batch

• Animation earns longer dwell time once people land on the post.

Both signals fire at once, and the algorithm pushes harder.

When was the last time you wrote a hook that could ONLY come from you?

What you’re known for > what you know

A wider distribution batch is only useful if the algorithm knows where to send your content. That’s where Topic Authority comes in.

Every post you publish gets a fingerprint built from its language, topics, media type, and early engagement patterns. When that fingerprint matches a reader’s interest profile, the post gets routed to their feed, whether they follow you or not.

LinkedIn calls this the Interest Graph, and the numbers tell the story:

→ In 2024, 72% of your reach came from your direct connections.

→ In 2026, that dropped to 31%. Almost 70% of your distribution now goes to strangers who share your topic interests.

Think about that next time you hit publish. Seven out of ten people who see your post don’t follow you. LinkedIn is a topic platform now. What you’re known for decides how far your content travels.

So how do you build that Topic Authority? Post consistently about one topic, and your posts stay visible up to 40% longer than posts from scattered profiles. The algorithm reads your body of work. If a stranger lands on your profile and can tell in one sentence what you’re about, your Topic Authority score goes up. If they can’t, it goes down.

A less saturated topic gives you an automatic advantage on top of that. When nothing else in the feed covers your specific angle, the algorithm routes you first.

This is where animated infographics come back in. When they deliver specific frameworks in a consistent niche, they build Topic Authority fast. Each one reinforces the same fingerprint. Each one tells the algorithm: this person knows this subject, and people who care about this subject engage with their content.

Volume without specificity dilutes the signal. Specificity without volume still works, because the algorithm rewards depth over breadth.

The format anomaly

So what happens when all of these signals fire at the same time?

Vince’s design formula has 4 criteria:

• big pain point (your audience has to feel it = saves)

• immediately actionable (they have to be able to apply this the next day)

• less saturated topic (opens interest clusters with zero competition)

• high density (every element earns its place = keeps dwell time up.)

Pair that with a personality-first hook and animation, and you trigger every signal the Interest Graph rewards at once: saves, sends, completion, dwell time, and topic authority.

That’s why our infographics outperform generic ones. Same format, different signal profile.

We built this by accident. Vince animates, I write personality-first.

Together, the format stacks every signal LinkedIn’s 2026 algorithm rewards.

TL;DR: Vince and I accidentally created a format anomaly.

Animated expertise + personality-first writing.

The algorithm has no crowded category to compare this against.

What this means for you

You’ve read the data. You’ve seen the numbers. Now the uncomfortable question: what are you going to do with it?

Design content fails on LinkedIn when it’s generic and disconnected from a real voice.

This format works because motion holds attention, personality earns distribution, specificity triggers saves, and topic consistency builds authority over time.

You don’t need to be a Figma designer.

You don’t even need to learn Jitter (the tool that animates the infographic).

You do need a format that gives the algorithm what it’s asking for: completion, dwell time, saves, sends, and a clear topic signal.

Right now, almost nobody is combining animation with personality-first writing on LinkedIn. That won’t last.

I’ve watched people copy the exact format and flop. Because they skipped the writing. A hook only you could write. A topic you own. Without that, the animation is lipstick on a generic post.

That’s what I teach inside The Obvious Yes. It’s the community where solopreneurs learn to write content the algorithm rewards and buyers remember. Hooks, structure, positioning, format breakdowns like this one. All in one room, with people building the same thing you are.

Become The Obvious Yes

A client sent me her positioning statement last month. She’d paid a branding agency 8K for it.

“I help forward-thinking leaders build resilient organizations through strategic communication and change management.”

I read it out loud to her on our first call. Then I asked her to read it out loud too.

Silence.

“It sounds like... anyone,” she said.

It did. You could swap her name for any of the 400 consultants in her niche and the sentence would still work. Same words. Same promise. Same nothing.

Her entire brand was built on expertise, credentials, and a sentence an agency wrote to sound professional. The human behind it was nowhere.

This happens constantly. Consultants who close every room they walk into but post content so generic it could be AI-generated. Founders who built something real and still sound like a LinkedIn template when they describe it. People with specific, hard-won knowledge, invisible because their brand stripped out everything that made them interesting.

And the market is making it worse. Here’s how it happened.

Why positioning lost its personality

The personal branding industry trained everyone to lead with expertise.

“Position yourself as a thought leader.”

Pick your content pillars, post consistently, and optimize your headline for keywords.

So people did. They listed credentials and wrote about frameworks. And they ended up sounding identical to every other expert in their field, because expertise is the one thing everyone in the same niche shares.

Expertise is the baseline. It’s what you need to get in the room. It’s what you deliver when you get hired. But it’s not what makes someone pick you over the other 50 people who deliver the same thing.

AI made this worse, faster. A year ago, writing decent content took effort.

Now anyone with a Claude window open produces content that sounds competent. Expertise-based content is being generated at scale. The supply is infinite. The demand for another “5 tips for better leadership” post is zero.

So what’s left?

You. The specific, weird, only-you version of how you think, what you believe, and why you do this work. Your personality. And most positioning frameworks skip it entirely.

What personality in positioning looks like

I’ll show you two versions of the same person. A cybersecurity consultant, mid-40s, 15 years in the field. Brilliant. Zero visibility.

Version 1 (what the agency gave him):

“Helping organizations build robust security frameworks to protect critical digital assets.”

Version 2 (what we found):

“I spent 10 years cleaning up breaches other consultants caused. My first client hired me because I told them their previous security audit was garbage. To their face. In the boardroom.”

Same person and expertise. Completely different energy. Version 2 is someone you remember. Someone you tell your colleague about. Someone you want on YOUR team, because you trust that he’ll tell you the truth even when it’s uncomfortable.

The difference? Version 2 has scars, a stance, and a story. Version 1 has keywords.

Here’s another one from a founder turned leadership coach, late 30s. Former CFO. Burned out, rebuilt, started coaching.

Version 1 (what a consultant gave him)

“Executive coach specializing in leadership development and organizational resilience.”

Version 2 (What we found):

“I was the CFO everyone praised in meetings and nobody talked to at lunch. I coached myself out of a career I was great at and miserable in. Now I work with executives who are winning by every metric except the one that matters to them.”

Same expertise. One version is bland AF. The other is a person with a specific experience and a specific take on what’s broken. You read it and you either think “that’s me” or “that’s not me.” Both responses are correct. Both are useful.

A good positioning statement qualifies. It tells the right people “this is for you” and lets everyone else keep scrolling. Generic positioning tries to attract everyone. Personality-first positioning attracts the right people and repels the wrong ones.

So where do you find it?

Where personality hides

Now, most people think personality means “be more casual” or “show some vulnerability.” Post about your morning routine. Share a failure story. Add a personal photo.

Personality in positioning lives deeper than a personal photo. It lives in three places you probably have never looked:

Your scars and stripes.

Scars are the hard stuff. The failures, the breakdowns, the moments you wanted to quit. Stripes are what you earned by surviving them. Both shape how you work and what you believe.

The cybersecurity consultant’s scar: years of fixing other people’s bad work.

That scar turned into a stripe: he developed an allergy to half-measures and a reputation for brutal honesty. That’s the positioning.

• The expertise (cybersecurity) is the category.

• The scar (cleaning up messes) is the story.

• The stripe (radical honesty) is the differentiator.

Your scars and stripes are specific to you. Nobody else has them. Nobody else lived them. And that’s what makes them uncopyable.

I can’t stress enough how scars only land when they’re specific. “I’ve had setbacks” is a fortune cookie and makes your audience cringe faster than you’ll lose reach. “I paid 14,000 euros to join a startup that turned out to be professional gaslighting with a cap table” is a story nobody forgets.

One costs you nothing to share. The other costs you something. The cost is what builds trust.

Your stance.

A stance is a belief you hold that some people will disagree with. If everyone agrees with your positioning, it’s too safe. Safe positioning gets polite nods and zero clients.

My stance: personality is the differentiator, not expertise. Some people hate that. They’ve invested years in credentials and certifications and they want those things to do the selling. I understand why, but I still disagree. That very disagreement is what draws the right clients to me and pushes the wrong ones away.

Strategically, your stance lives at the intersection of your experience and your opinion. What do you believe about your field that your competitors won’t say out loud? What have you seen that made you change your mind about how things work? What advice do you give clients that contradicts what the industry teaches?

That’s your stance. And it belongs in your positioning, front and center.

3x why

Once you have your scars, stripes, and stance, you need a structure to hold them together. This is the one I use to pressure-test every positioning statement I build with 1:1 clients.

• Why them: What outcome does your specific client want? (Not “grow their business.” Specific. “Close 3 enterprise deals this quarter without cold outreach.”)

• Why you: What in your expertise AND your personality makes you the right person to deliver that? (Not your degree. Your specific take, your process, the thing that makes working with you different from working with someone who has the same credentials.)

• Why now: What trigger makes them ready? (Not “they want to grow.” What happened this week or this month that made them Google your name? “They lost a deal to a competitor with half their experience but twice their visibility.”)

When all three are specific and honest, positioning stops sounding like generic slop and starts sounding like a person who gets it.

Subscribe now

The Swap Test

Here’s the simplest diagnostic I know. I call it The Swap Test.

Take your positioning statement. Your LinkedIn headline. Your bio and about section. Read it.

Now swap your name for a competitor’s. Does it still work?

If yes, you have an expertise statement. You do not have personality-first positioning. Because positioning that works for anyone differentiates no one.

The cybersecurity consultant’s agency version?

Works for any cybersecurity consultant on the planet. His real version works for exactly one person. Him. Because nobody else has his specific history of cleaning up other people’s failures and telling clients the truth in boardrooms.

Run The Swap Test on everything. Your website, your bio, your experience section. Every sentence that survives the swap needs to be rewritten until it doesn’t.

So. You know what to look for. You have the swap test. Now there’s just one more thing.

The piece you forgot about

Finding your personality in your positioning requires doing something uncomfortable: looking at yourself honestly.

The version where you admit what broke you, what you believe that others don’t, and why you do this work beyond the revenue.

Most service providers I meet skip this because it’s hard. Easier to write “strategic communication expert” than to sit with the question “what do I bring to this that nobody else does?”

I built a process for this. I call it the Personality-first Positioning Audit. It starts with questions most branding exercises never ask. Not “what’s your niche” or “who’s your target audience.” Questions like:

• What moment in your life was, looking back, an indicator of what you do today?

• If your best friend described what you do at a bar, what would they say?

• What do you believe about your industry that makes people uncomfortable?

The answers to those questions contain your positioning. The real one. The one an agency will never write for you because they don’t know your scars, your stripes, or your stance. Only you do.

And once you know that, you need somewhere to put it.

What to do with this

If you read this and thought “I know my positioning sounds generic but I don’t know where to start,” you’re not alone. I hear it every week.

I built the Personality-First Positioning Tool for exactly this. It’s a 29 euro self-guided audit that walks you through finding your scars, stripes, stance, and uncopyable core. The same questions I ask clients who pay me thousands, structured so you can do it yourself.

Take it for a spin here: https://magalidereu.thrivecart.com/pfb/

You’ll walk away with positioning that sounds like you. The specific, weird, only-you version. The one that makes the right people say “I need to talk to this person” and lets everyone else keep scrolling.

Because you’re too damn good to sound this forgettable. ✌️

What does your positioning sound like right now? Hit reply. I’ll tell you if it passes the swap test.

Leave a comment

Last month a client showed me her Claude project. Four custom skills. A content calendar automated to the hour. Prompt chains for hooks, bodies, CTAs, sign-offs. She had watched every YouTube tutorial, read the documentation, built the whole thing properly.

Her last 10 posts averaged 180 impressions.

I scrolled through them on her screen while she sat there, quiet. Each post was clean. Grammatically tight. Well structured. Completely interchangeable. If you swapped her name for someone else’s, nothing would break.

She looked at me and said, “I don’t understand. I did everything right.”

She followed every step. That was the problem.

I hear some version of this every week. Someone smart, with real expertise, builds a solid AI system, feeds it a topic, gets output, publishes. The output reads fine. It reads like everyone else’s content.

Because the audience does not care about your setup. They care whether there is a human behind the words. AI, left alone, removes the human faster than most people realize.

AI is a big piece of how I work. I’ve built voice profiles, anti-AI filters, content workflows, and Claude projects my clients use every day. A serious chunk of my business comes from helping people use these tools well.

But I still never let AI write my first draft.

Your first draft is ugly (and that’s the point)

The first draft is where the personality lives. The weird phrasing. The opinion you are not sure you should share. The sentence that makes your stomach drop a bit. The detail nobody else would have picked.

That stuff comes from you sitting with a blank page and writing what you think. Not from a model predicting what sounds good.

AI has no access to the real wiring. It does not know why you phrase things the way you do. It does not know which failure changed your entire view on pricing, and it has zero interest in your humor. It mirrors language. That is a different thing from knowing you, and the difference shows up in every post.

I spent ten years hiding my personality in corporate meetings, softening opinions and removing anything that made people uncomfortable.

Then I stopped. The right people showed up faster than they ever had before.

That change had nothing to do with better prompts.

