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I like rolling up my sleeves and building things.
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Sometimes that's a website that…
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Jessica Malnik posted thisJust received an unsolicited resume with a two-page FAQ section that somehow covers salary negotiations, social media addiction, diet advice, orangutans, wine, and the applicant's height. There is also advice to “get BMI under 23 and earn a million a year” and a fun fact about how male servants were paid in Victorian England. Again, this is a resume from a person I have never met, who emailed me out of nowhere asking me to hire him. I cannot emphasize this last part enough. I DID NOT POST A JOB.
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Jessica Malnik posted thisI went into GEO thinking influencing LLMs was probably much harder and more competitive than people were admitting. I’m starting to think we’ve overcomplicated it. After talking to more people at a GEO conference I spoke at and also doing the work myself, I’ve seen and heard enough examples to change my mind. The tactics aren’t magic. A lot of it is boring marketing fundamentals. Understand how these systems retrieve information. Figure out where they’re getting their information from. Build authority around the topics you actually want to be associated with. Create things worth citing. Get mentioned in the places they already trust. The part I’m much more skeptical of now is measurement, especially prompt tracking. A GEO analytics company raising a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation before the industry has even figured out what the hell it should measure is just one example. Tracking hundreds of static prompts and reporting that your brand moved from #4 to #2 feels suspiciously like taking a probabilistic system and forcing it into an SEO rank tracker because marketers need something colorful to put in the dashboard to show the CEO and CFO. Run the prompt again. Change the wording. Use another model. Ask again next week. Congratulations, you have got a different answer. I suspect GEO measurement ends up looking a lot more like PR than traditional SEO. Share of voice. How frequently you show up around the topics that matter. What brands are mentioned alongside you. Which sources and narratives you’re associated with. Which ones produce actual free trials, demos or sales. Maybe the biggest mistake we’re making with GEO is trying to make it behave like search. It doesn’t and building elaborate dashboards pretending that it does isn’t going to change that.
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Jessica Malnik shared thisThe internet really doesn’t need another ultimate guide written by someone who learned the topic 45 minutes ago from Claude. So, I got to spend a few hours this week talking about one of my favorite topics how B2B companies can create copy and content that doesn’t look and sound exactly like everyone else’s. We got into positioning, customer and SME insights, building a stronger point of view, conversion killers, and where AI actually fits into all of this. I also got to put some of it into practice with 7+ live website teardowns during the workshop. Thanks to everyone who came, asked questions, volunteered their companies for a teardown, and stuck around to chat afterward. Really fun room to teach.
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Jessica Malnik posted thisAI has made it dangerously easy to investigate your own questions now. I’ll see something and think. There’s no way that’s true. Three hours later, I’ve found six datasets, scraped a few websites, made some charts, edited a video about it, and published a landing page. This used to require more friction. You had an idea. Then you needed the data. Then somebody needed to analyze it. Somebody else had to make the thing. Another person had to publish it. Somewhere in there was a meeting or several. Now the gap between that's weird and I made something about it can be an afternoon. There are downsides to this. We have given millions of people the ability to produce things at incredible speed despite having absolutely nothing to say. Still, I love how little permission you need now. Find the weird thing. Figure out whether it’s actually weird. Make something out of it. Put it on the Internet. Let strangers tell you why you’re wrong.
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Jessica Malnik posted thisSomewhere there’s an extremely buttoned-up enterprise AI consultant teaching a 14-step AI framework. Meanwhile I’m getting surprisingly good results with using the following in my prompts: - Dumbass - Wrong file - DO NOT TOUCH THAT. Immediately followed by an extremely specific explanation of what it did wrong. The future of knowledge work is going great.
