We Hit 50k Followers. Here’s the Content Method That Got Us There (Full Breakdown)

Nicole Ramirez and I have been in a friendly race to 50,000 followers for weeks now, and last week, she crossed it first. (Did I say "crossed?" I meant ran through the finish line and kept running with a smile!)

Now you would expect that to sting, dear reader. Truth be told, I, ME, MOI, her friendly competitor, expected it to sting. That's the ordinary human response, right? And I was braced for a flicker of it. But it is not a measured, press-worthy quote when I say, when she sailed across that line, what I was overcome with was pride and excitement!

Nikki built that audience in roughly two years, starting after a 2024 layoff from Forbes. I have been following her as an enthusiastic fan and follower even before we became friends.

Now, watching someone do in two years what took me a decade should have been humbling in a bad way. Ultimately, it isn't, and here's why I genuinely feel excited by it…

Nikki found her lane early and hit it out of the park. My first 8 years were spent fumbling through business models — a start-up branding consultancy, then a cannabis marketing consultancy (story for another day), a social media agency, etc. The positioning I have now about showing authors, speakers, and thought leaders how to use LinkedIn to build platforms to launch books, lucrative speaking careers, and build a thought leadership business model showed up somewhere around year seven or eight, and everything that's worked has worked since.

So when I watch any of my creator friends compress ten years into two, I don't feel lapped. I feel like I'm watching proof that the slog is optional and that finding clarity about yourself and your content is possible. (After all, most of my momentum that shot me past 50k has happened in about 2.5 years since finding this clarity for myself)

The fumbling wasn't only about the business models. For most of those eight years, I was publishing constantly, and not one of those posts had a job. I'd drop something clever on Monday, something knee-deep and technical on Wednesday, and then sit there on Friday wondering why my calendar was empty. I had volume. Not one post was assigned a specific piece of work to do.

Which is why Nicole and I are linking arms to do something about it.

What content system clicked (for both of us, and every big creator I know)

Perhaps you are consistently going viral for your hot takes, but it's not bringing dollars in the door.

Or you're knee-deep in expertise, but it's not wrapped in a way that gets people to stop, read, and have an "aha" moment.

Or people know you and trust you, but they just have no idea how the eff to work with you (that happens alllllll the time).

Momentum gets stymied when you don't have an appropriate mix of three kinds of content.

Every post you publish is effectively doing one of three jobs.

It is:

1. Earning attention from people who have never heard of you.
2. Teaching the people who just found you.
3. Moving someone who already trusts you toward a purchase decision.

Top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel.

Reach, educate, convert.

Once you know which job a post is doing, you stop guessing every time you sit down. That's what Nikki and I are walking people through in our upcoming "That's a Post!" workshop.

Before that, here are three things you can do today, one for each job.

Open your camera roll, your sent folder, and your calendar. Go back 48 hours. Find three moments. (My Claude co-work ninjas can automate that)

I don't want you to find three ideas, but three specific moments.

Maybe it's the email you received that made you roll your eyes and think "the nerve of this person!"

Maybe it's the thing your kid said or did that stopped the whole house in its tracks. Or…the meeting where someone said the exact wrong thing with total confidence.

Write each one down in a single sentence. Don't worry about polish, hooks, or formatting for now (we'll get into that in the workshop). At this point, you are collecting raw material, not publishing.

The TOFU categories that reliably earn reach right now:

• Everyday observational humor about your industry. The absurd thing everyone in your field notices and nobody says.

• A hill you'll die on. A real opinion about how your industry works, stated plainly, with the willingness to be disagreed with.

• Ordinary life, told well. Parenting, commuting, the dentist's office. My real-world parenting observations consistently outperform my strategy posts, and Nikki sees the same pattern. Now this can be funny, or thoughtful. Notice how John Alfonsi, CPA, ABV, CVA did both back-to-back. One light, one beautifully reflective:

Also, notice that John isn’t a social media professional (I think it can sometimes feel like this type of content is only available to those who do social media full-time). He’s a forensic accountant and adjunct professor. And he’s told me this TOFU content has helped place people in his orbit who then read his thoughtful breakdowns of business valuations.