It had everything to do with saying what I thought, out loud, in rooms where it cost me something.

You have to earn the right to automate

I wrote about this before in The Quiet Death of Knowing How. The short version is simple. AI made production faster. The bottleneck was never production. It was thinking.

And yet I keep watching creators skip straight to the tools.

They build prompt chains before they’ve written 50 posts by hand. They automate funnels they have never run manually and build voice files before they know what their voice sounds like.

The output looks clean and structured. But it is hollow as f*ck.

Because they automated a skill they never built. Sorry guys, you can’t shortcut your way to a voice.

You build one by writing badly, often, for months. By publishing something you thought was sharp and watching it get 40 impressions, then staying with a half-formed idea long enough to figure out what you actually believe.

Every craft works like this.

A chef does not start with a Thermomix. You learn the feel of the material first, and only then does the machine become useful.

Once you’ve done that work, AI becomes a multiplier. Before that, it becomes a crutch that hides the gap between what you know and what you think you know.

If you’re early, do the reps first. Write manually and post without Claude. Build the muscle, then bring in the tools.

But 90% of the people reading this won’t do that. They want the output, even if it’s generic. They don’t want to learn the craft. And that is exactly why the 10% who do the work stand out so fast.

One raw paragraph beats 10 curated posts

The client I mentioned earlier? I asked her to do something she hated.

Close Claude. Open a blank doc. Write one paragraph about something that happened that week that pissed her off.

She stared at the screen for maybe 90 seconds.

Then she wrote about a call with a prospect who told her, “We already have someone who does what you do, but cheaper.” She wrote about hanging up, sitting in her car for 10 minutes, and Googling the cheaper person. She wrote about how that person’s LinkedIn was full of AI-generated carousels, stock photos, and “5 tips for better leadership” energy. She wrote about wanting to scream and quit on the same afternoon.

That paragraph had more personality than her last 10 posts combined.

So I pasted it into Claude with her voice files loaded and asked for five angles she could turn into a LinkedIn post. Claude came back with angles rooted in her experience, her frustration, her specific read on the market.

One of them was: “The person undercutting you on price is outposting you too. Here’s why that doesn’t matter.”

That worked because it came from something that happened to her, on a Tuesday, in her car. Not from a prompt asking Claude to “write a post about differentiation.”

That is where AI earns its place. It helps you find connections between lived material and positioning you would miss on your own.

But the moment you ask it to manufacture the lived material too, the whole thing collapses.

Subscribe now

The order of operations is backward

This is the mistake I see most, and it is everywhere.

People open Claude first. They type a topic, get output, tweak two words, and publish. Then they wonder why it sounds like a polite stranger who memorized their résumé.

I do it backward.

Here’s what that looks like on a real Saturday morning.

Step 1: Mine your week (10 minutes, no Claude)

Open a blank doc. Set a timer for 10 minutes. Write down 2 to 4 things that happened this week.

A conversation that stuck with you. A moment that annoyed you. Something a client said that is still rattling around in your head. Something you noticed that other people seemed to miss.

No structure, no cleanup. Write it the way you would text a friend:

That is enough raw material with your fingerprints on it.

Step 2: Ask Claude for angles (5 minutes)

Paste your raw notes into Claude along with your positioning doc. That doc should explain who you help, what you believe, what you sell, and what makes you different.

Then use this prompt:

Based on these notes and my positioning, give me 5 to 7 angles I could turn into a LinkedIn post. 

Each angle should connect a specific moment from my notes to a broader point about my work.

Claude is good at this. It spots connections between your lived material and your positioning that you miss when you are still too close to the experience.

Pick the angle that gives you a gut reaction. That is usually the right one.

Don’t have a positioning doc yet? Build one first. Without it, Claude has nothing meaningful to work with.

Use this prompt:

AskUserQuestion: "Let's build your positioning statement. Answer these questions, one by one or all at once, whatever feels natural.

1. Who do you help? Be specific.
2. What do you help them do or get?
3. What's the thing they're afraid of or hate about how it's usually done?
4. What's one opinion you have about your field that most people in it wouldn't say out loud?
5. What's something you do or believe that makes you different from others who offer something similar?"

Take the answers above and write a personality-first positioning statement in this structure:
"I help [specific who] [do/get what] without [fear or frustration]. I believe [contrarian or specific opinion]. What makes me different is [specific differentiator]."

Then write 2 to 3 alternative versions that play with tone: one more direct, one with more edge, one that leads with the belief instead of the who.

Flag any answer that feels vague or generic and tell me what a more specific version could look like.

Answer every question as specifically as you can:

Step 3: Write the draft yourself (15 to 20 minutes, no Claude)

This is the step most people try to skip. Do not skip it.

Start with the hook. One line that drops the reader into a scene. Who was there. Where it happened. What was at stake.

Then write like you are explaining to a smart friend what happened and why it matters. Set the scene, give context, make the point, close it.

Do not worry about formatting yet. Forget about length. Get the thinking down first.

Hand the whole thing back to Claude too early and the voice disappears. Your observations, your reactions, your sentence rhythm, your specific details.

That is the one thing AI cannot invent, and no prompt on earth will fix that gap once you’ve outsourced it.

Step 4: Let it ripen (2 to 4 hours minimum)

Walk away and do something else. Let your brain stop performing.

When you come back, the lines that felt sharp in the moment often feel forced. You will spot the sentence trying too hard. The point that does not land. Cut those without mercy.

You do not need distance because you are a bad writer. You need it because judgment gets better when ego calms down.

Step 5: Let Claude edit, not generate (5 minutes)

Once the draft exists, then Claude can help. This prompt works like a charm:

I want you to edit this LinkedIn post for skimmability and clear story flow.

Rules:
- Tighten language. Cut filler words, weak openers, and overwritten phrases.
- Remove redundancy. If the same idea appears twice, keep the sharper version.
- Improve formatting for LinkedIn skimmability: max 2 sentences per paragraph, single line breaks between them, no walls of text.
- Do not change my voice, sentence rhythm, or opinions.
- Do not add transitions, connective phrases, or sentences I didn't write.
- Do not replace specific names, dates, numbers, or examples with generic alternatives.
- Do not reorder sections unless the logic is broken. If you think it is, flag it.
- If a sentence feels unclear or awkward but you're unsure how to fix it without changing my voice, mark it [FLAG: reason].

Return:
1. The edited post
2. A bullet list of what you changed and why (be specific, not vague like "improved clarity")

Claude edits what I write. I write what I think. That line has never moved, and it never will. But I also never hit publish on what Claude hands back without reworking it myself. I add bullets, reorder things, and make sure the list reads evenly.

Because I know how writing works, and Claude does not.

The filter that changed everything

There is one more layer, and it changed my content more than anything else I built.

I keep an anti-AI writing filter. It lists the words, expression patterns, and structural tells that make a reader’s brain register “a machine wrote this” before they even finish the first paragraph.

I run it as a final pass on everything I publish. My clients do too.

The full skill lives inside my community. For a single post, the version below works well.

Clean up the text below. Apply every rule silently.

[PASTE TEXT HERE]

---

VOICE RULES

Write directly, specifically, and naturally.
Short paragraphs. Vary rhythm. Fragments allowed when natural.
Use contractions. Use I and you. Active voice.
Be specific: numbers, names, details, tradeoffs, real examples.
If the point is made, stop.

---

BANNED WORDS

Delete or replace: delve, realm, harness, unlock, tapestry, paradigm, cutting-edge, revolutionize, intricate, showcasing, crucial, pivotal, surpass, meticulously, vibrant, unparalleled, underscore, leverage, synergy, innovative, game-changer, testament, commendable, highlight, emphasize, boast, groundbreaking, align, foster, enhance, holistic, garner, pioneering, trailblazing, unleash, transformative, redefine, seamless, optimize, scalable, robust, empower, streamline, elevate, adaptive, effortless, data-driven, proactive, visionary, disruptive, reimagine, unprecedented, intuitive, synergize, democratize, accelerate, dynamic, immersive, supercharge, enduring, captivate, the ones, the part

---

BANNED VERB CONSTRUCTIONS

Replace with plain verbs (is, has, uses, gives, shows, causes, changes):
serves as, stands as, marks a, represents a, boasts a, features a, offers a, plays a role in, helps to, aims to, seeks to

---

BANNED OPENINGS AND PHRASES

Delete: In today's / It is important to note / It is worth noting / In order to / Let's dive in / Let's explore / Let's unpack / At the end of the day / Moving forward / To put this in perspective / What makes this particularly interesting / The implications here are / It goes without saying / Nobody is talking about / Most people don't realize / In this article I will / Despite its strengths / Challenges and future prospects / What this means is / The reality is

---

BANNED TRANSITIONS

Replace with a real transition or nothing: Furthermore / Additionally / Moreover / That said / That being said / With that in mind / It is also worth mentioning / On top of that

---

BANNED ENGAGEMENT BAIT

Delete: Let that sink in / Read that again / Full stop / This changes everything / Are you paying attention / You are not ready for this

---

NEGATIVE PARALLELISM BAN

Delete any construction that rejects one idea and replaces it with another.

Banned patterns: This isn't X. This is Y. / Not X. Y. / Forget X. Focus on Y. / Less X, more Y. / You don't need X. You need Y. / The problem is not X. It is Y. / It was never about X. It was always about Y.

Also banned when softened: While X may seem / Although X appears / Sure, X / Most people think X / At first glance / On the surface / Conventional wisdom says X.

Fix: delete the rejected frame. State the positive claim directly.

---

RULE OF THREE

If any claim is structured as exactly 3 parallel items, cut to 2 or expand to 4.

---

FALSE INTIMACY

Delete: Here is the truth / I will be honest with you / Can I be real / Between us / I am going to say something most people won't.

---

ANALOGY AND METAPHOR

No analogies unless the subject is technical or abstract and the analogy is shorter and more precise than the literal explanation.

Delete metaphor verbs used for abstract work: sanded down, bolted on, stitched together, layered, carved out, baked in, sparked, anchored, distilled, unpacked, crystallized, sharpened, surfaced, amplified, sculpted, cemented, bridged.

Use literal verbs: cut, added, removed, changed, joined, caused, showed, explained, fixed, named, listed, chose, rejected.

---

LINKEDIN-SPECIFIC PATTERNS

Delete hook shapes: I [did thing]. Here's what I learned / Unpopular opinion / Hot take / This might upset some people / Nobody talks about this / Steal this / Save this post / I used to think X. I was wrong / [Year] taught me [lesson].

Delete closing moves: What do you think / Drop your thoughts below / Tag someone who needs this / Which one resonates / Follow me for more / A moral spelled out in the final line.

Delete fake vulnerability: vague struggle without a specific date, number, name, or consequence.

---

FINAL CHECK

1. Cut the first sentence if it is throat-clearing
2. Replace vague claims with specific ones
3. Remove fake importance (pivotal, key turning point, major shift)
4. Remove repeated sentence shapes
5. Remove assistant chatter
6. Cut the ending if it only repeats the point
7. Ask: does this sound useful, or overworked?

---

OUTPUT

Return the cleaned version.
Then: one line per change, what you changed and why. No elaboration.

Once you start spotting these patterns, your own feed looks different fast. You see the fingerprints everywhere. And you understand why audiences scroll past content that looks clean but feels dead.

Your value is in the deviation

AI produces the average of its training data. That is useful for speed. It is terrible for distinction. And distinction is the only thing that makes a personal brand worth following.

Your value lives in how far you deviate from that average.

That deviation cannot be prompted into existence. It has to already exist in what you feed the model, which means it has to already exist in you. In the texture of your week, in the call that made you angry, in the client sentence you cannot stop thinking about, in the opinion you are still scared to publish.

AI makes me faster. The voice is still mine. And that order will never change.

Write the first draft yourself and let it be rough. AI cleans it up after. The rough is where the voice is.

If you want to stop sounding like everyone else and start sounding like you, try my personality-first positioning auditor. It’s €29. You've spent more than that on a sandwich you never finished.

Leave a comment

Every year, Richard Van Der Blom publishes a report that makes LinkedIn creators lose their minds. New numbers. New reasons to panic about reach.

This year’s edition landed TODAY. 217 pages. Over a million data points. And I sat down with it the way I sit down with everything: skeptical and caffeinated.

I didn’t disagree.

The 2026 Algorithm Insights Report reads like someone took my entire philosophy, ran it through a data engine, and said “yep, she’s right.” Interest Graph over network. Topic Authority over content volume. Personality over curated. Anti-slop over AI-generated filler.

I’m not saying this to pat myself on the back. I’m saying it because the data gives you a reason to stop second-guessing the approach and start executing it.

Here’s what the report says, where it backs what I teach, where it pushes me to tighten my own system, and what you do with all of it.

Your connections don’t decide your reach anymore. Your topic does.

This is the biggest number in the report, and I need you to sit with it.

In 2024, your connections made up 72 percent of who saw your content. Your network. The safe bubble.

In 2026, that number dropped to 31 percent.

Let me say that differently. Two years ago, LinkedIn showed your posts mostly to people who already knew you. Today, almost 70 percent of your feed comes from outside your direct network. Second and third-degree connections. Suggested Posts. People who have never heard of you but share your topic interests.