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Jessica Malnik posted thisOne thing I didn’t fully appreciate until I started traveling for work regularly is that the hardest part of a trip usually isn’t the meeting, the flight, or even the jet lag. It’s the 15-minute gaps where everything almost works. You land, you’re tired, and suddenly the small stuff starts stacking up. Your phone won’t load. You can’t find the hotel address. The WiFi login page won’t open. The message you need to send won’t go through. Individually, none of these are serious problems, but travel has a way of stacking them all at once when your patience is already at zero. I’ve started thinking about international travel the same way I think about systems design. Reduce dependencies, eliminate single points of failure, and assume things will go wrong at the worst possible time. One of the simplest decisions I made a while back was switching to Holafly Plans. It's a monthly subscription I can set up once and forget about it. Wherever I'm headed next, I'm already covered across +160 destinations under the same plan. It’s interesting how often better travel just means fewer things that can quietly break at the same time. Plus, Holafly is the world's first international mobile operator, which means one 2-minute install unlocks global data across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. It's a new category for how the world stays connected, and over 12 million travelers already rely on it. Oh and you can use code REMOTEWORKTRIBE for 10% off. https://lnkd.in/g9rMbJ4B
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Jessica Malnik posted thisSomewhere along the way, content marketer and copywriter became a wildly inadequate description of whatever the hell people pay me to do all day. On any given week, I might be writing copy, researching some bizarre rabbit hole, analyzing data, editing video, building and deploying a landing page, using Python to scrape something off or building an AI workflow because I got annoyed doing the same stupid task twice. A few years ago, several of those things belonged to completely different jobs. Now I can go from huh, I wonder if this is true to researching it, finding the data, figuring out the angle, making the thing, and publishing it without handing it off six times. I don't think everyone needs to become a one-person marketing department. That sounds terrible and probably violates several labor laws in France, but the line between I have an idea and I can make that idea exist has gotten very, very thin. That's the part I find interesting.
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Jessica Malnik shared thisI have once again discovered a completely normal-looking corner of the economy that becomes unhinged the second you start studying the numbers. I present to you the niche of dorm room interior design. There are hundreds of real businesses doing this since 2003. So, not just a little TikTok trend. Some are reportedly making seven figures (or more) a year with multi-year waitlists. Families can spend five figures decorating a maximalist room with everything from custom headboards and custom vanity stations to chandeliers and peel stick and stick wallpaper while their college freshman daughter can live in it for approximately nine months. I had approximately 700 questions. Naturally, I went down a giant rabbit hole and made a mini-documentary style video about this growing biz niche over the weekend. 🎥 https://lnkd.in/gsSSjcMu
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Jessica Malnik posted thisI regret to report that I now know an alarming amount about the influencer marketing economy surrounding SEC sorority recruitment. I was researching influencer marketing for a project and kept running into the same problem. There was plenty of coverage about the individual brands showing up in OOTDs, PR boxes, sponsored activations and rush collections, but I couldn't find anything that pulled all of it together. Apparently, my response to this problem now is to build the dataset myself. I ended up documenting 302 brands across 15 categories and classifying how each one showed up via gifted content, OOTD mentions, official partnerships, sponsored brand activations, rush collections or editorial coverage. Then I added company size and estimated influencer, UGC and gifting spend because apparently 302 rows wasn't enough of a rabbit hole. The part I found most interesting was separating the brands deliberately marketing around rush from brands that are simply showing up because this demographic already buys them. Those are two very different kinds of influencer marketing. Anyway, the whole thing is now a searchable index and downloadable dataset because this is apparently what I do when Google doesn't answer my question anymore. My job keeps getting weirder.
Jessica Malnik commented on a post
3h
The only time I got in trouble was when I slapped the principal because my mom forgot to pick me up. I was 8. So, I’m not sure what that says about my prospects.
Jessica Malnik replied to a comment
3d
Marjorie Clayman not unless you can share your perspective on Victorian hiring practices
Jessica Malnik replied to a comment
3d
Sarah Betts I’m afraid not. Fear sharing the formatting may unleash consequences.
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Jessica Malnik liked thisJessica Malnik liked thisI'm getting such similar vibes today as I was back in 2012 when I was trying to convince companies to invest in their blogs. Back then, no one wanted to build a blog. Except for a few marketers that were way ahead of the curve. Those folks (who I went and worked for), built massive businesses. Why didn't people want to build a blog? - "Our industry is boring" - "Where's the ROI?" - "Managing writers is hard" - "The audience is too small" Today, no one wants to: - Linkedin via personal accounts - Youtube - Branded subreddits For all the same dumb reasons. Yes, a few cracked folks are doing it. I'm doing it. But getting serious budget in B2B for this stuff is back to pulling teeth. Still easier for me to get blog budget right now which I find to be HILARIOUS. Could easily take what used to be a modest blog budget, hire some linkedin ghostwriters instead, and have at it for a year. Even if the quality is just decent, you'll clean up. Just like company blogging in 2015. By the time it's obvious, most of the upside will have already been captured.
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Jessica Malnik reacted on thisJessica Malnik reacted on thisReality matters. Frame the wall wrong and the wall lets you know, and it will cost you. Software never talks back, it seems infinitely malleable and iterative. Now there's an intern coding all night who has never met a customer, or anyone. Meanwhile the UK Post Office prosecuted close to a thousand postmasters for money that was never missing. It was a bug. Some went to prison. That one was at least a line someone could find. With a self-generative tech all you get is a woman losing her job, and her house, and an agent telling the board the layoffs are working as intended. Flawless software, a disservice to humanity.