By the way…if a voice in your head is saying this isn't Facebook — that era is over, and you can thank AI for ending it. LinkedIn carries more machine-generated content than any platform on earth. So something that reads as unmistakably human is no longer cringe, but rather a signal that a warm-blooded person wrote it. And that's refreshing.

To do: Write those three sentences in a note on your phone to start generating ideas.

Middle-of-funnel content changes how someone thinks about a problem. Somebody saw your funny post, clicked your profile, and is now deciding whether you know anything.

The fastest way to prove you do is to take the last real question a client or prospect asked you and answer it in public.

Structure it in three parts:

1. Name the challenge in their words, not yours.
2. Give the actual sequence you'd walk them through. Three steps, in order.
3. Say what changes once they do it.

Someone reading it should be able to think, I understand how she'd move me from where I am to where I want to be.

Back to John for a great example of this kind of content after his TOFU brought awareness:

• To Do: open your DMs or your sent email, find the last question you answered well, and turn that answer into a post.

This is the piece I'm most excited to teach.

Conversion runs on a principle: pain pushes until vision pulls. People will pay to make a problem stop long before they'll pay to make a good thing better. So bottom-of-funnel content has to name the pain accurately.

There are two levels of pain, and there's a third rung underneath that does the real work.

Topline pain is what someone would say out loud on a discovery call. My posts get likes, but nothing turns into clients.

The psychological belief underneath is what they'd never say out loud. Maybe I'm not as good at this as I've told everyone I am.

The 2:00 PM reality is where that belief actually lives. A specific, ordinary moment on an ordinary afternoon when the mask slips and no one is watching. I close the laptop after another post that went nowhere, and I wonder how much longer I can keep telling people the business is "building."

That third rung is the one that converts. It's specific enough that the right reader feels caught.

The move looks like this:

• Topline pain: Everyone's moving faster than me.
• Belief: The world is passing me by and my best years are behind me.
• 2:00 PM reality: I watched someone with half my experience land the keynote I wanted, and for the first time I let myself think I may not be cut out for this.

Open with the 2:00 PM moment. You want people to feel like you're reading their diary. Here's an example of one I’ve done more than once (it goes viral every time. Probably because when I read it even now, it feels like a gut-punch reminder of my darkest days of entrepreneurship):

• To Do: write one 2:00 PM sentence for your ideal client. One sentence. If it makes you slightly uncomfortable to write, you're close.

But, be careful…

None of those three things is difficult on its own. You could do all three before lunch.

The hard part is doing them every week without deciding, every single time, whether today is a day you have anything to say. That decision is what kills most people's consistency. The ideas are already there — you live them daily. What's missing is a way to step back, see them for what they are (GOLD), and put them into a system that moves them out the door before they evaporate.

That's what Nikki and I are building LIVE with you on September 8 and 10.

"That's a Post": The Everyday Content Collection System

Over two days, live, we cover:

1. How to capture content ideas in your everyday life so you never run out of inspo
2. How to categorize them into the appropriate type of content (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU)
3. And how to package them in a way that gets you the result you're after

Day 1, we find the content hiding in your ordinary week and teach you both of our capture systems side by side — mine and Nikki's, which work completely differently. Day 2, we build the system that gets those ideas published, and you leave with it running.

It took me eight years to figure out that every post needs a job. Nikki got there in two. You can get there in two afternoons in September!

If you've read this far, you already know you have the raw material. Come get the system! And as a subscriber to Build a Brand, you can register at the discounted rate of $97 (vs $147) with code LeDISCOUNT. (I’m crying at the code name — that was Nikki and her husband’s genius, and honestly, I’m obsessed.)

Save Your Seat Here

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