LinkedIn stopped being a network platform. It became a topic platform. The algorithm no longer asks “who do you know?” It asks “what are you known for?”

If you’ve been building your LinkedIn strategy around growing your connection count, this is the data telling you that strategy expired. The people seeing your content in 2026 are strangers who care about your subject, not contacts who accepted your request three years ago.

This is the Interest Graph. And it rewards one thing above all: a clear, specific, recognizable point of view in a defined topic lane.

That’s personality-first positioning. Not “who you know.” What you’re known for. Your expertise is what gets you in the room.

Your personality, your hot takes, your tone, your lived experience, is what makes people stay.

I call that combination your uncopyable core.

Expertise plus personality plus identity. The algorithm is now built to find it and reward it.

It literally caught up to what I’ve been building my business around.

Topic Authority is personality-first positioning in algorithm language.

The report introduces a concept called Topic Authority. LinkedIn’s internal measurement of whether you’re a credible, consistent voice in a specific subject area.

Three factors determine your Topic Authority score:

1. Topic consistency (do you stay in your lane?)

2. Engagement quality (are people having real conversations on your posts, or are they dropping fire emojis?)

3. Semantic coherence (does your content make sense as a body of work, or does it look like you threw spaghetti at a wall?).

Read those again: topic consistency, engagement quality, and semantic coherence.

That’s my entire methodology translated into algorithm metrics. One recognizable voice, repeating recognizable ideas, for a recognizable audience. That’s how I define personality-first positioning. LinkedIn gave it a technical name and a scoring system.

I’ve been telling clients for two years: pick your lane, build a recognizable voice, say the same things in different ways until your audience repeats your ideas back to you. One clear premise. One proof of relevance. A framework people remember and repeat back to you. Over and over and over.

The report puts numbers behind it. Creators who post within 2 to 3 consistent topics outperform creators who scatter across 6 or more, even if the scatterers post more frequently. Three posts a week on two themes outperforms five posts a week on six different topics.

The algorithm is measuring what I’ve been coaching. Whether a stranger landing on your profile for the first time could tell you, in one sentence, what you’re about.

If they can’t, your Topic Authority is low. Your content gets shown to fewer people. Your reach shrinks no matter how good your individual posts are.

If they can, the Interest Graph does the distribution work for you. It finds the people who care about your topic and puts you in front of them. Even if they’ve never heard your name.

The four content pillars. And how I translate them into three.

The report defines four content pillars for personal profiles:

• Authority (40-50%). Your expertise. Your frameworks, your teardowns, your “here’s how this works” and “here’s why this fails” content.

• Affinity (15-25%). What makes people like you, not respect you. Personal, professionally relevant stories. Behind-the-scenes of your work. The neurodivergent perspective. The “on paper, I’m the problem, in reality, the paper is correct” moments. The stuff that makes someone think “I want to work with THIS person.” The report calls this the top driver of emotional engagement and follower conversion.

• Proof (15-20%). Your receipts. Client results. Before-and-after profiles. Screenshots of DMs (sanitized). Revenue numbers with context.

• Demand (5-10%). Your direct asks. Audits, cohorts, offers, “3 spots open for X.” The report is blunt: skip this and you leave money on the table.

That’s what the data says. Four pillars, each with a percentage. I translate this into three buckets for my clients, because Authority and Affinity don’t work apart.

Your expertise gives you credibility. Your stories, your hot takes, your weird specific only-you observations, give you a worldview. Expertise alone makes you interchangeable. A worldview makes you the only option. The flaw is the feature = the mess is the material.

• Perspective (55%). Authority and Affinity merged into one bucket. Your frameworks and the personal stories that prove you earned them. The reason someone follows you instead of the other person teaching the same topic. When I say personality-first, perspective is usually where it lives.

• Proof (30%). Your receipts. Client results, revenue numbers, before-and-after profiles, DM screenshots. The evidence that your Perspective works in the real world.

• Promo (15%). The report calls it Demand. Same thing, clearer name. Your direct asks. A cohort. An audit. “3 spots for X.” If you never ask, nobody buys.

Three buckets. Perspective, Proof, Promo. You build Topic Authority by rotating through all three in a rhythm that keeps you visible, credible, and paid, without turning you into a content robot.

The algorithm is hunting AI slop. And your unedited Claude posts are the prey.

This is where I got loud reading the report (as one does).

LinkedIn is now tracking and de-weighting structurally generic, AI-generated content. Specifically: semantic duplication (saying the same thing in slightly different words across posts), synthetic tone (that smooth, helpful, vaguely inspiring voice that sounds like a customer service bot with a creativity upgrade), repetitive hooks, lazy polls, and templated structures.

The report says fully AI-generated, unedited content underperforms human-written content. The best results come from what they call “AI for prep, human voice for publication.”

Using AI to research, brainstorm, and structure, then writing the final version yourself. Or using voice-trained systems that capture your patterns, not generic output.

I want to frame this and hang it on my wall.

This is my entire stance on AI in content. I use Claude. I use Notebook LLM. I use Perplexity. I’m not anti-AI. I’m anti-slop. AI is a brain extender, not a ghostwriter. The moment it stops sounding like you, it stops working for you.

The algorithm agrees.

LinkedIn is getting better at detecting content that no human touched on the way out.

And it’s burying it.

So if you’re pasting your topic into Claude, hitting generate, copying the output, and posting it with a stock photo, the data says you’re wasting your time. The reach is declining. The engagement is hollow. And your audience is starting to notice.

Your voice is the unfair advantage. Your personality is the thing AI cannot replicate.

It shows up on a call and sounds like the person who wrote the post. No dissonance or some bait-and-switch bullsh*t. The algorithm is now enforcing that.

Where the report pushed me to tighten up.

I’d be dishonest if I only shared the validation. The report also flagged areas where my approach needs sharpening. Not changing. Sharpening.

• Stricter topic boundaries. I write about personality-first positioning, speaker monetization, anti-AI content, neurodivergence, and sometimes meta-observations about LinkedIn itself. The data says: 2 to 3 lanes. Not 5 or 6. Everything I post needs to anchor back to my core topics. The neurodivergence stuff, the personal stories, the ADHD moments, they all still fit. But they need to be tied to positioning, speaking, or content strategy every time. A “life update” post that doesn’t connect back to my expertise? The algorithm treats it like a tourist in someone else’s neighborhood.

• Specific vulnerability over vague vulnerability. The report says “vague vulnerability is invisible.” Audiences scroll past generic “I failed and learned” stories. They stop for specific, concrete moments tied to a real client, a real number, a real decision. This tracks with how I write at my best. The €20K I’m still owed. The startup disaster. The group chat where speakers trashed me. Those posts perform because they have receipts. Posts where I write something softer and less specific? They don’t hit the same way. The data confirms it.

• Depth over variety. The report cut the profile pillar model from five categories to four. I cut it to three. Fewer, broader pillars produce better behavior. Creators who chase variety dilute their topic signal. If I’m tempted to be “the everything person” for ADHD, autism, branding, speaking, AI, and content design, the data says: pick 2 to 3 and wrap the rest around those. The personal flavor stays. The scattering stops.

What you do with this.

I’m not going to pretend reading a report changes your business. Reports don’t do the work. You do. But here are the moves this data supports.

1) Audit your last 30 posts.

Pull them up. Read them as a stranger. Could someone landing on your profile for the first time tell you what your 2 to 3 core topics are? If the answer is no, your Topic Authority is leaking. Fix the signal before you worry about reach. Use this prompt to figure out what you actually talk about on LinkedIn and where your Topic Authority is leaking.

You are my LinkedIn Topic Authority auditor.  
Goal: Audit my last 30 posts and show me where my Topic Authority is leaking.

Input:
- Here are my last 30 LinkedIn posts:

###PASTE 30 POSTS###

Tasks:
- Group my posts into topics and tell me what my 2–3 strongest lanes are, in plain language.
- Flag any posts that fall completely outside those lanes.
- Write the one sentence a stranger would use to describe “what I’m about” based on these posts.
- Tell me which posts are confusing the algorithm (off-topic, mixed signals).
- Give me 3 concrete recommendations to tighten my Topic Authority over the next 30 days.

Output:
- A short summary of my 2–3 core topics.
- A list of “off-lane” posts with a one‑line fix for each.
- One sentence that describes what I am currently known for.
- 3 clear action points to fix my signal before I worry about reach.

2) Map your content to the three pillars.

Take the last month of posts and tag each one: Perspective, Proof, or Promo. Count the ratios. If you’re all Perspective and zero Promo, you’re educating people for free and wondering why nobody buys. If you’re heavy on Perspective but light on Proof, you’re likable but not credible. Balance it.

This Claude Cowork prompt will help you tag a month of posts, expose where you’re over‑teaching or under‑selling, and generate ideas to rebalance.

You are my LinkedIn content architect.  
Goal: Map my recent posts to the three pillars (Perspective, Proof, Promo) and fix the imbalance.

Pillars:
- Perspective = my point of view, frameworks, breakdowns, and lived‑experience stories that support my core ideas.
- Proof = evidence that my work works: client stories, my own journey, experiments, case studies, before/after, screenshots.
- Promo = clear invitations to work with me or buy something: audits, cohorts, 1:1, “3 spots for X”, launches.

Input:
- Here are my last 20–30 LinkedIn posts:
<<<PASTE POSTS>>>

Tasks:
- Tag each post as exactly one main pillar: Perspective, Proof, or Promo.
- Give me a simple count and percentage for each pillar.
- Tell me, in 1 short paragraph, what this mix implies:
  - What am I over‑doing?
  - What am I under‑doing?
  - How would this feel to a stranger who finds me today?
- Recommend a healthier mix for the next 4 weeks so:
  - I’m not “all Perspective, no Promo” (teaching for free, not selling).
  - I’m not “all Perspective, no Proof” (likable but not credible).
- Suggest 2 post ideas for each pillar, tailored to my existing topics and offers.

Output:
- A list or table of posts with their assigned pillar (Perspective / Proof / Promo).
- A short analysis of my current imbalance and how it lands with my ICP.
- A recommended 4‑week pillar ratio across Perspective, Proof, and Promo.
- 6 post ideas (2 per pillar) I can write next.

3) Check every draft for your uncopyable core

Read it out loud. Does it sound like you talking to a friend, or does it sound like a well-structured article written by nobody in particular?

If you could swap your name for anyone else’s and it still works, you didn’t add enough of yourself. Go back in. Add the five-second moment. Add the opinion that might cost you a follower. That’s personality-first in practice: your scars and your stance, baked into every piece.

Use this prompt to inject your ICP, personality, and CUE triggers into each post so your uncopyable core is obvious.

You are my Uncopyable Core checker.  
Goal: Make sure every LinkedIn draft reflects my Why Them (ICP), Why Me (personality), and Why Now (CUE).

Input:
1) My Uncopyable Core (Why them / Why me / Why now), if available:
<<<PASTE UNCOPYABLE CORE SUMMARY>>>

2) Draft LinkedIn post:
<<<PASTE DRAFT>>>

Tasks:
- Check the draft against my Uncopyable Core:
  - Does it clearly speak to my ICP (why them)?
  - Does it show my specific personality and lived experience (why me)?
  - Does it tap into a real trigger or moment that makes this urgent (why now)?
- Point out where the draft sounds generic or could be written by anyone.
- Add at least:
  - One five‑second concrete moment (scene, quote, number, DM, decision).
  - One opinion that a generic creator would avoid because it might cost them a follower.
- Rewrite the draft so it:
  - Sounds like me talking to a smart friend.
  - Keeps the original intent.
  - Bakes in my Why them / Why me / Why now.

Output:
- A brief diagnosis of what was missing from the Uncopyable Core perspective.
- A revised version of the post in my voice, with my uncopyable core clearly visible.

4) Post less, but sharper

The report’s sweet spot is 2 to 3 posts per week. Not 5 or daily. Two to three sharp, on-topic, personality-rich posts go further than a content mill schedule ever will. The algorithm rewards depth and consistency within your lane, not volume across random topics.

I post 7 times a week because I have a backlog of stories and LinkedIn is my primary growth and retention engine. But if you have to choose, 2 to 3 strong posts will always outperform 7 forgettable ones.

This prompt helps you create a focused 2–3 posts per week plan instead of a chaotic daily grind.

You are my LinkedIn cadence and sharpness strategist.  
Goal: Design a 2–3 posts per week plan that is sharper, more on‑topic, and sustainable.

Input:
- My 2–3 core topics (how I want to be known):
<<<LIST TOPICS>>>
- My Uncopyable Core summary (optional but ideal):
<<<PASTE UNCOPYABLE CORE>>>
- 3–5 example posts that feel “very me”:
<<<PASTE POSTS OR LINKS>>>

Tasks:
- Propose a 2‑week content plan with 2–3 posts per week (4–6 posts total).
- For each post, specify:
  - Type: Perspective (Authority/Affinity), Proof, or Promo (Demand).
  - Working title.
  - 1–2 sentence angle.
  - Suggested hook (first line under 20 words).
- Make sure:
  - Every post is clearly in one of my core topics.
  - At least one element of my Uncopyable Core shows up in each post.
- Suggest which posts should be carousels/documents vs text‑only, based on what tends to perform best for micro‑content (one clear idea, under ~600 characters).