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Jessica Malnik liked thisJessica Malnik liked thisThere's another reason why organic marketing programs keep getting slashed: how most of the current marketing leaders (myself included) came of age. For the bulk of my marketing career, we operated in a direct response environment. On both paid and organic. Google Ads(words) would drive leads instantly. Organic SEO could absolutely have an impact within 6 months if the niche wasn't too competitive. Same with just about any other channel. You could get pretty far even if you cut any marketing program that didn't generate material pipeline within 6 months. Most importantly, there was tons of traffic to go around. And anyone worth their salt in marketing could turn traffic into money (I always chuckle when folks say traffic doesn't equal revenue. Yeah it does bub, build the rest of the funnel). So so so many CMOs, CEOs, founders, and marketing leads came up in that environment. We all got to ignore brand marketing. And social. I know some folks didn't but a lot of teams did. I was in plenty of boardrooms. I definitely ignored that stuff. With LLMs, that direct response era is ending imo. It's not over yet but it's on it's way out. Or at least will have a lot less influence. Especially for any content or organic marketing program. And leadership is very out of step with the new era. No judgement, I'm having to recalibrate all sorts of stuff myself. In the same boat. But I do disagree with this kneejerk reaction: - If no progress on pipeline in 6 months, cut the program. - Double down on Meta or Google Ads, even as ROAS keeps getting worse I find that reaction to be uninspiring and short sighted. I'm not the only one to say this. Lots of folks are talking about the wane of direct response and the rise of branding. But boy oh boy are a lot of leaders going to struggle with this transition. Leaves a lot of opportunity for folks that are willing to: - Invest over years instead of months - Cast aside any need for attribution - Focus on the emotional connection instead of the ROI - Willing to build a brand one fan at a time - Not get suckered into the siren song of AI content
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Jessica Malnik liked thisSharing this publicly: How we’re going to adjust our approach for 2027 and 2028. I noticed that our trips were getting a little bit ‘samey’ - great trips but the same concept applied over and over. So here’s how we’re going to freshen things up. More Niche: Not just India - textiles of Rajasthan. Not just Bulgaria - birds of Bulgaria More Experts: Our expert led trips get insanely good feedback. We’re going to make more of them. Geologists, painters, you name it More Epic: Long trips, bigger scale. Not just the 5 stans, which is already epic enough. Why don’t we take people all the way from Xi’an to Istanbul - why not take them to the entire Silk Road?
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Jessica Malnik liked thisJessica Malnik liked thisMy little events-based side hustle runs on 16 chairs. That felt like a weakness until it became the whole strategy. The local bar I work with believes in building community, and gives me some space to host monthly events for free. The tradeoff is the room: 4 tabletops, 4 chairs each. Sixteen seats, no more, no fire code debate to be had. It turns out this constraint presents an authentic opportunity: with a unique offer and limited space, the scarcity is complete authentic, and events sell out quickly. "Do not wait" feels pushy to write and honest to read. My October event is selling faster than the September night did. The only thing I changed was saying the number out loud, as many times as possible. Where are you hiding your scarcity? Also, you can see the event copy for yourself, I'll drop it in the comments 👇
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Jessica Malnik liked thisJessica Malnik liked thisSince I started working for myself I've dropped the whole “work all week and nothing on weekends” thing. Now I work every day with some light work on weekends and I take real time off daily too. Shoutout to everyone else who does the same because they actually love what they do and not because they have to.
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Jessica Malnik liked thisJessica Malnik liked thisReasons to follow me: (Let me just try something here...) 1. I'm constantly looking for people to feature in our content at Exit Five. You know: • That little newsletter that goes out 2x/week to 40k B2B marketers, no big deal • Very average live shows that draw 1,500+ registrations every 2 weeks • Tiny podcast led by Dave Gerhardt and Dasha Shakov that's actually growing every month and gets shoutouts every day on LinkedIn 2. I talk about what happens behind the scenes of our media company. We produce lots of content every week, and we're often told it's good and valuable. We sweat every little thing and improve all the time. We're ruthless when it comes to quality and value. 3. I share my journey of job search, layoffs and sometimes successes in B2B marketing. 4. I go on tangents about marketing philosophy, the economy, life in Canada, in person events, and my hobbies that fuel my day-to-day: photography, outdoors, snowboarding, guitar, music, and more. Wanna be friends? 😏
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