College teacher turned ghostwriter | Scaling founders, coaches, and consultants to $100K+ /mo | Writing to build wealth and better self | 98,000 on Twitter (X)

Taylin John Simmonds

3 years ago, a friend lent me $40K to pay off my debt. So I could focus on business.

2 years ago, I offered to pay it back. He said no. Reinvest. Pay me later. 1 year ago, first payment. 

Yesterday, I paid him back!

Find the people who bet on you before it makes sense. Then spend your life proving them right.

College teacher turned Substack ghostwriter | Thoughts about craft, ideas, and AI as a creative partner (not a replacement) | 2B impressions | $4M+ revenue generated | All in on Substack

One pattern I’ve noticed in all the people that inspire me: They live a diverse life.

They layer unrelated skills. 
Read widely. 
And have friends you'd rarely see together. 

A rich life isn't only about money. It's about the range of experiences that made you who you are.

Stop calling yourself a content creator. Content creators chase algorithms. You're cultivating a body of work.

You're not in the content game. You're in the depth game.

And depth doesn't scale. It compounds.

I'm noticing a quiet rebellion against balance. 

People who disappear into their craft. 12, 15 hours a day for weeks. Then step back completely. No guilt. No routine. No splitting the difference. Full immersion, then full recovery. 

Seasons, not schedules.

You don't actually want to stop working. You just haven't found work worth your devotion.

The goal isn't to do less. It's to care so deeply about one thing that everything else becomes noise.

Find that thing. Then you'll never need convincing to start.

Everyone's trying to escape work. Fewer hours. Passive income. Early retirement. That's not freedom. That's avoidance.

You don't want to do less. You want something worth pouring everything into. Work that's worthy of your full attention, your full energy, your full devotion.

Find that first.

If AI is speeding up your writing process, you're using it wrong.

AI should slow you down. Stress-test your ideas. Pressure-test your arguments. Find the angle that actually matters before you write a word.

The bottleneck was never your writing speed. It was your thinking clarity.

You don't need 100 clients. You need a handful of the right ones and the devotion to serve them so well they never want to leave.

No empire. No team of 30. No "scaling to seven figures."

Just craft you're proud of and a livelihood that lets you live well.

A book you highlighted but never practiced is a book you never read.

Understanding doesn't live in the notes you took.

It lives in the choices you made differently afterward.

A life-changing habit I picked up recently: Fifteen minutes of breath work before work.

The breath brings me out of my head and into stillness. A stillness that makes creative work feel effortless.

Your best work is hiding behind the ritual you're skipping.

The real value in the AI age isn't what you know. It's who you can inspire.

Give them an aim, a compelling reason, and the next small step when everything feels overwhelming.

If you want to matter in the AI age, don't just share knowledge. 
Lend direction.

You're behind because you've never given 100% of yourself to the thing you care about.

Subtract everything that isn't it. Give it everything you have. Not 40%. Not most days. Everything.

You've never seen what happens when you actually commit. Find out.

CEO @ uSERP — Your SEO & Link Building Growth Partners | Hiring! | Forbes 30 under 30 | We'll scale your SEO-driven revenue 10x faster than hiring in-house

Founder & CEO at uSERP, the preferred link building agency for industry leading brands like monday.com, Robinhood, Crowdstrike, Binance, Wiz, Freshworks, Henry, Hightouch, Glassbox, and 100s more. We drive revenue through strategic SEO and authoritative link building, aligning search with business goals. Our team embeds with yours to execute outcome-focused programs that scale organic growth, build defensible authority, and win competitive markets.