Output:
- A simple 2‑week calendar with dates and posts.
- For each post: type, title, angle, hook, and format recommendation.

5) Build your Promo muscle.

If you haven’t made a direct ask in your last 20 posts, start. One in every 10 to 15 posts. A cohort. An audit. A “3 spots for X.” You don’t need to be salesy. You need to be clear about what you offer. The report says avoiding Promo posts is leaving revenue on the table. I agree.

Use this prompt in Claude Cowork to audit your last 20 posts for Promo gaps, write clear offer posts, and space them every 10–15 posts without feeling salesy.

You are my Promo‑muscle coach.  
Goal: Help me add clear Promo posts (direct asks) without sounding salesy or corporate.

Input:
- My main offers (who they’re for + outcome):
<<<LIST OFFERS>>>
- My ICP in 2–3 sentences:
<<<PASTE ICP>>>
- A couple of posts where my voice feels strongest:
<<<PASTE POSTS>>>
- (Optional) My last 20 LinkedIn posts, to check if I’ve made any direct asks:
<<<PASTE LAST 20 POSTS>>>

Definitions:
- Promo = posts that clearly invite people to buy, book, or apply (cohort, audit, 1:1, “3 spots for X”, etc.).
- Target = roughly 1 Promo post every 10–15 posts.

Tasks:
1) If I pasted my last 20 posts:
   - Count how many are Promo vs non‑Promo.
   - Tell me in 3–5 lines what this means (am I avoiding asking?).

2) Write 5 Promo posts that:
   - Each focus on one clear offer or next step.
   - Feel like a natural extension of my usual Perspective/Proof content, not a random hard sell.
   - Use my tone: direct, clear, slightly spicy, no fake urgency, no corporate speak.
   - End with one simple CTA (DM, comment, “3 spots for X”, “reply to this email/Substack”, etc.).

3) Suggest how to space these Promo posts:
   - Show me where to plug each one in a 4‑week schedule so I roughly hit 1 Promo post every 10–15 posts.

Output:
- A short diagnosis of my current Promo muscle (based on the last 20 posts, if provided).
- 5 ready‑to‑publish Promo posts in my voice.
- A simple 4‑week schedule showing where to place each Promo post.

I’m not changing the philosophy. I’m adding their language to mine.

I’ve been building around personality-first positioning before the algorithm had a name for it. Now it does: Topic Authority. Interest Graph distribution. Anti-slop detection. The report gave my methodology a measurement system.

The one thing I’m taking from this report that I didn’t have before: sharper language to sell it. Topic Authority built on your uncopyable core. Interest Graph distribution powered by your scars and stripes. Anti-slop by default because you write like a person, not a prompt.

Same method. Now with 177 pages of receipts. You can get yours at a discount here.

Now go do something with it. ✌️

Want help doing this, not reading about it? That’s Content to Gigs Community. Richard Van Der Blom kicks off the guest sessions on May 21st. You also get my full resource library: every positioning guide, posting rhythm, Claude skill file, and voice profile I build.

→ Deets here.

A LinkedIn creator got caught copying someone’s post word for word. But the real question is bigger than one guy.

Last week, Louis Butterfield posted a video on LinkedIn. It went viral, as his posts tend to do. Good engagement, good reach, the usual.

One problem. The content was lifted from Lewis Kemp.

Same structure, same wording. No credit.

Lewis called it out. Louis blocked him. Then deleted the post. Then, after the internet had already made up its mind, posted an apology. His wife doubled down in the comments instead of de-escalating.

The thing that made this sting? Louis runs a business called Video Heroes. He teaches people how to create content. Content creation is the product. And the product turned out to be someone else’s work with a new name on it.

This wasn’t Louis’s first case of plagiarism either (see screenshots).

Now. I’m not here to pile on. Enough people did that already.

I’m here because his story put a question on the table that every creator needs to sit with: where does inspiration end and plagiarism begin?

Because if we’re being honest, every single person posting online is borrowing from someone. The question is whether you’re doing it with integrity or without a spine.

Subscribe now

What plagiarism looks like online

In school, plagiarism was simple. Copy someone’s essay, get caught, get expelled. Clear rules. Clear consequences.

Online, the rules are blurry. There’s no citation format for a LinkedIn post. No peer review process. The “credit economy” runs on attribution, and when you skip it, you’re spending someone else’s intellectual currency like it’s yours.

Here’s where it gets tricky. There are levels.

1. Copying someone’s exact words without credit. That’s plagiarism. Full stop.

2. Copying someone’s structure. Using their framework, their flow, their sequencing. That’s a grey zone. If you add your own thinking and perspective, it’s fair game. If you copy-paste the skeleton and swap in different examples, you’re closer to theft than you think.

3. Copying someone’s idea. Ideas aren’t copyrightable. “Write about imposter syndrome” belongs to no one. But if someone has a specific take on imposter syndrome, a named framework, an original angle, a fresh metaphor, and you repackage it as your own insight? You know what you did.

The test is simple. If you swapped the original creator’s name onto your post and it still made sense, you didn’t add anything. You moved furniture around in someone else’s house and called it interior design. Yikes.

The psychology of why people cheat

Nobody wakes up deciding to be a plagiarist. It happens gradually. And virality is the accelerant.

It usually goes something like this:

You post something original. It does well. Dopamine hit.

You post again. Decent numbers. Another hit.

Then one week, nothing lands. The numbers drop, your brain panics. You start looking at what’s working for other people. You think “I’ll put my spin on it.” But you’re tired, or rushed, or both. So your “spin” is a light rewording and a new profile photo on top.

That’s how it starts. One shortcut. It works. Nobody notices. So you do it again. And again. Until someone does notice, and by then you’ve built a reputation on borrowed material.

The Butterfield situation is textbook. He taught content creation. He bragged about six-figure revenue. He had authority, visibility, gigs. And then the business shut down, and the first piece of content he posted after that turned out to be someone else’s work.

I don’t know what was going on behind the scenes. I don’t need to.

But the pattern speaks for itself. When the pressure to perform outpaces your ability to create, shortcuts start looking rational.

Virality is addictive. And addiction makes people do stupid things.

It happened to me too. In March, I made a dumb Claude-LinkedIn meme and posted it. Got 2K likes. By the next morning, people were sharing it everywhere as if they made it. One guy on X used it to sell his product, just like Louis did with this post. No credit, nothing.

And while I was writing this article, Jenny Stojkovic, a VC and tech creator with 250K+ followers, called out Nicole Lapin for plagiarizing her original work. Nicole Lapin. NYT bestselling author. Course creator. Someone with a whole team behind her. Same pattern. Bigger name.

This isn’t a fringe problem. It’s baked into how content works online right now.

The algorithm doesn’t even care if your post is original. It cares if people engage with it. That creates a perverse incentive: the system rewards output, not originality. And people who optimize for the system eventually lose track of the line between inspiration and theft.

What to do instead

If your content is your product, your integrity is your supply chain. One break and nothing downstream works. Here’s what I think everyone should do:

1/ Credit the source.

Always. Even when it feels unnecessary. “This post by [name] made me think about...” costs you nothing and builds trust. The audience respects a creator who shares where their thinking came from. It signals confidence, not weakness.

2/ Build your own story bank.

The reason you’re tempted to borrow is because you ran out of your own material. Fix the supply problem.

• Keep a journal

• Save voice memos.

• Screenshot things that piss you off

• Write down the weird moment from your Friday afternoon

Your content comes from your life, not from someone else’s feed.

/3 Write from moments, not from formats.

Formats are templates. Templates are replicable. But the specific five-second moment where you sat in your car after a bad client call and stared at your phone for six minutes before hitting send on the invoice? Nobody else has that. That moment is uncopyable. That’s your content.

When you’re inspired by someone, say so. Link their post and tag them. Show your audience the trail. It makes you look more credible, not less. People who hoard their sources look insecure. People who share them look generous and well-read.

How to borrow without being a thief

Everyone’s influenced by someone. Austin Kleon wrote a whole book about it. “Steal Like an Artist.” The title sounds like permission to plagiarize. It’s the opposite.

The core idea: copy to learn, transform to create, credit to respect.

When I see a post that performs well, I don’t copy it. I study why it worked. Was it the hook? The emotional arc? The structure? The specificity?

I reverse-engineer the mechanics, not the words.

That’s the difference between a student and a forger. A student learns technique. A forger reproduces the painting and signs someone else’s name.

You can use AI for this. And I’ll give you the exact prompts.

Step 1: The Analysis Prompt

Paste a post that caught your attention into Claude or ChatGPT and run this:

Analyze this LinkedIn post and break down its structure layer by layer: 

(1) Hook type, what pattern does it use? (contrarian, specific number, personal stakes, identity trigger, etc.) 

(2) Body logic, how does it flow? (list, story arc, problem/solution, rule of three, etc.) 

(3) Proof placement, where does credibility appear and why there? 

(4) Line pacing, what’s the average sentence length and why does it create momentum? (5) CTA type, does it self-identify, spark debate, or invite action? 

Here is the post: [PASTE POST]. 

Be specific. Name the exact techniques. Don’t summarize what the post says. Explain how it’s engineered.”

You’ll get a full breakdown of why that post worked. The mechanics. The engineering. Not the content.

Step 2: The Template Extraction Prompt

Run this right after Step 1. It builds on the analysis the AI gave you.

Now turn that breakdown into a reusable writing template with placeholders. Follow these rules exactly:

1. Keep the same structural order, pacing, and sentence rhythm as the original post
2. Replace every piece of content with a [PLACEHOLDER] in brackets — topic-agnostic, works for any niche
3. Add a one-line instruction in italics under each placeholder explaining what to write there
4. Label the emotional job of each section in parentheses — what it does to the reader

Now you have a structural template. A skeleton. No words from the original post. No ideas from the original creator. A pattern you can fill with your own stories, your own stakes, your own lived experience.

Then you close the tab and write your own post. With your own scars. Your own weird, specific, only-you observations. If you don’t know where to start, use this prompt first.

That’s creative borrowing. The AI deconstructs the mechanics. You supply the humanity. Those are two different jobs and both are necessary.

What you don’t do: paste someone’s post into AI and say “rewrite this in my voice.” That’s plagiarism with extra steps. You laundered someone’s thinking through a language model and called it yours. The AI didn’t make it original. It made it harder to trace.

Back to Louis

I feel bad for Louis, I really do. But I don’t think the copying was his biggest mistake. The response was:

• Blocking the original creator

• Deleting the plagiarized post

• Letting his wife escalate instead of de-escalate.

• Posting an apology that didn’t address the blocking.

Every step after getting caught made it worse.

If he’d said “I messed up, this was Lewis Kemp’s work, I should have credited him, full stop,” this would have been a 48-hour story.

Creators mess up. Audiences forgive fast when the accountability is real.

But when your business is teaching people how to create content, and your content turns out to be borrowed, and your first move is to silence the person you borrowed from?

The business itself becomes a scam.

Personality is the only differentiator you’ve got left. Your lived experience is the only thing AI, competitors, and copycats can’t replicate. The moment you start building on someone else’s material instead of your own, you’ve traded the one thing that made you uncopyable for a shortcut that expires the second someone notices.

So write your own stuff. Credit the people who inspire you. And if you get caught slipping, own it like an adult.

Because internet forgives mistakes. It doesn’t forgive cover-ups.

This article is 100% original. So I’m going to shamelessly use it to promote my Content to Gigs community. Want to learn how to build content that’s yours, sounds like you, and gets you paid? Doors open today.

Leave a comment

Friday afternoon, Claude Design dropped and I opened it before dinner. By Saturday morning I had 14 finished infographics sitting in my exports folder. One or two sat inside my brand system cleanly enough to ship. Others looked like AI slop dressed up in my colors. The range across one weekend was the story.

Around infographic nine, my stomach turned. I’ve been saying this for three years, it’s the thesis behind my work, and I named this newsletter Personality Pays for a reason.

The labor you’ve been paying for was never what made your brand yours.

Claude Design made that uncomfortably obvious over a weekend, and it exposed the ceiling while it was at it. The pattern has been building for years through Midjourney, Canva Magic, Figma AI, and Adobe Firefly. Friday was the moment it stopped being debatable. The floor of “good enough to ship” dropped through, and the ceiling didn’t move an inch.

Subscribe now

How I set up my design system

Quick context before the rest. I’m not a design novice flailing around over here. I’ve got a solid setup already, Figma for client work, Canva when I’m in a hurry, and a full brand token file covering colors, fonts, voice guidelines, and layout rules. The same file my designer used to work from.

I fed the Figma kit straight into Claude Design. Colors, type scale, logo, and reference images of past infographics I’d built, enough for it to work from.

From there Claude walked through my brand sheet step by step, building out templates for infographic, carousel, slide deck, and one-pager. After each one it asked for “looks good / needs work” feedback and kept iterating from there.

The design tab came back clean. Claude pulled my infographic pastels straight from the tokens with every hex code correct, matching the colors I’ve been running across carousels and cheatsheets for the last year. So far, so good.

