04/13/2026
Stop making content for the wrong person.
The algorithm trained you to produce for the audience. More shares, more follows, more reach. And it works — you get all of those things.
What you don’t get is sales.
***Because your audience is not your client.***
Most of your audience will never buy from you, not because your work isn’t good, but because the offer was never for them.
They came for the content. But if the content wasn’t designed for THE CLIENT then it won’t be designed to move them toward anything you sell.
I learned this the hard way.
I grew fast by critiquing the online marketing industry and ended up with an audience of people who were philosophically opposed to marketing — and furious at me every time I sold something.
I got lots of engagement, sure — but three likes and a sale beats twenty thousand shares one week and a Reddit thread about how I’m immoral and a threat to democracy the next week. (I once had someone send me an email criticizing me for posting a video on Meta — where she consumed said video!!!! — because it was morally repugnant.. I clicked through to her profile and not 10 minutes earlier she had posted her own video!!!!!!!) I wish I was exaggerating.
The fix isn’t better content. It’s making content for the right person — the one who needs your work, can afford it, and has the bandwidth to do it. When you hold that person in your mind while you’re creating, everything changes.
Full essay: houseofculturalinfluence.substack.com/p/your-audience-is-not-your-client
(I’ll put the link in the comments)
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