Testimonials: 

· "uSERP is purpose built for any enterprise class organization looking to scale organic growth. They're my ace in the sleeve." — Tyler Naples, Senior SEO at OnBoard

· "uSERP is the equivalent of having an SEO expert in your back pocket. The key to having a strong relationship with any SEO agency is ensuring that your content strategy is in alignment with your backlink strategy – and that has been critical to our success with uSERP. We don’t have to waste brain power trying to acquire high-quality backlinks or optimize anchor text, which means we can move at a much faster velocity.” — Luke Kline, Content Marketing Manager at HighTouch 

· "Anybody that’s looking to get a leg up on SEO and implement a streamlined process to be able to bring that authority to their site, I would definitely recommend uSERP.” — Raffaele Riconosciuto, Head of Marketing at Termly

· “uSERP gets results. Plain and simple. In the first three months, we achieved better outcomes than more than a year into working with a different company. Our internal goal for our domain rating growth was hit within 4 months, and I am beyond excited at the prospect of working with them well into the future and see where we can go.” — Stanford Swanson, SEO Strategist at Fusion Medical

· “I’ve never seen quality link building like this. Get these guys on your team before one of your competitors does. I’ve never seen quality link building scale up like this. They have exactly the right approach to improve authority and rankings.” — Andy Crestodina, CMO of Orbit Media

· "We’re now thought of as a market leader. We’ve gone from an unknown brand in the space to one that is thought of as a market leader. We’ve seen our site traffic increase from nothing to 70,000 organic visitors per month in 16 months.” — Caleb Frankel, Co-founder of EarlyBird

· “My number one keyword target to rank for was ‘business credit cards.’ With uSERP scaling top-tier links, we outranked NerdWallet and CreditCards, driving $140,000 per month in revenue.” — Garit Boothe, SEO at Nav

Jeremy Moser

If you're investing in SEO and GEO/AEO this year, be selective on who you partner with. The amount of purely misleading content about SEO and LLMs on LinkedIn has reached all time highs. 

You cannot rank first on ChatGPT. That's fundamentally not how LLMs work. AIs are highly inconsistent when recommending solutions. LLMs are probabilistic and they’re meant to give unique answers. There is no consistent #1 ranking brand.
  
The amount of times I have seen a Google Search Console screenshot....showing metrics from Google search...as "proof" that someone's LLM strategy is working...is nonsensical. 

Clicks are not what you track to determine visibility in generative engines. CTR from ChatGPT is abysmal because it's not designed to be a list of links. 

What you should be tracking is self-reported attribution, branded search growth, direct traffic, deep page entry, etc. 

Looking broadly, track visibility percentages across dozens to 100+ prompts you execute multiple times from multiple devices. 

Focus on building a cohesive, complimentary strategy between traditional SEO + AI. Look at core prompts that could serve your business as the solution, and understand how LLMs are coming to that conclusion. 

More often than not, it boils down to:

- Some prompts will pull from the brands website to cite and mention the brand (owned SEO content on your site where ChatGPT mentions you and cites you as the reason it mentioned you)

- Some prompts will pull from third-party comparisons, listicles, directories (link building / off page SEO)

- Some prompts will pull from reddit, social, and YouTube (forums, social, public town hall type content)

👉👉 Track, measure, and understand the intent behind these prompts, why different source materials are cited, and reverse engineer your strategy to build consensus across those common touch points: your website (content marketing), third party sites (link building), directories (off-page SEO), social/forums (off-page).

CEO @ uSERP — I get you more revenue from organic search.

Every GEO/AEO solution on the market tells you to publish significantly more content to "show up in AI engines." Then, structure that content for LLMs. Spin off 100 programmatic posts per month. Chunk your content. Listicles. Comparison posts. The whole nine yards.

While publishing great content in multiple formats on core keywords and prompts is fantastic...that's one of the smallest pieces of the puzzle.

It's table stakes now. Everyone is doing it. 

As a business, you don't actually want more CITATIONS in AI. You want more MENTIONS for decision making prompts. 

You want your brand to be recommended by someone asks ChatGPT "what are the best solutions for XYZ" more than you want ChatGPT to cite your article as a source to informational, broad prompts. 

And low and behold, the best way to make that happen?