The slide deck title page came close to what I’d build myself too. Orange hero side panel in my brand orange, logo in the corner, yellow highlight on the key phrase (the exact treatment I use on every headline), and the phone-prop photo that’s become my visual signature.

The mascot (me holding the iphone) was where things got petty. I kept trying to drop it in, and Claude Design kept spitting her back out distorted, cropped wrong, or quietly omitted like it was hoping I wouldn’t notice. Seven iterations in, I gave up. The final slide sat inside my brand without her, which was the compromise Claude forced me into.

The carousel cover was where things really fell apart. Off formatting, and a sans-serif font I’ve never used in my life, despite my font rules sitting right there in the tokens. It drove me nuts.

The cheatsheet came closest to my existing work after a few rounds. Five-step structure, orange pill badges, cream base, my exact orange brand color, and the “Helpful? Share with fellow speakers” button I put on every cheatsheet I publish.

Put this one next to the cheatsheets on my LinkedIn and the scroll test passes.

A designer’s eye catches the spacing drift and the slightly-off weight hierarchy. The audience won’t. That’s the floor dropping, not the ceiling rising.

Hold that thought. Because the next experiment showed what stayed the same.

Designing a Claude infographic from scratch

Two hours in, I tried something different. Brand system still locked in the tokens, so visual identity handled. This time I wanted Claude to build from scratch using an existing infographic as a structural reference. I picked one of Chris Donnelly’s and asked Claude to recreate the layout in my brand.

The prompt I used:

Recreate this exact uploaded infographic in my personal style.

Keep the same radial layout, central orange starburst, all 8 sections, titles, and full text content exactly as shown.

Make it much cleaner with:
- Generous white space
- Stronger visual hierarchy
- Better, modern typography
- High scannability and readability

Use my signature bold energy, but prioritize clarity and readability over density.

An hour of iterations later, it still looked like this (on the right).

When I showed it to a friend, she said “that’s not too bad I think? But it’s hard to read.”

Right there is the problem, and it’s bigger than her reaction. Audiences still clock quality when they see it. Strong hierarchy, generous white space, clear focal points, and readable type beat dense, flat layouts every time. The research on this is settled, and a new tool dropping on a Friday didn’t change it.

What changed is the bar for “good enough to ship” fell through the floor.

A non-designer prompting Claude looks at this radial mess and thinks “fine, ship it.” The audience clocks the crowded layout subconsciously and scrolls past. Engagement tanks. The creator blames the algorithm.

Meanwhile, the Claude logo in the middle of the infographic isn’t even the real Claude logo, and nobody in my test audience consciously noticed. They felt something was off without the language to name it, and they kept scrolling anyway.

That’s the real cost of aesthetic commoditization.

Work that looks fine still loses in the feed. “Fine” passes the shipper’s internal check and gets buried by anything made with real judgment.

Same brand system both times. Colors correct both times. Fonts correct in experiment one, ignored in experiment two.

What broke was judgment: layout choice, weight hierarchy, the willingness to delete, the taste to know what doesn’t belong on the canvas. None of which lives in a token file.

What this tool actually is

Claude Design builds what you describe. It won’t tell you whether what you described is strategically sound, visually sharp, or worth saving. The quality ceiling sits with the brief, meaning with you. Which breaks for anyone without design fundamentals.

• Without language like “headline at 3x body size, one dominant focal point, supporting elements in a clear secondary tier, everything else recedes,” Claude distributes visual weight evenly across every element. You get flat layouts where the eye has nowhere to land.

• Without a vocabulary for weight contrast, letter-spacing, type scale, and line-height, “make it look nice” is all you have to offer. Which is not a brief.

• Without the ability to tell a grid from a modular from a flowing narrative from a radial system, you prompt vaguely and get inconsistent output every time.

• Without the rule for social infographics (each point lands in under two seconds of reading), you overload the canvas. Claude packs it in.

• Without a feel for contrast ratios or white space as a design element, Claude respects your hex codes and still gives you something that fights itself visually.

None of this is Claude’s fault, by the way.

The tool works as advertised, compressing production time for people who already think in design terms. For anyone without that foundation, it produces output that looks fine and communicates poorly. On LinkedIn infographics, where communication is the point, that’s a complete disaster.

One honest caveat: taste isn't genetic, it's built. I didn't come out of the womb knowing weight contrast and focal hierarchy. I studied my niche, watched what landed, copied the right people for the reps, and got critiqued until I could see what I was missing. Any motivated operator will do the same, and Claude Design speeds those reps up if you treat the output as feedback instead of a finished product.

The good news for anyone reading this as a strategist, a consultant, a coach, or an expert selling their thinking: a human with taste stays in the loop even when clients have direct access to the tool themselves.

I wrote about this exact dynamic last week in The Quiet Death of Knowing How, the creators winning with AI right now are the ones who learned the mechanics before they reached for the shortcut. Design is just the latest layer catching up.

So no, your expertise didn’t become obsolete. It became the bottleneck, and that’s the whole point. Everyone has the execution layer now. Your judgment is the only thing still behind a gate.

The break-even math

If you know what you want, Claude Design hands you a client-ready infographic in fifteen minutes flat. That’s the magic screenshot everyone’s posting about.

If you don’t know what you want, welcome to iteration hell. Headline’s wrong on round one. Layout’s off on round two. Spacing’s off on round three. By round four you realize your concept doesn’t work and you’ve been polishing a turd. By round five you rage-quit, open Canva or Figma, and start the whole thing over from scratch.

Round seven arrives and you finally admit it. Opening Canva in the first place, dragging a template in, dropping your copy in the slot would have gotten you better work in less time with less frustration for less money.

So no, the tool doesn’t turn you into a designer. It hands designers and people with design taste a lever. For everyone else, it’s an expensive way to arrive at the same decent-but-forgettable work they’d have produced anyway, just with more existential dread along the way.

With taste and a POV, Claude Design multiplies your time. Without them, it multiplies your frustration. Either way, you’re the variable.

So what does this mean for you?

If your personal brand is carried by clean slides and a designer who charges €120 an hour, you have a problem. If your LinkedIn presence leans on tasteful carousels in your signature colors, you have a problem. If the first impression people get of you is “wow, so professional,” and the second impression is silence, you have a problem.

Clean design stopped being proof. Clean design is the baseline now. Every founder with a prompt box ships work that looks sharp.

One question left. The same one I’ve been asking clients for three years.

What’s uncopyable about you?

The layout is free now. So is the color palette. The logo, the fonts, the grid system, the carousel template, the signature CTA block, all free too.

What’s left is you and your POV, your scars, your weird obsessions, and the way you think about your field specifically enough that no prompt box on earth generates it.

That’s what sets you apart, all of it.

I told a client this six months ago and she cried in her car afterward. I’m not sorry I said it. She pivoted, doubled down on her real story, tripled her booking fee, and stopped apologizing for any of it. The tears were a side effect of realizing she’d been buying cover for five years.

Two moves

So where does this leave you on Monday morning? Two moves, in this order.

1) Use the tool. If you want to ship fast and on-brand with zero headache, grab Nano Banana. Solid infographics and carousels out the door without the iteration spiral.

If you want something unmistakably you that cuts through on LinkedIn, hire a pro. I work with Nick Broekema and Vince Pierri.

They turn good strategy into scroll-stopping personal brand assets no prompt box will match.

2) Redirect those hours into the only thing that matters now. Build what’s uncopyable about you. Write the story you’d never say on a keynote stage. Drop the framework nobody in your niche has named yet. Record the voice note about the client who humiliated you and the lesson that changed everything. Build the point of view that makes someone stop scrolling because this person gets it, not because the layout is clean.

Claude Design or Nano Banana or Nick and Vince will make it look sharp. That’s settled now. One question left. The same one that’s always mattered.

Does anyone care what’s on it?

If yes, these tools are a gift. If no, they’re a faster way to be ignored.

Your designer was never what your brand was selling. The product was always you.

Go build more of that.

PS: Content to Gigs community opens April 28. Built for people who want to earn their own taste instead of renting someone else's templates. Waitlist here.

Leave a comment

Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot belong to our daily stack now. Fastest adoption curve in human history.

I’m no exception to the rule, some of these tools I’m in love with.

But Marshall McLuhan saw this coming sixty years ago.

“We shape our tools. Then our tools shape us.”

Nobody listened in 1964. And nobody is listening now.

They want the finished post. The viral thread. The slick email. All delivered, packaged, and ready to ship.

But what they don’t want is twenty minutes of thinking about where a piece of content lives inside their funnel, who reads it, why they would care, and what happens next.

So. Watch what happens.

AI made production faster. But production was never the bottleneck. Thinking was.

Without thinking, speed becomes a liability. Every extra post becomes more evidence of the gap between what you know and what you believe you know.

Note: I’ll use Claude as shorthand throughout. Swap in whichever AI you’re married to.

The surface lie

The common belief goes like this.

AI lets you scale. AI removes the stress of the how. AI democratises good writing. AI flattens the playing field so beginners compete with experts overnight.

Lovely story. Almost true, which means still untrue.

And you can spot who bought the story by what they ask me for. People keep asking me for the prompt. Some take my stuff and build a skill file from it, a broken one, by the way.

And I’ve watched the same pattern play out on repeat. They hand their content brain to Claude, produce more output, and get worse results:

• Engagement dropped

• Sales stayed flat

• Audience growth stalled

They posted five times more and got five times less.

Sure, they moved faster. But they also moved faster in the wrong direction. And the machine gave them no signal, because the machine is indifferent to direction.

The machine is a typist with infinite stamina and zero stake in the outcome.

The deeper truth: tools shape their users

Every tool humans have ever built reshaped the humans who used them.

The plough changed bodies. The printing press changed minds. The smartphone changed attention.

So AI will reshape creators. Of course AI will. The live question is whether the reshaping improves them or hollows them out.

Right now, the evidence points at hollow.

AI makes the output appear before the thinking finishes. You never sit with the question long enough to understand the answer. You get a draft in seconds and ship a first thought as a final product.

The machine removed your reason to build the skill in the first place.

A funnel is learned the same way any practical skill is learned. Through repetition, failure, and iteration.

You only understand top, middle, and bottom of funnel after you’ve posted content that failed at each level, read the data, felt the sting, and rewritten.

No prompt library teaches the feeling. And no AI skill shortcuts the humiliation of a top-of-funnel post getting 12 likes when you were sure the idea was gold.

The fluency trap

Every era has a class of people who sound fluent and stay illiterate.

Fluent speakers string words together beautifully.

Literate speakers string thoughts together beautifully.

The difference stays invisible until the stakes rise.

AI made everyone fluent overnight. But literacy stayed exactly where it was.

You read AI-written content and notice the fluency first. The grammar is clean. The transitions work. The sentences have rhythm.

Then you finish the piece and ask yourself what you learned, and the answer is nothing.

Because writer never had to develop anything to say in the first place. The writing was produced before the thought existed.

Literacy lives inside the slow work of figuring out what you believe:

• Sitting with a half-formed idea for three weeks

• Testing the idea in three conversations

• Watching how strangers react when you post an early version

• Revising because something felt off and you aren’t sure why yet

Tools like Claude will skip every stage of the process for you. It will also ensure you never build the mental muscles those stages were designed to build.

Four paradoxes nobody wants to admit

The damage shows up in four places. You’ll recognize at least two of them from your own feed. Creators who notice the pattern first stop bleeding. The rest keep posting.

1) More output, less impact.

Creators who scaled to ten posts a week with AI report fewer DMs, fewer sales calls, fewer email replies. Volume killed signal.

Ten mediocre posts teach your audience to scroll past your name.

2) Fluent prose, empty message.

AI writes grammar well. But it writes ideas poorly.

You end up with content so glossy readers notice the gloss before the point. They read two sentences, feel nothing, and leave.

3) Perfect copy, wrong offer.

A gorgeous sales email sent to the wrong audience converts at zero.

Creators brag about AI-generated launches pulling in nothing because the funnel underneath was broken. No warming, no nurture, no offer-audience fit.

The email wasn’t the problem. The strategy was.

4) Faster production, slower growth.

People posting daily with AI grow slower than people posting twice a week with intent. Because algorithms reward dwell time and saves.

AI-slop gets scrolled. Thoughtful content gets saved and shared.

Speed plus strategy buries volume. And the daily posters keep losing to the weekly thinkers.

Three failures I’ve watched in real time

Paradoxes in the abstract look clean. Paradoxes inside someone’s business look like this. Three creators, three flavors of the same mistake.

A coach I know bought a prompt library for 300 dollars. She ran her whole quarter through Claude. Posted every day.

Her best post of the quarter? A note she typed manually on her phone while crying in a parking lot. And her worst performers were the posts Claude wrote with perfect structure.

The lesson she refused to learn is the lesson she needed most. Because the content worked when she was inside the content. And the Claude posts failed because Claude had no stake.

A consultant handed his entire funnel to an agency running AI-first. Three months in, he had roughly 45 new leads and zero sales.

Sure, the leads were real. The content was all top-of-funnel. But nobody built the middle. Not a single soul wrote for people ready to buy.

The agency was producing volume because volume is what AI produces best. And strategy was never on the table because strategy requires someone who understands the business, and nobody in the chain did.

