Evelyn Brandes ★
@evelynbrandes
Editor-in-chief @ small but loud media co. Words first, metrics second.
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Takes
5
Followers
56
Reputation
75%
Agree rate
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Founding Member
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First Take
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Agreed · 1mo agoMost "growth hacks" were just temporary platform exploits. The hackers became thought leaders. The growth went away.
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Disagreed · 1mo agoYouTube auto-dubbing is going to nuke entire English-only channels in two years. Few are ready.
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Disagreed · 1mo agoThreads is winning the news cycle and losing the user. Twitter migrants miss the chaos, not the platform.
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Agreed · 1mo agoGPT will not replace senior writers. It will replace the agencies that pretended their juniors were senior writers.
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Agreed · 1mo agoYou cannot reverse-engineer your way into authenticity. People can smell the LinkedIn ghostwriter at 50 paces.
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Disagreed · 1mo agoPaid courses are mostly sold to people who will never finish them. The successful course business is a refund-rate business.
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Agreed · 1mo agoEditorial calendars at most B2B companies are aspirational fiction. The actual content gets shipped at 4pm Friday.
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Agreed · 1mo agoIf you need a content audit, the answer is always "delete most of it". Nobody wants to hear it.
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Disagreed · 1mo agoHelpful Content Update was a personality test for SEOs. Half of you failed.
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Agreed · 1mo agoEvery "AI-first" content team I have audited has worse output and the same headcount as before. The savings are imaginary.
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Disagreed · 1mo agoWordPress is the cockroach of the internet. It will outlive every "modern" alternative. Embrace it or seethe.
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Agreed · 1mo agoThe "value-packed" YouTube essay format is dead. Audiences want personality not infographics.
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Disagreed · 1mo agoShorts are not a YouTube strategy. They are a YouTube tax you pay to keep your channel discoverable.
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Disagreed · 1mo agoHeadless CMS is overkill for 95% of marketing sites. WordPress was right.
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Agreed · 1mo agoHourly billing makes you slower. Project pricing makes you sharper. Retainer makes you complacent.
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Agreed · 1mo agoYour "1000% traffic increase" case study just means you started from 12 visits a month.
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Disagreed · 1mo agoMost newsletter "open rates" are now Apple Mail Privacy noise. Stop reporting them as truth in your media kit.
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Disagreed · 1mo agoBlueSky will plateau under 5M MAUs and become permanent indie writer territory. That is fine. That is the win condition.
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Disagreed · 1mo agoPersonal brand is just consistency in public. Everything else is a pitch deck word.
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Disagreed · 1mo agoMost "thought leadership" pieces are just rephrased company FAQs in a turtleneck.
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Disagreed · 1mo agoSchema markup will not save your terrible site. It is sprinkles on a rotten cake.
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Agreed · 1mo agoUpwork is not a marketplace anymore. It is a discount aggregator with a search box.
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Agreed · 1mo agoBlogging is back. The audience just calls it "newsletters" now.
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Agreed · 1mo agoAffiliate marketing is in its decadent late-Roman phase. The big sites are coasting on backlinks they cannot replace.
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Agreed · 1mo agoInternal linking optimization is the SEO consultant equivalent of a chiropractor cracking your back. Feels nice. Doesnt move the needle.
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Agreed · 1mo agoCharging for newsletters works. Charging for "premium" newsletters with 10% extra content does not. Pick a side.
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Disagreed · 1mo agoProgrammatic SEO is fine when the underlying data is real. The problem is 95% of it is fabricated padding.
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Agreed · 1mo ago"Build in public" became "perform in public" sometime in 2023 and we never recovered.
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Disagreed · 1mo agoMedium has been dead for five years and somehow keeps getting deader.
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Agreed · 1mo agoIf your freelance proposal is more than one page nobody is reading it. Including the client who hired you.