Off-page SEO, link building, brand building, PR.

AI engines only pull from your site 8% of the time when recommending you. Meaning 92% of the time an LLM like ChatGPT gives a brand/product/solution recommendation, they are pulling from other websites that mention and discuss the topic. 

If your strategy for both SEO + AI search does not include link building, PR, and brand building, you are going to see poor results. 

Creating consensus (the new term in AEO/GEO) to show up in AI is done via great off-page SEO and brand building. 

Thanks for sharing this great data, Yamini Rangan / HubSpot!

Most agencies are still treating AI visibility like it’s optional. Meanwhile, competitors are showing up where your clients should be. 

Your SEO foundations matter — quality links, strong authority. I've seen it drive 1,500%+ traffic growth for clients. That hasn’t changed.

But I've been testing tools to track how clients show up inside AI engines, and most fall short. 

Wellows is one that I keep coming back to…

It tracks how your clients appear across every major LLM, and turns citation data into outreach opportunities. Shows which third-party URLs AI engines cite. Builds repeatable workflows to earn citations for your clients, so it becomes a growth channel, not a one-off project.

Historical Monitoring tracks ranking movements, citation shifts, and causality over time. Client Reporting shows citation growth week-to-week, built for renewal calls. 

No more random pitching. Systematize your outreach with verified contacts, templates and sentiment analysis. 

Wellows helps close the major reporting gap between good SEO and AI visibility. 

SEO isn’t dead. Links are still the engine. Good content is the foundation.

You just need better visibility into where that engine is taking you in AI search.

Check it out here → https://lnkd.in/eVKHPan2

Most agencies don't fail because they can't get clients. They fail because they can't handle the ones they have.

I’ve scaled uSERP to 75+ active accounts. The hardest part wasn’t landing clients. It was realizing infrastructure decisions have real consequences. 

 → Bad hosting? You lose a client when their site goes down during a product launch. 
 → No link reclamation system? Millions in link equity evaporates and nobody notices until rankings drop. 
 → Manual reporting? Your team spends 20 hours a week on decks instead of execution.

At scale, infrastructure isn’t optional. 

Kinsta® just released a series of conversations with four agencies about what it really takes to scale: Built Mighty, 40Q, Fixel, and Pronto. 

They talk about infrastructure mistakes, the clients they should have turned down, systems that actually stuck, and the tradeoffs nobody shares publicly. 

No polished case studies. Just honest conversations with founders still figuring it out in real time.

If you're scaling an agency, this is worth your time.

Brand partnership • CEO @ uSERP — I get you more revenue from organic search.

It's a literal full time job to keep up with the pace of AI. If you're worried about the near future, you're not alone. However, I am optimistic about one thing...

Marketing. Those that can reliably command attention, build a brand with true affinity, and shape visibility in the marketplace are going to explode in demand. 

The more that execution becomes commoditized by AI, the lower the barrier to entry in...nearly every single space. The product building component of entrepreneurship becomes 100x easier. 

BUT, this also means that saturation and competition EXPLODE. Just because you build it does not mean they will come and use it. This has already been true in the last few years, and will become even more true as AI enables anyone to compete in mere days.

People that can command attention are going to be the #1 most valuable hire in companies over the next 5 years. 

Can you reliably...capture demand with SEO? Build a massive audience on Instagram and YouTube? Nurture a huge email distribution list people look forward to reading daily? 

If so, you're going to win BIG.

We're already seeing this:

1.  HubSpot just acquired Pat Walls' Starter Story (and previously The Hustle)
2. Pinterest acquired tvScientific to expand connected TV reach
3. Semrush acquiring media brands, blogs, etc
4. Pendo acquired Mind the Product community

Dozens more examples.

The more that barriers to entry vanish, the more important standing out becomes. 

Marketing is going to be more in demand than ever before.

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The Battle

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Taylin John Simmonds's LinkedIn Performance

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