A writer with 40,000 followers switched to AI drafting to save time. Six months later, subscriber growth flatlined.

So he’d become indistinguishable from every other LinkedIn generalist. The voice he’d spent five years building got averaged out in one quarter.

Five years of moat, erased by six months of convenience.

Why smart people skip the basics

Smart creators know the fundamentals matter. But they skip them anyway. The reasons run deeper than time or technique. The real decisions get made in the nervous system:

• Status

• Fatigue

• Ego

• Meaning

Status

Mechanics aren’t sexy. Knowing how a funnel works makes you sound like a 2012 marketing consultant. Just like knowing how to prompt Claude makes you sound like a 2026 operator.

One earns likes on X. The other earns sales. So creators optimize for the wrong signal because the wrong signal shows up on their phone every fifteen seconds.

Fatigue

Learning the boring basics takes months. Buying the shortcut takes minutes.

Brains prefer shortcuts. Full stop. So creators slap the “old school” label on the fundamentals they haven’t bothered to learn, because labelling something outdated is easier than admitting ignorance.

Ego

Admitting you don’t understand where leads come from, or what your audience needs at each stage, feels like admitting you’re not a real business yet.

AI lets you skip the admission. You get to look like a real business without being one. And the costume replaces the character.

Meaning

This one is quieter and more damaging.

Doing the work used to mean something. Writing a post from scratch used to be a small ritual of thinking. Handing the ritual to Claude feels efficient on Tuesday and empty by Friday.

Creators are losing the sense of authorship without noticing the loss, because loss of meaning never announces itself.

Meaning leaks slowly. One day you look at your content and feel nothing, and you don’t remember when the feeling left.

What the machine will never give you

Claude writes well. But Claude thinks no thoughts.

Your audience knows by sentence one. They know who’s lived the problem. They know who asked Claude to guess. Because every piece of writing is an act of presence, outsourced writing reads as an act of absence. And readers register the empty chair before they register the words.

Your audience wants a mind on the other end of the message.

But the machine has no mind. Only a statistical echo of every mind who ever wrote anything on the internet. Which works for a first draft, and fails for a brand.

Sit with the irony for a second. The skill getting devalued fastest right now is the EXACT skill AI will never replicate.

• Real thinking

• Real conviction

• Real voice built from real scars

Creators rushing to automate are automating away their only moat.

Subscribe now

What works instead

So. How do you use AI without becoming a casualty of AI?

You go backwards. You learn what the shortcut-sellers told you was already solved. And you keep the strategy inside your own head before you let Claude anywhere near your keyboard.

The boring bit comes first:

• Top of funnel attracts strangers

• Middle of funnel builds trust with people who already know you exist

• Bottom of funnel converts people ready to buy

Each piece of content has a job. And each job needs a different tone, length, and call to action. So learn which job each piece of content is doing before you write a single prompt.

Once you know the job, hand the typing to Claude. Hand the idea generation to Claude. Hand the first draft to Claude.

Machines are magnificent typists. So let them type.

But keep the strategy to yourself. That bit is yours. That bit is the actual product you’re building. And that bit is what your audience pays for, whether they know the word strategy or not.

The creators winning with AI right now are the most strategic operators in their niche.

Speed is a distant second. Five sharp posts a week pulls more weight than twenty throwaway ones, because they know what each post is doing before they write the prompt.

Speed without strategy is a treadmill. You move a lot. You go nowhere.

And the treadmill keeps running because stopping feels worse than continuing to sweat.

The philosophical cost

There’s a deeper reason to care about any of this beyond the revenue line.

When you hand your thinking to a machine, you don’t only lose the output. You lose the person you would have become by doing the work.

The creator who writes 500 posts manually over three years is not the same human as the creator who prompts Claude 500 times.

Both have 500 posts. Only one of them has 500 posts worth of thinking built into their nervous system.

The machine gives you the result. The machine charges you the growth you would have had if you had done the work yourself.

Nobody bills you for the version of yourself you didn’t become. The invoice arrives quietly, years later, when you realize you built a business on scaffolding someone else assembled.

Old trades knew something modern creators forgot.

There’s a reason every traditional apprenticeship took seven years. The tasks themselves were never the bottleneck. The human learning the tasks had to become a person worthy of shipping them.

The shortcut skips the becoming. And the becoming was the whole point.

Earn the prompt

The bar is on the floor because the shortcut came before the skill.

Creators built businesses without foundations. And the cracks arrive slowly, then suddenly.

Learn the how. Then automate the how.

The order matters more than any prompt.

Which paradox is yours? Drop it below, I read them all.

Leave a comment

PS: Content to Gigs community opens April 28. Built for the people who want to earn the prompt, not download someone else's. Waitlist here.

In January, I decided to brutally delete 200+ hook templates. Just three months later, my words hit 3 million readers on LinkedIn. So now I write every LinkedIn hook the same way: I rip them from real life.

Subscribe now

I don’t need stinking swipe files anymore. I designed something much better: PLACE.

Why your hooks die in three seconds

I’m sorry, but your hook dies in the first three seconds. But it probably has NOTHING to do with your idea. It might not even have anything to do with your writing. Both are fine. It’s just that your hook sounds like everyone else’s.

You wrote “You don’t have a content problem, you have a positioning problem,” and the reader kept scrolling. You opened with “Most leaders think X, but,” and they were already gone.

Anyone can see the difference between these vague vs specific openers. One ASKS the reader to care, the other makes them feel something before they decide whether to care.

It’s the difference between begging and grabbing.

PLACE is the anti-framework

People have been leaning on hook templates and swipe files for years, and they do their job. But after a while, every post starts with the same three “proven” openers, so your stuff ends up feeling like a copy of a copy.

Templates give you a basic shape, but nothing that sounds like you. And whatever AI detector you’re trying to dodge, your reader still feels it.

What you want is a hook that sounds like you talking, not a funnel guru chanting “high-converting framework.” You want it to feel like a story a friend would tell, not like it came out of a prompt.

That’s where PLACE comes in. Yes, it’s technically a framework.

But this one drags real moments, real people, and real stakes onto the page, so it sounds like you.

• Person: who’s in the story? It could be you, a client, a friend, the stranger you overheard on the train who clearly needs therapy.

• Location: where did it happen? Most likely online, on your way home, in a hospital waiting room.

• Action: what went down? Depending on where the post is going, this could be a realization, a win, a loss, a fight, a confession, someone asking for a refund and being absolutely right.

• Cost: what was on the line? A decent hook comes with a cost. Money, pride, a relationship, your reputation, your sanity after three all-nighters. Don’t forget this one.

• Era: when did it take place? This year, last week, 10 minutes ago, or that weird afternoon on your 36th birthday you still think about.

Three or more elements equals a hook with traction. Use all five, and people will screenshot the f*ck out of your hook.

Look at what happens when PLACE fires. Your reader gets dropped into a scene. Something is at stake. Something is about to go down. The vocabulary shifts. Words show up like:

• Destroyed

• Loss

• Killing me

• For a second

• And then

• Almost didn’t make it

• Saying no

• Revenge

Your life is the swipe file. Mine your week.

Why this works

Why do you scroll past someone’s first line without deciding to?

Specificity. Or the lack of it.

Specifics get read. Numbers, places, ages, dollar amounts, what your body felt in the moment. Each one tells the reader: this is a story about a real person. Vague language does the opposite. It reads as AI and your audience learned to skip it in under a second.

This is why PLACE has only one job: being specific. It’s cuts the adjectives and drops your reader into a scene. Opinions push people into agree-or-disagree mode, and most readers don’t care enough to pick a side.

Subscribe now

The 6 steps from blank doc to scroll-stopping hook

Now the workflow. Six steps, thirty minutes, blank doc to finished hook. Run it once and you’ll see the difference. Run it five times and I promise you’ll stop writing the old way for good.

Step 1. Mine your week, not your brain

Sit down with a blank doc (I just use my Notes app). Write the last 7 days as a list of moments. Where you were, who you were with, what changed and how you felt. Don’t filter. The “boring” moments are usually the strongest, because they sound like real life.

Wait for inspiration and you’ll write another iceberg metaphor. Skip it. Write the moment your client cried on Google Meet.

Step 2. Pick the moment with the highest emotional voltage

Leave out the wins and the lessons you’ve told 10 times. Pick the moment you’d hesitate to share at a dinner party. If it makes you flinch, your reader will stop scrolling.

The Monday moment stings. A client almost didn’t book me because my website felt too corporate. The thing I built to look “professional” was repelling the people I wanted to attract. Flinch-worthy. Picking this one.

If three moments feel safe and one feels exposing, the exposing moment is your hook.

Step 3. Tag your PLACE elements

Strip your moment down to the five fields. Person, Location, Action, Cost, Era. Write one line for each. If you draw a blank on three or more, the moment isn’t sharp enough yet. Pick another.

• Person: my client, a leadership coach with 15 years of experience

• Location: a Zoom call, her face half-lit by a ring light she clearly bought last week

• Action: she told me she almost didn’t book because my site made me look “too corporate”

• Cost: months of leads I’ll never know about, lost to a homepage I thought was polished

• Era: this Monday, 11 minutes into the call

Five out of five. Strong signal.

Step 4. Make your next hook lean, fat lean

My best LinkedIn hooks have two or three beats. For example:

"Last year, I REFUSED to write sales posts. F*cking cringe, man. $498K later, I use my own damn system:'

Can you feel the rhythm? That's because it follows lean/fat/lean. A punchy line to stop the scroll, a longer one to fill in the scene, then a short one to land it. It has a rhythm.

I don't even think about this as a rule anymore to be fair. I just read the draft out loud, and when three sentences in a row sound the same, I just break one.

Go try it on your last hook and say it out loud. If it drones, then you've found the problem.

Step 5. Now go read your draft out loud (yes, really)

Because if your tongue trips, your reader’s eyes will do the same. The solution is dead simple: cut the redundant adverbs. Say I wanted to write about a leadership coach who didn’t hire me because of my website looking too perfect.

“A leadership coach with 15 years of experience almost didn’t hire me.”

Flows clean, doesn’t stumble.

Now this one:

“It wasn’t my resume. My website looked too corporate.”

This freaking slaps.

Step 6. Write your final hook

After a few rewrites, you’ll likely land here:

A leadership coach with 15 years of experience almost didn’t hire me. It wasn’t my resume. My website looked too corporate

Three sentences, one face, one tension.

Your reader doesn’t know the story yet, which is good. They don’t need to. The hook did the one job it’s supposed to do: make them stay for the next line.

Common pitfalls and fixes

• Pitfall 1: You name the lesson before the moment.

  → Fix: cut the lesson. Drop the reader into the scene with zero context. Trust them to follow.

• Pitfall 2. You sanitize the cost.

  → Fix: name the real stakes. Money, embarrassment, fear. Dollar amounts beat “a lot.” “I cried in the bathroom” beats “I felt overwhelmed.”

• Pitfall 3. You blur the location.

  → Fix: pick one specific room. Not “at work.” Your desk. The corner of the conference room. The parking lot at 7 a.m. with the engine still running.

• Pitfall 4. You hide the era.

  → Fix: anchor the timestamp. “Tuesday morning” beats “recently.” “On my 36th birthday” beats “a while back.”

• Pitfall 5. You write about people in general instead of one person in specific.

  → Fix: name a single human. One client, one friend, one version of yourself from one moment. A crowd is forgettable. A face is felt.

Your 7-day PLACE workout

• Day 1. List ten moments from your last seven days.

• Day 2. Tag three of them with PLACE.

• Day 3. Write two or three hooks. Score each one.

• Day 4. Pick the highest scorer. Build the post around the hook.

• Day 5. Publish.

• Day 6. Track which hook pulled the most reach. Look for a pattern.

• Day 7. Repeat with a new batch of moments.

Run the loop for four weeks. By week three, your brain starts tagging moments in real time.

You’ll catch yourself thinking “Person, Location, Cost” while standing in line for coffee.

There’s your rewire. And your rewrite.

Your reader forgets to scroll

Your audience doesn’t owe you their attention. PLACE doesn’t trick anyone into handing attention over. PLACE makes the first sentence so specific your reader forgets to scroll.

Try PLACE on your next note, essay, or subject line. Watch what shifts.

Fun fact: the first line of this newsletter scores 4/5.

Tag the line yourself and see which element is missing.

PS. The Obvious Yes is open. The full PLACE prompt is inside, but hooks are the smallest piece of it. It’s the whole system I use to become the obvious yes: hooks, post structure, positioning, the personality-first way to write content people screenshot and buyers remember. Join The Obvious Yes.

Last Friday, I posted the ugliest selfie of my life.

Justin Welsh co-signed it in the comments.

A 10 million dollar solopreneur didn’t notice the numbers. He noticed the weird.

The 7 months before that comment looked like this:

• 7K to 28K followers

• Over 300K in revenue from LinkedIn alone

• Close to 6.5 million impressions

• Ranked #1 in personal branding on Favikon

I’m not going to pretend I’m not proud of that. I am.

And sure, being a decent writer helps. It wasn’t the reason.

The reason was smaller than talent. And harder.

