Lessons from 6,000 freelancers

Sorry to my haters, but I called it. 

2025 has indeed flown by.

The silver lining though?

I’ve learned a metric buttload from my fellow Top of the Funnel members this year.

So I thought I’d pull together my biggest takeaways from TOFU this year into one handy post.

Read on to learn:

• The state of the freelance content world (according to you!)

• How to future-proof your content marketing career

• What’s working for LLM visibility right now

• What a successful pitch looks like

• What’s working on LinkedIn right now

The state of the freelance content industry

Every now and then I run a poll in TOFU to give us all a temperature check on where the world of content is at right now.

These obviously aren’t formal surveys or anything. But 50+ freelance content folks respond to each one, so they offer a lil’ glimpse into what’s going on right now.

One big takeaway from those is that most TOFU members have kept their rates the same this year:

Another is that long-form “SEO content” is still what most of us are spending our days doing – followed by writing thought leadership content in a distant second and creating content strategies in third:

And as of September, the community was pretty much split down the middle on whether or not they'd been paid to edit AI content:

How to future-proof your content marketing career

The question we’re all asking:

Which content skills are still gonna be in high demand in the post-AI world?

Luckily for us, content marketing legend Ryan Law dropped his thoughts on this in TOFU a little while ago.

Here’s his 2¢:

What's working for LLM visibility right now

Like it or not, LLMs are here to stay.

Which means we’re all going to be creating content aimed at boosting LLM visibility sooner or later.

The question is:

What’s that content going to look like?

I decided to find out 👀

A little while back, I asked the members of our community if they’ve created any content specifically designed to influence LLM results. Then I followed up with everyone who said yes to find out what they’ve been doing…

You can get the full breakdown of what those fabulous folks shared with me here (including some real examples of content that’s appearing in ChatGPT and AI Overviews right now).

But the TL;DR is…

TOFU members have been aiming to show up in LLM results through:

• Niche listicles 

• Stats round-ups

• Content answering super specific questions

• Interactive content

• Hyper-recent news coverage

• Genuinely unique thought leadership

And folks are also trying to land “standard articles” in the LLM results by:

• Optimising for BLUF

• Spelling things out for the LLMs (through techniques like parallel construction) 

• Backing up product claims with quotes from third-party sites

And last but not least: content distribution – especially to the likes of Reddit and Quora – seems to be more important than ever…

What a successful pitch looks like

Earlier this year, I asked the community if they’d be willing to share any pitches they’ve sent that have led to paying clients. 

And thanks to some incredibly generous TOFU members, I ended up with screenshots of six successful pitches.

You can check those out – plus a breakdown of what made them all work – right here.

But the long and short of it is that they ended up falling into three categories:

• “Right place, right time” pitches. Short and sweet messages that happened to hit the right person’s inbox at the right time.

• “Value-first” pitches. Emails you put a tonne of work into to wow potential clients – but with no guarantee it’s going to pay off.

• “Personality-packed” pitches. Emails that prove you understand the client's industry, the challenges they’re facing, and exactly how you can help ‘em.

What doesn’t work – at least in my experience – is spray-and-pray, copy-and-paste cold pitches. I talk a bit about my experience with those (and what I do differently now) in this deep dive. 

What’s working on Linkedin right now

This one is hot off the press, folks…

TOFU’s resident content promo expert Jason Thibault shared his thoughts on what kind of content LinkedIn’s algo is rewarding right now just last week.

Here are Jason’s hot takes from the trenches:

Those are the biggest things I've learned from my fellow TOFU members this year.

And honestly? I want more of this. More sharing, more learning, more figuring out what actually works in this weird post-AI content world.

But to make that happen, I need to know what you want from TOFU in 2026…

We want to make TOFU better (and need your help!)

Take our quick year-end survey (just 2 minutes) to shape what the TOFU community and this newsletter look like next year. 

Your input will help us build a community that serves you best.

Thanks for helping shape the future of TOFU 🫶

👉 Complete the 2-minute survey