I realized I couldn’t compete on expertise alone. I refused to fake a persona to sound professional. I kept showing up even on the days I felt too loud or too insecure to post.

I stopped hiding. That was it.

Subscribe free to read this story

A 10M dollar solopreneur reacted to the weird, not the numbers

Justin’s comment proved something without him meaning to prove it.

He’s built a 10M dollar business. He sees metrics every day. My numbers weren’t what made him stop. It was the ugly selfie and the weirdness of the caption next to it.

A sharp operator at his level doesn’t react to “good content.” He reacts to signal. To a fingerprint he can’t mistake for anyone else’s.

That’s what personality does in a saturated feed. It tells people this is a human, not a brand account.

FYI, here’s the post.

Skillset is table stakes now. Personality is the moat.

AI ate expertise in one year. Every framework you teach is a free Claude answer. Your prospect ChatGPT’d the problem you solve before they ever typed your name.

So skillset stopped being the moat. Skillset is table stakes now.

The new equation: expertise + personality = profitable positioning.

Personality is the hot takes, the tone, what you obsess over, the thing you refuse to pretend you don’t care about. It’s the human fingerprint on top of the work.

And the fingerprint is almost always the thing you were told to tone down.

Mine is: loud, direct, autistic, over-honest, too online. Every trait my ex co-founder framed as a liability. Those are the traits Justin noticed.

The flaw is the feature. Always was.

Write about it enough, you become it on purpose

There’s a weird mechanic inside this you don’t see until you’ve done it for a while.

Write about your flaw enough, and you start to become it on purpose. The trait stops being something you apologize for. It becomes a position. Eventually it becomes a business.

I didn’t manifest this brand. I posted my way into it:

• I wrote about the autism until autistic professionals started booking calls.

• I wrote about being too much until too much became the reason clients pay me.

• I wrote about the 20K I never got back until it paid for itself twice over in inbound leads.

The sequence is: scar → skill → post → repeat.

You don’t have to believe me. Just compare my LinkedIn in July to today:

How to find your flaw to feature

This is where AI earns its keep.

People use AI to sound smarter, faster, safer. Wrong job.

The best use of AI is the opposite: as a mirror that pulls your personality out of hiding. The bits you’ve been told to tone down, the trait you’ve been apologizing for since your first performance review.

AI won’t write your personality for you. It will interview you until you can see it yourself.

Paste the prompt below into Claude Cowork. It interviews you about one flaw, mistake, or turning point. Picks the angle. Drafts a LinkedIn post that turns your weakness into the reason clients pick you.

Copy from here:

You are Claude Cowork, my warm, empathetic, and insightful AI collaborator and coach. You help people reframe painful personal experiences into powerful professional strengths with curiosity, support, and zero judgment.

We are going to do the **“From Flaw to Feature” exercise** together.

### Exercise Structure (exactly as designed):
1. **Identify the Flaw**  
   Think of something in your life that once felt like a real flaw or wound (examples: a failure that still stings, a firing you didn’t see coming, a partnership that broke you, a diagnosis that made you feel ashamed, etc.).

2. **Column 1 – What did it cost you along the way?**  
   (Examples: money, confidence, years, peace of mind, opportunities, etc.)

3. **Column 2 – What did you stop or start doing because of it?**  
   (Examples: undercharging, people-pleasing, staying quiet to keep the peace, walking away faster, choosing quality over quantity, etc.)

4. **Column 3 – How do your clients benefit from this now?**  
   (Examples: higher standards, direct feedback, better systems, pattern recognition, etc.)

### Your facilitation rules:
- Guide me **one step at a time**. Never move forward until I’ve fully answered the current step.
- **Always ask me questions first using AskUserQuestion.** Do not ask questions in regular message text — embed every question inside the AskUserQuestion format.
- In your very first response, use **AskUserQuestion** to:
  - Briefly explain the exercise in your own words (1–2 sentences)
  - Ask what my professional role is and who my typical clients are (this will help make Column 3 much more relevant and tailored)
  - Ask me to share a specific flaw or experience I’d like to turn into a feature.
- After I reply, reflect back what you heard with empathy (in normal text), then immediately use AskUserQuestion again to help me dig deeper or move to the next column when ready.
- Keep the tone encouraging and empowering — this is about turning pain into a professional superpower.
- When we finish all columns, show me a clean summary (you can use a simple table) that turns the original “flaw” into the resulting “feature.”

Start right now by using AskUserQuestion exactly as instructed above.

Here’s what that looks like

Your turn

• One scar that shaped you

• One unfair advantage it gave you

• One post about it, especially when it’s uncomfortable

If you want to delete the post five seconds after hitting publish, you picked the right one.

Reply to this email with the flaw you’ve been hiding. I’ll tell you the feature I see in it.

No funnel or upsell bullsh*t. Send me the thing you’ve been trained to tone down, and I’ll tell you what your audience will pay for.

Boldly yours ✌️

Magali

Leave a comment

A consultant came to me wanting to attract paid workshops. She’d done everything right:

• Picked a single audience: leaders.

• Identified a pain point: too busy putting out fires.

• Offered one solution: workshops on AI automation.

So her headline read: “I help busy leaders with AI workshops.”

Technically correct. Zero inbound leads. Weeks of nothing.

And she couldn’t figure out why. Because on paper? She’d followed every piece of LinkedIn advice out there. Pick your niche. Name your offer. Say who it’s for. Be specific.

She did all of it. And her inbox stayed empty. So I asked her one question:

“What does your ideal client say to themselves at 11 PM when they’re staring at their inbox?”

Because no one wakes up thinking, “I’m a busy leader who needs AI training.” That’s your language. Not theirs. Here’s what they wake up thinking:

• “I’m an exec one bad quarter away from burnout.”

• “I’m drowning in busywork with no time to think.”

• “I want 10 hours back without learning another damn tool.”

• “I’m too senior for some training that goes nowhere.”

Note how none of these mention AI, workshops, or the word “leader.” And none of them sound like a LinkedIn bio.

They sound like a person. A specific person with a specific frustration. And that’s what your headline should sound like too.

Describing what you do makes you blend in. Describing what they feel makes them stop.

Subscribe now

The rewrite

So we rewrote her headline to:

“I give overwhelmed B2B execs 10+ hours back every week without adding more tools | AI automation for leadership teams”

Six leads in seven days. Same person, same offer. Different words.

Why did this work? Four things.

• We named a person, not a category. “Busy leaders” is a demographic. “Overwhelmed B2B execs” is a person with a problem. When someone reads that and their stomach drops a little, that’s recognition. That’s the scroll-stop.

• We used their words, not yours. “AI workshops” is your language. “10+ hours back every week without adding more tools” is theirs. One sounds like a brochure. The other sounds like someone who gets it.

• We killed the objection in the headline. Every exec I’ve worked with has tool fatigue. “Without adding more tools” names that fear before they even think it. That’s what made them go “OK, this person gets me.”

• We snuck the format in last. The pipe separator lets you slide the “what” in after the pain. “AI automation for leadership teams” is there for SEO. But it comes after the pain. Always after.

How to do this yourself

Find their raw language

Go read their Reddit threads. Their Slack rants. Their DM complaints. The language they use when they’re frustrated and not performing for an audience. That raw language? That’s your headline.

If you’re doing discovery calls, pay attention to how people describe their problem in the first 90 seconds. Before they clean it up. Before they make it sound professional. Write that down. Because that unfiltered version is your headline.

I keep a note on my phone labeled “things clients say before they filter themselves.” It’s the most valuable copy resource I own.

Test it out loud

Say your headline at a networking event. If everyone in the room nods, it’s too broad. If one person flinches and says “wait, how do you know that about me,” you’ve nailed it.

→ “Busy professionals” = nobody.
→ “Solo founders drowning in ops with no team to delegate to” = somebody.

You don’t want 10,000 people to read your headline and feel mildly curious. You want 50 to read it and feel called out.

Sell the destination, not the vehicle

When I audit profiles, the most common mistake is the same every time. The headline reads like a menu item instead of a promise. “Executive coach.” “Fractional CFO.” “Leadership trainer.” “Digital strategist.”

OK cool, but what happens when I hire you? What changes for me?

That’s what belongs in the headline.

Nobody wants a workshop or a 6-week program. They want the result.

The formula I keep coming back to

For consultants and coaches:

“I turn {adjective + specific audience} into {measurable outcome} without {the thing they’re scared of}.”

Real example: “I turn overwhelmed B2B execs into leaders with 10+ hours back every week without adding more tools.”

It reads in under five seconds. Your headline gets scanned, not studied. If someone needs 15 seconds to figure out what you do, they’re gone.

A few more examples:

• “I turn burned-out consultants into booked speakers without cold outreach.”

• “Helping invisible experts land paid keynotes, no influencer act required.”

• “From overwhelmed solo founder to ops-free CEO, without hiring a full team.”

• “Your freelance rates are too low. I fix that. $10K/month, fewer clients.”

10 headline frameworks you can steal

I’ve been using these with clients for months. Every time we swap a generic “I help” headline for one of these, inbound leads show up within days.

Pick the one that matches your goal. Fill in the blanks. Test it this week.

1. Outcome-obsessed

• Goal: Show immediate results.

• Example: “Fractional CMO | Turning B2B founders into AI-first marketeers”

• Framework: [Job Title] | Turning [Industry/role] complexity into [desired state]

2. Authority and credibility

• Goal: Borrow instant trust

• Example: “Brand Strategist for Speakers | Featured in Forbes | 200+ speaker brands built”

• Framework: [Role / niche] | Featured in [cred marker] | [Quantity]+ [projects/clients/results]

3. Approachability

• Goal: Make hard topics feel human.

• Example: “People Ops Manager | Making HR feel human again for fast-growing startups”

• Framework: [Role] | Making [hard topic] feel [approachable outcome] for [ICP]

4. Client’s best friend

• Goal: Position yourself as the protector.

• Example: “I keep your churn low and your champions loud | Customer Success Manager”

• Framework: I keep your [big pain] low and your [positive asset] loud | [Role]

5. Hybrid practitioner

• Goal: Show you bring multiple skills together.

• Example: “Strategy, copy and video in one brain | 3x launches | Trusted by 20+ product teams”

• Framework: [Skill A], [Skill B] and [Skill C] | [Result metric] | Trusted by [X clients]

6. Provocative

• Goal: Stop the scroll with boldness

• Example: “Stop faking it | I help speakers get booked + paid through branding and positioning”

• Framework: [Bold statement] | I help [audience] [core outcome] through [method]

7. Transformation story

• Goal: Show you’ve walked the path

• Example: “From perfectionist exec to executive coach | 120% promotion rate | 300+ execs backed”

• Framework: From [old identity] to [new identity] | [Result metric] | [X people] backed

8. Mission-driven

• Goal: Attract people who share your values

• Example: “Protecting companies from AI-powered breaches | Cybersecurity keynote speaker”

• Framework: [Mission verb] with/from/by [risk/opportunity] | [Role/niche]

9. Niche specialist

• Goal: Own a tiny, high-value corner of the market.

• Example: “I work with bootstrapped SaaS founders | 0 paid ads | +25 founders helped”

• Framework: I work with [niche] | [Notable constraint] | [X clients] helped

10. The question hook

• Goal: Make them stop and answer in their head.

• Example: “What if your LinkedIn booked more meetings than your SDRs? | 130% reply rate”

• Framework: What if [asset/channel] beat your [comparison]? | [Result metric] | [Conversion metric]

The mega prompt: generate all 10 in one go

Don’t stare at blanks. Copy the prompt below into Claude, fill in your 5 details, and get 10 headline options back in under 60 seconds. Then pick the one that makes your stomach drop a little. That’s the one.

Copy everything below this line:

You are a LinkedIn headline copywriter. Your job is to write 10 headline options for me, one per framework listed below.
ABOUT ME (fill these in):
Replace the bracketed examples with your actual answers before pasting this prompt.

What I do and for whom: [e.g., “I coach burned-out B2B execs in SaaS companies to think strategically again”]
The result I deliver, in their words: [e.g., “10+ hours back per week, no more drowning in ops”]
The objection or fear that stops them from hiring me: [e.g., “they think coaching is fluffy and won’t move the needle”]
My strongest proof point: [e.g., “Featured in Forbes, 200+ execs coached, 120% avg promotion rate”]
One sentence that captures my bold stance or personal story: [e.g., “I went from burned-out VP to executive coach after my third panic attack in a parking lot”]

THE 10 FRAMEWORKS (write one headline per framework):

Outcome-obsessed — Lead with the result they get. Formula: [Job Title] | Turning [specific audience] into [desired state]
Authority + credibility — Lead with proof. Formula: [Role/niche] | [Cred marker] | [Quantity]+ [results]
Approachability — Make a hard topic feel human. Formula: [Role] | Making [hard topic] feel [approachable outcome] for [specific audience]
Client’s best friend — Position as their protector. Formula: I keep your [big pain] low and your [positive asset] high | [Role]
Hybrid practitioner — Show combined skills. Formula: [Skill A], [Skill B] and [Skill C] | [Result metric] | Trusted by [X]+ [clients/teams]
Provocative — Stop the scroll with a bold claim. Formula: [Bold statement] | I help [audience] [core outcome] through [method]
Transformation story — Show you walked the path. Formula: From [old identity] to [new identity] | [Result metric] | [X people] backed
Mission-driven — Attract people who share your values. Formula: [Mission verb + risk/opportunity] | [Role/niche]
Niche specialist — Own a tiny, high-value corner. Formula: I work with [niche] | [Notable constraint] | [X]+ [clients] helped
Question hook — Make them answer in their head. Formula: What if [their asset/channel] [did something unexpected]? | [Result metric]

STRICT RULES (follow all of these):

Every headline MUST be under 220 characters. Count them. If it’s over 220, rewrite shorter.
Lead with pain or outcome first. Never lead with a format like “I offer workshops” or “I run programs.”
Use their language, not yours. “Overwhelmed B2B execs” = good. “Leaders” = too vague. Write the way they’d describe their own problem at 11 PM.
Use the pipe separator ( | ) to separate the pain/outcome from the credential or method.
Each of the 10 headlines MUST have a different sentence structure. Do NOT start more than 2 headlines with the same word. Vary openings: start some with “I,” some with a bold claim, some with “From,” some with “What if,” some with the audience, some with the outcome. If I see 5 headlines starting with “I,” you failed.
Never use these words: leverage, unlock, elevate, empower, streamline, harness, transform, revolutionize, game-changer, cutting-edge, holistic, seamless, optimize, dynamic, robust.
No hashtags. No emojis. No exclamation marks.
Write like a person talking to a person, not like a marketing brochure.

OUTPUT FORMAT:
Give me all 10 headlines numbered 1-10 with the framework name next to each one. After the list, tell me which 2 you’d A/B test first and why. Then give me a “wildcard” 11th headline that breaks all the frameworks but sounds like something I’d say to a friend at a bar.

Now go do something with this

• Keep your headline under 220 characters. LinkedIn cuts it off in search and connection requests.

• Test 2 or 3 versions this week. You can change your headline anytime. It takes 30 seconds and there’s zero penalty for experimenting.

• Pair it with a strong “Featured” section on your profile so the headline doesn’t carry the full load alone. Because once the headline works, your About section and experience become 10x easier to write. The headline sets the frame. Everything else fills it in.

I’ve rewritten 5 to 6 client headlines a week using these frameworks for months now. The pattern is consistent: every time we replace “I help [generic audience] with [generic offer]” with one of these, inbound leads show up within days.

Your audience doesn’t care about another “I help” statement. They just want to feel seen.

Drop your current LinkedIn headline in the comments and I’ll tell you what’s missing. Or update yours with one of these frameworks and tag me. I’ll repost the best ones.

Want me to review your full LinkedIn profile? Reply “PROFILE” and I’ll send you the link.

Boldly yours

✌️Magali

Subscribe now

Hey you! You subscribed to The Obvious Yes and I’m glad you did.

Because I know you’re good at what you do. Your experience is real. The people who’ve worked with you know it.

But the people who haven’t? They want to know you BEFORE they hire you. And right now, nothing online lets them.

AI commoditized expertise like crazy:

• It writes faster than you

• Automates your workflows

• Turns anyone into a convincing expert by dinner.

So when expertise stops being what sets you apart, you lead with the one thing AI can’t fake.

Your personality. Not your credentials or your 20 years. The way you think. What pisses you off. What you refuse to water down. The reason someone picks YOU out of 98 qualified profiles in the inbox.

People hear “personality” and think trauma dumping. Hell nah.

Pity parties don’t build trust, and your journal entries belong in your Notes app.

When I say personality-first, I don’t mean personality-only.

It’s bigger than that.

• Your style, the colors and visuals only you pull off.

• Your scars and stripes, the hard years that left marks nobody else earned. The knowledge you paid for in mistakes and reps.

• Your stance, the POV you’ll defend even when it costs you. And whatever you show, every post flips it back to the reader.

That’s what this newsletter is. Every week, one move. Positioning, AI, LinkedIn, by following the personality-to-demand path. You do it. It stacks.

So who the f*ck am I?

Magali De Reu. Personality-first branding and positioning for experts who want paying clients coming to them, not applause. 11+ years in, 150+ brands built, ranked #1 globally for personal branding by Favikon.

None of that is why you should read this. This is:

I’d built brands for founders and coaches for years. Wrote for Forbes, covered SXSW, spoke at TEDx. I knew how to brand expertise so it gets paid. I’d done it for everyone but me.

Then I got ripped off. €20K owed, nothing lined up.

So I burned the playbook and went all in on LinkedIn. One audience: solopreneurs making money. Every post from lived experience and my own POV. Relationships that turn into leads, then sales.

→ One week later, I signed a Netflix client.
→ Two weeks later, €40K and 10K followers.
→ Six months later, #1 for personal branding on LinkedIn.

Today it’s a six-figure business run off 40K followers.

When something works THAT well, for you and your clients, you stop calling it luck.

You name it.

Mine is the Personality-to-Demand Method: personality-first content in, paying clients out. It runs on one engine, what I call the Personality-First Content Engine. The content you put out daily. Posts, hooks, stories, assets. Attention in at the top, demand out the bottom.

That’s what I hand you here. One move a week, until you’re the obvious yes.

I learned this the hard way. Last year, a woman at Amazon bought from me. She didn’t ask for case studies. Didn’t check certifications. Didn’t request a single reference. She’d read a rant I posted about getting screwed out of €20K by a guy with more ego than euros. That rant is what made her book the call.

People at Uber and Netflix closed in the same month. Neither asked for my methodology. Both had read the meltdowns.

So I pulled up my analytics. Went through every inbound lead from the last six months. And found a pattern I didn’t want to find: the posts I almost didn’t publish, the ones where I hovered over the button for six minutes wondering if I’d gone too far, those generated the revenue. The ‘professional’ content I spent hours perfecting? Furniture. Nobody asked for it.

In this first edition, we’re stripping away the ‘professional’ mask that’s costing you sales. You will learn:

• The trust equation: why flaws build authority faster than facts

• The boob strategy: how to find (and monetize) your uncopyable core

• The signals that sell: what buyers look for before the call, and it’s not your slide deck

A quick note before we start: If you are tired of guessing how to position yourself, the Content to Gigs Cohort is now open. It’s a 4-week sprint to fix your positioning, dial in your content, and build a pipeline that actually converts.

Check the details here

1. The trust equation

I believed this for years: if I get good enough, they’ll find me.

I got good enough. They did not find me.

‘Good enough’ is the entry fee. It stops you from getting sued. It does not get you hired. It does not get you rebooked. It does not make someone say “I felt like I already knew you” on a discovery call.

I see the same thing with every client. They come in with a content problem.

“My posts aren’t landing.”
“I’m not getting inbound.”
“I sound like everyone else.”

Nine times out of ten, the issue is identical: they’re showing credentials and hiding character.

Their feed reads like a textbook with a headshot attached. Frameworks. Tips. Numbered lists of things the reader already knows. All correct. All forgettable. All interchangeable with 400 other experts posting the same ideas in slightly different fonts. Example below.

I ran my own numbers recently. My tactical posts (clean structures, safe advice) average 3x fewer DMs and 5x less impressions than my confessional posts. The post about spiraling after leaving a toxic startup generated more sales conversations than my entire ‘content strategy’ series combined.

Certifications stop you from being disqualified. Personality is what gets you picked.

I’ve helped 90+ speakers build brands. The ones who break through are never the most credentialed. They’re the most legible. You read their content and you know exactly who you’re getting on the call. No dissonance. No bait-and-switch. No “oh, they’re way more boring in person.”

And here you are, sitting on 15 years of industry expertise, posting like a brochure, wondering why someone less qualified but louder keeps getting the gig you deserve.

The expertise isn’t the problem. The hiding is.

2. The boob strategy

I’ve been thinking about personal branding as a body. And I made a diagram. Look at it. You see what I see.

The left side is where you’ve been living. Textbook tactics. Scripts. Playbooks. Everything you were taught to lead with. Safe, professional, and identical to everyone in your price range.

The right side is everything you’ve been told to leave out. The quirks. The war stories. The way you talk when nobody’s editing you.

Now look at the center:

Battle-tested reality. Felt knowledge. The flaw is the feature. The messy middle.

That’s your uncopyable core. Your nipple.

I call it that because the shape is obvious. But also because the part you instinctively cover up, the sensitive center, is the part that feeds people.

You’ve been competing from the outer rim of the left circle. The commodity zone. Any AI tool produces that content faster and cheaper than you do. Your reader, scrolling at 11 PM after a long day, cannot tell your framework apart from the one three posts above it.

Personality alone, without expertise to back it up, is entertainment. Fun to watch. Nobody hires it.

But the overlap. Where what you know meets who you are when you stop performing. That’s where trust forms. That’s where “I felt like I already knew you” comes from.

Most of my clients haven’t read my methodology. But they did read a post where I was furious about being owed €20K and turned that fury into a lesson about vagueness as a weapon. They saw my AuDHD brain do what it does: strip the situation to its bones and say the thing nobody in the room would say.

All of them bought the boob. The uncopyable nipple. Before the call even started.

What the boob looks like in practice

Here’s the same expertise, with and without the core exposed.

Same credentials. Same expertise. Completely different energy. One gets scrolled past. The other gets remembered.

3. The signals that sell

This is the part of the theory that stings.

The thing you’re hiding. The thing you sanitize before you hit publish. The thing you think will make serious clients run. That’s the thing that makes them buy.

Buyers don’t evaluate you the way you think they do. They’re not comparing your credentials to someone else’s credentials. They’re scanning for three signals before they ever get on a call:

1. Consistency: do you sound the same everywhere? Post, call, delivery. If your content reads like a press release but you’re warm and funny in person, there’s a gap. That gap is where trust leaks out. The highest-paying clients I've closed all said some version of the same thing: "I felt like I already knew you." My posts, my emails, my calls all sound like the same person. No costume changes.

2. Specificity: do you share from the middle, or only from the mountaintop? A curated ‘lessons learned’ post, three years after the pain, reads as marketing. Because it is. You control the narrative. You picked the flattering angle. Your reader feels that, even if they can’t name it. They scroll. But someone writing about a loss they haven’t recovered from yet? That registers different. The brain goes: this is not a performance. This is happening. I trust this.

3. A point of view that costs you something. Performative vulnerability sounds like a TED talk. Real vulnerability sounds like a voice memo at 2 AM. The test I use: does sharing this cost you something? If it doesn’t, it’s not a signal. It’s marketing in a vulnerability costume.

The €20K post went up while I was still owed the money. The “I have nothing lined up” post went up during the week I had nothing lined up. The startup disaster posts went up while my hands were still shaking from the exit.

Within six months: grew from 7K to 21K followers. Over 200K in revenue rebuilt from zero. Ranked number 3 worldwide in personal branding on Favikon.

I didn’t clean up first. I showed up dirty. And the right people trusted me more for it.

The filter (so you don’t confuse “showing up dirty” with “showing up naked”)

Two tests before you hit publish. Every time.

1. The point test. Does this personal detail serve the argument? If the story makes a point, it stays. If it’s confession for confession’s sake, it goes. The €20K post worked because the point wasn’t “feel sorry for me.” The point was: vagueness is a weapon, and here’s how to spot it. My worst month became a lesson someone else could use on a Monday morning.

2. The cringe test. Reread it. If it makes you uncomfortable for the wrong reasons (pity, oversharing, main-character-without-the-plot), cut it. The discomfort of honesty is fine. The discomfort of “why did I tell them that” is not.

The goal is never “look at me.” The goal is “here’s what I learned, and you can take it home.”

4. The audit you’re not going to enjoy

Pull up your last 10 posts. Read them with one question:

Could someone swap their name onto this and nobody would notice?

If yes, you’re competing on expertise. Which means you’re competing on price. Which means you’re one cheaper option away from irrelevant.

Here’s the reckoning:

• Read your content out loud. If it sounds like something you’d say at dinner with a friend, keep it. If it sounds like a press release your company’s comms team approved, burn it. Your reader can smell the committee.

• When was the last time you published something that made your stomach drop? If the answer is “never,” your brand is a shield, not a signal. The posts that feel dangerous to publish build the trust your safe posts never will.

• Are you sharing what you know, or who you are when things go wrong? A framework shows competence. A story about the time your framework failed and what you did next shows character. Competence gets you considered. Character gets you chosen.

The discomfort you feel reading this is the distance between what you know and what you show. It’s the same distance your competitor, the louder, less-qualified one, walked across while you were perfecting your slide deck.

The Amazon client didn’t ask for my case studies.

She read about the worst month of my life. The €20K I was owed. The group chat of speakers trashing me. The panic of starting over with zero.

And she said: “I felt like I already knew you.”

The meltdown was the credential. The mess was the proof. The thing I almost didn’t publish was the thing that closed the deal.

Your ‘professionalism’ is an expensive costume. Underneath it is the person your next big client would hire.

The boob knows. ✌️

Magali

P.S. Content to Gigs is where we strip the mask and build something that sounds like you. Waitlist is open. Spots are capped.

If you want me to find your uncopyable core in one session, 1:1 intensives are available. I’ll tell you what’s broken. Then we fix it.